From the Vault: Pacific Navigation, Part 1

My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And for a couple of episodes, maybe more. We're not sure how these things ultimately fall together, but we're gonna be talking about how humans discovered and ultimately colonized the Polynesian Islands, places we know today as uh the Islands of Hawaii, Easter Island, New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, Fiji, uh Tuvalu, and more so in our in our information

and intercontinental travel age. Though I feel like these names may seem very familiar and known, even though they might be places that we also paradoxically know are very far away. From us. We may know that they are, in many cases, you know, vastly separated from other islands. But just because we can pull up pictures of them, just because we know, we could book a flight to one of these if we so desired, Uh, they may seem closer, they may see the world may seem smaller than it actually is.

You know, there's a very limited way of imagining what planet Earth is where you know, you say, okay, somebody picture the Earth, and and what do people picture. I think they probably picture looking down at some continental part of the Earth, maybe seeing mountain ranges, maybe seeing the Sahara Dessert or something. But often people picture land, right, they picture the continents. But if you look at Earth

from space, what it's really characterized by his ocean. Ocean covers most of the Earth's surface, and there's one ocean in particular that really takes the cake. It's the Pacific Ocean. Yeah. Yeah, but but I definitely wanted to drive home just how large the territories we're talking about here, and we're when we're talking about the colonization of this region, we're not

talking about European colonization. We're talking about the original human sailors who departed from Asia and gradually settled the remainder of the world, uh, setting off into the unknown. But then also depending on navigation, some really fascinating navigation techniques that we'll get into in order to uh to to chart this region. So yeah, when you look at at a map of the globe, it depends on how you're

looking at it. Right, If you're you're taking a very um uh, North America centric version and a very North America centric globe, you're like, all right, there's the Earth, it's mostly US, it's mostly North America. But you turn it around, you uh, you turn it to the Pacific side, and you're looking at a water world, a true water world. You're you're looking at a side of the globe that is almost all Pacific Ocean. Because the Pacific Ocean is

just simply enormous. It's the largest and the deepest averse oceans. We're talking sixty three million, eight hundred thousand square miles, that's approximately a hundred and sixty five million, two hundred and fifty thousand square kilometers, and it takes up one third of Earth's surface or thirty percent of it, depending on who's doing the calculation. It contains the deepest parts of the oceans, and it contains more than half of

the world's open water supply. Specifically within the realm of of Polynesia and Micronesia, these these subdivisions of parts of Oceania, which is the you know, the region of the Pacific containing the Pacific Islands where people live, um there in this part of the world. There's an author named David Lewis whose book I'm going to refer to throughout these episodes.

But there's a part of his book where he says that if you exclude New Zealand, within Polynesia and Micronesia, there are two parts land to every one thousand parts water. Uh So this is this is an area characterized almost entirely by water, but polka dotted with these little hubs of land throughout. Yeah, various far flung islands that people were able to to eventually colonize and and and make

their home. And it's yeah, it's it's fascinating. How again, I've I've been to I've been fortunate enough to travel to you know, say that some of the Hawaiian islands and you get there and you know, they're they're amazing But but like, I don't have the experience of of just the open Pacific, of of the of the many places, the majority of the places in the Pacific Ocean where there is no side of land, where there is only

the open water. Now, you don't have to be deep into historical theories of human migration to grasp the question of like looking at all these islands in the Pacific, seeing how far away they are from each other, how how small a percent of the area of the Pacific Ocean the islands represent, and notice how many of them are populated by people, and wonder, how on earth did that happen? How did people find and settle on all

of these tiny islands in this vast ocean. Yeah, it's it's it's a fascinating question one that one that we're still exploring to this day. We're still figuring out. But we're gonna be getting in a little bit more into the history of it and certainly into the navigational techniques the amazing ways that these these ancient sailors made their

way across the open ocean. But first of all, let's let's go ahead and just drive home that while while human colonization of the Pacific Islands is one of the

