Island. J. Edward Chamberlin
The story of sea travel might not have begun with Pacific islanders, but it did take flight with them several thousand years ago, and their extraordinary seafaring has its counterpart in modern space travel. They needed to find their way to and from islands hundreds, even thousands, of miles apart and sometimes scarcely breaking the surface of the sea. And they needed craft to get back against the prevailing winds and currents that might carry them wide under sail. So the people of Polynesia (which is a modern term, meaning “many islands”) had boats with remarkably stable design and construction, with sails that could catch the wind from different directions, and with the security that paddling provided. The particular oceangoing craft with which Polynesian seafaring is often associated—the outrigger canoe, where a separate float is attached to the main hull for stability—probably originated in South Asia. It seems to have been first used on the coasts of India and Sri Lanka, making its way eastward to the Torres Strait islands north of Australia and eventually throughout Polynesia (and also westward to Madagascar and the coast of East Africa). Two types were common: a small outrigger canoe, around thirty feet in length, used primarily for fishing or traveling short distances; and a larger vessel, either a double outrigger or two hulls connected by crossbeams (not unlike a modern catamaran), from fifty to a hundred feet long and capable of carrying a cargo of passengers and provisions sufficient for voyages of well over a month. The nautical technologies developed by the ancient Polynesian seafarers, still understood only in bits and pieces, allowed them to sail thousands of miles across the open ocean, even against the westerly currents and the east-to-west winds (generated by the rotation of the earth toward the east).
There would have been much local travel in the smaller craft, and the ability to launch and land boats safely would be learned by most members of any island community. Details of boat design, including wood type and sail rigging, varied across the region—which covers almost a third of the earth’s surface and includes many thousands of islands—but construction with wood held together by fiber (to provide flexibility) was probably universal, allowing for give and take with big loads in heavy seas. The sails could swing about at different angles to the keel of the boat so that they would catch the wind coming from various directions (as distinct from sails fixed to the mast, more or less at a right angle to the keel, to catch the wind from behind). The canoes were sometimes leaky, so bailing out the water was crucial, and carefully carved wooden bailers were standard equipment. Many men and women would have participated in the makeup of these boats, bringing together the crafts of woodworking (for hull, mast, deck, and outrigger) and weaving (for sails and ropes). The Polynesian canoe, in all its many forms, ranks as one of the great triumphs of human technology.
It was exceptionally seaworthy, and Polynesian navigation was truly remarkable. The skills of open ocean navigation were probably mastered by only a few, as was also true for their European counterparts. But mastered they were, allowing the Polynesians to undertake long voyages deliberately, and successfully. They did not measure angles between stars and planets to determine latitude, as European navigators did (with instruments that developed from the astrolabe and quadrant into the modern sextant), but took direction from the passage of the sun during the day and the movement of the moon, the planets, the stars and their constellations at night. Some Polynesians also used a kind of wind compass, it is said, though its particulars seem to have been forgotten. But technologies aside, there was one fundamental difference between European and Polynesian navigation. For the Polynesian navigator, the boat was fixed while everything else was in motion, with the sun and the moon and stars as guides and a matrix of islands rather than the mainland providing points of reference, like a plotline. For the European navigator, on the other hand, the boat was moving, with everything else fixed at any given moment on a map or in relation to the sun or stars in the sky. Polynesian navigation identified “here” as where the boat was seen to be on the ocean, with reference points observed and observations coordinated on that ocean to bring traveler and destination—another island—together. In European navigation, “here” was where the boat was determined to be on the map, with reference points established on that map according to scheduled observations, or “fixes.”
For the Polynesian navigator, then, even the ultimate point of reference—the island destination—moved through the stages of the voyage in relation to the boat, even though the navigator “knew” perfectly well that it did no such thing. Likewise a European navigator, using one of the various mapping “projections” that represented the curved surface of the earth on a plane surface, knew how to interpret the distortions that resulted. For example, in the Mercator projection (a map design invented by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in the mid-sixteenth century) the straight lines are lines of compass bearing, a mapmaking illusion achieved by gradually increasing the distance between lines from the equator to the poles, which puts the size of land out of scale (with Australia seeming smaller than Greenland, when it is in fact three times as large). These are tricks of the trade. Sailors around the world work with them and live with the illusions they require. So do we all, in fact, imagining that we are living on a flat earth, standing right side up, and that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
Of course, there were many other signs that the Polynesian navigators relied upon, in addition to the night sky and the sun. They knew the currents, the wave configurations, and the prevailing winds in their region. They recognized land breezes and “sea markers,” which were indicated not only by lines of seaweed and driftwood and the presence of types of fish, but also by the color of the water, especially near contrary currents. Precise directions, in shorter voyages, were given by birds returning to land every night after fishing, or taking off in the mornings; by sea turtles heading for shore; and by marine mammals such as dolphins on their way back from work or play. And smells would be noted, with breezes bringing the scent of green growth as early as a day before land was sighted. Skilled navigators would also feel and hear different wave configurations affecting the movement of the boat, and some of these would indicate the proximity of an island or the influence of a current. Reflections, such as the green of underwater atolls on the underside of clouds, would also help, along with the character of the clouds themselves. On longer voyages, migrating birds (such as the kohoperoa, or long-tailed cuckoo, which is well known on Samoa and Tonga and Raiatea and Tahiti and flies to New Zealand every October) could lead a Polynesian sailor to the island destination.
Every corner of the world has known island sailors, including Britain and Ireland and Iceland and the Mediterranean, as well as many South Asian and East Asian and African countries, and we sometimes score differences between them much too quickly. Seafarers everywhere share many of the same cognitive and cultural abilities—and an awareness of their fallibilities. Signs at sea are recognized by them all. James Cook, who learned much from Polynesian navigators during his three Pacific voyages (in the late 1760s and the 1770s), was successful because he brought his practices into line with their knowledge. Seagoing indicators similar to those the Polynesians relied on would have carried the Phoenicians across the Mediterranean and the Vikings to Iceland and the Amerindians to Jamaica. What distinguished each of these seafaring traditions was how they used the universal signs at sea to set their course. For any navigator, it is never just a matter of noticing signs. Like trackers in the desert or readers in the library, they need to interpret these signs—and the ways of interpretation, like the scripts of different languages, vary widely and need to be learned in different locations and different cultures. Furthermore, navigational directions are always relative rather than absolute, like sounds in a word or words in a sentence; and as with languages, these relationships are specific to each situation. So navigators would need to remember the movements of the signs (the “words” of their watery worlds) and the relationships between them (their “grammar” and “syntax”). “All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another,” said the Egyptian-Roman philosopher Plotinus in the third century CE, writing about what he called “the non-discursiveness of the intelligible world.”
The Polynesians knew that the ocean was full of signs, and they knew how to interpret one thing from another at sea. To do this, their memories would have been finely tuned, often aided by mnemonic devices such as knotted strings. And stories and songs played a part in this remembering. Rua-nui, described as a “clever old Tahitian woman, then bent with age and eyes dim,” in 1818 recited the following account of the birth of the heavenly