Gladwin, the anthropologist, wrote a wonderful description of the way voyaging by this method feels. “Picture yourself,” he suggested, “on a Puluwat canoe at night.”
The weather is clear, the stars are out, but no land is in sight. The canoe is a familiar little world. Men sit about, talk, perhaps move around a little within their microcosm. On either side of the canoe water streams past, a line of turbulence and bubbles merging into a wake and disappearing in the darkness. Overhead there are stars, immovable, immutable. They swing in their paths across and out of the sky but invariably come up again in the same places. You may travel for days on the canoe but the stars will not go away or change their position aside from their nightly trajectories from horizon to horizon. Hours go by, miles of water have flowed past. Yet the canoe is still underneath and the stars still above. Back along the wake, however, the island you left falls farther and farther behind, while the one toward which you are heading is hopefully drawing closer. You can see neither of them, but you know this is happening. You know too that there are islands on either side of you, some near, some far, some ahead, some behind. Everything passes by the little canoe—everything except the stars by night and the sun in the day.
This image of a canoe stationary on the great circle of the sea, while the ocean and all its islands slide past, is reminiscent of Polynesian tales in which islands float away or wander, or appear and disappear in certain places or at certain times of day, or have to be caught and tethered to the bottom of the sea. Islands in these stories are less fixed or stable than one might have expected; they are more like clouds or vapor, which from a distance they resemble. In some stories they are said to hover on the horizon and to be driven through the night sky by wind.
The last piece of the Oceanic navigational puzzle is the set of landfinding techniques, sometimes referred to as “expanding the target.” Birds, as one of Lewis’s instructors explained, “are the navigator’s very best friends.” If a low island can be seen at about ten miles, the range of terns and noddies—land birds that return to their islands at night—is twice that, while boobies, which fly “low and arrow-straight for the horizon” at dusk, are known to travel as many as fifty miles from land. The navigator Hipour, Gladwin reported, described the behavior of these birds in “downright affectionate” terms. He explained how, as the day comes to an end and the birds begin heading for home, “a booby which comes upon a sailing canoe will turn and start circling over it. He acts as though he wants to land on it, but does not. At last when the sky is almost dark he finally, perhaps reluctantly, leaves the canoe and heads straight for home.” The bird, said Hipour, shows the navigator the way, attracting even the most inattentive sailor by his antics and leading him on a course that is “unerringly true.”
In addition to bird lore, there is cloud lore: the way clouds will move slowly over an island “as if stuck” and then speed up once they are past it; or the “brightness” of clouds over an island as compared with those over the sea; or the way a land cloud will lie, at first, like other clouds on the horizon but, if you watch long enough, will appear to hover or keep re-forming while other clouds dissipate or move on. One navigator told Lewis that in calm weather you can sometimes see two clouds “like a pair of eyebrows” low on the horizon, or a tall V-shaped cloud, both of which will point to land. One of the best-known bits of cloud lore has to do with color: clouds over land or reef are said to have a pinkish tinge, while those over a lagoon are green. On a voyage with the Gilbertese navigator Iotiebata, Lewis recalled, the green on the underbelly of the clouds was so striking as they approached the atoll of Tarawa that he was surprised the navigator did not mention it. When asked about this, Iotiebata replied with some hesitation, “I did not wish to embarrass or insult you by mentioning this green. For after all, you are a navigator, of a kind, yourself—and even Europeans notice this obvious sign!”
Other signs include the “loom” of land, which Lewis describes as “a pale, shimmering column” of air, and a mysterious phenomenon known as “underwater lightning,” which is different from ordinary bioluminescence and which physicists even now are at a loss to explain. Islanders also speak of “sea marks”: places where porpoises or other creatures are known to feed, areas of mist or low visibility, whirlpools, cross seas, shining streaks on the surface of the water, congregations of sharks or jellyfish, and lines of flotsam that collect at the confluence of different ocean streams.
