Banca
There's not a single Polynesian (or Melanesian, or Micronesian) nation that has the industrial capacity to produce a modern ship. But the outside world *there* saw the benefits of two hulls much sooner than *here*. Patrol craft and ferryboats alike avail themselves of the catamaran's many advantages.
The general term for multihulled ships is banca, from the Tagalog bangka, which *there* would be romanized as "bañca". Bornei-Filipinas seems the natural place for modern banca building to have originated. The standard Polynesian, Malay, and Micronesian term is "vaka" and its many cognates.
This ship ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSV-1_Joint_Venture ) would serve as a medium-sized fast-transport type. There's no real reason you can't go supertanker sized with a catamaran or trimaran design; the only thing is that they are more expensive than monohulls of the same length. But to get the same carrying capacity from a catamaran design, you're almost always looking at a shorter and wider hull.
