The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays

by Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

This is exactly like the catamaran used on the coast of Madras, a model of one of which is in the Indian Museum; they are also used on the Ganges, and in the Asiatic isles. At Manilla they are known by the name of saraboas; but the perfection of raft navigation is on the coast of Peru. Ulloa, in 1735, describes the balzas used on the Guayaquil, in Ecuador, and on the coast as far south as Paita. They are called by the Indians of the Guayaquil jungadas, and by the Darien Indians puero. They are made of a wood so light that a boy can easily carry a log 1 foot in diameter and 3 or 4 yards long. They are always made of an odd number of beams, like the New Guinea and Indian rafts, the longest and thickest in the centre, and the others lashed on each side. Some are 70 ft. in length and 20 broad. When sailing, they are guided by a system of planks, called guaras, which are shoved down between the beams in different parts of the raft as they are wanted, the breadth of the plank being in the direction of the lines of the timbers. By means of these they are able to sail near the wind, and to luff up, bear away, and tack at pleasure. When a guara is put down in the fore part of the raft, it luffs up, and when in the hinder part, it bears away. This system of steering, he says, the Indians have learnt empirically, ‘their uncultivated minds never having examined into the rationale of the thing.’

It was one of these vessels which Bartolomew Ruiz, pilot of the second expedition for the discovery of Peru, met with; and which so astonished the sailors, who had never before seen any vessel on the coast of America provided with a sail. Condamine speaks of the rafts in 1743, on the Chinchipe, in Peru. They are also used on the coast of Brazil, where they are also called jungadas, from which locality there is a model of one in the British Museum, and another in the Christy collection. Professor Wilson thinks it was by means of these vessels, driven off the coast of America westward, that the Polynesian and Malay islands were peopled; and this brings us to the consideration of the peculiar class of vessel which is distributed over a continuous area in the Pacific and adjoining seas, viz. the outrigger canoe, which, I shall endeavour to show, was derived from the raft.

6. Outrigger-canoes.

The sailing properties of the balza, or any other similar raft, must have been greatly impeded by the resistance offered to the water by the ends of its numerous beams. In order to diminish the resistance, the obvious remedy was to use only two beams, placed parallel to each other at a distance apart, with a platform laid on cross-poles between them.

Of this kind we find a vessel used by the Tasmanians, and described by Mr. Bonwick, on the authority of Lieut. Jeffreys. The natives, he says, would select two good stems of trees and place them parallel to each other, but a couple of yards apart; cross-pieces of small size were laid on these, and secured to the trees by scraps of tough bark. A stronger cross-timber, of greater thickness, was laid across the centre, and the whole was then covered by wicker-work. Such a float would be thirty feet long, and would hold from six to ten persons (Herbert Spencer, Descriptive Sociology (London, 1874), No. 3, Table V).

In Fiji, Williams describes a kind of vessel called ulatoka, a raised platform, floating on two logs, which must evidently be a vessel of the same description as that used in Tasmania.

From these two logs were derived the double canoe on the one hand, and the canoe with the outrigger on the other.

A link between the catamaran and the outrigger canoe is seen in a model in the India Museum, from Madras. It consists of the usual catamaran, already described, of three beams lashed together, the longest being in the centre, across which are attached, their ends extending on one side, long outrigger poles, to the extremities of which, parallel, and at some distance from the catamaran, is fastened an outrigger log, of smaller size and length, pointed at both ends, and boat-shaped, exactly like those used with the outrigger canoes to be hereafter described. When the art of hollowing out canoes was introduced, then one canoe and one log, or two canoes, were employed, as the case might be. This I consider to be a more natural sequence than to suppose the outrigger invented as a means of steadying the dug-out canoe.

The outrigger canoe, and its accompanying double canoe, is used over the whole of the Polynesian and Asiatic islands—from Easter Island on the east, to Ceylon and the Andamans on the west. Their varieties are also, in some cases, continuous; and I will endeavour to trace the distribution of each, commencing with the canoe with the single outrigger.