Boats

You know you wanna see what some boats look like ...

These are all from the Maritime Museum in Auckland.

(This boat is a three beam canoe from Anuta in the Solomon Islands. According to the plaque, Anuta is a Polynesian outlier in the southeastern Solomons. [In general, the Solomons are Melanesian, but not this area.] This particular form of canoe is very seaworthy even though it's quite small.)

(This is from Futuna in Vanuatu. Futuna is far, far, far south in Vanuatu. The people there are still Melanesian but there's a lot of Polynesian influence down there and their language is actually Polynesian, which is different. This is a traditional outrigger canoe. Previously, Ni-Vanuatu used to do inter-island sailing in canoes like this, although that hasn't been practiced for about 200 years now. Nowadays, you definitely see canoes like this all throughout Vanuatu, but they are primarily used for fishing or short travel. There are people in this country who use canoes daily to travel to their gardens, for example. I know of communities on Epi and Maewo who do this; there have got to be plenty of them. In my part of the country, the Shepherds, canoes are really only used for fishing.)

This picture is small, but I hope you can get the gist! So this boat is a Fijian drua. It's an asymmetrical double hulled canoe. It can be used for ocean traveling or warfare. This is an extremely tiny example of one. According to the plaque, "[t]he largest could be up to 30 m in length and carry as many as 200 warriors." Can you imagine? 

Another thing I found really interesting -- apparently it's thought that the ancestors of the Pacific islands peoples used double hulled canoes like this to travel from South east Asia all the way through the Pacific, navigating only by stars, clouds, birds, and the like. Whenever I hear people try to denigrate Pacific cultures by asking about what technological advances they created, historically speaking, I feel like it's obvious. The Pacific Islanders have the greatest tradition of maritime expertise in the world. They made it from Indonesia to Hawaii, New Zealand to Tahiti, Tonga to Tongoa to Tongariki to Niue to Guadalcanal, on canoes, with no maps, no compass, just their seafaring expertise. That is amazing.