July 7, 2021 • 41 mins
The original discoverers of the Polynesian Islands traversed a vast ocean, bringing civilization to islands untouched by human activity. How did they do it? In this Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe discuss the sheer scale of the Pacific Ocean and environmental navigation.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of
My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
for a couple of episodes, maybe more. We're not sure
how these things ultimately fall together, but we're gonna be
(00:24):
talking about how humans discovered and ultimately colonized the Polynesian Islands,
places we know today as uh the Islands of Hawaii,
Easter Island, New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, Fiji,
uh Tuvalu, and more so in our in our information
and intercontinental travel age. Though I feel like these names
(00:47):
may seem very familiar and known, even though they might
be places that we also paradoxically know are very far
away from us. We may know that they are, in
many cases, you know, vastly separated from other islands. But
just because we can pull up pictures of them, just
because we know we could book a flight to one
(01:08):
of these if we so desired, Uh, they may seem closer,
they may see the world may seem smaller than it
actually is. You know, there's a very limited way of
imagining what planet Earth is where you know, you say, okay,
somebody picture the Earth, and and what do people picture.
I think they probably picture looking down at some continental
part of the Earth, maybe seeing mountain ranges, maybe seeing
(01:29):
the Sahara Desert or something. But often people picture land, right,
they picture the continents. But if you look at Earth
from space, what it's really characterized by his ocean. Ocean
covers most of the Earth's surface, and there's one ocean
in particular that really takes the cake. It's the Pacific Ocean. Yeah. Yeah,
but but I definitely wanted to drive home just how
(01:49):
large the territory is we're talking about here, and we're
when we're talking about the colonization of this region, we're
not talking about European colonization. We're talking about the original
human sailors who departed from Asia and gradually settled the
remainder of the world, uh, setting off into the unknown.
But then also depending on navigation, some really fascinating navigation
(02:10):
techniques that we'll get into in order to uh to
chart this region. So yeah, when you look at at
a map of the globe, it depends on how you're
looking at it. Right, If you're you're taking a very
um uh, north America centric version and a very North
America centric globe. You're like, all right, there's the Earth.
It's mostly US, it's mostly North America. But you turn
(02:31):
it around, you uh, you turn it to the Pacific side,
and you're looking at a water world, a true water world.
You're you're looking at a side of the globe that
is almost all Pacific Ocean. Because the Pacific Ocean is
just simply enormous. It's the largest and the deepest averse oceans.
We're talking sixty three million, eight hundred thousand square miles.
(02:54):
That's approximately a hundred and sixty five million, two hundred
and fifty thousand square kilometers, and it takes up one
third of Earth's surface or thirty percent of it, depending
on who's doing the calculation. It contains the deepest parts
of the ocean, and it contains more than half of
the world's open water supply. Specifically, within the realm of
of Polynesia and Micronesia, these these subdivisions of parts of Oceania,
(03:17):
which is the you know, the region of the Pacific
containing the Pacific Islands where people live. Um there in
this part of the world. There's an author named David Lewis,
whose book I'm going to refer to throughout these episodes.
But there's a part of his book where he says
that if you exclude New Zealand within Polynesia and Micronesia,
there are two parts land to every one thousand parts water.
(03:41):
Uh So this is this is an area characterized almost
entirely by water, but Polka dotted with these little hubs
of land throughout. Yeah, various far flung islands that people
were able to to eventually colonize and and and make
their home. And it's yeah, it's it's fascinating. How again,
I've I've been to I've been fortunate enough to travel
(04:01):
to you know, say that some of the Hawaiian islands
and you get there and you know they're they're amazing.
But but like, I don't have the experience of of
just the open Pacific, of of the of the many places,
the majority of the places in the Pacific Ocean where
there is no side of land, where there is only
the open water. Now, you don't have to be deep
(04:22):
into historical theories of human migration to grasp the question
of like looking at all these islands in the Pacific,
seeing how far away they are from each other. How
how small a percent of the area of the Pacific
Ocean the islands represent, and notice how many of them
are populated by people, And wonder how on earth did
(04:42):
that happen? How did people find and settle on all
of these tiny islands in this vast ocean. Yeah, it's
it's it's a fascinating question one that one that we're
still exploring to this day. We're still figuring out. But
we're gonna be getting in a little bit more into
the history of it and certainly into the navigational techniques
the amazing ways that these these ancient sailors made their
(05:05):
way across the open ocean. But first of all, let's
let's go ahead and drive home that while while human
colonization of the Pacific Islands is one of the most
recent human migration movements in our history, it still retains
you know, more than a few mysteries, uh, and using
everything from traditional histories and linguistic analysis to climate models
(05:26):
and genetics, researchers are still continuing to try and figure
out exactly how this migration occurred, when it occurred, where, uh,
you know, where where we went where humans migrated to
first in this and so we're going to be dealing
with some tentative dates here as we we roll through,
(05:46):
like the basic story of human migration across the Pacific. So,
according to Linda Noreene Schaefer, in Maritime Southeast Asia to
five hundred, this was a book that came out in
the ancestors of Malo, Polynesians left the mainland to settle Um,
the island of Taiwan around four thousand BC, and from
(06:09):
there they moved into what is now the Philippines and Indonesia,
and then during the third millennium BC, they moved on
to settle the islands uh And and Penninsula peninsulas of
what Schaffer refers to as Southeast Asia's maritime realm, and
the people who remained there came to be known as
the Malays. So from here we see movement of the
(06:29):
same people's further out into the ocean uh the very
movement of human migration that would eventually become the Polynesians.
By fifteen hundred BC, they had reached as far as
the Bismarck Archipelago north the east of New Guinea and
Um and Schaefer rights that within a few centuries they
had spread to West Polynesia, that's Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and
(06:53):
Polynesian sailors, explorers and colonists continued and eventually they were
eventually reached and colonized the far more remote eastward islands
of Hawaii, um what is now New Zealand and what
we have also come to refer to as Easter Island
or Rapa Nui. All right, so now let's try and
put some dates on all of this. But of course
(07:14):
all of this is UH is playing out over a
long period of time, and it's still an area of
ongoing study and discussions, so these dates are tendative. In
Schaefer's work, some of the estimated dates she sites include
Rapa Nui around five hundred CE, although estimates seem I've
seen estimates that suggest as early as three hundred C
(07:34):
and then UH. In nineteen nine, the University of Hawaii's
Dennis um Kawajarada suggested the following dates. He says, Okay,
hundreds and gathers inhabited Australia and New Guinea by fifty
thousand years ago, and then around between sixteen hundred and
twelve hundred b c E. A cultural complex called Lapita
(07:55):
had spread from New Guinea in Melanesia to as far
east as e g. Samoa and Tonga, and then Polynesian
culture developed at the eastern edge of this region. And
then he says that around three hundred b C or earlier,
seafares from Samoa and Tonga discovered and settled islands to
the east what are known now it's the Cook Islands,
uh Tahiti, Nui, uh To, Omotos and Hiva. And then
(08:18):
around three hundred sea or earlier, voyagers from central or
eastern Polynesia discovered in settled eastern island. And then around
four hundred sea or earlier, voyagers from the Cook Islands Tahiti,
Nua and or Hiva settled Hawaii. And then around one
thousand CEE or earlier, he wrote that the voyagers from
the Society Islands and or the Cook Islands settled what
(08:39):
is now in New Zealand. Now again these are just
tentative dates. Um there. You know, there's been a lot
of other work. For instance, according to the University of
Hawaii at Manoa anthropologist Terry Hunt, and this is via
Hokalua dot com, which will refer back to that website
some more in the future. Uh they were part of
a radio carbon study looking at artifacts from the island,
(09:00):
and they adjusted some of the suggested timelines based on
that work, ultimately arguing for a more rapid and recent
colonization of the outer islands. Specifically, he proposed Samoa around
eight hundred b c e the Central Society Islands between
ten and eleven twenty, and dispersal into New Zealand, Hawaii
(09:20):
and Rapa Nui and other locations between eleven ninety and
twelve nineties c e. UM and I've seen twelve CE
is sometimes cited as the most recent possibility for Rappa
Newly colonization. And so yeah, I know we're hitting every
one of a lot of dates here. I highly suggest
going out on your own and finding some of these
sources and pouring over them in more detail if you
want to get get a clear picture of how this
(09:42):
is going. There are also some wonderful visual aids depicting uh,
you know, exactly how uh these waves of migration might
have looked uh, And I'm always fascinated by those uh
even though they you know, they often change again, they're
subject to the same uh level of change that we
see with some of the pop sable dates for arrivals
and colonizations, etcetera. And again it's a very exciting area
(10:05):
of study, and you'll you'll see papers arguing for the
for for other things as well, the likes of South
American and even Antarctic contact by various Polynesian people um
and uh and I it's my understanding I didn't go
deep into some of those. I think some of those
are are kind of controversial or some of them and
certainly some of the evidence is maybe not as as solid,
But it just to give you an idea of where
(10:25):
some of the research is going today and what people
are looking at. But regardless of the exact dates, you know,
we can't discount the wonder and accomplishment of the whole scenario.
