June 7, 2022 • 42 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 classic Stuff to Blow Your Mind two-parter, Robert and Joe discuss the sheer scale of the Pacific Ocean and environmental navigation. (originally published 7/7/2021)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And today we've
got an episode for you from the vault. This is
part one of our series on Pacific Island navigation, which
originally aired July seven. This was a really fun series.
Uh my mind was was truly expanded by the stuff
(00:26):
we read for this episode. Uh so we hope you
enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of
My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
(00:48):
for a couple of episodes, maybe more. We're not sure
how these things ultimately fall together, but we're gonna be
talking about how humans discovered and ultimately colonized the Polynesian Islands,
places we know today as uh the Islands of Hawaii,
Easter Island, New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, Fiji,
(01:10):
uh Tuvalu, and more so in our in our information
and intercontinental travel age. Though I feel like these names
may seem very familiar and known, even though they might
be places that we also paradoxically know are very far away.
From us. We may know that they are, in many cases,
you know, vastly separated from other islands. But just because
(01:34):
we can pull up pictures of them, just because we know,
we could book a flight to one of these if
we so desired, Uh, they may seem closer, they may
see the world may seem smaller than it actually is.
You know, there's a very limited way of imagining what
planet Earth is where you know, you say, okay, somebody
picture the Earth, and and what do people picture. I
think they probably picture looking down at some continental part
(01:56):
of the Earth, maybe seeing mountain ranges, maybe seeing the
Sahara Dessert or something. But often people picture land, right,
they picture the continents. But if you look at Earth
from space, what it's really characterized by his ocean. Ocean
covers most of the Earth's surface, and there's one ocean
in particular that really takes the cake. It's the Pacific Ocean. Yeah. Yeah,
(02:17):
but but I definitely wanted to drive home just how
large the territories we're talking about here, and we're when
we're talking about the colonization of this region, we're not
talking about European colonization. We're talking about the original human
sailors who departed from Asia and gradually settled the remainder
of the world, uh, setting off into the unknown. But
then also depending on navigation, some really fascinating navigation techniques
(02:41):
that we'll get into in order to uh to to
chart this region. So yeah, when you look at at
a map of the globe, it depends on how you're
looking at it. Right, If you're you're taking a very
um uh, North America centric version and a very North
America centric globe, you're like, all right, there's the Earth,
it's mostly US, it's mostly North America. But you turn
(03:01):
it around, you uh, you turn it to the Pacific side,
and you're looking at a water world, a true water world.
You're you're looking at a side of the globe that
is almost all Pacific Ocean. Because the Pacific Ocean is
just simply enormous. It's the largest and the deepest averse oceans.
We're talking sixty three million, eight hundred thousand square miles,
(03:24):
that's approximately a hundred and sixty five million, two hundred
and fifty thousand square kilometers, and it takes up one
third of Earth's surface or thirty percent of it, depending
on who's doing the calculation. It contains the deepest parts
of the oceans, and it contains more than half of
the world's open water supply. Specifically within the realm of
of Polynesia and Micronesia, these these subdivisions of parts of Oceania,
(03:47):
which is the you know, the region of the Pacific
containing the Pacific Islands where people live, um there in
this part of the world. There's an author named David
Lewis whose book I'm going to refer to throughout these episodes.
But there's a part of his book where he says
that if you exclude New Zealand, within Polynesia and Micronesia,
there are two parts land to every one thousand parts water.
(04:11):
Uh So this is this is an area characterized almost
entirely by water, but polka dotted with these little hubs
of land throughout. Yeah, various far flung islands that people
were able to to eventually colonize and and and make
their home. And it's yeah, it's it's fascinating. How again,
I've I've been to I've been fortunate enough to travel
(04:31):
to you know, say that some of the Hawaiian islands
and you get there and you know, they're they're amazing
But but like, I don't have the experience of of
just the open Pacific, of of the of the many places,
the majority of the places in the Pacific Ocean where
there is no side of land, where there is only
the open water. Now, you don't have to be deep
(04:52):
into historical theories of human migration to grasp the question
of like looking at all these islands in the Pacific,
seeing how far away they are from each other, how
how small a percent of the area of the Pacific
Ocean the islands represent, and notice how many of them
are populated by people, and wonder, how on earth did
(05:12):
that happen? How did people find and settle on all
of these tiny islands in this vast ocean. Yeah, it's
it's it's a fascinating question one that one that we're
still exploring to this day. We're still figuring out. But
we're gonna be getting in a little bit more into
the history of it and certainly into the navigational techniques
the amazing ways that these these ancient sailors made their
(05:35):
way across the open ocean. But first of all, let's
let's go ahead and just drive home that while while
human colonization of the Pacific Islands is one of the
most recent human migration movements in our history. It still retains,
you know, more than a few mysteries and using everything
from traditional histories and linguistic analysis to climate models and genetics,
(05:57):
researchers are still continuing to try and figure out exactly
how this migration occurred, when it occurred, where, uh, you know,
where where we went where humans migrated to first in
this and so we're going to be dealing with some
tentative dates here as we we roll through, like the
basic story of human migration across the Pacific. So, according
(06:21):
to Linda Noreene Schaefer in Maritime Southeast Asia to five hundred,
this was a book that came out in the ancestors
of Maleo Polynesians left the mainland to settle Um the
island of Taiwan around four thousand BC, and from there
they moved into what is now the Philippines and Indonesia,
(06:43):
and then during the third millennium BC, they moved on
to settle the islands uh And and Peninsula peninsulas of
what Schaefer refers to as Southeast Asia's maritime realm, and
the people who remained there came to be known as
the Malays. So from here we see movement of the
aim people's further out into the Ocean UH, the very
(07:03):
movement of human migration that would eventually become the Polynesians.
By fifteen hundred b C. They had reached as far
as the Bismarck Archipelago north east of New Guinea and
Um and Schaefer rights that within a few centuries they
had spread to West Polynesia that's Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and
(07:23):
Polynesian sailors, explorers and colonists continued and eventually they're eventually
reached and colonized the far more remote eastward islands of Hawaii,
UM what is now New Zealand, and what we have
also come to refer to as Easter Island or Rapa Nui.
All right, so now let's try and put some dates
on all of this. But of course all of this
(07:44):
is UH is playing out over a long period of time,
and it's still an area of ongoing study and discussion,
So these dates are tended. In schaefer work, Some of
the estimated dates she sites include Rapa Nui around five
hundred CE, although estimates seem I've seen estimates that suggest
as early as three hundred c E. And then uh
(08:05):
in ninete, the University of Hawaii's Dennis um Kawajarada suggested
the following dates. He says, Okay, hundreds and gathers inhabited
Australia and New Guinea by fifty thousand years ago, and
then around the between sixteen hundred and twelve hundred b
c E. A cultural complex called Lapita had spread from
(08:26):
New Guinea in Melanesia to as far east as Fiji, Samoa,
and Tonga, and then Polynesian culture developed at the eastern
edge of this region. And then he says that around
three hundred b C. Or earlier, seafares from Samoa and
Tonga discovered and settled islands to the east what are
known now it's the Cook Islands, uh Tahiti, Nui, uh To,
(08:46):
Omotos and Hiva. And then around three hundred sea or earlier,
voyagers from central or eastern Polynesia discovered in settled eastern island,
and then around four hundred sea or earlier, voyagers from
the Cook Islands Tahiti, Nua and or He settled Hawaii.
And then around one thousand CE or earlier, he wrote
that the voyagers from the Society Islands and or the
(09:07):
Cook Islands settled what is now in New Zealand. Now again,
these are just tentative dates. Um. There. You know, there's
been a lot of other work. For instance, according to
the University of Hawaii at Manoa anthropologist Terry Hunt, and
this is via Hokalua dot com, which will refer back
to that website some more in the future. Uh. They
were part of a radio carbon study looking at artifacts
(09:29):
from the island and they adjusted some of the suggested
timelines based on that work, ultimately arguing for a more
rapid and recent colonization of the outer islands. Specifically, he
proposed Samoa around eight hundred b c e, the Central
Society Islands between ten and eleven twenty, and dispersal into
(09:49):
New Zealand, Hawaii and Rapa Nui in other locations between
eleven ninety and twelve nineties. Um, and I've seen twelve
hundred CE is sometimes cited as the most recent possibilit
pity for Rappa Newly colonization. And so yeah, I know
we're hitting every one of a lot of dates here.
