The Chumash natives that lived in the Santa Barbara Channel area, near what is now Los Angeles, California, U.S., (see map) built sea-worthy canoes called "Tomol", made with sewn planks of wood.
The word Tomol means "House of the Sea". (Source). The Chumash fashioned the planks from the logs of redwood driftwood which they curved using hot water (a clay pit, filled with water into which hot stones were placed, causing it to boil). They drilled holes along the planks' edges and used cord to lash them together. They caulked it with a blend of pine pitch and tar called "yop" (La Brea tar pits are very close to the sea in Los Angeles). (Source). The Chumash died out around 1850.
The Chumash used the tomol to reach the Channel Islands that are 34 km - 21 mi. from the mainland, and for deep-sea fishing. As the islands in that area were populated around 10,000 years ago, and that would have required sea-going watercraft, it is likely that these canoes are an ancient technology.
A paper by Brian Fagan (2004), The house of the sea: an essay on the antiquity of planked canoes in Southern California. American Antiquity, No. 69+1, p.7) argues they were first built around 8,500 years ago. There is no surviving specimen, though a replica was built (pictured below) based on notes taken by anthropologist John Peabody Harrington from information provided by a Chumash informant, Fernando Librado (1804-1915) who had seen them during his youth.
They were big canoes with several planks used on the side of the hull. Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, who navigated up the coast of California in 1542 wrote a journal and said the canoes he encountered in what is now Ventura, CA, were "Very good canoes, each of which held twelve or thirteen Indians". Impressed by them and their number, Cabrillo called the village there, "Pueblo de las Canoas" (Canoes Village).
Polynesian influences?
The idea was first proposed by Alfred Kroeber in 1939 in his work Cultural and natural areas of native North America (p. 44-45). I cite him below, the underlined text is my highlighting.
"There is a definite climax in this area among coast and island Gabrielino and Chumash, whose culture was semimaritime, with seagoing plank canoes. Although this climax culture was likely to have been further developed locally once it had taken root on the Santa Barbara Islands, its spontaneous origin on the mainland coast and growth to the point where it could reach the islands are hard to understand on the basis of either a Californian or a Sonora-Yuman culture basis. There is therefore a possibility that its impetus came in part either from the Northwest Coast or from across the Pacific, to both of which regions there are sporadic but fairly specific parallels: harpoon, canoe, round shell fishhooks, psychological cosmogony."
Some, however, consider that the know-how was a local development and not imported from Polynesia (see Meroz), furthermore, the date suggested by Fagan is roughly 8,000 years older than the first Polynesian migrations into the Pacific Islands. They predate the appearance of the Polynesians. Arnold also says they are not Polynesian, and preceed them, but places their creation date around 600 AD.
In my opinion there is another alternative: The tomol planks were sewn together using pairs of holes lashed individually. The Polynesians used a continuous sewing, so they differ. However, the Western Polynesians (Samoa) and Melanesians used discontinuous sewing. This suggests the technology used by the Chumash was Melanesian! (Source). This leaves the door open for an early Melanesian trans-Pacific voyage, even 8,500 years ago.
Let's take a look at the Polynesian and Melanesian sewn-plank canoes.
The Polynesian sewn-plank canoes
In 1846, the British government sent a warship, the HMS Grampus, commanded by Captain Henry Byam Martin to investigate the French annexation of the Society Islands. Martin, during his stay in Papeete, Tahiti, in February 1847, Martin wrote about a double canoe made of sewn planks he had seen in Taonoa, two miles from Papeete, which had sailed from what now are the Tuamotu Islands (Pomotoo):
"I walked to Taonoa to see a remarkable double canoe from the Pomatoo islands. It is in fact 2 canoes joined together. Each is about 50 feet long by 5 broad. There is not a nail in them. The logs of which they are constructed are sewn together with bark —and the jOinings are close & neat. The upper works or gunwales are of matting. She is schooner rigged with her masts stepped on the thwarts or connecting boards and I am told these craft stand a great deal of bad weather. Thirty eight persons crossed in her from Pomotoo—about 250 miles."
