Sea People

by Christina Thompson

  Piailug, who went by the nickname Mau, was an expert canoe builder and the grandson of a famous navigator. He had grown up on a Micronesian atoll and learned everything he knew in the traditional way—listening to the “talk of the sea,” watching his teachers, observing the ocean and the sky. To many of the Hawaiians, Mau seemed to embody the very essence of the old ways. “There was something about Mau. . . . He was not like a normal man—he knew things that no one else knew.” As for Mau, he, too, recognized his role in the venture: “I made that trip,” he said, “to show those people what their ancestors used to know.”

  ON MAY 1, 1976, Hōkūle‘a set sail from the island of Maui. Just before their departure, Mau addressed the crew, telling them how to behave while they were at sea. “Before we leave,” he told them, “throw away all the things that are worrying you. Leave all your problems on land.” On the ocean, he said, “everything we do is different.” At all times, the crew would be under the captain’s command: “When he says eat, we eat. When he says drink, we drink.” For three, maybe four weeks, they would be out of sight of land. “All we have to survive on are the things we bring with us. . . . Remember, all of you, these things,” he concluded, “and we will see that place we are going to.”

  On board, in addition to Captain Kapahulehua and Mau, were Finney, whose job it was to document the voyage, and Lewis, who would make a record of Mau’s navigation. Tommy Holmes sailed as a member of the crew, with the particular charge of looking after the animals—a pig, a dog, and “the proper moa” (a chicken)—along with a variety of roots, cuttings, and seedlings, wrapped in damp moss, matting, and tapa cloth to protect them from the sea. Accompanying the canoe in case of trouble, and to keep the detailed record of their position that would later be compared with Mau’s daily estimates, was the sixty-four-foot ketch Meotai.

  The primary navigational challenge was to keep the canoe far enough to the east as it made the long journey south. Hawai‘i is more than 2,600 miles north of Tahiti, but it is also about 500 miles west. The winds along the route are predominantly from the east—northeast above the equator and southeast below it. Add to this a westward-setting current and the problem was clear. “Our strategy,” wrote Finney, “was to sail as hard into the wind as the canoe would point without losing too much speed . . . and then to hold on to as much of that easting as possible.” The main worry was that when they reached the latitude of Tahiti, they would find themselves too far west and would then have to beat back into the wind to reach their destination.

  One of the biggest unknowns was whether Mau’s navigational knowledge would be sufficient, given that the route was entirely unfamiliar to him. “A medieval Tahitian or Hawaiian navigator,” wrote Lewis, “would have possessed information about the Hawaii–Tahiti seaway exactly comparable to Piailug’s about his own and neighboring archipelagos.” He would have known the star path, the winds and currents likely to be encountered, and the distance typically covered in a day’s sail; he would be sailing, you might say, in his own neck of the woods. But Mau came from a completely different part of the Pacific, far to the west, where the sky and sea and weather patterns were all different, and his experience covered only some of the latitudes that would be traversed in the course of this journey. This last had significant implications for the navigation—the North Star, for instance, figures prominently in Carolinian navigation, but below the equator it can no longer be seen. Thus, once they crossed over to the Southern Hemisphere, Mau would lose an important celestial reference point. Part of Lewis’s job had been to help Mau fill in the inevitable gaps in his geographic knowledge, and one of the ways they did this was by visiting the planetarium at the Bishop Museum. There, using the star projector, they simulated the way the night sky would change as the canoe traveled from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere. “Once this background was filled in,” wrote Lewis, Mau “laid down his strategy for the voyage—the etak (the Marquesas) and the star courses to be followed.”

  Leaving the Hawaiian Islands, Mau steered east-southeast toward the rising point of Antares, “a red giant of a star” in the constellation Scorpius, known to Polynesians as “the Fishhook of Maui.” Finney watched Mau watching the sky and the sea, describing it as “a rare privilege” to see a master navigator at work. Gladwin, the anthropologist, had observed that Carolinian navigators remained continually alert during a voyage. “They say,” he wrote, that “you can tell the experienced navigators by their bloodshot eyes.” Mau, thought Finney, “looks the part,” almost never sleeping, just catnapping from time to time. “Most of the time he stands leaning on the deck railing, or sits perched atop it, checking the sea, the sails and at night the stars.”

