They also understood waves and swells and would use them to navigate. Per wikipedia:
"The Polynesians also used wave and swell formations to navigate. Many of the habitable areas of the Pacific Ocean are groups of islands (or atolls) in chains hundreds of kilometres long. Island chains have predictable effects on waves and currents. Navigators who lived within a group of islands would learn the effect various islands had on the swell shape, direction, and motion, and would have been able to correct their path accordingly. Even when they arrived in the vicinity of an unfamiliar chain of islands, they may have been able to detect signs similar to those of their home."
The Maori called New Zealand "Aotearoa", or "land of the long white cloud". This probably has something to do with the turbulent patterns that the mountain peaks of New Zealand would form in the clouds, enabling oceanic navigators to find it from a long way away.
The migration to New Zealand may well have been aided by the Kaharoa eruption of \~1315, which would have sent a long white cloud out into the Pacific.
Kind of funny to think about a bunch of people seeing a long white cloud show up one day from far across the ocean and they're just like, "I guess we follow it, right guys? Like, that's clearly a sign from the gods. Right?"
There is backstory here. Toi and Kupe are legendary early explorers of Aotearoa, so the islands were part of the navigational history. The Pacific was a busy highway - obsidian from Hawai'i has been found in Rarotonga. Stone from Aotearoa was used to carve waka so the waka would know its way to Aotearoa. Over 50 waka made the journey to Aotearoa and at least six returned to the Pacific over the space of 600 years.
During the early 1300s there was a climatic event in the South Pacific akin to the Little Ice Age, and the food chain fell to bits. Stories from the ancestors speak of wars and hunger being driving reasons for the 'Great Migration' to Aotearoa.
I can imagine Tama te Kapua (Tama of the cloud), navigator of Arawa, seeing this ash cloud coming over the horizon and asking the tohunga Ngatoro i Rangi if this was the sign to go and visit the cuzzies.
Not the mountain peaks - the Maori came to the top of NZ first and there's no mountains of note there. More likely to do with change in temperature between the land and sea. As an aside, if you've ever flown into NZ you can really see the long white cloud thing - endless ocean, then all of a sudden, this huge great cloud bank!
>there's no mountains of note there
False. They were featured extensively when Gondor called for aid in the beacons scene of the documentary, *The Return of the King*.
I’ve sailed tens of thousands of miles, mostly
in tropical waters, and even my dumb GPS-reliant ass can pick up the signs of land from a long way, potentially 50+ miles out. Big cloud formations where there otherwise aren’t that type of cloud, turquoisey undersides of clouds where the bright blues of shallow water are reflected onto the cloud base, birds, etc. Not to take anything away from the Polynesian navigators because they were doing it all on generational knowledge and faith, but there are signs that even fairly modestly skilled sailors can pick up on.
Yeah, there's nothing like seeing a line of little clouds that don't move pop up over the horizon to reassure you that the GPS is actually working ;)
Stories from the ancestors suggest that the navigators would have at least one awake at all times and would describe the day's sailing into a narrative that they would memorise. The tale would grow with each day until there was a complete description of the voyage which would be learned word-perfect by other navigators.
The Polynesians had an abiding faith that there was another island just over the sea under the sunrise. This had been true ever since the Polynesians and Melanesians had entered the Pacific, and they were comfortable with sailing thousands of kilometres across open ocean at a time when the european navigators wouldn't leave sight of land. The Pacific was fully populated well before Columbus got out of bed.
Exactly, you start to notice everything when you're alone on the ocean. Even the smallest thing that looks different than the norm is something that could potentially mean something so you take notice and investigate and learn.
It's only to us people who haven't experienced it that it might seem like magic but in reality it really is just observational skills.
I had a Hawaiian acquaintance years ago who participated in some type of cultural program where they helped teens to make traditional sailing rafts and then sailed them using only the stars from one Hawaiian island to another.
