The entire day I was occupied in finishing a Salomon Island war canoe, the famous
“Tomako” used to go hunting for ‘heads”. But this model has been commissioned to serve as a gift to be offered to a famous author about Pacific history and culture .I am posting here a picture of the prow
ornaments of the canoe but further details can be seen in my Flickr.com album “Hawaiiancanoes”. I have a special liking for the Salomon Islands canoes. Indeed
I find them to be some of the most gracious canoes ever built in the South Pacific.
Ingeniously plank built, rather than carved, the prow and stern of those war canoes
are exceptionally tall and beautifully decorated with shells and feathers, as well as
with the famous nguzu-nguzu figure. Another type of canoe very similar to the
Tomako, and plank built as well, is the Filipino banca (boat) from Lake Taal.
If their hull shape and impressive prow and stern looks very much alike the Tomaka,
they differ however in that the Tomako has no beams and floats whereby the Filipino
banca is invariably equipped with a set of 2 double outriggers, sometimes 3 for the
larger bancas. And again, there is a further type of canoe whose hull shape and construction is remarkably similar to the two previous ones, and this is the Perahu
katir from Java.
After spending most of the day on the Tomako model, I hurried to draw the lines
for the 2 hulls of the voyaging canoe as viewed from top. Without that set of line
drawings I would not be able to calculate the height of the beams nor have a proper
idea regarding the shape and width of the beams.
