The voyaging-canoe revival examined
"Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors: Reviving Polynesian Voyaging" by Ben Finney; Bishop Museum Press $19.95 softcover; sale proceeds support Bishop Museum
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Staff Writer
University of Hawai'i anthropologist Ben Finney was an early proponent of the theory that Polynesians navigated their ways across the Pacific, countering the idea that the Pacific people were only technologically capable of "drift voyages."
Finney has built and sailed double-hulled voyaging canoes and is one of the founders of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. As such, he's uniquely qualified to discuss the revival of voyaging.
He has done so in a clear-eyed volume constructed around the remarkable 1995 sail in which six voyaging canoes from all over Polynesia followed the ancient route from the Marquesas to Hawai'i, five of them navigating without modern instruments.
Whether that event will have sparked a sustainable Pacific-wide renaissance of Polynesian voyaging remains to be seen, but in Hawai'i, the tradition appears well developed. There are several voyaging canoes now built in the Islands. Each county now has a big ocean-going canoe either sailing or under construction.
Hokule'a, of course, leads the list. The nearly 30-year-old canoe is conducting a 4,000-mile tour of the Hawaiian Archipelago, that will take it to Kure Atoll in the northwest to Hilo in the southeast, and dozens of points between.
"Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors" is honest about the challenges, mistakes and missteps that have bedeviled the voyaging effort, but throughout there is a sense of pride—that in retrospect, this was an effort worth undertaking. It reviews Finney's own construction of a 40-foot double-hull, Nalehia, in 1965, the development of the Hokule'a, which was launched in 1975, and eventually the construction of a small fleet of voyaging canoes in Hawai'i, New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Tahiti and elsewhere.
At the same time, Finney reviews the development of a modern equivalent of ancient non-instrument navigational techniques — much of the basic information from which came from navigator Mau Piailug of the island of Satawal.
Finney expertly places voyaging in its historical place, and includes vignettes of the many individuals who helped create its modern place. He gives special attention to two key figures: Myron Thompsom, who stepped in to reorganize the Polynesian Voyaging Society after the tragedy of 1978 in which Eddie Aikau was lost and the canoe capsized at sea; and his son Nainoa Thompson, the first of Hawai'i modern traditional navigators and present head of the voyaging organization.