Finally, there is the technique known as “wave piloting.” This is a version of navigating by swells, but with the added complication that in the vicinity of islands, waves are both reflected and refracted by the land. This creates complicated patterns of interference, which in the Marshall Islands have historically been depicted by stick charts made from the ribs of palm fronds, with shells to indicate the positions of islands. These stick charts have often been described as maps, but they are not maps or charts in the way we might think of them. They are teaching tools and mnemonic devices, part of an instructional tool kit used by experienced navigators to communicate concepts, and not something that would ever be relied upon at sea. As one anthropologist in the Marshall Islands put it, navigators there would consider it “scandalous to continue to consult a chart when underway.”
Micronesian stick charts are one of the very few physical manifestations of Oceanic navigational lore, which is essentially a body of oral knowledge. (Lewis stressed the incredible amount of information committed to memory by traditional navigators and noted that some of them, when reciting certain pieces of lore, would become irritated if they were interrupted and would have to go back to the beginning and start again.) It is not clear whether these stick charts are a local innovation or part of a system that has elsewhere been lost. But they have no connection with European cartography. As Lewis pointed out, “Europeans had no corresponding graphic representation of these phenomena [swells, waves, and their relationships to islands], and could not have had any, since the underlying principles were not generally known.”
Taken all together, these landfinding techniques—and perhaps others involving water temperature, color, drift objects, and other signs—can double or triple the distance at which an island can be detected. In some archipelagoes, these expanded targets overlap, creating a kind of “screen,” which a trained navigator would find difficult to miss. Ward, Webb, and Levison, who had given some thought to this issue in the design of their computer simulation, make the interesting suggestion that this vision of island screens might be one of the concepts behind the distribution of islands on Tupaia’s chart. They note that on the chart more than half the circumference of the sea around Tupaia’s home territory of Tahiti is masked by islands—a much greater density of land than actually exists. But perhaps what was being depicted was not the islands themselves so much as the expanded targets they represented. Perhaps it was less a matter of accuracy and more a reflection of the navigator’s belief that the sea was full of islands and “that if one landfall were missed another would be made.”
WHAT IS NOT easily conveyed in accounts of traditional navigational techniques is a sense of how navigation is experienced by its practitioners: not as an array of discrete techniques but as “a unity,” “the sum of input from such disparate sources as stars, swells, and birds being processed through training and practice into a confident awareness of precisely where they were at any one time”—a description that, in itself, seems to capture some of the difficulty. Even more elusive is the larger conceptual framework, the deep, inherited cultural understanding of island and ocean that was shared by those who for thousands of years lived in and with and by the sea.
“When a Puluwatan speaks of the ocean,” wrote Gladwin, “the words he uses refer not to an amorphous expanse of water but rather to the assemblage of seaways which lie between the various islands. Together these seaways constitute the ocean he knows and understands.” The island of Puluwat, seen in this way, “ceases to be a solitary spot of dry land” and “takes its pla
ce in a familiar constellation of islands linked together by pathways on the ocean.” The inhabitants of an atoll know, even if they have not been there, that beyond the horizon lies a “world of little islands . . . each in its own assigned place upon the vast surface of the sea.”
This view of the ocean as a thoroughfare rather than a barrier, together with the confidence that another island would always rise up over the horizon, makes sense when you think of the settlers of Remote Oceania as having started out in a realm in which islands were everywhere and not far apart. It was a perspective they might easily have developed—along with the necessary fishhooks and outriggers and navigational techniques—in what is sometimes described as the “island nursery” of Island Southeast Asia. But even this is not the whole story, for no matter how accustomed the earliest migrants were to the idea that islands were “inevitable,” some of the sea roads they would eventually travel were terrifically empty and long.
