linguistic:paraphrasing, stylistic:tone, structural:expansion
Crab claw rigs

Austronesian invention of catamarans, outriggers, and the bi-sparred triangular crab claw sails enabled their ships to sail for vast distances in open ocean. It led to the Austronesian Expansion. From Taiwan, they rapidly settled the islands of Maritime Southeast Asia, then later sailed further onwards to Micronesia, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar, eventually settling a territory spanning half the globe.

The proto- Austronesian words for sail, lay(r), and some other rigging parts date to about 3000 BCE when this group began their Pacific expansion. Austronesian rigs are distinctive in that they have spars supporting both the upper and lower edges of the sails (and sometimes in between). The sails were also made from salt-resistant woven leaves, usually from pandan plants.

Crab claw sails used with single-outrigger ships in Micronesia, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar were intrinsically unstable when tacking leeward. To deal with this, Austronesians in these regions developed the shunting technique in sailing, in conjunction with uniquely reversible single-outriggers. In the rest of Austronesia, crab claw sails were mainly for double-outrigger (trimarans) and double-hulled (catamarans) boats, which remained stable even leeward.

In western Island Southeast Asia, later square sails also evolved from the crab claw sail, the tanja and the junk rig, both of which retained the Austronesian characteristic of having more than one spar supporting the sail.