The Wood That Crossed an Ocean

A biography of a log. Contains almost no trees.

Greenland has no real forests. There's ice, rock, and the odd dwarf willow feeling very pleased with itself. The one exception is the Qinngua Valley down south near Nanortalik: 15 km of downy birch, some of it a whole 7 to 8 metres tall, protected by law since 1930. Try getting a straight five-metre gunwale out of that. Yet for thousands of years people built wooden-framed kayaks all along the coast. So where did the wood come from?

Siberia. By sea. The slow way.

Our hero is most likely a Scots pine. A team of Swiss and Russian researchers (Lena Hellmann and colleagues) tree-ring dated driftwood logs from Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard, and the pines overwhelmingly came from the Yenisei and Angara rivers in central Siberia: 91% of the ones they could date. Larch and spruce show up too, from further east in Siberia and from North America, but pine is the usual suspect.

So. One spring flood, the riverbank gives way and our pine tips into the Yenisei. It floats north to the Kara Sea, and here's the catch: wood only stays afloat for a year or two before it soaks up water and sinks. To make it to Greenland it has to freeze into the pack ice and hitch a ride on the Transpolar Drift, across the top of the world, out through the Fram Strait and down the East Greenland Current. Roughly 3000 km, about five years. Then the current spits it onto a beach, where a hunter looks at it the way you look at a free sofa on the pavement. No, not a siesta for you!

No tracking number, no estimated arrival, and nobody complained.

Plot twist: a lot of the 20th-century driftwood isn't some noble wild tree at all. The dated logs peak around 1960, when the Soviets were logging and floating timber down the Yenisei like there was no tomorrow, and plenty of it escaped the rafts. So some of that romantic Arctic driftwood is Soviet export that missed the sawmill. It still did the trip, though.

Meanwhile, in Stockholm

When the Paulownia for our qajaq building class arrived in Stockholm in 2022, the trucker walked in at 07:05 and announced that his brand-new shiny 4.5 m truck wouldn't fit under the trees, so we (well, I) had to collect our goods at the bridge. With what? "Not my problem." Sixty-odd planks went onto a cart, the first ten on my shoulder, while an old man walked past trying to decide whether I was crazy strong or just crazy.

In Paulownia's defence, it's about the lightest wood you can still build a kayak from: 250 to 300 kg per cubic metre, roughly half the weight of pine. Only balsa is lighter, and balsa is boat material only if your name is Thor Heyerdahl.

Siberian log: about 3000 km, five years in the ice, not a word of complaint. Swedish trucker: 200 metres, one tree branch, full diva.

Using every splinter

Driftwood wasn't made to order. It arrived cracked, twisted and waterlogged, so builders worked with what the sea gave them. A long straight piece became gunwales. Curved bits became ribs or deck beams. Where wood ran out, or a scarf joint was needed, bone, antler and baleen took over. Same deal with the norsaq: carved from whatever washed up. The supplier was the Arctic Ocean, and it doesn't take returns. (More on how those hunters built with intent in The qajaq came first.)

The Norse who farmed southern Greenland from around 985 had the same problem, only worse, because they wanted houses, barns and ships too. They imported timber from Norway, scavenged driftwood, and sailed to Markland (probably Labrador) for more. The Icelandic annals for 1347 mention a small Greenland ship that had been to Markland and got blown off course to Iceland on the way home. The Inuit just waited for the sea to deliver. Guess which approach lasted longer. (More Norse shenanigans in The Count of Greenland.)

We cheat, of course

Our ash and white oak for the ribs come fresh from an arborist's own sawmill, cut while we watch. Lovely wood, but it never went on an adventure.

Some of it did, sort of. My carpenter friend Patrik gave me some pieces of oak that used to be a floor in a house in Övre Östermalm, Stockholm, that he had refurbished. The house was built before 1850, and that oak probably started life as a little acorn some time in the 1400s, he said. Around when the last Norse in Greenland gave up and went quiet. Respect.

So next time you visit a museum with a real old qajaq, remember that somewhere, a long, long time ago, a tree fell into a river on the other side of the planet and became a boat.

What's the strangest place your boat wood has come from? Tell us in the comments. Ikea shelves count, with a little cringe.

//Tibor