TAWI TAWI, Philippines -- On a tropical island miles from nowhere, Robert Hobman's dream is taking shape from a century-old tree chopped down in the jungle.
The British-born adventurer has watched local boatbuilders on the Moslem island of Tawi Tawi carve the hardwood tree into a replica of a ship he believes Southeast Asians used to migrate to Africa hundreds of years before Christ.
Seeking to unravel the mysteries of the migration, Hobman, four other adventurers and a Filipino navigator plan to set sail later this month on a 4,600-mile voyage from Tawi Tawi through the Indonesian Archipelago and across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar.
It is a bid, Hobman said, to prove what academics have not.
'I've spent a long time sailing in Southeast Asia with Southeast Asian people and sailing in their boats,' he said. 'They are the greatest sailors in the world. The first great ocean sailors.'
Legend has it that the ancient voyagers sailed outrigger canoes to Africa by one of three routes -- two of them crossing the Indian Ocean and the other following the Asian coastline around to the Arabian Sea. But little is known about the voyages or the vessels that made them.
For years, Hobman has dreamed of piecing together the few anthropological clues and written records that support his theory.
'It's a Southeast Asian migration that could have come from somewhere in this area,' the 43-year-old sailor said at the formal launching of the 59-foot craft on Tawi Tawi, an island 650 miles south of Manila.
Without the aid of navigational instruments, the crew will be guided by the sun and the stars, southern equatorial currents, the southeast monsoon and trade winds. The only modern equipment aboard will be cameras to film the journey, a life raft and radio beacon equipment to meet international maritime safety regulations.
From Tawi Tawi, they will weave through the islands of Indonesia to Bali, where an Australian film crew documenting the voyage plans to join them to film whaling off the island of Lomblen.
With the July monsoon winds, the adventurers plan to hitchhike on a breeze 3,600 miles across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar. The final leg of the journey is expected to take eight weeks.
The voyagers will use two rectangular sails to power the ship and will live on a diet of dried and smoked meat, fruit, vegetables and fresh fish, just as the ancient travelers did.
Hobman says the trip is designed to explore 'the technology of the oceanic world in prehistoric times. It's something that actually happened. All I'm doing is recreating it.
'The academics aren't quite sure of the type of craft that was used, but I am.'
Joining Hobman on the voyage are artist Chico Hansen, 54, and freelance photographer Don King, 23, both of Hawaii; Britons Sally Crook, 31, a nutritionist, and sailor Stephen Corrigan, and 60-year-old Filipino navigator Jose Florentino.
Named 'Sarimanok' after a legendary messenger bird from the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, the ship was built almost entirely of materials from Tawi Tawi and neighboring islands by a team of Moslem and Christian shipwrights.
Held together by wooden pegs and rope woven from the hair-like bark of cabo negro trees, the vessel is similar in design to outrigger canoes still used by fishermen in the Sulu Sea.
The shipwrights originally worked from sketches Hansen drew based on archeological discoveries from the 3rd to 7th centuries in Malaysia and the Philippines, eight bas-reliefs on the stone gallery walls of the 8th century Buddhist temple at Borobudur in central Java and designs recorded by European explorers of the Philippines and the Spice Islands.
One of the islands in the Sulu Archipelago, Tawi Tawi's population of 370,000 is about 99 percent Moslem. Its only communication link to the outside world is by radio.
Hobman and Hansen have lived most of the year on Tawi Tawi's west coast in a village of about 300 people called Languyan. From their thatched-roof house atop a grassy hill, they can see the southern bay where their ship is now berthed in preparation for the expedition.
