BC Cook
IF one needed a boat capable of carrying them across the ocean with great speed and safety, you could hardly do better than a proa. An outrigger sailing canoe, the oddly shaped proa is actually the perfect shape, considering the building materials and tools islanders had to work with, and given their objectives in traveling abroad. With its slender main hull, smaller outrigger connected by spars, and a sail designed to move the craft forward regardless of the direction of the wind, the proa is still an object of astonishment and wonder to sailors and boat designers the world over. A case could be made that the proa was the greatest sailboat ever devised by mankind in its relentless pursuit of distant shores.
When the ancestors of today’s islanders explored the Pacific they designed a craft that was capable of great speeds over the water, could carry a small crew and their necessities, and could transport them safely in any weather. It had to resist flipping over and could be righted easily if it capsized. The proa resulted from these demanding specifications, and the design has hardly changed in hundreds of years.
The genius behind the proa was the outrigger. Sailors learned that a smaller hull attached to the windward side of the boat greatly reduced the rocking motion and kept the boat more stable in strong wind. If the lean became severe, the crew climbed along the spars toward the outrigger to even it out. Even if the proa fell completely over with the sail in the water, climbing onto the outrigger often provided enough counterweight to stand it back up.
A proa did not have a bow and a stern like most sailboats. It had two bows. That way, if the wind blew from another direction a sailor simply turned his body around and kept sailing with the outrigger to the windward side. The sail was often a simple triangle which was handled by one sailor.
Taking these features together, they allowed the craft to sail almost directly into the wind and still make progress, at speeds far faster than any traditional hull-type boat. When sailing across the wind, the speeds achieved by the proa were fantastic. In an ocean the size of the Pacific it is obvious why speed was such an important factor to sailors. They wanted to get to the next land mass as quickly as possible. The shorter the voyage, the fewer the chances for something to go wrong. Until the application of steam engines there was nothing faster than a proa.
For longer voyages sailors could build a shelter or other storage space on top of the outrigger spars for food, livestock, or extra passengers. This enabled the sailors to travel in larger numbers. Ancient mariners even developed a method of keeping a cooking fire burning onboard without endangering the boat. If a fleet of proas sailed together, they could transport enough people, livestock, tools and other essentials to start a new colony on another island. In this way, the ancient islanders populated an ocean full of small islands, separated by thousands of miles.
It is hard to imagine any other way. Without the speed, reliability and safety of the proa, it is difficult to see how the Pacific could have been conquered. But conquer it they did.
Dr. BC Cook taught history for 30 years and is a director and Pacific historian at Sealark Exploration (sealarkexploration.org). He currently lives in Hawaii.
