The Wayfinders (6 page)

In the shadow of Mau’s achievements, Nainoa, a
young Hawaiian from a disenfranchised noble family whose grandmother had
been beaten at mission school for speaking her native language, found hope
and aspired to greatness. From Mau he learned to pay attention to weather,
to read the waves, to understand the meaning of stars — as he put it, to
plot a chart to an island in his mind.

The prevailing trade winds do indeed come out of
the east, Nainoa told me, but they do not dominate in the simple manner
envisioned by Thor Heyerdahl and others. As the navigator Tupaia once
explained to Captain Cook, there is a time each year when the winds reverse,
and westerly breezes blow across the Pacific. A trough of low pressure forms
a corridor running east from northern Australia, the very route along which
the Lapita civilization migrated from the Bismarck Archipelago into the
central Pacific. Similarly, farther north, closer to Hawaii, the winds do
not consistently and only blow from the east. What’s more, as the
Hokule’a
has proven over the course of more than a dozen
deep ocean voyages, it is possible to tack into the wind, even with a fully
loaded canoe.

The ancient Polynesians, Nainoa added, were not
navigators in a modern sense so much as wayfinders. Sailing from Tahiti for
Oahu, for example, they did not set course for Pearl Harbor; they set out to
find a chain of islands, the Hawaiian Archipelago. Moreover, the distances
in the Pacific are not as formidable as they appear on a chart. With the
exception of the three most distant points of the Polynesian Triangle, Rapa
Nui, Hawaii and Aotearoa (New Zealand), no voyage from Melanesia through
Polynesia has to traverse more than 500 kilometres of open water, at least
as the crow flies. And there is more land than the maps reveal. At sea one
can see roughly 50 kilometres in any direction. Draw a circle with a radius
of 50 kilometres around every landfall, and suddenly the ocean shrinks and
the area effectively “covered” by land increases.

Clouds also provide clues to the wayfinder —
their shape, colour, character, and place in the sky. Brown clouds bring
strong winds; high clouds no wind but lots of rain. Their movements reveal
the strength and direction of winds, the stability of the sky, the
volatility of storm fronts. There is an entire nomenclature to describe the
distinct patterns clouds form as they gather over islands or sweep across
the open ocean. Light alone can be read, the rainbow colours at the edge of
stars, the way they twinkle and dim with an impending storm, the tone of the
sky over an island, always darker than that over open sea. Red skies at
sunrise and sunset indicate humidity in the air. A halo around the moon
foreshadows rain, for it is caused by light shining through ice crystals of
clouds laden with moisture. The number of stars within the halo anticipates
the intensity of the storm; if there are fewer than ten, expect trouble,
high winds, and torrential rain. If a double halo surrounds the moon the
weather will move in on the wings of a gale.

Other signs are found in wildlife and seamarks,
as opposed to landmarks. A tan shark moving lazily in the sea. A lone bird
separated from its flock. Dolphins and porpoises swimming toward sheltered
waters herald a storm, while the flight of a frigate bird heading out to sea
anticipates calm. Pelagic birds like the albatross lead nowhere, but others
such as petrels and terns travel fixed distances from their nests, returning
every night to land, rising out of the waves at sunset, their flight paths
home as precise as compass bearings. A sighting of a white tern indicates
that land is within 200 kilometres; the brown tern reaches out as far as 65
kilometres, the boobies rarely more than 40. Phosphorescence and the debris
of plants in the sea, the salinity and taste and temperature of the water,
the manner in which a swordfish swims, all these become revelatory in the
senses of the navigator.

All of this made sense until we rounded the
backside of Molokai and in the darkness of night sailed north into the face
of a distant storm. As Nainoa told me, it was one thing to know what to look
for, these clues and signs and indications; it was quite another to pull it
altogether and confront in the moment the ever-changing power and reality of
the sea.