You know that this this was this last age of
true human um exodus, true human discovery and colonization, visiting
(10:46):
places that humans had never been before, creating a foothold
of human civilization in places that had belonged only um
you know, to various animals before and in the case
of the Logan Islands, places where the no mammals had
ever arrived there, that had not flown or swam through
the seas you know that you had to have been
a bat or a seal. I want to read a
(11:07):
quote from from the University of Hawaii's Dennis Colorada here
for which he he really sums a lot of this
up um and again this is from there. That hoku
lea website at hokala dot com. That's h o k
u l e a dot com. Uh, he writes. Quote.
(11:27):
The Polynesian migration to Hawaii was part of one of
the most remarkable achievements of humanity, the discovery and settlement
of the remote, widely scattered islands of the Central Pacific.
The migration began before the birth of Christ. While Europeans
were sailing close to the coastlines of continents before developing
navigational instruments that would allow them to venture out into
(11:47):
the open ocean. Voyagers from Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa began
to settle islands in an ocean area of over ten
million square miles. The settlement took a thousand years to
complete and involved finding and fixing in mind the position
of islands, sometimes less than a mile in diameter, on
on which the highest landmark was a coconut tree. By
(12:08):
the time European explorers into the Pacific Ocean in the
sixteenth century. Almost all the habitable islands had been settled
for hundreds of years. It's truly remarkable. Yeah, especially when you,
I mean you get beyond the exact timelines and you
start looking at how they traveled and how they navigated, UM,
and what these islands were like when they found them. Uh,
(12:29):
we're gonna be you know, we're gonna get into the
moment more into the navigation models UM, either later in
this episode or in the next. But as Cabajorada points out,
what we're talking about voyages conducted entirely in canoes made
from wood and coconut fiber, constructed with tools made from bone,
rock and coral. They use sails woven from coconut or
or pandana sleeves, and when no win was available, they paddled.
(12:52):
And these were dangerous voyages as well, not only at
open sea, but when you arrived on some of these places,
it's easy to imagine the sort of stereotypical like Paradise Island. Uh,
you know vision where Okay, you've reached the island. The
dangerous part is done. Now you're in this place. It's
lush and full of life. But that's not like when
you get there, Yeah, like there's gonna be you know,
(13:14):
a bunch of animals ready for the picking, and you
know there there. If you get into specifics, there are
some cases where there's some sort of of of of
of of natural, naturally occurring animal on that island or
the waters around it that are perhaps easier pickings. But
in other cases you're dealing with environments where again like
they're they're just no mammals, there are no large meaty birds.
(13:36):
Uh you know, they're they're desolate there playing In some
cases there it was very difficult for humans to you know,
find the resources they needed to survive unless they, of
course brought them with them on voyages, which adds this
other wrinkle to these to these voyages that you would
have to bring things like pigs, chickens, etcetera. At the
same time, I want to drive home that there's no
(13:57):
one island environment here. There's a wide ver arriety in
the sorts of islands and island environments you encounter across
this vast region. Uh So the story is going to
be a little different each time. So again, in many
cases they had to bring important plant or animal species
with them, which of course is the same story you
see in land based migration, except with the challenges of
(14:18):
an open boat. And so you'd end up with this
first wave of invasive species on the island. And these
are often called canoe plants and canoe animals because again
that's how they reach their destinations. And ultimately we're talking dogs, pigs, chickens,
but also plants such as sugar cane, banana, coconut, taro,
and bab boo. So some of these plants that are
so you know, linked in the mind and linked culturally
(14:39):
to these islands that you have to remind yourself that
they were not always there. They were brought with them
with the people who settled these islands. Yeah, though personally
right now my mind is fixated on the idea of
having to make long sea voyages with like a canoe
full of chickens. Yeah, but it it was done. And uh,
and as we'll get into much later, you know, in
order or to prove that these voyages were possible, they
(15:02):
had to do things like bringing animals with them on
the test voyages. So, uh, it's it's fascinating now on
this topic of of the the environments on these different
islands and how they weren't fully stocked life nourishing buffets.
I thought that that David Lewis made an excellent point
in that book that you you mentioned briefly earlier. Oh yeah,
So to name this book, I'm gonna be referring to
(15:23):
it throughout these episodes. It's one I've been reading that
is a seminal work in the history of studies of
Pacific island navigation. And this was originally published by the
University of Hawaii Press in nineteen seventy two. It was
by a medical doctor, sailor and scholar named David Lewis,
and it's called We the Navigators The Ancient Art of
Land Finding in the Pacific. I was published in seventy two,
(15:45):
but I think updated with some subsequent editions at least
in nineteen ninety four, and it may have gone through
other editions since then. But this is a really interesting
book because its studies traditional Pacific navigation and land finding techniques,
not just by the the indirect evidence of trying to
like look at the history, but actually by putting them
to direct experiments, so navigating with experienced master navigators from
(16:10):
various specific islands and studying their techniques firsthand. Yeah. Yeah.
And and the point that that Lewis makes about the
stark environments was really neat because it meant that the
dangerous voyage to get to these islands and establish yourself
on these islands. You it didn't mean that you could stop.
In many cases, you would have to keep making voyages
(16:31):
because there were certain resources that you could not get
at the new island. But we're worth the dangerous journey
to acquire. Uh. The example that that Lewis brings up
is the lack of hard stone on the Cook Island
of Puka Puka, requiring journeys to take place, uh two
islands where hard stone could be acquired for use in
vital tool construction. And he writes that these would have
(16:53):
been complex trading cycles that would have also been influenced
by you know, other human factors like the since you know,
the desire for adventure, the um or, and also the
necessity of exile, which I found interesting, like ultimately the
idea of having a complex culture and cultural dynamics on
a single island. What what where do you send people?
(17:14):
Where do people run to? Uh? If if there if
there's some sort of political turmoil on the island, so
contact sometimes remains in place because of that as well. Now,
before we get into the specifics of of of navigation
in among Pacific islanders and the colonizing of Polynesia, I
(17:38):
thought we might briefly touch on some of the basics
of sailing and navigation is larger trends in human technology. Um,
we could easily do a proper even multi episode invention
episode about ships. But here are some of the key
dates provided in the seventy grade Inventions of the Ancient
World by Brian Fagan at all um a book I
(17:58):
refer to that refer to lot uh because it's really
good and again highly recommend people pick up a copy
of it. Um but A Fagan and the various co
authors that he worked on with the various sailing and
ship based chapters, points out that seagoing watercraft just in
general dates back probably before forty thousand b c E.
(18:18):
In Southeast Asia and Indonesia. We see long boats from
Neanderthal cultures from seventy two hundred b c E. And
we see long grafts from seventh century BC and Mesopotamia. Again,
these are just general dates based on some of the
earliest evidence we have, and then as far as things
like plank boats and that goes back to like three
(18:39):
thousand BC in egypt Um. And then finally we get
up to the frame first boats in the second and
third century c E and in my in what is
now all England. And as far as sailing, we have
depictions of sales from thirty one b C. In Egypt.
We see two masted ships from sixth century in b C.
(18:59):
B C in Egypt, and the oldest surviving sale comes
from the second century b C in Egypt. But again
these are just some of the oldest, uh, you know,
direct evidence that we have or depictions, descriptions, etcetera. As
Fagan points out in the section on navigation with Sean mcgrail,
author of Boats of the World and professor of maritime archaeology,
(19:20):
the earliest voyages for our ancestors would have remained within
side of land. Landmarks and sea marks would have been
key to navigation, and we see this reflected in recorded
traditions and classical and medieval sailing manuals. Makes sense, right,
I mean, it's like if if any of us were
to set out on a boat into the water, I
would want to keep land in sight. I need to
know where that land is. So all of this early uh.
(19:43):
You know, oceanic activity would have taken place withinside of land,
and we depended upon things you can notice on land. Uh.
