The canoa and the piragua — the hull the Spanish Caribbean ran on

The dugout of the Antilles, measured against European boats by a Spanish official in 1535: no keel, one tree, forty or fifty men in the largest, faster under eight paddles than a ship's boat under twelve, and unable to sink because it swamps instead. Oviedo also records the dependence — the Christians could not work their coastal and riverside estates without them. By 1611 canoa was a Castilian headword, generalised, the dictionary says, from what the craft was called in Santo Domingo.