The sky was still clear, the ocean black, the
heavens dominated by the innumerable silences of the stars. The
Hokule’a
lumbered into the swells, which were moderate,
but still strong, enough to heave the deck and obliterate, to my eye at
least, any sense of a horizon. The crew worked in two-hour shifts, with
everyone taking a turn at the helm, which was not a rudder but a long
steering paddle that took three to handle. Enshrouded by the night, the
canoe itself became the needle of a compass that was the sky. Behind us sat
the navigator, a young woman named Ka’iulani, Nainoa’s protege. She would
remain awake for twenty-two hours a day for the entire voyage, sleeping only
for fleeting moments when the mind demanded a rest.

Ka’iulani, like Nainoa and all of the experienced
crew, could name and follow some 220 stars in the night sky. She knew and
could track all the constellations, Scorpio and the Southern Cross, Orion,
the Pleiades and the North Star, Polaris. But for her the most important
stars were those low in the sky, the ones that had just risen or were about
to set. Nainoa explained: As the Earth rotates, every star comes up over the
eastern horizon, describes an arc through the sky, and then sets on a
westerly bearing. These two points on the horizon, where a specific star
rises in the east and sets in the west, remain the same throughout the year,
though the time at which a star emerges changes by four minutes every night.
Thus, as long as one is able to commit to memory all the stars and their
unique positions, the time at which each is to appear on a particular night,
and their bearings as they break the horizon or slip beneath it, one can
envision a 360-degree compass, which the Hawaiians divide conceptually into
the thirty-two star houses, each a segment on the horizon named for a
celestial body. Any one star is only dependable for a time, for as it arcs
through the sky its bearings change. But by then there will be another star
breaking the horizon, again on a bearing known to the navigator. Over the
course of a night at sea — roughly twelve hours in the tropics — ten such
guiding stars are enough to maintain a course. To steer, the crew at the
helm, instructed by the navigator, takes advantage of the canoe itself,
positioning the vessel so that a particular star or celestial body remains
framed, for example, within the angle subtended between the top of the mast
and stays that support it. Any consistent point of reference will do.

With the dawn comes the sun, always a critical
transition for the navigator. It is a moment to take measure of the sea and
sky, study the winds, and observe their impact on the waves. Mau, Nainoa’s
teacher, had dozens of names just to identify the different widths and
colours caused by the path of the sun as its light and shadow rose and moved
over water. All of these told him something about the day to come.

The stern of the
Hokule’a
is square, which allows the navigator readily to
orient to east and west at both sunset and break of day. There are eight
marks incised along the railings on both sides of the vessel, each paired to
a single point in the stern, giving bearings in two directions, fore and aft
— thirty-two bearings altogether, which correspond to the thirty-two
directional houses of the star compass. The navigator by day conceptually
divides the horizon ahead and behind, each into sixteen parts, taking as
cardinal points the rising and setting of the sun. Thus by day he or she
replicates the star compass of the night. The metaphor is that the
Hokule’a
never moves. It simply waits, the axis mundi of
the world, as the islands rise out of the sea to greet her.

Beyond sun and stars is the ocean itself. When
clouds or mist obliterate the horizon, the navigator must orient the vessel
by the feel of the water, distinguishing waves created by local weather
systems, for example, from the swells generated by pressure systems far
beyond the horizon. And these swells, in turn, must be differentiated from
the deep ocean currents that run through the Pacific, and which can be
followed with the same ease with which a terrestrial explorer would follow a
river to its mouth. Expert navigators like Mau, sitting alone in the
darkness of the hull of a canoe, can sense and distinguish as many as five
distinct swells moving through the vessel at any given time. Local wave
action is chaotic and disruptive. But the distant swells are consistent,
deep and resonant pulses that move across the ocean from one star house to
another, 180 degrees away, and thus can be used as yet another means of
orienting the vessel in time and space. Should the canoe shift course in the
middle of the night, the navigator will know, simply from the change of the
pitch and roll of the waves. Even more remarkable is the navigator’s ability
to pull islands out of the sea. The truly great navigators such as Mau can
identify the presence of distant atolls of islands beyond the visible
horizon simply by watching the reverberation of waves across the hull of the
canoe, knowing full well that every island group in the Pacific has its own
refractive pattern that can be read with the same ease with which a forensic
scientist would read a fingerprint.

