14. POTTERY, TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGY

​​​​Next to building a new community house, making a canoe was the biggest single task in Andamanese life. Andamanese canoes were barely seaworthy and hardly masterpieces of naval engineering. Their navigators were rightly terrified of drifting out of sight of land. The craft were very simple dug-outs, i.e. hollowed out tree trunks, very similar to the dug-out canoes familiar from European prehistory. Sails were unknown; the only power was supplied by paddling or poling (staken). A sophistication were the outriggers that stabilized the craft somewhat. Primitive though the technology was, there was still room for a qualitative gradient between south and north: the Onge canoes were the best while those of the Greater Andamanese were the worst. The Onge were also the most adventurous navigators, frequently traveling between Little Andaman and the southern tip of Great Andaman. Little Andaman is flat and invisible from the southern tip of Great Andaman while the cliffs of Rutland Island can be seen from Little Andaman. There are a number of conveniently placed small islands as stepping stones that reduced the longest distance that had to be crossed at a time to little more than 20 km (13 miles) so that the Onge accomplishment was not quite as great as might at first glance appear. The Onge raids on Car Nicobar are likely to be just stories: no Onge canoe could have safely, let alone regularly, made the 150 km (92 mile) crossing without any stepping stone islands on the way, and come back loaded down with loot.

Any large wave - and there are many of them in the open Andaman sea - could swamp an Andamanese canoe at any time. When one was overturned and its crew thrown into the water, it was all regarded as good clean fun. The canoes were unsinkable and merely had to be bailed out before the journey could resume. Goods carried, if not secured with rope, could be lost in this way, however.

Canoes were made of hollowed-out tree trunks but fire does not seem to have been used in the laborious hollowing-out process. Cutting down a large tree and then hollowing it out was done with adzes and involved a large amount of hard work over a considerable period of time by Andamanese standards, especially if the adzes used in the process did not have iron blades. As soon as iron had become plentiful, larger trees became practical and with them larger canoes.

Selecting and cutting down a tree for a canoe required an experienced eye. Many types of softwood trees were suitable but the tree had to be cut so that it fell in the right direction. This meant that if it was not absolutely straight, the convex side had to come to lie downwards. The trunk had to be cut to the right length and branches removed; next it had to be roughly hollowed out, the bark stripped off and the two ends shaped. Following this, the inside had to be finely finished and the sides and bottom reduced to the right thickness. Caulking was traditionally done with bees wax. Except for the ends, the canoe was cut so that overall it retained the shape of the original tree. The Onge cut the ends square and slanting with a small platform at either end. Onge canoes and those of the Sentineli were the same on both ends with no distinction between bow and stern. The Sentineli also cut the ends squarely but vertically and with only the tiniest of platforms. The Great Andamanese canoes had rounded ends with a small platform over the stern for the navigator and a large one over the bow for the harpoonist.

As the next step in the lengthy process of making an Andamanese canoe, the dug-out was dragged to the nearest beach and tested briefly in the water before its outrigger was attached. All but the very largest Andamanese canoes had outriggers to prevent the vessel with its round keel from turning over. The float was a straight spar of a light wood and was attached to the canoe with between three and eight booms, depending on the size of the canoe.

Additional technical refinements were ballast stones and a stone on which a small smoldering fire could be kept during the journey, an anchor in the form of a larger stone tied to a long piece of rope, some Nautilus shells for bailing out, a bamboo pole and some paddles. On the platform overhanging the prow a few holes were cut to attach the anchor rope and other ropes. For decoration, as good-luck charm or as part of an obscure ritual, turtle skulls were often hung beneath the prow platform.

The traditional outrigger canoes could vary in size from 4-5 m (13-16 ft) for 3 persons up to 9-10 m (30-33 ft) for 10 persons. Very large canoes for 30-40 persons without outriggers were made only after 1858 when iron adzes made their construction possible. When fully laden such large craft tended to be more stable in rough weather without outriggers than the smaller canoes were with them. The large canoes were used for longer-distance travels up and down the islands. They played their part in bringing the Andamanese groups closer together but also helped in the dissolution of traditional Andamanese society by spreading infectious diseases. They were not maneuverable enough for fishing expeditions but were often brought along as "mother ships" on which to store the catches of the smaller boats.

Canoes were owned by the man who had chosen the tree from which it was made. Other men helped the owner who in return was obliged to help his helpers when each of them decided on a new canoe for himself. Women did not own or make canoes but they were responsible for decorating them and sometimes for helping to row them. The women painted simple pattern with red and white clay on the inside of the canoe, on the platforms and on the paddles. Such painting was not renewed once it had worn off. Like the canoes, paddles could be made by the men only but were painted by the women. They could vary in size and shape according to the whim of the maker.

In deep water canoes were paddled, in shallow water a man on the forward platform poled the craft along. The large canoes without outriggers had oars copied from the British boats seen at Port Blair. All crafts were steered with a paddle. Andamanese canoes were made of soft wood and so were prone to attack by marine pests and rot. For this reason, they were not left in the water when not in use. The speed with which an Andamanese canoe could move was much exaggerated before 1858. It was soon found that they did not even reach half the speed of the ordinary British gigs then used.

The many myths and legends surrounding Andamanese canoes as well as their archaic construction speak for a considerable age of these vessels. One legend has four people escaping in a vessel of unspecified design when their world was deluged. The Aka-Bea believed that their first outrigger canoe had been introduced immediately after this calamity. It is glaringly obvious that the Andamanese built ships of much lower technical sophistication than those of their nearest neighbors, specifically those of the Nicobarese and of the Moken in the Burmese Mergui archipelago. It is another indication of the basic Andamanese conservatism and possibly an indication of a certain retrograde development that a people who had lived for thousands of years in an archipelago surround by nothing but wind and sea should not even have copied the principle of sailing. They need not have had the idea themselves: sailing ships of many types must have called at or passed in full view of the islands for millennia. The Andamanese, somehow, did not catch on.



Canoes were made with adzes, a tool that had only one other function, to dig graves. It is yet another of the many hints at a forgotten Andamanese religion that we can only note without offering an interpretation. Adzes with wooden handles and stone blades have been part of the human tool box for as long as 35,000 years but they became widely used in Europe only around 8,000 years ago when they were in demand for clearing forests and the hollowing out of dug-out canoes. Knives were made of iron by preference but traditionally split bamboo was used for a sharp blade. Another sharp tool, used as a planing knife (Hobelmesser) or as spokeshave (Speichenhobel) was the unaltered curved boar's (Eber, Keiler) tusk (Hauer). All these could be sharpened on whetstones and none were used as weapons; they were just working tools.