DRUA – Fiji’s incredible legacy of naval architectural excellence.

 Peter Nuttall        
Micronesian Center for Sustainable Transport,  

This article was published in the Fiji Sun a year ago since appearing on this blogsite.

Drua Fleet of Ovalau 1855 

Canoe Shed Tonga

I Vola Siga Vou – (credit Island Encounters Photography)

These truly are unprecedented times. Fiji, and its Pacific neighbours, are faced with two national disasters - the aftermath of Severe Tropical Cyclone Harold and the Covid19 pandemic. But a third, and possibly greatest threat, now looms large - a global economic depression likely of a magnitude unseen since the Great Depression. The effects of this will rock our vulnerable Pacific economies for the foreseeable future.

One of the few silver linings from the Great Depression was the renaissance in traditional canoe building that happened in maritime Fiji and especially the Lau group. The great drua fleets that were commonplace through central Oceania had largely been dismantled by the start of the 1900s, displaced by the new trading schooners and steam screw powered, and later diesel, ships of the European traders.

But as the global recession gripped the world following the 1929 Wall Street crash, there was simply no money in the islands of Fiji to buy new ships or the fuel needed to propel

them. Resilient islanders were forced back on their traditional resource base and so the last wave of construction of drua and camakau occurred. Borne out of simple necessity, this sad historical event meant that the knowledge of these incredible craft was kept alive a little longer.

In 2011 I was most fortunate to take a research team of Mataisau into the Southern Lau to record the fragments of cultural knowledge of drua heritage that still remained. For three weeks we went from one old drua building site to the next, to Kabara, Fulaga and Ogea. At each stop we would talanoa late into the night, hearing the stories of the great battleships and trading drua that were built from the vesi loa that grows only on these limestone islands. Over hundreds of years, large clans of Mataisau from Fiji, the Matitoga from Tonga and the Lemaki from Samoa were sent to the Lau and created the great ship building centre of the Pacific. From here drua were once exported far and wide.

The ships they built were remarkable; the fastest, highest preforming, double hulled vessels the world had seen. Early European explorers marveled at their speed and agility and the sheers size of the fleets. Whalers hunted these waters in fear of being overhauled and caught by these ships that simply dwarfed them in size and were capable of easily outrunning them at speeds up to 15 knots.

The largest recorded, Rusa i Vanua was 118 feet. When the Ra Marama was delivered from Fulaga to Ratu Cakabau in Bau in 1842, more than 50 drua came to see this new battleship – some travelling from Tonga and Uvea for the event.

In 2016 we launched i Vola Sigavou in Navua, a replica of the Ratu Finau in the Fiji Museum. We wanted to have a working drua on the water to train a next generation of kaiwai and keep this incredible legacy from the time when Fijians built the fastest ships afloat alive. We also hoped our young drua crew could build a sustainable tourism business and be employed doing what their ancestors did best. Sadly, the pandemic has squashed that dream. But with support from the US Embassy we are trying to think creatively about how we can continue this work online. On the Drua Experience Facebook page we are reaching out to all and any with knowledge of drua history and culture (or their cousins the kalia in Tonga and the ‘alia of Samoa). We want to use the time the virus has created positively, to build a living library of drua history and create online teaching tools to carry on the work we can no longer do on the water. So, kerekere Viti – any old pictures, stories, songs, information of any kind – please share with us so we can share with the next generation.