Canoe
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Fri 31 Aug 2012 09:05
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Christianity arrived late on Niue, in 1846, but as
usual it has striven hard and tragically successfully to eliminate almost all
traces of the Niueans previous existance. One of the few things to survive apart
from their language is the art of building dugout fishing canoes. Here is one,
in this instance kept in one of the innumerable seacaves:
 The hull of the canoe is a native tree trunk, cut
out by adze (before European metal tools arrived the centre was
carefully and repeatedly burnt, and then scraped out). It is an amazingly
skillful procedure resulting in a very thin and light canoe. Five other woods
are used to produce the deck, outrigger arms, outrigger itself and the struts
that support it. The only modern development is the use of nylon line in place
of coconut fibre to bind the outrigger to its arms. There are lots of these
canoes, and they're still being built. The canoes are kept on land or in caves
and launched across the reef. They do not go far to sea, perhaps 100m or so, and
fish on the drop-off where the water goes from 1m to several hundred metres
almost vertically. There is no surviving tradition here of building ocean-going
canoes, so it is far from clear what the original Niueans had - but given the
extraordinarily harsh coast it is entirely possible that there were never any
big canoes based on the island after it was settled - however the deliberate
extermination of the island's culture and oral history has ensured that we will
never know. Sad.
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