Once again, this raises the question not just of how but of why. Polynesian and Micronesian traditions give a whole raft of reasons for setting sail: procurement of valuable objects, trade, social visits, revenge, desperation, lust, a desire for conquest and war. To this nineteenth-century Romantics added the love of adventure, and those who have studied traditional navigation from an anthropological point of view tend to agree. “All over Oceania,” wrote Lewis, “a wandering spirit persists to this day.” In Puluwat, added Gladwin, voyaging to far islands, while ostensibly undertaken for some purpose like fetching a supply of tobacco or green turtles, was, “in large measure, an end in itself.” Far travel is—and surely was—a form of excitement, a measure of status, sometimes a matter of necessity. But it was also woven into the cosmogonic understanding of these sea people as both a beginning and an end. All over Polynesia, spirits of the dead embark on journeys; on the Polynesian outlier of Tikopia, a “sweet burial” was said to be the fate of a man lost at sea. Lewis was saddened but not surprised when, in 1970, the news reached him that his old friend and teacher Tevake had disappeared. Those who knew him said that he had “simply paddled out to sea in the manner of the Tikopians and did not intend to arrive.”
Hōkūle‘a
Sailing to Tahiti
Hōkūle‘a under sail, Polynesian Voyaging Society Archives.
KAMEHAMEHA SCHOOLS, HAWAI‘I.
LEWIS WAS NOT the only person with an interest in testing these ideas empirically; across the Pacific in California, a similar voyaging experiment was also under way. In 1965, an anthropologist named Ben Finney set about re-creating a traditional double-hulled Polynesian voyaging canoe. Finney, a lanky, fair-haired Californian with sailing experience racing catamarans—a “modern descendant” of the Polynesian craft—had been a student of Kenneth Emory’s at the University of Hawai‘i. Like Lewis, he had been piqued by Sharp’s claims about ancient Polynesian navigational capacities and, in particular, the poor seakeeping qualities of traditional Polynesian canoes: their supposed structural fragility, high risk of being swamped, and presumed inability to sail into the wind. “All this seemed absurd to me,” he wrote. But he also recognized that no one really knew what the capacities of such a vessel might be, there not having been one in Polynesian waters for hundreds of years. So, with help from some of his students at University of California, Santa Barbara, he built one.
The canoe, christened Nalehia (The Skilled Ones) “for the graceful way her twin hulls glided over the swells,” was forty feet long and weighed nearly one and a half tons. It was made from modern materials, including fiberglass and laminated oak, but was based on drawings of Polynesian canoes made by eighteenth-century explorers. The idea, wrote Finney, was to focus on sailing performance, “to try out the canoe in a series of trials . . . then sail it, or a larger canoe built from the lessons learned, from Hawaii to Tahiti and return.” (The choice of Tahiti was determined by the many Hawaiian legends and chants that refer to voyages back and forth between Hawai‘i and Kahiki—the Hawaiian name for Tahiti but also the name of a mythical faraway land, home to various ancestors, sorcerers, and gods.)
Nalehia never made it to Tahiti, in part because of flaws in the canoe’s design. The hulls, which had been made from casts of an old Hawaiian canoe, were U-shaped and too shallow to prevent the canoe from “skidding sideways at an alarming rate” when it was pointed into the wind. But Finney remained committed to the project, and in the early 1970s he returned to Honolulu, where he joined forces with two other people who had also been thinking about canoes: Tommy Holmes, a surfer and paddler from a prominent haole (European) family in Honolulu, and the Hawaiian artist Herb Kāne, whose romantic paintings of Polynesian voyagers were hugely popular in Hawai‘i. Together they founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society, a nonprofit corporation whose goal was to build and launch a “performance replica” and sail it to Tahiti and back.
The canoe would be named Hōkūle‘a (Star of Joy), the Hawaiian name for Arcturus, which is the zenith star of the Hawaiian Islands. At sixty feet long, it would be bigger than Nalehia and would cost a good deal more to build; the first estimate came in at $1,000 a foot, for a total that was the equivalent of almost $350,000 in today’s money. Finney wrote research grants, describing the project as “an exercise in ‘experimental archaeology,’” while Holmes tapped the Honolulu establishment and Kāne printed thousands of posters to sell. Additional funding came in the form of payment for the story rights from National Geographic, an advance from Dodd, Mead & Company for the rights to Finney’s proposed book, and a grant from the Hawaii Bicentennial Commission, which designated the venture—with the voyage planned for 1976—an official Bicentennial project.
