22 Friday, August 3, 2007 — The Marshall Islands Journal

Dennis’ decades of canoe discovery

Second in a three-part series

by GIFF JOHNSON

Having documented the construction of Jaluit and Likiep-style canoes, wooden boat builder Dennis Alessio was ready for his next assignment at Namdrik Atoll.

Although the outrigger building documentation projects got everyone jazzed up while the work was going on, this didn’t always translate into funding for the next project. Funding constraints would frequently slow the Waan Aelon Kein (WAK) canoe documentation project, but rarely diminished Alessio’s enthusiasm for the work.

The Alele was able to raise only a small amount of funding so the project at Namdrik focused on building just a six-foot canoe, using a small grant from the Australian government. This one mainly focused on Marshallese techniques for lashings used to build canoes.

While the project struggled for funding, canoe building in the RMI generally was on the decline in the face of an onslaught of bumbums and outboard motorboats that were much in demand, not only in Majuro and Ebeye but also on many outer islands.

While on Namdrik building the small canoe, Alessio and local fishermen organized a fishing tournament for canoes. “We had lots of prizes (for the winners),” Alessio recalled. “It was fun to do it.” Alessio returned to Majuro, but little did he know at the time that his work on the small canoe had generated much interest, and would see his return to Namdrik a short time later. Namdrik Senator Andrew Hisaiah, who was the vice speaker of the Nitijela, asked Alessio if he’d teach Namdrik men how to build a canoe out of plywood. “He put the money together for me to return to Namdrik to build a plywood canoe,” Alessio said. On arriving at Namdrik, “the first thing we did was paint the floor of the community on the floor,” he said. A “loft” is a wooden boat builder’s visual design that shows three views of the vessel — from the top looking down, from the side and up from the bottom — and serves as a blueprint for building the boat.

“In the United States, I trained ‘professionals’ in lofting,” Alessio said.

“My students were MBAs and college graduates and it took them weeks to see (and understand) the three dimensions of the boat on a two dimensional surface.” Alessio said he was amazed at the response from the canoe builders on Namdrik to his preparing the loft. “They were telling me how to do it,” he said. “They’d never done a loft before, but they knew how to build canoes. It was in their brains. It was totally visual, so when I put the view from bow to stern, they designed it and explained how they wanted it built.”

From the experience at Namdrik, Alessio learned that the way Marshallese set up for building an outrigger canoe mirrors the way traditional wooden boats are built.

Next stop for Alessio was Ailuk, where he worked with master builder Killon Takia to document two canoe styles, working on existing outriggers.

After the Ailuk work, the US-funded Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) provided money to bring Jaluit master builder Gennade Leon’s 30-year-old canoe to Majuro, where it was rebuilt as both a training opportunity for several Ailuk builders and a documentation project.

By late 1991, excitement was building for the Festival of Pacific Arts, which was being organized in the Cook Islands with canoes as the centerpiece. The RMI’s organizing committee wanted to build a canoe. “I put word out about building a voyaging canoe,” Alessio said. This was a big jump for the Waan Aelon Kein program, since its biggest canoe had been less than 25 feet, and a voyaging canoe would nearly double that length.

“Enewetak Senator Ismael John came in and told me ‘we can do it,’” Alessio recalls. But initially, some organizing committee members objected, saying an Enewetak canoe wasn’t a Marshallese design.

A few days later, Alessio found the solution to this knotty problem. “I borrowed a table sized outrigger model and took it to show to the committee,” Alessio said. “It (the model) had been at the United Nations on display when the Marshall Islands became a UN member (earlier that year).”

The committee members really liked the design of this canoe, and voted to have the voyaging canoe built based on the model. Alessio then explained that the model was of an Enewetak canoe.

And so a big crew of Enewetak islanders, led by master builders Lombwe Mark and Hertes John descended on Majuro to build the first voyaging canoe built in the Marshall Islands in 50 or more years. “The Enewetak crew was a joy (to work with),” Alessio said. They built the nearly 50-foot canoe in an old Trust Territory era quonset hut that was in the area now occupied by Cost Price.

Lots of local residents stopped by to watch the canoe building. “They’d say, ‘it’ll never sail. It’s going to sink.’”

But not only did it sail, it caused a sensation in the Cook Islands. It joined with the famed Hokule’a double-hulled canoe from Hawaii (which visited Majuro in February this year), and canoes from the Cook Islands and elsewhere in the south. “Polynesians had never seen a canoe like this,” Alessio recalled.

A big crowd gathered on the beach at Aitutaki Atoll to see the canoes off on their 140-mile voyage to Rarotonga, the center where the Festival was to open shortly.

Alessio recalled that the pass out of the atoll was very narrow, making it a challenge for the canoes to navigate to open ocean. The Enewetak sailors hoisted the sail and organized the rigging as the canoe slowly moved toward the pass.

“Then they pulled the sail in tight, maneuvered to catch the wind and shot out the channel,” Alessio said. “It was a precision move and the crowd went wild screaming and shouting as the canoe went sailing out.”

The Marshalls canoe was so fast, the crew had to stop and wait for other canoes to catch up on the overnight voyage to Rarotonga. Finally, the crew got tired of waiting, and zoomed along.

But as dawn broke, they hit a patch of heavy weather, with big waves and suddenly the mast snapped in two. It sounds almost too simple, but the crew simply fixed it and sailed on, still arriving at Rarotonga before the other Polynesian canoes.

In Rarotonga the Marshalls canoe — which later would go on display at the New Zealand Maritime Museum after the Festival of Arts — continued to stand out for its speed and design, as well as its single hull construction.

Back home in Majuro, there was a new development that would shape the canoe program in the years ahead. Now well known as the canoe program manager, then Alson Kelen was a new hire, a “rookie” too new to qualify for participation in the Cook Islands Festival.

Reprinted with the permission of GIFF JOHNSON