“A Canoe of the Sandwich Islands, the Rowers Masked”, and engraving after a drawing by John Webber, Plate 65 in the atlas of the British Admiralty authorized journal of Captain Cook’s 3rd voyage, 1784. This engraving is framed in the same koa wood as used for these canoes, which is a sacred Hawaiian wood. The scene was sketched by Webber who witnessed these war canoes at Kealakekua Bay, on the western side of the Big Island of Hawai’i, where Cook’s ships had anchored.
Aboard the canoe are 10-12 masked rowers. The rowers are transporting a priest who is carrying a feather-covered image of Kukailimoku, the Hawaiian god of war. The priests and paddlers are all wearing gourd masks and their double-hulled canoe is rigged with a woven sail. Double-hulled or single-hulled outrigger canoes were the primary form of transportation in Polynesian Hawaii.The smaller canoes, like the one depicted here, were shaped from a single, great koa log harvested from upcountry rainforests where they were carved before being hauled to the coast. The rowers paddled by the European vessels and continued on to shore with no explanation as to their mission.
John Ledyard, who was on board Cook’s ship Resolution, said of the scene he witnessed: “they had assembled from the interior and the coast. Three thousand canoes were counted in the bay”. The missionary William Ellis, also on the ship described the canoes: “The canoes of Sandwich islands appear eminently calculated for swiftness, being low, narrow, generally light, and drawing but little water. A canoe is always made out of a single tree: some of them are upward of seventy feet long, one or two feet wide, and sometimes more than three feet deep, though in length they seldom exceed fifty feet. The body of the canoe is generally covered with a black paint…. On the upper edge of the canoe is sewed, in a remarkably ordered way, a small band of hard whitewood, six to eight inches of width, according to the size and the length of the canoe.”
The Richard & Leslie Breiman Collection.
