Reprinted from
) f_
,,;
Sewn Plank Boats
Archaeological·and Ethnographic papers
based on those presented to a conference
at. Greenwich in November, 1984
edited by
Sean McGrail and Eric Kentley
i
·i·
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich,
Archaeological Series No. 10
BAR International Series 276
1985
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20:
SEWN-PLANK CRAFT OF SOUTH-EAST ASIA
A Preliminary Survey
Pierre-Yves Manguin
Summary
This paper is a first attempt at bringing together
the
ethnographical,
historical
and
archaeological
evidence presently available on sewn-plank craft of both
Island and Continental South-East Asia (including the
culturally related southern areas of present day China).
As far as possible at this early stage, this evidence
will then be considered in a broader Asian and Oceanian
context.
Introduction
Throughout this paper the term 'sewn' will be used in the
restricted sense of passing threads through holes bored in planks, so
as to make them fast.
It is not applied to planks held fast by edgedowelling which are merely lashed to frames or thwarts (in what
Horridge (1982) rightly calls a lashed-lug design).
j,
c;
'
0
Starting
with the early 1st millennium AD
Peryplus of the
Erythrean Sea, literature on the sewn craft of the Indian Ocean has
always been abundant; as a matter of fact, this structural feature has
generally been given as one of the area's specific technical characteristics.
Sewing of the planks in the smaller craft of the Pacific
Ocean has also received a fair share of attention after 18th century
discoveries.
Southern-East Asian sewn-plank craft, with the exception
of those from Vietnam, have until now attracted comparatively little
attention, despite the fact that they come from an area at the crossroads between the two Oceans (Fig.20.1).
Only G.A. Horridge has
recently devoted a few lines to the subject in an attempt to provide a
broader perspective to his study on lashed-lug boats, but this has been
done in very general terms and his sweeping chronological statements
are based on little concrete evidence (Horridge, 1982, 56-57).
Dai
Kaiyuan's comments on his recent discovery of a sewn-plank boat in
Southern China ignore the South-East Asian evidence and concentrate on
possible Indian Ocean influences (Dai Kaiyuan, 1983). The opportunity
is now taken to examine the available evidence on South-East Asian sewn
boats and to assess it within its proper context.
319
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OCEAN
20.1
South-East Asia and the distribution of sewn-plank craft
(sites mentioned in the text).
320
Vietnamese craft
Various European travellers of the 17th and 18th centuries mentioned the existence of Vietnamese sea-going or coastal sewn-plank
craft known as sinja (<thuyen gia), which traded all the way to Siam or
plied the coasts of Central Vietnam.
Some of them would have carried
up to 100 or 150 tons of cargo.
John Barrow, secretary to the British
Ambassador Lord Macartney, described those he saw in the Hue river in
1793: they wer·e beautifully ornate, some 15 to 25m in length, built up
at times with only five long planks assembled with wooden dowels· and
fastened with ropes made of 'bamboo fibres'; they had no frames (Paris,
1942, 353-355).
None of the later descriptions of Vietnamese boats
refer to such large vessels, which do seem to ·have vanished during the
18th century.
Before considering the evidence they provide, it should
be noted that the original inhabitants of the coastal areas of Central
Vietnam - roughly south of the 18th parallel - were not Vietnamese but
an Austronesian speaking people known as the Cams.
Their kingdom of
Campa was only progressively conquered by Vietnam in the 2nd millenium
AD, during which process much of the culture and technical knowledge of
the Cams was absorbed by the Vietnamese settlers.
Shipbuilding techniques, among others, developed into a very original hybrid tradition
in which Southern Chinese and Malay World inputs blended harmoniously.
Due to such specific historical developments, and to the consequent
isolation of .the area from the rest of the Malay World during the last
three centuries, it turned into a repository of craft designs elsewhere
forgotten:
stem-post leeboards, wicker-work hulls or sewn-plank craft
are amon~ t~ese technical peculiarities.
Admiral E. Paris, in.his invaluable Essai sur la construction
navale des peuples extra-europeens, was the first author to describe in
any detail' the sewn-plank boats he observed on the coasts of Central
Vietnam {E. Paris, 1841, 49-50 and pl.46-47). He gives a detailed plan
of a fishing boat of the Bay of Tourane (Da-nang), which he calls gayyou (<ghe gia?)(Fig.20.2). Its hull was basically made of five planks:
a flat bottom one, plus two on each side (with smaller wash~boards at
stem and stern).
It had no frames.
The planks were joined edge-toedge, assembled by means of wooden dowels inserted into their seams and
fastened with rattan stitches held under tension by flat wooden wedges
inserted under the ties and overlapping like tiles.
Paris says that a
flat knot was made at each end of the rattan thread, which was subsequently inserted into cavities made in the facing planks; these were
then plugged by forcing soft-wood pegs into them, that locked the tie
into position.
The sewing was thus done entirely in the inner side of
the planks (Fig.20.6A).
·0
Both Barrow and E. Paris, at half-a-century interval, mention
edge-dowelling of the strakes; as we shall see, this is not to be found
in the smaller sewn-plank craft that have survived into the 20th
century in Vietnamese waters (whereas it is found in most other Central
and South Vietnamese boats; Pietri, 1949,17,19). This, I believe, is a
confirmation of the fact that the earlier and still much larger sewnplank ships of South-East Asia must have been built with dowels
inserted into their planks, so as to provide a large hull with sufficient structural strength (frames being another way of achieving
this, as we shall see below when we consider the large early 1st
millennium AD ships).
