(Courtesy Jamestown Settlement)
The chief curator of the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News will deliver a free lecture Tuesday at Jamestown Settlement about an exhibition at the living history museum detailing log canoes in the Chesapeake Bay.
Lyles Forbes will talk about how the log canoe has evolved from a basic boat to a racing boat in the Chesapeake Bay. Forbes has spent much of his youth on or near the water, and he came to Virginia in 2000 to develop the museum’s International Small Craft Center, according to a news release from Jamestown Settlement.
He will also address a yearlong exhibition in place at Jamestown Settlement called “Working and Racing on the Bay: The Chesapeake Log Canoe.”
That exhibition can be seen until Sept. 8 and looks at the evolution of the boat from its days as a Powhatan vessel to when it served as a work and racing boat in the centuries that followed English settlement of the area.
Despite being at Jamestown Settlement, the exhibition is curated by the Mariners’ Museum. It features more than 100 artifacts from the Newport News museum, including a dugout canoe, wood samples, photographs, woodworking tools, boatbuilding tools and scale models illustrating log canoes.
The free lecture starts at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Jamestown Settlement.