Berlin’s stolen South Pacific canoe

Book Review: The Magnificent Boat

German Reich’s Pacific colonial activities in Sāmoa and German New Guinea have of late been sanitised; it wasn’t so bad really, just a bit of confusion but better than the rule of others. An ornate voyaging canoe and a Sāmoan war canoe, subjects of a stark book, remind one that German imperialism in the Pacific, as elsewhere, was brutal.  

Historian and journalist Götz Aly’s The Magnificent Boat, appearing in English this year, will horrify a Pacific readership, not least because Germany today flaunts the injustice in its capital, Berlin. 

Aly’s focus is on Berlin’s former royal palace, the Humboldt Forum, which offers as a premier attraction, an ornately decorated 15-metre boat from Luf in Papua New Guinea’s Bismarck Sea.

‘The boat is 15 metres long, was constructed without a single nail, and is decorated with marvellous carvings and paintings. It was built for the high seas and is capable of transporting fifty people,’ Aly writes. It was taken in deeply dubious circumstances by Max Thiel, a German trader, in 1902 after two decades of German military slaughter of its people. 

Max Thiel’s picture of the Luf boat

Around 1850 there were about 400 people on Luf. In December 1882 German warships Carola and Hyena massacred most of them to teach them a lesson not to resist colonial rule. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (who is honoured in the name of the sea around the island) personally ordered the ‘punitive expedition’ and demanded for years after a scorched earth approach to its people.