321
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Fishing boat from Da-nang, Central Vi@t-nam (Paris, 1841,.
pl.46; photo Musee de la Marine).
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Ghe-noc
Hill; Pit
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Lashings of the ghe-noc from Hue (photo by C.A. GibsonHill; Pitt-Rivers Museum).
-;>
With this major difference, the 20th century Vietnamese sewn-plank
boats do belong to the same family of craft as those described by
Barrow and Paris:
frameless, flat-bottomed hulls, with planks sewn
together edge-to-edge, the ties being visible on the inside of the hull
only, and made fast by tile-like wedges.
(197l,vol.X,20-22) describes such craft,
which he
Audemard
observed in Cam-ranh and Qui-nhon (in Central Vietnam) before World
War II.
The smallest of these boats would have been made of three
planks only, instead of five (or more, apparently, before the 18th
century).
The only slight difference in the sewing technique lies in
the way the ties were attached to the planks. Instead of having a knot
plugged into a cavity, two small connecting mortises were bored into
each one of the-facing planks, thus providing a point on to which the
ties would be attached (Fig.20.6B).
The most detailed description of the frameless sewn-plank craft of
Vietnam will be found in Pierre Paris' excellent Esguisse d'une ethno
graphie navale des pays annamites (1942,
353-356,
368-373 and pl.
lxxxviii,xc,xci,civ; see also Pietri, 1949, 71-73).
The boats he
describes were observed in Hue (the ghe noc) and in Nha-trang (the
thuyen song).
Such boats, or rather small versions of them, were
photographed by C.A. Gibson-Hill in Hue and Nha-trang in the 1950's
(Figs.20.3, 4,5).
The latest publication of Vietnamese sewn-plank
craft, as far as I am aware, is to be found in the u.s. Junk Blue Book
(1962, AI 26-36), where ghe noc or Hue and Quang-tri are descrJbed
together with the various ways in which they are used at sea and in the
rivers.
P. Paris takes the ghe noc as a model of these craft.
It was
built out of the usual five long planks (up to 15m in length), with a
pair of short wash-boards added at stem and stern, fitted with tenons
and mortises.
After careful adjusting of the edge-to-edge joints,
corresponding holes were pierced' in two adjoining planks, from their
inner side and into the seams (thus exemplifying a third way· of keeping
·the ties inside the hull Fig.20.6C).
These holes were bored some 20cm
apart.
Rattan threads were then inserted and tied in a loop over a
batten made of melaleuca leucadendra bark (which is commonly used in
Island South-East Asia under the name of kulit gelam for caulking, as
it is said to expand when wet).
Both E. Paris and Audemard omitted to
mention this. bark batten, but they probably did not spot it under the
wooden wedges, as the technique would not be sound wi.thout it.
The
batten was then covered with.thin laths of split bamboo.
Flat, tilelike, overlapping wooden wedges were finally inserted under the ties to
make the whole attachment fast.
According to Paris, the fact that the
watertightness was limited to the inner side of· the hull made the outer
side of the joints particularly vulnerable to rot and wood borers.
Planks were reshaped when the boats were over-hauled, which meant that
the latter's size was reduced as they grew older. The thuyen song would
also have a few transverse planks inserted near the bows and stern,
that acted as thwarts and were sewn to the side strakes.
The bows of
the ghe noc were closed off by a U-shaped transverse plank.
The
largest of these craft would have been equipped with a single mast
carrying a lug-sail, and a compensated, axial rudder mounted through a
hole in the aft part of the bottom plank.
Smaller craft would have no
sails or axial rudders and would be propelled by means of sweeps and
poles.
325
A
c
8
E
0
20.6
Sewing of planks in South-East Asian craft
A Ghe-rioc of Hue (after E. Paris, 1841)
~
Thuyen song of Cam-ranh and Qui-nhon (after Audemard,
1971)
c Ghe-noc of Hue (after P. Pa-ris, 1942)
. D · Cas eo of Manila (re cons true ted after the Mu see de
l'Homme model and various descriptions)
E Fishing boat of Hainan (after Dai Kaiyuan, 1983)
326
Audemard (197l,vol.X,57) also briefly mentions sewn-plank canoes
he observed on tributaries of the Mekong, in Laos, but he provides no
details as to the sewing technique.
The question of inland South-East
Asian sewn-plank boats must therefore remain open, as does that of
their building by non-Austronesian speaking people of South-East Asia.
Hai-nan island fishing boats
'~
I
Sewn plank boats have recently been found to be in use among the
fishermen of the Chinese island of Hai-nan, in Guangdong province (Dai
Kaiyuan, 1983). They are exclusively oared and have no mast. They are
rather small (7-lOm long), pointed at both ends, with a clearly vshaped hull.
The example which is illustrated has three strakes on
each side of the keel.
Frames are inserted and sewn to the planks
(these stitches do not seem to show on the outside of the hull, but
this is not clear). The strakes themselves are sewn together; the ties
are passed into holes pierced through the margins of the planks, thus
showing on the outer side.
They are tied inside on top of a batten
made of some sort of grass, and three bamhoo laths are inserted between
the coconut fibre (coir) rope and the batten (Fig.20.6E).
If compared with Vietnamese craft, these are a very different type
of vessel.
