Polynesians crossed thousands of miles of ocean with no instruments at all.
Long before European explorers arrived, Polynesian navigators found and settled almost every island in a vast triangle of the Pacific, from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. They steered by stars, ocean swells, birds and the colour of clouds, knowledge passed down in song. Modern sailors have re-created the voyages to show how.
The story begins with Austronesian-speaking peoples, who spread from around Taiwan through Southeast Asia between about 3000 and 1000 BC. A culture known as Lapita, famous for its decorated pottery, then pushed about 6,000 kilometres east from the islands near New Guinea to Tonga and Samoa between roughly 1300 and 900 BC. Exact dates for later settlement are hotly debated, but a common timeline puts the Cook Islands before AD 1000, with Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand settled later.
Voyagers sailed in outrigger or double-hulled canoes, and navigators, members of high-status guilds, memorised enormous amounts of information. By day they used the Sun's rising and setting points; by night, star compasses that could include dozens, sometimes as many as 150, stars with known bearings. They read the shape and direction of ocean swells, which island chains bend in predictable ways. Near land they watched for seabirds such as terns that fly out to fish in the morning and return at night, for clouds building over islands, and even for the green glow of a shallow lagoon reflected on the underside of clouds.
Europeans were impressed. On his first Pacific voyage James Cook sailed with Tupaia, a navigator from Ra'iatea who knew of 130 islands and drew a chart naming 74 of them. How Polynesians found their islands later became a contentious question, and in the mid-20th century Thor Heyerdahl argued that Polynesians came from South America, a theory that did not win general acceptance.
Experiments settled much of the argument. In the 1960s David Lewis sailed from Tahiti to New Zealand without instruments. In 1973 Ben Finney helped found the Polynesian Voyaging Society, whose double canoe Hōkūle'a later made traditional voyages across the Pacific, guided by teachings from the Micronesian navigator Mau Piailug and later by the Hawaiian Nainoa Thompson. Intriguing clues, like sweet potatoes from the Americas reaching Polynesia around AD 700, hint that Polynesians may even have reached South America and returned, though the plants could also have drifted across the ocean.
Source: Wikipedia — Polynesian navigation · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
