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Gladwin made the analogy that just as Westerners who drive automobiles often see their home as a location on a larger road map, Pulawatans see their islands as communities connected by lines of travel through the ocean. They maintain vast mental maps of all the islands’ spatial relationships to one another, but because these places are all out of sight of each other, the “landmarks” they use are swells, animals, reefs, wind, the sun, and, most important, stars. In some places, these cues were described in song. Vicente Diaz has described learning from the late Sostenis Emwalu of Pulawat about chants that are lists of creatures, stars, reefs, and landmarks referring to the voyage from the Central Carolines to Saipan through Guam. Diaz says, “[W]hen set to tune and performed properly this list was nothing less than an ancient and time-honored mnemonic map for travel.” From a young age, Carolinian navigators memorize star “courses” or “paths,” the points on the horizon where sequences of stars rise or set over an island, in order to create routes. In many cases, the navigator knows star paths for islands he has never even been to before. All together, Gladwin estimated, Carolinian navigators commit to memory star courses for over a hundred islands that span several thousand miles, and to sail accurately from one to the other they use a system called etak. “This is a body of knowledge which is not kept secret,” he wrote, “but there is scarcely any need to do so. No one could possibly learn it except through the most painstaking and lengthy instruction, so no outsider could pick it up merely by occasional eavesdropping.”
With etak, the navigator chooses an island, real or imagined, along his route as a reference point. He then uses the star bearings for this island to judge the distance he has traveled; each passing star overhead makes up a sort of segment of travel, and the number of segments along the voyage is the number of etak. Gladwin pointed out that the etak system isn’t based on environmental input but on conceptualization—it’s a tool for the navigator to synthesize his knowledge of rate, time, geography, and astronomy and create a framework for his powers of dead reckoning, the mental estimate of course and distance by sensing speed over time. “Everything that really matters in the whole process goes on in his head or through his senses. All he can actually see or feel is the travel of the canoe through the water, the direction of the wind, and the direction of the stars. Everything else depends upon a cognitive map, a map which is both literally geographical and also logical,” wrote Gladwin.
Understanding etak is tricky. Pulawatans don’t think of themselves as moving toward a star, but rather imagine the canoe and the stars are staying still while everything else is moving—water, islands, wind. It’s an experience, Gladwin explained, akin to a passenger on a train looking out of a window as everything passes by.
This picture he uses of the world around him is real and complete. All the islands which he knows are in it, and all the stars, especially the navigation stars and the places of their rising and setting. Because the latter are fixed, in his picture the islands move past the star positions, under them and backward relative to the canoe as it sails along. The navigator cannot see the islands but he has learned where they are and how to keep their locations and relations in his mind. Ask him where an island is and he will point to it at once, probably with considerable accuracy.
While Gladwin’s research focused on the depth of knowledge of one specific atoll in Micronesia, David Lewis’s book We, the Navigators recognized a commonality among the South Pacific navigation traditions that were still practiced. He saw a shared Pacific Island system of which the individual island skills were aspects, whether it was etak in Pulawat or wave piloting in Rongelap. In 1973, Finney, artist and historian Herb Kāne, and Hawaiian surfer and canoe paddler Tommy Holmes decided to build a canoe and sail it to Tahiti using traditional navigation as a way of proving that South Pacific Islanders had used these skills to voyage across Oceania. The effort became a catalyst for the emerging Hawaiian Renaissance: a resurgence of pride in indigenous music, art, farming, and sport. As the author Sam Low writes in his history of the Hōkūleʻa, Hawaiki Rising, Kāne believed that “the canoe was the center of the old culture—the heart of a culture that was still beating—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 and reawaken a lot of related cultural components around it.”
