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 July
20, 2004 -- Canadian boatbuilder Robert Morris accepted a
challenge from Scientific American Frontiers: imagine the
type of vessel that migrants thousands of years ago could
have used to travel from eastern Russia to North America.
He constructed an umiak that could have been used by ice age
people to travel long distances with their families and cargo.
Learn more about how this artisan learned traditional skin-on-frame
boatbuilding techniques and works to keep them alive - as
well as how he got interested in the first place.
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Early
years in the Arctic:
I actually lived in the Arctic when I was a child from late
1964 to 1968. My father was the station manager for a radio
station at what was then Frobisher Bay, and is now Iqaluit.
I saw my first kayak on the beach there. And we had a toy
model kayak made by an Inuit builder, covered in, I think
it was caribou hide. Might have been seal skin. It was about
two feet long. I played with that a lot when I was young.
I'm not sure whether that had any actual bearing on my eventually
building an Arctic kayak, but I was familiar with and comfortable
with the whole idea of the Arctic and being in the Arctic.
I went to school with Inuit kids, and all of that was part
of my environment when I was young.
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Mark
Reuten practices using a bow drill given to him by the
elders. Of the many cordless drills we have tried this
had some solid advantages. Made of caribou antler, bearded
seal skin and wood with a nail as a drill bit, it drills
remarkably fast, is silent, fits in a pocket, and the
batteries never run dry!
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From
Artist to boatbuilder:
My
education is in the Fine Arts and I studied design. I took
every technical studies course I could lay my hands on at
the Ontario College of Art. I wound up working in the Display
Section at the Vancouver Maritime Museum, and that was my
first real exposure to boats - aside from growing up around
boats at our cottage in Ontario, and paddling, and sailing,
and rowing, and so on. What I was responsible for there was
mounting displays in the museum proper and taking care of
the historically-interesting boats they have down at the harbor.
And I got to bail and do some minor repairs, and I also volunteered
onboard a steel-hulled old Airforce rescue boat.
I
wound up getting a job at another maritime site called Britannia
Heritage Shipyard. It's a very large site comprising an old
cannery that was converted to a shipyard in 1917, and a whole
bunch of additional buildings that supported and surrounded
it. It is being developed as an historic site, and a working
wooden boat yard. I was in on the ground floor there, sort
of learning boatbuilding two steps ahead of the volunteers
that I was busy recruiting. 
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