Wraecca / Vaka
Anthropologist Hal Rhoades recently visited Indigenous colleagues with deep seafaring histories in the Solomon Islands. He took copies of The Seafarer with him as gifts, sharing its thousand-year-old vision of exile on the whale-road with people for whom the ocean speaks of belonging rather than isolation.
my mood turns with the maul,
escapes, a moment, its locker of bones
to seek a threshold to the whale-world
Between zingy bites of pineapple and papaya, Captain Luke tells how, as a boy, he would paddle his small canoe out beyond the breakers crashing over the reef of his small island and call tiger sharks in the deep ocean using a coconut rattle. The memory of being on the ocean in conversation with one of its greatest and most charismatic denizens, brings a wide, sharp smile to his face.
Now in his 50s, Luke is bright-eyed, kind, generally quiet. His memory has been turned toward childhood by the small book I have just given him: The Seafarer, an Anglo-Saxon poem first written down sometime in the 10th century and newly interpreted by poet Matthew Hollis. Like a shark circling a strangely noisy little canoe, our conversation returns time and again to one of The Seafarer’s central themes: wraecca, an Old English word meaning exile, wanderer, wretch. In the poem, frost-bound, cold-gripped, towering seas are the outer signs of the Seafarer’s own internal, wretched exile from the agrarian, land-based Anglo-Saxon society they hailed from. In their world, to be sent to sea was to be forsaken. The poem reads as the Seafarer’s soulful attempt to find consolation in this sorry state.
Captain Luke comes from a very different society. His home island, Taumako, lies in the far east of the Solomon Islands, where his Polynesian ancestors arrived by canoe some 3,200 years ago. He calls it the “cross-roads of the ocean”. Tides and swells seem to encourage any ocean-going, wind-guided vessels travelling up or down the chain of Melanesian-Polynesian atolls to chart a course via Taumako. The island’s name encodes and communicates this convivial centrality. Tau: arriving, mako: dancing.
“The ocean is one of our many relations,” says Luke. When a child is born on Taumako a ceremony is held by the family during which the newborn’s umbilical cord is given to the ocean. What makes him feel wretched is not a fear of exile to the ocean, but from it.
The reasons for The Seafarer’s exile to the (meta)physical ocean are never explained, but the oceanic setting of their struggles makes sense and would have made compelling subject matter for denizens of agrarian societies. The majority would never have gone to sea. Those who did would largely have used the salty, encircling waters of our islands for perfunctory transit, trade and fishing, rather than identifying with ocean voyaging as a central feature of cultural identity. By and large, sea was a state in between lands, a nowhere place to be traversed and left behind.
At the time The Seafarer was written down the Anglo-Saxons were nearing the completion of the gradual process of Christianisation. In the second half of the poem the poet (and possibly their later monastic transcriber/s) foreshadows the idea of an icy limbo that would be formalised in Catholic doctrine of the later medieval period. They draw a clear equivalency between being banished to the ocean and a spiritual purgatory, cross-hatching Pagan and Christian ideas about hell as a place of cold and loss, from which souls might be saved and brought into the bright feast-hall, or a cloudless, strife-free heaven. In doing so they also, albeit at some historical and cultural distance, begin to articulate some of the deep root metaphors and concepts that have driven the exile of the Taumakans and other deep sea voyaging peoples from the ocean in more recent times.
The conditions of emptiness/fullness, damnation/salvation that The Seafarer explores are core components of the legal fiction of terra nullius (nobody’s land) used by colonial powers to expropriate the traditional land-based territories of indigenous peoples around the planet. ‘New’ lands were approached and conceptualised much as The Seafarer describes the sea: an untamed wilderness empty of ‘civilised’ human endeavours. When their presence was acknowledged at all, the indigenous inhabitants of these places were often categorised as a part of the ‘primeval’ wilderness. As de facto Pagan heathens, their only hope for salvation lay in being put to work in the service of the colonial venture, forced conversion and assimilation.
These logics also have their watery equivalent in colonial history: aqua nullius (nobody’s waters). In the Pacific, as elsewhere, colonial powers including the British and Dutch sought to restrict the movements of ocean voyaging peoples and to suppress the knowledge and traditions – from canoe construction to navigational systems – that enabled them to effectively manage and traverse coastal areas and the deep ocean. The legacy of these colonial policies remains with us today. Deep-sea mining companies, large fishing fleets and other industries continue to exploit the great blue spaces colonialism rendered “empty”, but which ocean-going indigenous peoples have travelled, fished and managed since time immemorial.
These legacies are also evident in the breakdown of the intergenerational transmission of seafaring knowledge on Taumako. Today the majority of the island’s youth go away to boarding school when they are 11. If their parents can afford it, they come back on a ferry for holidays. If they can’t, they may only return once they are 18. The years in which these young people would have learned Taumakan kastom (customary ways of living and being) are now spent away from the island. As a result, knowledge and skills that have lasted for more than 150 generations and the island’s continuing ecological health are hanging by a thread.
Luke and his wife Betty are doing all they can to reverse these trends and rekindle key elements of youth education for Taumakans in the spaces and times available to them. At the very heart of their work is the revitalisation of the Vaka, or ocean-going canoe, and the skills and knowledge needed to build practical water-going craft; potent symbols of oceanic belonging and living embodiments of the continuity of land and water.
TePuke – large, claw-sailed, deep ocean voyaging canoes – have over 100 named parts, all of which would have been sourced entirely from Taumako’s reefs, intertidal zones, beaches, wetlands, forests, and mountains. Being able to build a vaka requires Taumakans to take care of the many different species and ecotypes on their island home.
Soon Taumako will be ready to launch a new vaka. As an elder and the grandson of a great voyager, Luke will take the young people who helped to build it out onto the ocean. There they will stay for three days and nights observing the stars, sensing changes in the wind, feeling the presence of far-off islands in the swell of the ocean against their cool, moon-bathed skin.
Here in the isles whose shores The Seafarer looked upon so many centuries ago, historic reversals that re-cast our seas as places of belonging and sentience are also underway. Emma Critchley’s recent film, Soundings, makes the case through narrative, sound and dance. Seascape restoration is underway from the mouth of the Humber to the Solent strait. Every winter storm and rising tide reminds us, demands respect, brings The Seafarer’s parting words back to us across the centuries:
We must fix our compass and keep it fixed,
live within trust, moderate our ways.
Lines from The Seafarer, a new translation by Matthew Hollis with original photographs by Norman McBeath, published by Hazel Press.
Emma Critchley’s immersive video installation, Soundings, is on show at Tate St Ives until 5 October 2025, when it moves to Quay Arts on the Isle of Wight until 19 December 2025.
Hal is donating his author fee for this article to Luke and Betty’s community organisation, The Holau Vaka Taumako Association.
Words and photographs copyright © Hal Rhoades 2025.
Lines from The Seafarer copyright © Matthew Hollis 2025.
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