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THE VAKA TAUMAKO PROJECT
An Authentic Polynesian Voyaging Canoe
Sails Again

Vaka Taumako Approaching Nifiloli

The Return of Lata       An Authentic Polynesian Voyaging Canoe Sails Again by Dr. Mimi George and Paramount Chief of Duff Islands, Koloso Kaveia with translation assistance by Mr. Mostyne Vane. In August, 1998, the tepuke named Vaka Taumako made its first voyage. For the first time in over forty years, a Polynesian voyaging canoe (vaka) was built using completely traditional methods and materials. For the first time since 1963 a tepuke voyaged on a traditional route. The people who built and sailed the Vaka Taumako sum up the experience saying "Lata, the first person to build and sail a tepuke, came back at last." This is their affirmation that they are still the heirs of Lata, and when they do what Lata did they feel joy without measure. The Vaka Taumako Project Taumako is the largest of the Duff Islands, in the far northeast of the scattered Santa Cruz Group in the southeast Solomon Islands. Taumako has been a community for over 2,500 years old. British colonizers banned voyaging in the 1920's, but modern technology still does not serve Taumakoans. Taumako has no electricity, no airstrip or telephone, and no anchorage for the government motorship that may call every few months. Taumakoans still live in leaf houses that stand up to hurricanes, and rely on traditional gardening and fishing, weaving, carving, health care, etc. Taumakoans are not happy to be so cut off from and left out of the modern world, but they know that it is precisely because of their isolation and lack of modern development projects, such as logging and mining, that they still have extensive coral reefs and a virgin hardwood forest. They are blessed in that they still have all the natural materials necessary for building a vaka. They also have people who know how to do that using completely traditional methods. The oldest people of Taumako actually lived the life of traditional voyaging. Until the last tepuke broke up in 1963, they kept using the same technology that enabled our ancestors to colonize a third of the earth's surface in a few thousand years. Now they are at the mercy of the shipping schedule . and that dependence makes them both helpless and ashamed. Todays young Taumakoans are eager experience the joys and freedoms their great grandparents once did. They dream of reestablishing a proud and free connection to the world. They believe that traditional voyaging can still give them access to the best of the old and the new, and they beg the old people to show them the voyaging skills they know before they die. Stone-age voyaging knowledge still has both practical and spiritual value in Taumako today. Paramount Chief Koloso Kaveia, is a key emissary from the voyaging past. Kaveia followed in the footsteps, and the wake of Lata for about 85 years. He was born in the same place as Lata, his father and children are named Lata, and he voyaged on tepuke for over forty-five years, starting in the 1920's when there were 200 te puke in the Santa. Cruz Group. Kaveia also endured over forty years of having no tepuke to voyage on. Yet he is still able and willing to go to sea to show what he knows to young people. In 1993 he asked Dr. Mimi George to help him start an educational venture he named the Vaka Taumako Project. His aim was to show young people how to build and sail a tepuke using the ancient methods. He explained that before he and the other old people died they wanted their grandchildren to experience `the return of Lata.' Traditionally tepuke were made on order. Kaveia explains that the immediate reason that people stopped making tepuke was because "all the old people died." These old people were the ones who had friends on other islands that they could trust enough to order from or receive an order from. In the modern case, about eight thousand dollars US was needed to pay wages - enough to enable the five hundred strong community of Taumako to quit other work for a year and a half, so they could still pay their childrens school fees while working on the tepuke. In the Sta. Cruz Islands this kind of money is not available. What Kaveia needed was a reliable "order" from the outside. Kaveia wanted the fullest possible documentation of the process, and world-wide publication of the fact that there are still Polynesians who know how to make and navigate authentic voyaging canoes by ancient methods. I agreed to head the documentation effort. I also said I would try to raise the funds to make the order, if the tepuke would become the property of the community and be used as a training vessel. What Is