Easter Island Dugout
This began as a simple thought experiment, has lead to something, maybe, more.
First, there are no boatbuilding trees on Easter Island. The last one was cut down centuries ago, leaving it physically impossible to build a dugout canoe. And Easter’s 1000 miles from the nearest land… It’s a longish story, a mystery still unsolved. It’s told well by Jared Diamond in “Collapse;” a different version by Hunt & Lipo in “The Statues that Walked;” synopsis here: http://goo.gl/Ikskjv Mysteries still float around, but on one day with certainty, a man or woman living on this isolated island highly dependent on resources from the sea, cut down the last suitable boatbuilding tree and his entire society went to sea no more.
So my thought experiment; what would I do? How to build a boat in stone-age conditions with extremely limited resources? The story can go in many directions; this might be a tale of building indigenous boats in poorer seaside nations today, using super-cheap materials are suitable and available. It might be a “what if?” story of a wannabe seafarer actually stranded on Easter before the arrival of Western explorers.
For kicks, I’d like to keep it pretty broad, because I’d like help thinking outside as many boxes as possible. So, the design brief:
Build a small multihull, on the order of 16-24’ long, suitable for paddling or sailing (or both) on the beach at Easter Island. It should be a proa of course, the most efficient usage of limited resources, but other geometries are possible. The boat will get general usage, primarily fishing, some cargo carrying, and just possibly a suicidal jaunt offshore, in the general direction of civilization. Our boat needs to be capable of all weather sailing and must be capable of traveling against prevailing wind and wave—by definition anywhere we sail is “offshore” and we need to get back home eventually.
We have limited driftwood on the beach, but nothing longer than perhaps 4’ nor more than perhaps 1’ across. We have grasses suitable for weaving into matt sails and short cocoanut palms and other woody scrub and brush, available for harvesting cocoanut choir for low-quality ropes and sails; but far too punky and small for building canoes or other structures. Let’s say that we have taro root, yams and sweet potatoes and enough arable land that we have enough food to eat. We have small animals—chickens, rats, perhaps a few pigs—but insufficient leather to build skin canoes—unless harvested from the sea. We are a civilization of perhaps 1000 people, so we have helpers and we can contemplate building multiple canoes if there are any economies of scale to be had.
We know that Heyerdahl proposed reed boats, but were these actually used—or practical—on Easter? We also know that boats stitched together of small bits of driftwood and salvaged older boats existed, but these barely floated, let alone had strength for offshore conditions. As this isn’t a historical investigation, we needn’t limit ourselves to actual Easter Island boating or their past or present civilization.
What else is possible? What should we build?
It’s outside your design brief but one of the first things to come to mind is a stone coracle, I’ve consulted on the design of racing concrete canoes in the past.
Will think on it.
It’s outside your design brief but one of the first things to come to mind is a stone coracle, I’ve consulted on the design of racing concrete canoes in the past.
It’s funny; I was going down a whole different avenue, but just thought about stone boats this morning, too! Might have trouble with both the portland cement and the steel rebar, but then again… I think ferro-concrete cargo ships would have a big advantage over steel; cannot understand why it hasn’t been exploited. (And yes, I’ve been to the stone boat in Capitola, CA. It’s more than 70 years old and still structurally sound)
There’s also a method of using relatively thin masonry (clay?) tile ceilings in churches and such. These rely on highly curved shapes rather than mortar to hold them together. Could they be morphed into a boatbuilding method? Just dunno.
Dave
If there is a binder, paper boats would be a possibility. Pound brush and grass into fibers, boil and float to make paper sheets.
Maybe boil up seagulls to make a fat binder. Seagull pitch.
Then lay over a sand mold build up layers until you have a copy of Madness or something.
Horus and Set challenged each other to a boat race, where they each raced in a boat made of stone. Horus and Set agreed, and the race started. But Horus had an edge: his boat was made of wood painted to resemble stone, rather than true stone. -wiki
Quite a Horus story with one liar Set against another. Is there amoral to it?
Sorry, couldn’t resist it 😉
If there is a binder, paper boats would be a possibility.
It’s been done before. On 25 July 1622, John Taylor and Roger Bird rowed a boat made of brown paper down the Thames. They travelled some forty miles, from London to the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. This was done for a bet.
“A Voyage in a Paper-boat” - by John Taylor
This feat inspired comedian Tim Fitzhigham, in 2003, to create his own paper boat, though that very much resembled a kayak.
Paper Boat - National Maritime Museum
If you were to use paper then, given the technology constraints at the Easter Island locale, it might be best to roll them up, so that they are made into cardboard tubes. The paper could also be rolled up to form ‘plugs’, which could be inserted at intervals into the tube, as well as at each end of the tube. When that happens, your DIY paper has effectively become bamboo. And you can build things with bamboo.