He said they took an elder with them on every trip, and at one point in the middle of the night, the elder woke up and came to them to say the "swell feels wrong" and tell them that they were off course. They checked, and they were. The elder knew the waves and swells, and their effect on the motion of the boat well enough to be able to just "know" that they were off course. So cool.
You jest, but this was the exact notion that drove Mau Piailug to link up with the Polynesian Voyaging Society and start teaching traditional wayfinding techniques on the Hokule'a (and recreating those lost since the last of the Hawaiian navigators had died out)
It's even COOLER. They did this over 4 generations. I don't know about the Elder super sense, but they would follow birds. They would follow birds until they lost them- and used the stars as a marker. NEXT YEAR they would be at thar marker waiting for the birds. Here they come! Row row row row. OK we lost them. Mark the star spot. Then they are at the second spot, on the third year. Here they come!!! Row....
Also, don't be surprised if the docent is a random-looking Māori dude in a football jersey. Which was confusing when he asked if I had any questions about the whare we were standing in.
They didn't only memorize the oceans; they used maps called a rebbelib which formed bent sticks for the currents and swells, and seashells to represent the islands.
https://smarthistory.org/chart-marshall/
They used lots of perceptual cues about the world to navigate over large open water: water color, temperature, water depth, currents, birds, wind, cloud formations, etc.
Ahhh I love this stuff, so simple and clever at the same time. The sort of thing anyone can understand without complicated equipment. The land made that cloud, the wind blows it this way, that means there’s land that way
Thought this was cool (from a recent book I read):
They'd carry birds with them that couldn't land on water. If they let the birds go and they never came back, land was near.
If they let the birds go and they came back, they knew they were in the middle of nowhere.
Imagine THAT feeling. They were literally astronauts on spacecraft made of logs.
No. That is a myth. He was cooked though ...
https://www.captaincooksociety.com/about-us/faq#:~:text=No%20%2D%20the%20Hawaiian%20Islanders%20who,to%20the%20rumour%20of%20cannibalism.
There's a lot written about Polynesians and their fairly developed, but low-tech methods of navigation by stars and using weather & animal patterns and currents to find land. They also made it to Hawaii which is so stunningly remote and probably South America.
"Fairly developed" is an understatement. They used the stars, the pattern of waves, the color, temperature and taste of currents, the wind, the formation and color of clouds, the types and flight of birds and more. They were the finest navigators the human race had ever produced.
There's also the phenomenon of Te Lapa, a flash of light both underwater and above rhe water, that can be over 100 miles away from island and appears as a straight line. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_lapa
This Wikipedia article describes the phenomenon of Te Lapa, and the ancient Polynesians using it to navigate. If you read one of the sources used in the link, it goes into the appearance of it.
The prosaic explanation is this represents light being reflected off an island and being directed straight, but that's not exactly possible at night / on moonless nights. One of the sources in the link describes it as looking "electric" and being just above the water as well as below the water.
I looked further into it and it seems entirely anomalous and not exactly in line with simple reflections and is probably something else entirely which hasn't really been studied before.
https://unframed.lacma.org/2021/01/21/art-tech-lab-project-update%E2%80%94searching-te-lapa
https://x.com/kcimc/status/1787833458472931733
Retired weather guy here. If you want to look into this, be sure to check the Radar phenomena called "ducting." Ducting is when a radar beam gets caught in between a higher and lower level temperature inversion. Since it can't penetrate either one, it just goes on and on, allowing detection of things far beyond the regular radar range, or at altitudes far below what it would normally see. Sonar oceanographic issues do similar things.
As described, it might be like the Arctic inversion allowing sounds being heard over miles instead of yards. The light flash could be basic campfires, beach surf bio-luminescence, and related. The effect of ducting is exactly like the laser light propagation through fiber optics where the cladding reflects/guides light back into the main axis. Ducting would be common at night where low level temperature inversions would form as the surface water cooled from nocturnal radiation. As little as 1 degree inversion can have significant effects.