most recent human migration movements in our history. It still retains, you know, more than a few mysteries and using everything from traditional histories and linguistic analysis to climate models and genetics, researchers are still continuing to try and figure out exactly how this migration occurred, when it occurred, where, uh, you know, where where we went where humans migrated to first in this and so we're going to be dealing with some tentative dates here as we we roll through, like the

basic story of human migration across the Pacific. So, according to Linda Noreene Schaefer in Maritime Southeast Asia to five hundred, this was a book that came out in the ancestors of Maleo Polynesians left the mainland to settle Um the island of Taiwan around four thousand BC, and from there they moved into what is now the Philippines and Indonesia, and then during the third millennium BC, they moved on to settle the islands uh And and Peninsula peninsulas of

what Schaefer refers to as Southeast Asia's maritime realm, and the people who remained there came to be known as the Malays. So from here we see movement of the aim people's further out into the Ocean UH, the very movement of human migration that would eventually become the Polynesians.

By fifteen hundred b C. They had reached as far as the Bismarck Archipelago north east of New Guinea and Um and Schaefer rights that within a few centuries they had spread to West Polynesia that's Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and Polynesian sailors, explorers and colonists continued and eventually they're eventually reached and colonized the far more remote eastward islands of Hawaii, UM what is now New Zealand, and what we have also come to refer to as Easter Island or Rapa Nui.

All right, so now let's try and put some dates on all of this. But of course all of this is UH is playing out over a long period of time, and it's still an area of ongoing study and discussion, So these dates are tended. In schaefer work, Some of the estimated dates she sites include Rapa Nui around five hundred CE, although estimates seem I've seen estimates that suggest as early as three hundred c E. And then uh in ninete, the University of Hawaii's Dennis um Kawajarada suggested

the following dates. He says, Okay, hundreds and gathers inhabited Australia and New Guinea by fifty thousand years ago, and then around the between sixteen hundred and twelve hundred b c E. A cultural complex called Lapita had spread from New Guinea in Melanesia to as far east as Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga, and then Polynesian culture developed at the eastern

edge of this region. And then he says that around three hundred b C. Or earlier, seafares from Samoa and Tonga discovered and settled islands to the east what are known now it's the Cook Islands, uh Tahiti, Nui, uh To, Omotos and Hiva. And then around three hundred sea or earlier, voyagers from central or eastern Polynesia discovered in settled eastern island, and then around four hundred sea or earlier, voyagers from the Cook Islands Tahiti, Nua and or He settled Hawaii.

And then around one thousand CE or earlier, he wrote that the voyagers from the Society Islands and or the Cook Islands settled what is now in New Zealand. Now again, these are just tentative dates. Um. There. You know, there's been a lot of other work. For instance, according to the University of Hawaii at Manoa anthropologist Terry Hunt, and this is via Hokalua dot com, which will refer back

to that website some more in the future. Uh. They were part of a radio carbon study looking at artifacts from the island and they adjusted some of the suggested timelines based on that work, ultimately arguing for a more rapid and recent colonization of the outer islands. Specifically, he proposed Samoa around eight hundred b c e, the Central Society Islands between ten and eleven twenty, and dispersal into New Zealand, Hawaii and Rapa Nui in other locations between

eleven ninety and twelve nineties. Um, and I've seen twelve hundred CE is sometimes cited as the most recent possibilit pity for Rappa Newly colonization. And so yeah, I know we're hitting every one of a lot of dates here. I highly suggest going out on your own and finding some of these sources and pouring over them in more detail if you want to get get a clear picture of how this is going. There are also some wonderful visual aids depicting uh, you know, exactly how these waves

of migration might have looked UH. And I'm always fascinated by those uh even though they you know, they often change. Again, they're subject to the same uh level of change that we see with some of the possible dates for arrivals and colonizations, etcetera. And again, it's a very exciting area of study, and you'll you'll see papers arguing for the for for other things as well, the likes of South American and even Antarctic contact by various Polynesian people, UM

and UH. And I it's my understanding I didn't go deep into some of those. I think some of those are are kind of controversial or some of them and certainly some of the evidence is maybe not as as solid. But it just to give you an idea of where some of the research is going today and what people are looking at. UM. Regardless of the exact dates, you know, we can't discount the wonder and accomplishment of the whole scenario.

