I had settled down to a comfortable lassitude when I noticed R Paterson's letter ‘A sense of inflated entitlement' (The Weekend Sun, August 26) and in particular the phrase 'unstable canoes”. My first reaction was: 'Uh oh, where's ‘A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe' when you need it?”

In my childhood in Papua New Guinea I saw men fishing standing up in dug-out canoes. The modern stand-up paddleboard is a direct copy. On the Wewak coast I saw men making a seagoing outrigger canoe with considerable freeboard. The Norse longships would've had comparatively less freeboard. The canoe is not per se unstable - indeed, the Norse longship and the Hanseatic League cog were originally dugout canoes themselves, with freeboard added.

If R Paterson wants to make a point, he'd do better to question whether or not pre-contact Maori fishermen had the means to preserve their catch over such long distances. The Renaissance-era Basque fished off the coast of Newfoundland, but that was because they could salt the fish. The Mediaeval Icelanders and Norwegians preserved fish during winter by pickling them and lutefisk is a traditional delicacy I understand, but only in Norway and Sweden. Maori preserved birds in their own fat, but that required a fire and that mightn't have been possible on a fishing canoe.

As he's done nothing of the sort his letter kind of goes off at half-cock and one is left wondering in the cloud of black smoke and the totally ruined blunderbuss, what it takes for some people to start thinking.

W Parish, Bellevue.