July 13, 2021 • 49 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 three-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
we're back with part three of our series about ancient
Pacific island navigation. In the previous couple of episodes, of course,
(00:24):
if you haven't listened to those, you should go back
and check those out first so you can understand what
we're talking about today. But in the last couple of
episodes we talked about a lot of these fascinating mysteries
about the population of the Pacific Islands and and how
those islands were first colonized by humans, how people found them,
and then how people traveled between them once they knew
where all the islands were. Because, of course, this is
(00:45):
a huge area of the surface of the Earth that
is covered almost entirely by water, and only polka dotted
with these tiny islands here and there. And yet somehow,
without charts, without instruments like a like a compass um,
the navigators of the Pacific Islands were able to reach
the other islands in in the surrounding areas with this
(01:06):
amazing level of accuracy. So in the first episode we
talked about some of the history theories about the history
of the settlement of these islands, and then in the
last episode we talked about techniques that have been documented
that allowed master navigators to locate and and sail to
islands in this in this vast ocean with enough accuracy
(01:28):
that they could do so reliably over and over again.
And what those techniques without charts and modern instruments would
have been. Yeah, this this whole realm of environmental navigation,
which I just want to drive home again when we're
talking about this, we're talking not about some sort of
innate art or something that is just uh, this one
acquires by you know, being out in the water or
(01:49):
being uh, you know, growing up on the ocean, that
sort of thing. Now, this was this was a science
that was learned that was passed down from generation to
generation across these these different Pacific cultures. That's right. One
of the main sources we've been referring to is a
very important book in the history of of studying these
techniques that was by a scholar named David Lewis, and
(02:12):
it was published with the University of Hawaii Press in
nineteen seventy two. It's called We the Navigators, The Ancient
Art of Land Finding in the Pacific. And one thing
that's really really cool about this book is that Lewis
sailed well. He he interviewed many master navigators of different
Pacific islands in Micronesia and Polynesia, but he also sailed
(02:32):
with several navigators including UH, two very prominent navigators named
Hippur and Tevak, from whom he learned a whole lot
about these these techniques firsthand at sea, like they were
navigating his boat, which was a boat called the Ispiorn
and UH, and so we got to see these techniques firsthand.
And so in the last episode we talked mostly about
(02:54):
techniques for navigation on the open sea. Direction finding, so
especially using the stars to to orient towards your targets
and UH, and then using backup methods as well, such
as like using the sun during the daytime and navigating
by directionally reliable C swells, which was especially astounding to me,
(03:14):
like the idea that you, you know, you could learn
how to feel for certain patterns of C swells that
reliably come from a certain direction and then use that
to know which way you're heading. UM, and then also,
of course, you would have to pair these direction finding
techniques on the open sea with the system of dead reckoning,
which is knowing how far you have traveled based on
(03:36):
your rate of travel, your starting position, and your direction
of travel and so and so. That would be a
way of sort of record keeping your journey mentally as
you're going along the way, even though you don't necessarily
have new environmental clues to choose from. But today we
wanted to get mainly into the question of land finding.
So a traditional Pacific navigator has used open c navigation
(04:00):
techniques like celestial orientation and dead reckoning to get roughly
to the vicinity of an island. Once you are nearing
your destination, how do you actually find the land? Yeah,
because as we discussed in the previous episode, you don't
want to you know, be sailing in the right direction
to be in the vicinity of the island and then
not be able to see it to again again not
(04:21):
be close enough to pick up on the very obvious
cues that you were near the island, and have to
pick up on those more subtle cues that would require
training and expertise to notice. Right, I mean, one of
the biggest dangers actually for a Pacific island sailor is missing,
your target is going past the island you're trying to
(04:41):
get to without realizing it. Yeah, I mean, in a
very very loose sense, it's like depending on say, your
your GPS navigational system, which we refer to previously, you know,
using that to get to the immediate area, like the
block where the where the or is that you're trying
to go a story you've never been to before. But
(05:03):
then once you're there, the GPS is only gonna help
you so much. Then you're gonna have to pinpoint the sign,
figure out which storefront it is, figure out your parking, etcetera.
There are a whole new set of problems that your
mirror navigational system, your GPS, is not able to help
you with. Right. And so, one thing that's very interesting
that David Lewis explores in his book is what he
(05:25):
calls the idea of expanded target landfall. And what that
means is that by using a suite of land finding techniques,
you can essentially extend the radius of land a certain
reliable distance out into the ocean. And I'll talk about
the distances as we go on, but there's a certain
(05:47):
reliable distance out into the ocean that you can just
expect to be able to detect nearby land even if
you can't see it. And if you measure land, including
those radii out into the ocean beyond the shore and
h and especially beyond sort of like reefs and submerged
or or almost submerged a toolls nearby, you can actually
(06:09):
greatly expand the percent of the Pacific Ocean that is
taken up by by by land range. Basically, so you
can expand your target from these tiny islands surrounded mostly
by water to basically a block of islands with mostly
or totally overlapping ranges of land detectable water. Does that
(06:33):
make sense? Yes, yeah, basically increases the the the footprint
of the island, like the the detectable footprint of the island. Right. So, so,
of course the direction finding techniques like celestial navigation are
extremely important and getting you towards your your target, but
also the expanded target landfall is just as important, if
(06:55):
not more important. I mean, I guess you can't really
have one without the other. It is also extremely important
because you know, there's only so accurate you can get
with steering by stars, you still need to be able
to correct course and find the land once you're close enough.
And so, how far exactly can you expect to find
land from out in the ocean. Well, it does very
(07:17):
a lot, depending on local conditions. But Lewis cites a
scholar named Frankel who estimates that on average, land can
usually be detected from about thirty miles in any direction,
and Louis essentially agrees with this number. Uh, And then
he writes this quote. If we draw circles with thirty
miles radii around each Pacific island, we find that the
(07:39):
circles overlap over vast areas, giving rise to solid blocks
i e. Islands separated by not more than sixty miles
passing between which a canoe could not be more than
thirty miles offshore. So, with these expanded target landfall techniques,
the problem of finding these tiny islands in the past
(08:00):
ocean actually is much more manageable. It's reducible more to
finding these blocks or screens of islands within a certain angle.
You know a certain angle of direction from your starting position,
So it means that what would otherwise be a sprinkle
of islands becomes a clump of islands, yes, which there's
(08:21):
some there. You actually you shared a wonderful map here
that that that demonstrates this, and it's really it's really
quite impressive because you can see it making a huge
amount of difference, uh, is you're traveling, you know, between
these these islands, uh potentially even charting some of these
these more distant journeys. That's right. So if you're looking
at it from a map that includes expanded target landfall
(08:45):
as sort of a black circle around the island, what
would have been a smattering of of little tiny dots
instead turns into a big clump of black circles that
they're all overlapping each other. So this really does help
with the problem. But of course you you could easily
once again pass between these islands without actually being able
to see them visually. So you need to be able
(09:07):
to know what to look for. And again one of
the things that stressed, especially in we the navigators, is
that the degree of what they call screening the screening
of islands rather than individual island targets. So you would
aim for a screen like a line of islands that
are all overlapping within land finding range of one another.
(09:28):
That the the degree of screening of an island or
island group target was the number one safety concern when
making a journey there, So more screening more overlapping of
the expanded targets is safer, and less screening where there
are gaps between the expanded targets is much more dangerous
because again of the danger of unknowingly passing your target.
(09:52):
But I guess we should talk about what are the
actual landfall signs? What are the environmental signs that can
be used to detect a land from a long distance away.
I guess we should start with the one that is
the most obvious. Maybe this one doesn't actually need to
be said, but there are a couple of things about
it that are worth sorting out. Actually, So the most
obvious one is high ground. Right. In some cases your
(10:13):
target island is very tall and it can be seen
from very far away. So, for example, Tahiti reaches elevations
of something like seventy feet and for this reason, the
land itself can sometimes be seen from as far as
eighty miles away. That that's a real good distance. And likewise,
Hawaii that can be seen from extremely far away. It
contains volcanoes, and rising land mass that sometimes up up
(10:36):
to like thirteen thousand feet, but not every island is
tall like this. Many Pacific islands lie more or less
at sea level, with nothing much taller than the height
of a palm tree, and you can easily miss these.
Standard navigational lore holds that on these low islands, visibility
is about ten miles, given the presence of coconut palms,
(10:58):
which grow to about of any five feet high, so
at about ten miles you should be able to see
the tallest of the coconut palms. It's interesting. I was
reading about about this and it reminded me of our
episode on on the Font of Morgana, where we talked
about mirages and about how in some cases there were
islands that we even put on maps that turned out
to not be real. They were based on on mirrages.
(11:22):
And the reverse of that is also true. There are
islands that um certainly as as European powers were coming
into play and trying to map everything out, there were
islands that were that were known to be to exist
by by the natives, but various Europeans would would have
would decide, well, this was probably a mirage. We don't have.
(11:44):
We don't know exactly where it is, but it would
turn out it was actually there. Yeah, and it's funny
you should bring up the Fedamorghana episode because this land
finding technique is way down the list in terms of
of how commonly it was used in the level of
priori it's given. But one of the things mentioned in
this book is that land loom, the optical illusion of
(12:06):
being able to see the land in a in a
superior mirage projected up above the horizon, even though the
land is not visible itself from where you are. This
actually was sometimes used by some Pacific Island navigators, specifically
Lewis Sites navigators from the Gilbert's using this one. But
coming back to the idea of vantage points and high ground,
(12:28):
there is actually a pretty reliable mathematical equation you can
use for determining the visibility of an object over the
horizon at sea uh and and it goes like this,
So you take the square root of the height of
the object you're looking for in feet and and so
this is this method will be unit dependent, but the
square root of the height of the object and feet
(12:51):
so that could be a you know, a seventy five
foot tall palm tree, or it could be a mountaintop
or a lighthouse, whatever that is. And then you add
that to the square route of the observer's height, so
that would also be in feet. If you're you know,
if your eyes are five feet above the water, that's
five feet, or if you're sitting down in a low canoe,
it's probably even lower. And then you you add those
(13:12):
together and then you multiply by I've seen different numbers.