You know your frame of reference reference was based on
the place you came from. Sure, But what happens when
you leave side of land. Well, by the mid UH
set at millennium BC, sailors in the South Pacific were
of course doing this by means of what we call
(20:05):
environmental navigation. We'll be getting into this at length. Uh,
but you know, at this point you have to travel
beyond dependence on coastal landmarks and sea marks. But that
doesn't mean that there's not an order and a language
to the open ocean. And for those who had the
wisdom and the observational skills of the accumulated knowledge of
their ancestors, they could plot their way by these cues,
(20:27):
They could recognize them, they could read the map of
the ocean. Now we'll get into the details of this
in a bit, but as Fagan and mcgrail point out,
you'll find indirect references to environmental navigation methodologies in Homer's
the Odyssey, as well as in the medieval text of
the Life of St. Brendan, and environmental navigation would have
been used in some form worldwide by the first millennium CE,
(20:51):
and that's when instruments began to pop up. That's when
we begin to use these various technological things to help us, uh,
make our way across the open water. But with the
navigators of the Pacific Islands, we're talking again about peak
environmental navigation, a level of advancement that exceeded anything else
in the rest of the world, anything else that the
(21:12):
rest of the world was capable of or had been
capable of, um aweing some of the first Europeans to
encounter such techniques and for a while seeming simply impossible
to some Western minds. Uh, you know that for a
while it just seemed impossible that, oh, the people who
were you know, that live in these islands, they must
be here by accident, they must be here by mistake,
(21:34):
and they're merely survivors of the ocean. They're not masters
of its navigation. But as we'll get to they were.
They were the masters. That's exactly right. And that's actually
one of the main points that David Lewis makes in
this book We the Navigators. Um, he was responding in
some ways to kind of trends in scholarship on the
on the settlement of the Pacific islands that had tended
(21:56):
to say that, well, a large number of these islands
must have just been edtled and discovered by accident, right
that maybe a fisherman or traders were out at sea
and they became lost, they drifted off course, and just
by happenstance they drifted to new islands that hadn't been
settled before, and then having discovered them, those islands could
be settled. Of course, it is possible that some islands
(22:18):
were discovered this way, but Lewis pushes back, arguing that
there's actually a pretty good evidence for a a program
of deliberate exploration and very accurate navigation by the sailors
of the time to to locate islands and and settle them.
So maybe actually it's time to introduce this book more
fully that I've been reading because I wanted to mention
(22:38):
a number of things that he talks about in it.
So again, the book is called We the Navigators, The
Ancient Art of Land Finding in the Pacific. It was
first published in nineteen seventy two, and the author, David Lewis,
was as I said, he was a medical doctor. He
was an experienced amateur sailor, so he had participated in
like you know, yacht races and things like that, and
(22:59):
a scholar. He was born in England, but he was
raised in New Zealand and Rairotonga in the Cook Islands
in the South Pacific, and Lewis had been a sailing
and kayaking enthusiasts for much of his life. He had
done some competitive sailing, including a Transatlantic single handed yacht
race in nineteen sixty and at least one circumnavigation of
(23:20):
the globe in a catamaran, and inspired by his experiences
with long sea voyages in small boats and his love
of Polynesian culture since his childhood, in the nineteen sixties
he got a grant from Australian National University to study
traditional Polynesian navigation techniques that did not rely on charts
(23:41):
or scientific instruments, and he did this research by learning
directly from several older Polynesian sailors and master navigators, experimenting
firsthand with voyages across the Pacific. With these navigators at
the helm or experimenting with what they taught him. And
so there are three basic versus of non documentary information
(24:02):
that he talks about. So one is shore based instruction
on ancient navigation techniques from knowledgeable navigators in the Carolinians,
the Santa Cruz Reef Islanders and two groups of Tea
Copeans uh Niningo Islanders, Gilbert E's and Tongans. And then
he also gets instruction during navigation itself on his yacht
(24:25):
known as the is Bjorn, which is under the command
of two older master navigators who helped him with his research.
One is a man named Tevak of the Santa Cruz
Reef Islands and another is named Hippo Or of pula
Wat in the Carolines. And I like the approach here
because actually, uh he opens his book by talking about
the fact that understanding indigenous navigation of the Pacific has
(24:49):
been really held back by what he calls an overly
theoretical approach. You know, just people trying to uh look
at indirect evidence to understand how the navigation happened, rather
than doing firsthand voyages with the navigators themselves. Yeah, actually
diving into the the accumulated knowledge of these cultures on
(25:11):
navigation in some cases. So there's a lot of interesting
stuff about this book. One of the interesting things he
mentions early on is he says, when he was growing
up in Polynesia, he says to his elder Polynesian cousins, Uh,
the ocean quote was a homely and not unfriendly place.
And that's interesting because it I mean, obviously, as a
(25:31):
land lubber like me thinks the idea of voyaging out
on the ocean in a canoe is like, inherently just
sounds terrifying, right, But to some extent that is cultural.
That's like, because I'm not used to the idea and
to people that have a culture of of long ocean
voyages in small watercraft like these canoes and catamarans. Uh,
it's it's not necessarily such a scary thing. I mean,
(25:54):
of course ocean voyages do always involve dangers, but under
the guidance of these long tested, ancient navigational techniques, if
you know what you're doing and you know where you're going,
it is actually not necessarily a scary thing to do.
In fact, it could be a sort of joyful part
of your culture. But on the other hand, thinking about
the ocean as a homely and not unfriendly place, this
(26:16):
might cause you to assume that spending a lot of
time at sea would would make ancient Pacific Islanders have
a kind of intuitive feel for ocean navigation that couldn't
be put into words the same way that you have
for a lot of skills you have. You know, there
are a lot of things that if you do them
enough and you get good at them, you know what
to do and you can do it well. But you
(26:37):
couldn't necessarily explain to somebody else why you're doing what
you're doing. But Lewis strongly resists this type of characterization
about Pacific Island navigation. He says it's, in fact the
exact opposite. He writes, quote one further notable feature of
what we were told and had shown to us was
that never once did anyone lay claim to any form
(27:00):
of quote sixth sense. A navigator had reason to believe
that land lay over the horizon because he had observed
certain signs that told him so, not on account of
some vague intuition. And I think this is a really
important point to hammer home about how ancient Pacific Island
navigation worked. It wasn't that you've got a feel for
(27:21):
it and then you just instinctively knew what to do.
It was based on knowledge and well calibrated external signs,
and so I think that means it It probably makes
more sense to think of ancient Pacific navigation as more
of a science than an art. You're not just getting
a feel for things and relying on your intuition, but
referencing specific markers and indicators of your position. Though these
(27:44):
markers might be mostly invisible to people who didn't know
exactly what to look for. Yeah, I mean it makes sense,
right the science. You would need the science to get there,
because the the the ocean is ultimately unforgiving. You know,
if you were just going on a gut instinct, you
might you might be right some of the time, but
if you get it really wrong once, then you might
(28:04):
not be coming back to shore exactly. And that really
comes through in studying these techniques. It is based on
specific markers, specific pieces of knowledge, specific cues in the environment,
and a major point of of Lewis's book is how
accurate these specific techniques and external markers were in the
(28:25):
hands of a master Pacific navigator. Who knew what they
were doing UM. He writes that navigators of Polynesia and
Micronesia seem to employ basically all of the same techniques
with only slight variations. He says the only major differences
were the features of local geography, because a lot of
these um methods of navigation do rely on knowing where
(28:46):
specific islands in the area you're navigating are, so that
would be different depending on what island groups you're sailing between.
But otherwise the techniques are extremely similar, and he says
that throughout Polynesia and Micronesia. He said that the techniques
were employed basically with the same level of effectiveness, measured
by the accuracy at landfall, which in general was highly accurate,
(29:09):
especially astonishingly accurate for not using tools and equipment that
are available to twentieth century navigators. Than now, I wanted
to come back to a fact I already mentioned once earlier,
but it's this astonishing figure that that Lewis gives talking
(29:29):
about the world of the Polynesians and the Micronesians, saying
that they inhabit a world of ocean. Again, if you
exclude New Zealand, this area of the globe has two
parts land to every one thousand parts water. And then
he mentioned something about this that I thought was really interesting.
He writes, quote, ocean spaces can inhibit contact, though terrestrial
(29:50):
features like mountain ranges may do so equally, but they
become highways rather than barriers as marine technology, especially navigation,
becomes effective. I had never thought about that before, but
I think that that's exactly right. So you can have
various barriers to travel and communication between different regions and cultures.
