Ligogu spell
„I shall take hold of an adze, I shall strike! I shall enter my canoe, I shall make thee fly, O canoe, I shall make thee jump! We shall fly like butterflies, like wind; we shall disappear in mist, we shall vanish. You will pierce the straits of Kadimwatu (between the islands of Tewara and Uwama), you will break the promontory of Saramwa (near Dobu), pierce the passage of Loma (in Dawson Straits), die away in the distance, die away with the wind, fade away with the mist, vanish away. Break through your seaweeds (i. e., on coming against the shore). Put on your wreath (probably an allusion to the seaweeds), make your bed in the sand. I turn round, I see the Vakuta men, the Kitava men behind me; my sea, the sea of Pilolu (i. e., the sea between the Trobriands and the Amphletts); to-day the Kudayuri men will burn their fires (i. e., on the shores of Dobu). Bind your grass skirt together, O canoe” (here the personal name of the canoe is mentioned), fly!” The last phrase contains an implicit hint that the canoe partakes of the nature of a flying witch, as it should, according to the Kudayuri myth.
After this, the canoe-builder proceeds to scoop out the log. This is a long task, and a heavy one, and one which requires a good deal of skill, especially towards the end, when the walls of the dug-out have to be made sufficiently thin, and when the wood has to be taken off evenly over the whole surface. Thus, although at the beginning the canoe carpenter is usually helped by a few men — his sons or brothers or nephews who in assisting him also learn the trade — towards the end he has to do the work single-handed. It, therefore, always happens that this stage takes a very long time. Often the canoe will lie for weeks, untouched, covered with palm leaves against the sun, and filled with some water to prevent drying and cracking (see Plate XXV). Then the carpenter will set to work for a few days, and pause again. In almost all villages, the canoe is put up in the central place, or before the builder’s hut. In some of the Eastern villages, the scooping out is done on the sea beach, to avoid pulling the heavy log to and from the village.
Parallel with the process of hollowing out, the other parts of the canoe are made ready to be pieced together. Four broad and long planks form the gunwale; L-shaped pieces of wood are cut into ribs; long poles are prepared for longitudinal support of the ribs, and for platform rafters; short poles are made ready as transversals of the platform and main supports of the outrigging; small sticks to connect the float with the transversals; finally, the float itself, a long, bulky log. These are the main, constituent parts of a canoe, to be made by the builder. The four carved boards are also made by him if he knows how to carve, otherwise another expert has to do this part of the work (see Plate XXVI).
When all the parts are ready, another magical rite has to be performed. It is called „kapitunela nanola waga”: „the cutting off of the canoe’s mind”, an expression which denotes a change of mind, a final determination. In this case, the canoe makes up its mind to run quickly. The formula is short, contains at the beginning a few obscure words, and then a few geographical references to some places in the d’Entrecasteaux Archipelago. It is recited over a few drops of coco-nut oil, which is then wrapped up in a small bundle. The same spell is then again spoken over the ligogu blade, round which a piece of dry banana has been wrapped in the manner described above. The canoe is turned bottom up, the bundle with coco-nut oil placed on it and struck with the adze. With this the canoe is ready to be pieced together, and the first stage of its construction is over.