34FT. TOTARA CANOE

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 147, 18 March 1931, Page 7

34FT. TOTARA CANOE

Taranaki Bush Discovery TWO OTHERS IN MAKING I Dominion Special Service. New Plymouth, March 17. Mr. K. Anderson, of Aotuhia, situated 55 miles east of Stratford, while searching in the bush for totara timber for fencing posts, discovered three examples of primitive Maori workmanship in the form of canoes. One was completed and two others were in the course of construction. The completed canoe is still in good heart. It is 34 feet long, about 3 feet in beam and about 3 feet from keel to gunwale. It was situated in what was many years ago a clearing made by the Maoris, who inhabited the vicinity within remote but living memory. The canoe was made from a huge totara. Its interior was overgrown and filled with moss.

The clearing was overgrown with undergrowth as well as bigger totara and other trees that would have taken from forty to fifty years to reach their present size; . >

Two other totara trunks nearby were half hollowed out, but in these cases rot had set in and undergrowth had even penetrated the' sides of the embryo canoes. One of them had been burned badly by bush fires. The most interesting discovery, however, was a totara bowl lying upon several blocks, evidently placed there by the Maori workmen in order to keep the canoe from the ground, allow it to dry and to provide rests while the process of hollowing and shaping the canoe was proceeded with. From that totara bowl, felled by some of the last of Maoridom’s canoe-makers. Mr. Anderson will spilt timber for fencing posts to subdivide the section upon whicli he and his companions are engaged in late pioneering work.