You know that this This was this last age of true human um exodus, true human discovery and colonization, visiting places that humans had never been before, creating a foothold of human civilization in places that had belonged only um, you know, to various animals before, in the case of the Laggan Islands, places where the no mammals had ever arrived there, that had not flown or swam through the seas. You know that you had to have been a bat

or a seal. I want to read a quote from from the University of Hawaii's Dennis Colorada here for which he he really sums a lot of this up um. And again this is from there. That um hoku lea website at hokal dot com. That's h o k u l e a dot com. Uh, he writes quote. The Polynesian migration to Whai was part of one of the most remarkable achievements of humanity, the discovery and settlement of

the remote, widely scattered islands of the Central Pacific. The migration began before the birth of Christ, while Europeans were sailing close to the coastlines of continents before developing navigational instruments that would allow them to venture out into the open ocean. Voyagers from Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa began to settle islands in an ocean area of over ten million

square miles. The settlement took a thousand years to complete and involve finding and fixing in mind the position of islands sometimes less than a mile in diameter, on on which the highest landmark was a coconut tree. By the time European explorers into the Pacific Ocean in the sixteenth century, almost all the habitable islands had been settled for hundreds

of years. It's truly remarkable. Yeah, especially when you, I mean you get beyond the exact timelines and you start looking at how they traveled and how they navigated, UM, and what these islands were like when they found them. Uh, we're gonna be you know, we're gonna get into more into the navigation models UM, either later in this episode

or in the next. But as Calahorada points out, what we're talking about voyages conducted entirely in canoes made from wood and coconut fiber, constructed with tools made from bone, rock and coral. They use sails woven from coconut or or pandana sleeves, and when no win was available, they paddled. And these were dangerous voyages as well, not only at open sea, but when you arrived on some of these places,

it's easy to imagine this sort of stereotypical like Paradise Island. Uh, you know vision where Okay, you've reached the island, the dangerous part is done. Now you're in this place. It's lush and full of life, but that's not really when you get there. Yeah, like there's gonna be you know, a bunch of animals ready for the picking, and you know,

there there. If you get into specifics, there are some cases where there's some sort of of of of of of natural, naturally occurring animal on that island or the waters around it that are perhaps easier pickings. But in other bass you're dealing with environments where again, like they're they're just no mammals, there are no large meaty birds.

Uh you know, they're they're desolate, they're played. In some cases, there was very difficult for humans to you know, find the resources they needed to survive, unless they of course brought them with them on voyages, which adds this other wrinkle to these to these voyages, that you would have to bring things like pigs, chickens, et cetera. So at the same time, I want to drive home that there's

no one island environment here. There's a wide variety in the sorts of islands and island environments you encounter across this vast region. Uh So the story is gonna be a little different each time. So again, in many cases they had to bring important plant or animal species with them, which of course is the same story you see in land based migration, except with the challenges of an open boat. And so you'd end up with this first wave of

invasive species on the island. And these are often called canoe plants and canoe animals because again that's how they reach their destinations. And ultimately we're talking daw pigs, chickens, but also plants such as sugarcane, banana, coconut, taro, and bad boot. So some of these plants that are so you know, linked in the mind and linked culturally to these islands, that you have to remind yourself that they were not always there. They were brought with them with

the people who settled these islands. Yeah, though personally right now my mind is fixated on the idea of having to make long sea voyages with like a canoe full of chickens. Yeah, but it it was done. And uh, and as we'll get into much later, you know, in order to prove that these voyages were possible, they had to do things like bringing animals with them on the test voyages. So uh, it's it's fascinating now on this topic of of the the environments on these different islands

and how they weren't fully stocked life nourishing buffets. I thought that that David Lewis made an excellent point in that book that you you mentioned briefly earlier. Oh yeah, So to name this book, I'm gonna be referring to it throughout these episodes. It's one I've been reading that is a seminal work in the history of studies of Pacific island navigation. And this was originally published by the

