There is a coveted little red canoe, always stored under a fixed roof, that has taken me to many places on the back roads. Along with purpose, it is family.
On National Canoe Day (June 26) I visited the Canadian Canoe Museum and had a transformative experience when I gently touched the triangular stern deck of Bill Mason's 16’ Prospector red canoe, where the aged wooden gunwales bend and join with the fitted cover. There are a number of red canoes at the new, recently opened museum in Peterborough and contemporary, multimedia museums like this one can take interaction to an emotional level.
Mason said famously, “There is nothing that is so aesthetically pleasing and yet so functional and versatile as the canoe.”
Symbol
The Seven Wonders of Canada was a 2007 competition sponsored by CBC Television's The National and CBC Radio One's Sounds Like Canada.
Making the official Seven Wonders of Canada, the Canoe, the Igloo, Niagara Falls, Old Quebec City, Pier 21 Halifax, Prairie Skies, and the Rockies. Then CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge commented on the top winner, “It’s hard to imagine Canada being Canada without the canoe. Explorers, missionaries, fur traders and First Nations — they’re all linked by this subtle and simple craft.”
To many, it is the quintessential Canadian experience. It begins by picking up a paddle, there always seems to be a canoe in someone’s backyard or at the cottage/camp.
For some the canoe is a symbol of our connection to the natural world, for others, it can be a symbol of colonialism.
Beyond those thoughts, the Canadian Canoe Museum has many vessels that invite us to learn more about Canada and there are more than just canoes. It is a Canadian place through and through.
History
For the last 27 years, the Canadian Canoe Museum has been the world’s largest and most significant collection of canoes, kayaks and paddled watercraft. It began as an ambitious community project and it has created a new world-class museum.
Ian Merringer is the former editor of Canoeroots, Adventure Kayak and Rapid magazines, the three magazines that were folded into the present Paddling magazine. He is currently an editor of Ski Canada magazine.
He authored a magazine article on the Canadian Canoe Museum months before its opening.
“The move is a massive leap forward for the museum. The most generous thing you could have said about the previous location was that it was nondescript. Superlatives roll off the tongue when contemplating the new location, both the setting and the building. Anyone who cares about canoeing heritage should feel assured that there is now a fitting place for the story of canoes to be told.
“I also think it has national significance. Canoes are a central, and still tangible, aspect of the history of Canada, and the museum is the place where that can be both appreciated and articulated.”
Carolyn Hyslop is featured in the article and is the Canadian Canoe Museum’s Executive Director. She has been leading The Canadian Canoe Museum since 2016 when the activities related to building a new waterfront museum and leading a national capital campaign began in earnest.
“These watercraft and their stories have a pivotal role to play in understanding our past and our collective future," she said.
Working with a committed board and an inspiring team of staff, volunteers and a national community of supporters and partners, she is grateful to have the privilege of bringing the vision for a transformational cultural offering to fruition. It opened this May 13 and is situated on the Little Lake waterfront, part of the Otonabee River, where the Canadian Canoe Museum will conduct paddling workshops and tours. It is where the museum should be on the water.
She projects the exhibits and programs will attract 87,000 people annually for the non-profit organization with an annual budget of approximately $1.5 million.
She began her career with the Museum in 2002 and has held many roles, including Education Coordinator, Public Programs Manager, Director of Operations and General Manager. She earned a Bachelor of Education from Queen’s University’s Outdoor and Experiential Education program and a Bachelor of Kinesiology from McMaster University.
“From the Exhibition Hall to the Lakefront Campus, we offer a variety of ways to connect with the land, water, and canoe, whether you are an avid paddler, history buff, or an adventurous family!” Attracting new Canadians to paddling will be important.
Founded on a collection of the late Professor Kirk Wipper and established in Peterborough in 1997, the Museum’s holdings now number more than 600 canoes, kayaks and paddled watercraft. Together they span the country from coast to coast to coast and represent many of the major watercraft traditions of Canada.
In 2013, the Senate declared The Canadian Canoe Museum and its collection a cultural asset of national significance.
What to see
Throughout the exhibits, there is a range of media. “Through the use of ambient audio sounds, large photographs, video and the immersive canvas wall tent, we want the canoes and kayaks and our visitors to be immersed,” she explained.
