Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  But by the 1970s, his assertions were losing ground; his ideas were being ridiculed, in the face of much other evidence, both genetic and linguistic, together with a growing belief that Pacific islanders had once had supreme navigational skills. These skills, it was thought, could well have brought the Melanesians, the Micronesians, and most especially the Polynesians to their mid-ocean homes not by accident of drifting, but by deliberate feats of good seamanship. Moreover, their navigation had brought them not from the far shores of the Americas, but from Asia.

  If this was true, the feat of these seaman was considerable, the stuff of legend. Five thousand years BP (using the new dating convention with which I began this book; 3000 BC as it used to be), islanders from the archipelagos of the Philippines and in the South China Sea had started moving both westward and eastward in canoes, populating as they did islands in the Indian Ocean as far away as Madagascar, and in the Pacific Ocean as distant as Easter Island. The evidence for their having done so is overwhelming: pottery shards, imported animal types, and words of common origin, together with the kinds of boats they used, of which images appear in ancient pictographs. They sailed, they paddled, they established communities, they planned return voyages, they traded, they planted gardens, and they fished.

  The southwestern Pacific Ocean was one of these migrants’ major destinations and was where, thanks to the accident of tectonic movement explained on earlier pages, the islands are arranged in rough diagonal lines, somewhat more tightly bunched together than elsewhere. To get from one group to another seldom requires a voyage of more than three hundred miles. To the early Melanesians and Papuans, as these first migrants turned out to be, such may well have seemed formidable expeditions, but the distances were not insuperable. We do not think of those who made these island-to-island voyages as mid-ocean rovers. Rather, we see them as they see themselves: as a landed people separated by expanses of sea.

  But the achievements of the early people of Polynesia are quite different, and are such as to set them very much aside. The distances for them were truly prodigious. Their present-day homeland, roughly a triangle bounded by Hawaii in the north, Easter Island to the east, and the hulking mass of New Zealand to the west (or, to use the Polynesians’ names for these last two, Rapa Nui and Aotearoa), is almost entirely marine, nearly all aqueous. Perhaps a new word should be coined for where such people live: they inhabit not a homeland but a home sea, in this case an expanse of fourteen million square miles of ocean, dusted with islands that are few and almost all far between. With the single exception of New Zealand, one statistic underlines the way in which Polynesia is so different: for every two square miles of land, there are fully a thousand square miles of sea, making it remarkable that so much of the land is inhabited. For how on earth (though perhaps not the best turn of phrase) did all these people get there?

  Captain James Cook had an early inkling. In the Tahitian Islands, on his first voyage to the South Seas in 1769, he took aboard a Raiatean priest named Tupaia and discovered that the holy man had a quite extraordinary knowledge of all the surrounding islands, and an uncanny ability to tell directions from one to the other. Joseph Banks, the Endeavour’s resident scientist, was amazed at Tupaia’s talents: “[W]hat makes him more than anything else desirable is his experience in the navigation of these people and Knowledge of the islands in these Seas; he has told us the names of above 70, the most of which he has been at.”

  Tupaia, who traveled with Cook all the way to Indonesia, then astonished the captain still further by drawing him a map of the ocean that extended for more than two thousand miles, side to side, and showed all the major island groups (Fiji, Tonga, the Marquesas) that Cook hadn’t thus far found himself. This remarkable man died of fever in Jakarta (Batavia, as it then was). But he left Cook and Banks with a firm impression that there were navigators on these islands who had special skills, who could get themselves around the ocean without the use of clocks, sextants, compasses, or any of the newfangled devices that were enabling Westerners to explore and conquer the world. Men such as Tupaia did it all by looking at the sea, at the stars, and at the passing fish and birds. From the evidence of nature and nature alone, men like him could wander their world at ease and settle its islands with deliberate purpose.

  But for the more than two centuries that followed, the West was openly scornful of this notion. No one could be so clever, they thought, as to sail with purpose across seas so vast as these—certainly not people so backward and savage as the near-naked islanders they encountered in mid-ocean. No doubt they were excellent boat builders, their canoe constructions of great elegance and strength, their sails and paddles and arrangements of outriggers enabling them to slide through the waves with elegance and speed. But as for navigating across thousands of miles of open water to settle themselves? That was just impossible to imagine.

