Oceania’s wayfinding skills
The art of getting a vessel and its occupants from one place on a vast ocean to another
Quite how the Pacific Ocean’s early long-distance mariners found their way so impressively will never be precisely known. Islanders had no written language, and by the time Europeans arrived in the Pacific, the colonization of the last habitable islands of Oceania had all but ended. Widespread open-ocean voyaging between archipelagoes using traditional wayfinding techniques still persisted—European mariners were greatly impressed by Polynesian seafarers’ knowledge of the night sky and of their maritime environment. But the voyaging soon came to an end—due to, among other things, catastrophic population crashes in Polynesia caused by introduced diseases.
Only in parts of Micronesia did an active body of navigation knowledge persist just long enough into the modern age to be systematically recorded and learned. Thanks to that luck, and to parsing oral narratives of migration, Western ethnological records, archaeological evidence and, in recent years, trial-and-error efforts on the water, an understanding of how Pacific voyagers accomplished their navigational feats has deepened.
Pacific navigators had none of the essentials of Western navigation: no compass for following a course, no sextant for estimating latitude, no chronometer for longitude. That fact has led observers to notice the dissimilarities between Western and Pacific seafaring. In reality, the key stages of making a traditional Pacific voyage are recognisably the same as those of a Western one. Nicholas Thomas sums them up in “Voyagers: the Settlement of the Pacific” as: orientation or course-setting; maintaining a course once it has been determined; and making landfall. Any modern sailor, even one reliant on GPS, would recognise them.
Still, the potential for mutual confusion starts at the beginning. For course-setting, a modern sailor will use the abstraction of laying a course on her paper chart or, more likely these days, her laptop. But Pacific navigators had no charts. Mr Thomas reports how in 1821 an English missionary, John Williams, called at Atiu in the Cook Islands. A local chief, Rongomatane, offered to direct the Europeans to Rarotonga. The largest of the Cook Islands lay a day-and-a-half’s sail away on a course of south-west by west, yet Rongomatane was pointing in all sorts of directions, to the Europeans’ bafflement.
What they failed to understand was the importance of jumping-off points, with specific landmarks essential for orientation. For instance, the summit of a hill would have to be in line with a spit of land on the shore or even with a rock that had been moved to a particular spot. Rongomatane took Williams’s schooner down the coast to the starting-point, where he had the vessel manoeuvred into place. “When his marks on the shore ranged with each other,” Williams wrote, “he cried out, ‘That’s it! That is it!’ I looked immediately at the compass, and found the course to be S.W. by W.” Today a rising Hawaiian navigator, Kala Baybayan Tanaka, explains how prominent rocks long known to be essential to course-setting have sacred value to her island communities.
Using a back-transit (ie, lining up two features behind you and keeping them in line as you sail away) serves for as long as landmarks are visible astern. After that, stars take over. Because of Earth’s rotation, stars rise in the east and set in the west, each one meeting pretty much the same point on the horizon at any given latitude. And so at night ocean navigators orient themselves using rising or setting stars and constellations. When a star rises too high in the night sky to be of use, another one on the horizon is pressed into service.
Star courses are laid down for different destinations. A big part of a navigator’s training is in learning the night sky and star courses. On land, a “star-compass” is laid out rather like a compass rose to aid memorisation of stars and their positions when they rise and set. Where there is a cross-wind or known cross-current, the star course makes allowance for leeway (the sideways component of a sailing boat’s movement) or set. Peia Patai, a Cook Islands navigator, has a star-compass motif tattooed impressively around his belly button. He knows to recognise and steer by many dozens of stars, many of whose traditional names have been forgotten. Earlier navigators knew and used perhaps 120 stars.
Dead reckoning is a means of tracking a vessel’s progress that is well-known to Western sailors—using bearing and speed to estimate position. In the Caroline Islands a remarkable variant exists, known as the etak system, as Ben Finney in “Vaka Moana”, a compendium on Pacific voyaging and settlement, explains. When travelling to a distant island a “reference” island is chosen roughly mid-way between starting-point and target, but well off to one side—indeed, it is usually invisible. With the vessel heading to his destination, the bearing of the reference island changes, as do the chosen stars that rise or set beyond it. The exercise usefully divides the voyage into segments, or etak. In a further, impressively abstract, evolution, Peia explains, if no physical reference island exists, you simply invent one, to serve the same purpose.
During the day, or when the night-sky is clouded over, wayfinders must steer in relation to a swell. These are travelling waves, a form of energy imparted by distant wind and weather systems. Disparate swells may overlap with each other, as well as with the waves being generated by the present wind driving the craft. Few Western-style sailors are even remotely as attuned to the complex interplay of swells as are Pacific navigators. Pacific teachers these days often make their students drift on the ocean for hours on their backs, to gain a more visceral feel of swell movements.