Separate from the exhibits is the Collection Hall, each row having five tiers of organized canoes and kayaks on cradles, each with provenance related to its donation or acquisition. Collectively they are not only wall-to-wall physically within the 20,000-square-foot space, their diversity spans centuries of canoe heritage and cultures.
There is a teal canoe that belonged to Farley Mowat and an orange canoe of Gordon Lightfoot’s.
On the way to the exhibits, it offers an inspiring view through 23-foot-high glass windows from the atrium and mezzanine.
“This will be home to approximately 550 watercraft. This is a Class A museum-controlled environment, as is the rest of the museum, and will be open to guided/facilitator tours by Museum staff and volunteers.” This alone cost $11 million from Heritage Canada to protect the antiquities.
Indigenous Peoples around the world designed, built, and used the first canoes and kayaks. Carolyn said, “The canoe embodies Indigenous cultural memory – and is a living cultural object with both historical and contemporary relevance. As part of exhibition development, collection care, and community engagement, The Canadian Canoe Museum works alongside Indigenous Peoples to share stories and care for the collection in a good way.”
What else to see
The Museum’s artifacts range from the great dugouts of the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest to the singular bark canoes of the Beothuk of Newfoundland; from the skin-on-frame kayaks of northern peoples from Baffin Island in the east to the Mackenzie River Delta in the northwest to the all-wood and canvas-covered craft manufactured by companies with names like Herald, Peterborough, Chestnut, Lakefield and Canadian. Over the years, paddled watercraft from as far away as Samoa and Kenya have helped the Museum expand its reach and scope to include international examples.
Within the forest green walled decor are six permanent displays. The focused but unobtrusive lighting highlights the shapes and designs of the many crafts. The interpretation displays complement the displayed items.
The Knowledge and Research Centre is home to the Archives Storage and the Library and Research Rooms. The Centre provides space for properly caring for a growing collection of rare books, maps and other archival assets, including film and video, photographs and recorded oral histories. There is a library archive with more than 1200 books and maps for researchers to delve into.
Personal note
When you are surrounded by canoes it evokes insight and stirs memories.
Brian Emblin, my intrepid adventuring buddy from Timmins, was along for the Canadian Canoe Museum visit.
The dose of canoes made him recall. “Growing up in Hearst, like everyone else in the north, we always seemed to have a canoe in the backyard. We didn’t have a Wonderland destination so your family went on a canoe trip.”
He eventually made a mold for a cedar strip and cloth canoe.
With his wife-to-be, Liz Mulholland, their first date was in a borrowed canoe, his dad’s. Brian thought he would show “this gal,” who had tripping experience his prowess on the Vermillion River near Sudbury. The paddling excursion went a little sideways.
“We did not demolish it but it was bent and a patch was needed on the fibreglass hull.”
He bought his wife Liz a canoe as a wedding present.
The entrance to the Canadian Canoe Museum exhibit area is a swirl of suspended, diverse watercraft above an on-floor map detailing Canada’s countless rivers and lakes. People pause and point out the many trips they have been on. And then there is all those canoes and kayaks to marvel at. With the little red canoe you start paddling in your mind.
Whether you are a history buff or a canoer of any experience level there is much “to appreciate through the role of watercraft as a path to inspiration, self-discovery and well-being.”
Exhibits
An ill-fated northern Ontario canoe trip is highlighted at the Canadian Canoe Museum. I have taken students in voyageur canoes on the Upper Ottawa River, much like the St. John’s Christian school expedition described in the display but none of our trips resulted in serious injury or death. To learn more about this trip, check the Back Roads Bill archives linked below and look for the column called Weighing risks against the benefits of school trips.
The Temiskaming canoe tragedy is featured through a 22,’ custom-designed wood and canvas Chestnut Canoe-Selkirk model commissioned by the school in 1978. There’s a backdrop of Lake Temiskaming along with an audio clip from one of the survivors, Mike Mansfield.
The displayed canoe, one remaining of four in the original brigade, was only paddled a few hours before disaster struck. This model had too high seats and sides, making it “tippy” and vulnerable, it was a formula for disaster on June 13 forty-six years ago. Twelve students and a teacher died of hypothermia, the incident, often cited, continues to impact outdoor education.