University of Hawaii Press in nineteen seventy two. It was by a medical doctor, sailor and scholar named David Lewis, and it's called We the Navigators, The Ancient Art of Land Finding in the Pacific. I was published in seventy two, but I think updated with some subsequent editions at least in nineteen nine, and it may have gone through other

editions since then. But this is a really interesting book because its studies traditional Pacific navigation and land finding techniques, not just by the the indirect evidence of trying to like look at the history, but actually by putting them to direct experiments, so navigating with experienced master navigators from various Pacific islands and studying their techniques firsthand. Yeah. Yeah.

And and the point that that Lewis makes about the stark environments was really neat because it meant that the dangerous voyage to get to these islands and establish yourself on these islands. You it didn't mean that you could stop. In many cases, you would have to keep making voyages because there were certain resources that you could not get at the new island. But we're worth the dangerous journey

to acquire. Uh. The example that that Lewis brings up is the lack of hard stone on the Cook Island of Puka Puka, requiring journeys to take place uh two islands where hard stone could be acquired for use in

vital tool construction. And he writes that these would have been complex trading cycles that would have also been influenced by, you know, other human factors like the sense of you know, the desire for adventure, the um or, and also the necessity of exile, which I found interesting, like ultimately the idea of having a complex culture and cultural dynamics on a single island. What what where do you send people?

Where do people run to? Uh? If if there if there's some sort of political turmoil on the island, so contact sometimes remains in place because of that as well. Now, before we get into the specifics of of of navigation in among Pacific islanders and the colonizing of Polynesia, I thought we might briefly touch on some of the basics of sailing and navigation, is larger trends and human technology. UM. We could easily do a proper even multi episode invention

episode about ships. But here are some of the key dates provided in the seventy grade Inventions of the Ancient World by Brian Fagan at all um, a book I refer to that I referred to a lot, uh because it's really good and again highly recommend people pick up a copy of it. UM. But Fagan and the various co authors that he worked on with the various sailing and ship based chapters points out that seagoing watercraft just in general dates back probably before forty thousand b CE.

In Southeast Asia and Indonesia. We see longboats from Neanderthal cultures from seventy two hundred b c E and we see low graphs from seventh century BC and mess of Botania. Again, these are just general dates based on some of the earliest evidence we have. And then as far as things like plank boats, and that goes back to like three thousand BC in Egypt Um. And then finally we get up to the frame first boats in the second and third century CE in in my in what is now

all England. And as far as sailing, we have depictions of sales from thirty one b C in Egypt. We see two masted ships from sixth century in BC BC in Egypt, and the oldest surviving sale comes from the second century BC in Egypt. But again these are just some of the oldest direct evidence that we have or depictions, descriptions, etcetera. As Fagan points out in the section on navigation, with Sean mcgrail, author of Boats of the World and professor

of Maritime archaeology. The earliest voyages for our ancestors would have remained within sight of land. Landmarks and sea marks would have been key to navigation. And we see this reflected in record did traditions and classical and medieval sailing manuals. Makes sense, right, I mean it's like if if any of us were to set out on a boat into the water, I would want to keep land in sight.