The keel, the planking and the frames are witnesses to a
much more ela~orate building technique, which would be viable for much
larger boats.
On the other hand, the sewing process, with separate
lashings tied around a batten covered with bamboo laths, is very c~ose
to that of the Vietnamese coast; it differs in the use of coir instead
of rattan; in the composition of the battens; in that the ties show on
the outer side of the hull; and in the absence of the wooden wedges
driven under the ties.
The last two peculiarities make this a less
elaborate design than that of Vietnam.
I have remarked earlier that the techniques in use among Vietnamese boatbuilders were inherited from their Cam predecessors on the
stretch of coast they settled on.
It happens that an ethnic group
speaking an Austronesian language cognate to Cam has been described on
the southern coast of Hai-nan (Benedict, 1983).
The sewn-plank boats
were only found in two districts of the east coast of the island
(Wanning and Wenchang), and the language family of their users has not
been indicated.
This may nevertheless well be another trace of a
technique formerly in use among Austronesian speaking groups of the
South China Sea.
Dai Kaiyuan (1983,87) quotes from a 17th century
gazetteer of Guangdong province in which boats with rattan lashings are
already said to be in use in Hai-nan.
An earlier text of the 12th
century also mentions large ships sewn with rattan thread being built
in Guangdong for merchants who wanted to cross.the 'big sea'.
It is
not clear who built and sailed these ships; as we will see below, such
sewn vessels were said, 3 centuries earlier, to be built and manned by
South-East Asians.
We now have to cross the South China Sea to the East to find
further examples of sewn-plank boats.. From now on, all of them will be
found to be built and used by speakers of languages of the Austronesian
family.
327
Sarawak war boats
The Rev. A. Horsburgh provides us with a long, precise description
of the building technique in use among the Dayaks of Sarawak (which
ethnic group exactly is not made clear in the text, but Ling Roth,
quoting from the latter, mentions the Balau; Horsburgh, 1858, 36-37;
Ling Roth, 1968,II, 246-247). The building design is odd, to say the
least, for a South-East Asian boat (or, as far as I am aware, in any
other context). I will quote directly from the original text:
"The ordinary boats of the Dyaks are long; narrow canoes,
hollowed out of the trunk of a tree, the sides being raised
by planks pinned upon them.
Their war-boats, however, are
much larger, and are constructed differently. The lunas; or
keel plank, which is of the entire length of the boat, has
two ledges on its inside, each of them about an inch from
each margin of the plank.
Each of the other planks, which
are likewise the entire length of the boat, has an inside
ledge on its upper margin, its lower margin being plain,
like an ordinary plank.
When the Dyaks have made as many
planks as are necessary for the boat they intend constructing, · they put them together in the following manner:
The
lunas, or keel plank, being properly laid down, the first
side plank is brought and placed, with its lower or plain
edge, upon the ledge of the keel plank.
The ledge of the
first side plank being thus the upper-most, it becomes in
turn the ledge upon which the lower edge of the second side
plank must rest.
The ledges of the keel plank, and of the
first side plank, are then pierced, and firm rattan lashings
passed from the one to the other.
The lower edge of the
second side plank is in like manner laid upon the ledge of
the first, and these two planks are lashed together in the
same way as the first was lashed to the keel.
Thus they
place the edge of each plank'upon the ledge of that immediately below it, lashing them both firmly together; and.when
they have in this manner put on as many planks as they wish
(generally 4 or 5 on each side), they caulk the seams, so as
to render the boat watertight.
Hence, in the construction
of their boats they not only employ no nails, treenails, or
bolts, but even no timbers - nothing but planks ingeniously
lashed together by rattans, and then caulked.
It is true
that these lashings are not very durable, as the rattans
soon get rotten; but this is of little consequence, since,
whenever a boat returns from an expedition, the lashings are
cut, and the planks being separated, are taken up into the
house. When she is again wanted, the planks are taken down,
and the boat reconstructed as before. To propel their boats
they employ paddles of about 3 feet in length - never oars,
and seldom sails."
Without any evidence of a comparable design in South-East Asia
(or, for that matter, elsewhere), without further iconographical information, there is little one can comment on this otherwise clear
description. If I understand alright the position of the ledge an inch
below the top margin of each plank, and the fact that the plain lower
edge of the next plank rests on this ledge, mean that we must have a
reverse clinker style hull.
The lashings that tie the ledges together
328
,.
do not seem very logical and it is difficult to understand
would have kept the planks close together sideways.
how
these
Luzon boats
Turning to the island of Luzon, in the northern Philippines, we
come across further examples of sewn-plank craft. Again, these will be
shown to share characteristics with the boats previously described in
Vietnam and Hai-nan, as well as to differ from them in many ways. The
relevant boats of Luzon are usually described under the name casco, a
Spanish term conveying the idea of a hollow shell (and consequently the
hull of a vessel); the actual local names are not known, except for
barangay, the use.of which is otherwise widespread in the Philippines.
They seem to fall, according to the available evidence, into two broad
categories.
Admiral E. Paris once more provides us with the earliest detailed
description of such a casco, which he sketched in the early 19th
century in the Bay of Manila (Paris, 1841,67 and pl.72-73). Her shape
was rectangular, with a flat bottom sloping upwards at the bows and a
transom stern made of a single piece of wood (Fig.20.7).
The bottom
and the sides were made of thick, irregular planks, sewn together by
means of small flat ties covered with white putty.
