Abstract
is generally reckoned that the maritime expertise of Pacific Islanders was very considerable. At the same time, the extent to which Pacific peoples have been able to participate with success in modern maritime activities like trade and fisheries has been limited, and at the large scale these activities remain in the hands of governments and foreign companies. In this paper I examine one aspect of maritime technology, canoe travel, on the atoll of Ontong Java, a Polynesian outlier north of the Solomon Islands.1 I discuss the importance of canoe travel in the pre-contact period, and examine the ways in which parts of this indigenous technology have survived on Ontong Java up to the present.
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