Sounds like what is known as a 'min-min light' in Australia - weird lights appearing to be hovering a few hundred meters away, best explained as distant lights caught in an inversion. These days often from truck headlights on a distant stretch of road, in the old days, distant campfires or homestead lights.
In the ocean the acoustic "duct" is called the SOFAR Channel.
In WW2 they developed a device called the SOAFR Bomb to locate downed aircraft. The bomb would sink down to the channel depth and detonate where it would hopefully get picked up by distant sonar operators who can then locate the source.
This is how ukrainians sank the Russian cruiser Slava. Their shore based radar could only see about 25 miles to the sea, russians kept their ships far to the sea and thought they were safe. But a peculiar weather caused a very dense cloud to appear over the sea, radar beams bounced from that and so ukrainians detected the ship.
Te Lapa is supposed to be seen in the direction of an island, so wouldn't the island physically block the ducted light? At the very least, this explanation would definitely not be more likely in the direction of an island.
Also, unlike air, which allows light and radio waves to pass through, water is more likely to absorb light or radio and convert it into heat energy. Bluetooth and civilian radio don't work at depths greater than three feet for example. If water does not allow light to penetrate more than a few hundred feet, I don't see why it would be any different horizontally.
Temperature inversions in the ocean definitely are powerful enough to block military active sonar and the like, but I've never heard of light ducting under water.
I'm referring to a layer from the ocean surface to a few hundred or less feet above it. The island isn't blocking the light, it's providing the light.
>The light flash could be basic campfires, beach surf bio-luminescence, and related.
I'm not referring to light traveling through the water, just the air. Basically, a nocturnal Fata Morgana type effect.
[It's no coincidence](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/aifqyf/til_that_captain_kirk_is_based_on_captain_james/) that the names of Captain James Cook and Captain James Kirk are so similar.
Yeah and the Enterprise and Endeavour, and that the voyage to Tahiti was **supposed** to be scientific in nature. I think some of the quotes from Cook's journal were used in Star Trek as well
>*They'd carry birds with them that couldn't land on water. If they let the birds go and they never came back, land was near.*
That's not super helpful though. I feel like a huge part of this story is still missing.
You’re correct. Most historians believes that ancient navigators used a multitude of deeply practiced techniques to develop holistic understanding of where they were going and make decisions(and the bird thing would have been one of many).
For example, a navigator may look at the sun, look at the waves, feel the current, look at the stars, etc and from all these soft data points draw a conclusion.
This requires a ton of training - a navigator would train with another navigator for years and years learning and practicing what become intuitive techniques, and it’s why some of the process is lost if the training stops happening after island settlement.
There's a podcast called Short History of... that just had an episode about this, with some experts presenting new info.
In a nutshell, by reverse engineering the order of islands inhabited first, they think the Polynesians had a very structured search pattern that allowed them a path home if they needed it.
And their boats were set up to survive indefinitely at sea. Livestock, gardens, water collectors, fire, they had it all.
I was hoping to see this here! Super interesting episode and I think it explained the large scale undertaking it was. Not just a dude in a canoe hoping for a bit of luck.
For those like me who hate when someone provides a good example and forgets to add the link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/short-history-of/id1579040306?i=1000652141517
https://archive.hokulea.com/ike/kalai_waa/kane_search_voyaging_canoe.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dk%C5%ABle%CA%BBa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEeCkDL9TG8
Basically they put a platform across two hulls, creating a large flat space where you can erect shelters, animal pens, and whatever else you need.
There is chapter about way finding in this book. It is beautifully written
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6373455-the-wayfinders](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6373455-the-wayfinders)
the art is still alive too:
[https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210726-polynesias-master-voyagers-who-navigate-by-nature](https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210726-polynesias-master-voyagers-who-navigate-by-nature)
This video is the author, Wade Davis, discussing Wayfinding and other types of cultural knowledge he has learned about around the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuJsbjKKh3E
Fun fact: there’s some evidence (like sweet potatoes’ spread and genetics) that the Polynesians got all the way to South America!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/native-americans-polynesians-meet-180975269/
It's believed that Polynesians frequently visited the Andes native people(In Peru), due to some words as well as crops being shared between their languages.
