The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

sailors.
    That people were able to make so many minute landfalls again and again was due to their outstanding familiarity with the ocean environment and their ability to “expand” the size of their intended landfalls by relying on phenomena other than direct visual contact with their destination. This esoteric knowledge was transmitted orally to a select few from one generation to the next. Some of these techniques are common to other maritime traditions—following birds that feed at sea but nest on land, noting where different species of fish or sea mammals are found, looking for smoke generated by natural fires, or discerning changes in water color over reefs. In the Pacific, sailors developed the ability to read the patterns ofocean swells and how these change as they are deflected when passing islands. Clouds can announce the presence of islands lying below the horizon by shifts in color, speed, and shape. Finally, there is the “loom” of an island, a faint but telltale column of light above islands, especiallyatolls withlagoons. Taken together, these phenomena widen the range at which sailors can sense the presence of land by as much as thirty miles, which increases dramatically the likelihood of finding even the smallest speck in the sea.
    But locating land at a distance is not the same as purposefully navigating from one island to another, which the sailors of Oceania accomplished by observation of both the environment and the heavens. Their approach to celestial navigation requires memorizing “the direction of every known island from every other one.” An island’s bearing relative to another is determined by the rising or setting star under which the island lies relative to the observer. When sailing between two islands, a third is chosen as the
etak
, or reference island. The navigator knows the stars under which the
etak
lies in relation to the islands of departure and destination, as well as the stars under which the
etak
lies at various stages of the passage between them. Thus a passage is broken into a series of
etak
stages. Using
etak
depends on knowing how all known islands are related to one another with respect to different stars, so a navigator sailing between, for example, theCaroline Islands of Woleai and Olimarao (117 miles apart) would use Faraulep (70 miles to the north) as the
etak;
but when sailing from Olimarao to Faraulep, Woleai would be the
etak.
    Sailors in different areas of the Pacific tended to apply different methods of traditional navigation. Among the few remaining practitioners today,Marshall Islanders pay most attention to ocean swells, while sailors in the Federated States ofMicronesia rely more on the rising and setting of stars. Starting in the 1970s, researchers began interviewing and sailing with the last adepts of traditional navigation to learn their secrets and determine whether these were reliable enough for the sorts of voyages necessary to maintain contact between islands separated by many hundreds of miles of open water. In 1976, thePolynesian Voyaging Society built the
Hokule’a,
adouble canoe rigged with clawsails, which sailed from Hawaii via the Tuamotus toTahiti, about twenty-four hundred miles.Mau Piailug, a wayfinder from Satawal (an island of about four square kilometers) in the Carolines, navigated the
Hokule’a
across the northeast trade winds, the equator, and then into the southeast trades before they made Tahiti, thirty-four days out from Maui. In 1985, a Hawaiian student ofPiailug’s namedNainoa Thompson navigated the
Hokule’a
on an expedition that covered many of the old routes within Polynesia—sixteen thousand miles’ worth—between theCook Islands, New Zealand,Tonga,Samoa, Tahiti, and the Tuamotus. In 1999, the Polynesian triangle was closed with a voyage from Hawaii toEaster Island via the Marquesas. The successful completion of these voyages, among others, proved that early sailors relying on an orally transmitted body of navigational