From the very beginning, the voyage of the Hōkūle‘a was seen as having a dual purpose: it would be the vehicle for experimental research into the seakeeping abilities of a vessel built along traditional lines, and, at the same time, it would encourage a revival of interest in the ancient history of the Hawaiian people. Finney, who was invested in the academic debate, was focused primarily on the experimental dimension, though he understood what the canoe could mean to Hawaiians. He noted that there was much more interest in such a project in the 1970s than when he had first begun to think about it in the late 1950s. In those early days, he wrote, interest in Hawaiian culture had been “minimal” even among Hawaiians, but there was a new feeling in the islands in the early seventies. Decolonization and indigenous rights movements were gaining strength around the world, including in Polynesia. Hawaiians who had only ever spoken English were starting to learn Hawaiian; the study of hula was on the rise; the University of Hawai‘i formally recognized the discipline of Hawaiian studies; and activists were engaging in battles over particular pieces of land, most notably the Hawaiian island of Kaho‘olawe, which had been used as a bombing range by the U.S. military in the aftermath of World War II.
Kāne, whose own return to Hawai‘i from the Midwest was a reflection of this renaissance, was focused on Hōkūle‘a’s symbolic potential. “The canoe was the center of the old culture—the heart of a culture that was still beating,” he is quoted as saying, “and I thought that if we could rebuild that central artifact, bring it back to life and put it to hard use, this would send out ripples of energy.” But even he was not prepared for the impact the canoe had on Hawaiians. In preparation for the voyage to Tahiti, Hōkūle‘a made a tour of the other Hawaiian islands. When they dropped anchor in Hōnaunau Bay, on the Big Island, so many people came out that Kāne said he thought “the island was going to tilt. You could not see a rock. It was all solid people. They weren’t doing anything. They weren’t waving. They were just sitting there looking at the canoe.” It went on like that for days. “The faces would change but the crowd was still there. Wherever we went it was that way.”
There was, however, a dark side to this magnetism, for it was impossible to celebrate the revitalization of Hawaiian culture without recognizing the forces that had brought it to its knees. One of the emotions stirred up by the Hawaiian Renaissance was ang
er aimed at those who seemed to represent the interests that had reduced Hawaiians to second- or third-class citizens in their own islands. A small but vocal faction of the Hawaiian community began to argue that the entire project should be reserved for Hawaiians only and that haoles should not be allowed to sail on Hōkūle‘a or have anything to do with it. “No one could foresee,” recalls one of the early crew members, “how pride in the canoe, reviving pride, would turn into possessiveness.” Gradually a rift began to form between the leaders of the project and some of the crew, who felt that, as kanaka maoli (true Hawaiians), they ought to be in charge. Finney was a prime target of resentment, not only as an outsider and a haole but, as one commentator later put it, as “a professor who seemed to embody a western scientific view of things—who saw the voyage as an ‘experiment’ of some kind, not the culminating dream of revival that some of the crew considered her to be.”
The appointment of a Hawaiian captain, Kawika Kapahulehua, an experienced sailor from Ni‘ihau who spoke fluent Hawaiian, helped bridge the gap. But there was another crucial position that could not be filled by either a haole scientist or a Hawaiian, and that was the all-important role of navigator. The experimental goal was to reenact a traditional voyage as accurately as possible, and that meant not only replicating a traditional vessel but navigating by traditional means. Nowhere in Polynesia was there anyone who knew how to do this, and so Finney turned to David Lewis for advice. Lewis suggested that they look for a navigator in the Caroline Islands, and the man who ultimately agreed to assist them was a calm, self-possessed man in his forties from the island of Satawal, known as Pius Piailug.
Sea People Page 27