They set out to raise $100,000 and started enlisting others to help design the canoe. When the boat was launched into the water a couple of years later, they brought a man named Pius Mau Piailug to Hawaii from Micronesia. He had been born in 1932, and both his grandfather and father were master navigators. The place of his birth was Satawal, the atoll 130 miles from Pulawat where Gladwin had spent months learning navigation from the Caroline Islanders. By eighteen, Piailug had been initiated in the pwo ceremony, a sacred initiation for navigators. But after that, the ceremony stopped being held for lack of students, and Piailug worried that the knowledge was going to be lost to the next generation of Satawalese. He became friends with a Peace Corps volunteer by the name of Mike McCoy, who told Finney about Piailug. The connection was extremely fortuitous; Piailug possessed a body of knowledge that had disappeared in Hawaii but that a group of young people were now eager to revive, in particular Nainoa Thompson, a young canoe paddler who began years of study under Piailug’s instruction but also utilized resources at a local planetarium, developing a hybrid of techniques from both old and modern sources.
The first successful voyage of the Hōkūleʻa to Tahiti took place in 1976 with Piailug as navigator. Then in 1980, after years of study, Thompson navigated the canoe to Tahiti and back. Thompson describes a moment during that voyage when he nearly lost his way, only to glean what he understood to be the mystery of wayfinding in the ocean. One night he lost track of all the directional cues in bad weather and began to panic. He experienced an overwhelming sense of being out of control, of the dread of failure, when suddenly he felt the moon above him. Based on this single sensation, he was convinced he knew where he was and managed to navigate the canoe. “I can’t explain it. There was a connection between something in my abilities and my senses that went beyond the analytical, beyond seeing with my own eyes,” he said in Hawaiki Rising. “That night, I learned there are levels of navigation that are realms of the spirit. Hawaiians call it na’au—knowing through your instincts, your feelings, rather than your mind or your intellect. It’s like the doors of knowledge open and you learn something new. But before the doors open you don’t even know that such knowledge exists.” In 2007, Thompson and four other Hawaiians, as well as eleven others, were initiated in the first pwo ceremony on Satawal since 1950.
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Few predicted the Hōkūleʻa would still be sailing forty years later. But during that time South Pacific Islanders have undertaken a fight to preserve navigation practices, or in some cases resurrect them entirely, in tandem with a broader cultural renaissance in language, art, and education. They’ve managed to do this by turning to elders, sharing knowledge between islands, and launching educational organizations, canoeing clubs, and schools. The Hōkūleʻa helped stave off a cultural extinction, and today, in addition to the Polynesian Voyaging Society, Hawaii now has over a dozen voyaging societies, and there are also voyaging societies in the Cook Islands, New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, and Tonga. There are indigenous skills and navigation schools like WAM in the Marshall Islands and the Waa’gey school in the Caroline Islands. Some of these resurgences are taking place in less expected places: a San Diego community of Chamorros, the indigenous people of the Mariana Islands, spent a year building a traditional forty-seven-foot canoe from a single redwood tree—the first to sail in nearly three centuries.
In these places, practicing navigation traditions is an act of self-determination and authority, taking control over identity by wrenching it away from missionaries, colonial governments, and tourism economies—even scientists and anthropologists. On the leeward side of the is
land of Maui I talked to Kala Tanaka Baybayan, a thirty-three-year-old mother of two and native Hawaiian, about this effort. We met in Lahaina, a laid-back town whose main street is lined with upscale surfing boutiques and tourist bars selling happy-hour mai tais, and greeted one another in an oceanfront park under a halau, a wooden pavilion with a traditional fiber roof that serves as a “house of instruction.” The ground beneath our feet was once “crown land,” the royal grounds for Maui’s chiefs and kings going all the way back to the the sixteenth century’s chief Pi’ilani. After Kamehameha the Great took control of the Hawaiian Islands in the early 1800s with a fleet of 960 war canoes and some 10,000 soldiers, Lahaina became the capital of the kingdom. Looking west toward the ocean, I could see the reef offshore where members of the royal family once rode the longest continuous wave on Maui on their papa he’e nalu, surfboards. Baybayan told to me that a lizardlike deity, called a mo’o, has always protected the people here; when some of Maui’s residents decided to build a traditional sea-voyaging double-hulled canoe in the mid-1970s, the first in many generations, they called it Mo’olele, the leaping lizard. The boat, called a wa’a, is a forty-two-foot canoe with solid wood hulls and was dry-docked next to us.
