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GREENVILLE — It was with uncanny ease that the first few birch bark canoes glided into view, cutting the wind-riffled surface of Moosehead Lake.

Their paddlers directed the boats in loose courses around one another with short, confident strokes as the fleet grew from three to 10. Soon, a flotilla of 15 boats had gathered about 50 feet offshore.

On July 24, 1857, Henry David Thoreau set out on the same lake in a birch bark canoe crafted by his Penobscot guide, Joe Polis.

“Think of our little eggshell of a canoe tossing across that great lake, a mere black speck to the eagle soaring above it!” Thoreau mused in his journal.

That was one thing Thoreau got wrong, James Francis noted as he watched the flotilla Thursday, 167 years to the day after the famed naturalist wrote that journal entry. Birch bark canoes designed and built by Wabanaki people for an estimated 3,000 years are durable and resilient said Francis, who is himself an experienced canoeist and the Penobscot Nation’s director of cultural and historic preservation.

“If you look at a canoe that was built in the 1500s, no difference, technically,” said Patrick Almenas, a Penobscot canoe builder. “It’s never been improved.”

The hulls of these boats are best constructed out of the bark of a single birch tree that must be about 4 feet, maybe larger, in diameter. The bark is about an eighth of an inch thick. Using hot water to make the bark pliable, builders secure it, with the exterior surface facing in, around wooden gunwales. They give the bark shape and form by inserting stiff ribs crosswise down the length of craft. Spruce root stitching, a shade darker than the amber hue of the bark, holds everything in place, and the hulls are sealed using a mixture of pine pitch and bear fat (modern-day builders often use more readily available lard).

The entire process can take a master builder over 500 hours for a boat that costs $1,500 per foot (meaning a 16-foot canoe is a $24,000 boat).

So to observe a gathering of 15 birch bark canoes, like that one that took place at the Greenville Junction Wharf as part of the Thoreau-Wabanaki Trail Festival, is exceedingly rare.

The festival commemorates Thoreau’s journeys into Maine’s North Woods and celebrates the Indigenous practices and knowledge of the Wabanaki people who guided and educated him during his travels. Thursday’s flotilla, part of a five-day event schedule, attracted an assortment of Thoreau enthusiasts, canoe paddlers and builders, Wabanaki people and visitors interested in the culture and boat-building.

Under a tent at the wharf, the boats awaited their launch.

Fresh spots of rich golden sealant — the pitch and lard combination used as a sort of epoxy — had been slathered on the day before as part of a repitching workshop led by master builder Steve Cayard.

Cayard sports the bushy gray beard one might expect of an expert boatbuilder who works out of an off-grid homestead in the back woods. Although he is not Indigenous himself, Cayard is the preeminent authority on the construction of Wabanaki style birch bark canoes. The last Wabanaki builders were active in the 1920s, Cayard said. He began closely studying the style and finished his first canoe in 1979.

He began to work with Wabanaki tribes in Maine and Canada to bring back the traditional canoe construction style and train a new generation of builders.

“We’re looking at like 25 years of cultural revitalization,” Francis said, gazing upon the flotilla.

The canoes are light, about 50 to 70 pounds depending on their length, and stiff and responsive under paddle. The Penobscot word for the boats, àkwitǝn, means “that which floats lightly,” Francis said.

“There’s this natural material connection to the natural water,” he added. “They handle like no other.”

Alexandra Conover Bennett, a lauded Maine guide with a lifetime of experience in canoes, first paddled a birch bark canoe in the early 1980s.

“It belied what it weighed — and they don’t weigh much,” she said. “But a similar length wood-canvas canoe, which are very light canoes, too, feels less light than a bark, and a plastic canoe feels dreadfully leaden.”

She and her husband brought their 2002 Cayard canoe to the flotilla.

Cayard built, helped build or trained the builder of nearly every boat on Moosehead Lake Thursday.

It was under Cayard’s tutelage that renowned Passamaquoddy canoe builder David Moses Bridges, who died in 2017, mastered the craft. Bridges’ great-grandfather was one of the last Passamaquoddy builders and in 2013, he and Cayard built a canoe at the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor together. The 14-foot boat still remains on display in the museum — except on Thursday, when it was loaned out for the flotilla.

“One of the things they told them when they were building it was like, ‘Look, you got to get this thing on the water occasionally,'” said David Bridges’ brother, Darel Bridges. “It just needs to be kept wet.”

He kneeled in the boat wielding a white ash paddle he’d made in the form of one his great-grandfather’s and propelled himself gently out onto the lake.

Reuben M. Schafir is a Report for America corps member who writes about Indigenous communities for the Portland Press Herald.