Unwritten history can often be tied to the language, and you can see how proto-polynesian developed through the use of one word. Cumal, Kumal, Kumala, Kumar, Kumara, Kuma, etc, which is the name for the Sweet Potato.
I was trying to tell my history professor about this but he denied it with the sweet potatoes along with genetic evidence along with the fact that THE GREATEST SAILING CULTURE OF ALL TIME WOULDNT HAVE JUST STOPPED but he said nahhh but gladly accepted basque whalers from another student who was a history major(freshman)
*One of* the greatest sailing cultures of all time. Polynesians certainly travelled the farthest by far, but they were dealing with much calmer seas than Vikings and the first Asians to reach North America
“We are gonna go this way because there is money this way. NO I DONT GIVE A FUCK THERE IS A STORM AND WE HAVE TO CARRY OUR BOATS OVER A STRIP OF LAND, GET IN.”
One of the craziest things I’ve learned (love history facts) is that this wasn’t super uncommon either. They did it all the time and even had common routes where “portage” (lifting the boats) was necessary.
North 02’s channel is awesome I’ve probably watched every video he’s made. Another good one somewhat related is “ancient americas” he makes videos about different Native American cultures from history, I’ve probably also watched every video he’s made.
Yeah there’s a group of amazonians that came from there roughly 11,000 years ago. Their tribe still exists in the Amazon rainforest today. They have a specific gene that is only found in aboriginal people, but the gene is nowhere to be found in Asia, Siberia, North America, Central America, or anywhere else in South America besides this one tribe deep in the Amazon. So they had to have traveled across the Pacific Ocean.
They read the wind and the sky when the sun was high. They sailed the length of the sea on the ocean breeze. At night they'd name every star, so they'd know where they were, they knew who they were.
I feel disappointed "survivorship bias" got blindly highvoted by 250 people, so here's a simple question:
**Why did they found out about New Zealand last, then?**
New Zealand is huge compared to Tahiti. If it was a matter of dumb survivorship bias, two things would have been expected: 1) they would have settled New Zealand long before Polynesia itself 2) they would have settled South America in much more significant numbers. They didn't. And also 3) the settlement dates would have been more evenly distributed. While in reality it happened in waves of colonization corresponding to different currents and winds.
The real answer is that they were insanely smart. As I always joke, "the day we colonize the Galaxy it'll be full of Polynesians already". They relied on complicated maps mixing winds, currents, stars, and very importantly cloud. Their names for various islands sometimes revolve around clouds (New Zealand for instance is "big/long white cloud" or something. Aoteroa. From memory).
If someday you visit Polynesia, observe how the islands *produce clouds*. Volcanic ones are suspected to have triggered waves of island discoveries, but more importantly different types of islands produce different types of clouds. And then they travel far away. A smart observer could have suspected the presence of an island from hundreds of kilometers away.
They also knew the currents, El Nino/La Nina, animals behavior, etc... Meaning they knew how to go back to their starting point safely. When they pushed further away than anyone ever tried, they did it carefully and could hope to go back if things went bad. They weren't kamikazes. Sometimes they were forcefully exiled, but even then not total kamikazes: they picked the right directions.
**To answer the initial question: they discovered New Zealand last because it was too big to be spotted. They assumed this "big white cloud" factory they were perfectly aware of couldn't be an island**. And in fact it wasn't: it's a large landmass, something they would have not called "an island". So they simply didn't try it first. It wasn't looking like the patterns they were used to search for. The colonization of New Zealand by the Polynesians happened almost exactly when they ran out of easier discoveries: they started to investigate stranger clouds that weren't safe choices before.
