The Trireme Trust - Newsletter 16 - Pacific Boatbuilding

Pacific Boatbuilding

Surely one of the oddest places for the trireme flag to fly is Kalua Bay on Taumako, in Temotu Province of the Solomon Islands. Although approximately the size of Poros, Taumako, largest of the Duff group, appears on few maps. In fact, many maps of the Solomons omit Temotu, the country's easternmost province, altogether. Indeed, compared to the large islands that lie westward, Temotu does not look like much, a mere 926 sq.km of lands scattered over 150,000 sq.km. of ocean. So how did Olympias' colours make it way out there?

The answer to that question is a story that began in 1968 when Dr. David Lewis came to Temotu to study traditional Polynesian navigation with the late Basil Tevake, one of the greatest sailors of his generation. Until Lewis began his work in the 60's the anthropological establishment - which at the time included few sailors - held that human settlement of Oceania was more or less accidental; that people simply drifted around until they bumped into isalnds. underlying this mindset was the notion that what white people cannot do cannot be done, that because Europeans could not confidently navigate the vast Pacific without sophisticated technological aids, no one else could.

Lewis' research, first published in 1972 in his book We, the Navigators, proved this assumption wrong. Not only did the Oceanic peoples know what they were doing when they first colonised islands from Te Pito o te Henua (aka Easter Island) to Hawai'i to Aotearoa (New Zealand) to Madagascar, some of them still knew. Although the introduction of European methods had largely replaced Austronesian ones, and colonial administrators had in many cases forbidden voyaging by canoe, a few men and women in remote areas like Temotu retained the ancient skills. Because these take years of on-the-job training to learn, and because navigators customarily taught by demonstration, no systematic documentation existed till Lewis began his studies.

In 1993 Lewis and his colleague, cultural anthropologist Dr. Mimi George, returned to Temotu to visit friends and collect material for the new edition of We, the Navigators. Stopping at Taumako, they met up with Kruso Kaveia, who had been Tevake's steersman in 1968 and was now Paramount Chief of Duff Islands. Chief Kruso told them he feared that unless he and the few people in their 70's and 80's taught a new generation of navigators soon, the skills of his people would die with him and his contemporaries. Moreover to teach traditional navigation, they would need a traditional canoe or tepuke, and the people who knew how to build one of these were also likely to die soon. Lewis and George shared his anxiety and promised to help make the construction and sailing of a tepuke possible. The minimum length of a real tepuke is 12 metres, although some of old people remember ones that were as much as 20 metres. This is, in a nutshell, the story of the Vaka Taumako (Taumako Canoe) Project, an endeavour that, despite cultural and geographical distance, shares many features of the Trireme Trust's work.

How the flag got to Taumako was aboard the Gryphon, Dr. George's yacht, which furnished transport to Taumako for her, Nils Thomas and myself. The nearest airfield to Duffs lies on Santa Cruz island, some 300 km to the southwest. Ships to Duffs are few; sometimes months go by between the theoretically monthly rounds of the government cargo vessels. There being no harbour at Taumako, sometimes even when the ship arrives rough seas prevent unloading of passengers or cargo. A support boat is therefore almost essential.

We anchored at Kalua Bay on 28 June to document the final stages of construction for the two tepuke being built under the auspices of Vaka Taumako Project. Previously, Mimi and I had visited in April of 1996 to finalise the Project agreement, secure government permits, and do all the other things necessary to get things rolling. I returned in December and January to record preliminaries, including felling of the first tree. This time we stayed until after the two project canoes and one constructed by one enterprising member of the community were launched on 12 September.

For most of the time, the flag flew from Gryphon's mast. Several people asked about it, and some enjoyed looking at photos of Olympias. Because of their geographical and cultural situation, citizens of Temotu are always interested in canoes, and the "bigfella custom war canoe blong Greece" intrigued them (I should add that Duffs might be a fruitful recruiting site for future trireme trials).