  Even Captain Cook, on his subsequent voyages, said he thought that most of Polynesia had been settled not on purpose, but by castaways. The island populations he and his brother explorers happened upon in all their later expeditions could have reached such places as Hawaii and Easter Island only by drifting there, by allowing the currents and the winds to take them, and they had settled down only by luck and happenstance. Their journeys were invariably one-way only; were haphazard in their routes and random in their destinations. This was the fixed belief into modern times; Kon-Tiki was an attempt—a failed one, as it happens—to prove that the islands had been populated by drifters from the Americas. Accidental driftings from somewhere—that was the belief.

  This thinking was careless and patently absurd: the currents and winds would actually make it impossible for a Polynesian craft coming from the south to happen upon Hawaii. But it seldom occurred to those who discounted the islanders’ acumen. The stubborn minds of most Western intruders simply could not grasp—largely because of their belief in their own racial superiority—that any skills other than their own were worthy of consideration or respect.

  But as it happens, navigating was a well-honed skill in Polynesia; had been so for hundreds of years; was an integral part of the sagas, songs, and poetry of the islanders; was taught and learned in schools; had a name (the skill known as ppwo, its initiated practitioners as ppalu); and was key to all travel and settling within the Polynesian triangle. Yet ironically it was a skill that had swiftly diminished as Western empire builders ever more firmly impressed themselves on the Pacific, and mainly for reasons of colonizers’ administrative convenience.

  The locals’ navigational skills started to vanish—a self-fulfilling prophecy—for the simple reason that incoming Westerners banned inter-island canoe travel by their subjects. The Germans, the Japanese, and in some places also the British and the French decided that it was far too dangerous to have island boats set off at will on voyages that were not sanctioned in advance. As well as being risky, incurring maybe a charge on the parish or on insurance firms, it might well require the carrying by crewmen of passports or laissez-passers or other permissions. One Polynesian island might be run by the German authorities, another by the British, a third by the French—it would create mayhem if islanders were to paddle and sail between them willy-nilly.

  All of a sudden the informal and unstructured Polynesian nation, which inhabited areas of ocean as large as Russia, or the size of the North and South American continents combined, was quite swept away. Acting, as they would say, in the best interests of order and good governance, the new European masters kept their islanders on the islands to which they, the Europeans, felt they belonged—and as a result, for the islanders, something of their precious essence died.

  The main casualty was the skill of the navigator. The elders—much revered in Pacific cultures, since they were the possessors of what some today call “the original instructions” on the conduct of traditional life—allowed their knowledge of the sea to wither away. By the 1970s it was said to be essentially moribund. Pacific Islanders had become involuntary components of twentieth-centu
ry culture, and their ancient sailing skills—wayfinding, as it was known—had all but vanished.

  Except that, as a group of eager young Hawaiians discovered in the early 1970s, there were one or two ppalu still living who knew the secrets. One was a forty-year-old Yapese named Pius Piailug, who had been initiated in the mysteries of wayfinding when he was six years old. He was revered as a master navigator on the island of Satawal, in the Carolines. Though he was still young enough and spry enough to think of imparting his knowledge to others, few on his tiny island—only four hundred people then lived there, eking out a living fishing and gathering coconuts—seemed to want to learn, and he fully expected that his knowledge would die with him. He would be among the last of the navigators in the Polynesian world.

  Then came a curious concatenation of circumstances. He took a job as a seaman on an inter-island steamship—by now he had assumed the nickname Mau, signifying his strength as a master outrigger handler. While at sea, journeying among Yap and Chuuk and Kosrae and a host of smaller Micronesian islands, he met and became friends with an American Peace Corps worker named Mike McCoy. The two talked often of the secret mysteries of the noninstrumental navigation that Mau had learned. McCoy, fascinated, then wrote an essay about the technique. The essay attracted the attention of an American anthropologist in Honolulu, Ben Finney, who was just then playing his part in the so-called Second Hawaiian Renaissance, a somewhat faltering movement trying to remind native Hawaiians of their heritage.

