At mid-afternoon we embarked on the Penobscot. Our birch was
nineteen and a half feet long by two and a half at the widest part,
and fourteen inches deep within, both ends alike, and painted green,
which Joe thought affected the pitch and made it leak. This, I think,
was a middling-sized one. That of the explorers was much larger,
though probably not much longer. This carried us three with our
baggage, weighing in all between five hundred and fifty and six
hundred pounds. We had two heavy, though slender, rock-maple paddles,
one of them of bird's-eye maple. Joe placed birch bark on the bottom
for us to sit on, and slanted cedar splints against the cross-bars
to protect our backs, while he himself sat upon a cross-bar in the
stern. The baggage occupied the middle or widest part of the canoe.
We also paddled by turns in the bows, now sitting with our legs
extended, now sitting upon our legs, and now rising upon our knees;
but I found none of these positions endurable, and was reminded of
the complaints of the old Jesuit missionaries of the torture they
endured from long confinement in constrained positions in canoes, in
their long voyages from Quebec to the Huron country; but afterwards I
sat on the cross-bars, or stood up, and experienced no inconvenience.

It was dead water for a couple of miles. The river had been raised
about two feet by the rain, and lumberers were hoping for a flood
sufficient to bring down the logs that were left in the spring. Its
banks were seven or eight feet high, and densely covered with white
and black spruce,--which, I think, must be the commonest trees
thereabouts,--fir, arbor-vitae, canoe, yellow, and black birch, rock,
mountain, and a few red maples, beech, black and mountain ash, the
large-toothed aspen, many civil-looking elms, now imbrowned, along
the stream, and at first a few hemlocks also. We had not gone far