Polynesia's Genius Navigators

How did the first inhabitants of Easter Island arrive? It is the most remote inhabited island on Earth. The coast of Chile lies 2,300 miles to the east, Tahiti 2,500 miles to the northwest, and the nearest island, with a total population of 54 people, is tiny Pitcairn, 1,400 miles to the west. The answer lies in the deeply rooted traditions of Polynesian culture.

Photo credit: © Grafissimo/iStockphoto

For the ancient Polynesians, finding Easter Island, a small 64-square-mile speck in this vast ocean, must have been like finding a needle in a haystack; but the Polynesian community today is convinced their navigators intuitively discovered and settled this island. "At the backbone of the maritime tradition lies the outrigger canoe," explains archeologist and Easter Island specialist Jo Anne Van Tilburg, "the quintessential symbol of Polynesian mastery of the sea. The outrigger canoe is today part of every Polynesian island child's upbringing, except on Easter Island. There, the outrigger canoe was lost sometime in the mid-1800s." Van Tilburg has been instrumental in reintroducing three outrigger canoes to the island. The islanders' loss of their seafaring past, according to Van Tilburg, "took away the traditional link people had with the sea."

For Van Tilburg, the Polynesian canoe is a metaphor in her theories of how the Easter Islanders transported and erected their 15-ton moai. "It's not much different from erecting a mast on a very large canoe. It's a transfer of technology from one industry to another. The people who built these structures were both sailors and farmers, and they used their seafaring technology to help them in moving and erecting their moai....Erecting a mast on a ship or a statue on a platform requires similar abilities, skills, and tools."

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Polynesia's Genius Navigators

Hawaiian navigators sailing multi-hulled canoe, ca 1781

A world of water

The people of the Pacific are intimately tied to the ocean. They sailed the sea hundreds of years before Europeans, using voyaging canoes crafted from island materials and stone tools. The Polynesians approached the open ocean with respect; indeed, the ocean was integrated naturally into Polynesian culture, as they came from small islands surrounded by vast ocean expanses. No other culture embraced the open sea so fully.

For the continental Europeans, on the other hand, the ocean was looked upon as a menacing world that only the bravest explorers ventured upon for long periods of time. And even these explorers felt at odds with the ocean upon which they traveled. One of Magellan's chroniclers described "a sea so vast the human mind can scarcely grasp it." To a Polynesian islander, the world is primarily aquatic, since the Pacific ocean covers more area than land in this region. The Pacific, in fact, covers one-third of the Earth's surface.

a learned art

In island culture, the double canoe and its navigator were integral to the survival of the people. As an island became overpopulated, navigators were sent out to sail uncharted seas to find undiscovered islands.

For weeks, they would live aboard boats made from wood and lashings of braided fiber. Thousands of miles were traversed, without the aid of sextants or compasses. The ancient Polynesians navigated their canoes by the stars and other signs that came from the ocean and sky. Navigation was a precise science, a learned art that was passed on verbally from one navigator to another for countless generations.

In 1768, as he sailed from Tahiti, Captain Cook had an additional passenger on board his ship, a Tahitian navigator named Tupaia. Tupaia guided Cook 300 miles south to Rurutu, a small Polynesian island, proving he could navigate from his homeland to a distant island.

Cook was amazed to find that Tupaia could always point in the exact direction in which Tahiti lay, without the use of the ship's charts. Sadly, Cook was never able to learn and document Tupaia's navigational techniques, for Tupaia, and many of Cook's crew, died of malaria in the Dutch East Indies. Unlike later visitors to the South Pacific, Cook understood that Polynesian navigators could guide canoes across the Pacific over great distances.

instruments of nature

But these navigational skills, along with the double canoe, disappeared with the emergence of Western technology, which mariners the world over came to rely on.

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Asia's Undersea Archeology

by Richard Gould

Diver with bowl Overseas trading of fine porcelain and other objects began in China during the Song Dynasty.

Seaborne commerce on a large scale in Asia dates to the Song Dynasty of China (A.D. 960-1270). The Mongols in the succeeding Yuan Dynasty (ca. 1271-1368) went on to build even more ships on a grand scale, and during his stay at the imperial court from 1275 to 1292, Marco Polo described four-masted, seagoing merchant ships with watertight bulkheads and crews of up to 300. Early in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), an expansion of seaborne trade took place with the construction of an immense treasure fleet—reported to consist of 317 ships when it was assembled in Nanjing in 1405—that made trading cruises throughout the Indian Ocean and the China seas

 Although shipwreck archeology is relatively new in Asia, important finds are pointing the way toward the broader use of archeological evidence relative to the documentary history of this era of Chinese maritime expansion.

Ancient Chinese Exploeres

Treasure junks: fact or fiction?

The Ming account of the voyages that followed strains credulity: "The ships which sail the Southern Sea are like houses. When their sails are spread they are like great clouds in the sky." Were the reported dimensions of the biggest galleons—over 400 feet long by 150 wide—gross exaggerations? If accurate, these dimensions would signal the biggest wooden ships ever built. Only the mightiest wooden warships of the Victorian age approached these lengths, and several of these vessels suffered from structural problems that required extensive internal iron supports to hold the hull together. No such structures are reported in the Chinese sources.

Zheng He's ships, as depicted in a Chinese woodblock print thought to date to the early 17th century Enlarge Photo credit: Courtesy of Instructional Resources Corporation, www.historypictures.com

However, in 1962, the rudderpost of a treasure ship was excavated in the ruins of one of the Ming boatyards in Nanjing. This timber was no less than 36 feet long. Reverse engineering using the proportions typical of a traditional junk indicated a hull length of around 500 feet.

Unfortunately, other archeological traces of this "golden age" of Chinese seafaring remain elusive. One of the most intensively studied wrecks, found at Quanzhou in 1973, dates from the earlier Song period; this substantial double-masted ship probably sank sometime in the 1270s. Its V-shaped hull is framed around a pine keel over 100 feet long and covered with a double layer of intricately fitted cedar planking, thus clearly indicating its oceangoing character. Inside, 13 compartments held the residue of an exotic cargo of spices, shells, and fragrant woods, much of it originating in east Africa.

The Quanzhou wreck suggests that over a century before Zheng He's fabled voyages, the Chinese were already involved in ambitious trading exploits across the Indian Ocean. Even back then, their sturdy ships equaled the largest known European vessels of the period. By inventing watertight compartments and efficient "lugsails" that enabled them to steer close to the wind, Chinese shipbuilders remained ahead of the West in the following centuries.

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