Below is an image showing it (Source):
Abraham Fornander reported in 1880 (see p. 8) that Rev. J. Williams, saw in Tahiti, in 1819, a "large canoe planked up and sewed together whose hold was twelve feet deep" (3.6 m) it had sailed 700 mi. (1,125 km).
Clearly, the Polynesians had mastered the art of building sewn-plank boats. But, what about the Melanesians?
Melanesian Sewn-Plank Canoes
S. Percy Smith, in his work Hawaiki the Whence of the Maori... (see p. 157), published in 1897, described the Alia canoe of the Melanesians:
"The alia is a double canoe and was thus described to me by Mr Kennison a boat builder in Savāi'i. "The biggest canoe of the two is sometimes as much as one hundred and fifty feet in length each end tapers out to nothing; the second canoe is not nearly so long as the first. They sail fast and like the Malay proas, do not go about in beating, but the sheet of the sail is shifted from bow to stern instead. There is a platform built between the two canoes, and both ends are decked over for some distance - the platform a house is usually erected. These double canoes will turn to wind ward very well. The canoes are built up of many slabs joined together with great neatness, and each plank is sewn to the next one with sinnet, which passes through holes bored in a raised edge on the inside of each plank." It was in this kind of canoe that the voyages of the Samoans and Tongans were made... Other accounts I obtained say that the alia was a Tongan design originally, and that the Samoans copied it from them. Again, it is said that the Tongans derived their model of the canoe from Fiji, which brings us back to this: That it probably originated with the ancestors of Maori and Rarotongan... who formed as I believe a distinct migration into the Pacific."
In their excellent book Canoes of Oceania (1938), A.C. Haddon and James Hornell mention (p. 39) that the Melanesians of Solomon Island built four varieties of sewn plank canoes: the mon, lisi, ora, and binabina, none of which had outriggers. The plank-built canoe of these islands did not use sails, they were propelled with oars or paddles, showing that they were primitive.
Haddon, in Vol II - The canoes of Melanesia, Queensland, and New Guinea, goes into many details about the watercraft of this region. It is worth noting that he mentions the Melanesians at Nukumanu atoll (p.69) using driftwood planks (like the Chumash!) sewn together, that could carry up to 20 men. At San Cristoval, they were 30 to 40 ft. long (9 - 12 m), with three strakes (a continuous, longitudinal course of planks along the side of a vessel), and inlaid with shells (coincidentially, the Chumash canoes also had shell inlays - Source). Some could carry 90 men. The text includes the following image with two varieties of sewn-plank canoes from San Cristoval
Based on the theories of the late 1930s, Haddon and Hornell suggest that the "kava-people" (here they follow Paul Rivet's theory that mentions them as late arrivals in Melanesia) introduced canoes into Melanesia, they originally used dugouts (canoes made by hollowing out a tree trunk), then improved them and made them more seaworthy by adding strakes and that "this improvement may have led to the evolution of a plank-built boat, in which the original dugout underbody has been reduced to a mere keel." Adding that the "true plank-built boat with inserted rib-frames fastened to cleats on the strakes was employed only sporadically in western Oceania; it had its origin in Indonesia and so can not be regarded as a local development. We consider that it belonged to one of the later spreads from the west into Polynesia."
It is evident that the authors don't consider the Melanesians as capable of developing the sewn-plank knowhow on their own and required a more "civilized" input from Indonesia. I disagree.
The Patagonian Chonos
Not much is known about these people because they became extinct by the mid 1700s. European disease killed them all. The Chono lived south of Chiloe island, in Chile, along the Patagonian coast of the Guaitecas Islands, Taitao Peninsula and the Guayanecos Islands, up to the Gulf of Penas.
They lived in their canoes, the Dalcas. They fished, hunted sea lions and collected shellfish. Their boats were their livelihood.
Dalca: the sewn-plak canoe
The first to mention them was Francisco de Ulloa, who in 1553, sailed south along the Chilean Patagonian coast. In the Chonos Archipelago (45°S) they saw a canoe, on land, "made made of three planks, very well sewn together, 24 to 25 feet (7 meters) long, and the seams had been treated with a bitumen that they make... they were like shuttles with very high tips. (Source).
