The Tomol Revival

In our most recent posts, which looked at the cultural background of the Chumash tomol and at tomol construction, both referred to replica boats – tomols that have been built since the end of "natural" indigenous use of this interesting sewn-plank canoe.

Tomol under construction by Fernando Librado, 1912 or 1913. (Click any image to enlarge.)

The first such replica was built in 1912 or 1913 under the direction of Fernando Librado, probably the last of the Chumash "Brotherhood of the Tomol" – the guild that built and used the boats. Librado, then 73 years old, built the boat at the request of John Peabody Harrington, an anthropologist who "discovered" (for the purposes of modern science) that the Chumash had not died out by the 1870s and were, in fact, still a living culture in the first decade of the 20th century. Recognizing the central role the tomol had played in Chumash culture prior to and well into the era of the Spanish missions, Harrington plied Librado with hours of questions about every aspect of tomol construction and usage, and had him build a full-size replica that is now in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. (See the museum's pages on Chumash life.)

Librado's replica was not correct in all respects -- it used commercially sawn lumber and its shape was not quite authentic -- but through its construction, Harrington was nevertheless able to capture much detail about the building process, and through his intensive questioning of Librado, he was able to tease out the differences and arrive at was is probably a very accurate depiction of the boat's original form and construction. Harrington continued to live among the Chumash so intensively that he became one of them and, after receiving a post with the federal Bureau of American Ethnology, he documented their culture in thousands of pages of hand-written notes, leaving virtually no aspect of Chumash life unrecorded.

Librado's tomol in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. (Photo from  blog Jack Elliott's Santa Barbara Adventure.)

In the 1970s there was a widespread reawakening of American Indian/First Peoples pride and culture, and in 1975, members of the Quabajai Chumash Indian Association built Helek, a tomol that took advantage of Harrington's notes and Librado's replica. (I've seen the word helek defined variously as hawk, falcon, and peregrine falcon.) This boat was launched in 1976, and it was campaigned on historic Chumash stomping grounds between San Miguel Island, Santa Rosa Island, and Santa Cruz Island in the Channel Islands group.

Plans for Helek, based on Harrington's description and Librado's replica. This is probably the most accurate depiction possible of a tomol.

Helek's maiden voyage.

Helek proved the be the first of several modern replicas. The Chumash Maritime Association was founded in 1996 and built the tomol 'Elye'wun (Swordfish) which, in 2001 crossed from the mainland to Santa Cruz Island: a 21-mile voyage taking 10 hours. Since then, channel crossings by the group have become a nearly annual event (the trip was cancelled in 2012 due to rough seas on the scheduled day).

'Elye'wun, built by the Chumash Maritime Association

A Google image search for "Chumash tomol" turns up photos of several additional replicas, although details on most of these have proven elusive. Some of them are clearly more authentic than others, and the quality of workmanship varies widely. Nonetheless, it appears that tomol construction is no longer in danger of becoming a lost art, and that it is being practiced by cultural organizations and individuals as a means of preserving both Chumash heritage and native skills.

I invite readers to provide information and photos about specific tomol projects. We'd love to learn and show more. Thanks!

Tomol Construction

A Chumash tomol. Painting by Robert Thomas. Click any image to enlarge.

In our previous post, we looked at social and economic aspects of the California Chumash planked canoe or tomol. Now let's see how they were built.

The primary construction materials were softwood for planking, asphaltum (i.e., bitumen) and pine pitch for sealing, and red milkweed for caulking and sewing. Redwood was the preferred wood, because of its light weight, durability, rot resistance, and ease of working. Redwood is not native to the Santa Barbara region where the Chumash lived, but a fair amount turned up as driftwood, primarily on the shores on the Channel Islands. Far less redwood driftwood was available on the mainland on the other side of the Santa Barbara channel. On the other hand, bitumen was easily mined on the mainland from exposed coastal cliff faces, so most tomols were built on the islands with bitumen imported from the mainland. But because of the economic importance of the tomol, they were built wherever possible, including on the mainland, and if redwood was unavailable, other softwoods were used.

Tree trunks were split into planks with wedges made from whalebone. The quality of the planking material was of such concern that a log might only yield a few planks acceptably free of knots, cracks and bad grain. After being split, planks were further worked to consistent thickness with axes and adzes made of stone or shell, then smoothed with sharkskin "sandpaper."

The tomol was built right side up. The bottom plank was somewhat dished, but it was not thick enough to constitute a "dugout" base: in other words, the tomol was a true plank-built boat, not an extended dugout. The bottom plank was set on a V-shaped framework that established the angle of the sides. (It's not clear to me from the available materials whether this was a single building form located amidships, or a series of connected forms -- i.e., a building frame -- that determined the shape at several stations.)

