- Kayak background curios

Earliest written sources on Greenlandic kayaks or umiaqs are in 12th Century Icelandic manuscripts:

"Here are also often beached boat wrecks (as happened now at [two peninsulas in North Iceland] Anno 1625), with no iron nails, but lashed with twigs in complicated and genius ways, filling every 'hub,' and wedges under for tension, as reported with the boat Asmundur "kastanrasti" took of Greenland to Iceland which was lashed with sinew; Anno 1189."
(Halldorsson, Ólafur. Grænland í midaldarritum p.52. 1978, Reykjavík. Rough translation by BK)

The Icelandic word for a skin-on-frame boat is "húdkeipur" ('skin oarlock'). Earliest written sources for "húdkeip" (canoes?) are in Eirik the Red's saga, when describing an encounter by Icelander Karlsefni and his crew, at Hóp (New York) around AD1007
(oldest manuscript source: Íslendingabók, Ari Fródi, ca 1125-1130):

And early one morning they noticed nine [húdkeips] where poles were waved, topped with a bundle of corn, sunwise.... The visitors then rowed towards them and were very curious when they walked ashore. They were short men, grim looking and wild hair on their head. Strong eyed with broad cheekbones...."
(Roughly translated by BK, from Eirik the Red's saga. Svart á Hvítu, 1985, Reykjavík.)

Greenlandic as a written language is a relatively new form, dating to an 18th Century Norwegian priest on the Mid-West coast. Dialects vary greatly, due to various Inuit migrations from Canada and relative isolation. Thus, on the East Coast, even 20 years ago, there would be significant differences from one fjord system to another.

The kayak as we know it today, based on the Cape Farewell region, stems from a Canadian migration to West Greenland after AD1200 (reaching the Cape Farewell region after AD1450). Their kayak evolved further in the South where the dog sled was of little use and seal hunting in open water played a larger role. This kayak mixed with much older type East Greenlandic kayaks, when the people of the South East Coast migrated west over Cape Farewell after 1850. The subsequent fusion of East to West is the well known Cape Farewell design which we work from.

sewing needle for boat skin

*Some characters in older style writing have been replaced in modern West Greenlandic:
"ĸ" - 'kra' is replaced with "q"
"ũ" - 'U-tilde' is replaced with "uukk"
"û" - 'U-circumflex' is replaced with "uu."

**East Greenlandic words in ITALICS are suggested by Tobias to be same as west coast dialect, here we have copied modern writing.

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