Sea Control - Sea Control 564 - Canoes, Rivers, and more! With Scot McFarlane

Episode Date: February 15, 2025

Links1. Scot McFarlane, "The Canoe," American Historical Association.

Welcome aboard Sea Control fans, this is Jay and my guest today is Scott McFarlane. We're going to talk about canoes, rivers, and whatever related subjects we can fit into today's episode. Scott, would you mind starting off by telling us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, thanks, Jay. So I'm a river historian. That's what I call myself. And I tell stories about rivers and the ways in which people miss that. There's so much more to rivers than just steamboats or something like that. They really actually both change the way that people who live along them

think about the world. And also they're a great way to learn just about any aspect of history. And prior to my current role where I'm consulting both on rivers and really honestly, mostly about american history in general i was working for the american historical association we were setting how history is being taught in public schools across the country and i'm continuing some of that work now as well by making sure that students in public schools learn river history and environmental history because they're really not in middle schools and high schools doing that at this point so i'm trying to change that as well nice thank you you came to us he controls attention by an article you wrote about canoes and the AHA. So just to give folks a little

bit of context, and we'll have a link to that in the show notes later. As a reminder, I'd like to tell the listeners all the opinions we express are our own and not necessarily representative of any institution which you might be otherwise associated. So on sea control, you know, we talk a lot about warships. It's kind of a Navy thing, a lot about merchant ships, fighting age of sail, nuclear-powered warships, all that. But we frankly rarely talk about something as simple as canoes and rivers really other than you know maybe a river in warfare and all so should you um start by explaining maybe why if you think naval officers and strategists and historians might care about something like canoes and rivers yeah that's a great question well i mean rivers have

and canoes which have not been exclusively used along rivers have been important to so many people for thousands of years across the world and they were really essential to their worldview to life and death and to military conflicts. And, you know, this great variety of canoes and canoe cultures, I think, is something that shows also the importance of adaptation of sort of the ways in which particular places make particular people with particular kinds of boats. And another example is supply chains, which I think used to be talked about a lot a couple of years ago and, you know, is still relevant is that canoes tell stories about supply chains that are, I think, useful for us.

So if we use Maine, where I live, as an example, the birch bark canoe was very important, and I can talk more about that later, but it was also a sort of beautiful piece of craftsmanship that was crafted out of trees, out of birch bark, out of spruce roots, out of pitch pine, and all those things could be found here on Maine not far from a river from a waterway and so that was a big advantage compared to say if you were the British with a big old boat that you needed say a sawmill in order to have the right kind of lumber for and you can even carry that story forward if you want to just look at canoes in Maine over time and those of you that maybe our recreational canoers today know that Royal X was this very lightweight, strong,

perfect plastic that canoes were made out of. I don't know exactly when that started, maybe in the 1970s, perhaps. And these were just the best boats. And, you know, many of them were actually in some ways, you know, could trace their origins back to the birch bark canoe in some ways. But this was a perfect lightweight boat and then they stopped making royal x because basically canoes were the only sort of project that was using this kind of plastic and it wasn't cost effective for the plastic manufacturer to make royal x and worse they stopped making it and all of a sudden we ended up with canoes that were much heavier and clunkier than they used to be and so the canoe manufacturers have actually at least several of them sort of worked together to make a new product

called T4MX that's supposed to replace Royal X, uh, over time. And, you know, these are all different stories of supply chains, both old and new stories that, uh, are, are, you know, very relevant to, to thinking about, you know, being prepared. Nice. Thanks. Yeah. Didn't, didn't know a lot of that. Um, living, you're of course in Maine, living in the, uh, I'm out in the Puget Sound area. And that was of course the, the major way of the Native Americans got around here and then and then when the white settlers showed up um you read lots of things where they would also have they would have various other type of ships but then they're nothing beat just having a a native canoe and a lot of ways to get around because you the supply chain for that of course

is pretty simple it's just the trees are here so you could use those but but you read about that about the uh even the army and stuff just acquiring canoes from the natives to get around so very cool you talked a little bit about this just now but in the aha article you write a lot about the roles canoes and rivers played an earlier colonial settlement up in New England there. Could you talk a little bit about that some more? Yeah. And I think once again, this was a story that didn't happen just in New England, but across much of North America and other places as well. So I'm reading a book now about the Calusa in Florida, who had a whole fleet of canoes that really sort of made them the dominant force in the water there for a while. Or down in New York