The fore and aft
extremities of the bottom, and the side angles, were strengthened with
floors carved out of solid timber. Strong thwarts were laid across the
top side planks to hold the thatched cabin.
Galang succinctly
describes the later cascos, without reference to their being sewn, in
11
the following terms:
A long, almost rectangular barge or lighter,
sometimes with sails.
Principally used for loading merchandise. Very
common in the islands." (Galang, 1941, 295 and pl.4/2, 5/1). There is
little else one· can learn about this type of casco from the sources
known to me.
A fine model of a so-called ~sampan from Manila' is now preserved
the Musee de l'Homme in Paris (Departement d'Oceanie, n°87.1.1;
it entered the collection in 1887 as a gift from the French Consul to
the Philippines).
This boat differs from the previous type in many
ways. Like the Vietnamese craft, she is basically made of five large
planks. The large bottom plank and the two almost vertical side planks
are of the entire length of the boat and are sewn to the solid timber
stem post and transom stern.
Two shorter additional side planks are
inserted between the bottom and the sides, thus giving the hull a
double chine cross section (Fig.20.8).
There are ·no frames, but
additional structural strength is provided by two transverse rattan
braces near the stem and stern timbers, and by two pairs of thwarts
placed on each side of the main beam.
The lower thwarts are lashed
with rattan to two pairs of lugs carved out of each of the smaller side
planks.
The upper thwarts are lashed to a carved out ledge running
along the top length of the upper side planks.
The bottom lugs are
clearly of the same type as those used in the lashed-lug design - for
which there are many Filipino and Indonesian examples -, but they do
not serve entirely the same purpose as there are no frames attached to
them.
:~t
The five planks, and the stem and stern timbers are sewn together
by means of separate rattan lashings (some 30 to 40cm apart, assuming
the scale of the model to be approximately 1/10).
These ties are
329
20.7
Cascos near Man:i.la
(Paris,~.·. . ··18·4:t~p1.~(:3.,; l)btot:f;f·:Ku~;iE~
Marine)
330
dt., .•;t~
a
20.8
Casco from Manila (after model no.87.1.1. in the Musee de
l'Homme, Dept. Oceanie; not to scale).
a. cross-section near the main beam
b. side view of the bare hull
331
driven through holes bored through the planks:
they therefore show on
the outside of the hull. The edge of the bottom plank closely fits the
side of the lateral one; whereas the two side planks overlap in a
rudimentary way (considering the minute details and the excellent
overall quality of the model, I take this is also faithful to the
original).
The model, though, does not show how the joints - particularly the overlapping side planks - were kept watertight.
An early 20th century description of the building of sewn plank
craft (called barangayan), on the north coast of Luzon, fits in
perfectly, despite the geographical distance, with the Musee de l'Homme
model and provides some further evidence. The logs (called cascos) for
the planks were floated to the building site at Aparri. They were then
shaped, two pieces for each side and a larger one for the bottom, and
holes bored near the seams.
These were tied with a special kind of
rattan traded from inland and said to last two years in sea water.
The ties were fastened with one man standing inside the hull and
another one outside..
The holes were then plugged with coconut husk.
The stem (a thick, narrow, curved piece of wood) and the stern (flat
and trapezoid) were then added. Only after completion of the hull were
the thwarts placed across the top planks and the arched covering of
split bamboos, rattan and thatch installed (there is no mention in this
description of the internal thwarts lashed to lugs found in the Paris
model).
Anot.her reference to sewn boats, from the extreme south of
Luzon, (called tinahi in Tagalog, i.e. 'sewn together') mentions well
pounded coconut husks being used between planks as caulking, sometimes
also a mixture of lime and sap. All holes were stopped up.
An early 17th century glossary of Tagalog has a few words that
refer to the sewing of local boats and thus gives us additional clues
to the process of making their joints watertight. Bitic is "to sew the
planks of boats with rattan".
Sicsic is "to caulk the seams of sewn
planks with pounded coconut husk".
Balotbot:
the first step when
caulking a boat, i.e. to fill in 'the seams with bonot (coconut husk?);
salogsog: the second step, i.e., after inserting the bonot, to close
the seams by inserting (bamboo) canes between the bonot and the ties;
The
balibol·: the third step, i.e. to caulk (stop up?) the holes. 1
method used is not made perfectly clear by these glosses.
Neverthe~
less, the process of "inserting bamboo (laths?) under the rattan ties
and the coconut husk"is clearly reminiscent of the Hai-nan boat (and,
without the wooden wedges, of those of Vietnam):
the coconut husk,
rather than being inserted into the seams, as the word 'caulking'
(Spanish calafetear) would suggest in an European context, would have
been formed into a batten running along the joints inside the hull
(Fig.20.6D).
Indonesian logboats
In 19th century Indonesian waters, E. Paris came across logboats
(dug-out canoes) with sewn wash-boards.
They do not, per se, add much
to the technical data on South-East Asian sewn-plank craft, but they do
add to the distribution pattern of sew forms in Island South-East Asia
and should therefore be briefly mentioned.
One of them is from Menado
(North Sulawesi):
its dug-out base "was raised with broad planks sewn
(to the dug-out) by means of small, flat (separate) ties, and held
together by lashings attached to carved-out lugs.
These planks were
joined at their extremities by very nicely done interior stitches"
332
(Paris, 1841, 85 and pl. 97/10-14).
