Eventually, Nainoa realized that he could learn only so much in the planetarium. “Knowledge alone,” wrote Kyselka, “is not wayfinding. How can you know the wind other than by sailing?” He needed an experienced wayfinder to teach him, and the only one he knew was Mau. Taking a gamble, Nainoa flew to Micronesia to ask Mau if he would come back to Honolulu and instruct him. At first Mau put him off, saying he would think it over, but a few months later he turned up in Hawai‘i. “I will train you to find Tahiti,” he told Nainoa, “because I don’t want you to die.”
This time the experience was different: Nainoa was the perfect apprentice, but, even more important, the feeling of the endeavor had changed. This was due largely to the leadership of the elder Thompson, who, while encouraging the crew and their supporters to think of the canoe as Hawaiian, was broadly inclusive. “You need to define your community,” he told them, “and community is never about what separates you from each other—your race or your culture—it’s about what binds you together.” Mau could see that they were operating with a new set of values and that, as Nainoa put it, “there were no longer any racial issues among the crew.”
In 1980, Hōkūle‘a set off again for Tahiti. Mau sailed on the canoe, but the navigation was entirely in Nainoa’s hands. Only once during the voyage did Mau step in: at the very end of the voyage—thirty-one days out—when they were barely an hour’s sail from their landfall in the Tuamotus. At the time, Nainoa knew they were close, but he was not sure precisely where the island was. The evening before, he had seen birds flying south, heading home for the night, which meant that the canoe was still north of where they wanted to be. The next morning, before dawn, it was all hands on deck, eyes peeled for the first sign of birds. But although they waited and waited, no birds appeared. “I was in near trauma,” Nainoa writes, “my first voyage, in my early twenties.” Mau, however, was perfectly calm.
At last, a solitary bird was spotted, once again flying south. Since it was now morning and time for birds to go out and fish, Nainoa interpreted this to mean that they had somehow drifted past the island in the night and that it was now behind them. In his panic, he told the crew to turn the canoe around, “to look for the island the bird was coming from. They turned the canoe around—and now we are sailing north, back toward Hawai‘i.” It was at this point that Mau stepped in. “Turn the canoe around and follow the bird,” he said. Nainoa was completely puzzled. “I didn’t know why. He didn’t tell me why, but we turned the canoe around and now we saw other birds flying south. Mau said, ‘You wait one hour and you will find an island.’” One hour later he stood up and said, “The island is right there.”
“Vision,” writes Nainoa, “is not so much about just looking, but knowing what to look for. It’s experience. Mau had seen in the beak of the bird a little fish, and he knew that the birds were nesting, so they had flown out earlier that morning and were taking food back to their young before they fed themselves. He just did not tell me that in our training program.”
IT WAS A stunning achievement. Without maps or charts or instruments or recording devices, without even paper and pen, an apprentice navigator—the first from Hawai‘i in at least half a century—had piloted a canoe more than 2,500 miles, spanning more than thirty-five degrees of latitude, and made landfall on an atoll in the Tuamotus. Mau, who had been the first to accomplish this, had done it on the strength of more than thirty years’ experience as a navigator. Nainoa—to an extent that is remarkable in hindsight—was not quite making it up, but not quite navigating in the traditional manner, either. He was weaving together the strands of two very different traditions, combining everything he had learned from school and books and the planetarium with everything he had learned from Mau about looking at the horizon, feeling the wind and waves, and observing the physical world.
Finney had written in some frustration in the 1970s that it had been “naïve” to think that the goals of “scientific research and cultural revival could be easily combined,” and there was always tension around the notion that the Polynesian Voyaging Society embodied two seemingly conflicting ways of looking at the world. But, in fact, almost everything about Hōkūle‘a had been syncretic from the start. The canoe itself was based on traditional designs that had been recorded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by European observers, interpreted by the Chicago Art Institute–trained Hawaiian artist Herb Kāne, and constructed with modern materials like fiberglass and plywood. The chants and ceremonies surrounding the voyages were a blend of contemporary Hawaiian cultural practices, ceremonies from other parts of Polynesia, and traditional sources recorded in the nineteenth century by men like Abraham Fornander and S. Percy Smith. But the most thrilling example of fusion was the navigational method pioneered by Nainoa and subsequently taught to navigators all across the Pacific: a mix of Mau’s Carolinian knowledge, modern astronomical information, and innovations that the young Hawaiian had arrived at on his own.
The star compass Nainoa employed was based on that used by navigators on Satawal—except that it was geometric, with thirty-two evenly divided segments oriented on the cardinal points. (The Carolinian compass has irregular segments oriented on the rising and setting points of important stars.) The names he used for stars, directions, and constellations were a combination of traditional Hawaiian terms, names of his own devising, and terms used by Western astronomers (which are themselves derived from a mixture of Arabic, Latin, and Greek). Some of Mau’s methods proved impossible for him; he, not surprisingly, found etak “a difficult concept,” and maintained his orientation over the length of the voyage in relation to a predetermined “reference course” instead. He relied heavily on bird signs for landfinding and, by his own admission, found it challenging to learn how to read swells. But his long hours in the planetarium paid off in the discovery of a new technique for determining latitude using the rising and setting times of particular pairs of stars.
