Sails on a paddled hull
A canoe sets out as a paddled boat, but adding a sail to a narrow hull is an old solution wherever people travelled by water and wind was available. The challenge is stability: a long, slim hull heels easily under sail, and it does not resist sideways drift. Traditional builders solved this in different ways, the most important being the outrigger float and the double hull. This article is about those traditional canoes, as opposed to the recreational decked canoes of Victorian Britain and North America, covered in the evolution of the sailing canoe.
The Pacific
The Pacific is where sailing canoes were developed furthest. Austronesian-speaking peoples spread across the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific over several thousand years, and their ability to cross long distances relied on canoes with sails. Archaeology and linguistics suggest outrigger canoes with sails were in use well before European contact, though the earliest forms and dates are debated because wooden boats rarely survive.
Common types included single-outrigger canoes, with a float on one side, and double canoes, in which two hulls were joined by a platform. The latter could carry large crews, stores and, on migrations, plants and animals. Sails often took the form known as a crab-claw sail, a triangular sail held between two curved spars, and some regions used other shapes, such as a rectangular mat sail. Sails were woven from plant fibres such as pandanus. The account of Polynesian voyaging describes how navigators sailed such craft across wide stretches of ocean, and the same craft are discussed from a different angle in the history of the outrigger canoe.
In Micronesia, the flying proa is a canoe that sails with the outrigger to windward and can reverse direction by changing ends, rather than turning round. Such craft were famed for speed in descriptions by European visitors. In 1769 and later, observers on Captain Cook’s expeditions recorded detailed impressions of Pacific vessels, as the Cook Pacific voyages record.
Africa and the Indian Ocean
Along the East African coast and in the Indian Ocean, outrigger canoes with sails have long been used for fishing and local transport. Small craft of this type are still seen around Zanzibar, Tanzania and Madagascar, where Austronesian influence reached from Southeast Asia in the first millennium CE, a link which historians and linguists have studied. Larger sewn-plank vessels, such as the mtepe of the Swahili coast, were also built, and these are not canoes in the strict sense. Wider context for these seas is given in the account of monsoon trade winds.
On West Africa’s Atlantic coast, large dugout canoes were used by coastal peoples for fishing, trade and transport, and European travellers from the fifteenth century onward described them. Most were paddled, and the evidence for the use of sails varies from place to place. Some writers say sails were used on lagoons and rivers, but it is safer to say that records are patchy. The broader seafaring tradition of the continent is discussed in the article on African coastal seafaring.
The Americas
When Europeans arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, they met peoples who travelled between islands in large dugout canoes, which gave the word canoe to European languages. Those craft were primarily paddled. On his fourth voyage in 1502, Columbus’s party encountered a large trading canoe off the coast of what is now Honduras, with cargo and a crew of paddlers, usually identified as Maya. Sails on canoes in the Caribbean after European contact are described by some sources, and there is a debate among historians as to how far sails were used before contact. Cautious accounts leave this open.
Elsewhere in the Americas, the Chumash of California built plank-built canoes called tomols, and Pacific Northwest peoples built large dugout canoes. Some northwest canoes were reported to use sails after European contact, which may have been adopted from visiting ships. On the Pacific coast of South America, sail-powered balsa rafts are recorded, but those are rafts, not canoes.
Why the evidence is uneven
Part of the difficulty is that wood and fibre decay, so there is little physical evidence for early boats. Historians rely on early European accounts, which can be inaccurate, as well as on oral tradition, linguistics and a few archaeological finds. For the Pacific and Indian Ocean the evidence is relatively strong; for parts of the Americas and Africa it is thinner. This uneven record explains why many statements about “the first sailing canoe” cannot be supported.
Legacy
Traditional sailing canoes did not vanish. They are still built and sailed in many places, and revival projects have sought to rebuild voyaging canoes using traditional methods, a kind of experimental archaeology that tests ideas about the past. The design principles, a light hull with a float or second hull, also underlie modern twin-hull craft and the broader family of multihulls, a subject the article on the catamaran addresses elsewhere.