Secrets of Polynesian navigation
They call it Te Lapa, which means flashing light. It emanates from islands, homing in the ocean voyagers. Dr Marianne (Mimi) George is an experienced sailor and a cultural anthropologist, based in Hawaii. She has seen Te Lapa herself, although initially she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her.
New Zealand doctor David Lewis also witnessed it on his Pacific voyages with traditional navigators, who have long used Te Lapa as a navigation aid, though no-one can explain its source.
Lewis was the author of the foundation text on traditional navigation, We the Navigators (1972). He famously put his own boat in the charge of master navigators like Chief Kaveia from Taumako in the Santa Cruz Islands, to observe their reckoning.
George regularly visits Taumako, the only place where traditional navigation has been practised continuously, because they still depend on it. They have no phones, no electricity, and just one or two irregular ship visits to transport students home and away again.
George, the scientist, wants to establish the source of Te Lapa, and has recruited an artist to attempt to record it on camera, and prove its existence.
Chief Kaveia had a theory that George wants to test. A fundamental of ocean navigation is reading the swells that travel thousands of miles across the Pacific from the four diagonal corners of the compass, driven by seasonal storms.
These swells are big and round and powerful, underlying the choppy wave noise on top. They bounce off islands, and meet each other in predictable interference patterns, fanning out, and adding to make bigger swells or cancelling each other out.
The swell may be the only guide navigators have when it’s overcast. The interference patterns are themselves an indication of land close by, and are expertly interpreted by master sailors.
Kaveia hypothesised that the raised curve of the intersecting waves might be acting as some kind of lens to focus the light.
This may indeed be the case, George thinks. But that would not solve the mystery of the source of the light. She says one possibility is electromagnetic emissions from tectonic movements around islands.
George was raised in upstate New York, far from the ocean that is now her home, office and laboratory. She decided to be an anthropologist after she became captivated by the wonder of Pacific voyaging and settlement.
How could people find their way to new islands so sparsely scattered in that vast ocean, and then return home again?
‘‘These days we are so dependent on our phones and navigation aids, we have the lost the ability to use our inbuilt senses to understand our world,’’ she laments.
George was in Blenheim recently, speaking at a University of Otago and
To¯ taranui 250 Trust science history conference, where scientists, historians and anthropologists of all stripes, from the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Australia, and the Pacific, gathered to pick over the bones of the great navigators like Tupaia and Cook, and reveal new insights about their craft, their maps and mindsets.
Delegates were impressed by other light phenomena. In a film of the newly hewn waka forging through Queen Charlotte Sound to meet the Endeavour replica that had visited a week earlier, the eyes of the young Ma¯ ori crew members were flashing with pride.
This time the meeting with the Endeavour was on their terms.