(30:12):
But whereas a mountain on land is always a barrier,
you know, even if you build a road through it,
the mountain will still slow you down. You know, making
a road through it just makes it sort of less
of a barrier. The ocean is something that can transition
from a brick wall to a super highway. Once you
have the skill and the knowledge and the technology of
(30:32):
to figure out where you're going and how to get there,
and you have the right kind of watercraft, the ocean
turns into the most efficient method of travel in the world. Yeah,
that's an excellent point. Now, there's one thing that has
made studying Pacific islander navigation more difficult than it might
otherwise be, which is that in many of these societies,
(30:53):
or maybe all of them and definitely most of them. Uh,
Navigational lore seems to have been something that was often
kept secret and only shared with a small group of
initiated experts. So it wasn't just that everybody in a
in a Micronesian or Polynesian society knew how to navigate
on the open ocean, but that you would have sort
(31:13):
of a class of educated navigators who would have this
this lore about how to get from place to place
within their brains and would be passed on to the
next generation of navigators. But it wouldn't be general knowledge
that was shared by everyone. Yeah, and I think that
will make even more sense as we'd get into some
of the details of say, navigating by stars and what
(31:34):
that entailed, you realize that this required specialized training and
a specialized eye, and not everybody was going to necessarily
be cut out for it, and it wouldn't make sense
for everyone to to invest this level of time and
energy into the understanding of it, right. And it's interesting,
I don't know exactly what all of the pressures leading
to it being a sort of specialized bit of of
(31:56):
exclusive lore among a special class of of navigators would be.
I mean, there might have been economic concerns keeping it
contained that way, or it might have just been sort of,
you know, the the difficulty of training people to to
have all of this knowledge in their head. I'm not
quite sure, but that's an interesting question as well. Now
there's another thing that Lewis gets into in his book
(32:17):
which I thought was really interesting about Again, when you
just look at the problem of you look at a
map of the Pacific Ocean and you think, how could
it be possible to navigate you know, these vast distances
without you know, modern scientific types of equipment or charts
and that kind of thing. And uh, And there is
one aspect of it that helps make the problem seem
(32:40):
more comprehensible, and it's this. Lewis writes that it is possible,
quote to sail to almost all the inhabited islands of
Oceania from Southeast Asia without once making a sea crossing
longer than three hundred and ten miles. The only exceptions
are Easter Island, Hawaii and New Zealand, though the most
(33:00):
predictable routes between Eastern and Western Polynesia are also long
such isolated lands apart, the majority of gaps between islands
and even archipelagos are well under three hundred and ten
miles and usually in the fifty to two hundred mile range.
Since no one wants to cross more open ocean than necessary,
it follows that most passages were of this order. So
(33:24):
if you know your Pacific geography and you know where
the islands are and how to navigate to them, the
problem of crossing the vast ocean actually can sometimes be
decomposed into many smaller journeys between islands, and the vast
Pacific ocean problem can be broken up into a kind
of stepping stone pattern. However, this does not mean that
(33:46):
ancient Pacific islanders were incapable of longer sea voyages. They
were not, and sometimes they did make them. Now, coming
back to the idea that Lewis pushes back against that
many of the islands of the Pacific would have been
settled initially through random drifts of people who found new
islands by accident while drifting about after you know, becoming
(34:07):
lost or something like that. Lewis pushes back against that,
and one line of evidence he sites is computer simulations
of human spread and settlement through random drifts. He writes
of this subject quote Contrary to expectations, the results showed
that while accidental advent upon a number of island groups
was likely, drifts could not account for certain crucial contact stages.
(34:29):
These were virtually impossible except as exploratory probes and subsequent
deliberately mounted ventures. The probability of drifts occurring was negligible
or zero across the following seaways Western Melanesia to Fiji,
Eastern Polynesia to Hawaii, New Zealand, or Eastern Island Eastern
Polynesian contact with the America's in either direction, the probability
(34:53):
of their having been drifts from Western to Eastern Polynesia
and from Western Polynesia to the Marquesas zone was very low,
and so here Lewis is arguing that not only were
the navigators of the ancient Pacific Islands able to travel
uh with with great accuracy between known islands and island groups,
that they also appear to have mounted these deliberate, intentional
(35:16):
exploratory ventures into new waters to find islands that had
not yet been discovered, and of course, in doing so,
would have the knowledge to be able to locate these
islands again upon you know, going back home and then
returning which again is astounding. Yeah, yeah, simply astounding. And
I think a lot of these the counter ideas, the ideas, yeah,
(35:38):
that that these had to be accidents, these you know,
these people that people could possibly have set out and
discovered these. I mean, it's such a I guess, a
landsman approach, you know, based on a you know, it's
the kind of analysis that a culture that is that
is more situated on the land and and does not
view the ocean as the majority of the world or
their world. I keep coming back to this, uh analysis
(36:01):
that for the for instance, the Polynesians, most of the
world was ocean and and and generally that's not the
sort of worldview you encounter with with with with Western civilizations.
And now certainly you have certain you know, civilizations and
cultures within the civilizations that are more uh nautical and
more dependent on maritime traditions. But but even then it's
(36:25):
it's it's often the case that they are they're more
attached the land, they're closer to the continent, and in
these cases we're dealing with with with islands within just
a vast world of water. Now, there's one big question
that Lewis also addresses in his book, which is the
question of what happened to so much of this, this
ancient Pacific navigational knowledge. Right, clearly some people in the
(36:48):
twentieth century still possess it, but this seems to have
become increasingly rare. Uh. And you could easily blame the
import of foreign navigation equipment and techniques by other cultures. Right,
So if you have brought in charts and compasses and
things like that from from elsewhere, there's less need to
rely on the ancient navigational lore to get from place
(37:09):
to place. But unfortunately it doesn't seem like that's the
only cause. It also seems that by the last few
centuries many island groups in the Pacific came to be
ruled by foreign empires, and those empires, in many cases
simply forbade travel between islands, Lewis writes in in one
footnote in the book, quote the banning by European administrations
(37:31):
of inner island canoe travel must have been a potent
cause of navigational decline. Voyages were forbidden, for instance, in
the Carolines. In German times. It Illan attributed the loss
of traditional lore on Nningo to the effect of the
Old German regulations prohibitions remain in force today and this
would have been in ninety two in among other places,
(37:52):
the Tahiti group, and voyaging is strongly discouraged in the
Gilbert's Not only must atrophy of knowledge have resulted, but
deliberate voyages had to be kept secret. Advent upon another
island was invariably attributed to accident. So this seems to
be one of the detrimental effects of various colonialisms on
on on the Pacific islands that it would have led
(38:15):
to a steepening decline in the ancient navigational lore and
the passing down of this knowledge about how to navigate
by the stars and these other signs, because there was
simply less opportunity for people to navigate to you know,
go out in the open ocean the way they would
have before. Now it's interesting too, though, that there are
exceptions to this uh as well. I was looking at
(38:37):
this on that that Hokolea website and over there that
they discussed and this is also discussed at on the
website for the Bishop Museum UM in Hawaii on the
island of Oahu, which is an excellent museum about various
Polynesian cultures. And gets into a lot of what we're
discussing here. Definitely worth visiting if you if you make
(38:58):
it out to olaho um But that as as discussed
these on both of these sources, the art of deep
sea voyaging in Hawaii had it been extinct for several
hundred years before contact with Europeans. So this period of
long voyages ended along with all contact with other Polynesian islands,
and they lived in near complete isolation until seventy eight, right,
(39:22):
So that's fascinating as well. Yeah, so there could be
a number of causes there. So there's also there's like,
in one sense, you could have a kind of natural
atrophy of knowledge, and then there could be some loss
of knowledge by by imposition of colonial rule, and then
also some loss of knowledge by the introduction of alternative
methods for travel. But fortunately not all the knowledge was lost.
(39:43):
And so we have the accounts of of Lewis doing
this firsthand research with with master navigators like hip Or
and and Teak. And I was going to get into
some of the specifics of of these navigation techniques in
this episode, but we're already running kind of long, so
I think maybe we should all it there and then
come and talk about the navigation techniques in part two, Yeah,
(40:05):
how to read these environmental cues and engage in environmental navigation.
And then and then also some of the history of
proving it out and then what what that those experiments
those uh uh, those those voyages approved about history itself.
