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Updated: April 30, 2025
"Maru," said the chief, when we sat on the mats at late supper after a return from the lagoon, "it is a pity you were not here when the Tahitians had their 'ar'ia and pahi, our large canoes for navigating on the moana faa aro, the landless sea. The 'ar'ia was a double canoe, each seventy feet long, high in the stern, and lashed together, outrigger to outrigger.
He spoke in reassuring tones, and led my mother to the side of the ship, whither I followed them, and became at once absorbed in what was going on. The outrigger launch referred to was a goodly-sized boat, fitted with a small engine and screw propeller. Its chief peculiarities were two long poles or spars, which lay along its sides, projecting beyond the bows. These were the outriggers.
Why, as for his cauda, if you will believe me, Sir John, I once saw a man, on the coast of Patagonia a savage, to be sure, and not a philosopher, as this fellow pretends to be who had an outrigger of this sort, as long as a ship's ringtail-boom. And what was he, after all, but a poor devil who did not know a sea-lion from a grampus!"
On one side there is an outrigger formed of two long bent sticks, to the outer ends of which is bound a curved beam of light wood, which skims along the surface of the water, rendering the canoe secure from an upset on that side, while the weight of the outrigger makes an upset on the other very unlikely.
Leaving his find to their cleansing, Shann went back to prospect the pile of raft material, choosing pieces which could serve for an outrigger frame. He was handicapped as he had been all along by the absence of the vines one could use for lashings.
Not that the score or more of young surf-riders loafing on the beach could not venture there, or were afraid to venture there; but because their biggest outrigger canoes would have been swamped, and their surf-boards would have been overwhelmed in the too-immense over-topple and down-fall of the thundering monsters.
The canoes seen here are either single or double, in the latter case consisting merely of two lashed together, usually without an outrigger. The single canoes vary in length from 20 to 30 feet, and carry from five to a dozen people. Each end tapers to a sharp projecting point longer at the bow.
These beams kept the plank parallel with the canoe, but not in contact with it, for it floated in the water with an open space between; thus forming a sort of double canoe. This we found was intended to prevent the upsetting of the canoe, which was so narrow that it could not have maintained an upright position without the outrigger.
It is an atoll, while the Solomons are high islands; and its people and language are Polynesian, while the inhabitants of the Solomons are Melanesian. Lord Howe has been populated by the westward Polynesian drift which continues to this day, big outrigger canoes being washed upon its beaches by the southeast trade.
Not all days, and only on rare days, is the surf heavy at Waikiki; and, in the days that followed, Ida and Lee Barton, much in evidence on the beach and in the water, continued to arouse disparaging interest in the breasts of the tourist ladies, although the Outrigger captains ceased from worrying about them in the water.
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