NEW GUINEA CANOES WITH OUTRIGGERS.
From Photographs supplied by the Hon. J. E. Jenkins.
Many of the canoes lacked stability, even in calm waters, and the risk of capsizing was greater in waters liable to sudden storms or exposed to the ocean swell. To meet this difficulty and at the same time permit of the continued use of the shallow harbours of their coasts, the Malays are supposed to have invented the outrigger, and this conjecture is based on the fact that wherever the Malay influence is traceable there some form of the outrigger or double canoe is to be found also.
The primitive hollowed log generally constitutes the hull of the canoes of the Pacific Islanders. The rest is mainly a matter of ornamentation. With but few exceptions, the islanders seem to have believed that the higher and more imposing and ornamental they could make the stems or sterns of their vessels, the more dreadful in war were they likely to be. Many of these elevations are beautifully carved; other canoes are merely grotesque, and not a few have no artistic feature whatever to redeem them from absolute hideousness. As a means of terrifying an enemy by presenting such things to his astonished gaze they would doubtless be effective, had it not been that the enemy would retaliate by presenting something equally ugly, with the result that the moral effect which each party sought to exercise upon the other would be neutralised. Some of the islanders are said to have decorated the prows of their vessels with the skulls of opponents killed in previous expeditions; while others contented themselves with locks of human hair, similarly derived, as naval adornments. With the exception of bows, arrows and spears, all their weapons were designed for fighting at close quarters. It must have been a labour of love, as well as a feeling of pride in the appearance of the fearfully shaped and murderous clubs, which led them to carve their weapons as carefully as they did, to render them so deadly, and to adorn them with mother-of-pearl and sharks’ teeth. Not a few of the paddles were given serrated edges in order that they could be the more effectively employed as war clubs if necessary.
There are not many native war canoes now left in the South Seas. None of the islanders, except the head-hunters, habitually kept canoes for war purposes, though at times one would be designed and built for some special expedition. The last of the great Samoan war canoes has almost rotted to pieces on the shore. It is doubtful if it has ever been used in a warlike expedition. It was between 60 and 70 feet in length, and 18 to 20 feet beam over all. It consisted of two large single canoes, placed parallel a few feet apart, and joined by a plank deck which ran across the greater part of the vessels. Amidships was a house-like erection, used as a shelter. It was propelled by oars, but also carried a mast and sails. It could easily carry a hundred men.
The great canoe to hold three hundred men is but a memory; all that is left of it is its steering paddle, 40 feet in length, which adorns the wall in the Ethnographical section of the British Museum.
STEM-PIECE, MAORI WAR CANOE.