Nainoa has often remarked that in the beginning he relied more on geometry and analytic mathematics because he didn’t know how to navigate the way Mau did. It was not just that he lacked Mau’s vast store of experiential knowledge, but that he had been raised to think in a different way. Both Nainoa and Lewis described being struck by the differences between the way they were accustomed to thinking about geographic problems and the way traditional navigators saw them. To illustrate this, Lewis described a conversation he had with the Carolinian navigator Hipour. Lewis was trying to establish the location of an island known as Ngatik. No maps or charts of the area existed, and no one from Hipour’s island had been to Ngatik in generations. But because it was used as an etak reference island, its star bearings were known. Using this information, Lewis drew a diagram “to illustrate that Ngatik must necessarily lie where these etak bearings intersected.” Hipour, he wrote, “could not grasp this idea at all. His concept was the wholly dynamic one of moving islands, and possibly this is why he several times asked me how islands got onto charts.”
It has been observed that Lewis’s framing of this question involved certain assumptions about “the relation of the problem solver to the space in which the problem is being solved.” The diagram Lewis drew for Hipour takes a bird’s-eye view of the situation, a point of view that is actually impossible to achieve unless you are up in the sky looking down. Nevertheless, it is the point of view that Western navigators are most accustomed to—so much so that, as Lewis reminded us, “it is easy for us to forget . . . how much of an abstraction a chart really is.” The Carolinian navigational system is also quite abstract—etak is, after all, an abstraction of “a rather high order”—but it is constructed around a different point of view. The Carolinian navigator’s perspective is “egocentric,” that is, it occupies a “real point of view on the real local space” and envisions everything else—stars, islands, reference objects—only as it exists in relation to the viewer. Thus, “the star bearings of the etak island radiate out from the navigator himself” and cannot be triangulated to give the
location of the island, because the only place they ever meet is him.
This may seem like an odd way of thinking about geography. But one could argue that the “egocentric” point of view is actually the default perspective even in societies where map use is common. There is an intriguing experiment in which a group of New Yorkers were asked to describe the layouts of their apartments. Their accounts fell into one of two categories, described by the researchers as the “map” and the “tour.” In a map account, the apartment dweller might describe his or her apartment like this: “The kitchen is next to the dining room and across the hall from the coat closet.” In a tour account, by contrast, he or she might say something like “You come into the hall and turn left into the living room.” The vast majority of the New Yorkers surveyed described their apartments in tour terms; only a minuscule 3 percent described them in terms of a map.
Tour thinking is sometimes understood to differ from map thinking in the same way that orality differs from literacy. And one can see how features of non-instrumental navigation overlap with other systems for managing knowledge in an oral culture: the first-person perspective, the emphasis on experience, the encoding of information in narrative form. Mau, who came from an essentially oral culture, had learned much of his technical knowledge—star paths, bearings, names of swells—in the form of oral narratives, and sometimes, when he wanted to recall something specific, he would chant to himself “to ‘revisit information.’”
A number of traditional chants of the type used by Carolinian navigators—narratives with names like “Catching the Sea Bass,” “Aligning the Weir,” “The Lashing of the Breadfruit Picker”—have been recorded. These chants are presented as stories, but their primary function is to arrange large volumes of navigational information into “manageable inventories of knowledge.” A typical example, called “Reef Hole Probing,” describes the movements of a parrotfish that lives in a hole in the reef on a particular island. When a stick is stuck into the hole, the fish is frightened and escapes to the next island, where it hides in a new reef hole. Again comes the stick, and again the fish flees to the next island, and so it goes, all the way around the chain, until finally the fish returns to the first island, where it is caught. Each time the fish swims away, it does so “under the appropriate star bearing for the next island,” and in this way the chant—a quite explicit “tour”—provides the navigator with the directions he needs to travel throughout the archipelago.
To those in Hawai‘i, Mau’s wayfinding ability—his infallible sense of direction, his ability to predict weather, his vast storehouse of general knowledge about the sky and the sea—seemed almost uncanny. Some tried to explain it by invoking a spiritual dimension; others suggested that Mau might have some kind of sixth sense. But the term most frequently employed was “intuition,” an inscrutable form of knowing that does not rely on evidence or reason.
Almost from the beginning, Nainoa had concluded that his success as a navigator was contingent upon developing this sense of intuition. He tells an interesting story about a night on his maiden voyage as a navigator, in 1980. The canoe was in the doldrums, the sky was pitch black, it was pouring, and a twenty-five-knot wind was coming first from one direction and then another. The crew were looking to him for direction, but Nainoa was exhausted and had lost any clear sense of which way to go. Then, “I suddenly felt this warmth come over me,” he writes. “The sky was so black, I couldn’t see the moon, but I could feel where it was. . . . I directed the canoe on a new course and then, just for a moment, there was a hole in the clouds and the light of the moon shone through—just where I expected it to be.”