  The connection led to an unexpected invitation that landed one day in 1974 at Mau Piailug’s front door, and that had to be dictated to him, since he read no English. Would he care to be flown up and across to Honolulu, to help plan Hawaii’s celebration of the American Bicentennial? For it happened that a new-formed group of Hawaiians, with Ben Finney among them, and all eager to display themselves as supporters of the Polynesian cultural diaspora, had decided on an expedition. They would try to make a twenty-six-hundred-mile journey from Hawaii to Tahiti in a traditional sailing canoe, using no navigational instruments at all. No such thing had been accomplished for six hundred years. Yet having a skilled navigator such as Mau Piailug aboard should give the project a good chance of success.

  Mau jumped at the chance. He agreed, and flew right away to Hawaii, first to meet the men and women who had established the Polynesian Voyaging Society, which had organized the building of the Hokule‘a and had then convinced the state government that, with an inaugural celebratory navigation to Tahiti, a renewed sense of pride could be instilled in the native Hawaiian people. If this voyage succeeded, the Voyaging Society argued, thousands of potentially disaffected native Hawaiians (the young, most especially—members of what back in the 1970s was a forlorn underclass of Hawaiian Islands society) might well rally to the cause. The venture had romance and beauty to it, after all. Some might indeed become navigators themselves, and all might reassert their newfound personae not so much as Americans, but now as reborn Polynesians.

  To that extent, the Hokule‘a was to be a symbol. Mau Piailug would be the man who would first help the craft and the crew sail the twenty-six hundred miles south to Tahiti. He might also teach his skills to the canoe’s crew and to others, so that the Hokule‘a could evolve from being simply a symbol and become a catalyst for a profound and ocean-wide cultural reaction.

  The basis for noninstrumental navigation, hard to learn but impossible to forget, is a deep knowledge of the sea. Navigators had to know the feel of the ocean, how its waves and swells pressed against the hull of a boat. Those who knew Mau when he was back down in the Caroline waters said he was often to be found lying, apparently asleep, deep down in his boat’s bilges. When approached, he would raise a hushing finger to his lips: he was carefully listening, hearing, feeling the waters rumble beneath him, learning from their sounds how they were going, which way, at what strength. There was much more to it of course. A navigator had to have an intimate knowledge of the stars, had to be familiar with all winds and the caprices of weather, had to know much about the wildlife (birds, most especially) that was to be seen in and above the ocean.

  All were equally important—except the stars were the most important. And in that one regard, Mau Piailug was for a while found wanting. The stars he knew, and the ones his brother navigators in Hawaii and the Carolines knew, were those of the Northern Hemisphere. Tahiti, however, was south of the equator, and the skies there were different, and wholly unknown to the man from Satawal.

  Yet there was an easy solution. The Bishop Museum in Honolulu had a planetarium, and for several weeks in 1975, Mau and his would-be navigator colleagues went there to study the stars of the Southern Hemisphere, as the projector whirled them across the horizons and through the zeniths and meridians and along their azimuthal arcs. The misshapen cruciform pattern of the Southern Cross became the new lodestar, replacing Polaris of the northern horizon. By the early summer of 1976, Mau pronounced himself sufficiently familiar with the skies to begin the journey.

  The Hokule‘a was ready, too. In appearance she was entirely traditional: she had been built to resemble two large voyaging canoes pictured in Captain Cook’s journals, which he had seen in Tonga and Tahiti two centuries before. But the construction was not entirely traditional: performance accuracy had been the byword during her building, so while there was plenty of bamboo and oak, sailcloth and coir, there was also nylon and fiberglass, Dacron and plywood. Her hulls, however, had been given their enormous strength by immense timbers sent down to the Hawaiians by a group of Alaskan Indians, in a gesture of pan-Pacific kinship.