Baybayan describes herself as part of the new generation of Oceanic voyagers. “We’re using tradition and knowledge but also science and new heuristic devices,” she says. I noticed an unusual tattoo on her left forearm, a pattern of abstract shapes in black ink. She explained to me that they are symbols for navigation done in a Marquesian Island style. “The T shapes represent an octopus, Kanaloa, the God of the Ocean whose tentacles stick onto knowledge. The triangles represent the stars, and the birds are the ones that help clue us to where land is,” she said. “I got it in the beginning. When I decided I wanted to do this forever.” Baybayan has studied traditional wayfinding for twelve years as an apprentice navigator; in two months she would board the Hikianalia, the seventy-two-foot sister canoe to the Hōkūleʻa, as its captain, navigating from Hawaii to Tahiti to meet the canoe and celebrate the end of its four-year-long voyage around the world. When she’s not at sea, she teaches Maui’s schoolchildren about Hawaiian voyaging and wayfinding as the education coordinator for Hui O Wa’a Kaulua, the nonprofit that originally built Mo’olele.
Baybayan’s maternal great-grandparents were from Hiroshima, and her father’s family were fishermen from Lahaina. In the late 1970s her dad, Chad Kalepa Baybayan, became interested in traditional voyaging and went to learn from Nainoa Thompson. “I could see that Nainoa was always looking for signs—the swells, the stars, the wind—and I tried to see what he was seeing,” he told Sam Low in the book Hawaiki Rising. “I knew that he was in a different world from the rest of us and I was curious about what kind of world that might be. Just watching him, I began to dream that someday I could be a navigator. I knew it was a far-fetched dream but that was my opportunity so I decided to learn as much as I could.” He became one of the early crew members of the Hōkūleʻa, and in the spring of 1980 he was one of fourteen who sailed the canoe thirty-one days from Hawaii to Tahiti, a distance of twenty-four hundred miles, using only the stars, wind, water, and birds. When the tops of the coconut trees of an island in the Tuamotus became visible on the horizon, he described the experience as time running backward, of reliving the voyages of his ancestors. “My ‘aumakua were with me,” he said. Today he is navigator-in-residence at the ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center of Hawaii.
But Baybayan wasn’t ushered into voyaging by her father. She describes him as a quiet person whose voyaging often took him away from home. Though he was fluent in Hawaiian, she never learned the language from him. “He never asked us to go sailing when we were young. It was his passion, and he wanted us to decide what our passions were,” she explained. When Baybayan went to college at the University of Hawaii in Hilo and Maui, she developed a strong interest in traditional Hawaiian culture. She became fluent in Hawaiian and learned the history of her birthplace, how the islands were inhabited by long-distance voyagers. “In my twenties I wanted to know about voyaging. I asked my grandma. She said I’ll go talk to your dad, and then she [came back and] said you’re going to sail with your dad. He has just finished building a voyaging canoe.”