I highly suggest going out on your own and finding
some of these sources and pouring over them in more
(10:10):
detail if you want to get get a clear picture
of how this is going. There are also some wonderful
visual aids depicting uh, you know, exactly how these waves
of migration might have looked UH. And I'm always fascinated
by those uh even though they you know, they often change. Again,
they're subject to the same uh level of change that
we see with some of the possible dates for arrivals
(10:31):
and colonizations, etcetera. And again, it's a very exciting area
of study, and you'll you'll see papers arguing for the
for for other things as well, the likes of South
American and even Antarctic contact by various Polynesian people, UM
and UH. And I it's my understanding I didn't go
deep into some of those. I think some of those
are are kind of controversial or some of them and
certainly some of the evidence is maybe not as as solid.
(10:53):
But it just to give you an idea of where
some of the research is going today and what people
are looking at. UM. Regardless of the exact dates, you know,
we can't discount the wonder and accomplishment of the whole scenario.
You know that this This was this last age of
true human um exodus, true human discovery and colonization, visiting
(11:16):
places that humans had never been before, creating a foothold
of human civilization in places that had belonged only um,
you know, to various animals before, in the case of
the Laggan Islands, places where the no mammals had ever
arrived there, that had not flown or swam through the seas.
You know that you had to have been a bat
or a seal. I want to read a quote from
(11:39):
from the University of Hawaii's Dennis Colorada here for which
he he really sums a lot of this up um.
And again this is from there. That um hoku lea
website at hokal dot com. That's h o k u
l e a dot com. Uh, he writes quote. The
Polynesian migration to Whai was part of one of the
(12:00):
most remarkable achievements of humanity, the discovery and settlement of
the remote, widely scattered islands of the Central Pacific. The
migration began before the birth of Christ, while Europeans were
sailing close to the coastlines of continents before developing navigational
instruments that would allow them to venture out into the
open ocean. Voyagers from Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa began to
(12:21):
settle islands in an ocean area of over ten million
square miles. The settlement took a thousand years to complete
and involve finding and fixing in mind the position of
islands sometimes less than a mile in diameter, on on
which the highest landmark was a coconut tree. By the
time European explorers into the Pacific Ocean in the sixteenth century,
(12:43):
almost all the habitable islands had been settled for hundreds
of years. It's truly remarkable. Yeah, especially when you, I
mean you get beyond the exact timelines and you start
looking at how they traveled and how they navigated, UM,
and what these islands were like when they found them. Uh,
we're gonna be you know, we're gonna get into more
into the navigation models UM, either later in this episode
(13:04):
or in the next. But as Calahorada points out, what
we're talking about voyages conducted entirely in canoes made from
wood and coconut fiber, constructed with tools made from bone,
rock and coral. They use sails woven from coconut or
or pandana sleeves, and when no win was available, they paddled.
And these were dangerous voyages as well, not only at
(13:25):
open sea, but when you arrived on some of these places,
it's easy to imagine this sort of stereotypical like Paradise Island. Uh,
you know vision where Okay, you've reached the island, the
dangerous part is done. Now you're in this place. It's
lush and full of life, but that's not really when
you get there. Yeah, like there's gonna be you know,
a bunch of animals ready for the picking, and you know,
(13:47):
there there. If you get into specifics, there are some
cases where there's some sort of of of of of
of natural, naturally occurring animal on that island or the
waters around it that are perhaps easier pickings. But in
other bass you're dealing with environments where again, like they're
they're just no mammals, there are no large meaty birds.
Uh you know, they're they're desolate, they're played. In some cases,
(14:09):
there was very difficult for humans to you know, find
the resources they needed to survive, unless they of course
brought them with them on voyages, which adds this other
wrinkle to these to these voyages, that you would have
to bring things like pigs, chickens, et cetera. So at
the same time, I want to drive home that there's
no one island environment here. There's a wide variety in
(14:30):
the sorts of islands and island environments you encounter across
this vast region. Uh So the story is gonna be
a little different each time. So again, in many cases
they had to bring important plant or animal species with them,
which of course is the same story you see in
land based migration, except with the challenges of an open boat.
And so you'd end up with this first wave of
(14:51):
invasive species on the island. And these are often called
canoe plants and canoe animals because again that's how they
reach their destinations. And ultimately we're talking daw pigs, chickens,
but also plants such as sugarcane, banana, coconut, taro, and
bad boot. So some of these plants that are so
you know, linked in the mind and linked culturally to
these islands, that you have to remind yourself that they
(15:13):
were not always there. They were brought with them with
the people who settled these islands. Yeah, though personally right
now my mind is fixated on the idea of having
to make long sea voyages with like a canoe full
of chickens. Yeah, but it it was done. And uh,
and as we'll get into much later, you know, in
order to prove that these voyages were possible, they had
to do things like bringing animals with them on the
(15:34):
test voyages. So uh, it's it's fascinating now on this
topic of of the the environments on these different islands
and how they weren't fully stocked life nourishing buffets. I
thought that that David Lewis made an excellent point in
that book that you you mentioned briefly earlier. Oh yeah,
So to name this book, I'm gonna be referring to
it throughout these episodes. It's one I've been reading that
(15:55):
is a seminal work in the history of studies of
Pacific island navigation. And this was originally published by the
University of Hawaii Press in nineteen seventy two. It was
by a medical doctor, sailor and scholar named David Lewis,
and it's called We the Navigators, The Ancient Art of
Land Finding in the Pacific. I was published in seventy two,
(16:15):
but I think updated with some subsequent editions at least
in nineteen nine, and it may have gone through other
editions since then. But this is a really interesting book
because its studies traditional Pacific navigation and land finding techniques,
not just by the the indirect evidence of trying to
like look at the history, but actually by putting them
to direct experiments, so navigating with experienced master navigators from
(16:40):
various Pacific islands and studying their techniques firsthand. Yeah. Yeah.
And and the point that that Lewis makes about the
stark environments was really neat because it meant that the
dangerous voyage to get to these islands and establish yourself
on these islands. You it didn't mean that you could stop.
In many cases, you would have to keep making voyages
(17:01):
because there were certain resources that you could not get
at the new island. But we're worth the dangerous journey
to acquire. Uh. The example that that Lewis brings up
is the lack of hard stone on the Cook Island
of Puka Puka, requiring journeys to take place uh two
islands where hard stone could be acquired for use in
vital tool construction. And he writes that these would have
(17:24):
been complex trading cycles that would have also been influenced by,
you know, other human factors like the sense of you know,
the desire for adventure, the um or, and also the
necessity of exile, which I found interesting, like ultimately the
idea of having a complex culture and cultural dynamics on
a single island. What what where do you send people?
(17:44):
Where do people run to? Uh? If if there if
there's some sort of political turmoil on the island, so
contact sometimes remains in place because of that as well. Now,
before we get into the specifics of of of navigation
in among Pacific islanders and the colonizing of Polynesia, I
(18:08):
thought we might briefly touch on some of the basics
of sailing and navigation, is larger trends and human technology. UM.
We could easily do a proper even multi episode invention
episode about ships. But here are some of the key
dates provided in the seventy grade Inventions of the Ancient
World by Brian Fagan at all um, a book I
(18:28):
refer to that I referred to a lot, uh because
it's really good and again highly recommend people pick up
a copy of it. UM. But Fagan and the various
co authors that he worked on with the various sailing
and ship based chapters points out that seagoing watercraft just
in general dates back probably before forty thousand b CE.
(18:48):
In Southeast Asia and Indonesia. We see longboats from Neanderthal
cultures from seventy two hundred b c E and we
see low graphs from seventh century BC and mess of Botania. Again,
these are just general dates based on some of the
earliest evidence we have. And then as far as things
like plank boats, and that goes back to like three
(19:09):
thousand BC in Egypt Um. And then finally we get
up to the frame first boats in the second and
third century CE in in my in what is now
all England. And as far as sailing, we have depictions
of sales from thirty one b C in Egypt. We
see two masted ships from sixth century in BC BC
(19:30):
in Egypt, and the oldest surviving sale comes from the
second century BC in Egypt. But again these are just
some of the oldest direct evidence that we have or depictions, descriptions, etcetera.
As Fagan points out in the section on navigation, with
Sean mcgrail, author of Boats of the World and professor
of Maritime archaeology. The earliest voyages for our ancestors would
(19:52):
have remained within sight of land. Landmarks and sea marks
would have been key to navigation. And we see this
reflected in record did traditions and classical and medieval sailing manuals.
Makes sense, right, I mean it's like if if any
of us were to set out on a boat into
the water, I would want to keep land in sight.