  On May 1, 1976, her twin claw sails were unbrailed, and after ceremonial quaffing of ‘ava—their last alcohol, because from now on, both strong drink and the company of women were forbidden—the craft set sail from Maui. There were two brawny Hawaiians at the steering sweeps, and the diminutive Mau Piailug at the helm. He was to guide them over the huge distance into the Southern Hemisphere and to the gathering of French possessions that were their intended target. They were seventeen men aboard, together with a dog and a pig (which were both spectacularly seasick for the first week of the trip), and two chickens. They also took, as gifts, plants they hoped would flourish on Tahiti: breadfruit seedlings, yams, tiny coconut palms, and mulberry tree seeds. Their diaries and the ship’s log they kept have a curious absence about them: they were never able to record the times of any of the happenings aboard, since they had no watches or clocks. As with all the instruments that could possibly help them—and from an analog watch, of course, one can always deduce direction—these had been left behind, on land.

  Mau Piailug assembled a hammock of knotted cords and slept outside, at the boat’s stern, for the entire journey. He spent his days contemplating the swells and the clouds, feeling the breeze, watching for birds. He would occasionally nudge the steersmen to turn their sweeps a little this way or that. At night he was focused on the stars, noting where they rose and set, measuring with his hands the angles at which they curved their way across the sky. Once the canoe had passed across the equator and the four arms of the Southern Cross began to appear on the horizon, he murmured with pleasure: it was just as the Bishop planetarium had predicted, the sky not as unfamiliar as he had feared.

  He judged the speed by eye, the distance traveled by no more than dead reckoning. Each day at noon—the sun would tell him it was noon, in its brief overhead pause at its zenith in the sky—he would announce to the rest of the crew just where they were, usually in reference to a cape or a headland left far behind. As the voyage progressed, he forecast the number of days left before the Hokule‘a left the trade winds, or entered the doldrums; and then he finally offered up a bearing for the Tuamotus, and then for Tahiti. The crew was perpetually astonished: the ancient technique still worked, flawlessly. Mau could guide them over all these thousands of miles of trackless water, knowing all the while exactly where he was, and almost precisely when he would reach his destination.

  It took exactly a month for the craf
t to make it first landfall. The swells were suddenly interrupted. A pair of terns flew by. A line of black was etched onto the horizon shortly before dawn on June 1, 1976. The razor-sharp reefs, adroitly avoided, encircled the tiny Tuamotuan island of Mataiva, which was reached on time and exactly as predicted. Tahiti was just 170 miles away from here, and the Hokule‘a did the journey in one more day, reaching the port of Papeete and a wild celebration of sheer ecstasy, as every pure Polynesian within a hundred miles came down to the dock to offer congratulations and profound thanks for a journey well accomplished. Seventeen thousand people, half the island’s population, turned out.

  Perhaps no other state in the Union could have offered a more satisfying celebration that Bicentennial year—yet it was more a celebration of Polynesian than American identity. This point was not lost on the Hawaiians when the boat returned later that summer: the spirit of the Hawaiian Renaissance, inaugurated so recently, took immediate hold, and still flourishes today.

  The Hokule‘a has made many journeys in the years since. A young native Hawaiian named Nainoa Thompson, who helped bring the boat back to Hawaii after that first voyage (and who used navigational instruments on the return trip, to test the mixing of the two techniques), would become Mau Piailug’s heir and successor. Under his captaincy, the Hokule‘a has made ten more journeys, most as successful as the first,1 though to much more distant destinations. Nainoa Thompson made his own first solo voyages to and from Tahiti in 1980; after that there were journeys across to Tonga; to the west coasts of America and Canada; a very trying trip over to Easter Island in 2000; then, in 2007, to Yap and to Satawal, where the now ailing Mau Piailug—he would die in 2010—was presented with an award for having initiated all this; and then on to Japan.

  Here came an epiphany for all. For as the boat slid into and out of port after port along the southern Japanese coast, she transmitted a singular message, if unwittingly, to the Japanese people. The message transcended the simple novelty of the event, remarkable though it might be, of a ship being sailed all the way from Micronesia to Yokohama without anyone aboard having a compass, a sextant, or a watch. What so impressed the Japanese was the realization, the reminder, that they were a Pacific people, too, just as were the Polynesians and the Micronesians, the Papuans and the Melanesians. They were all somehow united—practically, yes, but mystically also—by an ocean that should rightly be regarded as more of a bridge than a barrier.