One will recognise in this
description a transition between, on the one hand, a dug-out canoe and
a planked boat and, on the other hand, between sewn-plank and lashedlug designs.
The same author describes another dug-out from East Java
which has raised wash-boards sewn on the inner side of the hull (ibid.
80 and pl. 91).
-c
The Pontian and Butuan finds
The next pie~e of evidence that I wish to present is of an
archaeological nature:
it represents, by far, the earliest documented
sewn-plank craft in South-East Asia.
It was found and excavated by
Evans in 1926 on the bank of the Pontian river, in the State of Pahang,
on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula (Evans 1927).
The remains,
after falling into oblivion, were found again by C.A. Gibson-Hill who
described them and offered a very hypothethical reconstruction of the
hull (Gibson-Hill 1952).
They again went into oblivion until the
Curator of the newly founded Muzeum Abu Bakar at Pekan (Pahang) brought
them back and exhibited them in their region of origin.
This is where
A sample had meanwhile been
I was allowed to examine them iJ;l 1982.
taken from its timbers and a 14 c dating yielded a 293 ± 60 AD result
(BM-958; Booth, 1984, 203).
Despite the fact that this dating was
carried out long after the remains were first exposed, the result is
perfectly in accordance with the dating of the ceramics that were found
in the wreck by Evans. These have been found by Malleret to be exactly
similar to some of those he got in his own excavations at Oc-eo,_ in
south Vietnam, which gives them a broad 1st to 6th century AD dating
(Malleret, 1959-63, II, 118 and pl.lxxiii).
Gibson-Hill had only two brief remarks on the way the planks and
the keel-piece of the Pontian boat were held together by ties and
wooden dowels, as he was more interested in the lashed-lug fastening of
the frames and the general· shape of the boat, which he compared, on
flimsy evidence, to modern types' of the Gulf of Siam.
Wh~t I believe
..is one of the essential pieces of evidence which may be gathered from
.this shipwreck is actually the eo-location of three techniques seldom
found together on the same craft: sewing of the planks, edge-dowelling
and frames lashed to carved-out lugs.
Fig.20.9 was drawn to scale
after the remains of the Pontian boat (A) and those of the earlier of
the two wrecks from Butuan (Mindanao, Philippines) (B). The latter is
now preserved at the site museum.
It has been dated to 320 ± 110 AD
(GAK 7744; Phillippine delegation, 1984).
Both shipwrecks obviously belong to the 'lashed-lug planked boat'
shipbuilding tradition which has now been proved to be widespread in
Island Southeast Asia, and which may still be ·observed in remote areas
such as Lamalera (on which tradition see Scott 1982; Horridge 1978,
1982; Barnes, this volume).
The Butuan wreck is offered here as the earliest example of a
fully fledged lashed-lug design (as clearly defined in Horridge, 1982,
1).
The Pontian boat, however, has several odd characteristics.
Whereas the regular lashed-lug craft would have a large number of
dowels inserted into the seams of her planks (every 16-18cm in the
Butuan wreck), she has much fewer dowels (some 92-94cm apart).
The
strakes of the usual lashed-lug boat would normally be held together in addition to the lashing of the frames and thwarts to the lugs - by
333
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Fastening of the planks of the Pontian (A) and Butuan (B)
shipwrecks (3rd and 4th centuries A.D.)
334
small wooden locking pegs inserted across the planks and into the
dowels; the Pontian boat, instead, has her planks sewn together by
means of ties made of vegetal fibres, some of which have remained in
the holes to the present day (no botanical identification has been
carried out so far; both this rope and that used to lash the Butuan
boat components together do look very much like the fibre of the arenga
pinnata, or sugar palm, widely used in the Philippines under the name
of cabo negro and in the Malay World under that of ijo{).
The holes
into which the threads are passed are pierced in pairs 3cm apart, lcm
in diameter), on each side of the carved lugs (thus approximately 45 to
48cm apart), and would face similar holes in the adjoining strake. The
holes are bored from the inside of the hull and into the seams of the
planks (thus leaving, in a regular South-East Asian design, the outer
side of the planks untouched).
Despite the fact that none of this has
been preserved in the wreck, one may speculate that the ties were held
fast by some sort of wedge driven into the loop and that caulking was
used to make the joints watertight, as is usual in modern Indonesian
boats (and may still be observed in the Butuan wreck).
The Pontian boat, therefore, must be seen as so far the best and
earliest example of an intermediate construction design:
it may be
said to ·represent the regular transition between purely sewn-plank
boats comparable to some Cam/Vietnamese craft and the fully edge~
dowelled, lashed-lug boats of Island South-East Asia. The insertion of
a few dowels into the seams of the planks gave her hull enough rigidity
to allow for the sewing to be limited to comparatively widely spaced
ties.
The remaining ties would later disappear when more dowels, and
particularly the small locking pegs, would be used to prevent the
planks from riding apart.
A recent confirmation of this structural
strength was offered when an 18m sewn-plank canoe, edge-dowelled, with
frames and thwarts lashed to lugs ( inspj.red by the Pontian boat
technique, except for her solid dug-out base), was built in the Sulu
Archipelago (Southern Philippines) and sailed across rough seas to
Java and Bali by expedition leader Robert Hobman.
The expedition is
·due to proceed in June 1985 across the Indian Ocean, straight to
~adagascar).
Other references
Only brief mentions were made in passing to sewn-plank vessels
that would have been larger than those described by modern observers,
or found so far in archaeological contexts.
