HOW TO NAVIGATE USING THE STARS
Polynesian master voyagers don’t need modern compasses to navigate their way around the vast waters of the Pacific.
Long before the advent of modern science and technology, Polynesian navigators could travel vast distances across the Pacific between New Zealand in the southwest, Hawaii in the north and Easter Island in the southeast. Those navigational practices had almost vanished by the 1970s – but the Polynesian Voyaging Society on Hawaii has since revived the knowledge with the help of Mau Pialug, a traditional navigator from the Micronesian island of Satawal.
Kālepa Baybayan was one of a handful of Pialug’s students, and he has now become a master navigator in his own right. He says a key tool is the ‘star compass’. This is not a physical object but a mental construct – the navigator memorises positions of the stars in the night sky, and when they rise and set, to orientate the canoe.
The stars are useful in other ways too: the altitude of a star changes with the canoe’s latitude. This means a skilled navigator with a detailed knowledge of the night sky can
pinpoint the canoe’s north-south position from the height of a given star above the horizon, using an outstretched hand as a measuring tool. “You know when you are approaching land because the stars will tell you by their altitudes,” says Baybayan.
The navigator also uses passing flotsam and mental arithmetic to judge how fast the boat is moving, and keeps track of the canoe’s wake relative to the orientation of the canoe itself to judge the degree to which winds are driving the boat off-course. Both factors must be taken into account if the navigator is to mentally calculate the canoe’s approximate east-west position. The navigator must track all of these factors – and many more – for days on end. “The trip from Hawaii to Tahiti is 2,400 nautical miles: it’s going to take you about three weeks to get there,” says Baybayan. “It’s a mental challenge to do this without notes or writing. But it gives incredible satisfaction to complete a voyage successfully.”
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