Perhaps the Easter Islanders could have followed the lead of the Moriori of the Chatham Islands. I think the environment and flora of both places are quite similar. The Moriori canoes were made of flax and kelp, the latter being inflated with air to help increase the canoes’ buoyancy.
Perhaps the Easter Islanders could have followed the lead of the Moriori of the Chatham Islands. I think the environment and flora of both places are quite similar. The Moriori canoes were made of flax and kelp, the latter being inflated with air to help increase the canoes’ buoyancy.
I was going to call BS on this. I’ve played with a lot of bull kelp and the stuff is BARELY able to float itself. I did a little research instead and learned that New Zealand Bull Kelp and California Bull Kelp are different—the NZ variety has a lot more floatation, so, though this is the only instance I find of the stuff being used to float a boat fulla holes, it is apparently genuine. The Chatham Islands are still 4000 sea miles from Easter, so I don’t know if NZ Bull Kelp grows there, but it’s certainly possible.
Regardless, adding buoyancy bags to a fundamentally leaky boat is a bit of genius, regardless of where or when. Buoyancy bags could be animal skins, large fish bladders, scrap styrofoam, gourds, even micro-driftwood, bundled together and stuffed into the bilges of the boat.
In a modern design sense, going to buoyancy bags inside a rigid—but non-watertight structure is an ingenious way of building an inflatable boat, inside-out. Since the hull structure is rigid and defines the water flow, the “inflated” boat inside needs only the tiniest of inflation pressure and individual bladder integrity (could be a pile of 2 liter coke bottles, for instance) The total bladder volume only needs to equal the projected payload; you wouldn’t need to fill the boat with floaty stuff, just enough to float the cargo and crew.
Dave
If there is a binder, paper boats would be a possibility. Pound brush and grass into fibers, boil and float to make paper sheets. Maybe boil up seagulls to make a fat binder. Seagull pitch. Then lay over a sand mold build up layers until you have a copy of Madness or something.
Actually, this is close to where I was thinking. It’s not necessary to reduce the grass, sticks and driftwood all the way to pulp; if you had a suitable binder you could make something like oriented strand board (OSB) out of bigger chunks and pieces of it.
Dig a boat-shaped hole in the sand, take a giant mixing bowl full of cut up bits of whatever you find on the ground, add binder (glue/resin/adhesive), stir it all up and slather it into the hole. Maybe 1” thick, maybe 3” thick, depends on the stuff you use—and the binder. Best to stomp it down or vacuum bag the whole thing to consolidate it, then remove the bag to let the binder dry. Yeah, I see lots of problem with this, too: What’s the binder? How do we keep the hole’s shape while we’re plastering it with guck? How’s the final boat gonna be watertight?
Binder first. The easiest and in many ways best is bird’s eggs if you can get them. Most recommend just the whites, but there’s almost as much albumin in the yokes as the whites, so… Eggs are a natural adhesive; they don’t need any treatment, cooking or adulterating to make then into glue. Far far better, dried egg whites are waterproof. (according to Wikipedia…) With Easter being thousands of miles from other land, they’d have had—still have—huge rookeries of seabirds; whipping up a couple hundred gallons of egg-whites wouldn’t be inconceivable.
Other binders include boiled hide, hooves bones or even meat of animals and fish (also feathers and hair, but the chemistry is more complex; maybe too complex for us). Easter was and is known for millions of rats—also the ancients actively hunted dolphin (the mammal, not the fish) so larger thicker leather pelts could have been a possibility. A third class of binder is cooked starch, as from tapioca, potatoes, yams, taro, or Sago Palm. None of these are completely waterproof, so you’d need to paint the structure as well. If you cook starch and add a plasticizer like glycerin or sorbitol (both natural, but probably not natively available on Easter Island), your binder becomes much more flexible and more waterproof.
Of course in modern times, you could import the binder—the same stuff used to make OSB you find at Home Depot or Lowes. You can also bring a wood chipper in and chop up anything from grasses to palm shrubs to driftwood to sticks; all are maw for our OSB production.
And speaking of which, if you’re going to build short-run OSB from native materials in far-away places, why build flat sheets? Using Hughes’ cylinder molding, or Marple/Brown’s Constant Camber molds, you could build ready-curved sheets that naturally go together as boat hulls, ready-made and eggshell-like strong. These same sheets can be made into houses and sheds, so there’s a market for them, most anywhere.
