Amongst the many types of canoes built across Oceania, one particular type stands out: the Samoan canoe

The master shipwrights of Samoa built the most beautiful canoe models, often imitated and only equaled by the Fijian carpenters. The lines of those vessels are extremely fine and perfect, like some elongated equal triangle starting amidship towards the bow and the stern.

Other characteristics make the Samoan canoe exceptional, and I am thinking here in particular of the VA’A ALO fishing canoe of which I made a scale model some years ago.

The Va'a alo, like the SOATAU, the AMATASI , the double-hulled VA’A TELE, and KALIA were all plank-built, meaning that planks were used to create the hull of the vessel.

The canoes of Tuamotu, Easter Island, Tahiti in Polynesia, Kiribati and Nauru in Micronesia, and the Solomon Islands in Melanesia are built from assembled wooden pieces. But their method of assembly is quite primitive; it is the method of lashing "through and through."

The Samoan carpenters perfected this technique, and it is likely they who developed the method of internal ligatures, or invisible lashings. I have used that procedure on the va'a alo model