Time was when the only way to get around this country was by canoe.

Settling, trading, hunting, shipping, exploring, warring - it all happened by canoe, a remarkably efficient, versatile and durable vessel that has changed little since Caribbean natives first started hollowing out tree trunks for transportation thousands of years ago.

The canoe is so intertwined with the history of Canada that it has its own museum, the only canoe museum in North America.

The Canadian Canoe Museum is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year and its 10th in the Ontario Marine Corporation of Canada’s enormous manufacturing plant in Peterborough.

With more than 600 canoes and kayaks, it has the world’s largest collection of paddled watercraft, including dugouts, outriggers, whalers, and plank canoes and birchbark models.

Pierre Trudeau’s birch bark canoe - and his fringed buckskin jacket - are also part of the collection. But there’s one canoe the museum will never get its hands on, even though it’s more within reach than it has been for nearly 200 years.

The Maliseet cargo canoe, built in New Brunswick around 1820 and currently being restored at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, is home in Canada, but just for the summer.

When the job is completed, the 21-foot vessel will be flown back to Ireland, where it has spent most of its life.

According to the museum, the canoe was built by Maliseet craftsmen and sold to a British army captain named Stepney St. George, who was stationed in the godforsaken colony of Canada.

When he returned to Headford Castle, his 13th century castle in Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, the canoe went, too.

St. George was widowed and the father of seven children when the potato famine struck the Emerald Isle in the 1840s. Unlike most of the English landlords who occupied Ireland, St. George apparently had a heart

He became chairman of the Relief Committee, turned his office and storehouses into soup kitchens for the starving Irish, and badgered the Relief Commission Office at Dublin Castle for more boilers because the four he had couldn’t keep up with the desperate need.