I need to know where that land is. So all
of this early Uh, you know, oceanic activity would have
(20:15):
taken place withinside of land, and we depended upon things
you could notice on land. Uh. You know your frame
of reference. Reference was based on the place you came from. Sure,
but what happens when you leave side of land. Well,
by the mid second millennium BC, sailors in the South
Pacific were of course doing this by means of what
we call environmental navigation. We'll be getting into this at length. Uh,
(20:40):
but you know, at this point you have to travel
beyond dependence on coastal landmarks and sea marks. But that
doesn't mean that there's not an order and language to
the open ocean. And for those who had the wisdom
and the observational skills, of the accumulated knowledge of their ancestors.
They could plot their way by these queues, they could
recognize them, they could read them app of the ocean.
(21:01):
Now we'll get into the details of this in a bit,
but as Fagan and mcgrail point out, you'll find indirect
references to environmental navigation methodologies in Homer's the Odyssey as
well as in the medieval text of the Life of St. Brendan.
And environmental navigation would have been used in some form
worldwide by the first millennium CE, and that's when instruments
(21:22):
began to pop up. That's when we begin to use
these various technological things to help us, uh make our
way across the open water. But with the navigators of
the Pacific Islands, we're talking again about peak environmental navigation,
a level of advancement that exceeded anything else in the
rest of the world, anything else that the rest of
the world was capable of, or had been capable of,
(21:45):
um aweing some of the first Europeans to encounter such
techniques and for a while seeming simply impossible to some
Western minds. Uh, you know that, for for a while
it just seemed impossible that, oh, the people who are
you know, they live in these islands. They must be
here by accident, they must be here by mistake, and
they're merely survivors of the ocean. They're not masters of
(22:08):
its navigation. But as we'll get to they were. They
were the masters. That's exactly right, And that's actually one
of the main points that David Lewis makes in this book,
We the Navigators. Um. He was responding in some ways
to kind of trends in scholarship on the on the
settlement of the Pacific Islands that had tended to say that, well,
a large number of these islands must have just been
(22:29):
settled and discovered by accident, right, that maybe a fisherman
or traders were out at sea and they became lost,
they drifted off course, and just by happenstance they drifted
to new islands that hadn't been settled before, and then
having discovered them, those islands could be settled. Of course,
it is possible that some islands were discovered this way,
but Lewis pushes back, arguing that there's actually a pretty
(22:52):
good evidence for a a program of deliberate exploration and
very accurate navigation by the sailors of the time time
to to locate islands and settle them. So maybe actually
it's time to introduce this book more fully that I've
been reading, because I wanted to mention a number of
things that he talks about in it. So again, the
book is called We the Navigators, The Ancient Art of
(23:14):
Land Finding in the Pacific. It was first published in
nineteen seventy two, and the author, David Lewis, was, as
I said, he was a medical doctor. He was an
experienced amateur sailor, so he had participated in like you know,
yacht races and things like that, and a scholar. He
was born in England, but he was raised in New
Zealand and Rahirotonga in the Cook Islands in the South Pacific.
(23:36):
And Lewis had been a sailing and kayaking enthusiast for
much of his life. He had done some competitive sailing,
including a Transatlantic single handed yacht race in nineteen sixty
and at least one circumnavigation of the globe in a catamaran,
and inspired by his experiences with long sea voyages in
(23:56):
small boats and his love of Polynesian culture since his childhood,
in the nineteen sixties, he got a grant from Australian
National University to study traditional Polynesian navigation techniques that did
not rely on charts or scientific instruments. And he did
this research by learning directly from several older Polynesian sailors
(24:18):
and master navigators, experimenting firsthand with voyages across the Pacific
with these navigators at the helm or experimenting with what
they taught him. And so there are three basic sources
of non documentary information that he talks about. So one
is shore based instruction on ancient navigation techniques from knowledgeable
(24:39):
navigators in the Carolinians, the Santa cruz Reef Islanders and
two groups of Tucopeans uh Niningo Islanders, Gilbert E's and Tongans.
And then he also gets instruction during navigation itself on
his yacht known as the Ispjorn, which is under the
command of two older mass Ster navigators who helped him
(25:01):
with his research. One is a man named Tivak of
the Santa cruz Reef Islands and another is named Hippo
Or of Pula Watt in the Carolines. And I like
the approach here because actually uh he opens his book
by talking about the fact that understanding indigenous navigation of
the Pacific has been really held back by what he
(25:22):
calls an overly theoretical approach. Uh, you know, just people
trying to, uh look at indirect evidence to understand how
the navigation happened, rather than doing firsthand voyages with the
navigators themselves. Yeah, actually diving into the accumulated knowledge of
these cultures on navigation in some cases. So there's a
(25:43):
lot of interesting stuff about this book. One of the
interesting things he mentions early on is he says when
he was growing up in Polynesia, he says to his
elder Polynesian cousins, Uh, the ocean quote was a homely
and not unfriendly place. And that's interesting because it, I mean, obviously,
as a land lubber like me thinks the idea of
(26:04):
voyaging out on the ocean in a canoe is like
inherently just sounds terrifying, right, But to some extent that
is cultural. That's like, because I'm not used to the
idea and to people that have a culture of of
long ocean voyages in small watercraft like these canoes and catamarans. Uh,
It's it's not necessarily such a scary thing. I mean,
(26:24):
of course, ocean voyages do always involve dangers, but under
the guidance of these long tested, ancient navigational techniques, if
you know what you're doing and you know where you're going,
it is actually not necessarily a scary thing to do.
In fact, it could be a sort of joyful part
of your culture. But on the other hand, thinking about
the ocean as a homely and not unfriendly place, this
(26:47):
might cause you to assume that spending a lot of
time at sea would would make ancient Pacific islanders have
a kind of intuitive feel for ocean navigation that couldn't
be put into words the same way that you have
for a lot of skills you have. You know, there
are a lot of things that if you do them
enough and you get good at them, you know what
to do and you can do it well. But you
(27:07):
couldn't necessarily explain to somebody else why you're doing what
you're doing. But Lewis strongly resists this type of characterization
about Pacific island navigation. He says it's in fact the
exact opposite. He writes, quote one further notable feature of
what we were told and had shown to us was
that never once did anyone lay claim to any form
(27:30):
of quote sixth cents. A navigator had reason to believe
that land lay over the horizon because he had observed
certain signs that told him so, not on account of
some vague intuition. And I think this is a really
important point to hammer home about how ancient Pacific island
navigation worked. It wasn't that you've got a feel for
(27:51):
it and then you just instinctively knew what to do.
It was based on knowledge and well calibrated external signs,
And so I think that means it it probably makes
more sense to think of ancient Pacific navigation as more
of a science than an art. You're not just getting
a feel for things and relying on your intuition, but
referencing specific markers and indicators of your position, though these
(28:14):
markers might be mostly invisible to people who didn't know
exactly what to look for. Yeah, I mean it makes
sense right the science, that you would need the science
to get there, because that the the ocean is ultimately unforgiving.
You know, if you were just going on a gut instinct,
you might you might be right some of the time,
but if you get it really wrong once then you
(28:34):
might not be coming back to shore exactly, and that
really comes through in studying these techniques. It is based
on specific markers, specific pieces of knowledge, specific cues in
the environment, and a major point of of Lewis's book
is how accurate these specific techniques and external markers were
(28:54):
in the hands of a master Pacific navigator who knew
what they were doing UH. He writes that navigators of
Polynesia and Micronesia seem to employ basically all of the
same techniques with only slight variations. He says the only
major differences were the features of local geography, because a
lot of these UM methods of navigation do rely on
(29:15):
knowing where specific islands in the area you're navigating are,
so that would be different depending on what island groups
you're sailing between. But otherwise the techniques are extremely similar,
and he says that throughout Polynesia and Micronesia, he said
that the techniques were employed basically with the same level
of effectiveness, measured by the accuracy at landfall, which in
(29:37):
general was highly accurate, especially astonishingly accurate for not using
UH tools and equipment that are available to twentieth century navigators.
Than now. I wanted to come back to a fact
I already mentioned once earlier, but it's this astonishing figure
(29:57):
that that Lewis gives talking about the world Old of
the Polynesians and the Micronesians, saying that they inhabit a
world of ocean. Again, if you exclude New Zealand, this
area of the globe has two parts land to every
one thousand parts water. And then he mentioned something about
this that I thought was really interesting. He writes, quote,
ocean spaces can inhibit contact, though terrestrial features like mountain
(30:22):
ranges may do so equally, but they become highways rather
than barriers as marine technology, especially navigation, becomes effective. I
had never thought about that before, but I think that
that's exactly right. So you can have various barriers to
travel and communication between different regions and cultures. But whereas
(30:43):
a mountain on land is always a barrier, you know,
even if you build a road through it, the mountain
will still slow you down. You're making a road through
it just makes it sort of less of a barrier.