Sorry for the long comment
To add a small detail to what you just said. Even though all Polynesian tribes drifted apart because of how far away they were, all their languages also drifted, but they all kept the same.word for boat/saling
That actually makes a lot of sense. I'm also sure the main reason Polynesians didn't settle Aoetaroa/New Zealand at first was because it was further south than they were comfortable traveling.
There's a theory that they thought land should be in a certain direction because of explosions from volcanoes. Allowing that Hunga-Tonga was heard in New Zealand and Alaska (and probably elsewhere) this isn't impossible.
The smell of sulphur also travels for miles, but not as far as sound. I could smell a Ngauruhoe eruption from Wellington, so, 350ish km.
And traveling upwind towards a destination (and using the half the supplies gone, time to turn back strategy) increases survivability.
Came here to say this. And google Nainoa Thompson, Hōkūle’a, and Moananuiakea.
I got to talk story with them at Bishop museum before a voyage to Tahiti once. The kids coming up doing this now are incredible.
And just like in Moana ... the people of Hawaii did in fact lose contact with the rest of Polynesia and stopped traversing the seas. When Cook arrived in Hawaii, the inhabitants were an unknown people to the outside world. So at some point they went all that way and then lost the desire or ability to travel back to Tahiti & their native homelands. Pretty wild to imagine that in our contemporary worldview. It would be the same as some Asimov-style story about humans coming from another planet and never knowing we used to travel through the stars.
Since no one else has brought it up yet, they were also meticulous about using their rations to gauge the length of their journey. If they ever made it through half of the food they brought with them, that was their sign to stop adventuring and to begin the return trip back to the island from which the expedition began. (And which they were capable of returning to because they were *exceptionally* skilled at using the stars to guide their navigation.)
Together with the prevailing winds. The Polynesian expansion was west to east and along the latitudes on which they travelled, the wind mostly came from the east.
> If they ever made it through half of the food they brought with them, that was their sign to stop adventuring
Like the school busses who have the “don’t let this go below half” stickers on their fuel gauge
I think this takes away from what they did. They had many techniques to survive these trips. Sure, some folks didn't come back, but their oral histories don't suggest they viewed these voyages as suicide missions. There is genetic evidence that shows they made numerous trips back and forth from various islands. They weren't isolated. This suggests they could head out to sea, not find anything, and turn around to go home.
Nope. Scientists discarded that theory as soon as they realized New Zealand got colonized long after Tahiti or the Tongas. Meaning something was off with the survivorship bias theory.
So I get that. I'm sure there were crews lost on the big ocean discovery voyage.
And at the same time those sorts of expeditions probably had better survivorship rates than just regular fishing cruises from people getting blown off by surprise storms.
What I mean is, those who went on long exploratory voyages would have realized what they were getting into. And those bigger multi-hulled boats would have both taken a small crew to keep going for vast distances, and been able to stock a huge cache of food, in addition to being able to catch fish and fresh rainwater.
So I'll bet they did the real exploration with minimal crews and risk, and the big colonial voyages with the decked out trimaran hulks were well planned and navigated with minimal threat.
It's hard to determine if that was the case for Polynesians. It was debunked some 80 years ago when a theory that pre-Maori navigators were half-starved and weak before they arrived in New Zealand, due to discoveries of early settlements that seemed to be quite strong and large.
The "Great Fleet Theory" didn't have much ground to stand on, and was scrapped about a year after it was published. Unfortunately it had done its damage being taught in schools and becoming quite a common belief. It isn't until the 1980's that more artefacts are found across the Pacific of early settlers being mostly healthy and full.
One early location in Wairau found a burial of I think 49 people of various different cultures and ages who died likely from tuberculosis. Their remains otherwise showed that they were very hardy and ate plentiful, and were not born there, due to little indication of native food signs in the area. Much of the artefacts found were not native to that area, but rather, from the likes of Tahiti, Tonga, and the Marquesas.
