Canoes and Canots in New France: Small Boats, Material History and Popular Imagination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Among Canadian Anglophones, there is a persistent popular association of the French in New France with the voyageurs of the fur trade. Coupled with this association is a nationalist narrative that sees the fur trade as laying the foundations of the modern Canadian nation. Part of this stereotype is that of the birch bark canoe, especially the large fur trade versions, as the preferred watercraft of the early French. Reinforced by the powerful iconography of the birch bark voyageur canoe since the late 19th century, especially in the images of Frances Hopkins, this notion overlooks much contrary evidence. This paper suggests that there was no love affair between the French and the birch bark canoe: rather, it suggests that from the beginning French colonists turned wherever possible to other forms of small wooden boats to serve their needs. The prevalence of the birch bark canoe for water transportation in the pays d’en haut and the northwest does not apply to the French colony overall. Resume Chez les anglophones du Canada, l’imagerie populaire associe encore les Francais de la Nouvelle-France aux voyageurs de la traite des fourrures. Parallelement a cette association, le discours nationaliste fait de la traite des fourrures une des pierres d’angle de la nation canadienne moderne. Au coeur de cette vision stereotypee, le canot d’ecorce de bouleau, particulierement sa version grand format concue pour la traite, joue le role d’embarcation de predilection des Francais de la colonie. Renforcee depuis le XIXe siecle par la puissante iconographie du voyageur au canot d’ecorce – on pense surtout aux images de Frances Hopkins – cette conception fait l’impasse sur beaucoup de preuves du contraire. Cet article suggere que les Francais n’etaient nullement amoureux du canot d’ecorce : en fait, il montre que des le debut, les colons francais, autant que possible, avaient recours a d’autres types de petites embarcations en bois pour repondre a leurs besoins. La predominance du canot en ecorce de bouleau sur les eaux du Nord-Ouest et du Pays-d’en-haut ne s’applique pas a l’ensemble de la colonie francaise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".