Took a look at the saves, and most likely the corruption has been caused by the many item stacks on the punt plus the many animals following. The game should warn of overloaded punts, but there are instances where boundaries get broken.
By tutorial resetting do you mean that it got right back to first task? I managed to get it to proceed, falsely, to the next task when travelling around with your punt, gear and flock of animals.
Always a bit tricky to get on track afterwards, but the saves surely help. Also, when the game ate your woodsman's axe, what was the instance when it happened? Feel free to provide details if you can recall. I mean, did you for example drop the axe on punt while paddling overworld map, then zoom-in and upon getting to shore noticed it missing. Or did you drop it on zoomed-in map, rowed around a bit and noticed it missing at some point. Or any details...?