Then, wanting
to cross waters too deep for a pole, they invented the first paddles;
and so made the same sort of catamaran that you can still see on the
Coromandel Coast in southern India. But savages who knew enough to
take catamarans through the pounding surf also knew enough to see that
a log with a hollow in the upper side of it could carry a great deal
more than a log that was solid; and, seeing this, they presently began
making hollows and shaping logs, till at last they had made a regular
dug-out canoe. When Christopher Columbus asked the West Indian savages
what they called their dug-outs they said _canoas_; so a boat dug out
of a solid log had the first right to the word we now use for a canoe
built up out of several different parts.
[Illustration: "DUG-OUT" CANOE]
Dug-outs were sometimes very big. They were the Dreadnought
battleships of their own time and place and people. When their ends
were sharpened into a sort of ram they could stave in an enemy's canoe
if they caught its side full tilt with their own end. Dug-out canoes
were common wherever the trees were big and strong enough, as in
Southern Asia, Central Africa, and on the Pacific Coast of America.
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