So join us next time as we continue to discuss
this topic. In the meantime, if you would like to
(40:26):
listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
you'll find them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind
podcast feed and that can be found wherever you get
your podcasts. We just asked that wherever that happens to be,
just rate, review and subscribe if you have the power
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that that that helps us out. Love a good star rating,
love good subscription, keep it in huge thanks as always
(40:49):
to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other to suggest a topic
for the future, just to say hello, you can email
us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
(41:09):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listening to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the production of
My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
for a couple of episodes, maybe more. We're not sure
how these things ultimately fall together, but we're gonna be
(00:24):
talking about how humans discovered and ultimately colonized the Polynesian Islands,
places we know today as uh the Islands of Hawaii,
Easter Island, New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, Fiji,
uh Tuvalu, and more so in our in our information
and intercontinental travel age. Though I feel like these names
(00:47):
may seem very familiar and known, even though they might
be places that we also paradoxically know are very far
away from us. We may know that they are, in
many cases, you know, vastly separated from other islands. But
just because we can pull up pictures of them, just
because we know we could book a flight to one
(01:08):
of these if we so desired, Uh, they may seem closer,
they may see the world may seem smaller than it
actually is. You know, there's a very limited way of
imagining what planet Earth is where you know, you say, okay,
somebody picture the Earth, and and what do people picture.
I think they probably picture looking down at some continental
part of the Earth, maybe seeing mountain ranges, maybe seeing
(01:29):
the Sahara Desert or something. But often people picture land, right,
they picture the continents. But if you look at Earth
from space, what it's really characterized by his ocean. Ocean
covers most of the Earth's surface, and there's one ocean
in particular that really takes the cake. It's the Pacific Ocean. Yeah. Yeah,
but but I definitely wanted to drive home just how
(01:49):
large the territory is we're talking about here, and we're
when we're talking about the colonization of this region, we're
not talking about European colonization. We're talking about the original
human sailors who departed from Asia and gradually settled the
remainder of the world, uh, setting off into the unknown.
But then also depending on navigation, some really fascinating navigation
(02:10):
techniques that we'll get into in order to uh to
chart this region. So yeah, when you look at at
a map of the globe, it depends on how you're
looking at it. Right, If you're you're taking a very
um uh, north America centric version and a very North
America centric globe. You're like, all right, there's the Earth.
It's mostly US, it's mostly North America. But you turn
(02:31):
it around, you uh, you turn it to the Pacific side,
and you're looking at a water world, a true water world.
You're you're looking at a side of the globe that
is almost all Pacific Ocean. Because the Pacific Ocean is
just simply enormous. It's the largest and the deepest averse oceans.
We're talking sixty three million, eight hundred thousand square miles.
(02:54):
That's approximately a hundred and sixty five million, two hundred
and fifty thousand square kilometers, and it takes up one
third of Earth's surface or thirty percent of it, depending
on who's doing the calculation. It contains the deepest parts
of the ocean, and it contains more than half of
the world's open water supply. Specifically, within the realm of
of Polynesia and Micronesia, these these subdivisions of parts of Oceania,
(03:17):
which is the you know, the region of the Pacific
containing the Pacific Islands where people live. Um there in
this part of the world. There's an author named David Lewis,
whose book I'm going to refer to throughout these episodes.
But there's a part of his book where he says
that if you exclude New Zealand within Polynesia and Micronesia,
there are two parts land to every one thousand parts water.
(03:41):
Uh So this is this is an area characterized almost
entirely by water, but Polka dotted with these little hubs
of land throughout. Yeah, various far flung islands that people
were able to to eventually colonize and and and make
their home. And it's yeah, it's it's fascinating. How again,
I've I've been to I've been fortunate enough to travel
(04:01):
to you know, say that some of the Hawaiian islands
and you get there and you know they're they're amazing.
But but like, I don't have the experience of of
just the open Pacific, of of the of the many places,
the majority of the places in the Pacific Ocean where
there is no side of land, where there is only
the open water. Now, you don't have to be deep
(04:22):
into historical theories of human migration to grasp the question
of like looking at all these islands in the Pacific,
seeing how far away they are from each other. How
how small a percent of the area of the Pacific
Ocean the islands represent, and notice how many of them
are populated by people, And wonder how on earth did
(04:42):
that happen? How did people find and settle on all
of these tiny islands in this vast ocean. Yeah, it's
it's it's a fascinating question one that one that we're
still exploring to this day. We're still figuring out. But
we're gonna be getting in a little bit more into
the history of it and certainly into the navigational techniques
the amazing ways that these these ancient sailors made their
(05:05):
way across the open ocean. But first of all, let's
let's go ahead and drive home that while while human
colonization of the Pacific Islands is one of the most
recent human migration movements in our history, it still retains
you know, more than a few mysteries, uh, and using
everything from traditional histories and linguistic analysis to climate models
(05:26):
and genetics, researchers are still continuing to try and figure
out exactly how this migration occurred, when it occurred, where, uh,
you know, where where we went where humans migrated to
first in this and so we're going to be dealing
with some tentative dates here as we we roll through,
(05:46):
like the basic story of human migration across the Pacific. So,
according to Linda Noreene Schaefer, in Maritime Southeast Asia to
five hundred, this was a book that came out in
the ancestors of Malo, Polynesians left the mainland to settle Um,
the island of Taiwan around four thousand BC, and from
(06:09):
there they moved into what is now the Philippines and Indonesia,
and then during the third millennium BC, they moved on
to settle the islands uh And and Penninsula peninsulas of
what Schaffer refers to as Southeast Asia's maritime realm, and
the people who remained there came to be known as
the Malays. So from here we see movement of the
(06:29):
same people's further out into the ocean uh the very
movement of human migration that would eventually become the Polynesians.
By fifteen hundred BC, they had reached as far as
the Bismarck Archipelago north the east of New Guinea and
Um and Schaefer rights that within a few centuries they
had spread to West Polynesia, that's Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and
(06:53):
Polynesian sailors, explorers and colonists continued and eventually they were
eventually reached and colonized the far more remote eastward islands
of Hawaii, um what is now New Zealand and what
we have also come to refer to as Easter Island
or Rapa Nui. All right, so now let's try and
put some dates on all of this. But of course
(07:14):
all of this is UH is playing out over a
long period of time, and it's still an area of
ongoing study and discussions, so these dates are tendative. In
Schaefer's work, some of the estimated dates she sites include
Rapa Nui around five hundred CE, although estimates seem I've
seen estimates that suggest as early as three hundred C
(07:34):
and then UH. In nineteen nine, the University of Hawaii's
Dennis um Kawajarada suggested the following dates. He says, Okay,
hundreds and gathers inhabited Australia and New Guinea by fifty
thousand years ago, and then around between sixteen hundred and
twelve hundred b c E. A cultural complex called Lapita
(07:55):
had spread from New Guinea in Melanesia to as far
east as e g. Samoa and Tonga, and then Polynesian
culture developed at the eastern edge of this region. And
then he says that around three hundred b C or earlier,
seafares from Samoa and Tonga discovered and settled islands to
the east what are known now it's the Cook Islands,
uh Tahiti, Nui, uh To, Omotos and Hiva. And then
(08:18):
around three hundred sea or earlier, voyagers from central or
eastern Polynesia discovered in settled eastern island. And then around
four hundred sea or earlier, voyagers from the Cook Islands Tahiti,
Nua and or Hiva settled Hawaii. And then around one
thousand CEE or earlier, he wrote that the voyagers from
the Society Islands and or the Cook Islands settled what
(08:39):
is now in New Zealand. Now again these are just
tentative dates. Um there. You know, there's been a lot
of other work. For instance, according to the University of
Hawaii at Manoa anthropologist Terry Hunt, and this is via
Hokalua dot com, which will refer back to that website
some more in the future. Uh they were part of
a radio carbon study looking at artifacts from the island,
(09:00):
and they adjusted some of the suggested timelines based on
that work, ultimately arguing for a more rapid and recent
colonization of the outer islands. Specifically, he proposed Samoa around
eight hundred b c e the Central Society Islands between
ten and eleven twenty, and dispersal into New Zealand, Hawaii
(09:20):
and Rapa Nui and other locations between eleven ninety and
twelve nineties c e. UM and I've seen twelve CE
is sometimes cited as the most recent possibility for Rappa
Newly colonization. And so yeah, I know we're hitting every
one of a lot of dates here. I highly suggest
going out on your own and finding some of these
sources and pouring over them in more detail if you
want to get get a clear picture of how this
(09:42):
is going. There are also some wonderful visual aids depicting uh,
you know, exactly how uh these waves of migration might
have looked uh, And I'm always fascinated by those uh
even though they you know, they often change again, they're
subject to the same uh level of change that we
see with some of the pop sable dates for arrivals
and colonizations, etcetera. And again it's a very exciting area
(10:05):
of study, and you'll you'll see papers arguing for the
for for other things as well, the likes of South
American and even Antarctic contact by various Polynesian people um
and uh and I it's my understanding I didn't go
deep into some of those. I think some of those
are are kind of controversial or some of them and
certainly some of the evidence is maybe not as as solid,
But it just to give you an idea of where
(10:25):
some of the research is going today and what people
are looking at. But regardless of the exact dates, you know,
we can't discount the wonder and accomplishment of the whole scenario.