The ocean is something that can transition from a brick
wall to a super highway once you have the the
skill and the knowledge and the technology of to figure
(31:03):
out where you're going and how to get there, and
you have the right kind of watercraft, the ocean turns
into the most efficient method of travel in the world. Yeah,
that's an excellent point. Now, there's one thing that has
made studying Pacific islander navigation more difficult than it might
otherwise be, which is that in many of these societies,
(31:23):
or maybe all of them, and definitely most of them, Uh,
navigational lore seems to have been something that was often
kept secret and only shared with a small group of
initiated experts. So it wasn't just that everybody in a
in a Micronesian or Polynesian society knew how to navigate
on the open ocean, but that you would have sort
(31:43):
of a class of educated navigators who would have this
this lore about how to get from place to place
within their brains and would be passed on to the
next generation of navigators. But it wouldn't be general knowledge
that was shared by everyone. And that will make even
more sense as we'd get into some of the details
of say, navigating by stars and what that entailed, you
(32:05):
realize that this required specialized training and a specialized eye
and not everybody who's going to necessarily be cut out
for it, and it wouldn't make sense for everyone to
to invest this level of time and energy into the
understanding of it, right, And it's interesting. I don't know
exactly what all of the pressures leading to it being
a sort of specialized bit of of exclusive lore among
(32:28):
a special class of navigators would be. I mean, there
might have been economic concerns keeping it contained that way,
or it might have just been sort of you know,
the difficulty of training people to to have all of
this knowledge in their head. I'm not quite sure, but
that's an interesting question as well. Now there's another thing
that Lewis gets into in his book which I thought
was really interesting about Again, when you just look at
(32:51):
the problem of you look at a map of the
Pacific Ocean and you think, how could it be possible
to navigate you know, these vast distances without you know,
modern scientific types of equipment or charts and that kind
of thing. And uh. And there is one aspect of
it that helps make the problem seem more comprehensible, and
(33:12):
it's this Lewis writes that it is possible, quote to
sail to almost all the inhabited islands of Oceania from
Southeast Asia without once making a sea crossing longer than
three hundred and ten miles. The only exceptions are Easter Island,
Hawaii and New Zealand, though the most predictable routes between
Eastern and Western Polynesia are also long such isolated lands apart.
(33:37):
The majority of gaps between islands and even archipelagos are
well under three hundred and ten miles, and usually in
the fifty to two hundred mile range. Since no one
wants to cross more open ocean than necessary, it follows
that most passages were of this order. So if you
know your Pacific geography and you know where the islands
(33:58):
are and how to navigate to, the the problem of
crossing the vast ocean actually can sometimes be decomposed into
many smaller journeys between islands, and the vast Pacific ocean
problem can be broken up into a kind of stepping
stone pattern. However, this does not mean that ancient Pacific
islanders were incapable of longer sea voyages. They were not,
(34:21):
and sometimes they did make them. Now, coming back to
the idea that Lewis pushes back against that many of
the islands of the Pacific would have been settled initially
through random drifts of people who found new islands by
accident while drifting about after you know, becoming lost or
something like that. Lewis pushes back against that, and one
line of evidence he sites is computer simulations of human
(34:44):
spread and settlement through random drifts. He writes of this
subject quote, Contrary to expectations, the results showed that while
accidental advent upon a number of island groups was likely,
drifts could not account for certain crucial contact stages. These
were virtually impossible except as exploratory probes and subsequent deliberately
(35:05):
mounted ventures. The probability of drifts occurring was negligible or
zero across the following seaways Western Melanesia to Fiji, Eastern
Polynesia to Hawaii, New Zealand, or Eastern Island Eastern Polynesian
contact with the America's in either direction, the probability of
their having been drifts from western to Eastern Polynesia, and
(35:26):
from Western Polynesia to the Marquesas zone was very low,
and so here Louis is arguing that not only were
the navigators of the ancient Pacific islands able to travel
uh with with great accuracy between known islands and island groups.
That they also appear to have mounted these deliberate, intentional
exploratory ventures into new waters to find islands that had
(35:51):
not yet been discovered, and of course, in doing so,
would have the knowledge to be able to locate these
islands again upon you know, going back home and then returning,
which again is astounding. Yeah, yeah, simply astounding. And I
think a lot of these the counter ideas, the ideas, yeah,
that that these had to be accidents, these you know,
these people, that people could possibly have set out and
(36:13):
discovered these I mean, it's such a I guess a
landsman approach, you know, based on a you know, it's
the kind of analysis that a culture that is that
is more situated on the land and and does not
view the ocean as the majority of the world or
their world. I keep coming back to this, uh analysis
that for the for instance, the Polynesians, most of the
(36:35):
world was ocean and and and generally that's not the
sort of worldview you encounter with with with Western civilizations.
And now certainly you have certain you know, civilizations and
cultures within the civilizations that are more uh nautical and
more dependent on maritime traditions. But but even then it's
(36:55):
it's it's often the case that they are they're more
attached to the land, they closer to the continent, and
in these cases we're dealing with with with islands within
just a vast world of water. Now, there's one big
question that Lewis also addresses in his book, which is
the question of what happened to so much of this,
this ancient Pacific navigational knowledge. Right, clearly some people in
(37:18):
the twentieth century still possess it, but this seems to
have become increasingly rare. Uh. And you could easily blame
the import of foreign navigation equipment and techniques by other cultures. Right, So,
if you have brought in charts and compasses and things
like that from from elsewhere, there's less need to rely
on the ancient navigational lore to get from place to place.
(37:40):
But unfortunately it doesn't seem like that's the only cause.
It also seems that by the last few centuries, many
island groups in the Pacific came to be ruled by
foreign empires, and those empires in many cases simply forbade
travel between islands. Lewis writes in in one footnote in
the book, quote the banning by your European administrations of
(38:01):
Inner Island canoe travel must have been a potent cause
of navigational decline. Voyages were forbidden, for instance, in the Carolines.
In German times, it Illan attributed the loss of traditional
lore on Nningo to the effect of the old German regulations.
Prohibitions remain in force today, and this would have been
in nineteen seventy two in among other places, the Tahiti group,
(38:24):
and voyaging is strongly discouraged in the Gilbert's Not only
must atrophy of knowledge have resulted, but deliberate voyages had
to be kept secret. Advent upon another island was invariably
attributed to accident. So this seems to be one of
the detrimental effects of various colonialisms on on on the
Pacific islands that it would have led to a steepening
(38:47):
decline in the ancient navigational lore and the passing down
of this knowledge about how to navigate by the stars
and these other signs, because there was simply less opportunity
for people to navigate to, you know, go out in
the open ocean the way they would have for now
it's interesting too though that there are exceptions to this,
uh as well. I was looking at this on that
(39:08):
that Hokolea website and over there that they discussed and
this is also discussed at UM on the website for
the for the Bishop Museum UM in Hawaii on the
island of Oahu, which is an excellent museum about various
Polynesian cultures and gets into a lot of what we're
discussing here. Definitely worth visiting if you if you make
(39:28):
it out to Oahu. UM. But that as as discussed
these on the both of these sources, the art of
deep sea voyaging in Hawaii had it been extinct for
several hundred years before contact with Europeans. So this period
of of long voyages ended along with all contact with
other Polynesian islands, and they lived in near complete isolation
(39:50):
until seventeen seventy eight, right, So that's fascinating as well. Yeah,
so there could be a number of causes there. So
there's also there's like, in one sense, you could have
a kind of natural atrophy of knowledge, and then there
could be some loss of knowledge by by imposition of
colonial rule, and then also some loss of knowledge by
the introduction of alternative methods for travel. Yeah, but fortunately
(40:12):
not all the knowledge was lost, and so we have
the accounts of of Lewis doing this firsthand research with
with master navigators like hip or and and Tevik. And
I was going to get into some of the specifics
of of these navigation techniques in this episode, but we're
already running kind of long, so I think maybe we
should call it there and then come and talk about
the navigation techniques in part two. Yeah, how to read
(40:36):
these environmental cues and engage in environmental navigation and then
and then also some of the history of proving it
out and then what what that those experiments those uh uh,
those those voyages approved about history itself. So join us
next time as we continue to discuss this topic. In
the meantime, if you would have liked to listen to
(40:56):
other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you'll find
them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed,
and that can be found wherever you get your podcasts.
