While researching and listing canoes on my TUAMOTU web page, it occurred to me that I bought, many years ago, the large hull of a model canoe entirely plank-built. I wondered whether it might be of Tuamotu origin.

The Tuamotu archipelago is devoid of large trees, and it needed some prodigious ingenuity to build large canoes from short, narrow pieces of plank , the only material available at that time.

Tuamotu models are extremely rare; there are some at the Musee de la Marine in Paris, at the New Zealand Museum Te Papa Tongarewa and at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. I doubted therefore that this very old hull of mine, hardly holding together with original sennit could be a Tuamotu canoe.

I was intrigued; I wanted to know more. The hull of that canoe was hidden behind and on top of boxes full of household items. When I reached it, I immediately realized that it was not Tuamotu. The hull was covered with dust, but I could clearly make out that the hull was not stitched together by a multitude of small planks imitating those found on a "Pahi", but composed of several rows of planks, some as long as the hull itself.

Among Polynesian canoes, only those made in Tuamotu, Tahiti, Easter Island, the Southern Islands and Samoa were plank-built.

The hull of my model was V-shaped, typical of Micronesian canoes, and plank-built, which led to the conclusion that the hull on that model was Gilbertese, now Kiribati.