Actually I found a navigational website that suggested multiplying that
number by one point one seven. Lewis gives gives the
idea to multiply by one point one five. But whichever
way you do, you'll probably get pretty close to the
same answer, and this will give you the distance away
(13:33):
in miles that an object can usually be seen over
the horizon. But that made me think about the height
of the observer, which makes me wonder about the land
finding virtues of different watercraft, right, because they're obviously different
kinds of watercraft. People make these journeys and sometimes there
in they could be in outrigger canoes or they could
(13:53):
be in a double hulled traditional navigational vessel that would
have a much more raised form in the middle with
even a cabin that I guess you could technically get
on top of. I don't know how, I don't know
what all of the techniques with with ancient Pacific watercraft
would be for getting higher up as a vantage point.
But that seems like that that could give you an
advantage as well, right, because of course they would not
(14:16):
have the advantage that that you would have with agin
a crow's nest lookout in a in a western sailing vessel,
like you know, a large scale ocean voyaging ship. That's right.
But uh, fortunately, these these specific navigators had lots of
other environmental cues they could look for. And these cues
(14:37):
are very important because even with taller islands, so even
if you're trying to get, you know, to a place
that's mountainous, you're trying to get to Tahiti or Hawaii
or something, environmental conditions can render these less visible. So
Louis gives the example of mountains, the mountains of Mangareva
and truck which should be visible based on their height
from like forty five miles away, but he says that
(15:00):
in his case, when he was once approaching in in
the boat, they were unable to see the peaks of
these islands because of overcast, and so their first visual
sighting was actually of the surrounding barrier reef rather than
of the island itself. Now, as we go on to
discuss more of these land finding techniques, it's important to
note that they vary in both directions, meaning that the
(15:22):
land finding techniques very in preference of individual navigators and
navigator cultures and in availability at target. So there are
some like, uh, there's some traditions of land finding lore
that place more emphasis on one or the other. But
also you need to have the backup knowledge because you're
not always going to be able to find all of
(15:43):
these when you look for them. Yeah, again, this is
a suite of tools that one that a navigator would use.
This is a toolbox of different techniques, and you're not
gonna want to depend on just one of them. Now,
you're gonna use several of them, and some of them
are gonna better than others. But when used in congress,
you can get the train navigator can get really positive results. Now,
there's one thing that Lewis mentions in this book which
(16:05):
I thought was interesting, which is a sort of counter
example to uh. The thing we've talked about a couple
a couple of times, which is that he says, you know,
none of the navigators he spoke to or traveled with
ever ever appealed to the idea of a sixth sense.
Right you were mentioning this earlier, it's not just intuition
about being at sea. When they were making navigational decisions,
(16:26):
they could always point to specific markers. They could say
the reason I'm going this way is because of this.
It's something that was in the environment that could be
pointed out and understood. So it wasn't just a gut feeling.
But one place in which he does say intuition seemed
to come in was in the calculus of how much
to wait different types of observations of of land finding signs.
(16:50):
So navigators might get close to an island and you'd
see one kind of sign and then another one, and
they'd be trying to decide which way to go based
on maybe different conflicting signals, or or what what the
sort of sum total or average of the evidence was.
And that did seem to be more based on a
gut feeling after surveying all the evidence available to them.
(17:12):
So I thought that was an interesting counterpoint. Thank thank
thank so. The first big sign to mension, I think
would be birds. Uh. There's actually a part where where
Lewis sites a navigator named Tita who says that who
is quoted at length on this. He says birds are
(17:34):
the navigator's very best friends. Birds are useful up to
twice the site range of an island from a canoe.
And he also says the site range of land is
about ten miles and that of birds twenty. The birds
which are the most significant are turns and noddies. Yeah,
I've read that. Yeah. A lot of it comes down
to familiarity with bird species. It's not just, of course
(17:56):
birds in general, but specific knowledge of how are out
to see a particular bird species will typically go So
if it's a if it's a sea bird, for instance,
the distance could be somewhere in the neighborhood of a
hundred kilometers, which is about sixty two point one miles. Um.
You know, again, it's just going to depend on the
(18:17):
exact variety of bird, uh, while other varieties of bird
are going to stay much closer to land. That's right.
So yeah, you need to look not just for birds
in general, but for specific species of birds, because there are,
as you mentioned, pelagic species like petrolls and sheer waters
that will just not lead you to land with any reliability.
(18:39):
If you follow them, you may end up cruising out
into the deep and not coming back. But once you
get within about thirty to fifty miles of shore, you
will start to see some familiar species that are somewhat reliable.
So first of all, you'll see booby birds uh and
sometimes predatory frigate birds. At this distance of thirty to
fifty miles, and then even closer, within about twenty to
(19:02):
twenty five miles of the nearest a toll, you will
get what what Louis says are quote mixed flocks of
white turns and noddies that will be encountered busily searching
for fish. And once again, they show no more interest
in directing the wayfarer than a busy New York policeman.
Uh So, so there's some further deduction you have to do.
(19:23):
It's not just like you see the birds and then
you immediately know what's up. If you see booby birds,
frigate birds, turns and naughties, you know you're close, but
you can't really use their flight paths and behavior throughout
the daytime to know which direction land lies. So what
do you do. Well, you have to use time of day.
These species roost on land and they have to return
(19:45):
to solid ground daily, and so the time of day
tells you a lot. They typically fly out to their
fishing shoals from land in the early morning, and then
they return to land in the evening. So to read
a passage from from Louis here he writes quote towards evening,
the frigate birds, for example, will be seen to abandon
their leisurely patrolling, climb even higher, and set off in
(20:07):
one direction, probably homing by sight. About the same time,
the boobies will tire of their inquisitive inspections and fly
low and arrows straight for the horizon. As the noddies depart,
they will weave slightly in and out between the crests
of larger waves, while the turns will be flying a
little above them, but all will be following a very
(20:27):
exact path towards their home island. So once you are
within range of land, and you've gotten there again by
the process of of of open sea navigation, often by
the stars, and uh, and then these backup methods together
with dead reckoning, you get within range of the island,
you start to see certain bird species and you know
which species to look for and what time of day
(20:48):
to follow them. And if you see the birds all
trending in the same direction around sundown, then you know.
There are also a few stories here and there about
islands where some sea going birds have and domesticated, you know,
like fed and trained. But these stories seemed kind of
vague and uncertain, but it is at least an interesting
possibility to consider, whether there's much to it or not.
(21:10):
Like what if an island culture could essentially train frigate
birds to be the walmart greeters of the island. Yeah, yeah,
and almost like living lighthouses in some respects. Yeah, because
the behavior of birds can factor and apart from just uh,
you know, flying back like booby, birds are considered useful
in that they will not only fly towards land at
(21:31):
the close of day, they will often take an active
interest in approaching boats and they will try to land
on them, like land on the rigging or something, before
eventually flying off toward home in the evening. Now, I
know a lot of you out there probably watched The
Simpsons or have watched The Simpsons in the past, and
you're probably thinking about the scene in the episode Boy
Scouts in the Hood. Uh uh, this is the the
(21:53):
episode and what let's see. I'm trying to remember exactly
how it went. And did they get lost at sea? Well,
first they get lost at her which then results and
then being lost at sea and they're trying to get
back to land and then what do they see in
the sky? They see a seagull. Is this the one
that starts with Bart wanting a knife but to get
a knife, Yeah, and he has to he has to
(22:14):
read the book don't do what Donny Don't does. But yeah,
it ends up with them doing a boy Scout river race,
and so they're lost at sea and what I don't
remember what happens with the seagull. I think Ned declare.
Ned is with them, and Ned looks up and he
sees that there's a seagull and he declares that they're saved. Um,
but then it is it is. Then it is brought
up that seagulls only go out to sea to die,
(22:36):
and then the seagull dies, so they're still lost. Uh.
Now I was thinking about this in connection with with
with some of these islands, particularly with the Hawaiian Islands.
And this is a fun fun fact of the various
species of seagulls out there, and there are many. Seagulls
are not one species, they're multiple. You'll find some of
them in the Hawaiian Islands. But a great mini goals
(22:59):
cannot survive in Hawaii because the islands lack the sort
of shallow coastal scavenging waters that one finds in continental settings.
Some of these goals do wind up in Hawaii, but
only to starve to death because they do not have
the environment they need to survive. Well, that actually ties
into the next thing I wanted to mention, which is
that everything we've talked about so far is in the
(23:20):
context of land finding by way of local birds in
a near radius to an island, you know they live
on the island, and once you see them, you know
you're near the island. You can follow them home. But
there's another use of bird navigation entirely, which is the
possibility that some ancient Pacific islanders deduced the presence of
(23:41):
previously unknown islands by observing the migratory patterns of land birds.
Stories like this exist in some island sailor lore, so
it seems quite reasonable to assume that that some islands
were indeed discovered this way. But ultimately it's it's historical
speculation and we don't know for sure, but that that
does seemed like a very plausible guess as to how
(24:03):
some of these islands were found when they had never
been seen by humans before. I should also add that
above the various birds you could site that would give
you an indication that you were near land, the Dodo
the absolute best. Once you've once you've spotted the Dodo,
you're good to go. But by the way, if you
find yourself in Hawaii, if you find yourself on the
(24:23):
island of Oahu, I highly recommend going to the Bishop
Museum there. Um it is. It is a wonderful museum
that covers so much about Polynesian culture and uh in
Hawaiian history, and it covers some of what we're talking
about here. There there there's stuff about the canoes that
were used, uh the navigational techniques that were used, and
(24:45):
and so forth. So I'm sure the Bishop Museum will
come up again, but I highly recommend it you if
you if you visit the islands, you you kind of
owe it to yourself to go to the Bishop Museum.