We just asked that wherever that happens to be, just rate,
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We we greatly appreciate anyone that does that. That helps
us out. I love a good star rating, Love Good subscription,
(41:17):
keep it in huge thanks as always to our excellent
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(41:39):
Blow Your Mind's production of I Heart Radio for more
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
(42:01):
Proper char
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And today we've
got an episode for you from the vault. This is
part one of our series on Pacific Island navigation, which
originally aired July seven. This was a really fun series.
Uh my mind was was truly expanded by the stuff
(00:26):
we read for this episode. Uh so we hope you
enjoy Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of
My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
(00:48):
for a couple of episodes, maybe more. We're not sure
how these things ultimately fall together, but we're gonna be
talking about how humans discovered and ultimately colonized the Polynesian Islands,
places we know today as uh the Islands of Hawaii,
Easter Island, New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, the Cook Islands, Fiji,
(01:10):
uh Tuvalu, and more so in our in our information
and intercontinental travel age. Though I feel like these names
may seem very familiar and known, even though they might
be places that we also paradoxically know are very far away.
From us. We may know that they are, in many cases,
you know, vastly separated from other islands. But just because
(01:34):
we can pull up pictures of them, just because we know,
we could book a flight to one of these if
we so desired, Uh, they may seem closer, they may
see the world may seem smaller than it actually is.
You know, there's a very limited way of imagining what
planet Earth is where you know, you say, okay, somebody
picture the Earth, and and what do people picture. I
think they probably picture looking down at some continental part
(01:56):
of the Earth, maybe seeing mountain ranges, maybe seeing the
Sahara Dessert or something. But often people picture land, right,
they picture the continents. But if you look at Earth
from space, what it's really characterized by his ocean. Ocean
covers most of the Earth's surface, and there's one ocean
in particular that really takes the cake. It's the Pacific Ocean. Yeah. Yeah,
(02:17):
but but I definitely wanted to drive home just how
large the territories we're talking about here, and we're when
we're talking about the colonization of this region, we're not
talking about European colonization. We're talking about the original human
sailors who departed from Asia and gradually settled the remainder
of the world, uh, setting off into the unknown. But
then also depending on navigation, some really fascinating navigation techniques
(02:41):
that we'll get into in order to uh to to
chart this region. So yeah, when you look at at
a map of the globe, it depends on how you're
looking at it. Right, If you're you're taking a very
um uh, North America centric version and a very North
America centric globe, you're like, all right, there's the Earth,
it's mostly US, it's mostly North America. But you turn
(03:01):
it around, you uh, you turn it to the Pacific side,
and you're looking at a water world, a true water world.
You're you're looking at a side of the globe that
is almost all Pacific Ocean. Because the Pacific Ocean is
just simply enormous. It's the largest and the deepest averse oceans.
We're talking sixty three million, eight hundred thousand square miles,
(03:24):
that's approximately a hundred and sixty five million, two hundred
and fifty thousand square kilometers, and it takes up one
third of Earth's surface or thirty percent of it, depending
on who's doing the calculation. It contains the deepest parts
of the oceans, and it contains more than half of
the world's open water supply. Specifically within the realm of
of Polynesia and Micronesia, these these subdivisions of parts of Oceania,
(03:47):
which is the you know, the region of the Pacific
containing the Pacific Islands where people live, um there in
this part of the world. There's an author named David
Lewis whose book I'm going to refer to throughout these episodes.
But there's a part of his book where he says
that if you exclude New Zealand, within Polynesia and Micronesia,
there are two parts land to every one thousand parts water.
(04:11):
Uh So this is this is an area characterized almost
entirely by water, but polka dotted with these little hubs
of land throughout. Yeah, various far flung islands that people
were able to to eventually colonize and and and make
their home. And it's yeah, it's it's fascinating. How again,
I've I've been to I've been fortunate enough to travel
(04:31):
to you know, say that some of the Hawaiian islands
and you get there and you know, they're they're amazing
But but like, I don't have the experience of of
just the open Pacific, of of the of the many places,
the majority of the places in the Pacific Ocean where
there is no side of land, where there is only
the open water. Now, you don't have to be deep
(04:52):
into historical theories of human migration to grasp the question
of like looking at all these islands in the Pacific,
seeing how far away they are from each other, how
how small a percent of the area of the Pacific
Ocean the islands represent, and notice how many of them
are populated by people, and wonder, how on earth did
(05:12):
that happen? How did people find and settle on all
of these tiny islands in this vast ocean. Yeah, it's
it's it's a fascinating question one that one that we're
still exploring to this day. We're still figuring out. But
we're gonna be getting in a little bit more into
the history of it and certainly into the navigational techniques
the amazing ways that these these ancient sailors made their
(05:35):
way across the open ocean. But first of all, let's
let's go ahead and just drive home that while while
human colonization of the Pacific Islands is one of the
most recent human migration movements in our history. It still retains,
you know, more than a few mysteries and using everything
from traditional histories and linguistic analysis to climate models and genetics,
(05:57):
researchers are still continuing to try and figure out exactly
how this migration occurred, when it occurred, where, uh, you know,
where where we went where humans migrated to first in
this and so we're going to be dealing with some
tentative dates here as we we roll through, like the
basic story of human migration across the Pacific. So, according
(06:21):
to Linda Noreene Schaefer in Maritime Southeast Asia to five hundred,
this was a book that came out in the ancestors
of Maleo Polynesians left the mainland to settle Um the
island of Taiwan around four thousand BC, and from there
they moved into what is now the Philippines and Indonesia,
(06:43):
and then during the third millennium BC, they moved on
to settle the islands uh And and Peninsula peninsulas of
what Schaefer refers to as Southeast Asia's maritime realm, and
the people who remained there came to be known as
the Malays. So from here we see movement of the
aim people's further out into the Ocean UH, the very
(07:03):
movement of human migration that would eventually become the Polynesians.
By fifteen hundred b C. They had reached as far
as the Bismarck Archipelago north east of New Guinea and
Um and Schaefer rights that within a few centuries they
had spread to West Polynesia that's Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and
(07:23):
Polynesian sailors, explorers and colonists continued and eventually they're eventually
reached and colonized the far more remote eastward islands of Hawaii,
UM what is now New Zealand, and what we have
also come to refer to as Easter Island or Rapa Nui.
All right, so now let's try and put some dates
on all of this. But of course all of this
(07:44):
is UH is playing out over a long period of time,
and it's still an area of ongoing study and discussion,
So these dates are tended. In schaefer work, Some of
the estimated dates she sites include Rapa Nui around five
hundred CE, although estimates seem I've seen estimates that suggest
as early as three hundred c E. And then uh
(08:05):
in ninete, the University of Hawaii's Dennis um Kawajarada suggested
the following dates. He says, Okay, hundreds and gathers inhabited
Australia and New Guinea by fifty thousand years ago, and
then around the between sixteen hundred and twelve hundred b
c E. A cultural complex called Lapita had spread from
(08:26):
New Guinea in Melanesia to as far east as Fiji, Samoa,
and Tonga, and then Polynesian culture developed at the eastern
edge of this region. And then he says that around
three hundred b C. Or earlier, seafares from Samoa and
Tonga discovered and settled islands to the east what are
known now it's the Cook Islands, uh Tahiti, Nui, uh To,
(08:46):
Omotos and Hiva. And then around three hundred sea or earlier,
voyagers from central or eastern Polynesia discovered in settled eastern island,
and then around four hundred sea or earlier, voyagers from
the Cook Islands Tahiti, Nua and or He settled Hawaii.
And then around one thousand CE or earlier, he wrote
that the voyagers from the Society Islands and or the
(09:07):
Cook Islands settled what is now in New Zealand. Now again,
these are just tentative dates. Um. There. You know, there's
been a lot of other work. For instance, according to
the University of Hawaii at Manoa anthropologist Terry Hunt, and
this is via Hokalua dot com, which will refer back
to that website some more in the future. Uh. They
were part of a radio carbon study looking at artifacts
(09:29):
from the island and they adjusted some of the suggested
timelines based on that work, ultimately arguing for a more
rapid and recent colonization of the outer islands. Specifically, he
proposed Samoa around eight hundred b c e, the Central
Society Islands between ten and eleven twenty, and dispersal into
(09:49):
New Zealand, Hawaii and Rapa Nui in other locations between
eleven ninety and twelve nineties. Um, and I've seen twelve
hundred CE is sometimes cited as the most recent possibilit
pity for Rappa Newly colonization. And so yeah, I know
we're hitting every one of a lot of dates here.
