Greenland in Europe

Abstract

DURING the present month a new light has been thrown upon the Aberdeen kayak (skin-canoe) referred to in NATURE of January 13, p. 648. Fresh information upon this subject is found in a diary of a tour through Scotland in 1760 by the Rev. Francis Gastrell (born 1707; M.A. Oxon. 1728), son of a Bishop of Chester, and owner—by purchase in 1753—of New Place, Stratford-on-Avon. His diary is now preserved in the Shakespeare Museum at Stratford. In a paper read on March 10 before the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Mr. James Sinton quoted Gastrell's statement that when visiting King's College Chapel, Old Aberdeen, on October 12, 1760, he there saw “a Canoo about seven yards long by two feet wide wh[ich] about thirty-two years since was driven into the Don with a man in it who was all over hairy spoke a language wh[ich] no person there could interpret; he lived but three days, tho all possible care was taken to recover him”. This canoe is now in the anthropological museum at Marischal College, Aberdeen. Its exact length is 17 ft. 9 in., its greatest breadth being scarcely 18 in. and its weight 34 lb. Francis Douglas, who saw it in or about the year 1782, describes it as “a canoe taken at sea, with an Indian man in it, about the beginning of this century. He was brought alive to Aberdeen, but died soon after his arrival, and could give no account of himself”.