If it has proved difficult to untangle the history of the fishing boats on the Great Lakes, this is in part due to the confusion caused by ‘naming’. If William Watts had called the boats he built in Canada ‘Drontheims’, there would have been no doubt of their origins, but he didn’t, he called them ‘fish boats’ or ‘skiffs’, both terms that had been used to describe such boats in Ireland, but which had little specificity. Watts, of course, was not considering the needs of history, but the need to sell boats to people of varied ethnic origin who had no idea what the word ‘Drontheim’ meant, but knew they needed a fish boat.

In Ireland, the name ‘Drontheim’, and ‘Norway Yawl’, which preceded it, emphasised the long-distance connections that had brought these boats to Ulster. Once local builders started to produce their own variations on the Norwegian imports, however, they soon acquired local identities. In Donegal, they were known as ‘Greencastle Yawls’, after the initial location of the MacDonald boatyard, where they were built. Even after MacDonalds moved to Moville, the name kept the attachment to Greencastle. The larger craft of North Donegal were called Westerd Drontheims, to distinguish them from their smaller cousins, but on bilingual Tory Island, the large boat was An Bád Mór (The Big Boat) or in English, the ‘Big Salmon Boat’, whilst the smaller variants were called ‘Skiffs’. In the County Antrim fishing harbours, the Drontheim became the ‘Skerries Yawl’ after a small group of rocky islands just outside Portrush. On Rathlin Island they were called Shallops, a name of French origin, usually applied to ship’s boats, but on the nearby Scottish isle of Islay they were ‘Irish Skiffs’ or Sgoth Eireannach and in the Mull of Kintyre, re-establishing the connection with Donegal, they were known as ‘Greencastle Skiffs’ or ‘Greenies’, despite the fact that the Scots got most of their boats from the Hopkins and Kelly boatyards in Portrush.

In this small area of the north-west of Ireland and south-west of Scotland, we thus have a great variety of nomenclature, referring to origin, function and local associations. The urge to bestow local names did not erase appreciation of wider connections, however. The owners of Greencastle Yawls and Skerries Yawls fished each others waters, and raced against each other in regattas at Moville or Portstewart, where all competed in the ‘Drontheim’ class (MacPolin 1999).

It is surprising that in Canada the Watts boats were named ‘skiffs’ rather than ‘yawls’, since yawl would appear to have been the dominant term in south Donegal and Sligo, but then there is no evidence that it was the Watts brothers who bestowed this name upon them. In any event, we may suggest that ‘Collingwood Skiff’ was the Georgian Bay term for a Drontheim, in exactly the same way that ‘Greencastle Skiff’ was the Argyle term for the same kind of vessel.

The Drontheim was a boat with many names. In the case of the Mackinaw, we have the reverse situation: a name with many boats. The name, of Ojibwe origin, has not only been applied to a city, a township, a county and an island all in the vicinity of the famous straits, but also to everything from Mackinaw trout to Mackinaw blankets to Mackinaw guns (Cecil 2001a p61). It has also been applied to a vast number of different kinds of watercraft (ibid), sometimes by the people who used them, sometimes retrospectively by others, and sometimes, it’s hard to tell. Cecil suggests that many of these craft may have been “erroneously named” (ibid. p63), although who is qualified to make such judgements he does not investigate.

“The power of the magic M word” (ibid p66) with which Cecil struggled, may be due to its aural familiarity to people of Scots-Irish descent, who formed a significant part of the immigrant population of the area, bestowing names of their own in the fishing communities where the vessels were used, such as ‘Antrim Street’ in Charlevoix, Michigan. The three syllable word 'Mackinaw' is similar in sound to many place names in Northern Ireland, such as Maghera, or Lisbellaw, in fact if it were to appear on a signpost in Ireland it would probably spark a debate in local history circles about the correct Gaelic translation: (Magh an….- The Plain of ?). In fact there have been such debates concerning the Ojibwe meaning, variously translated as: ‘Great Turtle’, ‘Place of the Great Dancing Spirit’ or ‘a…mythical group of Indians who row through the forest and shoot but are never seen’ (ibid. p63).

The Indians themselves, however, did not use the ‘magic M word’ to describe their boats, although others did, also calling them Indian Macks. To the Aboriginal inhabitants of Manatoulin island they were Bemassing Giman (boat that is moved by the wind) whilst in Michigan, the Odawa word Naalikwaan was used (Cecil 2002).

For most of the people who have historically used these boats, on both sides of the Atlantic, they were first and foremost a tool of their trade, and many names were simply descriptive, yet different descriptions focussed on different attributes. Bád Mór, Bemassing Giman, and 'Fish Boat' describing respectively the size, means of propulsion and purpose of the boat.. People gave increased meaning to such artefacts, which were vital for life, by giving them names describing their origins: Norway Yawl, Drontheim, Sgoth Eireannach; personal associations to builders: Watts boats or MacDonald boats were used in Georgian Bay, Beattie, Kelly or MacDonald boats in Ulster; or local associations which tied them to their own place and identity: Skerries Yawl, Collingwood Skiff, Mackinaw Boat.

In recent years, the boats have lost their practical uses, as the fisheries were destroyed, in Ireland by industrial fishing methods, in the Great Lakes by the invasion of the lamprey, a parasite which wiped out fish stocks. At the same time, the craft have acquired an increased significance as a marker of a local identity in a globalising world. This in itself has influenced ‘naming’. Joyce notes that “when fish boats become yachts they tend to be given a more attractive name”: thus “Maine sloop boats…became Friendship sloops, named after one of the villages that built them” (1987). Likewise, William Watts jnr. denied that Collingwood fish boats had been called Mackinaw Boats, but adopted the name himself when it became apparent that it increased his boats’ marketability to yachtsmen (ibid).

Kiefer relates how, when he expressed interest in building a boat, a friend said to him “If I was from Michigan I’d build a Mackinaw Boat” (1992). Kiefer did so, and the vessel had increased meaning for him due to its local associations. The Nelson Zimmer design he built from included lapstrake construction, like Watts, a high sheer to the bow, a la Chenier, and a plan differing from any previous model, being fuller towards the stern, in contrast to both the ‘cod’s head, mackerel tail’ and the symmetrical plans used by traditional fishing boats (Cecil 2001b). The boat was well suited for pleasure sailing, however, which is what she, like all contemporary Mackinaw boats and Drontheims, is used for. The pleasure of sailing her is added to by the local identity imbued in her by the name. Zimmer had sold over 100 sets of plans for the Mackinaw Boat he designed by 1982 (Swanson 1982 p106).

Similar motivations have led to the reconstruction of Drontheims in Ireland and Scotland and the reconstruction of Collingwood Skiffs in Canada.

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