Nainoa describes this as the moment when he realized he could tap into something “beyond the analytical, beyond seeing with my eyes,” something he could not explain “from a scientific point of view.” One might demystify this as an example of “skill in guessing well”—which is another way of thinking about intuition—but for Nainoa it was more like knowing in a different way. He cites the Hawaiian term na‘au, which means, literally, “entrails” or “gut” and refers to the part of the body that, in some Polynesian traditions, is viewed as the “immediate organ of sensation” and the place “where all impressions are first received.” For Nainoa, the idea that he was reaching a more intuitive level of understanding about the physical world—that he was thinking not just with his conscious mind but with his body, in some sense feeling his way across the ocean—was a sign that he was coming closer to navigating in “the ancient way.”
BRINGING THESE TWO ways of knowing together turned out to be, as Finney put it years later, “more rewarding than we had ever dreamed.” Over the next few decades, Hōkūle‘a would go on to make a series of spectacular voyages, beginning, in the mid-1980s, with a two-year “Voyage of Rediscovery,” sailing the length and breadth of Polynesia, from Hawai‘i to Tahiti and the Cook Islands, then on to Aotearoa (New Zealand), Tonga, and Samoa. It then sailed what has long been considered one of the most perplexing of the ancient sea routes: eastward against the trades from Samoa to Tahiti. (The solution, it turned out, was just as Tupaia had described it to Cook: wait for the west wind, which did, in fact, occasionally blow.)
Everywhere the canoe went, it was met by crowds of enraptured islanders, inspiring so much enthusiasm throughout the Pacific that by the mid-1990s, seven more voyaging canoes had been built—in Hawai‘i, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, and Aotearoa—and enough navigators trained to marshal a pan-Polynesian fleet, which sailed en masse from the Marquesas to Hawai‘i in 1995. In 1999, Hōkūle‘a closed the triangle by making the difficult passage to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). This was followed by voyages in 2007 to Micronesia and Japan and, finally, in 2013–2017, the ultimate challenge: the Mālama Honua voyage around the world. Although the arrival of European shipping in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had put an end to the isolation of many Polynesian societies, the voyages of Hōkūle‘a reunited them in a different way. As one woman put it when the canoe finally reached Rapa Nui: “You have not closed the triangle, you have opened it for us!”
On the research front, too, it almost seemed as though the quest had been concluded—here it was, the end of the story: They did it after all! In fact, the voyages of Hōkūle‘a did not—indeed, could not—prove anything about what had actually happened in the distant past. What they did prove was the robustness of non-instrumental navigation as a method and the feasibility of voyaging in general. They demonstrated—conclusively—that a trained and capable navigator, using nothing but the stars, winds, and swells, could hold a course, calculate the distance traveled, hit a small target with sufficient accuracy, and incorporate all the necessary information into a mental construct that was both flexible enough to allow for adaptation and systematic enough to be passed on. Initially framed as a response to skeptics like Andrew Sharp, the experimental voyaging movement quashed any lingering suspicions about the technical abilities of prehistoric navigators—whether they had been capable of traversing the long seaways of the Pacific; whether they could sail against the prevailing winds; whether, having ventured out into the unknown, they could return to their home islands. If Sharp had “demoted” Polynesians from seafarers to castaways, the Polynesian Voyaging Society re-elevated them to navigators and explorers.
Part VI
What We Know Now
(1990–2018)
In which we review some of the latest scientific findings and think about what it takes to answer big questions about the deep past.
The Latest Science
DNA and Dates
Excavations by the Canterbury Museum Archaeological Group at Wairau Bar, New Zealand, 1964.
PHOTO BY DON MILLAR, COURTESY SANDY MILLAR.
THE ERA OF experimental voyaging left everyone with a clear sense of the plausibility of long-distance prehistoric travel in the Pacific, showing persuasively how it could have been done. But it added nothing to the eternal debates about who (in the sense of ancestry) the first voyagers were
or when any of this happened. There were other issues, too, that remained unsettled: How large or small were the original colonizing populations? In what order were the islands settled? Did Polynesians in fact make it to South America? These were all questions that had been asked before, but during the last decades of the twentieth century, advances in two areas in particular—genetics and radiocarbon dating—promised progress on several of these fronts.
When it comes to the question of who Polynesians are—that is, who they are in terms of large global populations—the issue had ultimately boiled down to the question of whether their strongest affinities were with Asian or Melanesian populations, the idea of their being closely related to Native American populations having been largely rejected. The problem, as anthropologists saw it, could be articulated in terms of competing migration theories. One theory, popularly known as the “express train to Polynesia” (a phrase coined by the well-known biologist and geographer Jared Diamond), or sometimes “out of Taiwan,” argued that the precursors of the Polynesians had originated in the islands of Southeast Asia and had swept through Melanesia, carrying all their cultural belongings—their foods and plants and language and customs—with them on their way to the remote Pacific.
This, however, did not seem all that plausible to some, including the anthropologist John Terrell, who proposed an alternative known as the “entangled bank.” Terrell argued that the express train model did not reflect the way human history actually plays out. Borrowing Darwin’s image of “an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth,” he argued that the settlement history of Remote Oceania, like other large-scale human movements, was “an interlocking, expanding, sometimes contracting and ever-changing” set of interactions, a chaos of “interdependence and complexity.”
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