Waves are also important for landfinding. A sea that flattens might suggest that an out-of-sight island is blocking the long ocean swell (atolls are rarely visible more than ten miles out, but their dampening effect on upwind swells reaches farther). What is more, swells can refract around invisible land or bounce back to criss-cross with the incoming swell—an effect you can observe in miniature by watching how waves bounce off a harbour wall. Other signs of land include cloud formations and even the green of coconut stands reflected on the underside of distant clouds. Seabirds, too, give vital clues about the presence of land: fairy terns and noddies rarely fly further than 30 nautical miles (55.6km) from land, frigate birds and boobies considerably more. Evening flights of nesting birds can point the way to land.
Like aiming for a bigger target, finding a cluster of atolls is always easier than making for a single speck. But that Pacific navigators routinely did both, over great expanses of ocean, remains staggering. No wonder great status accrued to them on finding new land. A modern-style navigator at the end of a voyage is lucky if she is stood the first round at the Bar du Port.
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The best sailors in the world
Why the vaka, vehicle for the extraordinary story of the peopling of Oceania, is enjoying a revival
“No alcohol, no smoking, no drugs, no sex: the vaka is a marae!” The instructions for the crew of Paikea are clear. A marae is the name given to a communal sacred space in Polynesian or Maori culture. Though usually a place ashore, this 40-foot replica of a traditional Polynesian double-hulled sailing canoe, known as a vaka, va’a or waka, feels hallowed enough as this author takes the first night-watch, drifting hove-to away from the breaking reef off tiny Mitiaro, one of the Cook Islands’ remoter territories.
The eight-strong crew have just returned full-bellied from a feast thrown by the 130 islanders that consisted of a whole roast pig, fowl, taro and fish; plus prayers, speechifying, Maori songs in pure harmonies and laughter. The farewell from the quay still rings in the watch’s ears as a carpet of stars reels overhead. A humpback whale with her calf blows by the boat. And a rumble comes from the deckhut of one of the Pacific Ocean’s most revered navigators, Peia Patai (pictured).
A couple of hours later Peia commands the crew to make sail for Atiu, over the horizon to the south-west. Seeing his chosen star rising, he tells the helmsman to steer for it. Soon Paikea is lolloping over the swell. Peia sits at the port stern quarter, looking up at the sky and over at the cross-swells, giving occasional orders to the helmsman wrestling with the huge wooden steering paddle. At dawn the island appears. The ritual of welcome, feasting and feting will surely begin again.
Paikea, run by the Te Puna Marama Voyaging Foundation on Rarotonga, largest of the Cook Islands, is part of a revival in sailing skills and traditional navigation. The revival began in Hawaii in the 1970s but has since gathered pace across Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia. The story of the settlement by long-distance voyagers of island Oceania is unparalleled. They had no compass, sextant or chronometer. Rather, they relied on a deep understanding of sea swells, on clouds, on the flights of birds and, above all, on the star-compass, the nightly turning of the firmament.
Much of the knowledge was closely guarded and often hereditary. But in the Cook Islands, as elsewhere, it was nearly all lost. With the advent of European and American traders, missionaries and rulers, long-distance exchange ceased or, increasingly, took place on modern vessels and on Western terms. Today the arrival of Paikea, named after a whale-riding demigod, symbolises the ancestral means by which the islanders came to be where they are. She is greeted with joy.
Captain James Cook was the first European to call at Atiu, in 1777. Many, including this author, were taught at school that it was European explorers who opened up the Pacific. In reality the arrival of the Europeans came just when the last—and most impressive—settlement in human history was coming to an end: the peopling of the remote islands of the Pacific. The settlement happened across much of an ocean that encompasses a third of the Earth’s surface. Those who undertook it had embraced entirely new maritime technologies and survival skills enabling long-distance voyaging, dependable navigation and the means of successful colonisation when they made landfall. The navigation relied, above all, on a deep, learned knowledge of how and where the sun, stars, moon and planets rise and set. And so, as K.R. Howe, a historian, writes, as well as marking the conclusion of our terrestrial settlement, Polynesians’ expansion marked the beginning of our extraterrestrial journey too.
The peopling of the remote islands of the Pacific began around 1500bc and seems to have happened in two wild bursts. Along the way Hawaii was discovered and settled after 900ad and New Zealand around 1200, from jumping-off points in east-central Polynesia. By then Polynesians had even made it to the Americas.
By the time the Europeans showed up the Polynesian expansion was largely over. It was plain to Cook that the peoples of much of Oceania were, in terms of looks, language and myths, “the same nation”. Cook yearned to know more about their provenance, though not as much as Pacific islanders do today. Curiosity and pride about roots encompasses the revival in the craft that enabled their existences.
Three broad island regions of Oceania are defined as Micronesia to the north-west, Melanesia to the west and Polynesia east of that. Thanks to archaeology, linguistic research and dna analysis, the shared origins of all three groups have come more sharply into focus. Islanders descend largely from Austronesian-speaking voyagers whose linguistic roots trace back to Taiwan. Over millennia, ancestors pushed through South-East Asia. But a restless streak kept them moving south-east. They eventually jumped off into Oceania from the Philippines (for Micronesia) and from the easternmost tip of Papua New Guinea for the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji (Melanesia). Most of this movement was over by 1000bc, but it resumed a millennium later across what became Polynesia.