The Vietnamese 'sinja'
were said to have reached 150 tons in the 17th century, and larger
ghe noc seem to have still been built late in the 19th century (Pietri,
1949, 72). There was a reference in the 12th century to large trading
craft built in Guangdong by unnamed shipwrights:
this being a time
when large colonies of Arab and Persian merchants had settled in
Southern Chinese harbours, there is no way of telling if these sewn
craft were part of the local South-East Asian tradition or of Indian
Ocean or1g1n.
However, there are a few 1st millennium AD Chinese
sources that provide us with further information on the trading ships
of the South-East Asian policies of the time.
It should be remembered
that an ocean-going Chinese merchant navy was only developed in the
last two centuries of the 1st millennium AD. The ships described in
earlier Chinese sources are always clearly stated to be of foreign
usually South-East Asian (kunlun) - origin.
335
An AD 304 flora of South-East Asia, when describing the sugar palm
tree (Arenga pinnata), states that "the bark can be made into ropes
which become pliable in water.
The foreigners use these to bind
timbers together in boats" (Hui-Lin Li, 1979, 90). These black ropes
which do not rot in sea-water - called ijok in Malay and known as
cabo negro in the Philippines - have been in constant use in South-East
Asian shipbuilding until recently (and, as we have seen, seem to have
been used to bind the components of the Pontian and the Butuan craft,
both of them roughly contemporary with the above flora).
We thus have
a clear statement about South-East Asian sewn-plank (or lashed-lug)
boats.
Other texts, dating from the 3rd to the 8th centuries AD, are more
specific about the South-East Asian ships themselves:
up to some 50m
in length, they carried 250 tons of cargo or more, apart from a
thousand passengers; they had four masts and sails; iron nails or
clamps, common by that time in Chinese yards, were not made use of:
but "with the fibrous bark of the coconut tree, they make cords which
bind the parts of the ship together" (Manguin, 1980, 275). Whether the
coconut tree fibre is mistaken for that of the sugar-palm tree, as
often happens, or coir was actually used (as in modern Hai-nan or in
the Indian Ocean) is impossible to say: both trees are common in the
area, but South-East Asians seem to have always favoured the arenga
fibre, or els~ rattan, rather than coir which, on the other hand, is in
general use in the Indian Ocean.
Whichever the fibre used for lashings, we do have confirmation of
the existence during the 1st millennium AD of large sea-going ships of
South-East Asian build, the timbers of which were held together with
vegetable fibre. No description provides enough details to distinguish
between sewn-plank or lashed-lug designs (or a combination of both),
but the mere size of the ships referred to as early as the 3rd century
AD calls for some structural strength that could only have been
provided by edge-dowelling of the planks and/or the use of frames (as
.found, for instance, in the large Indian Ocean sewn~plank dhows). Both
·edge-dowelling and frames are found in the·early South-East Asian craft
surveyed in this paper and there is no objection in hypothesizing such
a design in large ships of the first few centuries of the 1st millen~
nium AD.
No shipwrecks have been excavated as yet in South-East Asia that
would confirm the above Chinese descriptions.
A riverine site in
Palembang (South Sumatra), in an area known to have been one of the
major centres of the maritime state of Srivijaya (7th to 13th century),
has yielded pieces of wood with dowel holes and, seemingly, arenga
fibre lashings, that may well be part of such a·large ship. An excavation on this site is being planned by the Indonesian National Centre
for Archaeological Research (Manguin, 1982).
Conclusions
After having brought together these scattered data on sewn-plank
cra.ft in South-East Asia, the first impression is that of their broad
geographical dispersion within the area, despite the present scarcity
of the available data (not forgetting the coasts of Southern China, an
area that has been proved to be culturally close to South-East Asia in
prehistoric times) (Fig.20.1).
The extreme diversity of boat designs
336
!j
is similarly of note.
If the sewing technique itself is dissociated
from the boat design, we do not get a much more coherent picture,
despite the fact that at least one series of clearly cognate designs
have
been identified in Vietnam,
Hai-nan and the
Philippines
(Fig.20.6).
By relying on the logical assumption, often used by
linguists, that the origin area of a technique is most likely to be
found in the area of maximum technical diversity, there are then good
grounds to retain as a working hypothesis the idea of a South-East
Asian homeland (at least as far as East Asia is concerned:
sewn-plank
techniques are universal and there obviously are other areas in the
world where they are known to have been independently developed; the
Northern Europe sewn-plank boats and their evolution into lashed-lug
designs are strikingly similar to those of South-East Asia).
When considering the Pacific area, there is no further need to
prove that the people who settled on the multiple islands of Oceania
started from South-East Asia some 4000 to 5000yrs ago, and sailed there
on the craft that had been developed in South-East Asian waters.
The
fact is that sewn-plank craft are ubiquitous in the Pacific. One first
remark is that the most widespread design has the stitches - both
continuous or separate - showing outside the hull.
This may be an
indication that the concealing of the ties inside the planks was a
later development in South-East Asia (the distribution of frames
stitched to the skin, whether functional or vestigial, should also be
studied in the Pacific in this respect).
There are however some notable exceptions to the above mentioned
rule.
In the Fiji archipelago of Melanesia, and in the neighbouring
groups of Tonga and Samoa of Polynesia, boatbuilders tend to fasten the
planks of their boats by sewing them together through holes bored in
facing ledges carved out on the inner side of the plank or, exceptionally, into the seams (without a ledge).
