Aleutian Islands

George Dyson has set himself a task even more difficult than preserving the wisdom of a vanishing culture: reviving an art that is already lost. The son of a Princeton physicist, Dyson, 38, was fascinated by 18th century accounts of Aleutian kayakers, who were said to have sustained speeds of 10 knots on the open ocean in their 15-ft. to 30-ft. craft, defying the apparent limits imposed by the length of the boat and human endurance. For two decades, Dyson, a self-taught boatbuilder, has worked to rediscover the technological secrets of these fabled vessels, or baidarkas, as Russian colonists called them.

For more than 5,000 years, Aleut Indians plied the islands off Alaska in craft made of animal skins and bone. Over time these craft diverged in design from other kayaks. They evolved curiously split bows, sterns that were wide at the top but V-shaped at the bottom, and bone joints that made the vessels 100 times as flexible as modern boats. The Aleuts became shaped to the demands of kayaking vast distances, developing huge upper bodies from relentless paddling and bowed legs that allowed them to sit confined for hours. By the time the Russians arrived in pursuit of sea-otter pelts in 1741, the Aleuts had established a marriage of man and technology near perfect for hunting sea mammals.

The baidarka changed markedly under the influence of the Russians and then began to disappear with the end of the sea-otter hunts in the last century. After World War II, the Aleuts switched to motor-powered craft. In his efforts to reconstruct the original kayaks, Dyson, based in Bellingham, Wash., relies on early accounts of explorers and sea captains.

The most intriguing elements of baidarka design are those that show the Aleuts' rejection of typical kayak forms in favor of a distinctive approach. Dyson speculates that the forked bow prevents the boat from submarining in waves. It also gives the kayak the speed advantage of a longer, slenderer craft, and may set up a wave that counteracts the drag-inducing bow wave of ordinary designs. The oddly configured stern may help the kayak make the transition from a vessel that pushes through the water to one that planes on top of the water.

Dyson believes that the baidarka will have a robust future, influencing the shape of modern sport kayaks. Physicist Francis Clauser designed a forked-bow craft for a syndicate in the 1986-87 America's Cup race. Dyson still speaks of the genius of the Aleut kayak builders with reverence: "Modern science has recognized all the elements that went into the baidarka, but nobody put them together to achieve a synthesis the way the Aleuts did."