All right, So we've talked about high ground, we've talked
about birds. What's next. Okay? The next one is is
fascinating to me and and it is the use of
(25:07):
clouds to find nearby land. So you might think, well,
how could you use that? I mean, there are clouds
over the open ocean. What what would clouds tell you?
But it turns out they can tell you quite a lot. There.
There is this tradition among Pacific navigators of looking for
your target by what's known as land clouds, patterns of
(25:27):
cloud formations that are consistent with the presence of land
rather than open water. So how would clouds appearing over
an island be any different than clouds appearing anywhere else. Well, well,
they're actually a number of signs that are used. So
navigators claim first of all, that clouds move more quickly
over open water and more slowly over land, almost as
(25:49):
if they appear to become stuck over islands that are
hidden beyond the horizon. But there are also a number
of difficult to describe characteristics that that these navigators look for.
Having to do with the formation, appearance, and behavior of
clouds over dry land, and one example is the the
telltale shapes, specifically the eyebrows and the V shape. Both
(26:13):
of these are referred to, for example, by a navigator
named Aberra, that is that was extensively interviewed by by
David Lewis in his book, and so according to the
navigational lore of Aberra, uh the eyebrows meaning these I mean,
I guess I can't describe them any better than that.
Clouds that look like eyebrows appear in the sky over
(26:34):
where an island would be. So if they are eyebrows,
you'd imagine the island down below the horizon is sort
of where the noses or maybe where the lips are,
so it's between the two eyebrows. And these eyebrow looking
clouds are more common when the weather is calm and
there are no other clouds, whereas a different formation, known
as the V shape the V shaped column is present
(26:55):
over islands when there is wind and when there are
other clouds, and the V shape basically the vertex of
it at the bottom points down to where the island is.
But even more fascinating than that, to me is that experience.
Navigators mentioned that there are cues rooted in the color
of clouds. Clouds hovering over an island below the horizon
(27:17):
will tend to have different colors and levels of brightness
than clouds floating over the ocean, and apparently a lot
of this has to do with the actual reflection of
the colors of the land lying below the cloud. It's amazing. Yeah, yeah,
this is really neat. I was reading about this specifically
as it concerns lagoons. Lagoons being shallow bodies of water, uh,
(27:42):
the open ocean being deep water, and therefore the lagoon
water as reflected in the cloud, will be a lighter
shade of blue. Um so, so yeah, that's so. You know,
it's not like a mirror. You're not gonna be like, oh, look,
I can see the reflection of the entire island to
which we are going. No, but to the arained ie
you would be able to see the difference in the color,
(28:03):
like there's a lighter blue reflected in the clouds, that
that must be the blue of the lagoons on the island.
Though I should of course also stressed this, like a
lot of the things we're discussing here we should add
the caveat under the right conditions exactly, So none of
these signs we're talking about are always observable. Uh And
and Lewis stresses this a lot that it requires consistent,
(28:23):
focused attention in looking for all of the available cues
that you know about. So looking for a few minutes
you are quite likely to see nothing to get no cues.
But if an experience navigator pays close attention for several hours,
usually at least one type of land sign will manifest. Yeah,
And just to get a sense of what the the
(28:44):
the effects of reflected color from land on the clouds
would be, like, I want to read a section from
Lewis here where he describes some examples. So uh, he says,
quote the colors that begin to appear closer to land
very with the makeup of the island. There are three
kinds of island with core responding clouds. Tita says. Above
lagoon islands, the cloud roof tends to be greenish. Over
(29:07):
extensive areas of white sand or surf, the cloud or
a portion of it will be brighter, more white than
the rest. The clouds above a wooded green island will
be darker than their neighbors. Abera referred to a pink
tinge over reefs and green above lagoons. Re We likewise
said that lagoon islands reflect green, and ones without lagoons
(29:30):
a reddish color. Islands with no lagoons, like Couria said Yotibata,
reflect a dark color that must be distinguished from rain cloud,
which appears very similar. Islands with big stretches of dry
reef or mangroves have bright colored clouds above them. And
then he mentions that given the fact that all of
the stuff he's just been saying comes from different interviews
(29:53):
with different navigators from different islands, and with four separate
interpreters transcribing what they were saying, Uh, the fact that
they're so consistent in what they say about the colors
reflected in the clouds is pretty amazing. Now, there's another
very important thing that I'm not going to spend a
lot of time on, just because we discussed it somewhat
(30:13):
in our previous episode and now in the last episode,
we talked about feeling for swells in the sea as
a way of direction finding, but also a navigator can
feel for the reflection refraction and interference with swells with
no notion swells to detect that land is nearby. And
Lewis goes into deep detail on this practice in his book,
But essentially, it's it's a similar to feeling to direction
(30:37):
finding with the help of swells, except feeling for interruptions
and swells and reflections of swells from known land masses.
But there's one last thing I wanted to talk about
here that is really interesting and almost kind of creepy,
especially because it is to some degree still mysterious, though
there there's some ideas about what it might be. Uh.
(30:57):
So we've talked, you know, at length before about bioluminescence
in the ocean. You know, a kind of that is
a regular, profuse light in the water from organisms like
bioluminescent plankton and uh and Lewis recounts in the book
that some navigators say that bioluminescence in the water just
doesn't tell you much useful. Other sources seem to think
(31:19):
it increases when near near land or a reef. But
in any case, it's important to distinguish regular bioluminescence in
the water from this next land sign, which is fascinating
and It's what David Lewis calls deep phosphorescence, but it
is also known as ta lapa spelled t E space
(31:39):
l a p A. The navigator Tevak calls this calls
it underwater lightning. It's also described by another navigator as
ulo a tahi or the glory of the seas. And
so I wanna read Lewis describing what this is' he's
just picking up after tevk has has called it underwater lightning,
which he thinks is an excellent analog g and Lewis
(32:01):
writes quote. It comprises streaks, flashes, and momentarily glowing plaques
of light all well beneath the surface, exactly like lightning.
It flickers and darts and is in constant motion. It
occurs a good deal deeper down than common luminescence, at
anything from a foot or two to more than a fathom.
(32:21):
All right, So that's already strange, because I, you know,
otherwise I'd never heard of anything like that anymore. Flashes
of light from deep under the water, almost like lightning.
But it gets even weirder. Apparently ta lapa seems to
flash from the direction of an island or a reef.
You can see it well into the deep sea when
you're eighty two a hundred miles away from land, But
(32:44):
as you approach the island, the flashes of light become
more and more rare, and then they disappear entirely as
you get really close. The distance from land or from
reefs also seems to affect how the light moves. They're
slow flashes of light far out at sea, but in
about ten to twenty miles from land it starts to
take on a rapid, whipping back and forth movement. And uh.
(33:07):
And it's also generally understood that tai lapa coming from
reefs is slower moving than tei lapa coming from islands.
So this was amazing to me because I had never
heard of anything like this before. Yeah. Yeah, this is
definitely new to me as well. Um and it is
mysterious sound and the idea of underwater bioluminescent lightning being
some sort of guide again, like all of these things,
(33:29):
not the primary guide, but some additional tool that you
could turn to. Right. Well, one thing I want to
note what you said, it's the tai lapa is bioluminescent,
which it may well might be, but it might be
some other kind of luminescence as well. It's still there's
still some question about what causes it, and we'll discuss
that more in a minute. But uh, but yeah, I
(33:50):
think it's not a given that it's necessarily bioluminescent, like
the you know, the like the general sort of ambient
glow that you see in the upper area of the sea,
that's no owned to be bioluminescent. But it's important that
what you say that this is very much a backup
method and it's not known to everyone. So Lewis documented
references to it in the navigational lore from two Polynesian
(34:13):
areas and one Micronesian area, but there were plenty of
other navigators who didn't seem to know anything about Taylapa,
like they had never even heard of this concept. Yeah.
One of the people, the more recent people that we
were looking at concerning this topic is a Harvard physicist
by the name of John huth Um And uh, and
he points out that, Yeah, in some cultures you just
(34:34):
see no mention of it, the Marshall Islands being one
that he specifically mentions where they just didn't didn't have
the concept and and it's unknown exactly why is it
an environmental reason? Like whatever this phenomena is, it's not
it wasn't present, uh, you know around the Marshall Islands
or islands that were of interest to these navigators, or
(34:54):
is it a situation where for this particular culture they
found that this was not a reliable navigational tool and
it just wasn't worth keeping around, Like it's not one
you can lean heavily on, and it would always be
just kind of like a second or third tier backup. Anyway,
it remained a mystery. Yeah, yeah, So some islanders explained
(35:17):
that as this backup method of navigation, they could use
te Lapa to steer on dark, rainy nights. So maybe
you can't see the stars, you can perhaps see these
flashes of underwater lightning. And Louis actually documents that he
himself observed it. There was one night when it was
late at night and it was dark and he was
sailing with Tevak. This was on the thirty one of December,
(35:40):
he writes, quote land Lapa was seen to be darting
to and fro along two distinct bearings, which were both
plain enough for me to see despite the clear night
and the comparative nearness of the islands. One series kept
flashing from a direction which tevk averred was that of
the volcano Tina Coola. The other he said it was
from the island of Nadeni. Morning revealed the high islands
(36:04):
of Tina Coola and Nadini, each about twenty miles away
and respectively west and south of our position. These were
the directions that the old navigator had indicated. So in
this experience, he says, yep I saw it. Tek told
me it was there. I looked and I saw it,
and it was in the directions of the islands, just
like he said it would be. And so Louis did
(36:26):
believe he was the first person to document this navigational
sign in print. Of course, it was known before him
to to the people who possessed it as part of
their navigational lore. But he believed that this phenomenon had
no European definition and uh. And of course, again not
all navigators in the Pacific Islands were aware of Talapa,
but some were from at least three distinct regions that
(36:48):
he that he interviewed navigators from. And it was interpreted
and it turned out to provide accurate information. So what
was it? What's causing these flashes of light underneath the
or from the direction of islands or reefs, Lewis ultimately
says in the book. And then again, this was in
seventy two, so we may have developed some knowledge since then.