  Although some of those on board were experienced sailors—Mau, Kawika, Lewis, Finney—many of the crew were what are known in Hawai‘i as “watermen,” meaning surfers, paddlers, and lifeguards. They were good swimmers, strong and at home in the sea, but they had never crewed professionally or sailed long distances. Just six days out, one of them startled the relief captain by asking, “Hey, we almost there?” In fact, it would be more than three weeks before they saw land again. As the journey lengthened, this lack of experience began to show. Various minor crises—the discovery of water in a section of the hulls; problems with the food; issues over contraband like radios and marijuana; an argument over the setting of the sails—exposed defects in the chain of command and widened the rift that had opened before the voyage started. A long spell in the Doldrums with fitful, shifting winds and periods of glassy calm—the sea, as one recorder of the story put it, “smoothed to a vast skin of heaving mercury under a copper sun”—only aggravated the situation. One of the crew members became nearly catatonic, while others retreated into a sullen funk, refusing to stand watches and openly defying those in charge. Finney was aggravated by what he saw as a lack of discipline; Mau, though he said little, was worried about the rising tension on the canoe.

  As they drew closer to their target, Lewis began to fear that they had been pushed too far west. But Mau seemed “calmly confident,” and on the thirtieth day of the voyage he predicted that they would reach the Tuamotus the next day. Not long after this, a crew member spotted some white fairy terns. Then the regular trade-wind swell faltered. “An island lies out there,” wrote Finney. “But which island? And how far away?” The next day, the Hōkūle‘a made landfall on Mataiva, at the extreme northwestern edge of the Tuamotu Archipelago, less than two hundred miles north of Tahiti.

  Hōkūle‘a arrived in the Tahitian capital, Papeete, on the morning of June 4. Unbeknownst to the crew, who had been out of radio communication with the rest of the world, the Tahitians had been avidly following Hōkūle‘a’s progress, posting the canoe’s daily position on charts tacked up around the city and broadcasting updates in newspapers and on radio and TV. The governor of French Polynesia had declared the day of their arrival a public holiday; schools and businesses were closed, and the harbor was filled with hundreds of paddling canoes, launches, and yachts. People had begun gathering at the harbor the previous night, and by the time the canoe arrived, wrote Finney, “they were everywhere, standing knee deep in the surf, surging over the reef, jammed along the shore, perched atop waterfront buildings and weighing down the limbs of shade trees lining the water’s edge.” More than seventeen thousand people—over half the population of the island—had come to witness Hōkūle‘a’s arrival. On shore, there was cheering and the beating of drums, then, as the canoe approached, a silence fell over the crowd and a church choir lifted up its voice in a Tahitian hymn of welcome composed specially for the day. The effect, as thousands of singers joined in, was “spine-tingling,” according to one eyewitness.

  THE SUCCESS OF the voyage was a cultural triumph, the first time in hundreds and hundreds of years that a Polynesian voyaging canoe had made the journey between Hawai‘i and the Society Islands. It was also an experimental success: Mau had navigated the canoe 2,600 miles along an unknown sea road; the vessel had performed adm
irably; even the plants and animals had done well. And yet, all was not as it should be. Shortly before their arrival in Tahiti, Mau had taken Finney aside and told him that he would not be navigating the canoe back to Hawai‘i, as planned. He was unhappy with the behavior of the crew, and, not wanting to confront them directly, he recorded a message for them to listen to after he was gone. “When we leave from Maui,” he told them, “I say, don’t take your problems with you on the trip. Okay, when we leave from Maui, you don’t leave the problem in the land. Everybody take the problem to the trip.” The crew, Mau said, had been “very, very bad”; even though it would be a different crew for the return voyage, he was not confident that they would be any better. All he wanted at this point was to go home. “Now is last, last I’m see you, you see me,” he said on the tape. “Don’t ask me to come to Hawai‘i ever again.”