I highly suggest going out on your own and finding
some of these sources and pouring over them in more
(10:10):
detail if you want to get get a clear picture
of how this is going. There are also some wonderful
visual aids depicting uh, you know, exactly how these waves
of migration might have looked UH. And I'm always fascinated
by those uh even though they you know, they often change. Again,
they're subject to the same uh level of change that
we see with some of the possible dates for arrivals
(10:31):
and colonizations, etcetera. And again, it's a very exciting area
of study, and you'll you'll see papers arguing for the
for for other things as well, the likes of South
American and even Antarctic contact by various Polynesian people, UM
and UH. And I it's my understanding I didn't go
deep into some of those. I think some of those
are are kind of controversial or some of them and
certainly some of the evidence is maybe not as as solid.
(10:53):
But it just to give you an idea of where
some of the research is going today and what people
are looking at. UM. Regardless of the exact dates, you know,
we can't discount the wonder and accomplishment of the whole scenario.
You know that this This was this last age of
true human um exodus, true human discovery and colonization, visiting
(11:16):
places that humans had never been before, creating a foothold
of human civilization in places that had belonged only um,
you know, to various animals before, in the case of
the Laggan Islands, places where the no mammals had ever
arrived there, that had not flown or swam through the seas.
You know that you had to have been a bat
or a seal. I want to read a quote from
(11:39):
from the University of Hawaii's Dennis Colorada here for which
he he really sums a lot of this up um.
And again this is from there. That um hoku lea
website at hokal dot com. That's h o k u
l e a dot com. Uh, he writes quote. The
Polynesian migration to Whai was part of one of the
(12:00):
most remarkable achievements of humanity, the discovery and settlement of
the remote, widely scattered islands of the Central Pacific. The
migration began before the birth of Christ, while Europeans were
sailing close to the coastlines of continents before developing navigational
instruments that would allow them to venture out into the
open ocean. Voyagers from Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa began to
(12:21):
settle islands in an ocean area of over ten million
square miles. The settlement took a thousand years to complete
and involve finding and fixing in mind the position of
islands sometimes less than a mile in diameter, on on
which the highest landmark was a coconut tree. By the
time European explorers into the Pacific Ocean in the sixteenth century,
(12:43):
almost all the habitable islands had been settled for hundreds
of years. It's truly remarkable. Yeah, especially when you, I
mean you get beyond the exact timelines and you start
looking at how they traveled and how they navigated, UM,
and what these islands were like when they found them. Uh,
we're gonna be you know, we're gonna get into more
into the navigation models UM, either later in this episode
(13:04):
or in the next. But as Calahorada points out, what
we're talking about voyages conducted entirely in canoes made from
wood and coconut fiber, constructed with tools made from bone,
rock and coral. They use sails woven from coconut or
or pandana sleeves, and when no win was available, they paddled.
And these were dangerous voyages as well, not only at
(13:25):
open sea, but when you arrived on some of these places,
it's easy to imagine this sort of stereotypical like Paradise Island. Uh,
you know vision where Okay, you've reached the island, the
dangerous part is done. Now you're in this place. It's
lush and full of life, but that's not really when
you get there. Yeah, like there's gonna be you know,
a bunch of animals ready for the picking, and you know,
(13:47):
there there. If you get into specifics, there are some
cases where there's some sort of of of of of
of natural, naturally occurring animal on that island or the
waters around it that are perhaps easier pickings. But in
other bass you're dealing with environments where again, like they're
they're just no mammals, there are no large meaty birds.
Uh you know, they're they're desolate, they're played. In some cases,
(14:09):
there was very difficult for humans to you know, find
the resources they needed to survive, unless they of course
brought them with them on voyages, which adds this other
wrinkle to these to these voyages, that you would have
to bring things like pigs, chickens, et cetera. So at
the same time, I want to drive home that there's
no one island environment here. There's a wide variety in
(14:30):
the sorts of islands and island environments you encounter across
this vast region. Uh So the story is gonna be
a little different each time. So again, in many cases
they had to bring important plant or animal species with them,
which of course is the same story you see in
land based migration, except with the challenges of an open boat.
And so you'd end up with this first wave of
(14:51):
invasive species on the island. And these are often called
canoe plants and canoe animals because again that's how they
reach their destinations. And ultimately we're talking daw pigs, chickens,
but also plants such as sugarcane, banana, coconut, taro, and
bad boot. So some of these plants that are so
you know, linked in the mind and linked culturally to
these islands, that you have to remind yourself that they
(15:13):
were not always there. They were brought with them with
the people who settled these islands. Yeah, though personally right
now my mind is fixated on the idea of having
to make long sea voyages with like a canoe full
of chickens. Yeah, but it it was done. And uh,
and as we'll get into much later, you know, in
order to prove that these voyages were possible, they had
to do things like bringing animals with them on the
(15:34):
test voyages. So uh, it's it's fascinating now on this
topic of of the the environments on these different islands
and how they weren't fully stocked life nourishing buffets. I
thought that that David Lewis made an excellent point in
that book that you you mentioned briefly earlier. Oh yeah,
So to name this book, I'm gonna be referring to
it throughout these episodes. It's one I've been reading that
(15:55):
is a seminal work in the history of studies of
Pacific island navigation. And this was originally published by the
University of Hawaii Press in nineteen seventy two. It was
by a medical doctor, sailor and scholar named David Lewis,
and it's called We the Navigators, The Ancient Art of
Land Finding in the Pacific. I was published in seventy two,
(16:15):
but I think updated with some subsequent editions at least
in nineteen nine, and it may have gone through other
editions since then. But this is a really interesting book
because its studies traditional Pacific navigation and land finding techniques,
not just by the the indirect evidence of trying to
like look at the history, but actually by putting them
to direct experiments, so navigating with experienced master navigators from
(16:40):
various Pacific islands and studying their techniques firsthand. Yeah. Yeah.
And and the point that that Lewis makes about the
stark environments was really neat because it meant that the
dangerous voyage to get to these islands and establish yourself
on these islands. You it didn't mean that you could stop.
In many cases, you would have to keep making voyages
(17:01):
because there were certain resources that you could not get
at the new island. But we're worth the dangerous journey
to acquire. Uh. The example that that Lewis brings up
is the lack of hard stone on the Cook Island
of Puka Puka, requiring journeys to take place uh two
islands where hard stone could be acquired for use in
vital tool construction. And he writes that these would have
(17:24):
been complex trading cycles that would have also been influenced by,
you know, other human factors like the sense of you know,
the desire for adventure, the um or, and also the
necessity of exile, which I found interesting, like ultimately the
idea of having a complex culture and cultural dynamics on
a single island. What what where do you send people?
(17:44):
Where do people run to? Uh? If if there if
there's some sort of political turmoil on the island, so
contact sometimes remains in place because of that as well. Now,
before we get into the specifics of of of navigation
in among Pacific islanders and the colonizing of Polynesia, I
(18:08):
thought we might briefly touch on some of the basics
of sailing and navigation, is larger trends and human technology. UM.
We could easily do a proper even multi episode invention
episode about ships. But here are some of the key
dates provided in the seventy grade Inventions of the Ancient
World by Brian Fagan at all um, a book I
(18:28):
refer to that I referred to a lot, uh because
it's really good and again highly recommend people pick up
a copy of it. UM. But Fagan and the various
co authors that he worked on with the various sailing
and ship based chapters points out that seagoing watercraft just
in general dates back probably before forty thousand b CE.
(18:48):
In Southeast Asia and Indonesia. We see longboats from Neanderthal
cultures from seventy two hundred b c E and we
see low graphs from seventh century BC and mess of Botania. Again,
these are just general dates based on some of the
earliest evidence we have. And then as far as things
like plank boats, and that goes back to like three
(19:09):
thousand BC in Egypt Um. And then finally we get
up to the frame first boats in the second and
third century CE in in my in what is now
all England. And as far as sailing, we have depictions
of sales from thirty one b C in Egypt. We
see two masted ships from sixth century in BC BC
(19:30):
in Egypt, and the oldest surviving sale comes from the
second century BC in Egypt. But again these are just
some of the oldest direct evidence that we have or depictions, descriptions, etcetera.
As Fagan points out in the section on navigation, with
Sean mcgrail, author of Boats of the World and professor
of Maritime archaeology. The earliest voyages for our ancestors would
(19:52):
have remained within sight of land. Landmarks and sea marks
would have been key to navigation. And we see this
reflected in record did traditions and classical and medieval sailing manuals.
Makes sense, right, I mean it's like if if any
of us were to set out on a boat into
the water, I would want to keep land in sight.
