Customer Reviews

Canoes of Oceania (Special publications - Bernice P. Bishop Museum ; 27-29)

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I simply cannot believe no one has reviewed this remarkable book here yet. Where would anyone start....? perhaps that was the problem. Well, to start, this is a book has the aura of a work written in a time when you marked your intellectual territory and explored it thoroughly like a lost continent, gave it the most of your life. The travel, the endless note-taking, the sifting of sources, the drawings.... Yet it was a never a lost world, it was old, it had its technologies and accomplishments to stand alongside a trip to Mars. In this book find the "space ships" at the end of an evolution of a thousand or two thousand years or more. The European explorers stumbled upon islands and found people whose canoes could sail closer to the wind than their own, without the aid of metal tools, metal fastners, rope walks. Give the Pacific people some vegetable fiber, a log, a weavable tree-leaf, a shell, and the gathered know-how of hard voyaging, desperation, lost-at-seas, and joyous landfalls, and they express the material thinking of the human combining the solution of technical problems with the ritual and aesthetic. Where they could, they produced outrigger canoes of beauty that will seem strange and stunning to the Western reader. Where they could not, as on the resource-depleted Easter Island, they still nearly came up with something from nearly nothing. There now, I did what I could. If you call yourself a sailor, you need to see this book. You may read some straight through, but mostly I prophesize you'll sometimes pick it up, flip randomly to some page, and fall into engrossed study. --wt