(37:08):
But Lewis said he really didn't know what it was,
and he guessed that it may have had something to
do with deep swell movement, maybe a kind of deep
reflection of waves from islands or reefs. But that leaves
a lot of lingering questions. Why why if it's bouncing
off of these islands or reefs, why could it be
seen at such great distances from land, albeit moving more slowly.
(37:31):
And one thing that I that I found so I
was reading a Harvard Gazette article about the work of
that physicist you mentioned John Huth, who had done some
follow up work on this, and uh. This Gazette article
mentioned that many scholars disputed Lewis's reports of the Talapa quote.
The lights were initially dismissed as fantasy when other researchers
(37:51):
reported that they were unable to see them. Some critics
who said thought that pursuing quote underwater lightning was akin
to chasing the abominable no Man. Yeah. John Huth seems
to have done a fair amount of work dealing with
with Ti Lapa and one when the source that I
was a reading was the article Conclusions a cross Disciplinary
(38:14):
Journey through Spatial Orientation by who, published in the journal
Structure and Dynamics in sixteen, and in this he points
out that there is still no definitive explanation for the
origin of Ti Lapa, But one possibility that that he
seems so like, is that it's a byproduct of fish
darting in a patch of sea rich with uh dino
(38:34):
of flagelets which emit light in response to the stimuli
of pressure waves. But even if that is the case,
he says, then it still leaves a mystery of the
directionality of the fish movements themselves. You know why and
how can we navigate by this information? Right? What if
that's the explanation, why would it point to islands in
a reliable way? Right? And uh? One of the challenges
(38:58):
and researching is uh, Hooth points out, is just the
difficulty of rooper reproducing sightings. We need further studies which
require both sensitive equipment and dependable sightings of the phenomena.
Um and and again he pointed to the fact that
you don't actually see it as a navigational aid in
some cultures, uh, such as the Marshall Islands, raising questions
(39:19):
of you know, is this cultural? Is it environmental? And
it's simply unknown. Um uh so yeah, it's it's it's
really fascinating. And again it it it. I think it
serves to just reminders als that, yeah, we're dealing with
a suite of different navigational techniques and and if if
this is among the tools at your disposal, then you know,
(39:40):
perhaps it is useful in in deciding like fine tuning
your your your directional approach. But perhaps for some of
some cultures they abandon it because it did not seem
useful enough. We just don't know. I mean, I'm pretty
convinced that people are actually observing this, that it's not
just a fantasy. And I mean not only because it
(40:01):
is part of the navigational lore and seems to have
been used as this backup method of direction finding, but
also because I mean there are additional modern reports of
people saying, yeah, I actually did see it, even if
I was not able to photograph it. For example, I
found an article by a scholar named Marianne George who
is a cultural anthropologist who uh talks about this in
(40:24):
an article called Polynesian Navigation and Ta Lapa the Flashing
published in Time and Mind, the Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness,
and Culture from and she also talks about having been
able to eventually witness it herself out on the ocean.
But I don't think you can find video of it.
I don't think anybody has ever captured it like that,
so it's still a very interesting question than now. One
(40:52):
of the really interesting things concerning all of this again
is the idea that in modern times, reach researchers have
had to to fit a lot of this back together,
you know, depending on genetics and linguistics and lural histories, etcetera,
all these various disciplines and as discussed in multiple places,
but specifically, you see this discussed at the Bishop Museum,
(41:15):
both the physical museum and the online presence. You also
see it discussed at at the website for Hokuleau. That's
how that's um at HOCA dot com. That is h
O k u l e uh pus v A. Is
that you saw something rather interesting concerning deep sea voyages
in Hawaiian culture, and I believe I mentioned this is
(41:35):
one of the previous episodes, and that is that deep
sea voyages in Hawaii had been extinct for several hundred years. UH.
This was before contact with Europeans. The period of long
voyages ended along with all contact with other Polynesian islands,
and they lived in near complete isolation until seventeen seventy eight.
Now there remained memories of the the age of long
(41:56):
voyages and stories of their origins, of of the in
the Hawaiian people, um and the waves of migration from Tahiti,
which is two thousand five miles away, But again, the
exact art of deep sea voyages had not been practiced
for quite some time. Meanwhile, some Europeans formed their own
ideas about how humans could have possibly made it out
(42:17):
to such far flung islands. We mentioned this uh in
passing you know, the idea that it was surely, surely
by accident that these ancient sailors made their way to
these various islands. Right, the idea that new islands would
have always been discovered and initially colonized by people who
got lost or you know, blown away in storms. Random
drifts basically, and again modern scholarships has turned away from
(42:39):
that idea that, of course there would probably be some
cases of islands being discovered by accident, but also a
lot of cases of deliberate exploratory ventures. Now there are
also some outliers, such as thor hair Dolls hypothesis that
South American sailors made the voyage. Uh He famously tried
and failed to prove this, But yeah, the predominant theory
for a long time with that polina Jian sailors just
(43:00):
simply didn't have the skill to make the journey and
they either rode the wind currents and or were blown
off course and arrived at the Hawaiian Islands by accident.
But then in nineteen seventy three, the Polynesian Voyaging Society
formed to challenge this theory. Uh Dr Ben of Finny
Herb Collinui Kane and Tommy Holmes aimed to put together
(43:21):
a team to build a traditional deep sea voyaging Hawaiian
canoe and sail it from the Hawaiian Islands to Tahiti. Now,
one of the challenging parts in all this was simply
finding a traditional sailing master. Again, especially when you're dealing
with Hawaiian culture. This is this is something of a
forgotten science at the uh SO it had not been
practiced in a while. So they ended up going with
(43:43):
a particular individual by the name of of moult Pie
long Um who lived ninety two through two thousand ten,
a man from the Micronesian island of Sodawall. He'd been
trained from an early age and the traditional techniques of
of navigation environmental navigation, and he proved an essential part
of this whole experiment and is still remembered as a
(44:05):
major figure both in the academic exploration of of Hawaiian history,
Polynesian history, uh and and Oceanic culture, but also just
a sort of something of a cultural hero as well.
So the story of of Hokalia is really fascinating and
they've been whole documentaries about it. They have a wonderful website.
But essentially they build a sixty two ft long, nineteen
foot wide, double hulled canoe or waakkula, and they called
(44:30):
it um. They called the vessel um hoku Lea, named
for an important navigational star. It's the star of Gladness,
also known as our tourists and the brightest Star in
the Boaties constellation. While the ship's construction also made use
of plywood, fiberglass and resin uh and it was accompanied
by a modern vessel, um Hokala itself was completely unpowered,
(44:53):
and even more importantly, navigation was attempted without the use
of any technology or devices, at least down the way
to Tahiti. Um for the return trip, they did use
some instruments, uh, but they just yeah, they depended on
the traditional navigation practices that maultpie Loon brought with him.
And so on May one six they set out from
(45:14):
Honolula Bay on Maui and traveled thirty three days uh
to Papa Atta Harbor in Tahiti. And they also brought
along with them livestock to study how these could be
cared for at sea, because as we mentioned, you know,
canoe species were a key part of the equation. It's
not just could you could you voyage to this island
or these islands, but could you bring the species with
(45:36):
you that you needed to survive? Yeah, And and it
was a success. Again, they did use instruments on the
return trip, but at that point they had already proved
what was possible and multiple voyages have been completed since
then to further prove all of this out. Now, an
interesting wrinkle in all of this um is that during
the nine nineties, the Bishop Museums Native Hawaiian Arts and
(45:57):
Culture Program, they set out to create an authentic verse
of this sort of vessel using only traditional and native material,
so again, you know, not the fiberglass and so forth.
But they said, let's build one like would have been
built historically. And they found that the native CoA trees
of the islands were too small due to human activities,
(46:17):
so they ultimately that they had to they had to
go beyond the islands in order to get the wood
to build the canoe. They were ultimately gifted four hundred
year old spruce logs from a tribe in southeast Alaska
and use those to construct the vessel. Yeah. So anyway,
I I highly recommend looking into the Hoka Project, their website,
(46:38):
various documentaries about what they did and and and continue
to do. It is my understanding that the vessel is
still functional, still operational, and they still uh, they still
take it out. This whole series has been one of
those uh episodes on the show where I'm just amazed
because I uh this is something I knew absolutely nothing
about to start with. I would not have known the
(47:00):
very first thing about like how you navigate on the
open sea without instruments. I mean to be honest, I
don't know how you do it with instruments either, but
but uh, but yeah, this is this has been so
eye opening, Uh, just thinking about like how much information
you can get from the environment if you know, if
you've when you build on the knowledge accumulated over generations,
(47:22):
and you have the discipline and the attention to pay
attention to your surroundings with this level of care. Yeah,
as certainly as as a landsman, as Hermon and Melville
would put it, I am amazed by all this. But
but I think it's also worth with pointing out that,
you know, we've touched on experienced sailors who have been
very into this topic as well have been amazed by
it as well. So uh, yeah, there's there's a lot
(47:43):
to marvel at here. All right, Well, there you have it.