Each strake consisted of several short planks which were beveled at the ends to make lap joints. The strake-to-strake joints were butted and had caulking bevels, like standard carvel planking. The garboards, which were set on top of the bottom plank, were beveled to establish the proper angle for the sides.

Fitting the planks was probably the most difficult and time-consuming task in tomol construction. A complex series of lines was strung as guides to each plank's shape. On occasion, it was possible to get out a plank with the proper curves from a suitably curved piece of timber; at other times, a plank might be hewn to the required curved shape. Most planks, however, had to be sprung in place. To soften them, they were placed in clay-lined, water-filled pit, and hot rocks were added to boil the water. After the planks had soaked for some hours, they were removed and quickly bent and twisted to shape on the boat. They were bedded in yop -- a mixture of bitumen and pitch pine.

Pairs of holes were bored in adjacent planks with stone drills, and grooves cut between the holes. Waxed cordage made of red milkweed fiber was passed through the holes: each stitch consisted of three turns, followed by two knots. (Cordage was made by women; men performed all other tasks associated with construction.) All stitches were separate. The ties were recessed into the surface of the plank, and so were protected from abrasion. Plank laps were stitched in a similar manner. More milkweed fiber was forced into the planking bevels. All plank joints and tie-holes were sealed with more yop.

A tomol built in 1912 or 1913 for anthropologist John Peabody Harrington by Fernando Librado, the last Chumash to have worked with the old "Brotherhood of the Tomol" boatbuilders guild.

Most tomols had six strakes. A single thwart was placed amidships, sandwiched between the fifth and sixth (gunwale) strakes. This was the only internal strengthening member, and it was never used as a seat. The first five strakes were apparently beveled to meet at the bow and stern (where they were stitched together): the gunwale strakes stopped just short of one another, leaving a V-shaped gap at the ends through which fishing or harpoon lines could run. Half-round "ears" were sewn atop the ends of the gunwale strakes, raising the height of the V. While claims are made that these served as washboards, they appear too small to have been functional: I believe they were primarily decorative. A rope was passed around the both ends, just inboard of the ears, to keep the uppermost strakes from spreading.

After planking was complete, internal stem- and sternposts were added. These were triangular in cross-section and extended from the bottom plank to the top of the fifth strake, and were fastened with yop and stitches.

Excess yop was then scraped off and the wood was sanded again and sealed with pine pitch. Red ochre was added to the pitch for color. Using a raccoon-tail brush, all stitches were painted black. The ears were often decorated with shell inlays in geometric patterns, and occasionally crushed abalone shell was dusted onto the pine pitch sealant while it was still tacky: this made the whole boat sparkle in the sunlight.

Helek, a replica tomol (26.5' LOA) built in 1976.

Construction of a tomol took two to six months for seven workers– a really significant outlay of labor and resources for a hunter-gatherer society. The boats were highly valued and received daily maintenance. Although they leaked badly and required almost constant bailing, they were seaworthy and well-suited to the needs of their builders. According to a Spanish sea captain's report in 1602:

"A canoe came out to us with two Indian fishermen, who had a great quantity of fish, rowing so swiftly that they seemed to fly.... After they had gone five Indians came out in another canoe, so well constructed and built that since Noah's Ark a finer and lighter vessel with timbers better made has not been seen."

After the Spanish settled the Santa Barbara region, Chumash boatbuilders produced tomols for the Spanish missions, which relied on them for communications and trade. The design of the tomol did not change, but the Spanish made sawn lumber and steel tools available, and this must have greatly telescoped the building process. 

A tomol replica: does anyone know where this is and who built it?

MAIN SOURCES: 
Jeanne E. Arnold, "Credit Where Credit is Due: The History of the Chumash Oceangoing Plank Canoe," American Antiquity, 72(2), 2007, pp. 196-209
Dee Travis Hudson, "Chumash Canoes of Mission Santa Barbara: the Revolt of 1824," Journal of California Anthropology, 1976
Brian Fagan, "The Chumash," in Time Detectives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995

The Chumash and the Tomol

A tomol replica built in 1976. Source: Chumash Maritime Organization. (Click any image to enlarge.)

The Chumash were a North American maritime culture, originally based on the mainland and Channel Islands on both sides of the Santa Barbara Channel in California. (I use the past tense in describing the culture as maritime for, while many Chumash people still remain in the area, their culture is no longer defined by maritime activities.) The area is particularly rich in marine resources, and the Chumash used at least three kinds of boats to exploit them.

Probably the first to appear was the tule reed "balsa," a raft of bundled reeds. It seems likely that tule balsas provided the means by which the islands were settled some 12,000 years ago, long before Chumash culture arose. Bundle boats are among the simplest of all watercraft to produce, and the main building materials were readily available in large quantities on the mainland shores of the Santa Barbara Channel, and in smaller amounts on the islands. In addition to large beds of reeds, naturally-occurring tar, in the form of asphaltum, is found in the area, and the Chumash used this to coat the reed bundles and increase their water resistance.