Since Cook’s time, the history of the settlement of Polynesia has been a subject of tantalising (if often wrong-headed) inquiry. Foundation myths and oral legends throw some light. Self-replicating in their general form, the legends travelled with the voyagers. From island to island gods such as Maui, who fished new land out of the sea, were recruited and repurposed to cap the founding myths of new settlements. In those myths, the settlements’ founding navigators, chiefs and shamans enjoy high status. Oral traditions support the supposition that Polynesians embarked on vakas as family bands of two dozen to 200-odd individuals, traversing hundreds or thousands of miles of open ocean to inhabit new island groups.
Yet legends help little in confirming the timing and sequencing of settlement. Archaeological and linguistic analysis agrees that the expansion probably began in Samoa, 2,800km (1,750 miles) north of New Zealand, and ended in Easter Island, 7,000km east. But it disagrees on whether it started around 900ad and lasted a short few centuries, or whether it began much earlier and lasted longer. A genetic analysis of modern-day Polynesians, published in Nature magazine in 2021, settled many doubts about sequencing and duration.
The researchers inferred a genetic story from, in effect, looking down the wrong end of a telescope: every time a voyaging group left an already populated island for a new, uninhabited one, the genetic diversity on successive voyages would shrink even as the settlement range expanded. They were right. Their analysis suggested that the first vaka set off from Samoa in about 800ad, arriving first at the high and fertile island of Rarotonga. From there voyagers hopped in all directions, reaching Easter Island around 1210.
The story of intentional voyaging seems so extraordinary that for years many did not believe it. The theory of “accidental drift” argues that the remote Oceanic islands must have been populated by inshore fishermen or travelling warriors carried away in storms. The theory does not hold water. Vakas carried whole families. They shipped a portable landscape of pigs, fowl and dogs along with breadfruit, coconut and the pandanus tree (for sails, rope and cloth). Such species were vital to life on impoverished island biomes. It is hard to imagine they were brought by chance.
Computer simulations of ocean currents blew another hole in the theory of accidental drift; genetic analysis underscoring the purposefulness of settlement sank it. Yet the naysayers set in train a remarkable group of sailors, scholars and cultural leaders determined to show that their ancestors knew what they were doing and to revive old navigational techniques.
It was almost too late. Across Polynesia the acquired navigational techniques had largely died out. But in the 1960s a New Zealand doctor and long-distance sailor, David Lewis, found the practices living on among a tiny handful of old navigators in the extensive Caroline Islands in Micronesia. One navigator, Tevake, arrived for a voyage among the islands on Lewis’s boat with “15 people, including sleepy children, wailing babies and a new bride recently purchased with feather money”. On deck squalls and a veering wind paralysed Lewis’s sense of direction. By contrast Tevaka stood with his feet wide apart, setting the course in relation to a cross-swell which Lewis had not even noticed. (Navigators, famously, would lean their testicles on the moving boat to divine the cross-swells.)
We must take the current
In 1976 another navigator known to Lewis from the same islands, Mau Piailug, joined the Hokulea, commissioned by the Hawaii-based Polynesian Voyaging Society, and guided her on a trip from Hawaii to Tahiti, over 4,000km apart. Four years later, his student, Nainoa Thompson, the first Hawaiian navigator in six centuries, accomplished the same. Mau Piailug spotted Peia’s promise; Mr Thompson was his chief teacher; and in 2011 Peia was initiated as a master navigator.
Though some claim it was, navigation was probably never an exclusively male preserve. Peia points out that in Micronesia, even if men sailed more than women did on inter-island voyages, women held the knowledge as an insurance against menfolk being lost at sea. And consider, says Sean Mallon, curator of voyaging at New Zealand’s national museum, the country’s Maori name, Aotearoa: “long, white cloud”. New Zealand is said to have been discovered by Kupe, a legendary Polynesian navigator. But, in the story, it is his wife who declares, sensing land beneath it: “A cloud, a cloud, a white cloud—a long, white cloud!” Today, new generations of women navigators are on the rise.
The vaka revival is striking. A generation ago old navigational knowledge in the Pacific hung by a thread. Just a few navigators such as Mr Thompson and Peia helped keep that thread from snapping. Certainly much traditional knowledge is lost, but much has been relearned or—it hardly matters—reinvented.
More importantly, the revival has fostered a cultural renaissance around a Pacific spirit better able to face shared challenges, climate change above all. In an age where, elsewhere, unscrupulous leaders seek potency by emphasising the separateness of identities, the vaka are helping reimagine a Pacific identity defined, as Nicholas Thomas, an anthropologist, puts it, by our capacity to connect. That’s a star worth steering by. ■