We hope you have enjoyed this journey, if we've enjoyed
a researching and discussing it, If you would like to
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(48:05):
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(48:26):
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(48:49):
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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
we're back with part three of our series about ancient
Pacific island navigation. In the previous couple of episodes, of course,
(00:24):
if you haven't listened to those, you should go back
and check those out first so you can understand what
we're talking about today. But in the last couple of
episodes we talked about a lot of these fascinating mysteries
about the population of the Pacific Islands and and how
those islands were first colonized by humans, how people found them,
and then how people traveled between them once they knew
where all the islands were. Because, of course, this is
(00:45):
a huge area of the surface of the Earth that
is covered almost entirely by water, and only polka dotted
with these tiny islands here and there. And yet somehow,
without charts, without instruments like a like a compass um,
the navigators of the Pacific Islands were able to reach
the other islands in in the surrounding areas with this
(01:06):
amazing level of accuracy. So in the first episode we
talked about some of the history theories about the history
of the settlement of these islands, and then in the
last episode we talked about techniques that have been documented
that allowed master navigators to locate and and sail to
islands in this in this vast ocean with enough accuracy
(01:28):
that they could do so reliably over and over again.
And what those techniques without charts and modern instruments would
have been. Yeah, this this whole realm of environmental navigation,
which I just want to drive home again when we're
talking about this, we're talking not about some sort of
innate art or something that is just uh, this one
acquires by you know, being out in the water or
(01:49):
being uh, you know, growing up on the ocean, that
sort of thing. Now, this was this was a science
that was learned that was passed down from generation to
generation across these these different Pacific cultures. That's right. One
of the main sources we've been referring to is a
very important book in the history of of studying these
techniques that was by a scholar named David Lewis, and
(02:12):
it was published with the University of Hawaii Press in
nineteen seventy two. It's called We the Navigators, The Ancient
Art of Land Finding in the Pacific. And one thing
that's really really cool about this book is that Lewis
sailed well. He he interviewed many master navigators of different
Pacific islands in Micronesia and Polynesia, but he also sailed
(02:32):
with several navigators including UH, two very prominent navigators named
Hippur and Tevak, from whom he learned a whole lot
about these these techniques firsthand at sea, like they were
navigating his boat, which was a boat called the Ispiorn
and UH, and so we got to see these techniques firsthand.
And so in the last episode we talked mostly about
(02:54):
techniques for navigation on the open sea. Direction finding, so
especially using the stars to to orient towards your targets
and UH, and then using backup methods as well, such
as like using the sun during the daytime and navigating
by directionally reliable C swells, which was especially astounding to me,
(03:14):
like the idea that you, you know, you could learn
how to feel for certain patterns of C swells that
reliably come from a certain direction and then use that
to know which way you're heading. UM, and then also,
of course, you would have to pair these direction finding
techniques on the open sea with the system of dead reckoning,
which is knowing how far you have traveled based on
(03:36):
your rate of travel, your starting position, and your direction
of travel and so and so. That would be a
way of sort of record keeping your journey mentally as
you're going along the way, even though you don't necessarily
have new environmental clues to choose from. But today we
wanted to get mainly into the question of land finding.
So a traditional Pacific navigator has used open c navigation
(04:00):
techniques like celestial orientation and dead reckoning to get roughly
to the vicinity of an island. Once you are nearing
your destination, how do you actually find the land? Yeah,
because as we discussed in the previous episode, you don't
want to you know, be sailing in the right direction
to be in the vicinity of the island and then
not be able to see it to again again not
(04:21):
be close enough to pick up on the very obvious
cues that you were near the island, and have to
pick up on those more subtle cues that would require
training and expertise to notice. Right, I mean, one of
the biggest dangers actually for a Pacific island sailor is missing,
your target is going past the island you're trying to
(04:41):
get to without realizing it. Yeah, I mean, in a
very very loose sense, it's like depending on say, your
your GPS navigational system, which we refer to previously, you know,
using that to get to the immediate area, like the
block where the where the or is that you're trying
to go a story you've never been to before. But
(05:03):
then once you're there, the GPS is only gonna help
you so much. Then you're gonna have to pinpoint the sign,
figure out which storefront it is, figure out your parking, etcetera.
There are a whole new set of problems that your
mirror navigational system, your GPS, is not able to help
you with. Right. And so, one thing that's very interesting
that David Lewis explores in his book is what he
(05:25):
calls the idea of expanded target landfall. And what that
means is that by using a suite of land finding techniques,
you can essentially extend the radius of land a certain
reliable distance out into the ocean. And I'll talk about
the distances as we go on, but there's a certain
(05:47):
reliable distance out into the ocean that you can just
expect to be able to detect nearby land even if
you can't see it. And if you measure land, including
those radii out into the ocean beyond the shore and
h and especially beyond sort of like reefs and submerged
or or almost submerged a toolls nearby, you can actually
(06:09):
greatly expand the percent of the Pacific Ocean that is
taken up by by by land range. Basically, so you
can expand your target from these tiny islands surrounded mostly
by water to basically a block of islands with mostly
or totally overlapping ranges of land detectable water. Does that
(06:33):
make sense? Yes, yeah, basically increases the the the footprint
of the island, like the the detectable footprint of the island. Right. So, so,
of course the direction finding techniques like celestial navigation are
extremely important and getting you towards your your target, but
also the expanded target landfall is just as important, if
(06:55):
not more important. I mean, I guess you can't really
have one without the other. It is also extremely important
because you know, there's only so accurate you can get
with steering by stars, you still need to be able
to correct course and find the land once you're close enough.
And so, how far exactly can you expect to find
land from out in the ocean. Well, it does very
(07:17):
a lot, depending on local conditions. But Lewis cites a
scholar named Frankel who estimates that on average, land can
usually be detected from about thirty miles in any direction,
and Louis essentially agrees with this number. Uh, And then
he writes this quote. If we draw circles with thirty
miles radii around each Pacific island, we find that the
(07:39):
circles overlap over vast areas, giving rise to solid blocks
i e. Islands separated by not more than sixty miles
passing between which a canoe could not be more than
thirty miles offshore. So, with these expanded target landfall techniques,
the problem of finding these tiny islands in the past
(08:00):
ocean actually is much more manageable. It's reducible more to
finding these blocks or screens of islands within a certain angle.
You know a certain angle of direction from your starting position,
So it means that what would otherwise be a sprinkle
of islands becomes a clump of islands, yes, which there's
(08:21):
some there. You actually you shared a wonderful map here
that that that demonstrates this, and it's really it's really
quite impressive because you can see it making a huge
amount of difference, uh, is you're traveling, you know, between
these these islands, uh potentially even charting some of these
these more distant journeys. That's right. So if you're looking
at it from a map that includes expanded target landfall
(08:45):
as sort of a black circle around the island, what
would have been a smattering of of little tiny dots
instead turns into a big clump of black circles that
they're all overlapping each other. So this really does help
with the problem. But of course you you could easily
once again pass between these islands without actually being able
to see them visually. So you need to be able
(09:07):
to know what to look for. And again one of
the things that stressed, especially in we the navigators, is
that the degree of what they call screening the screening
of islands rather than individual island targets. So you would
aim for a screen like a line of islands that
are all overlapping within land finding range of one another.
(09:28):
That the the degree of screening of an island or
island group target was the number one safety concern when
making a journey there, So more screening more overlapping of
the expanded targets is safer, and less screening where there
are gaps between the expanded targets is much more dangerous
because again of the danger of unknowingly passing your target.
(09:52):
But I guess we should talk about what are the
actual landfall signs? What are the environmental signs that can
be used to detect a land from a long distance away.
I guess we should start with the one that is
the most obvious. Maybe this one doesn't actually need to
be said, but there are a couple of things about
it that are worth sorting out. Actually, So the most
obvious one is high ground. Right. In some cases your
(10:13):
target island is very tall and it can be seen
from very far away. So, for example, Tahiti reaches elevations
of something like seventy feet and for this reason, the
land itself can sometimes be seen from as far as
eighty miles away. That that's a real good distance. And likewise,
Hawaii that can be seen from extremely far away. It
contains volcanoes, and rising land mass that sometimes up up
(10:36):
to like thirteen thousand feet, but not every island is
tall like this. Many Pacific islands lie more or less
at sea level, with nothing much taller than the height
of a palm tree, and you can easily miss these.
Standard navigational lore holds that on these low islands, visibility
is about ten miles, given the presence of coconut palms,
(10:58):
which grow to about of any five feet high, so
at about ten miles you should be able to see
the tallest of the coconut palms. It's interesting. I was
reading about about this and it reminded me of our
episode on on the Font of Morgana, where we talked
about mirages and about how in some cases there were
islands that we even put on maps that turned out
to not be real. They were based on on mirrages.
(11:22):
And the reverse of that is also true. There are
islands that um certainly as as European powers were coming
into play and trying to map everything out, there were
islands that were that were known to be to exist
by by the natives, but various Europeans would would have
would decide, well, this was probably a mirage. We don't have.
(11:44):
We don't know exactly where it is, but it would
turn out it was actually there. Yeah, and it's funny
you should bring up the Fedamorghana episode because this land
finding technique is way down the list in terms of
of how commonly it was used in the level of
priori it's given. But one of the things mentioned in
this book is that land loom, the optical illusion of
(12:06):
being able to see the land in a in a
superior mirage projected up above the horizon, even though the
land is not visible itself from where you are. This
actually was sometimes used by some Pacific Island navigators, specifically
Lewis Sites navigators from the Gilbert's using this one. But
coming back to the idea of vantage points and high ground,
(12:28):
there is actually a pretty reliable mathematical equation you can
use for determining the visibility of an object over the
horizon at sea uh and and it goes like this,
So you take the square root of the height of
the object you're looking for in feet and and so
this is this method will be unit dependent, but the
square root of the height of the object and feet
(12:51):
so that could be a you know, a seventy five
foot tall palm tree, or it could be a mountaintop
or a lighthouse, whatever that is. And then you add
that to the square route of the observer's height, so
that would also be in feet. If you're you know,
if your eyes are five feet above the water, that's
five feet, or if you're sitting down in a low canoe,
it's probably even lower. And then you you add those
(13:12):
together and then you multiply by I've seen different numbers.