Even with a tar coating, tule reeds are a short-lived commodity, so hard evidence for the use of such craft so long ago is hard to come by. But the early occupation of the islands, and evidence of cross-channel trade that followed it but predates the probable development of other boat types, indicate that some sort of watercraft was in regular use, as do excavations of dwelling sites that indicate that the Chumash diet included marine animals that would have been difficult to obtain without the use of a boat.

Tule reed balsas were still in use at the beginning of the historic era (around the middle of the 16th century AD), when the Spanish first explored and later colonized the area. They were about 2.5 meters LOA and capable of carrying two or three people. They were used primarily for nearshore and coastal fishing and transport, and occasionally for cross-channel crossings. The Chumash also had dugout canoes, but confined them to nearshore and coastal use.

The boat for which the Chumash are best known was a large and highly capable sewn-plank canoe called a tomol. The tomol has been called "the single most important, valuable property in the Chumash economy" and "one of the most sophisticated technological innovations in precolonial North America," and described as "(possibly) the most sophisticated and laborious-to-build large watercraft of the New World," requiring costly materials and some 500 man-days of skilled labor to construct (All three quotations: Arnold, 2007).

As an unusually expensive construction, it is not surprising that the tomol played a central role in Chumash culture. Its development around 500 AD gave rise to the culture's central economic activities (fishing for large, powerful fish species, and trade), and defined important aspects of cultural hierarchy, including the creation of economic elites and the centralization of power in chiefdoms.

Lines for the replica tomol shown above, based on a boat built in 1912 by an old Chumash master builder. The replica boat was 26.5 feet LOA.

Tomols ranged from 3.7 to 9 meters LOA, with most between 6 and 7 meters. They were double-ended, with flat bottoms and lightly-curved sides that sloped sharply outward. Those of the most common size could carry two tons of cargo or 12 passengers, although far more passengers could be carried in a pinch. During the Chumash revolt in 1824, two tomols carried 50 adults and children, including crew, cross-channel from Mission Santa Barbara to escape from Spanish forces.

Crews ranged from three to six men including a man assigned to bailing, for the tomol leaked constantly. Paddlers knelt on grass mats in the bottom, using double-bladed paddles with very long shafts and small, gourd-shaped blades.

Tomols were launched from open beaches. They were light, and were launched by being lifted and placed in water deep enough to float them before they were loaded. One man remained in the water to help hold the boat bow-on to waves and give the boat a good shove to get it started.

Paddle strokes were coordinated among the crew. It's reported that a good crew could paddle all day, repeating this song over and over:

The canoe / Courage! / You have the power to succeed in reaching the other side, so that you may get where you want to go . . .

All common fishing methods were conducted from the tomol: hook and line (using hooks made of shell), netting, trapping, harpooning, and collecting by hand. Large, aggressive species, including swordfish, marlin, tuna, shark and giant sea bass were caught, as were anchovy, abalone, and sea mammals.

The tomol made possible regular cross-channel trade in large, heavy, bulky items and nonessentials. Mainland exports to the islands included stone mortars and vessels, stone tool cores, bundles of milkweed fiber (used for binding, including stitching the tomol's planks), seeds, acorns, deer, bows and arrows, and large chunks of asphaltum. Reverse trade consisted mainly of finished products of stone or bone, baskets, and otter pelts.

Considerable non-trade travel also occurred, probably for social, matrimonial and ceremonial purposes, the last of which might include the movement of an entire village. Fares were sometimes paid with shell bead money.

Tomol construction was controlled by a guild and supervised by a master builder, known as the altomolich, who directed a building crew of six in a range of skilled tasks, including getting out and fitting planks, fastening, caulking, and decorating. In control of such a critical economic activity, the altomolich was of high status and well compensated. Only chiefs and altomolichs could afford to own tomols, and sometimes the two roles were held by a single individual.

Stay tuned. We'll continue to look at the tomol in future posts.

UPDATE, 2 May, 2014: Reader Yoram Meroz has pointed out his recent paper on the indigenous Chumash source of tomol technology. It convincingly refutes the theory that the tomol was introduced from Polynesia.

MAIN SOURCES: 
Jeanne E. Arnold, "Credit Where Credit is Due: The History of the Chumash Oceangoing Plank Canoe," American Antiquity, 72(2), 2007, pp. 196-209
Dee Travis Hudson, "Chumash Canoes of Mission Santa Barbara: the Revolt of 1824," Journal of California Anthropology, 1976
Brian Fagan, "The Chumash," in Time Detectives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995