  Mau’s departure was an enormous blow; without him, there was no one to navigate the canoe. When Hōkūle‘a set out for home a month later, it would have to be conventionally guided, using compass, sextant, and maps. There were other changes, too: although Captain Kapahulehua would remain in command, neither Finney nor Lewis would sail on the return trip. On the plus side, the return crew would include a couple of women. (This, too, had been a bone of contention, with some traditionalists arguing that women should not be allowed to sail in the canoe—though, as many pointed out, it was quite unclear how any of the islands would ever have been populated if a prohibition against carrying women had been the rule.)

  Out of this breach emerged the person who would, in years to come, lead the Polynesian voyaging movement. His name was Nainoa Thompson, and, like many of those involved with Hōkūle‘a, he was a paddler and surfer with little experience on the open sea. He had, however, been present at the first launching of Hōkūle‘a and had watched the ritual celebrations, with their prayers and their blowing of conch shells and offerings of food. Nainoa later recalled that he had never heard anything like this before. “I could see what we were doing but I did not understand why we were doing it. . . . It was a brand new experience for me as a Hawaiian. These were ancient traditions that were not valued in modern Hawai‘i. This was the rebirth of all that.”

  Nainoa, whose father was Hawaiian and whose mother was part haole, part Hawaiian, was a handsome, self-contained young man with “tremendous intensity.” He was good at math and science and had a gift for spatial relations, but he was burdened by feelings of frustration that had to do, in part, with the social conditions of the 1960s and ’70s. He was trying, as he later put it, “to understand my place in the larger society where Hawaiians were considered second-rate.” The challenge of non-instrumental navigation strongly appealed to him, and on the voyage back from Tahiti, he began to pay attention to the swells and the stars.

  Back in Honolulu, Nainoa continued to think about these problems, making himself a star compass big enough to sleep in and testing his navigational knowledge on short trips to sea. He followed Mau and Lewis’s example and visited the Bishop Museum planetarium, where he made friends with a lecturer named Will Kyselka. Two or three times a week, he would go to the planetarium and study the night sky, making notes on the positions of the stars while Kyselka ran the projector. Nainoa’s notebooks quickly began to fill up, but the true scope of the endeavor was only beginning to reveal itself. “The more I learn, the more I understand,” he had written on the way back from Tahiti, and “the more I understand, the more I know how complicated the heavens are.”

  IN 1978, THE Polynesian Voyaging Society decided to make a second voyage to Tahiti. Finney had resigned after the 1976 trip, and this time Hōkūle‘a would be captained, crewed, and guided entirely by Native Hawaiians. Nainoa would serve as navigator (or wayfinder), using only traditional techniques, but the canoe would also carry an instrumental navigator, who would not reveal their position unless it became necessary for the safety of the crew. In another departure from the plan of the first voyage, the canoe would not be accompanied by an escort vessel. “We thought we could do without one,” recalls Ben Young, then president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, “because Hōkūle‘a had made the voyage down and back without any problems.”

  The departure was set for mid-March, but when the day came, there was a gale of wind, with rain and whitecaps as far as the eye could see. “It was blowing like shit,” one witness remembered. “Small craft warnings. The whole nine yards.” Several people thought that Hōkūle‘a, which was scheduled to depart after dark, was overloaded. Finney, who had come down to watch the canoe being readied for sea, was alarmed. “No escort boat, no Mau, overloaded, in heavy seas and at night,” he later recalled. “And the rest is history.”

  Around midnight, in winds of up to thirty knots, with ten-foot swells, Hōkūle‘a capsized in the Moloka‘i Channel, about seventeen miles from the island of Lana‘i. Water had gotten into one of the hulls, swamping it, which then cantilevered the other out of the sea. “It just happened in seconds,” remembered a crewman. “The whole thing just kind of flipped over like a Hobie Cat.” The crew managed to scramble onto the overturned hulls, but, while there was no immediate danger of the canoe sinking, there was also no way to right it. “We were sitting on the keel of the canoe,” Nainoa remembers. “Windy. Rough. . . . There wasn’t much to do, just keep calm.”

