York boat

[1][2] It was named after York Factory, the headquarters of the HBC, and by some accounts was supposedly modeled after the Orkney yole (itself a descendant of the Viking longship).

The boat's heavy wood construction was a significant advantage when travelling waterways where the bottom or sides of the hull were likely to strike rocks or ice.

The solid, all-wood hull of the York boat could simply bounce off or grind past obstacles that could easily inflict fatal damage on a soft-hulled vessel.

Crewing a York boat was an arduous task, and those who chose this life faced "unending toil broken only by the terror of storms," according to Sir John Franklin.

They were modeled on the birchbark canoe invented by Native peoples in the eastern woodlands, but were sheathed with thin cedar planks in lapstrake (clinker) fashion, without a fixed rudder.

[5] The documentary shows a reconstructed boat, the Maryann Muminawatum, rowed from Norway House by eight rowers, a coxwain, and a steersman.

Unlike the Hudson's Bay reconstruction, the replica York boat in this video shows crudely carved oars with the midsection left as a thick beam to counterbalance the weight of the loom and blade outside of the pivot point the while the rowers' end tapers to a slender handle.