The Chumash Tomol
How the Chumash built their plank canoes. This excerpt uses the paragraph about how tomols were built and one sentence about the Brotherhood of the Tomol. It leaves out the rest of the page, which tells about modern tomol crossings.
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Hundreds of years ago, the island Chumash traveled these ancient waters. They went to hunt, fish, and trade. They built canoes called tomols. They used redwood trees that drifted down the coast. They cut the trees into planks. They fastened the planks together with animal sinews and sealed them with a tar-like substance called yop. Yop is a mix of pine pitch and asphaltum. Asphaltum occurs naturally in the Channel and along the coast. It comes from oil seeping into the water from below the earth’s surface. The tomol is still the oldest example of an ocean-going watercraft in North America.
The tomol is central to Chumash heritage. Members of the Brotherhood of the Tomol built and paddled it.