Mau Piailug

The question the 1976 voyage was built to answer had been argued since the eighteenth century. Were the Pacific islands settled by deliberate voyaging, or by canoes blown off course? Andrew Sharp had argued the drift case forcefully in the 1950s, and the argument mattered because it decided whether Pacific peoples were credited with a navigational science or with luck.

By the 1970s no Hawaiian held the traditional knowledge. It survived in the Caroline Islands, where a handful of navigators still practised, and Mau Piailug agreed to sail. In 1976 he took Hokule'a, a double-hulled canoe built for the purpose, from Hawaii to Tahiti, roughly two and a half thousand miles, with no instruments of any kind.

The method he used is a system, not an intuition. Stars are held in a mental compass of rising and setting points around the horizon, and a course is steered by keeping the appropriate star on the appropriate part of the canoe, changing star as each rises too high. When cloud hides the sky the swells serve, distinguished by direction and feel. Birds, cloud formations over land and the colour of the water give landfall. Position is tracked by etak, in which a reference island off to one side is imagined moving backwards along the star points as the canoe advances, so the voyage is reckoned in segments rather than in miles.

The canoe arrived. Seventeen thousand people met it in Papeete.

On Satawal, navigational knowledge belonged to lineages and was released in stages, and the pwo ceremony that initiated a navigator carried obligations to the community as well as a body of technique. To hand that knowledge to outsiders was not an ordinary decision.

Mau Piailug made it on a judgement about the future. Younger men on Satawal were not taking up the training, ships and engines had made the canoe seem unnecessary, and he concluded that the knowledge would die with his generation if it stayed where it was. He taught Nainoa Thompson and others in Hawaii through the late 1970s and 1980s, in part by building a star compass out of coral on the ground.

In 2007 he conducted a pwo ceremony on Satawal, the first there in decades, initiating a group of navigators that included several of his Hawaiian students. He died in 2010.

What followed is a Pacific-wide revival: voyaging canoes built and sailed in Hawaii, Aotearoa, the Cook Islands, Samoa and elsewhere, and a circumnavigation by Hokule'a between 2014 and 2017. This is living knowledge held by the communities that practise it, taught within their own institutions and on their own terms. The atlas records that it exists, who carried it and how it was passed on. It does not teach it, and the ceremonial dimension of pwo is named here as belonging to Satawal rather than described.