city there's a great book saltwater frontier that asked the question why why are there so many native people in the new york area in connecticut and places like that when their land was taken from them pretty wholly you know a long time ago and the answer is because because of the water and because they would build these huge canoes out of tall tulip trees and and those were superior in a place like the Hudson Estuary there. And then we come up to Maine, and then this is really the story here is the Birchbark Canoe of the Wabanaki, the tribe's native to what is now Maine. The Birchbark Canoe was the superior technology because it was lightweight

and quiet, and it had people who knew the rivers. And so when the British were trying to settle in Maine, they were not able to keep up their boats there's all these first person descriptions of the ways in which they could not out paddle the Wabanaki and the ways in which they would would lose track of them on the water and you know the great thing about a birch bark canoe is that it's not just quiet but you can paddle it up a river until the river turns to land and then you can carry that canoe somewhere else and just jump into another watershed and you you couldn't do that with those uh those huge boats um so if you go sort of to the end of the colonial period in the american

revolution the story there's the story of benedict arnold which you know many of you might be familiar with which is basically that benedict arnold was going to get a group of about a thousand men to go from maine to quebec city basically go up the kennebec you know via some smaller streams into the st lawrence and sort of at the outset of the revolution he was going to surprise the british forces there and sort of get a notch one more victory for the the home team but and the way they were going to do that is they're going to follow a portage route that Wabanaki had long used using birch bark canoes but they so they took the first part of that and said we'll do this bold daring thing bold daring thing and we will do exactly what the Wabanaki

have been doing for a long time but instead of using a 50 pound birch bark canoe we're going to use 400 pound boats and there's actually a and I know that there's 400 pounds because there's a great little society I don't know their exact name that are really interested in that trek that he did and they'll they sometimes try and recreate his route and they've made many models of these boats and i asked them and they said yep they weigh right about 400 pounds so instead of a 50 pound boat carrying you know through this sort of marshy land between water and rivers they were carrying these 400 pound boats and uh so they really missed missed part of the story they missed missed the history missed what was happening in present day and and so that ended up being really

devastating you know many people died basically there's stories of people's shoulders you know you'd be able to see flesh and bone because they were carrying these 400 pound boats through there instead of these persimmon canoes and so it's sort of one of the ways in which you know history lessons lessons of just being aware of what's around and you know you you can't sometimes you you want to just take one little piece of something like oh we'll follow that portage route but you missed the most important part which was you need that lightweight canoe yeah i didn't i knew a little about the benedict arnold story and like you said a lot of our listeners but that that part i that i think that ties into a lot of just basic a good lesson for irregular warfare working with

indigenous tribes that kind of thing i mean going for lawrence of arabian farther back is pay attention to uh what those folks are doing because they've been doing it a lot longer than you have So that's very cool. Very cool. Didn't know the big difference between carrying a 500-pound or a 400-pound canoe and a 50-pound. I guess on that front, because something like that, they call it wet gap crossings, are still a challenge for any military forces getting in just exactly what you're talking about now, even with modern equipment. And I guess not to get too speculative, but since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, of course, one of the innovations we've seen the Ukrainians was to up armor and add weapons to a fairly standard kayak that we might be familiar with for fishing or recreation. And that gave Ukrainians a cheap platform with maneuverability and wealth in a country that has a lot of rivers, that kind of thing. Do you think the canoe, kayak, something like that still has actual, you know, aside from that, do you still think it might still have some potential in warfare? Yeah, it's hard for me to imagine exactly that thing, but the circumstances, but they're, you know, canoes are really just so well suited to rivers and to sort of to going in places where maybe it's very shallow at times. And once again, I think if you look at some of the lessons, I guess, in some ways of the ways in which Native people across North America successfully pushed back and resisted and were sort of the superior force is, you know, they did that in different ways.

like um sometimes it was also a question of um just their numbers they would have say you know 60 70 80 canoes that uh could overwhelm sort of you know it's sort of reminiscent of um the drone warfare that that's happening now that that that you know is an advantage or um you know just that there's other ways in which you know a craft just is going to be better suited for things i have a carbon fiber canoe that's kind of like a modern um birch bark canoe and i you know i can carry it with my finger people see me walking around town and think that i'm a lot stronger than i am and you know i i could see a lot of uses where you know if you needed to be on the water to to be quiet and fast and you know that would be the best thing and you know you think a lot about

zodiac sort of covering some of that same sort of places where you know things get shallow but you know if you need something stealthier quieter right uh then a canoe might might well be the answer that doesn't need much fuel just a few pikes to paddle yeah they do still get i know some use in practice like that that's that's interesting stuff to think about um and then i'll get a little broader in your your bio and you talked about that you're a historian of rivers um how did you just ask like how did you how did you get into that field we most again most of our folks probably are more listening or more into like blue water ops kind of thing maybe they saw a navy ship at some point and i mean we're all around rivers i guess a lot more than we are

you know warships and and of course you know the middle of pacific blue water how'd you how'd you get into this well i've always been drawn to rivers i always found them i don't know for lack have a better word therapeutic but it was actually when i was uh 18 years old i was uh originally from texas and dallas wanted to um dam this river in texas and i had been making documentary films as a high school student and i decided i would make a documentary to sort of show all the things that were going to be lost uh if they dam this river so that dallas could water their lawns and And when I ended up filming the documentary, I realized that the film wasn't about some endangered plant or whatever. I mean, sure, those are special in certain ways, but it was about the people that were only they were so unique because the way they adapted to that particular river.

