Navigating by nature: the Pacific wayfinders
When European explorers entered the Pacific Ocean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were astonished to find that almost every habitable island, however remote, was already occupied. From Hawaii in the north to New Zealand in the south and Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, in the east, people sharing closely related languages and cultures had settled a vast triangle of ocean whose sides each measure several thousand kilometres. How they had done so, without compasses, charts or any form of writing, became one of the great puzzles of Pacific history.
For a long time, many outsiders refused to believe that the islanders had reached their homes deliberately. Some nineteenth-century writers proposed that the Polynesians must have come from a lost continent that had since sunk beneath the waves. In the mid-twentieth century, a more sceptical theory gained influence: that the islands had been settled by accident, as canoes blown off course by storms drifted until they happened to strike land. On this view, purposeful navigation over thousands of kilometres of open sea was simply impossible without instruments, and the settlement of the Pacific was the result of countless unplanned voyages, most of which must have ended in disaster.
The drift theory began to lose support in the 1970s, for two main reasons. The first was a series of computer simulations that modelled the paths of thousands of imaginary canoes drifting with the prevailing winds and currents. Very few of them reached the more remote island groups, and some, such as Hawaii and New Zealand, were almost never reached by drift at all. The second was more dramatic. In 1976, a double-hulled voyaging canoe called Hōkūleʻa, built according to traditional designs, sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti, a distance of more than 4,000 kilometres, without any modern instruments. Its navigator, Mau Piailug, came from a small island in Micronesia where traditional wayfinding had survived, and he guided the canoe using only his knowledge of the sea and sky.
The methods that Piailug and others have described are remarkable for their range and subtlety. At night, navigators steer by the points on the horizon where particular stars rise and set. Because each star always rises at the same point, a navigator who has memorised the rising and setting positions of dozens of stars possesses, in effect, a compass in his head. During the day, or when the sky is cloudy, attention shifts to the ocean swells: long, regular waves generated by distant weather systems, which can keep a constant direction for days. Experienced navigators are able to feel these swells through the movement of the canoe, sometimes lying down in the hull to sense them more clearly, and can distinguish several swells crossing one another at once.
Finding a small island at the end of a long voyage poses a different problem, since even a slight error in direction could cause a canoe to pass it by. Here, navigators rely on signs that effectively enlarge the target. Certain seabirds, for example, fly out to sea to fish in the morning and return to land at dusk, so a navigator who sees them in the evening knows which direction to follow. Clouds tend to gather and remain stationary over high islands, and the underside of a cloud above a shallow lagoon may take on a faint greenish tint. Swells, too, are altered as they bend around an island, creating patterns that a skilled navigator can detect long before land is visible. An island that is only a few kilometres wide may thus announce its presence across an area many times larger.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the tradition, however, is the way navigators conceive of the journey itself. In the system used in parts of Micronesia, the navigator imagines the canoe as stationary while the islands move past it. A reference island, out of sight to one side, is pictured as travelling backwards beneath a sequence of stars as the voyage progresses, allowing the navigator to track his progress. To Western observers trained to think of a ship moving across a fixed map, this seemed at first a strange way of thinking. Researchers such as the anthropologist Dr Ruth Calder have argued, however, that it is no less logical: it is simply a different frame of reference, well suited to a world without charts.
Since the voyage of Hōkūleʻa, traditional navigation has undergone a revival across the Pacific. Piailug, breaking with the custom that such knowledge should be passed on only within particular families, agreed to teach students from other islands, and a new generation of navigators has since completed long voyages of its own. For many Pacific islanders, the revival has become a source of cultural pride, a demonstration that their ancestors were not lost sailors at the mercy of the wind but among the most accomplished explorers in human history. The puzzle that once seemed so baffling to outsiders has turned out to have a simple answer: the islanders found their way because they knew how.