What about spars? Hopefully there is bamboo on Easter (anybody know??), but if not, well, there’s always composite construction: Lay down a “raft” of, for instance dried reeds. Make it as long as the spar you want and as wide as 3 times the final diameter. Lay several pieces of packing tape across the raft at maybe 1’ intervals (you can use any stone age equivalent of packing tape you wish—maybe fish leather and hide glue. Many will work) Now you can slather on some binder and roll your raft up into a cylindrical tube. After it dries, coat it with the local equivalent of papier mache (or fiberglass) in order to fix the shapes and orientation of the original rushes and there you go—spars.
Way better to go find some bamboo—even small groves of it would be sufficient for spars. Big groves and you’d be building boat hulls out of the stuff, now wouldn’t you?
Regardless, adding buoyancy bags to a fundamentally leaky boat is a bit of genius, regardless of where or when. Buoyancy bags could be animal skins, large fish bladders, scrap styrofoam, gourds, even micro-driftwood, bundled together and stuffed into the bilges of the boat.
Think outside of the box. Ponder this snippet, which comes from the news24.com website:
Condoms are safe - for sailing
2000-08-24 12:51
Riga - A trio of Latvian adventurers landed in a small village near the Estonian border late on Tuesday, completing a 100-kilometre (60-mile) journey across the edge of the Baltic Sea in a raft made of 20 000 inflated condoms.
They were five aboard when the raft left Cape Kolka on August 17, but two got off when they put into a small Estonian island in the Gulf of Riga after being becalmed for three days. Given the poor reputation of the contraceptives, the sailors admitted they had been worried that they might end up swimming.
“We were worried that they might not be strong enough, even though we got the extra strong ones,” said Ivars Beitans, who dreamt up the journey. “Only about half the condoms made it for the whole trip,” he added.
Beitans and the others spent the week before the launch blowing up the condoms and stuffing them into sacks that were lashed together and fixed with a sail. The trip, sponsored by a major condom manufacturer, was a test run for a sail possibly next year across the Baltic Sea to Sweden in a raft built with 250 000 condoms. - Sapa-AFP
After a bit of searching, have managed to find a more substantial article at the following Estonian link:
epl.delfi.ee - Latvians’ condom raft
Attached is a photo of said device.
Given the endless TV coverage and expense of finding one airplane intentionally flown into oblivion, the one thing actually found was garbage - and lots of it. Was listening to Captain Paul Watson (of Sea Shepherd Foundation) on Real Time the other day and he was quoted saying there is 7 million tons of used plastic floating in Gyres in the Pacific.
In today’s world we need to think of garbage as a legitimate primary resource. It shows up on every beach in the world. Plastic and fossil fuel debris (polypropylene netting, floats etc.) can all be ground into beads and remanufactured into just about anything. Rather than look to nature for more resources to exploit, why not walk the beach and collect junk?
If today’s garbage dump oceans were available to the South Pacific islanders of centuries gone by, I’m pretty sure proa evolution would have taken a different course - as the better available materials would have been used.
Here in our Canadian arctic, baIdarka and umiak frames were constructed from beachcombing finds of bits of driftwood and bones. There is a great local exhibition here in Ottawa at one of the museums showing both finished and in-progress builds. Sea worthy? Yes. These boats were the primary point to point transport (before modern freighter canoes and outboard motors) once the winter ice melted for much of the northern coast of Canada and Greenland - there are no roads. Skin on frame? Sure.
—
Bill in Ottawa
An acquaintance of mine George Dyson, wrote the definitive book on Baidarkas. ISBN 978-0882403151 Available used for under $10, a steal. It’s apparently true that, given sufficient animal hides, these can be built of the tiniest and cheapest pile of materials of nearly any boat—and certainly their performance/dollar ratio is exceptional—again assuming animal hides available.
Dave
given sufficient animal hides
I think that on Easter Island, you’d need to use rat hides. Your culture would start kids out with needle and rat sinew early on in life.
I think that on Easter Island, you’d need to use rat hides. Your culture would start kids out with needle and rat sinew early on in life.
I love the mind-picture that creates, “Here you are, son, your first bit of rat hide. And here’s a tiny piece of rat sinew as well. Make something wonderful for your Mama.” 😊
I read that some 20% of bones found in Easter refuse sites are of dolphins. This compared to <1% on other Pacific islands. Clearly Easter islanders actively hunted these, suggesting some success in small boat construction and sailing—skin boats wouldn’t be completely beyond the pale.
Dave
That’s another bleak-yet-appealing image; a skin-on-frame outrigger sailing canoe made exclusively from dolphin skin and bone. It’s a picture that belongs on a ratty black heavy-metal T-shirt.
(I bet that the sailing canoes that the Rapa Nui made were tackers of one sort or another.)