The handicraft of canoe-building was hereditary. Every considerable chief had his matai, but those of Rewa, descended from Tongan immigrants, were the most esteemed in the west and those of Kambara in the east. In 1860, however, the
Fijian matai fell upon evil days, for the chiefs preferred the Tongan craftsmen, who had begun to settle in the group. Besides canoes the matai made lali (wooden drums), kava and food bowls, all cut from the solid timber with the adze. Every stage of canoe-building called for its special feast and presentation to the matai, and in order to test the actual cost of these I once had a canoe built by a Rewa matai and his mate on the Fijian system of remuneration. I was acting as Commissioner of Tholo West at the time, and being in native eyes vested with the powers of a Roko Tui, I could play the part of carpenter's patron with plausibility. The men who hauled in the logs were given the appropriate feast, the matai had his feast at the completion of the hull, at the fixing of the upper works, at the lashing of the deck. I obtained the mats for the sails from Yasawa by kerekere (begging), and sent their equivalent in kind; the neighbouring villages performed the ceremony of rova (and received their reward) after the launching. When I came to reckon up the bill I found that it came to £13—a little more than the contract rate for building canoes at that time, which was £2 a fathom; or, to put it in another way, as the canoe was two months in building, about £3 a month for each man besides rations. But since my carpenters were on their mettle, the canoe was better built than it would have been by a contract builder.
Forward and abaft the deck both in the ndrua and the thamakau are open wells, in which a man stands baling with a wooden scoop, for the joints and seams of the planking let in a good deal of water when under sail. Beyond these wells some fluted work is left by the adze, and a line of beading is left along the lee side both to afford footholds to the men who carry over the foot of the yards in tacking and to carry fixed blocks for the tuku or mast-stay. A remarkable feature about these carvings is that they never vary, though some of them have no object but that of ornamentation, and they are sufficiently elaborate to have been only arrived at after a long period of evolution.
If the Fijian canoe is so carelessly handled as to bring the outrigger to leeward she immediately capsizes, for the
pressure of the wind drives the outrigger under water. In order to keep the outrigger to windward when tacking it is therefore necessary to make what was formerly the bow become the stern, the sail must be turned inside out, and the mast, yards and steer-oar must all be changed over. This complicated manœuvre is accomplished with extraordinary skill. Instead of luffing up into the wind as in a cutter the steersman keeps away until the wind is abeam, the sheetman slacking the sheet simultaneously until the sail is flapping. Two or three men then run out to the prow, seize the foot of the yards and carry them bodily amidships. During this operation they have to bear the weight of the mast, which is sloping forward at an angle of 45 degrees, and to relieve them of some of this extra weight a man is hauling on the running stay, which runs through a block astern. As they pass the mast with their burden the lower yard is let go, the sheet is passed round their legs, and the sail turns inside out. They tramp forward, and the mast again begins to incline, throwing its weight upon them. A man now seizes the other stay, and in obedience to their loud cries of "Tuku!" begins cautiously to pay it out. If he is too quick the weight of the mast precipitates the men and the sail into the water; if he is too slow he holds them back. At last the foot of the yards is planted with a thud into its nest in the carving and lashed secure, but before the sheet can be hauled in the heavy steer-oar, which takes two men to lift, has to be dragged inboard and carried aft. All this time the hull is heaving in the trough of the sea, and the mat sail is thrashing itself to pieces. Sometimes the yard-carriers slip on the wet deck, and tumble overboard, sail and all, in inextricable ruin, but if all goes well the canoe is gathering way on the new tack in less than sixty seconds, and though to the spectator on board the moment is full of excitement and risk, to those watching it on shore it is the most precise and beautiful manœuvre known to seamanship.
NEW MODELS OF SCULLING
And now we come to a remarkable paradox. The Tongans were the great navigators of the Pacific; the Fijians are not known to have voyaged beyond their own group. The Tongans were so expert with the adze that they rapidly
displaced the Fijian canoe-builder in his own country. And yet the Tongan counterpart to the ndrua was the tongiaki, a craft so clumsy and ill-finished that it did not survive the eighteenth century, when the Tongans learned the art of canoe-sailing from Fijians. The tongiaki was like the ndrua in build, but its mast was immovable and it tacked like a cutter. To make this possible the mast was stayed on both sides from a clumsy transom which protruded many feet beyond the deck. It could lie close to the wind on one tack, but on the other the sail was broken up into pockets by the mast, which held the wind and stopped all headway. Consequently it was the practice to wait for a fair wind, and set the sail on what would be the lee of the mast, and if the wind changed there was nothing for it but to change the course. It was, no doubt, this fact that led to so many Tongans being cast away on remote islands, and to the mixing of Polynesian with Melanesian blood. From 1790 to 1810 it had become the custom for Tongan chiefs to voyage to Fiji in their clumsy tongiaki, join in the native wars, and take as their portion of the loot Fijian ndrua, in which they beat back to Tonga, and in a very few years the tongiaki[102] was extinct.
There were two ways of propelling a canoe in a dead calm—the vothe and the sua. The vothe is a leaf-shaped paddle cut from one piece of vesi hardwood, five feet long and eighteen inches across the widest part of the blade. Adapted for propelling light canoes on the rivers, it is ineffective against the dead weight of the heavy thamakau. In shape and size the sua resembles the oar of a ship's cutter. Thrusting it down perpendicularly into the water between the hull and the outrigger, and using the cross-tie as a rowlock, the sculler describes short, semicircular sweeps with the blade, throwing his weight against the handle in front of him as he stands upon the deck. When two are sculling they swing in time, but in opposite directions, and there is no exercise that displays the grace of the human body in action to better advantage. A speed of three miles an hour is the maximum that
can be attained with the sua, but the scullers can maintain this speed for a long time without fatigue. The stroke is as difficult to acquire as that of the gondolier, but when you have once acquired it you wonder wherein the difficulty lay.