The Dalca canoe of the Chonos was built with three to five wooden planks which were sewn together with vegetable fibers. They used the wood of the larch (alerce) tree (Fitzroya cupressoides) which was light and did not rot. The split the trunks lengthwise with wedges into planks. They soaked and fired the planks to bend them into shape, and then perforated the holes used to sew them.
One, conserved at the Stockholm Folkens Museum Etnografiska in Sweden measures 4.26 x 1.00 x 0.51 m (13.9 x 3.3 x 1.6 ft.). There are Spanish accounts of canoes carrying 15 oarsmen and measuring 10 meters (33 ft.) long. They had a rudder, ribs, benches and sometimes masts. They were large like the Chumash Tomols or the Samoan canoes.
The spaces between the planks were caulked with the leaves of a local plant. There was no tar in the area and no pine pitch to fill the gaps.
José Toribio Medina in his "Aboríjenes de Chile" (1882) quotes Father Diego de Rosales (p. 193) who in the mid 1600s described them as follows:
"They made them from just three boards sewn together, and cut the planks to the length they wanted for the canoe, and with fire between some lockers they bent them as needed to make a boat with a stern and bow, and the one that serves as the floor raises the point at the front and back more than the others so that it serves as the bow and stern, and the rest as the keel. The other two boards, arched with fire, serve as sides, with which they form a long and narrow boat, joining some planks with others and sewing them with the bark of some wild reeds called culeu, crushed from which they make some twisted ropes that do not rot in the water. And to sew the planks they open holes in correspondence with fire and after they are sewn they caulk them with the leaves of a tree called fiaca or teroa which are very viscous and they put maqui bark on top and in this way they make canoes capable of carrying two hundred quintals of cargo [1 quintal = 100 pounds ~46 kg]. They have one in the stern who steers it with a paddle or oar and eight or ten oarsmen and one who is always pumping or bailing with a tray because they are always taking on water."
I have not found any information on the sewing technique, was it continuous or one-on-one? The original dalcas were made to last, and since making a long cord is complicated, it is probable that they used short cords to tie the plank-holes together in a discontinuous way. Later, during historic Spanish conquest times (1700s), inspired by the Europeans, and using iron axes, they made larger ones, and also dalcas that could be taken apart to portage them. They probably acquired European ropes for longer continuous sewing because fewer knots would quicken the process of taking the canoes apart and sewing them together again after the portage. If so, Melanesian, Chumash and Chono canoes were sewn in a manner different to the Polynesian plank canoes.
Discussion
The Chonos lived close to Mocha Island, mentioned in a previous post as a possible beachhead for trans-Pacific voyagers. Another interesting point is that the Chumash and the Chonos despite being 9,900 km apart - 6,150 mi. (in a straight line) or 9,901.62 km (6,152.58 mi) or 12,200 km (7,600 mi) if you take a coast-hugging route, shared the same mtDNA, the D4H3a variety (See my 2014 post mtDNA D4H3a haplogroup): " the D4h3a tends to have a coastal distribution along the Pacific Ocean from Canada to Tierra del Fuego: Canada, California, Ecuador, Southern Chile and Argentina. The Yaghan, Alakaluf, Chono, Cayapa, Chumash, and the man from On Your Knees Cave, all had this haplogroup. They all built sea-going craft: rafts, dugout canoes, bark canoes and "sewn plank" canoes."
However, the D4h3a mtDNA haplogroup is not present in Melanesia. It is found in East Asia. We could suppose that the navigators were a group of men, who traveled without women. Or, if they did, the imprint they left in the local genetic pool was small, and got diluted over the following millennia. The same can be said about their Y-chromosome influence on the local Amerindians.
Regarding plank-canoes, Robert Heizer (1942) is categorical and denies any Polynesian influences in the American sewn-plank canoes: "We may conclude with the summary statement that the Chilotan dalca and the Santa Barbara tomolo, in the light of present information, are each ascribable to local and independent origin."
Could people in different parts of the world develop the same technology independently? Yes, it is very likely. Human minds think in a similar way and find similar solutions to problems (hunting, fishing, farming, etc.)
Could Melanesians cross the Pacific before the Polynesians, some 8,000 years ago, pushed by favorable winds during an El Niño event and reach America? Yes, it is possible.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
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