The Tale of the Flying Canoe

You won’t find specifications for a flying canoe in the Canoeing.com Canoe Guide, but with the holiday season nearing its high-water mark, we thought we should spend a little time talking about flying canoes all the same.

You see, after recently reporting that Shelley Posen debuted an original poem at the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario based on the French-Canadian “Flying Canoe” folktale, we’ve found ourselves delving deeper and deeper into the tale, also known as “La Chasse-Galerie.” We were intrigued that our favorite variety of watercraft played such a prominent role in this important folk tale that has been handed down through the generations.

The “Flying Canoe” tale is the dark story of woodsmen in Quebec making a pact with the devil to deliver them home, via a flying canoe, to their wives and families for New Year’s celebration. A version of the tale originated in Europe, we learned. In the Old World original, a hunter named Gallery who refused to attend Mass on Sundays because of his love for hunting, was condemned to be chased across the sky by galloping horses and howling wolves.

The New World variant of the tale traded homesick woodsmen for the obsessed hunter and added a flying canoe to the telling, which the devil makes available to the lumbermen, if they forgo touching a crucifix or invoking God’s name while en route. Depending on the version of the story told, all, some, or none of the sky-paddlers perish by the end of the trip.

The National Film Board of Canada has produced THIS wonderful short film adaptation of the story.

Hearing about the story reminded one person in our office of artist Henri Julien’s artistic depictions of the story. Julien, who worked for 22 years as a political caricaturist for the Montreal Daily Star, sketched scenes from the tale at the request of Honoré Beaugrand who published one of the best-known versions of the story in his Montreal newspaper in 1891.

You can see the sketches and read the Beaugrand version of the story HERE.

Julien also painted a representation of the story which is now part of the Musée du Québec’s collection and was featured in a 1998 McMichael Canadian Art Collection exhibition called “In The Wilds: Canoeing and Canadian Art.”

Imagery from the story appears in a lot of other places too. We know of an ice-sculpture of the flying canoe, HERE, there’s a brand of ale brewed in Quebec, Maudite, that appropriates the canoe and the devil in its packaging, HERE, and Canada issued a stamp in 1990 featuring some especially spooky imagery from the story, HERE.

So, as you travel this holiday season, – whether by plane, train, automobile, or conventional canoe – we at Canoeing.com wish you the very best of the holiday seasons … and a less eventful trip than that experienced by the men paddling the “Flying Canoe.”

Illustration: La Chasse-galerie de Henri Julien (1852-1908) (Musée du Québec) Public Domain.