ABOVE: Alika Bumatay (left) and Zak Shimose lash the wae (spreader) of a 150-year-old outrigger waa (canoe) donated to the Norwich Museum in England by King David Kalakaua.
"Sir," he wrote, "His late Majesty King Kalakaua, of the Hawaiian Islands made me a present of a native canoe, some 18 feet in length with paddles and outriggers complete. ... If you will accept the boat I will have it cleaned and forwarded as soon as possible."
The Kalakaua canoe became part of the museum's collection but relegated to a warehouse, its existence scarcely known and seen in person by only a handful of people from Hawaii. One of them is Hilo kalai waa (canoe carver) Zak Shimose, a former apprentice of late master carver Ray Bumatay. He first heard about the Kalakaua canoe after his mentor visited the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC in 2018 to see the world's oldest documented Hawaiian canoe, carved from koa and hibiscus at least two centuries ago. It was a gift to the Smithsonian from Queen Kapiolani when she and then-Princess Liliuokalani made a diplomatic stop in DC in 1887 during their trip to Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in London. One of the Smithsonian's curators mentioned a "sister" canoe in England. That piqued Shimose's interest.
"Look at it in the context of the times," Shimose says. "It was less than five years prior to the overthrow. These gifts were given with the intention of making a statement: 'Hey, we're an independent, strong nation.'" Last summer Shimose, along with fellow carvers Alika Bumatay (Ray's son) and Paul Higgins, visited the Norfolk Collections Centre near Norwich to see the canoe. They were welcomed by museum staff and local dignitaries, including a representative of the Crown.
Even under the warehouse's fluorescent lights, the Kalakaua canoe, at least 150 years old, is handsome, says Shimose. Its smooth, dark koa hull is in good shape, devoid of major dings. Bumatay says that it had been carved with an adze and that its pepeiao (internal brackets) were chiseled out of the hull just as pre-contact canoes were. "The 'turtle deck' in the bow, i.e. forward of the raised lip, is the origin of the hurricane deck of our mail steamers," reads the museum's notes, nodding to a Polynesian design that British shipwrights adopted.
Bumatay greeted the canoe the same way his father had when he approached the Kapiolani canoe. "This is one of the happiest canoes I have met, and I say this because he's still serving his purpose," Bumatay says. "A lot of canoes are not serving the purpose they were carved for. Many of our kupuna [ancestor] canoes that were carved for fishing have been modified for the sport of paddling. I can see my dad smiling as soon as he would have seen the canoe." Bumatay noticed one of the wae (spreaders) was upside down and helped relash it. He showed the museum staff how to rig the iako (spars) and ama (outrigger float), and offered to carve a canoe for the museum as "a companion to keep him company till other people from Hawaii can aloha him," he says.
For a while the Kalakaua canoe rested on a rack directly under a birchbark canoe the museum acquired in 1893. During their visit the Hawaiian carvers videoconferenced with canoe carvers of the Wolastoqiyik Nation in New Brunswick, Canada, who confirmed that it was one of theirs. Shimose hopes to learn whether it might be one of three special canoes the Wolastoqiyik built in the 1820s. The first to be discovered, the Grandfather Akwiten canoe, representing the spirit of the grandfathers, was spotted in the rafters of a university in Galway, Ireland, in 2001 and eventually repatriated to New Brunswick. The whereabouts of the other two remain unknown; the Norwich canoe might be one of them.
It's extraordinary, Shimose believes, that the oldest surviving birchbark canoe (Grandfather Akwiten) and the oldest surviving koa canoe (the Kapiolani canoe) were built around the same time and that perhaps their lost siblings have been roommates for the past 130 years. "There's a purpose that the canoes have been calling out, and I think the endgame is with this Wolastoqiyik connection," Shimose says. "I think that's the final piece to this story."