  All through the night, the crew clung to the canoe, occasionally letting off flares, while they drifted farther and farther out of both shipping lanes and commercial flight paths. Around ten the next morning, a crewman named Eddie Aikau, a champion surfer and lifeguard, volunteered to go for help. Nainoa remembers feeling conflicted. “We’re tired, we’re somewhat in shock, we’re in denial.” But Eddie “was like a miracle man—he could do anything. . . . I remember grabbing his hand and holding his hand real tight . . . and he said, ‘It’ll be okay. Everything will be okay.’” Eddie set off on his surfboard, and all that day, the rest of the crew sat on the overturned hulls. None of the planes had seen them, nor had any of the ships that passed within sight. Back in Honolulu, it was assumed that they were observing radio silence, in keeping with the aim of doing things the old way. By nightfall, the crew knew they were in trouble.

  Then, around 8:00 P.M., the pilot of a Hawaiian Airlines flight out of Kona just happened to look out his window and see a flash of light down on the water. Circling back to get a better look, he caught the flare of a vessel in distress. The crew knew they had been spotted when the plane turned toward them and blinked its lights. A few hours later, a Coast Guard helicopter arrived to scoop the cold and exhausted sailors out of the sea. But the question on everyone’s mind was: Where is Eddie?

  The loss of Eddie Aikau, whose body was never recovered, changed everyone associated with the Polynesian Voyaging Society. In the wake of the accident, the community was split: one camp felt that the whole project had become too dangerous, while the other believed that if they didn’t continue, Eddie’s sacrifice would be for naught. Eddie had told Nainoa, in the lead-up to the voyage, that he just wanted “to see Tahiti come out of the ocean,” a reference to the mythic vision of pulling an island from the sea. After his death, this idea became a touchstone for Nainoa. “For me,” he recalls, “there was no question as to whether we should continue voyaging or not—the question was how are we going to do it.”

  Reinventing Navigation

  Nainoa Thompson

  Nainoa Thompson, 1989, photo by Ken Ige.

  HONOLULU STAR-BULLETIN ARCHIVES.

  IN THE WAKE of Eddie Aikau’s death, the man who took charge of the Polynesian Voyaging Society was Nainoa Thompson’s father. A social worker and community leader, Myron “Pinky” Thompson knew that Hawaiians needed something to restore their cultural pride, and Hōkūle‘a had already demonstrated its capacity to inspire. If the canoe did not sail again, he argued, “if the canoe’s legacy is tragedy, that will only confirm the expectation that Hawaiians always fail.” Nainoa, meanwhile, redoubled his efforts, returning to the planetarium. There, he
and Kyselka studied how the heavens would change as the canoe journeyed south, how the dome of the sky would rotate backward behind them—or, as Nainoa preferred to think of it, how the horizon in front of them would dip—while the stars’ rising and setting times would shift a few minutes earlier each day as the earth rotated around the sun. They ran the projector back a thousand years to see what the sky had looked like when Hawai‘i was first discovered by voyagers from the south. Then back another two thousand years to the sky as it had looked to the first settlers of Tonga and Samoa.

  Three thousand years ago, when the Lapita people were making their way across the western Pacific, the night sky had been quite different from what it is now. Thanks to the slow wobble of the earth’s axis, Polaris, now essentially stationary, had been rising and setting, while the Southern Cross, which today lies below the horizon for anyone north of Miami, was so high in the sky that someone in Alaska would have been able to see it. This means that star paths from these earlier periods would have been quite different from the paths that a navigator would use today, and that the corresponding navigational chants—even supposing they could have survived into the modern era—would have been of little use to modern navigators. This may help explain why star and constellation names cannot be traced back very far linguistically, nowhere near as far as, say, canoe parts or food names or fishing terminology. Not only is the sky local—that is, different in different places—but the stars themselves have moved.