I need to know where that land is. So all
of this early Uh, you know, oceanic activity would have
(20:15):
taken place withinside of land, and we depended upon things
you could notice on land. Uh. You know your frame
of reference. Reference was based on the place you came from. Sure,
but what happens when you leave side of land. Well,
by the mid second millennium BC, sailors in the South
Pacific were of course doing this by means of what
we call environmental navigation. We'll be getting into this at length. Uh,
(20:40):
but you know, at this point you have to travel
beyond dependence on coastal landmarks and sea marks. But that
doesn't mean that there's not an order and language to
the open ocean. And for those who had the wisdom
and the observational skills, of the accumulated knowledge of their ancestors.
They could plot their way by these queues, they could
recognize them, they could read them app of the ocean.
(21:01):
Now we'll get into the details of this in a bit,
but as Fagan and mcgrail point out, you'll find indirect
references to environmental navigation methodologies in Homer's the Odyssey as
well as in the medieval text of the Life of St. Brendan.
And environmental navigation would have been used in some form
worldwide by the first millennium CE, and that's when instruments
(21:22):
began to pop up. That's when we begin to use
these various technological things to help us, uh make our
way across the open water. But with the navigators of
the Pacific Islands, we're talking again about peak environmental navigation,
a level of advancement that exceeded anything else in the
rest of the world, anything else that the rest of
the world was capable of, or had been capable of,
(21:45):
um aweing some of the first Europeans to encounter such
techniques and for a while seeming simply impossible to some
Western minds. Uh, you know that, for for a while
it just seemed impossible that, oh, the people who are
you know, they live in these islands. They must be
here by accident, they must be here by mistake, and
they're merely survivors of the ocean. They're not masters of
(22:08):
its navigation. But as we'll get to they were. They
were the masters. That's exactly right, And that's actually one
of the main points that David Lewis makes in this book,
We the Navigators. Um. He was responding in some ways
to kind of trends in scholarship on the on the
settlement of the Pacific Islands that had tended to say that, well,
a large number of these islands must have just been
(22:29):
settled and discovered by accident, right, that maybe a fisherman
or traders were out at sea and they became lost,
they drifted off course, and just by happenstance they drifted
to new islands that hadn't been settled before, and then
having discovered them, those islands could be settled. Of course,
it is possible that some islands were discovered this way,
but Lewis pushes back, arguing that there's actually a pretty
(22:52):
good evidence for a a program of deliberate exploration and
very accurate navigation by the sailors of the time time
to to locate islands and settle them. So maybe actually
it's time to introduce this book more fully that I've
been reading, because I wanted to mention a number of
things that he talks about in it. So again, the
book is called We the Navigators, The Ancient Art of
(23:14):
Land Finding in the Pacific. It was first published in
nineteen seventy two, and the author, David Lewis, was, as
I said, he was a medical doctor. He was an
experienced amateur sailor, so he had participated in like you know,
yacht races and things like that, and a scholar. He
was born in England, but he was raised in New
Zealand and Rahirotonga in the Cook Islands in the South Pacific.
(23:36):
And Lewis had been a sailing and kayaking enthusiast for
much of his life. He had done some competitive sailing,
including a Transatlantic single handed yacht race in nineteen sixty
and at least one circumnavigation of the globe in a catamaran,
and inspired by his experiences with long sea voyages in
(23:56):
small boats and his love of Polynesian culture since his childhood,
in the nineteen sixties, he got a grant from Australian
National University to study traditional Polynesian navigation techniques that did
not rely on charts or scientific instruments. And he did
this research by learning directly from several older Polynesian sailors
(24:18):
and master navigators, experimenting firsthand with voyages across the Pacific
with these navigators at the helm or experimenting with what
they taught him. And so there are three basic sources
of non documentary information that he talks about. So one
is shore based instruction on ancient navigation techniques from knowledgeable
(24:39):
navigators in the Carolinians, the Santa cruz Reef Islanders and
two groups of Tucopeans uh Niningo Islanders, Gilbert E's and Tongans.
And then he also gets instruction during navigation itself on
his yacht known as the Ispjorn, which is under the
command of two older mass Ster navigators who helped him
(25:01):
with his research. One is a man named Tivak of
the Santa cruz Reef Islands and another is named Hippo
Or of Pula Watt in the Carolines. And I like
the approach here because actually uh he opens his book
by talking about the fact that understanding indigenous navigation of
the Pacific has been really held back by what he
(25:22):
calls an overly theoretical approach. Uh, you know, just people
trying to, uh look at indirect evidence to understand how
the navigation happened, rather than doing firsthand voyages with the
navigators themselves. Yeah, actually diving into the accumulated knowledge of
these cultures on navigation in some cases. So there's a
(25:43):
lot of interesting stuff about this book. One of the
interesting things he mentions early on is he says when
he was growing up in Polynesia, he says to his
elder Polynesian cousins, Uh, the ocean quote was a homely
and not unfriendly place. And that's interesting because it, I mean, obviously,
as a land lubber like me thinks the idea of
(26:04):
voyaging out on the ocean in a canoe is like
inherently just sounds terrifying, right, But to some extent that
is cultural. That's like, because I'm not used to the
idea and to people that have a culture of of
long ocean voyages in small watercraft like these canoes and catamarans. Uh,
It's it's not necessarily such a scary thing. I mean,
(26:24):
of course, ocean voyages do always involve dangers, but under
the guidance of these long tested, ancient navigational techniques, if
you know what you're doing and you know where you're going,
it is actually not necessarily a scary thing to do.
In fact, it could be a sort of joyful part
of your culture. But on the other hand, thinking about
the ocean as a homely and not unfriendly place, this
(26:47):
might cause you to assume that spending a lot of
time at sea would would make ancient Pacific islanders have
a kind of intuitive feel for ocean navigation that couldn't
be put into words the same way that you have
for a lot of skills you have. You know, there
are a lot of things that if you do them
enough and you get good at them, you know what
to do and you can do it well. But you
(27:07):
couldn't necessarily explain to somebody else why you're doing what
you're doing. But Lewis strongly resists this type of characterization
about Pacific island navigation. He says it's in fact the
exact opposite. He writes, quote one further notable feature of
what we were told and had shown to us was
that never once did anyone lay claim to any form
(27:30):
of quote sixth cents. A navigator had reason to believe
that land lay over the horizon because he had observed
certain signs that told him so, not on account of
some vague intuition. And I think this is a really
important point to hammer home about how ancient Pacific island
navigation worked. It wasn't that you've got a feel for
(27:51):
it and then you just instinctively knew what to do.
It was based on knowledge and well calibrated external signs,
And so I think that means it it probably makes
more sense to think of ancient Pacific navigation as more
of a science than an art. You're not just getting
a feel for things and relying on your intuition, but
referencing specific markers and indicators of your position, though these
(28:14):
markers might be mostly invisible to people who didn't know
exactly what to look for. Yeah, I mean it makes
sense right the science, that you would need the science
to get there, because that the the ocean is ultimately unforgiving.
You know, if you were just going on a gut instinct,
you might you might be right some of the time,
but if you get it really wrong once then you
(28:34):
might not be coming back to shore exactly, and that
really comes through in studying these techniques. It is based
on specific markers, specific pieces of knowledge, specific cues in
the environment, and a major point of of Lewis's book
is how accurate these specific techniques and external markers were
(28:54):
in the hands of a master Pacific navigator who knew
what they were doing UH. He writes that navigators of
Polynesia and Micronesia seem to employ basically all of the
same techniques with only slight variations. He says the only
major differences were the features of local geography, because a
lot of these UM methods of navigation do rely on
(29:15):
knowing where specific islands in the area you're navigating are,
so that would be different depending on what island groups
you're sailing between. But otherwise the techniques are extremely similar,
and he says that throughout Polynesia and Micronesia, he said
that the techniques were employed basically with the same level
of effectiveness, measured by the accuracy at landfall, which in
(29:37):
general was highly accurate, especially astonishingly accurate for not using
UH tools and equipment that are available to twentieth century navigators.
Than now. I wanted to come back to a fact
I already mentioned once earlier, but it's this astonishing figure
(29:57):
that that Lewis gives talking about the world Old of
the Polynesians and the Micronesians, saying that they inhabit a
world of ocean. Again, if you exclude New Zealand, this
area of the globe has two parts land to every
one thousand parts water. And then he mentioned something about
this that I thought was really interesting. He writes, quote,
ocean spaces can inhibit contact, though terrestrial features like mountain
(30:22):
ranges may do so equally, but they become highways rather
than barriers as marine technology, especially navigation, becomes effective. I
had never thought about that before, but I think that
that's exactly right. So you can have various barriers to
travel and communication between different regions and cultures. But whereas
(30:43):
a mountain on land is always a barrier, you know,
even if you build a road through it, the mountain
will still slow you down. You're making a road through
it just makes it sort of less of a barrier.