You know that this this was this last age of
true human um exodus, true human discovery and colonization, visiting
(10:46):
places that humans had never been before, creating a foothold
of human civilization in places that had belonged only um
you know, to various animals before and in the case
of the Logan Islands, places where the no mammals had
ever arrived there, that had not flown or swam through
the seas you know that you had to have been
a bat or a seal. I want to read a
(11:07):
quote from from the University of Hawaii's Dennis Colorada here
for which he he really sums a lot of this
up um and again this is from there. That hoku
lea website at hokala dot com. That's h o k
u l e a dot com. Uh, he writes. Quote.
(11:27):
The Polynesian migration to Hawaii was part of one of
the most remarkable achievements of humanity, the discovery and settlement
of the remote, widely scattered islands of the Central Pacific.
The migration began before the birth of Christ. While Europeans
were sailing close to the coastlines of continents before developing
navigational instruments that would allow them to venture out into
(11:47):
the open ocean. Voyagers from Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa began
to settle islands in an ocean area of over ten
million square miles. The settlement took a thousand years to
complete and involved finding and fixing in mind the position
of islands, sometimes less than a mile in diameter, on
on which the highest landmark was a coconut tree. By
(12:08):
the time European explorers into the Pacific Ocean in the
sixteenth century. Almost all the habitable islands had been settled
for hundreds of years. It's truly remarkable. Yeah, especially when you,
I mean you get beyond the exact timelines and you
start looking at how they traveled and how they navigated, UM,
and what these islands were like when they found them. Uh,
(12:29):
we're gonna be you know, we're gonna get into the
moment more into the navigation models UM, either later in
this episode or in the next. But as Cabajorada points out,
what we're talking about voyages conducted entirely in canoes made
from wood and coconut fiber, constructed with tools made from bone,
rock and coral. They use sails woven from coconut or
or pandana sleeves, and when no win was available, they paddled.
(12:52):
And these were dangerous voyages as well, not only at
open sea, but when you arrived on some of these places,
it's easy to imagine the sort of stereotypical like Paradise Island. Uh,
you know vision where Okay, you've reached the island. The
dangerous part is done. Now you're in this place. It's
lush and full of life. But that's not like when
you get there, Yeah, like there's gonna be you know,
(13:14):
a bunch of animals ready for the picking, and you
know there there. If you get into specifics, there are
some cases where there's some sort of of of of
of of natural, naturally occurring animal on that island or
the waters around it that are perhaps easier pickings. But
in other cases you're dealing with environments where again like
they're they're just no mammals, there are no large meaty birds.
(13:36):
Uh you know, they're they're desolate there playing In some
cases there it was very difficult for humans to you know,
find the resources they needed to survive unless they, of
course brought them with them on voyages, which adds this
other wrinkle to these to these voyages that you would
have to bring things like pigs, chickens, etcetera. At the
same time, I want to drive home that there's no
(13:57):
one island environment here. There's a wide ver arriety in
the sorts of islands and island environments you encounter across
this vast region. Uh So the story is going to
be a little different each time. So again, in many
cases they had to bring important plant or animal species
with them, which of course is the same story you
see in land based migration, except with the challenges of
(14:18):
an open boat. And so you'd end up with this
first wave of invasive species on the island. And these
are often called canoe plants and canoe animals because again
that's how they reach their destinations. And ultimately we're talking dogs, pigs, chickens,
but also plants such as sugar cane, banana, coconut, taro,
and bab boo. So some of these plants that are
so you know, linked in the mind and linked culturally
(14:39):
to these islands that you have to remind yourself that
they were not always there. They were brought with them
with the people who settled these islands. Yeah, though personally
right now my mind is fixated on the idea of
having to make long sea voyages with like a canoe
full of chickens. Yeah, but it it was done. And uh,
and as we'll get into much later, you know, in
order or to prove that these voyages were possible, they
(15:02):
had to do things like bringing animals with them on
the test voyages. So, uh, it's it's fascinating now on
this topic of of the the environments on these different
islands and how they weren't fully stocked life nourishing buffets.
I thought that that David Lewis made an excellent point
in that book that you you mentioned briefly earlier. Oh yeah,
So to name this book, I'm gonna be referring to
(15:23):
it throughout these episodes. It's one I've been reading that
is a seminal work in the history of studies of
Pacific island navigation. And this was originally published by the
University of Hawaii Press in nineteen seventy two. It was
by a medical doctor, sailor and scholar named David Lewis,
and it's called We the Navigators The Ancient Art of
Land Finding in the Pacific. I was published in seventy two,
(15:45):
but I think updated with some subsequent editions at least
in nineteen ninety four, and it may have gone through
other editions since then. But this is a really interesting
book because its studies traditional Pacific navigation and land finding techniques,
not just by the the indirect evidence of trying to
like look at the history, but actually by putting them
to direct experiments, so navigating with experienced master navigators from
(16:10):
various specific islands and studying their techniques firsthand. Yeah. Yeah.
And and the point that that Lewis makes about the
stark environments was really neat because it meant that the
dangerous voyage to get to these islands and establish yourself
on these islands. You it didn't mean that you could stop.
In many cases, you would have to keep making voyages
(16:31):
because there were certain resources that you could not get
at the new island. But we're worth the dangerous journey
to acquire. Uh. The example that that Lewis brings up
is the lack of hard stone on the Cook Island
of Puka Puka, requiring journeys to take place, uh two
islands where hard stone could be acquired for use in
vital tool construction. And he writes that these would have
(16:53):
been complex trading cycles that would have also been influenced
by you know, other human factors like the since you know,
the desire for adventure, the um or, and also the
necessity of exile, which I found interesting, like ultimately the
idea of having a complex culture and cultural dynamics on
a single island. What what where do you send people?
(17:14):
Where do people run to? Uh? If if there if
there's some sort of political turmoil on the island, so
contact sometimes remains in place because of that as well. Now,
before we get into the specifics of of of navigation
in among Pacific islanders and the colonizing of Polynesia, I
(17:38):
thought we might briefly touch on some of the basics
of sailing and navigation is larger trends in human technology. Um,
we could easily do a proper even multi episode invention
episode about ships. But here are some of the key
dates provided in the seventy grade Inventions of the Ancient
World by Brian Fagan at all um a book I
(17:58):
refer to that refer to lot uh because it's really
good and again highly recommend people pick up a copy
of it. Um but A Fagan and the various co
authors that he worked on with the various sailing and
ship based chapters, points out that seagoing watercraft just in
general dates back probably before forty thousand b c E.
(18:18):
In Southeast Asia and Indonesia. We see long boats from
Neanderthal cultures from seventy two hundred b c E. And
we see long grafts from seventh century BC and Mesopotamia. Again,
these are just general dates based on some of the
earliest evidence we have, and then as far as things
like plank boats and that goes back to like three
(18:39):
thousand BC in egypt Um. And then finally we get
up to the frame first boats in the second and
third century c E and in my in what is
now all England. And as far as sailing, we have
depictions of sales from thirty one b C. In Egypt.
We see two masted ships from sixth century in b C.
(18:59):
B C in Egypt, and the oldest surviving sale comes
from the second century b C in Egypt. But again
these are just some of the oldest, uh, you know,
direct evidence that we have or depictions, descriptions, etcetera. As
Fagan points out in the section on navigation with Sean mcgrail,
author of Boats of the World and professor of maritime archaeology,
(19:20):
the earliest voyages for our ancestors would have remained within
side of land. Landmarks and sea marks would have been
key to navigation, and we see this reflected in recorded
traditions and classical and medieval sailing manuals. Makes sense, right,
I mean, it's like if if any of us were
to set out on a boat into the water, I
would want to keep land in sight. I need to
know where that land is. So all of this early uh.
(19:43):
You know, oceanic activity would have taken place withinside of land,
and we depended upon things you can notice on land. Uh.