Walking away from the named ‘Père Lallemant’ (important French Jesuit priest) canoe, the reflection was of the young boys with the vintage orange horse collar life jackets, with the white ties in a front bow, paddling off into expansive water, far away from safety, in the cedar stripped, canvas blue canoe unaware that the risk had not been accounted for. Is the risk worth it?
Longest canoe trip
Also because there was an interview with Dana Starkell the Orellana canoe was a must-see and feel.
The battered fibreglass canoe covered with decals was recognized in the Guinness Book of Records in 1986 for the longest canoe journey – 12,000 miles. You can see and sense it has been paddled, it has been trusted.
In this canoe story, Don Starkell set out from Winnipeg, Manitoba, with his sons, Dana, and (for part of the trip), Jeff. The trip began with upstream travel on the Red River, they reached the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.
Travel along the coast of Mexico was fraught with danger from ocean currents and surf landings, to which were added soldiers and bandits along the coast of Honduras and Columbia. After much-needed professional repairs in Venezuela, they reached the Orinoco River, where 1,000 miles of upstream paddling connected them with the Rio Negro and the Amazon, finishing at Belem at the mouth of the Amazon.
Canoes, like this display, and like little red ones, do take you to many memorable places near and far.
Red ones
Back to these red canoes and why are they often that colour?
There are a few theories. During the early 20th century, one the first canoe manufacturers, the Chestnut Canoe Company, offered their wood-canvas canoes in two stock colours, either red or green.
Another is that men in red are more desirable to women, according to a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. When asked to rate pictures of men wearing a variety of colours, women rated men in red “higher in status and more likely to earn a better living.”
The largest red canoe in the world is found in Toronto at Ontario’s Canoe Landing Park near Lake Ontario. Designed by artist Douglas Coupland, the 30-foot-long canoe is an homage to artist Tom Thomson.
The Cobalt poet Henry Drummond also wrote about The Red Canoe, ”De win' is sleepin' in de pine, but O! de night is black!” - read more in the Sept. 8, 2021, Village Media article found in the archives linked below. The author is often considered to be Canada’s first national poet, a “great poet,” the poet of the Habitant. He became Cobalt’s first doctor and was revered by the silver mining community.
Mason touch
Bill Mason had a successful film career at the National Film Board of Canada making 18 films. He also wrote two canoeing books on paddling and the Government of Canada had a stamp issued in his honour.
Bill Mason’s 16-foot red Prospector canoe is possibly the most famous in Canada.
It was at the top of the list to see.
It arrived at the Mason home on Meech Lake, north of Ottawa, from the builder, Chestnut Canoe Company in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in the spring of 1973. From that moment, the canoe was used in many of Bill Mason’s projects, his instructional films on canoeing, his books, The Path of the Paddle, The Song of the Paddle, and his last epic film, Waterwalker.
It was frequently used on Bill’s month-long solo trips on the north shore of Lake Superior, on family trips in Algonquin Park, and on trips down the Pukaskwa River, north of Superior, where the canoe ribs were damaged.
It is known that Bill danced at his son’s wedding with the canoe on his shoulders, and his wife, Joyce, scattered Bill’s ashes from it in 1989. It was donated to the Canadian Canoe Museum after their daughter, Becky, performed a canoe ballet on the Trent-Severn Waterway in Peterborough in 1999.
A couple of other Bill Mason quotes on the other side of canoeing - portaging.
“Anyone who says they like portaging is either a liar or crazy.”
“… portaging is like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer: it feels so good when you stop.”
At this stop, my feeling is that Bill Mason is a Canadian paladin. The canoe was his cause and we accepted it gratefully. His commitment to the red canoe is something to emulate.
The Canadian Canoe Museum celebrates one of the most elegant modes of transportation ever designed. Take the back roads and wind your way towards Peterborough. Canoes are us.
The Canadian Canoe Museum does invoke emotions. So many, never too many, canoe trips with friends and family, and the little red canoe.
I'll leave you with this musing to paddle on with: “Your canoe is like your child, there’s always a natural and timeless connection.”
More local news
Browse local flyers
Weather forecast
Find local deals
View local webcams
Verified Commenter, please