The ocean is something that can transition from a brick
wall to a super highway once you have the the
skill and the knowledge and the technology of to figure
(31:03):
out where you're going and how to get there, and
you have the right kind of watercraft, the ocean turns
into the most efficient method of travel in the world. Yeah,
that's an excellent point. Now, there's one thing that has
made studying Pacific islander navigation more difficult than it might
otherwise be, which is that in many of these societies,
(31:23):
or maybe all of them, and definitely most of them, Uh,
navigational lore seems to have been something that was often
kept secret and only shared with a small group of
initiated experts. So it wasn't just that everybody in a
in a Micronesian or Polynesian society knew how to navigate
on the open ocean, but that you would have sort
(31:43):
of a class of educated navigators who would have this
this lore about how to get from place to place
within their brains and would be passed on to the
next generation of navigators. But it wouldn't be general knowledge
that was shared by everyone. And that will make even
more sense as we'd get into some of the details
of say, navigating by stars and what that entailed, you
(32:05):
realize that this required specialized training and a specialized eye
and not everybody who's going to necessarily be cut out
for it, and it wouldn't make sense for everyone to
to invest this level of time and energy into the
understanding of it, right, And it's interesting. I don't know
exactly what all of the pressures leading to it being
a sort of specialized bit of of exclusive lore among
(32:28):
a special class of navigators would be. I mean, there
might have been economic concerns keeping it contained that way,
or it might have just been sort of you know,
the difficulty of training people to to have all of
this knowledge in their head. I'm not quite sure, but
that's an interesting question as well. Now there's another thing
that Lewis gets into in his book which I thought
was really interesting about Again, when you just look at
(32:51):
the problem of you look at a map of the
Pacific Ocean and you think, how could it be possible
to navigate you know, these vast distances without you know,
modern scientific types of equipment or charts and that kind
of thing. And uh. And there is one aspect of
it that helps make the problem seem more comprehensible, and
(33:12):
it's this Lewis writes that it is possible, quote to
sail to almost all the inhabited islands of Oceania from
Southeast Asia without once making a sea crossing longer than
three hundred and ten miles. The only exceptions are Easter Island,
Hawaii and New Zealand, though the most predictable routes between
Eastern and Western Polynesia are also long such isolated lands apart.
(33:37):
The majority of gaps between islands and even archipelagos are
well under three hundred and ten miles, and usually in
the fifty to two hundred mile range. Since no one
wants to cross more open ocean than necessary, it follows
that most passages were of this order. So if you
know your Pacific geography and you know where the islands
(33:58):
are and how to navigate to, the the problem of
crossing the vast ocean actually can sometimes be decomposed into
many smaller journeys between islands, and the vast Pacific ocean
problem can be broken up into a kind of stepping
stone pattern. However, this does not mean that ancient Pacific
islanders were incapable of longer sea voyages. They were not,
(34:21):
and sometimes they did make them. Now, coming back to
the idea that Lewis pushes back against that many of
the islands of the Pacific would have been settled initially
through random drifts of people who found new islands by
accident while drifting about after you know, becoming lost or
something like that. Lewis pushes back against that, and one
line of evidence he sites is computer simulations of human
(34:44):
spread and settlement through random drifts. He writes of this
subject quote, Contrary to expectations, the results showed that while
accidental advent upon a number of island groups was likely,
drifts could not account for certain crucial contact stages. These
were virtually impossible except as exploratory probes and subsequent deliberately
(35:05):
mounted ventures. The probability of drifts occurring was negligible or
zero across the following seaways Western Melanesia to Fiji, Eastern
Polynesia to Hawaii, New Zealand, or Eastern Island Eastern Polynesian
contact with the America's in either direction, the probability of
their having been drifts from western to Eastern Polynesia, and
(35:26):
from Western Polynesia to the Marquesas zone was very low,
and so here Louis is arguing that not only were
the navigators of the ancient Pacific islands able to travel
uh with with great accuracy between known islands and island groups.
That they also appear to have mounted these deliberate, intentional
exploratory ventures into new waters to find islands that had
(35:51):
not yet been discovered, and of course, in doing so,
would have the knowledge to be able to locate these
islands again upon you know, going back home and then returning,
which again is astounding. Yeah, yeah, simply astounding. And I
think a lot of these the counter ideas, the ideas, yeah,
that that these had to be accidents, these you know,
these people, that people could possibly have set out and
(36:13):
discovered these I mean, it's such a I guess a
landsman approach, you know, based on a you know, it's
the kind of analysis that a culture that is that
is more situated on the land and and does not
view the ocean as the majority of the world or
their world. I keep coming back to this, uh analysis
that for the for instance, the Polynesians, most of the
(36:35):
world was ocean and and and generally that's not the
sort of worldview you encounter with with with Western civilizations.
And now certainly you have certain you know, civilizations and
cultures within the civilizations that are more uh nautical and
more dependent on maritime traditions. But but even then it's
(36:55):
it's it's often the case that they are they're more
attached to the land, they closer to the continent, and
in these cases we're dealing with with with islands within
just a vast world of water. Now, there's one big
question that Lewis also addresses in his book, which is
the question of what happened to so much of this,
this ancient Pacific navigational knowledge. Right, clearly some people in
(37:18):
the twentieth century still possess it, but this seems to
have become increasingly rare. Uh. And you could easily blame
the import of foreign navigation equipment and techniques by other cultures. Right, So,
if you have brought in charts and compasses and things
like that from from elsewhere, there's less need to rely
on the ancient navigational lore to get from place to place.
(37:40):
But unfortunately it doesn't seem like that's the only cause.
It also seems that by the last few centuries, many
island groups in the Pacific came to be ruled by
foreign empires, and those empires in many cases simply forbade
travel between islands. Lewis writes in in one footnote in
the book, quote the banning by your European administrations of
(38:01):
Inner Island canoe travel must have been a potent cause
of navigational decline. Voyages were forbidden, for instance, in the Carolines.
In German times, it Illan attributed the loss of traditional
lore on Nningo to the effect of the old German regulations.
Prohibitions remain in force today, and this would have been
in nineteen seventy two in among other places, the Tahiti group,
(38:24):
and voyaging is strongly discouraged in the Gilbert's Not only
must atrophy of knowledge have resulted, but deliberate voyages had
to be kept secret. Advent upon another island was invariably
attributed to accident. So this seems to be one of
the detrimental effects of various colonialisms on on on the
Pacific islands that it would have led to a steepening
(38:47):
decline in the ancient navigational lore and the passing down
of this knowledge about how to navigate by the stars
and these other signs, because there was simply less opportunity
for people to navigate to, you know, go out in
the open ocean the way they would have for now
it's interesting too though that there are exceptions to this,
uh as well. I was looking at this on that
(39:08):
that Hokolea website and over there that they discussed and
this is also discussed at UM on the website for
the for the Bishop Museum UM in Hawaii on the
island of Oahu, which is an excellent museum about various
Polynesian cultures and gets into a lot of what we're
discussing here. Definitely worth visiting if you if you make
(39:28):
it out to Oahu. UM. But that as as discussed
these on the both of these sources, the art of
deep sea voyaging in Hawaii had it been extinct for
several hundred years before contact with Europeans. So this period
of of long voyages ended along with all contact with
other Polynesian islands, and they lived in near complete isolation
(39:50):
until seventeen seventy eight, right, So that's fascinating as well. Yeah,
so there could be a number of causes there. So
there's also there's like, in one sense, you could have
a kind of natural atrophy of knowledge, and then there
could be some loss of knowledge by by imposition of
colonial rule, and then also some loss of knowledge by
the introduction of alternative methods for travel. Yeah, but fortunately
(40:12):
not all the knowledge was lost, and so we have
the accounts of of Lewis doing this firsthand research with
with master navigators like hip or and and Tevik. And
I was going to get into some of the specifics
of of these navigation techniques in this episode, but we're
already running kind of long, so I think maybe we
should call it there and then come and talk about
the navigation techniques in part two. Yeah, how to read
(40:36):
these environmental cues and engage in environmental navigation and then
and then also some of the history of proving it
out and then what what that those experiments those uh uh,
those those voyages approved about history itself. So join us
next time as we continue to discuss this topic. In
the meantime, if you would have liked to listen to
(40:56):
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them in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed,
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(41:17):
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