You know your frame of reference reference was based on
the place you came from. Sure, But what happens when
you leave side of land. Well, by the mid UH
set at millennium BC, sailors in the South Pacific were
of course doing this by means of what we call
(20:05):
environmental navigation. We'll be getting into this at length. Uh,
but you know, at this point you have to travel
beyond dependence on coastal landmarks and sea marks. But that
doesn't mean that there's not an order and a language
to the open ocean. And for those who had the
wisdom and the observational skills of the accumulated knowledge of
their ancestors, they could plot their way by these cues,
(20:27):
They could recognize them, they could read the map of
the ocean. Now we'll get into the details of this
in a bit, but as Fagan and mcgrail point out,
you'll find indirect references to environmental navigation methodologies in Homer's
the Odyssey, as well as in the medieval text of
the Life of St. Brendan, and environmental navigation would have
been used in some form worldwide by the first millennium CE,
(20:51):
and that's when instruments began to pop up. That's when
we begin to use these various technological things to help us, uh,
make our way across the open water. But with the
navigators of the Pacific Islands, we're talking again about peak
environmental navigation, a level of advancement that exceeded anything else
in the rest of the world, anything else that the
(21:12):
rest of the world was capable of or had been
capable of, um aweing some of the first Europeans to
encounter such techniques and for a while seeming simply impossible
to some Western minds. Uh, you know that for a
while it just seemed impossible that, oh, the people who
were you know, that live in these islands, they must
be here by accident, they must be here by mistake,
(21:34):
and they're merely survivors of the ocean. They're not masters
of its navigation. But as we'll get to they were.
They were the masters. That's exactly right. And that's actually
one of the main points that David Lewis makes in
this book We the Navigators. Um, he was responding in
some ways to kind of trends in scholarship on the
on the settlement of the Pacific islands that had tended
(21:56):
to say that, well, a large number of these islands
must have just been edtled and discovered by accident, right
that maybe a fisherman or traders were out at sea
and they became lost, they drifted off course, and just
by happenstance they drifted to new islands that hadn't been
settled before, and then having discovered them, those islands could
be settled. Of course, it is possible that some islands
(22:18):
were discovered this way, but Lewis pushes back, arguing that
there's actually a pretty good evidence for a a program
of deliberate exploration and very accurate navigation by the sailors
of the time to to locate islands and and settle them.
So maybe actually it's time to introduce this book more
fully that I've been reading because I wanted to mention
(22:38):
a number of things that he talks about in it.
So again, the book is called We the Navigators, The
Ancient Art of Land Finding in the Pacific. It was
first published in nineteen seventy two, and the author, David Lewis,
was as I said, he was a medical doctor. He
was an experienced amateur sailor, so he had participated in
like you know, yacht races and things like that, and
(22:59):
a scholar. He was born in England, but he was
raised in New Zealand and Rairotonga in the Cook Islands
in the South Pacific, and Lewis had been a sailing
and kayaking enthusiasts for much of his life. He had
done some competitive sailing, including a Transatlantic single handed yacht
race in nineteen sixty and at least one circumnavigation of
(23:20):
the globe in a catamaran, and inspired by his experiences
with long sea voyages in small boats and his love
of Polynesian culture since his childhood, in the nineteen sixties
he got a grant from Australian National University to study
traditional Polynesian navigation techniques that did not rely on charts
(23:41):
or scientific instruments, and he did this research by learning
directly from several older Polynesian sailors and master navigators, experimenting
firsthand with voyages across the Pacific. With these navigators at
the helm or experimenting with what they taught him. And
so there are three basic versus of non documentary information
(24:02):
that he talks about. So one is shore based instruction
on ancient navigation techniques from knowledgeable navigators in the Carolinians,
the Santa Cruz Reef Islanders and two groups of Tea
Copeans uh Niningo Islanders, Gilbert E's and Tongans. And then
he also gets instruction during navigation itself on his yacht
(24:25):
known as the is Bjorn, which is under the command
of two older master navigators who helped him with his research.
One is a man named Tevak of the Santa Cruz
Reef Islands and another is named Hippo Or of pula
Wat in the Carolines. And I like the approach here
because actually, uh he opens his book by talking about
the fact that understanding indigenous navigation of the Pacific has
(24:49):
been really held back by what he calls an overly
theoretical approach. You know, just people trying to uh look
at indirect evidence to understand how the navigation happened, rather
than doing firsthand voyages with the navigators themselves. Yeah, actually
diving into the the accumulated knowledge of these cultures on
(25:11):
navigation in some cases. So there's a lot of interesting
stuff about this book. One of the interesting things he
mentions early on is he says, when he was growing
up in Polynesia, he says to his elder Polynesian cousins, Uh,
the ocean quote was a homely and not unfriendly place.
And that's interesting because it I mean, obviously, as a
(25:31):
land lubber like me thinks the idea of voyaging out
on the ocean in a canoe is like, inherently just
sounds terrifying, right, But to some extent that is cultural.
That's like, because I'm not used to the idea and
to people that have a culture of of long ocean
voyages in small watercraft like these canoes and catamarans. Uh,
it's it's not necessarily such a scary thing. I mean,
(25:54):
of course ocean voyages do always involve dangers, but under
the guidance of these long tested, ancient navigational techniques, if
you know what you're doing and you know where you're going,
it is actually not necessarily a scary thing to do.
In fact, it could be a sort of joyful part
of your culture. But on the other hand, thinking about
the ocean as a homely and not unfriendly place, this
(26:16):
might cause you to assume that spending a lot of
time at sea would would make ancient Pacific Islanders have
a kind of intuitive feel for ocean navigation that couldn't
be put into words the same way that you have
for a lot of skills you have. You know, there
are a lot of things that if you do them
enough and you get good at them, you know what
to do and you can do it well. But you
(26:37):
couldn't necessarily explain to somebody else why you're doing what
you're doing. But Lewis strongly resists this type of characterization
about Pacific Island navigation. He says it's, in fact the
exact opposite. He writes, quote one further notable feature of
what we were told and had shown to us was
that never once did anyone lay claim to any form
(27:00):
of quote sixth sense. A navigator had reason to believe
that land lay over the horizon because he had observed
certain signs that told him so, not on account of
some vague intuition. And I think this is a really
important point to hammer home about how ancient Pacific Island
navigation worked. It wasn't that you've got a feel for
(27:21):
it and then you just instinctively knew what to do.
It was based on knowledge and well calibrated external signs,
and so I think that means it It probably makes
more sense to think of ancient Pacific navigation as more
of a science than an art. You're not just getting
a feel for things and relying on your intuition, but
referencing specific markers and indicators of your position. Though these
(27:44):
markers might be mostly invisible to people who didn't know
exactly what to look for. Yeah, I mean it makes sense,
right the science. You would need the science to get there,
because the the the ocean is ultimately unforgiving. You know,
if you were just going on a gut instinct, you
might you might be right some of the time, but
if you get it really wrong once, then you might
(28:04):
not be coming back to shore exactly. And that really
comes through in studying these techniques. It is based on
specific markers, specific pieces of knowledge, specific cues in the environment,
and a major point of of Lewis's book is how
accurate these specific techniques and external markers were in the
(28:25):
hands of a master Pacific navigator. Who knew what they
were doing UM. He writes that navigators of Polynesia and
Micronesia seem to employ basically all of the same techniques
with only slight variations. He says the only major differences
were the features of local geography, because a lot of
these um methods of navigation do rely on knowing where
(28:46):
specific islands in the area you're navigating are, so that
would be different depending on what island groups you're sailing between.
But otherwise the techniques are extremely similar, and he says
that throughout Polynesia and Micronesia. He said that the techniques
were employed basically with the same level of effectiveness, measured
by the accuracy at landfall, which in general was highly accurate,
(29:09):
especially astonishingly accurate for not using tools and equipment that
are available to twentieth century navigators. Than now, I wanted
to come back to a fact I already mentioned once earlier,
but it's this astonishing figure that that Lewis gives talking
(29:29):
about the world of the Polynesians and the Micronesians, saying
that they inhabit a world of ocean. Again, if you
exclude New Zealand, this area of the globe has two
parts land to every one thousand parts water. And then
he mentioned something about this that I thought was really interesting.
He writes, quote, ocean spaces can inhibit contact, though terrestrial
(29:50):
features like mountain ranges may do so equally, but they
become highways rather than barriers as marine technology, especially navigation,
becomes effective. I had never thought about that before, but
I think that that's exactly right. So you can have
various barriers to travel and communication between different regions and cultures.