I need to know where that land is. So all of this early Uh, you know, oceanic activity would have taken place withinside of land, and we depended upon things you could notice on land. Uh. You know your frame of reference. Reference was based on the place you came from. Sure, but what happens when you leave side of land. Well, by the mid second millennium BC, sailors in the South Pacific were of course doing this by means of what

we call environmental navigation. We'll be getting into this at length. Uh, but you know, at this point you have to travel beyond dependence on coastal landmarks and sea marks. But that doesn't mean that there's not an order and language to the open ocean. And for those who had the wisdom and the observational skills, of the accumulated knowledge of their ancestors. They could plot their way by these queues, they could recognize them, they could read them app of the ocean.

Now we'll get into the details of this in a bit, but as Fagan and mcgrail point out, you'll find indirect references to environmental navigation methodologies in Homer's the Odyssey as well as in the medieval text of the Life of St. Brendan. And environmental navigation would have been used in some form worldwide by the first millennium CE, and that's when instruments began to pop up. That's when we begin to use these various technological things to help us, uh make our

way across the open water. But with the navigators of the Pacific Islands, we're talking again about peak environmental navigation, a level of advancement that exceeded anything else in the rest of the world, anything else that the rest of the world was capable of, or had been capable of, um aweing some of the first Europeans to encounter such techniques and for a while seeming simply impossible to some

Western minds. Uh, you know that, for for a while it just seemed impossible that, oh, the people who are you know, they live in these islands. They must be here by accident, they must be here by mistake, and they're merely survivors of the ocean. They're not masters of its navigation. But as we'll get to they were. They were the masters. That's exactly right, And that's actually one of the main points that David Lewis makes in this book,

We the Navigators. Um. He was responding in some ways to kind of trends in scholarship on the on the settlement of the Pacific Islands that had tended to say that, well, a large number of these islands must have just been settled and discovered by accident, right, that maybe a fisherman or traders were out at sea and they became lost, they drifted off course, and just by happenstance they drifted to new islands that hadn't been settled before, and then

having discovered them, those islands could be settled. Of course, it is possible that some islands were discovered this way, but Lewis pushes back, arguing that there's actually a pretty good evidence for a a program of deliberate exploration and very accurate navigation by the sailors of the time time to to locate islands and settle them. So maybe actually it's time to introduce this book more fully that I've been reading, because I wanted to mention a number of

things that he talks about in it. So again, the book is called We the Navigators, The Ancient Art of Land Finding in the Pacific. It was first published in nineteen seventy two, and the author, David Lewis, was, as I said, he was a medical doctor. He was an experienced amateur sailor, so he had participated in like you know, yacht races and things like that, and a scholar. He was born in England, but he was raised in New Zealand and Rahirotonga in the Cook Islands in the South Pacific.

And Lewis had been a sailing and kayaking enthusiast for

much of his life. He had done some competitive sailing, including a Transatlantic single handed yacht race in nineteen sixty and at least one circumnavigation of the globe in a catamaran, and inspired by his experiences with long sea voyages in small boats and his love of Polynesian culture since his childhood, in the nineteen sixties, he got a grant from Australian National University to study traditional Polynesian navigation techniques that did

not rely on charts or scientific instruments. And he did this research by learning directly from several older Polynesian sailors and master navigators, experimenting firsthand with voyages across the Pacific with these navigators at the helm or experimenting with what they taught him. And so there are three basic sources

of non documentary information that he talks about. So one is shore based instruction on ancient navigation techniques from knowledgeable navigators in the Carolinians, the Santa cruz Reef Islanders and two groups of Tucopeans uh Niningo Islanders, Gilbert E's and Tongans. And then he also gets instruction during navigation itself on his yacht known as the Ispjorn, which is under the command of two older mass Ster navigators who helped him

with his research. One is a man named Tivak of the Santa cruz Reef Islands and another is named Hippo Or of Pula Watt in the Carolines. And I like the approach here because actually uh he opens his book by talking about the fact that understanding indigenous navigation of the Pacific has been really held back by what he

calls an overly theoretical approach. Uh, you know, just people trying to, uh look at indirect evidence to understand how the navigation happened, rather than doing firsthand voyages with the navigators themselves. Yeah, actually diving into the accumulated knowledge of these cultures on navigation in some cases. So there's a

