Cook Islands set features Polynesian canoes

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33455, 9 February 1974, Page 10

Cook Islands set features Polynesian canoes

<By

KENNETH ANTHONY)

Modern minds marvel at the amazing voyages carried out by the great explorers of the past who ventured into unknown seas in tiny sailing vessels, Men like Vasco da Gama, Columbus, Magellan, Cabot, Tasman and Cook have a sure place in history-—and in the stamp album too

Bui. hundreds of years before Columbus sailed the Atlantic the great seafarers of the Pacific Ocean had expiored and inhabited all the islands of the vast Polynesian ''triangle”, ranging from Hawaii and Easter Island in the east, to New Zealand in she west. Each side of that '‘triangle” is more than 5000 miles long and it encloses an area larger than the whole of Africa, Appropriately enough the Cook Islands, named after perhaps the greatest of British explorers, have new commemorated the achievements of these ancient Polynesian navigators by issuing a set of seven stamps illustrating the various types of craft they used. Tainui, on the Uc stamp, was the name given to the largest. It is described as a double canoe, but "canoe” in its modern meaning does not convey the size of the twinhulled vessel with its two

huge sails, ft was more than 70ft long—not much smaller than Columbus’s Santa Maria. And it was in ships of this kind that the Maoris set out from the Cook Islands to discover and settle in New Zealand. These Polynesian migra-

tions took place over thousands of years. The height of activity is generally considered, to have occurred about the same time as the Viking explorations in Europe, but recently discoveries of elaborately decorated Polynesian pottery have been made in sand beneath hard

coral crusts, and these have been dated back to 1200 B.C. Most of the ships shown on the stamps can no longer be seen today. In fact some of the designs are taken from the drawings of an artist who accompanied Captain Cook on his voyages of discovery 200 years ago. But one type survives into the modern era. This is the vaka, a graceful double canoe which is still used in rhe Cook Islands for night fishing, and is clearly an ancestor of the catamaran, now widely used for pleasure sailing.