The periagua: a dugout canoe with sails

What is a periagua?

A periagua was the biggest member of the dugout canoe family. Builders chose an enormous tree, often a cypress in the Carolinas, and hollowed out the trunk. To make a larger boat, they would often saw the hollowed log in half along its length and fit one or more flat planks between the two halves, like the middle leaf of a table. That made the boat wider and able to carry much more without sinking deeper in the water. Planks could also be added along the sides to raise them.

A dictionary of sea terms from 1769 put it simply: a true canoe was made from one tree, but a periagua was made from two trunks joined into one boat. In practice every owner built to suit his own needs, so periaguas came in all shapes and sizes.

Where does the word periagua come from?

The boat and its name both began with the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and the American coasts, who were carving dugout canoes long before Europeans arrived. Spanish writers recorded the word piragua in the 1530s, borrowed from a language of the Carib family. French turned it into pirogue, which reached English in the 1660s.

English colonists could never agree on the spelling. Records from the late 1600s and early 1700s call the same kind of boat a periagua, periauger, periago or pereago. North Carolinians usually said “periauger” and South Carolinians “periagua”. Today’s word “pirogue” is best known for the small canoes of Louisiana’s bayous, which grew up later.

How did a periagua sail?

A periagua could be rowed or sailed. In calm weather, or in a narrow creek, a crew of about four to ten rowers pulled it along; in 1681 Spanish prisoners told Dampier of a big one, kept on the Pacific coast of South America, that was rowed with 14 oars. In open water the crew could step one or two masts and set fore-and-aft sails, meaning sails that run along the length of the boat rather than across it, like a sloop’s. In the Carolinas two masts, with no ropes bracing them and no sails out in front, seem to have been usual, and the masts could be taken down.

That mix made the periagua handy. It floated in very shallow water, so it could go up rivers and creeks and over sandbars, and its oars let it move against the wind or with no wind at all. Its weakness was the open sea. Periaguas worked mostly on rivers, sounds and sheltered coasts, with only short trips out into the ocean, although a few Carolina periaugers did make coastal voyages as far as the West Indies.

Who used periaguas around 1715?

Almost everyone who lived near the water.

• Carolina and Virginia settlers used them as the everyday workboats of the rivers. Writing in 1709 about North Carolina, the explorer John Lawson said canoes and periaugers were used mainly to cross rivers, creeks and bays, and that the largest could carry about 80 barrels or more. A South Carolina periagua carried around 30 to 50 barrels of rice.
• Indian traders in South Carolina loaded periaguas with cloth, tools, guns and rum for Native nations and brought deerskins back. The colony also used them as scout boats, patrolling the inland waters south of Charles Town against raids from Spanish Florida.
• Fishermen and turtle hunters worked from dugouts of every size. The buccaneer William Dampier admired the Miskito men of Central America, who harpooned fish, turtle and manatee from their canoes and were hired by English crews for their skill.
• Logwood cutters, the “Baymen” who cut logwood for dye around the Bay of Honduras and the Bay of Campeche, used them too. In 1715 one group of Baymen was reported working from two sloops and several periaguas.

Who rowed the periaguas of the Carolinas?

In the South Carolina Lowcountry, many periaguas were crewed by enslaved Black boatmen. A skilled enslaved captain was called a patroon, and he and his rowers carried planters’ rice, deerskins and other goods along the rivers and creeks to market at Charles Town. The historian Lynn Harris has shown that these watermen built a culture of their own. They were expert boat handlers, they raced their boats, they carried news from plantation to plantation, and some carried on small trades of their own.

A boat could also be a road to freedom. In 1687 a group of eleven people, eight men, two women and a small child, escaped from Carolina by boat (one account says a canoe) and reached Spanish St Augustine in Florida. Among them were a man named Mingo, his wife and their three-year-old daughter. Spain later promised freedom to people who escaped from the English colonies, and in the 1700s many more enslaved Carolinians tried to escape south by boat, many of them towards St Augustine.

Did pirates use periaguas?

Yes, especially pirates who had no ship yet. In 1680 a band of English buccaneers, raiders who attacked Spanish towns and ships, marched across the Isthmus of Darien, now Panama, to reach the Pacific. Dampier, who was with them, wrote that they set off in “Canoas and Periago’s” supplied by their Indigenous allies. That April, rowing canoes, they attacked and beat a small Spanish squadron off Panama.

The Bahamas pirates of the game’s era began the same way. In 1713 and 1714 small bands of two dozen men or fewer, among them men who sailed with Benjamin Hornigold, raided Spanish shipping off Cuba and Florida in canoes and periaguas. Once they captured a sloop, they moved up. In early 1716 Sam Bellamy, later captain of the Whydah, is reported to have begun his piracy in a pair of periaguas before taking bigger vessels.