(30:12):
But whereas a mountain on land is always a barrier,
you know, even if you build a road through it,
the mountain will still slow you down. You know, making
a road through it just makes it sort of less
of a barrier. The ocean is something that can transition
from a brick wall to a super highway. Once you
have the skill and the knowledge and the technology of
(30:32):
to figure out where you're going and how to get there,
and you have the right kind of watercraft, the ocean
turns into the most efficient method of travel in the world. Yeah,
that's an excellent point. Now, there's one thing that has
made studying Pacific islander navigation more difficult than it might
otherwise be, which is that in many of these societies,
(30:53):
or maybe all of them and definitely most of them. Uh,
Navigational lore seems to have been something that was often
kept secret and only shared with a small group of
initiated experts. So it wasn't just that everybody in a
in a Micronesian or Polynesian society knew how to navigate
on the open ocean, but that you would have sort
(31:13):
of a class of educated navigators who would have this
this lore about how to get from place to place
within their brains and would be passed on to the
next generation of navigators. But it wouldn't be general knowledge
that was shared by everyone. Yeah, and I think that
will make even more sense as we'd get into some
of the details of say, navigating by stars and what
(31:34):
that entailed, you realize that this required specialized training and
a specialized eye, and not everybody was going to necessarily
be cut out for it, and it wouldn't make sense
for everyone to to invest this level of time and
energy into the understanding of it, right. And it's interesting,
I don't know exactly what all of the pressures leading
to it being a sort of specialized bit of of
(31:56):
exclusive lore among a special class of of navigators would be.
I mean, there might have been economic concerns keeping it
contained that way, or it might have just been sort of,
you know, the the difficulty of training people to to
have all of this knowledge in their head. I'm not
quite sure, but that's an interesting question as well. Now
there's another thing that Lewis gets into in his book
(32:17):
which I thought was really interesting about Again, when you
just look at the problem of you look at a
map of the Pacific Ocean and you think, how could
it be possible to navigate you know, these vast distances
without you know, modern scientific types of equipment or charts
and that kind of thing. And uh, And there is
one aspect of it that helps make the problem seem
(32:40):
more comprehensible, and it's this. Lewis writes that it is possible,
quote to sail to almost all the inhabited islands of
Oceania from Southeast Asia without once making a sea crossing
longer than three hundred and ten miles. The only exceptions
are Easter Island, Hawaii and New Zealand, though the most
(33:00):
predictable routes between Eastern and Western Polynesia are also long
such isolated lands apart, the majority of gaps between islands
and even archipelagos are well under three hundred and ten
miles and usually in the fifty to two hundred mile range.
Since no one wants to cross more open ocean than necessary,
it follows that most passages were of this order. So
(33:24):
if you know your Pacific geography and you know where
the islands are and how to navigate to them, the
problem of crossing the vast ocean actually can sometimes be
decomposed into many smaller journeys between islands, and the vast
Pacific ocean problem can be broken up into a kind
of stepping stone pattern. However, this does not mean that
(33:46):
ancient Pacific islanders were incapable of longer sea voyages. They
were not, and sometimes they did make them. Now, coming
back to the idea that Lewis pushes back against that
many of the islands of the Pacific would have been
settled initially through random drifts of people who found new
islands by accident while drifting about after you know, becoming
(34:07):
lost or something like that. Lewis pushes back against that,
and one line of evidence he sites is computer simulations
of human spread and settlement through random drifts. He writes
of this subject quote Contrary to expectations, the results showed
that while accidental advent upon a number of island groups
was likely, drifts could not account for certain crucial contact stages.
(34:29):
These were virtually impossible except as exploratory probes and subsequent
deliberately mounted ventures. The probability of drifts occurring was negligible
or zero across the following seaways Western Melanesia to Fiji,
Eastern Polynesia to Hawaii, New Zealand, or Eastern Island Eastern
Polynesian contact with the America's in either direction, the probability
(34:53):
of their having been drifts from Western to Eastern Polynesia
and from Western Polynesia to the Marquesas zone was very low,
and so here Lewis is arguing that not only were
the navigators of the ancient Pacific Islands able to travel
uh with with great accuracy between known islands and island groups,
that they also appear to have mounted these deliberate, intentional
(35:16):
exploratory ventures into new waters to find islands that had
not yet been discovered, and of course, in doing so,
would have the knowledge to be able to locate these
islands again upon you know, going back home and then
returning which again is astounding. Yeah, yeah, simply astounding. And
I think a lot of these the counter ideas, the ideas, yeah,
(35:38):
that that these had to be accidents, these you know,
these people that people could possibly have set out and
discovered these. I mean, it's such a I guess, a
landsman approach, you know, based on a you know, it's
the kind of analysis that a culture that is that
is more situated on the land and and does not
view the ocean as the majority of the world or
their world. I keep coming back to this, uh analysis
(36:01):
that for the for instance, the Polynesians, most of the
world was ocean and and and generally that's not the
sort of worldview you encounter with with with with Western civilizations.
And now certainly you have certain you know, civilizations and
cultures within the civilizations that are more uh nautical and
more dependent on maritime traditions. But but even then it's
(36:25):
it's it's often the case that they are they're more
attached the land, they're closer to the continent, and in
these cases we're dealing with with with islands within just
a vast world of water. Now, there's one big question
that Lewis also addresses in his book, which is the
question of what happened to so much of this, this
ancient Pacific navigational knowledge. Right, clearly some people in the
(36:48):
twentieth century still possess it, but this seems to have
become increasingly rare. Uh. And you could easily blame the
import of foreign navigation equipment and techniques by other cultures. Right,
So if you have brought in charts and compasses and
things like that from from elsewhere, there's less need to
rely on the ancient navigational lore to get from place
(37:09):
to place. But unfortunately it doesn't seem like that's the
only cause. It also seems that by the last few
centuries many island groups in the Pacific came to be
ruled by foreign empires, and those empires, in many cases
simply forbade travel between islands, Lewis writes in in one
footnote in the book, quote the banning by European administrations
(37:31):
of inner island canoe travel must have been a potent
cause of navigational decline. Voyages were forbidden, for instance, in
the Carolines. In German times. It Illan attributed the loss
of traditional lore on Nningo to the effect of the
Old German regulations prohibitions remain in force today and this
would have been in ninety two in among other places,
(37:52):
the Tahiti group, and voyaging is strongly discouraged in the
Gilbert's Not only must atrophy of knowledge have resulted, but
deliberate voyages had to be kept secret. Advent upon another
island was invariably attributed to accident. So this seems to
be one of the detrimental effects of various colonialisms on
on on the Pacific islands that it would have led
(38:15):
to a steepening decline in the ancient navigational lore and
the passing down of this knowledge about how to navigate
by the stars and these other signs, because there was
simply less opportunity for people to navigate to you know,
go out in the open ocean the way they would
have before. Now it's interesting too, though, that there are
exceptions to this uh as well. I was looking at
(38:37):
this on that that Hokolea website and over there that
they discussed and this is also discussed at on the
website for the Bishop Museum UM in Hawaii on the
island of Oahu, which is an excellent museum about various
Polynesian cultures. And gets into a lot of what we're
discussing here. Definitely worth visiting if you if you make
(38:58):
it out to olaho um But that as as discussed
these on both of these sources, the art of deep
sea voyaging in Hawaii had it been extinct for several
hundred years before contact with Europeans. So this period of
long voyages ended along with all contact with other Polynesian islands,
and they lived in near complete isolation until seventy eight, right,
(39:22):
So that's fascinating as well. Yeah, so there could be
a number of causes there. So there's also there's like,
in one sense, you could have a kind of natural
atrophy of knowledge, and then there could be some loss
of knowledge by by imposition of colonial rule, and then
also some loss of knowledge by the introduction of alternative
methods for travel. But fortunately not all the knowledge was lost.
(39:43):
And so we have the accounts of of Lewis doing
this firsthand research with with master navigators like hip Or
and and Teak. And I was going to get into
some of the specifics of of these navigation techniques in
this episode, but we're already running kind of long, so
I think maybe we should all it there and then
come and talk about the navigation techniques in part two, Yeah,
(40:05):
how to read these environmental cues and engage in environmental navigation.
And then and then also some of the history of
proving it out and then what what that those experiments
those uh uh, those those voyages approved about history itself.
So join us next time as we continue to discuss
this topic. In the meantime, if you would like to
(40:26):
listen to other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
you'll find them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind
podcast feed and that can be found wherever you get
your podcasts. We just asked that wherever that happens to be,
just rate, review and subscribe if you have the power
to do so. We we greatly appreciate anyone who does
that that that helps us out. Love a good star rating,
love good subscription, keep it in huge thanks as always
(40:49):
to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other to suggest a topic
for the future, just to say hello, you can email
us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
(41:09):
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