lot of interesting stuff about this book. One of the interesting things he mentions early on is he says when he was growing up in Polynesia, he says to his elder Polynesian cousins, Uh, the ocean quote was a homely and not unfriendly place. And that's interesting because it, I mean, obviously, as a land lubber like me thinks the idea of voyaging out on the ocean in a canoe is like inherently just sounds terrifying, right, But to some extent that

is cultural. That's like, because I'm not used to the idea and to people that have a culture of of long ocean voyages in small watercraft like these canoes and catamarans. Uh, It's it's not necessarily such a scary thing. I mean, of course, ocean voyages do always involve dangers, but under the guidance of these long tested, ancient navigational techniques, if you know what you're doing and you know where you're going, it is actually not necessarily a scary thing to do.

In fact, it could be a sort of joyful part of your culture. But on the other hand, thinking about the ocean as a homely and not unfriendly place, this might cause you to assume that spending a lot of time at sea would would make ancient Pacific islanders have a kind of intuitive feel for ocean navigation that couldn't be put into words the same way that you have for a lot of skills you have. You know, there are a lot of things that if you do them enough and you get good at them, you know what

to do and you can do it well. But you couldn't necessarily explain to somebody else why you're doing what you're doing. But Lewis strongly resists this type of characterization about Pacific island navigation. He says it's in fact the exact opposite. He writes, quote one further notable feature of what we were told and had shown to us was that never once did anyone lay claim to any form

of quote sixth cents. A navigator had reason to believe that land lay over the horizon because he had observed certain signs that told him so, not on account of some vague intuition. And I think this is a really important point to hammer home about how ancient Pacific island navigation worked. It wasn't that you've got a feel for it and then you just instinctively knew what to do.

It was based on knowledge and well calibrated external signs, And so I think that means it it probably makes more sense to think of ancient Pacific navigation as more of a science than an art. You're not just getting a feel for things and relying on your intuition, but referencing specific markers and indicators of your position, though these markers might be mostly invisible to people who didn't know

exactly what to look for. Yeah, I mean it makes sense right the science, that you would need the science to get there, because that the the ocean is ultimately unforgiving. You know, if you were just going on a gut instinct, you might you might be right some of the time, but if you get it really wrong once then you might not be coming back to shore exactly, and that

really comes through in studying these techniques. It is based on specific markers, specific pieces of knowledge, specific cues in the environment, and a major point of of Lewis's book is how accurate these specific techniques and external markers were in the hands of a master Pacific navigator who knew what they were doing UH. He writes that navigators of Polynesia and Micronesia seem to employ basically all of the

same techniques with only slight variations. He says the only major differences were the features of local geography, because a lot of these UM methods of navigation do rely on knowing where specific islands in the area you're navigating are, so that would be different depending on what island groups

you're sailing between. But otherwise the techniques are extremely similar, and he says that throughout Polynesia and Micronesia, he said that the techniques were employed basically with the same level of effectiveness, measured by the accuracy at landfall, which in general was highly accurate, especially astonishingly accurate for not using UH tools and equipment that are available to twentieth century navigators.

Than now. I wanted to come back to a fact I already mentioned once earlier, but it's this astonishing figure that that Lewis gives talking about the world Old of the Polynesians and the Micronesians, saying that they inhabit a world of ocean. Again, if you exclude New Zealand, this area of the globe has two parts land to every one thousand parts water. And then he mentioned something about

this that I thought was really interesting. He writes, quote, ocean spaces can inhibit contact, though terrestrial features like mountain ranges may do so equally, but they become highways rather than barriers as marine technology, especially navigation, becomes effective. I had never thought about that before, but I think that that's exactly right. So you can have various barriers to

travel and communication between different regions and cultures. But whereas a mountain on land is always a barrier, you know, even if you build a road through it, the mountain will still slow you down. You're making a road through it just makes it sort of less of a barrier.

