On May 1, 1976, a traditional Polynesian canoe called Hōkūleʻa left Honolua Bay in Hawai’i and began the 3,800-kilometer (2,400-mile) journey to Tahiti. However, unlike all other modern expeditions, this voyage was to be completed without compasses, maps, satellite navigation, or any other wayfinding tools, relying instead on traditional knowledge about the stars, swells, and signs to reach its destination.
Despite widespread pessimism about the possibility of achieving such a feat, Hōkūleʻa completed its trip in just over a month before returning to Hawai’i using the same ancient navigation methods before the end of July. Crewed by members of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, the Hōkūleʻa sparked a revival in the lost art of wayfinding and has been in constant use for the past five decades, completing multiple long-distance voyages including a round-the-world trip – all without the assistance of modern apparatus.
The techniques that have safely guided the vessel across vast oceans take a lifetime to learn, and are the same as those that facilitated the dispersal of our species across the globe throughout most of human history.
A journey through the sky
The stars have guided navigators across land and sea since time immemorial, with the art of astronomical navigation receiving its first mention in Homer’s Odyssey sometime around the eighth century BCE. More than a millennium earlier, the Minoans used “star paths” to create a flourishing trade empire, calculating their course by learning where in the sky certain stars rise and set.
The same concept forms the basis of the Hawaiian star compass, which provides the cornerstone of traditional Polynesian navigation and divides the sky into families of stars occupying 32 houses. The different houses correspond to the positions of the stars as they emerge from the horizon when they rise and descend back into the ocean as they set.
You don’t need to know 5 billion stars in the sky, but you need to know important ones that are going to help direct you to particular directions around this compass that’s in your mind.
Lehua Kamalu
Sailing towards the right stars when they are low in the sky is a surefire way to maintain a correct course, although it becomes necessary to switch to a new target once a celestial point rises too high. To plot a route, therefore, sailors need to memorize a specific sequence of guiding stars, each rising and setting at different times of the night.
“You don’t need to know 5 billion stars in the sky, but you need to know important ones that are going to help direct you to particular directions around this compass that’s in your mind,” Lehua Kamalu, Hōkūleʻa crew member since 2009, told IFLScience. “The easiest example is the North Star… although another would be the first star on the Belt of Orion, which rises due east consistently.”
Overall, Kamalu says a navigator typically has about 200 stars in their mental compass at any given time and will start learning the celestial pathways required for a given voyage a full year before setting sail. Despite all this training and preparation, however, she estimates that the stars are only usable “about 10 percent of the time”, as bad weather and full moons block out many of these distant guiding points.
“Most of the time you’re not going to get this stunning full dome [with] no cloud and no moonlight disrupting your vision,” she says. “It’s always probably going to be pretty hard to see, and you’re going to be picking stars out in the middle of clouds with very difficult visual conditions.”
Added to that, it’s also worth pointing out the stars are of no use whatsoever during the daytime. Of course, that’s no biggie for the GPS-tracked modern sailor, but traditional navigators need to really know their onions if they want to stay on course with no help from the heavens.
Reading the surroundings
The weather is so often the scourge of the stargazing wayfinder, yet can also provide vital clues about which direction to head. Clouds on the horizon, for example, can sometimes indicate a coastline, since the air tends to heat up faster over land than it does over the ocean, thus rising higher and condensing into clouds.
Birds are also important messengers for sailors looking for land, although you have to be pretty familiar with the avian inhabitants of your destination to interpret their signals. For instance, seabirds that always sleep on the shore act as signposts for keen ornithologists as they reliably fly out to sea at dawn before returning to land at dusk. Noting their direction of travel at different times of the day can therefore reveal the location of the nearest coastline.
Other birds have less rigid routines but can still be relied upon to feed their chicks, who are usually waiting in their nest back on dry land. Depending on whether these birds have a full beak or are empty-mouthed as they fly past, sailors can guess whether they’re heading out to sea in search of food or back to land to puke into the mouths of their young.
For the most skilled navigators, the winds and the waves can often yield the most detailed information about which way they’re heading.
Thanks to the usefulness of these flying beacons, Kamalu says that “very traditional navigators know a lot about the birds that live on their islands – about what their patterns of feeding are, how far [out to sea] they go.” And if you know how to read the signals that surround you at sea, “you start to see signs of land long before you can actually see an island itself on your horizon.”
“We call it expanded landfall,” she says.
Even for those still too far out in the ocean to detect these early traces of solid ground, there are still plenty of essential clues in the air. But you have to know which way the wind blows if you want to make head or tail of the currents drifting by. For instance, Kamalu explains that “[in Hawai’i] we have a dominant east-northeast wind, I would say. And as you get closer to the equator, it’s more of an east wind. And then as you go down to Tahiti, it’s more of a southeast wind.”
“And so one of the features that is pretty consistent throughout is that we have east winds, and we have east waves created by these east winds.” For the most skilled navigators, the winds and the waves can often yield the most detailed information about which way they’re heading.
Riding the wave
“If you talk to the most experienced navigators… they would say the wave is the most critical thing,” says Kamalu. Sometimes referred to as wave piloting, the art of deciphering the churning water can reveal vital data about changes in swells, currents, and other key elements of ocean dynamics. This, in turn, can be used to estimate the direction of faraway islands and plot a course to remote destinations.
Often, the most adept wave pilots would resort to simply lying down in their canoe and feeling the rhythm of the ocean in order to get a lock on a wave pattern.
Traditionally, Micronesian wave pilots would train with the assistance of “stick charts”, which use strips of coconut husk and cowrie shells to model wave patterns and currents. Armed with only these abstract-looking diagrams, ancient sailors successfully conquered vast stretches of the Pacific Ocean, regularly voyaging thousands of miles to reach distant islands.
Unsurprisingly, however, learning to read the waves is not easy and requires an incredible amount of practice. “There’s usually just a bunch of waves coming from a bunch of different places that are all converging at your location, all throughout the day, and you want to try and find some consistent ones that are following a pattern,” says Kamalu. “And if you can find one, and you can get a reliable direction on it, you can use that to navigate.”
Often, the most adept wave pilots would resort to simply lying down in their canoe and feeling the rhythm of the ocean in order to get a lock on a wave pattern. According to Kamalu, developing this remarkable skill “requires you to have a good feel for it, and that’s not the most natural thing if it’s not something that you learned pretty early on.”
“In the traditions, they would train at two years old, three years old, four years old, and you just kind of develop this natural instinct,” she says.
Ultimately, then, it’s clear that ancient navigation methods can still be used to accurately navigate across the world. The Hōkūleʻa – and the revival of traditional wayfinding it has inspired – is irrefutable evidence for that. However, becoming sufficiently aligned with the ocean to be able to read its secrets may be unattainable for those who haven’t been initiated in their infancy.
After all, the winds, waves, weather, and stars are never static, which means a wayfinder can never rest.
Even for those who do reach this level of proficiency, the task of navigating without instruments is always a major undertaking. After all, the winds, waves, weather, and stars are never static, which means a wayfinder can never rest. Moreover, having to keep track of these forever-changing elements makes it impossible to ever hand over the reins to another pilot, which is why the Hōkūleʻa – like other traditional vessels – typically only has one navigator for each voyage.
Putting all that into a nutshell, Kamalu says that “notoriously, as a navigator, your job is not to sleep, but to pay attention.”
This article first appeared in Issue 23 of our digital magazine CURIOUS. Subscribe and never miss an issue.
