The Pacific Islands - Part 2 - Navigating the Pacific

The only two things the people needed were the double canoe and a skilled navigator. These Polynesian navigators had developed over centuries a sophisticated system of navigation based on spatial orientation.

The knowledge of the sky was an important and hard core oral tradition for them, with the training of a navigator beginning at 12 years of age and taking 20 years to become proficient in, due to the bulk of information he had to familiar himself with. This included everything there was to know about :

• the workings of the double canoe
• the positions and movements of the several hundred stars in the sky
• reefs
• ocean currents
• coastal observations
• bird identification

and so on.

The photo is of Hokuleia, the Polynesian Voyaging Society's first canoe. The society built it, then sailed it in 1976 to prove that Polynesian navigation over long distances was possible without the use of western instruments.

The 1976 trip covered 5,000 miles between Hawai'i and Tahiti and proved that such trips were possible. If this interests you, you might want to read about Thor Heyerdahl, who beat the society to it in 1947 in the Easter Island section.

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