Actually I found a navigational website that suggested multiplying that
number by one point one seven. Lewis gives gives the
idea to multiply by one point one five. But whichever
way you do, you'll probably get pretty close to the
same answer, and this will give you the distance away
(13:33):
in miles that an object can usually be seen over
the horizon. But that made me think about the height
of the observer, which makes me wonder about the land
finding virtues of different watercraft, right, because they're obviously different
kinds of watercraft. People make these journeys and sometimes there
in they could be in outrigger canoes or they could
(13:53):
be in a double hulled traditional navigational vessel that would
have a much more raised form in the middle with
even a cabin that I guess you could technically get
on top of. I don't know how, I don't know
what all of the techniques with with ancient Pacific watercraft
would be for getting higher up as a vantage point.
But that seems like that that could give you an
advantage as well, right, because of course they would not
(14:16):
have the advantage that that you would have with agin
a crow's nest lookout in a in a western sailing vessel,
like you know, a large scale ocean voyaging ship. That's right.
But uh, fortunately, these these specific navigators had lots of
other environmental cues they could look for. And these cues
(14:37):
are very important because even with taller islands, so even
if you're trying to get, you know, to a place
that's mountainous, you're trying to get to Tahiti or Hawaii
or something, environmental conditions can render these less visible. So
Louis gives the example of mountains, the mountains of Mangareva
and truck which should be visible based on their height
from like forty five miles away, but he says that
(15:00):
in his case, when he was once approaching in in
the boat, they were unable to see the peaks of
these islands because of overcast, and so their first visual
sighting was actually of the surrounding barrier reef rather than
of the island itself. Now, as we go on to
discuss more of these land finding techniques, it's important to
note that they vary in both directions, meaning that the
(15:22):
land finding techniques very in preference of individual navigators and
navigator cultures and in availability at target. So there are
some like, uh, there's some traditions of land finding lore
that place more emphasis on one or the other. But
also you need to have the backup knowledge because you're
not always going to be able to find all of
(15:43):
these when you look for them. Yeah, again, this is
a suite of tools that one that a navigator would use.
This is a toolbox of different techniques, and you're not
gonna want to depend on just one of them. Now,
you're gonna use several of them, and some of them
are gonna better than others. But when used in congress,
you can get the train navigator can get really positive results. Now,
there's one thing that Lewis mentions in this book which
(16:05):
I thought was interesting, which is a sort of counter
example to uh. The thing we've talked about a couple
a couple of times, which is that he says, you know,
none of the navigators he spoke to or traveled with
ever ever appealed to the idea of a sixth sense.
Right you were mentioning this earlier, it's not just intuition
about being at sea. When they were making navigational decisions,
(16:26):
they could always point to specific markers. They could say
the reason I'm going this way is because of this.
It's something that was in the environment that could be
pointed out and understood. So it wasn't just a gut feeling.
But one place in which he does say intuition seemed
to come in was in the calculus of how much
to wait different types of observations of of land finding signs.
(16:50):
So navigators might get close to an island and you'd
see one kind of sign and then another one, and
they'd be trying to decide which way to go based
on maybe different conflicting signals, or or what what the
sort of sum total or average of the evidence was.
And that did seem to be more based on a
gut feeling after surveying all the evidence available to them.
(17:12):
So I thought that was an interesting counterpoint. Thank thank
thank so. The first big sign to mension, I think
would be birds. Uh. There's actually a part where where
Lewis sites a navigator named Tita who says that who
is quoted at length on this. He says birds are
(17:34):
the navigator's very best friends. Birds are useful up to
twice the site range of an island from a canoe.
And he also says the site range of land is
about ten miles and that of birds twenty. The birds
which are the most significant are turns and noddies. Yeah,
I've read that. Yeah. A lot of it comes down
to familiarity with bird species. It's not just, of course
(17:56):
birds in general, but specific knowledge of how are out
to see a particular bird species will typically go So
if it's a if it's a sea bird, for instance,
the distance could be somewhere in the neighborhood of a
hundred kilometers, which is about sixty two point one miles. Um.
You know, again, it's just going to depend on the
(18:17):
exact variety of bird, uh, while other varieties of bird
are going to stay much closer to land. That's right.
So yeah, you need to look not just for birds
in general, but for specific species of birds, because there are,
as you mentioned, pelagic species like petrolls and sheer waters
that will just not lead you to land with any reliability.
(18:39):
If you follow them, you may end up cruising out
into the deep and not coming back. But once you
get within about thirty to fifty miles of shore, you
will start to see some familiar species that are somewhat reliable.
So first of all, you'll see booby birds uh and
sometimes predatory frigate birds. At this distance of thirty to
fifty miles, and then even closer, within about twenty to
(19:02):
twenty five miles of the nearest a toll, you will
get what what Louis says are quote mixed flocks of
white turns and noddies that will be encountered busily searching
for fish. And once again, they show no more interest
in directing the wayfarer than a busy New York policeman.
Uh So, so there's some further deduction you have to do.
(19:23):
It's not just like you see the birds and then
you immediately know what's up. If you see booby birds,
frigate birds, turns and naughties, you know you're close, but
you can't really use their flight paths and behavior throughout
the daytime to know which direction land lies. So what
do you do. Well, you have to use time of day.
These species roost on land and they have to return
(19:45):
to solid ground daily, and so the time of day
tells you a lot. They typically fly out to their
fishing shoals from land in the early morning, and then
they return to land in the evening. So to read
a passage from from Louis here he writes quote towards evening,
the frigate birds, for example, will be seen to abandon
their leisurely patrolling, climb even higher, and set off in
(20:07):
one direction, probably homing by sight. About the same time,
the boobies will tire of their inquisitive inspections and fly
low and arrows straight for the horizon. As the noddies depart,
they will weave slightly in and out between the crests
of larger waves, while the turns will be flying a
little above them, but all will be following a very
(20:27):
exact path towards their home island. So once you are
within range of land, and you've gotten there again by
the process of of of open sea navigation, often by
the stars, and uh, and then these backup methods together
with dead reckoning, you get within range of the island,
you start to see certain bird species and you know
which species to look for and what time of day
(20:48):
to follow them. And if you see the birds all
trending in the same direction around sundown, then you know.
There are also a few stories here and there about
islands where some sea going birds have and domesticated, you know,
like fed and trained. But these stories seemed kind of
vague and uncertain, but it is at least an interesting
possibility to consider, whether there's much to it or not.
(21:10):
Like what if an island culture could essentially train frigate
birds to be the walmart greeters of the island. Yeah, yeah,
and almost like living lighthouses in some respects. Yeah, because
the behavior of birds can factor and apart from just uh,
you know, flying back like booby, birds are considered useful
in that they will not only fly towards land at
(21:31):
the close of day, they will often take an active
interest in approaching boats and they will try to land
on them, like land on the rigging or something, before
eventually flying off toward home in the evening. Now, I
know a lot of you out there probably watched The
Simpsons or have watched The Simpsons in the past, and
you're probably thinking about the scene in the episode Boy
Scouts in the Hood. Uh uh, this is the the
(21:53):
episode and what let's see. I'm trying to remember exactly
how it went. And did they get lost at sea? Well,
first they get lost at her which then results and
then being lost at sea and they're trying to get
back to land and then what do they see in
the sky? They see a seagull. Is this the one
that starts with Bart wanting a knife but to get
a knife, Yeah, and he has to he has to
(22:14):
read the book don't do what Donny Don't does. But yeah,
it ends up with them doing a boy Scout river race,
and so they're lost at sea and what I don't
remember what happens with the seagull. I think Ned declare.
Ned is with them, and Ned looks up and he
sees that there's a seagull and he declares that they're saved. Um,
but then it is it is. Then it is brought
up that seagulls only go out to sea to die,
(22:36):
and then the seagull dies, so they're still lost. Uh.
Now I was thinking about this in connection with with
with some of these islands, particularly with the Hawaiian Islands.
And this is a fun fun fact of the various
species of seagulls out there, and there are many. Seagulls
are not one species, they're multiple. You'll find some of
them in the Hawaiian Islands. But a great mini goals
(22:59):
cannot survive in Hawaii because the islands lack the sort
of shallow coastal scavenging waters that one finds in continental settings.
Some of these goals do wind up in Hawaii, but
only to starve to death because they do not have
the environment they need to survive. Well, that actually ties
into the next thing I wanted to mention, which is
that everything we've talked about so far is in the
(23:20):
context of land finding by way of local birds in
a near radius to an island, you know they live
on the island, and once you see them, you know
you're near the island. You can follow them home. But
there's another use of bird navigation entirely, which is the
possibility that some ancient Pacific islanders deduced the presence of
(23:41):
previously unknown islands by observing the migratory patterns of land birds.
Stories like this exist in some island sailor lore, so
it seems quite reasonable to assume that that some islands
were indeed discovered this way. But ultimately it's it's historical
speculation and we don't know for sure, but that that
does seemed like a very plausible guess as to how
(24:03):
some of these islands were found when they had never
been seen by humans before. I should also add that
above the various birds you could site that would give
you an indication that you were near land, the Dodo
the absolute best. Once you've once you've spotted the Dodo,
you're good to go. But by the way, if you
find yourself in Hawaii, if you find yourself on the
(24:23):
island of Oahu, I highly recommend going to the Bishop
Museum there. Um it is. It is a wonderful museum
that covers so much about Polynesian culture and uh in
Hawaiian history, and it covers some of what we're talking
about here. There there there's stuff about the canoes that
were used, uh the navigational techniques that were used, and
(24:45):
and so forth. So I'm sure the Bishop Museum will
come up again, but I highly recommend it you if
you if you visit the islands, you you kind of
owe it to yourself to go to the Bishop Museum.