The ocean is something that can transition from a brick wall to a super highway once you have the the skill and the knowledge and the technology of to figure out where you're going and how to get there, and you have the right kind of watercraft, the ocean turns into the most efficient method of travel in the world. Yeah,

that's an excellent point. Now, there's one thing that has made studying Pacific islander navigation more difficult than it might otherwise be, which is that in many of these societies, or maybe all of them, and definitely most of them, Uh, navigational lore seems to have been something that was often kept secret and only shared with a small group of

initiated experts. So it wasn't just that everybody in a in a Micronesian or Polynesian society knew how to navigate on the open ocean, but that you would have sort of a class of educated navigators who would have this this lore about how to get from place to place within their brains and would be passed on to the next generation of navigators. But it wouldn't be general knowledge

that was shared by everyone. And that will make even more sense as we'd get into some of the details of say, navigating by stars and what that entailed, you realize that this required specialized training and a specialized eye and not everybody who's going to necessarily be cut out for it, and it wouldn't make sense for everyone to to invest this level of time and energy into the

understanding of it, right, And it's interesting. I don't know exactly what all of the pressures leading to it being a sort of specialized bit of of exclusive lore among a special class of navigators would be. I mean, there might have been economic concerns keeping it contained that way, or it might have just been sort of you know, the difficulty of training people to to have all of this knowledge in their head. I'm not quite sure, but

that's an interesting question as well. Now there's another thing that Lewis gets into in his book which I thought was really interesting about Again, when you just look at the problem of you look at a map of the Pacific Ocean and you think, how could it be possible to navigate you know, these vast distances without you know, modern scientific types of equipment or charts and that kind

of thing. And uh. And there is one aspect of it that helps make the problem seem more comprehensible, and it's this Lewis writes that it is possible, quote to sail to almost all the inhabited islands of Oceania from Southeast Asia without once making a sea crossing longer than three hundred and ten miles. The only exceptions are Easter Island, Hawaii and New Zealand, though the most predictable routes between Eastern and Western Polynesia are also long such isolated lands apart.

The majority of gaps between islands and even archipelagos are well under three hundred and ten miles, and usually in the fifty to two hundred mile range. Since no one wants to cross more open ocean than necessary, it follows

that most passages were of this order. So if you know your Pacific geography and you know where the islands are and how to navigate to, the the problem of crossing the vast ocean actually can sometimes be decomposed into many smaller journeys between islands, and the vast Pacific ocean problem can be broken up into a kind of stepping stone pattern. However, this does not mean that ancient Pacific islanders were incapable of longer sea voyages. They were not,

and sometimes they did make them. Now, coming back to the idea that Lewis pushes back against that many of the islands of the Pacific would have been settled initially through random drifts of people who found new islands by accident while drifting about after you know, becoming lost or something like that. Lewis pushes back against that, and one line of evidence he sites is computer simulations of human

spread and settlement through random drifts. He writes of this subject quote, Contrary to expectations, the results showed that while accidental advent upon a number of island groups was likely, drifts could not account for certain crucial contact stages. These were virtually impossible except as exploratory probes and subsequent deliberately

mounted ventures. The probability of drifts occurring was negligible or zero across the following seaways Western Melanesia to Fiji, Eastern Polynesia to Hawaii, New Zealand, or Eastern Island Eastern Polynesian contact with the America's in either direction, the probability of their having been drifts from western to Eastern Polynesia, and from Western Polynesia to the Marquesas zone was very low, and so here Louis is arguing that not only were

the navigators of the ancient Pacific islands able to travel uh with with great accuracy between known islands and island groups. That they also appear to have mounted these deliberate, intentional exploratory ventures into new waters to find islands that had not yet been discovered, and of course, in doing so, would have the knowledge to be able to locate these islands again upon you know, going back home and then returning,

