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>
>
>I suppose they also did not have compass, so DR
>was not available to them, and they had to rely
>on CelNav entirely. So I would be interested to know
>more details on how exactly they did it.

There was a book discussed here sometime ago called as I remember

We,
the navigators; the ancient art of landfinding in the Pacific.
by Lewis, David  I found it a hard read but he gets the idea across.

He went out to the Pacific in the 50-s and gathered up as much lore as he
could and made some voyages with natives after locking up all modern nav aids.

The basic skill was a catalog of stars yielding a kind of compass. For each
point in their compass, they had a collection of stars.  They steered by
them only when they were low on the horizon.  As each rose too high it was
replaced with another lower one.  Day time course was largely determined by
wind and wave direction.  They also knew a set of zenith stars for each
island so they had some idea of latitude.  An important part of their lore
was making the target bigger.  Clouds, birds, and particularly wave
interference patterns were important for this purpose.  One native
navigator told the author he could detect changes in the interference
pattern by the way his testicles swung.

I also remember the natives had a form of dead reckoning.  If they were
going from A to B.  They divided the leg up into sections and would keep a
mental note of
where they were.  Important if they had to change destination in midstream
and had to start using a different set of compass stars.

The natives didn't always use direct routes,  the recipe for one voyage
went something like sail this course until the water changes color
indicating you have reached a submerged reef, then a radical course change
to reach the destination.

When the author showed the natives modern charts, they couldn't understand
them.

   

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