NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Traditional Polynesian 'location indicators'
From: George Huxtable
Date: 2004 Feb 22, 11:14 +0000
From: George Huxtable
Date: 2004 Feb 22, 11:14 +0000
There's a lot yet to be understood about Polynesian methods of navigation. All I have learned is from books, mostly by David Lewis, and to me, what he has been able to learn and pass on has been rather unsatisfying. It may already be too late for much more to be discovered, as island folk-memories fade away (and GPS takes over?). The voyages that Lewis recounts as having taken with islanders in his books tended to be hops between familiar islands. These may have been just out of sight over the horizon, or if much further, there would be other islands as guide-posts along the way. The argument goes "If the Polynesians were not superb navigators, how could their society spread to cover so much of the Pacific?" Lewis gives an account which I am quoting from memory and am not certain which book it's in, roughly as follows- A Polynesian punishment for serious transgressions of their code was banishment. The offender would be put into a boat with a woman and a pregnant sow, and instructed not to return. As a strategy for propagating and diffusing the species, I don't know of a better. And it involved no navigational skill at all. The chance of coming across another island was perhaps 50%. The chance of making a successful landing in the surf, perhaps 50% again. The chance of it being habitable and uninhabited, or else having friendly inhabitants, perhaps another 50%. But life was cheap. In time, every habitable island would be populated. To those wandering offenders can presumably be added other island voyagers who had got blown out of their intended course and lost their way. I have ended up somewhat sceptical of claims of the superb ocean-navigating skills of the Polynesian peoples (or the other Pacific-island societies). But that is entirely on the basis of secondhand learning (and a sceptical nature), and my mind is open to being convinced otherwise. George. ================================================================ contact George Huxtable by email at george@huxtable.u-net.com, by phone at 01865 820222 (from outside UK, +44 1865 820222), or by mail at 1 Sandy Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK. ================================================================