This was the Natchez River in Texas. and so ever since then i've been sort of working to find different ways to help people understand that that their rivers can kind of shape not just our economies but our cultures and even you know our personalities almost and i think it's worth thinking too about the once again thinking about the story of the canoes of adaptation of sort of local conditions of you know how buried the rivers are even in in north america so that we have rivers in maine that are that have sort of steeper gradients where we generated power for so long where sort of industry really started in the united states and then we have you know very different kinds of rivers in a place like texas

that are much siltier and where we're interested in maybe just the water that's in there as opposed to the power and if you think about those conflicts that um occur between the british and the wabanaki in maine they weren't didn't just take place on the rivers they took place because of the rivers because in a place like maine that's cold and um you know it's like i always tell people there's only one terrible month in maine and then it's march when it's icy and just miserable and the one place where you could um survive in those lean times is from the rivers is from the fish that were flowing through the rivers but the rivers were the same things that you know the early settlers wanted to to dam to build sawmills and grist mills and

so those were the original really the root of a lot of the conflicts in that period were over rivers over the fact of how rivers and the power that flowed through the weather was through fish or or mills like how that would be used and you know today another thing that's kind of interesting and exciting that's happening in rivers in the united states is the dam removal movement they're removing huge dams across the country they just spent 500 million dollars doing that out in on the klamath and and actually the the first dam to be removed the first big one in the united states was uh the edwards dam here in maine um in augusta and it's kind of interesting you know if you tie it together to uh naval history because part of the reason well first of all part of the reason

why that was one of the first dams is because it was one of the oldest so the old ones come down first because you know there's a real argument about safety there about security um but the other you know sort of one of these contingent things about history is that uh bath ironworks where they build um destroyers where they built those you know very expensive uh crazy looking some vaults uh very familiar listeners i'm sure to tie that in there so yeah so so the bath ironworks were expanding and you know they had to do some remediation because they were going to destroy some wetlands and you know sort of the army corps engineers you know you you gotta you gotta you you destroy wetlands these days you gotta you gotta pay for it so they had you know several

million dollars that they they put towards the removal of that dam you know that's not the only funding source but it's sort of here the bath iron works is expanding on this same waterway they have to you know follow federal regulations to to some degree and they're some of that money that they're using to remediate is actually going to remove the edwards dam which is the very first big dam that came down the country and has really set off this whole dam removal movement so you know just seeing how the way all those things are all that history is tied together and helping other people see that is what i what i enjoy doing nice thank you so much this has been i think fascinating and went beyond again what we usually talk about on sea control

is there uh where can we find you online and what else are you working on nowadays yeah you can find me online i have a couple different sites actually probably the most relevant one uh is riverhistories.org and i've collected a lot of resources on the history of rivers there you can also find me at oxbowhistory.com if you're looking for a historical consultant so i'm i am doing some consulting work for various institutions and companies and things like that but one of the projects that i mentioned at the beginning that i'm really focused on as well that's more of a fundraising project is making it so that students across the country can learn the history of rivers because you know everywhere you go there's a river and that's something that

students, you know, often don't have a chance to really learn about the history. They may learn about the ecology of it in science class or something like that. They don't learn, you know, why do we care about this river? Why is this river a part of our community? And the other thing that I think I'm pushing with that is the story of climate change. So students are learning a lot about climate change in some ways, and it's pretty depressing for a lot of them. But rivers tells, tells, I think, a different story. You know, we passed the 1972 Clean Water Act in the United states and a lot of rivers like ones in maine that were so stinky when you'd walk across them you'd vomit are now much cleaner and it's a real story of progress that happened you know in the

recent past and so i want students to be able to learn from those kinds of histories and not just students who you know environment history something that's taught in university or you know you go to a fancy private school you learn it but i want all students to have that opportunity so i'm i'm working on that as well nice thanks so much we will um try and put links to most of that in our show notes here so uh listeners can keep keep up on this fascinating topic topic um thanks again for joining us and thanks to all our listeners out there and we'll talk to you next time Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon