This article is adapted from an article Hari wrote for The Planetarium Magazine and was first published there.
The scaling down of long-distance voyages in the Pacific after the 1500s, combined with European contact, missionaries and modern history, facilitated the loss of traditional navigation knowledge dissemination channels. By the beginning of the century, knowledge had survived only in a few navigators scattered throughout the Pacific and in information cyphered in traditional stories and cultural practices. However, after the 1960s, the traditional navigation methods saw a revival thanks to dedicated people who worked together to decode and share the information available at the time, working with descendants of the ancient navigators or current navigators from Melanesia to Micronesia and Polynesia.
Pacific Navigation today
What we call Pacific navigation today is a combination of ancient practices that have been recreated from various sources and revisited at times through modern interpretation and learning. For instance, the current interpretation of the star compass used now by the Polynesian Voyaging Society was reconstructed by Hawaiian navigator Nainoa Thompson from the teachings of Micronesian navigator Mau Piailug and his own observations. The star compasses used by current Māori and Polynesian navigators are an adaptation of both Mau Piailug’s and Nainoa Thompson’s compasses. Young Māori navigators are now encouraged to learn mathematics and astronomy like Nainoa Thompson. This does not change or alter the ancient knowledge but supports the learning of it in the modern context. The acceleration of the learning is now done in planetaria, something which Nainoa Thompson started himself, and many voyaging societies now have (portable) planetaria, which they use as an aide for their learning.
The revival of traditional methods of navigation
The revival of traditional navigation methods in the Pacific started in the 1960s. At the time, the Polynesian Voyaging Society was founded, and navigator David Lewis (1917-2003), after sailing with several active navigators, independently found out that Oceanians shared a common system of wayfinding, with regional variations that could be traced as far away as Indonesia. The system was based on non-instrument observations of the stars and other heavenly bodies, as well as of the changing patterns of the clouds, wind and sea, and by observing birds and the marine environment, sometimes alike but more often different from modern navigational practices.
The Star Compass
Since Pacific navigation knowledge has been orally transmitted, it has had many variations, and invariably, some information has been lost throughout the centuries. For instance, no physical permanent representations of the Polynesian star compass have been found, although the concept was fully in use, a fact reflected in the oral traditions and stories. However, the indigenous navigation techniques from the Pacific represent a unified alternative concept to latitude navigation that we are accustomed to, one that was established by people who used their geographical environment to their benefit.
Navigation started by looking at clues from nature
Indigenous navigation in the Pacific was accomplished by looking at the sky for guidance and using stars as reference points, without using instruments to measure directions and distances precisely, but rather making mental approximations of the distances and using environmental markers to acquire landfall. According to Lewis, oceanic navigation is composed of three main tasks: – orientation, course setting and steering, – dead reckoning and – homing in on the target island. It started historically as east-west navigation between the islands located in the tropical zone to the north of the Equator, using the vertical paths of the rising and setting stars as directional markers and Zenith stars for fixing the latitude.
Then by observing stars that travelled the same road.
Instead of constellations/asterisms, as we know them, for navigational purposes, stars formed linear paths (asterisms) where stars of the same declination “travel the same road.” The original zenith star was replaced throughout the night by other stars in the same declination, thus keeping the zenith marker even when the main star had set.
The concept of etak was introduced, a technique of dead reckoning using stars in different houses and a reference point between the stars and the navigator (usually an island) to estimate the distance travelled.
From linear asterisms to meridian stars
As the Polynesians’ ancestors settled more of the Pacific, further techniques were developed, such as different markers to indicate the direction North-South—pairs of meridian stars, which are stars that reach the meridian at the same time.
Then, the star compass concept was created by carefully observing the rising and setting azimuths of stars, which allowed for directional orientation, given that the positions of the stars on the celestial sphere do not apparently change generally for thousands of years. The main navigational stars were grouped in segments, which later gave the 32 houses of the compass. Initially, they were not equal but marked according to the rising and setting points of the stars. The houses were also marked and named according to the predominant winds.
The mental concept of the star compass allowed the navigator to know the vessel’s position at any time by looking at the stars, the knowledge used to orient, set the course, steer, and dead reckoning. Steering, orienting and dead reckoning was also done with the help of the waves, winds and clouds. Homing was done by reading environmental signs such as land birds, clouds, waves and other patterns.
A successful divergent knowledge system
Traditional Pacific navigation is a clear example of a successful divergent knowledge system that arose to problem-solve the issue of territorial expansion in an environment that was different from the one where humans traditionally evolved – a large mass of land pinpointed by sources of water. In contrast to where their ancestors left, indigenous people of the Pacific thrived in an environment that stretched across large masses of water pinpointed by islands by developing new rules and customs that ensured their survival in those specific geographical conditions. This is the quintessence of creating a culture.
What blows my mind about this is how different these two navigation systems are yet how similar they are. I’ve long been fascinated with biases and mindsets. This story has the opportunity to show that the same problem can be solved in more than one way. I wanted to communicate this problem-solving, the creation of new knowledge and seeing something from different points of view to all young people here. This is how the movie Ngā Tohunga Whakatere – The Navigators was born.
Hari