All of this is extraordinary, each one of these
individual skills and intuitions a sign of a certain brilliance. But as we
isolate, deconstruct, even celebrate these specific intellectual and
observational gifts, we run the risk of missing the entire point, for the
genius of Polynesian navigation lies not in the particular but in the whole,
the manner in which all of these points of information come together in the
mind of the wayfinder. It is one thing, for example, to measure the speed of
the
Hokule’a
with a simple calculation: the time a bit of foam
or flotsam, or perhaps a mere bubble, takes to pass the known length
separating the crossbeams of the canoe. Three seconds and the speed will be
8.5 knots; fifteen seconds and the vessel slogs at a mere 1.5 knots.

But it is quite another to make such calculations
continually, day and night, while also taking the measure of stars breaking
the horizon, winds shifting both in speed and direction, swells moving
through the canoe, clouds and waves. The science and art of navigation is
holistic. The navigator must process an endless flow of data, intuitions and
insights derived from observation and the dynamic rhythms and interactions
of wind, waves, clouds, stars, sun, moon, the flight of birds, a bed of
kelp, the glow of phosphorescence on a shallow reef — in short, the
constantly changing world of weather and the sea.

What is even more astonishing is that the entire
science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you
are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got to where you
are. One’s position at any one time is determined solely on the basis of
distance and direction travelled since leaving the last known point. “You
don’t look up at the stars and know where you are,” Nainoa told me, “you
need to know where you have come from by memorizing from where you sailed.”

It was the impossibility of keeping track over a
long voyage of every shift in speed, current, and bearing that kept European
sailors hugging the coastlines before the problem of longitude was solved
with invention of the chronometer. But this is precisely what the
Polynesians managed to do, and all without benefit of the written word.
There were no logs, notebooks, or charts, no speedometers, watches, or
compasses. Every bit of data — wind, currents, speed, direction, distance,
time — acquired over the course of a deep sea voyage, including the sequence
of its acquisition, had to be stored within the memory of one person, the
navigator. Latitude north and south could always be determined from the
stars, but not longitude. Should the navigator lose the position in
relationship to the reference course, the vessel would be lost. This is why
Ka’iulani, like all wayfinders, did not sleep over the course of our short
journey. Navigators do not sleep. They remain monk-like, undisturbed by the
crew, with no mundane tasks to perform, sitting alone on a special perch at
the stern of the vessel, tracking with their minds.

“If you can read the ocean,” Mau once told
Nainoa, “if you can see the island in your mind, you will never get lost.”

In 1976, on its first deep sea voyage, the
Hokule’a
under Mau’s guidance sailed from Hawaii 4,400
kilometres to Tahiti, where it was greeted, quite unexpectedly, by an
enormous, jubilant crowd of over 16,000. Nothing like this had ever been
seen in French Polynesia. The colonial administrators, as long ago as the
mid-eighteen hundreds, had formally outlawed virtually every aspect of
traditional cultural life, including long-distance oceanic trade between the
islands. The
Hokule’a
brought everything back to life, as if the wind
itself were whispers coming forward in time.

In 1999, having criss-crossed the Pacific from
Marquesas and to Aotearoa, the Polynesian Voyaging Society embarked on its
most ambitious journey. With Nainoa as navigator, the
Hokule’a
would try to pull Rapa Nui out of the sea. It was
a wildly ambitious expedition. The distance from Hawaii to Easter Island is
roughly 10,000 kilometres, but the journey implies crossing the Doldrums and
tacking into the wind for 2,300 kilometres, which effectively doubles the
total sailing distance to nearly 20,000 kilometres. And all to make landfall
on an island 23 kilometres in diameter, less than a single degree on a
compass, had in fact a compass been on board. Food and water rations were
cut in half to lighten the load. In dry dock 4,000 pounds were stripped from
the vessel. The crew was the smallest ever to sail the
Hokule’a
.
The route went via the Marquesas to Pitcairn Island. From there they would
tack south, pick up the westerly winds, and sail east and north until within
a distance from their target roughly equivalent to the length of the
Hawaiian Archipelago. Then they would search for the island, sailing back
and forth in a grid, careful that on the downwind runs to the west they
would not overshoot and find themselves forced by the winds to sail on for
South America.