All right, So we've talked about high ground, we've talked
about birds. What's next. Okay? The next one is is
fascinating to me and and it is the use of
(25:07):
clouds to find nearby land. So you might think, well,
how could you use that? I mean, there are clouds
over the open ocean. What what would clouds tell you?
But it turns out they can tell you quite a lot. There.
There is this tradition among Pacific navigators of looking for
your target by what's known as land clouds, patterns of
(25:27):
cloud formations that are consistent with the presence of land
rather than open water. So how would clouds appearing over
an island be any different than clouds appearing anywhere else. Well, well,
they're actually a number of signs that are used. So
navigators claim first of all, that clouds move more quickly
over open water and more slowly over land, almost as
(25:49):
if they appear to become stuck over islands that are
hidden beyond the horizon. But there are also a number
of difficult to describe characteristics that that these navigators look for.
Having to do with the formation, appearance, and behavior of
clouds over dry land, and one example is the the
telltale shapes, specifically the eyebrows and the V shape. Both
(26:13):
of these are referred to, for example, by a navigator
named Aberra, that is that was extensively interviewed by by
David Lewis in his book, and so according to the
navigational lore of Aberra, uh the eyebrows meaning these I mean,
I guess I can't describe them any better than that.
Clouds that look like eyebrows appear in the sky over
(26:34):
where an island would be. So if they are eyebrows,
you'd imagine the island down below the horizon is sort
of where the noses or maybe where the lips are,
so it's between the two eyebrows. And these eyebrow looking
clouds are more common when the weather is calm and
there are no other clouds, whereas a different formation, known
as the V shape the V shaped column is present
(26:55):
over islands when there is wind and when there are
other clouds, and the V shape basically the vertex of
it at the bottom points down to where the island is.
But even more fascinating than that, to me is that experience.
Navigators mentioned that there are cues rooted in the color
of clouds. Clouds hovering over an island below the horizon
(27:17):
will tend to have different colors and levels of brightness
than clouds floating over the ocean, and apparently a lot
of this has to do with the actual reflection of
the colors of the land lying below the cloud. It's amazing. Yeah, yeah,
this is really neat. I was reading about this specifically
as it concerns lagoons. Lagoons being shallow bodies of water, uh,
(27:42):
the open ocean being deep water, and therefore the lagoon
water as reflected in the cloud, will be a lighter
shade of blue. Um so, so yeah, that's so. You know,
it's not like a mirror. You're not gonna be like, oh, look,
I can see the reflection of the entire island to
which we are going. No, but to the arained ie
you would be able to see the difference in the color,
(28:03):
like there's a lighter blue reflected in the clouds, that
that must be the blue of the lagoons on the island.
Though I should of course also stressed this, like a
lot of the things we're discussing here we should add
the caveat under the right conditions exactly, So none of
these signs we're talking about are always observable. Uh And
and Lewis stresses this a lot that it requires consistent,
(28:23):
focused attention in looking for all of the available cues
that you know about. So looking for a few minutes
you are quite likely to see nothing to get no cues.
But if an experience navigator pays close attention for several hours,
usually at least one type of land sign will manifest. Yeah,
And just to get a sense of what the the
(28:44):
the effects of reflected color from land on the clouds
would be, like, I want to read a section from
Lewis here where he describes some examples. So uh, he says,
quote the colors that begin to appear closer to land
very with the makeup of the island. There are three
kinds of island with core responding clouds. Tita says. Above
lagoon islands, the cloud roof tends to be greenish. Over
(29:07):
extensive areas of white sand or surf, the cloud or
a portion of it will be brighter, more white than
the rest. The clouds above a wooded green island will
be darker than their neighbors. Abera referred to a pink
tinge over reefs and green above lagoons. Re We likewise
said that lagoon islands reflect green, and ones without lagoons
(29:30):
a reddish color. Islands with no lagoons, like Couria said Yotibata,
reflect a dark color that must be distinguished from rain cloud,
which appears very similar. Islands with big stretches of dry
reef or mangroves have bright colored clouds above them. And
then he mentions that given the fact that all of
the stuff he's just been saying comes from different interviews
(29:53):
with different navigators from different islands, and with four separate
interpreters transcribing what they were saying, Uh, the fact that
they're so consistent in what they say about the colors
reflected in the clouds is pretty amazing. Now, there's another
very important thing that I'm not going to spend a
lot of time on, just because we discussed it somewhat
(30:13):
in our previous episode and now in the last episode,
we talked about feeling for swells in the sea as
a way of direction finding, but also a navigator can
feel for the reflection refraction and interference with swells with
no notion swells to detect that land is nearby. And
Lewis goes into deep detail on this practice in his book,
But essentially, it's it's a similar to feeling to direction
(30:37):
finding with the help of swells, except feeling for interruptions
and swells and reflections of swells from known land masses.
But there's one last thing I wanted to talk about
here that is really interesting and almost kind of creepy,
especially because it is to some degree still mysterious, though
there there's some ideas about what it might be. Uh.
(30:57):
So we've talked, you know, at length before about bioluminescence
in the ocean. You know, a kind of that is
a regular, profuse light in the water from organisms like
bioluminescent plankton and uh and Lewis recounts in the book
that some navigators say that bioluminescence in the water just
doesn't tell you much useful. Other sources seem to think
(31:19):
it increases when near near land or a reef. But
in any case, it's important to distinguish regular bioluminescence in
the water from this next land sign, which is fascinating
and It's what David Lewis calls deep phosphorescence, but it
is also known as ta lapa spelled t E space
(31:39):
l a p A. The navigator Tevak calls this calls
it underwater lightning. It's also described by another navigator as
ulo a tahi or the glory of the seas. And
so I wanna read Lewis describing what this is' he's
just picking up after tevk has has called it underwater lightning,
which he thinks is an excellent analog g and Lewis
(32:01):
writes quote. It comprises streaks, flashes, and momentarily glowing plaques
of light all well beneath the surface, exactly like lightning.
It flickers and darts and is in constant motion. It
occurs a good deal deeper down than common luminescence, at
anything from a foot or two to more than a fathom.
(32:21):
All right, So that's already strange, because I, you know,
otherwise I'd never heard of anything like that anymore. Flashes
of light from deep under the water, almost like lightning.
But it gets even weirder. Apparently ta lapa seems to
flash from the direction of an island or a reef.
You can see it well into the deep sea when
you're eighty two a hundred miles away from land, But
(32:44):
as you approach the island, the flashes of light become
more and more rare, and then they disappear entirely as
you get really close. The distance from land or from
reefs also seems to affect how the light moves. They're
slow flashes of light far out at sea, but in
about ten to twenty miles from land it starts to
take on a rapid, whipping back and forth movement. And uh.
(33:07):
And it's also generally understood that tai lapa coming from
reefs is slower moving than tei lapa coming from islands.
So this was amazing to me because I had never
heard of anything like this before. Yeah. Yeah, this is
definitely new to me as well. Um and it is
mysterious sound and the idea of underwater bioluminescent lightning being
some sort of guide again, like all of these things,
(33:29):
not the primary guide, but some additional tool that you
could turn to. Right. Well, one thing I want to
note what you said, it's the tai lapa is bioluminescent,
which it may well might be, but it might be
some other kind of luminescence as well. It's still there's
still some question about what causes it, and we'll discuss
that more in a minute. But uh, but yeah, I
(33:50):
think it's not a given that it's necessarily bioluminescent, like
the you know, the like the general sort of ambient
glow that you see in the upper area of the sea,
that's no owned to be bioluminescent. But it's important that
what you say that this is very much a backup
method and it's not known to everyone. So Lewis documented
references to it in the navigational lore from two Polynesian
(34:13):
areas and one Micronesian area, but there were plenty of
other navigators who didn't seem to know anything about Taylapa,
like they had never even heard of this concept. Yeah.
One of the people, the more recent people that we
were looking at concerning this topic is a Harvard physicist
by the name of John huth Um And uh, and
he points out that, Yeah, in some cultures you just
(34:34):
see no mention of it, the Marshall Islands being one
that he specifically mentions where they just didn't didn't have
the concept and and it's unknown exactly why is it
an environmental reason? Like whatever this phenomena is, it's not
it wasn't present, uh, you know around the Marshall Islands
or islands that were of interest to these navigators, or
(34:54):
is it a situation where for this particular culture they
found that this was not a reliable navigational tool and
it just wasn't worth keeping around, Like it's not one
you can lean heavily on, and it would always be
just kind of like a second or third tier backup. Anyway,
it remained a mystery. Yeah, yeah, So some islanders explained
(35:17):
that as this backup method of navigation, they could use
te Lapa to steer on dark, rainy nights. So maybe
you can't see the stars, you can perhaps see these
flashes of underwater lightning. And Louis actually documents that he
himself observed it. There was one night when it was
late at night and it was dark and he was
sailing with Tevak. This was on the thirty one of December,
(35:40):
he writes, quote land Lapa was seen to be darting
to and fro along two distinct bearings, which were both
plain enough for me to see despite the clear night
and the comparative nearness of the islands. One series kept
flashing from a direction which tevk averred was that of
the volcano Tina Coola. The other he said it was
from the island of Nadeni. Morning revealed the high islands
(36:04):
of Tina Coola and Nadini, each about twenty miles away
and respectively west and south of our position. These were
the directions that the old navigator had indicated. So in
this experience, he says, yep I saw it. Tek told
me it was there. I looked and I saw it,
and it was in the directions of the islands, just
like he said it would be. And so Louis did
(36:26):
believe he was the first person to document this navigational
sign in print. Of course, it was known before him
to to the people who possessed it as part of
their navigational lore. But he believed that this phenomenon had
no European definition and uh. And of course, again not
all navigators in the Pacific Islands were aware of Talapa,
but some were from at least three distinct regions that
(36:48):
he that he interviewed navigators from. And it was interpreted
and it turned out to provide accurate information. So what
was it? What's causing these flashes of light underneath the
or from the direction of islands or reefs, Lewis ultimately
says in the book. And then again, this was in
seventy two, so we may have developed some knowledge since then.
