Dugout Canoes The canoes that you see in the water and on the bank of the inlet are dugouts, made from the hollowed-out trunks of large trees like pine and chestnut. They're not like the canoes of people to the north, which are often made of birchbark.  In Pequot territory, we don't have the large birch trees necessary to provide big sheets of bark; and in any case, those lightweight birchbark canoes aren't seaworthy enough to take into the ocean. So we've found a different way to make canoes. Our men fell a large, straight tree and hollow it out. They do this by building a fire on top of the log and then chipping away at the charred wood with adzes or gouges. From start to finish, a man can singlehandedly make a small canoe, like one of those you see here, in about 10 days. These small canoes seat one or two people and are used for fishing and local transportation. We also have larger, ocean-going canoes that hold as many as 30 or even 40 people, which can take us to offshore islands. One advantage of living on the coast is speedy transportation, with routes provided by the ocean, rivers, and estuaries -- the areas where rivers meet the ocean, as you see here. Estuaries, such as the one you see here, provide us with many useful resources. We use plants like bulrushes and cattails, which you see around the edge of the inlet, for weaving mats and baskets. We harvest many types of edible plants and their underground tubers, including those of the marsh mallow, whose pink flowers you see in bloom on the far bank. And estuaries provide fish and shellfish as well as attract waterfowl, which we hunt. We even have a use for the inedible horseshoe crab; we sometimes make arrow points from the sharp tails of their shells, which often wash up on shore. Behind the Scenes with Museum Researcher Doug Currie We have several types of evidence that people in southern New England used dugout canoes. There are early European engravings that clearly illustrate dugout canoes in the Northeast, and there are ethnohistorical records; written accounts, both before and after colonization. But the most interesting evidence we have is the canoes themselves, which we occasionally find preserved at the bottoms of ponds. Native people didn't use their canoes in the wintertime, when the small rivers and ponds froze over. But they knew that if they left the canoes above ground they'd rot quickly;  they'd fill up with snow, then the sun would warm them, and that freeze-thaw cycle isn't good for the wood. So in order to preserve the canoes, people used to fill them with heavy rocks and sink them fairly deep, in about 20 feet of water, near the edge of ponds. In the spring, the people would usually just dive underwater and take the rocks out, and the canoe would float back up. But sometimes we find one today, still submerged and weighted with rocks. Did someone forget they put a canoe under that pond? Did they have to move to another area? Did they die? A lot of conditions have to be just right for the canoes to be preserved, so only two or three have ever been found in Connecticut. But even that's enough for us to see exactly what kind of canoes the Pequots had.