Stitches are separate in the
latter designs, as in South-East Asia.
This is also the area where
a lashed-lug technique has been described (Haddon and Hornell, 1936-38,
:I, 191, 232, 263, 284, 339, 442; Paris, 1841, 117-121 and pl.121).
Closer to South-East Asian waters, the large outriggerless plankbuilt boats of the Solomon Islands (usually known as the ~), show
a very clear affinity with Eastern Indonesian lashed-lug modern boat
designs.
They could reach up to 15m in length and carry as many as 90
men.
Lugs were left protruding from the carved planks, to which solid
timber frames were lashed.
They differed from contemporary Indonesian
craft in that their planks were sewn together (not edge-dowelled). The
ties were made of separate lashings of fibre or creepers passed through
holes bored across the planks, the margins of which were first reduced
in thickness by being chamfered on both sides. These grooves along the
seams were then covered with a thick dressing of vegetable putty made
from the Parinarium nut (Haddon and Hornell, 1936-38, II, 81-113;
Hornell, 1946, 208-209). We thus have another example, together with
the 3rd century AD Pontian boat of the Malay Peninsula, of an intermediate design:
sewing of the planks, and frames lashed to lugs. On
an imaginary linear evolution line, the mon would stand somewhere
before the edge-dowelled and sewn Pontian boat, which would be followed
in turn by the fully edge-dowelled Butuan wreck.
How should these closer than usual similarities between Pacific
and South-East Asian techniques be explained?
Are they the result of
337
independent inventions after contact with the South-East Asian homeland
Or alternatively are they a proof of continuing relations
was lost?
with it?
Archaeologists have suggested on other grounds that the
Solomon Islands may have had trade contacts with Eastern Indonesia and
the Philippines during the Metal Age (i.e. some 2000 yrs ago; Bellwood,
1978, 269). Skipping the New Hebrides where no such designs are found,
the Fiji, Tonga and Samoa archipelagoes are clearly the next steps
after the Solomons on the way to Central Pacific. A closer scrutiny of
the variety of designs involved on this possible route falls out of the
scope of this paper, as would the comparison with other kinds of
evidence.
Let it only be suggested here that a detailed inquiry into
the fastening techniques of Melanesian and Polynesian canoes, and their
comparison with South-East Asian possible prototypes may well add new
elements to the history of man's settlement in the Pacific.
The problems involved when comparing South-East Asian sewn-plank
boats with those of the Indian Ocean are of a quite different nature,
owing to different historical developments, as well as to the lack of
comparable archaeological evidence.
Sophisticated sewing techniques
were well established in the western half of the Indian Ocean by the
mid-3rd millennium BC, as witnessed by the restoration of the Royal
Ship of Cheops (Lipke, 1984).
No more archaeological evidence is
available for Asian sewn-plank craft of the Indian Ocean:
not one
single non-European shipwreck has been reported so far in the whole
area.
Textual evidence, starting with the early 1st millennium AD
Peryplus of the Erythrean Sea, is far from lacking, but it never gives
enough details to allow for a proper identification of the fastening
technique:
all we know is that sewing was always the rule; that coir
was in general use; that frames and dowels were attested (Moreland
1939; the most up-to-date study is that of Lewis, 1973). Ethnographic
evidence, as far as I am aware, has sho~1 that, in modern boats at
least, sewing was always done in a continuous mode, with long threads
being driven through hole after h9le across the planks, always showing
on the outer side of the hull, with simple fibre battens pla.ced between
the ties and the joints (the East African mtepe was no exception:
the
outside threads were cut off after a peg had been driven from outside
into the holes to stop up the ties).
With the exception of the Royal
Ship of Cheops, which had all her lashings inside the hull - but which
is difficult, at this stage of research, to correlate with the rest of
the evidence - we thus appear to have a sewing tradition which is
substantially different from that of South-East Asia, at least in the
later stages of its development. The latter - again, seemingly, in its
post-'Pacific conquest' stages - favours stitches kept inside the
planks; they are always discontinuous; the battens have a complex
design, with bamboo laths inserted under the ties together, at times,
with wooden wedges.
Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, there
are no examples of the evolving of Indian Ocean sewn-plank craft into
lashed-lug designs.
Roughly at the time when the Royal Ship of Cheops was built, at
the other end of the Indian Ocean, the Austronesian speaking people of
South-East Asia were starting to sail into the Pacific, presumably in
sewn-plank boats.
The three millennia that follow, as far as Indian
Ocean and South-East Asian craft are concerned, remain totally undocumented, and there is no way one may risk an hypothesis to account for
this period.
Maritime exchange across the Bay of Bengal, with Indian
trade commodities being found in South-East Asia, appears to start some
338
time in the middle of the 1st millennium BC; this, at least, is what is
shown by archaeological evidence, but earlier contacts between the two
areas are most probable.
If the current theories on the peopling of
Madagascar are correct, Austronesian speaking groups would have sailed
across the Indian Ocean near the beginning of the 1st millennium AD.
All of this does indeed point towards early maritime contacts between
the two worlds.
Yet, whichever the presently undocumented genesis of
the two shipbuilding traditions, the fact remains that, in the early
years of the lst millennium AD, large sewn or lashed ships had been
developed in South-East Asian waters; the appearance of the clearly
indigenous lashed-lug design in 3rd and 4th century shipwrecks further
proves that an already long local evolution had taken place in the
area.