Her first voyage was from Oahu to Lahaina, a journey that took one day and night. “Before that I was into typical, regular things. I would say into pop culture. This was my first experience into another world. I realized that there is so much more, there is so much more to what we do in our everyday lives. If you’re paying attention and listen, often there is a whole other story, telling us where we are.” Baybayan kept learning, availing herself to crew on any voyages she could. “In the beginning I didn’t know what to ask. The more I did it, the questions would come to me and it would take me to the next level. I could draw the connections. I could follow the path that the story follows,” she said. “It’s a gate to other sets of questions.” In 2007 she sailed to Japan on the Hōkūleʻa, the same year that her dad and four other men were initiated in a pwo ceremony and became a part of the two-thousand-year-old lineage of master navigators, by Mau Piailug himself. In 2014 she was a crew member on the Hōkūleʻa from Hawaii to Tahiti. “When I’m away from land and cut off and on the canoe, my mind changes. Immediately, in the first two days, I’m different. I’m seeing things,” she said. “It’s 100 percent relying on yourself to see, hear, and feel, there’s no modern instruments, there’s no compass. It makes me feel good. I’m not lost.” Fear, she said, never enters into the picture. “I’m more nervous during the last ten minutes of the voyage, when we come back to harbor.”
For Baybayan, navigation is a cultivation of both scientific knowledge—geometry, physics, mathematics—and intangible instincts, a set of intuitions that are nourished and strengthened through experience and eventually, over a lifetime, add up to mastery. “Stars are actually the easiest part of the puzzle,” she said of what’s happening in her mind when she navigates. “We do more dead reckoning. I can’t overcomplicate things. Was that seven knots or six knots? You have to be confident. All of the training is to build that confidence in us to make these observations.” There are times, she explained, that utilizing navigation skills feels more akin to spirituality than science. “Some people say traditional navigators were scientists but spirituality was a part of what they did. And a huge part of what we do is spiritual. Science doesn’t account for spirituality.” Her words reminded me of what Nainoa Thompson had said about a moment he lost his bearings on the 1980 voyage to Tahiti aboard the Hōkūleʻa, about the mysterious “levels of navigation that are realms of the spirit.”
Despite her twelve years of experience and captaining the Hikianalia through the deep sea over twenty-four hundred miles, Baybayan makes a living at home on Maui as a server at the Feast at Lele, a nightly banquet where tourists are treated to traditional hula dancing depicting the history of Polynesian migration and eat Kalua pig and poke ‘ahi. On some nights she performs at the Westin Ka’anapali Ocean Resort, offering guests a chance to learn “Stellar Navigation.” Few people, it seems, have found a way to survive and support a family voyaging canoes in the modern world. “If the voyaging societies were successful, then we would have voyaging canoes out there,” she said, nodding her head toward the empty stretch of ocean behind us. “Every day we would be getting a different group of kids.” She pauses. “It’s scary, the fragility of this knowledge, because if you don’t take care of it, you lose it. We’re fighting hard.”
* * *
Five thousand miles from Maui, I sat on a sloping grass field on the southern side of Governor’s Island eating fried chicken, musubi, kimchi, and chunks of sweet pineapple, watching men and women dancing traditional hula while we all waited for the Hōkūleʻa. As word spread among us that the canoe would soon be swinging by the island, everyone moved to the waterside, the lower Manhattan skyline gleaming in the sun, and began to chant a blessing, wishing the crew of the Hōkūleʻa safety on the next leg of their journey.
Then the giant canoe came into view, its two red crab claw–like sails pregnant with the wind, cutting across the choppy channel with incredible power and speed. As it passed by us, a crew member stood on the bow, puffed his chest, and blew into a conch shell, and the sound was carried by the wind across the water to us.
The dissonance between the proud boat sailing in front of the steel and glass infrastructure of the world’s most powerful economic center was startling, and more beautiful than I imagined. I thought about something Anthony had said: for Pacific Islanders, the canoe itself is an island in the ocean, and that island is precious, a means of survival, one that makes us human. And the canoe-as-an-island is a metaphor that can be extended to a much greater scale, for what is the earth if not a kind of canoe upon which we are all floating in a sea of space, bound together by a shared destiny? He said, “What if it’s not just Hawaii, not just Polynesia, not just the Pacific, what if that perspective was common to people all around the planet?”
Then the Hōkūleʻa, simultaneously a representation of an ancient past, a symbol of resistance to the present, and the crucible for so many people’s hope for the future, disappeared out of sight.
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