Chapter IV
Canoes and Sailing
I
A canoe is an item of material culture, and as such it can be described, photographed and even bodily transported into a museum. But—and this is a truth too often overlooked—the ethnographic reality of the canoe would not be brought much nearer to a student at home, even by placing a perfect specimen right before him.
The canoe is made for a certain use, and with a definite purpose; it is a means to an end, and we, who study native life, must not reverse this relation, and make a fetish of the object itself. In the study of the economic purposes for which a canoe is made, of the various uses to which it is submitted, we find the first approach to a deeper ethnographic treatment. Further sociological data, referring to its ownership, accounts of who sails in it, and how it is done; information regarding the ceremonies and customs of its construction, a sort of typical life history of a native craft—all that brings us nearer still to the understanding of what his canoe truly means to the native.
Even this, however, does not touch the most vital reality of a native canoe. For a craft, whether of bark or wood, iron or steel, lives in the life of its sailors, and it is more to a sailor than a mere bit of shaped matter. To the native, not less than to the white seaman, a craft is surrounded by an atmosphere of romance, built up of tradition and of personal experience. It is an object of cult and admiration, a living thing, possessing its own individuality.
We Europeans—whether we know native craft by experience or through descriptions—accustomed to our extraordinarily developed means of water transport, are apt to look down on a native canoe and see it in a false perspective—regarding it almost as a child’s plaything, an abortive, imperfect attempt to tackle the problem of sailing, which we ourselves have satisfactorily solved.[1] But to the native his cumbersome, sprawling canoe is a marvellous, almost miraculous achievement, and a thing of beauty (see Plates [XXI], [XXIII], [XL], [XLVII], [LV]). He has spun a tradition around it, and he adorns it with his best carvings, he colours and decorates it. It is to him a powerful contrivance for the mastery of Nature, which allows him to cross perilous seas to distant places. It is associated with journeys by sail, full of threatening dangers, of living hopes and desires to which he gives expression in song and story. In short, in the tradition of the natives, in their customs, in their behaviour, and in their direct statements, there can be found the deep love, the admiration, the specific attachment as to something alive and personal, so characteristic of the sailors’ attitude towards his craft.
And it is in this emotional attitude of the natives towards their canoes that I see the deepest ethnographic reality, which must guide us right through the study of other aspects—the customs and technicalities of construction and of use; the economic conditions and the associated beliefs and traditions. Ethnology or Anthropology, the science of Man, must not shun him in his innermost self, in his instinctive and emotional life.