The present state of the art does not warrant additional
conclusions
regarding the relationship and the eventual
crossinfluences between the Indian Ocean and South-East Asian sewn-plank
craft traditions.
One last set of preliminary conclusions to this survey will deal
with the evolution of sewing and lashing techniques within South-East
Asian waters.
The transition from purely sewn to lashed-lug designs
(and ultimately to fully dowelled craft, as described by Manguin, 1980)
has obviously come gradually, in stages. This is, however, by no means
a linear process. A strictly chronological argument is a tricky factor
to use when one is dealing with data ranging over many thousand years:
the broad variety in development processes within South-East Asia does
afford opportunities to observe techniques elsewhere forgotten b~ing
used in modern times.
However, there is no reason to believe that
these have been kept unchanged for the past 2,000 yrs or more:
a
synchronic cross-section from the West to the East of South-East Asia
in the 19th/20th century, as was done in this paper, showed that
discrete components of the designs under concern could be found in a
variety of seemingly aleatory arrangements (thwarts lashed to lugs in
the flat-bottomed Luzon casco; ties showing outside the hull in an
otherwise sophisticated Hai-nan boat, etc.).
After comparing the Pacific and South-East Asian sewing designs,
and logically assuming that those in general use in the Pacific were
first used in the South-East Asian homeland, the obvious conclusion is
that continuous sewing, through the planks, has later evolved into
discontinuous stitches kept inside the seams of the planks.
It is
worth noting. here that a reverse process appears to have occured in
Northern Europe (Westerdahl, 1985, 50-51).
Two authors have argued to the effect that the development of
edge-dowelling was directly linked to the introduction of metal technology, on the basis of the absence of both metal and dowels. in the
Pacific (Horridge, 1982, 1, 57), or on that of the unfitness for dowelling of the conical holes obtained with stone tipped drills (Lewis,
1978, 93). I believe that this is not as clear-cut as it appears. To
compare modern screw augers to spoon-bit stone ones is not relevant, as
most if not all traditional metal tools would have been of the spoonbit variety, achieving the same result as the stone tool.
The
complexity of the work at hand cannot be invoked:
Many ethnic groups
of New Guinea did not use iron tools until a few decades ago and
ethnographers have shown that they were capable of producing sophisticated objects with stone tools; in the Solomons, boatbuilders of the
early 20th century preferred a pump drill tipped with a flake of
339
chalcedony to metal awls or augers (Haddon and Hornell, 1936-38, II,
82).
Stone gouges that may have been used for cutting dowel holes are
furthermore very common in Neolithic assemblages of South-East Asia.
Then edge-dowelling is not totally absent in the Pacific:
when
describing the large and extremely sophisticated double-canoes of the
Tuamotus in 1839, Admiral Paris made it clear that dowels were used
when fastening their sewn planks together (these canoes also had frames
inserted and stitched to their skin; Paris, 1841, 136; Haddon and
Hornell, 1936-38, I, 83). It could be argued that metal tools had by
then been adopted by local boatbuilders, but it is not likely that such
a change would have occured in half a century of intermittent contact
with Western sailors, and adopted on a large, complex and quickly
disappearing type of boat, in which you would normally expect dowels to
be used to afford structural strength.
None of these arguments are
very convincing and the question must remain open.
On the other hand,
it is obvious from the above evidence that metal technology - which
appeared in the west of Maritime South-East Asia in the second half of
the 2nd millennium BC (with iron coming into use about half a millennium later, around 700 BC) - was not necessarily followed by dowelling:
the Pontian boat, among others, shows a first attempt at that in the
3rd century AD only, and purely sewn craft are still in use in the 20th
century.
Sewn planks with fibre-caulking held in place by oversewn
battens have been associated elsewhere with early metal technologies
(Johnstone, 1980, 178).
Acknowledgements
This paper is a considerably expanded and modified version of a
preliminary draft read at the 2nd International Conference on Indian
Ocean Studies, held at Perth, Western Australia, in December 1984. I
am grateful to Dr. Sean McGrail for agreeing to publish it together
with the other papers of this Symposium, for which it was originally
planned.
I wish to thank Mr. Mochtar bin Abu Bakar, Curator of· the Pahang
Museum, for bringing to my attention the new whereabouts of the Pontian
boat remains and for kindly authorising me to carry out research work
on the premises.
I am also grateful to Dr. A.E. Evangelista, Director
of the Philippines National Museum, for allowing me to study the Butuan
shipwrecks kept in Manila and on the site.
The Pitt-Rivers Museum of
Oxford and the Musee de la Marine in Paris should finally be thanked
for allowing me to reproduce some of their pictures.
Note
1.
W.H. Scott, personal communication.
I am very grateful to W.H.
Scott for sending me these references from early Spanish sources
and from H. Otley Beyer's collection (now kept in the manuscript
department of the National Library of Australia).
The first
description of the casco is from G. Chua, Barangayan building,
paper no. 14, in Beyer's Ibanag Ethnology, vol, I, 1919.
The
second is from C. Salvador on Dumagats of Kalamat Island and the
Province of Ambos Camarines, paper no. 25 in Beyer's Ethnology of
the Minor Christian Groups,
vol.III,
1919.
The 17th century
glosses of Tagalog words are from Pedro de San Buenaventura's
Vocabulario de la lengua Tagala (Pila, 1613).
340
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343