Welcome to Old Town

Canoe is a Taíno word, recorded by Columbus after his initial Bahamian intercourse with these, his first Indians. The word was transmitted among the European languages as applied indiscriminately to any of the diverse boats used in the waters of the American hemisphere. (According to the same pidgin grammar, all the varied people who designed, built, and employed these boats were called Indians.) The differences between, for example, the dugout Miskito coasting duri – etymon to our Gulf of Maine banks dory – and the lightweight Penobscot birchbark agwiden were thus linguistically sublimated. James Rosier writes in 1605 of the Wabanaki Canoas; Plymouth County Court Records attribute an accidental drowning death in 1660 to a "naughty canoo". In consequence to the Northeast's becoming the locus of England's greatest successes in American colonization, and to the obvious superiorities of its ingenious portageable design, the cedar-&-birch boat of the Maine woods came eventually to eclipse all else in the semantic field "canoe". The integrity of the design was found to survive the replacement of its birchbark & sprucegum sheath with one of painted canvas, and the Old Town Canoe Co. began at the end of the 19th century to produce them this way in great quantity and to market them aggressively. Today as one enters Old Town the welcome sign reads, somewhat redundantly, "Welcome to Old Town, Home of the Old Town Canoe". Indian Island in Old Town being – and having been, from time immemorial – the axial hub of the Penobscot nation, whose agwiden is the unaltered, already-perfect prototype to our modern canoe, the sign should read, "Welcome to Old Town, Home of the Canoe".