a Tepuke? The written record about tepuke is confusing and sketchy. First hand reports of voyaging canoes in the Santa Cruz Group start with Quiros, Mendana's pilot, in 1596, and end with anthropologists William Davenport and Gerd Koch in the early 1960's. Haddon and Hornell (1935) and many others have used the term tepuke or pukei or puki to describe a wide variety of craft, and misidentified a photo of a smaller, faster, type of vaka called tealolili with the tepuke (1935:Vol. II, fig 33). While none of them fully sorted out what was and what was not a tepuke, many of them correctly reported that tepuke were customarily used for voyages of several hundred miles, and that the best tepuke were made at Taumako. According to Taumakoans, the tepuke is a six fathom or longer, massively outrigged proa, with a riser between the hull and the crossbeam, a house on the windward platform above the outrigger, and a `crab-claw' sail. A minimum sized tepuke, such as Vaka Taumako, can carry several passengers and several tons of cargo, while a large tepuke may carry forty or more passengers. Traditionally, the paying cargo included smaller sailing canoes like the five and a half meter tealolili of the subtype called holoholau, and the two to four meter tealo, that were lashed onto the tepuke in the manner of safety ama. Tepuke cruise at five to fifteen knots, depending on conditions, the length of the vessel, and the point of sail. A small tepuke on an overnight voyage of one hundred nautical miles may have a crew of four, while a larger tepuke may have six to ten crew and as many as forty passengers. The main hull is a single hollowed out log. Since tepuke shunt (change ends) rather than tack. When the tepuke is sailing to windward and changes direction through the eye of the wind, crewmembers carry the sail from one end of the canoe to the other and restep it at the new bow. The outrigger remains on the windward side. The sail of the tepuke is a radically `crab claw' (delta wing or slender foil) shape that is woven from pandanus leaves (laufala) and tied onto a spar and a boom of almost identical dimensions. Each of these is a two part spar, the parts of which are grown to shape from a very flexible sort of mallow tree and lashed together. The spar is stepped at the bow ends (moumoa) of the hull in a special carved and lashed fitting. Crab claw sails outperformed every other type of sail in wind tunnel tests (Marchaj, 1995), capturing 50 to 150% more windforce than the bermudan when reaching or running, and 90% as much as bermudan when sailing to windward. In scientific terms it creates lift aided by the powerful vortices that form at the ends of the crab claw points. Furthermore the rig has great flexibility in adjustment of the height and attitude of the sail to the wind, because the sail does not have a fixed forward edge, and is fixed only at the tack, In Taumakoan terms, the way the sail works is the same as the wings of a tropic bird when it hovers over the reef. The main hull of a tepuke is carved from a hardwood log. Only a narrow opening is cut along the length of the hull. This opening is covered with fitted planks (tetau) and made watertight, except for an open topped, riser box that rises about a meter from the hull, midway from the ends of the hull. Using stones and drinking coconuts, the hull is trimmed to run about 90% underwater - an ancient precursor to SWATH design. The float (ama) is made of two to four floats lashed together, depending on how much buoyancy is needed. The floats are carved from soft, light, wood, such as breadfruit. The platforms (haihale and katea) spanning the crossbeams (lakahalava) are spacious and are located almost two meters off the water, because of the riser box that is lashed between the hull and the crossbeams. There is a sturdy, streamlined leaf house (hale) on the leeward platform. It provides shelter for spare matting for the sails, cordage, tools, especially valuable cargo such as shell and feather valuables, and for the navigator/captain and any women and infants. In the 1970s it was widely believed that the last Polynesian navigator was dead, and many thought, Taumakoans included, that no more tepuke would be built. Yet the Vaka Taumako and its crew are here today. For anyone interested in voyaging technology or traditional Polynesian culture, the launching and voyage of the Vaka Taumako is a miraculous opportunity to see what was only vaguely represented in petroglyphs and the drawings and reports of Europeans. For the community of Taumako, building and sailing the Vaka Taumako is a realisation of their ancient destiny as builders and voyagers ... a manifestation of their identity as the heirs of Lata.