Portable boats were not unknown to the ancient tribes of the British Isles. In Mr. Shirley’s _Account of the Dominion of Farney_ in Ulster, a curious example of a portable boat is described, formed of the trunk of an oak tree, measuring twelve feet in length by three feet in breadth, hollowed out, and furnished with handles at both ends, evidently for facility of transport from one loch to another. The district is one abounding with small lakes, such as the ancient Irish chiefs frequently selected as chosen retreats in which to construct their crannoges, or other insulated strongholds, beyond the reach of hostile surprise. But a closer analogy may be traced between the Indian birch-bark canoe and the coracle of the ancient Briton described by Julius Cæsar as a frame of wicker-work covered with skins. The same kind of canoe is in use at the present day on the lakes in the interior of Newfoundland, where the Montagnars from the Labrador coast frequently spend the summer. Their birch canoes are carefully secured for the return voyage to the mainland; and a deer-skin stretched over a wicker frame supplies all the requisites for inland navigation. But the true counterpart to the British coracle is the Esquimaux kaiak, which consists of a light frame covered with skin; and as this is brought over the top, and made to wrap round the body of its occupant, it enables the amphibious navigator, both of the North Pacific and the Greenland seas, to brave a stormy ocean in which no open boat could live.