which again is astounding. Yeah, yeah, simply astounding. And I think a lot of these the counter ideas, the ideas, yeah, that that these had to be accidents, these you know, these people, that people could possibly have set out and discovered these I mean, it's such a I guess a landsman approach, you know, based on a you know, it's the kind of analysis that a culture that is that is more situated on the land and and does not view the ocean as the majority of the world or

their world. I keep coming back to this, uh analysis that for the for instance, the Polynesians, most of the world was ocean and and and generally that's not the sort of worldview you encounter with with with Western civilizations. And now certainly you have certain you know, civilizations and cultures within the civilizations that are more uh nautical and

more dependent on maritime traditions. But but even then it's it's it's often the case that they are they're more attached to the land, they closer to the continent, and in these cases we're dealing with with with islands within just a vast world of water. Now, there's one big question that Lewis also addresses in his book, which is the question of what happened to so much of this,

this ancient Pacific navigational knowledge. Right, clearly some people in the twentieth century still possess it, but this seems to have become increasingly rare. Uh. And you could easily blame the import of foreign navigation equipment and techniques by other cultures. Right, So, if you have brought in charts and compasses and things like that from from elsewhere, there's less need to rely on the ancient navigational lore to get from place to place.

But unfortunately it doesn't seem like that's the only cause. It also seems that by the last few centuries, many island groups in the Pacific came to be ruled by foreign empires, and those empires in many cases simply forbade travel between islands. Lewis writes in in one footnote in the book, quote the banning by your European administrations of Inner Island canoe travel must have been a potent cause of navigational decline. Voyages were forbidden, for instance, in the Carolines.

In German times, it Illan attributed the loss of traditional lore on Nningo to the effect of the old German regulations. Prohibitions remain in force today, and this would have been in nineteen seventy two in among other places, the Tahiti group, and voyaging is strongly discouraged in the Gilbert's Not only must atrophy of knowledge have resulted, but deliberate voyages had to be kept secret. Advent upon another island was invariably

attributed to accident. So this seems to be one of the detrimental effects of various colonialisms on on on the Pacific islands that it would have led to a steepening decline in the ancient navigational lore and the passing down of this knowledge about how to navigate by the stars and these other signs, because there was simply less opportunity for people to navigate to, you know, go out in the open ocean the way they would have for now

it's interesting too though that there are exceptions to this, uh as well. I was looking at this on that that Hokolea website and over there that they discussed and this is also discussed at UM on the website for the for the Bishop Museum UM in Hawaii on the island of Oahu, which is an excellent museum about various Polynesian cultures and gets into a lot of what we're discussing here. Definitely worth visiting if you if you make

it out to Oahu. UM. But that as as discussed these on the both of these sources, the art of deep sea voyaging in Hawaii had it been extinct for several hundred years before contact with Europeans. So this period of of long voyages ended along with all contact with other Polynesian islands, and they lived in near complete isolation until seventeen seventy eight, right, So that's fascinating as well. Yeah,

so there could be a number of causes there. So there's also there's like, in one sense, you could have a kind of natural atrophy of knowledge, and then there could be some loss of knowledge by by imposition of colonial rule, and then also some loss of knowledge by the introduction of alternative methods for travel. Yeah, but fortunately not all the knowledge was lost, and so we have the accounts of of Lewis doing this firsthand research with

with master navigators like hip or and and Tevik. And I was going to get into some of the specifics of of these navigation techniques in this episode, but we're already running kind of long, so I think maybe we should call it there and then come and talk about the navigation techniques in part two. Yeah, how to read these environmental cues and engage in environmental navigation and then and then also some of the history of proving it out and then what what that those experiments those uh uh,

those those voyages approved about history itself. So join us next time as we continue to discuss this topic. In the meantime, if you would have liked to listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you'll find them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed, and that can be found wherever you get your podcasts. We just asked that wherever that happens to be, just rate, review and subscribe if you have the power to do so. We we greatly appreciate anyone that does that. That helps

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