Posted on: Tuesday, June 22, 2004

ISLAND VOICES
Navigation came from Micronesia

By George Avlonitis
Amateur historian who lives in Honolulu

It's nice that the Hawaiians and other Polynesians are learning, again, to navigate by the stars.

In the late 18th century, European explorers marveled at the navigational skills of the Polynesians, declaring that, before Captain Cook, the Polynesians were 600 years ahead of the Europeans.

The problem is, the star navigation used by the Hawaiians today is not Polynesian at all — it's Micronesian, learned from the celebrated Mau Piailug from Satawal, Micronesia, because the last navigator in the whole of Polynesia had died in the 1970s (see "Hokulea: The way to Tahiti" by Ben Finney).

The Micronesian navigation is not Polynesian because, among other reasons, the Micronesian culture never contacted the Polynesians.

Therefore, despite claims that the great achievement of Polynesian navigation has been revived, today's star navigation is just another star navigation practiced all over the world for thousands of years before the Polynesians appeared.

Archaeological and other records show that contact of Hawaiians with other Polynesians stopped in the 13th century with the arrival of the Tahitians to Hawai'i. In the 1770s, before Western discovery of Hawai'i, a Tahitian navigator made a detailed map of Polynesia, still extant, for Captain Cook (who thought it was curiously similar to his own map), without showing Hawai'i.

To be sure, some time after the discovery of Hawai'i, when Captain Cook communicated with Hawaiians in Tahitian, the Hawaiian chants talked of the ancestors in Tahiti — Kahiki in Hawaiian. But, Kahiki also means faraway land, and nobody seems to have noticed when, exactly, these chants were composed — before or after the discovery.

Another point showing lack of contact with other Polynesians is that Captain Cook knew very little about the Marquesas Islands, Nuku-Hiva, the first origin of the Hawaiians. Therefore, presumably, he didn't mention them to the Hawaiians. The Hawaiians, in turn, didn't mention them in their chants.

The above observations are made in order to show that the long-voyage Polynesia navigation was lost for centuries and cannot be revived.

It is also interesting to note that in the early 1800s, Kamehameha I bought European ships and sent them to China to sell sandalwood. He hired European navigators. Kamehameha II owned several European ships, all navigated by Europeans when sailing outside Hawaiian waters.