(37:08):
But Lewis said he really didn't know what it was,
and he guessed that it may have had something to
do with deep swell movement, maybe a kind of deep
reflection of waves from islands or reefs. But that leaves
a lot of lingering questions. Why why if it's bouncing
off of these islands or reefs, why could it be
seen at such great distances from land, albeit moving more slowly.
(37:31):
And one thing that I that I found so I
was reading a Harvard Gazette article about the work of
that physicist you mentioned John Huth, who had done some
follow up work on this, and uh. This Gazette article
mentioned that many scholars disputed Lewis's reports of the Talapa quote.
The lights were initially dismissed as fantasy when other researchers
(37:51):
reported that they were unable to see them. Some critics
who said thought that pursuing quote underwater lightning was akin
to chasing the abominable no Man. Yeah. John Huth seems
to have done a fair amount of work dealing with
with Ti Lapa and one when the source that I
was a reading was the article Conclusions a cross Disciplinary
(38:14):
Journey through Spatial Orientation by who, published in the journal
Structure and Dynamics in sixteen, and in this he points
out that there is still no definitive explanation for the
origin of Ti Lapa, But one possibility that that he
seems so like, is that it's a byproduct of fish
darting in a patch of sea rich with uh dino
(38:34):
of flagelets which emit light in response to the stimuli
of pressure waves. But even if that is the case,
he says, then it still leaves a mystery of the
directionality of the fish movements themselves. You know why and
how can we navigate by this information? Right? What if
that's the explanation, why would it point to islands in
a reliable way? Right? And uh? One of the challenges
(38:58):
and researching is uh, Hooth points out, is just the
difficulty of rooper reproducing sightings. We need further studies which
require both sensitive equipment and dependable sightings of the phenomena.
Um and and again he pointed to the fact that
you don't actually see it as a navigational aid in
some cultures, uh, such as the Marshall Islands, raising questions
(39:19):
of you know, is this cultural? Is it environmental? And
it's simply unknown. Um uh so yeah, it's it's it's
really fascinating. And again it it it. I think it
serves to just reminders als that, yeah, we're dealing with
a suite of different navigational techniques and and if if
this is among the tools at your disposal, then you know,
(39:40):
perhaps it is useful in in deciding like fine tuning
your your your directional approach. But perhaps for some of
some cultures they abandon it because it did not seem
useful enough. We just don't know. I mean, I'm pretty
convinced that people are actually observing this, that it's not
just a fantasy. And I mean not only because it
(40:01):
is part of the navigational lore and seems to have
been used as this backup method of direction finding, but
also because I mean there are additional modern reports of
people saying, yeah, I actually did see it, even if
I was not able to photograph it. For example, I
found an article by a scholar named Marianne George who
is a cultural anthropologist who uh talks about this in
(40:24):
an article called Polynesian Navigation and Ta Lapa the Flashing
published in Time and Mind, the Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness,
and Culture from and she also talks about having been
able to eventually witness it herself out on the ocean.
But I don't think you can find video of it.
I don't think anybody has ever captured it like that,
so it's still a very interesting question than now. One
(40:52):
of the really interesting things concerning all of this again
is the idea that in modern times, reach researchers have
had to to fit a lot of this back together,
you know, depending on genetics and linguistics and lural histories, etcetera,
all these various disciplines and as discussed in multiple places,
but specifically, you see this discussed at the Bishop Museum,
(41:15):
both the physical museum and the online presence. You also
see it discussed at at the website for Hokuleau. That's
how that's um at HOCA dot com. That is h
O k u l e uh pus v A. Is
that you saw something rather interesting concerning deep sea voyages
in Hawaiian culture, and I believe I mentioned this is
(41:35):
one of the previous episodes, and that is that deep
sea voyages in Hawaii had been extinct for several hundred years. UH.
This was before contact with Europeans. The period of long
voyages ended along with all contact with other Polynesian islands,
and they lived in near complete isolation until seventeen seventy eight.
Now there remained memories of the the age of long
(41:56):
voyages and stories of their origins, of of the in
the Hawaiian people, um and the waves of migration from Tahiti,
which is two thousand five miles away, But again, the
exact art of deep sea voyages had not been practiced
for quite some time. Meanwhile, some Europeans formed their own
ideas about how humans could have possibly made it out
(42:17):
to such far flung islands. We mentioned this uh in
passing you know, the idea that it was surely, surely
by accident that these ancient sailors made their way to
these various islands. Right, the idea that new islands would
have always been discovered and initially colonized by people who
got lost or you know, blown away in storms. Random
drifts basically, and again modern scholarships has turned away from
(42:39):
that idea that, of course there would probably be some
cases of islands being discovered by accident, but also a
lot of cases of deliberate exploratory ventures. Now there are
also some outliers, such as thor hair Dolls hypothesis that
South American sailors made the voyage. Uh He famously tried
and failed to prove this, But yeah, the predominant theory
for a long time with that polina Jian sailors just
(43:00):
simply didn't have the skill to make the journey and
they either rode the wind currents and or were blown
off course and arrived at the Hawaiian Islands by accident.
But then in nineteen seventy three, the Polynesian Voyaging Society
formed to challenge this theory. Uh Dr Ben of Finny
Herb Collinui Kane and Tommy Holmes aimed to put together
(43:21):
a team to build a traditional deep sea voyaging Hawaiian
canoe and sail it from the Hawaiian Islands to Tahiti. Now,
one of the challenging parts in all this was simply
finding a traditional sailing master. Again, especially when you're dealing
with Hawaiian culture. This is this is something of a
forgotten science at the uh SO it had not been
practiced in a while. So they ended up going with
(43:43):
a particular individual by the name of of moult Pie
long Um who lived ninety two through two thousand ten,
a man from the Micronesian island of Sodawall. He'd been
trained from an early age and the traditional techniques of
of navigation environmental navigation, and he proved an essential part
of this whole experiment and is still remembered as a
(44:05):
major figure both in the academic exploration of of Hawaiian history,
Polynesian history, uh and and Oceanic culture, but also just
a sort of something of a cultural hero as well.
So the story of of Hokalia is really fascinating and
they've been whole documentaries about it. They have a wonderful website.
But essentially they build a sixty two ft long, nineteen
foot wide, double hulled canoe or waakkula, and they called
(44:30):
it um. They called the vessel um hoku Lea, named
for an important navigational star. It's the star of Gladness,
also known as our tourists and the brightest Star in
the Boaties constellation. While the ship's construction also made use
of plywood, fiberglass and resin uh and it was accompanied
by a modern vessel, um Hokala itself was completely unpowered,
(44:53):
and even more importantly, navigation was attempted without the use
of any technology or devices, at least down the way
to Tahiti. Um for the return trip, they did use
some instruments, uh, but they just yeah, they depended on
the traditional navigation practices that maultpie Loon brought with him.
And so on May one six they set out from
(45:14):
Honolula Bay on Maui and traveled thirty three days uh
to Papa Atta Harbor in Tahiti. And they also brought
along with them livestock to study how these could be
cared for at sea, because as we mentioned, you know,
canoe species were a key part of the equation. It's
not just could you could you voyage to this island
or these islands, but could you bring the species with
(45:36):
you that you needed to survive? Yeah, And and it
was a success. Again, they did use instruments on the
return trip, but at that point they had already proved
what was possible and multiple voyages have been completed since
then to further prove all of this out. Now, an
interesting wrinkle in all of this um is that during
the nine nineties, the Bishop Museums Native Hawaiian Arts and
(45:57):
Culture Program, they set out to create an authentic verse
of this sort of vessel using only traditional and native material,
so again, you know, not the fiberglass and so forth.
But they said, let's build one like would have been
built historically. And they found that the native CoA trees
of the islands were too small due to human activities,
(46:17):
so they ultimately that they had to they had to
go beyond the islands in order to get the wood
to build the canoe. They were ultimately gifted four hundred
year old spruce logs from a tribe in southeast Alaska
and use those to construct the vessel. Yeah. So anyway,
I I highly recommend looking into the Hoka Project, their website,
(46:38):
various documentaries about what they did and and and continue
to do. It is my understanding that the vessel is
still functional, still operational, and they still uh, they still
take it out. This whole series has been one of
those uh episodes on the show where I'm just amazed
because I uh this is something I knew absolutely nothing
about to start with. I would not have known the
(47:00):
very first thing about like how you navigate on the
open sea without instruments. I mean to be honest, I
don't know how you do it with instruments either, but
but uh, but yeah, this is this has been so
eye opening, Uh, just thinking about like how much information
you can get from the environment if you know, if
you've when you build on the knowledge accumulated over generations,
(47:22):
and you have the discipline and the attention to pay
attention to your surroundings with this level of care. Yeah,
as certainly as as a landsman, as Hermon and Melville
would put it, I am amazed by all this. But
but I think it's also worth with pointing out that,
you know, we've touched on experienced sailors who have been
very into this topic as well have been amazed by
it as well. So uh, yeah, there's there's a lot
(47:43):
to marvel at here. All right, Well, there you have it.
We hope you have enjoyed this journey, if we've enjoyed
a researching and discussing it, If you would like to
listen to other episodes of stuff to blow your mind,
you can find them in the Stuff to Blow Your
Mind podcast feed, which will good wherever you get your podcast.
Core episodes air on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We run a
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(48:05):
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power to do so, just rate, review and subscribe. Huge
(48:26):
thanks as always 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
topic for the future, just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
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