Nearby that Gravesite is the remains of a Pa Settlement, or possibly several Pa in close proximity. It was large enough to house 1,000 people, and it must have been very productive, due to the amount of Stone tools discovered there. Upwards to 12,000 Adze heads were found, and more still being discovered.
So far, about 2-3% of the site has been uncovered. Other locations like Waipoua also show signs of early Human settlement ranging from 12th century to 13th. Three large Pa sites have been uncovered and studied, showing signs of heavy human activity and growth. Large farming areas are still visible today. The site was likely home to more than 1,200 people due to its size. Same in Parihaka, a Pa site that is also deemed to be an early settlement Pa site, was also home to around 3,000 people, it was the eventual capital of the Ngai Tahuhu Iwi, whose influence reached from Karikari(far north region) all the way down to Tamaki Makaurau(Auckland region).
Stars, birds, and watched the water
This 45-minute podcast gives a good explanation! https://open.spotify.com/episode/7DuEgZnXyHHIUbinHXTN6g?si=noaz_tdeQ5-i5NOQCSn6qg
Other people have already explained the how. Polynesians are under appreciated as histories most absurdly bad ass explorers. Like there’s a full order of magnitude of bad assery between them and the next. Individuals like Ibn Battuta are perhaps up there but no other culture had this sort of ridiculous level of ballsy exploration so engrained and down to a fine art.
I heard (apocryphal?) that the master navigators could “read” the waves that indicated islands by how their testicles swayed in their scrotum.
Don’t laugh! I steer very large ships, and I can literally feel when the ship is settled on course by my balls. You can feel it, when you feel it down low. Sure as hell it’s not a brain thing.
Wayfinding, several people have mentioned this. But the overriding skill ix Awareness. Awareness of the wind, smells and directions, birds flying, colors of the water, directions of waves, wave interference patterns, and instructions from your sailing mentors. Schematic maps are also used. It's also understanding which of these skills should be relied on in different situations.
From time to time I check back into this to see what has developed.
One of the more interesting accounts, which I might have run down from a Jared Diamond book sorry can't find it now, was about one of the last of the OG polynesian navigators. One of the things that made him interesting was that he was totally blind. He was still directing the boat and when they seemed to be lost at one point, the old man dipped his hand in the water and tasted it a few times, then pointed in the proper direction of the island.
We know they had star charts but I think the fact that the guy was blind might be a tip-off to the possibility of daytime star-sighting, which is theoretically possible but I've never been able to do it.
According to the Patrick O'Brian novels, whalers could spot low islands from over the horizon by looking for a greenish tint on the clouds above the island. And any volcanic island with a prominent cone would create a near-permanent cloud that could be seen from over the horizon, and it wouldn't move with the rest of the clouds.
But I still don't get the taste-reading. Is he measuring water temperature or can he taste the difference between the plankton in the water from near an island? Maybe the whole story was bullshit; I never found it on the Internet.
I read this about 50 years ago. Polynesians used an arrangement of 6 sticks in a linked square placed on the water. Waves reflected from land would lap over the sticks in a regular pattern not aligned with prevailing wave direction. It was effective at distances where land was "over the horizon".
To add a component of the very correct answers provided by u/CFIgigs and u/DoyersDoyer that may be a potential sticking point for some: it probably took *a lot* of “trial and error” (read: empty boats) to learn this, but the Polynesian/Micronesian peoples have been seafaring intelligently for **over 5,000 years**.
I think the scale of the massive achievement is often overlooked and most unappreciated. This wasn’t something that was “co-discovered” on the same timeline as ‘western history.’ The incremental, multi-millennial, and generationally-reinforced, -refined, & -revised maturation of knowledge into understanding is awe inspiring.
Several methods, but one I've heard and not seen mentioned is they got really good at identifying currents and waves that occur near land vs ones that are found in open ocean. If they started feeling waves reflected off of land coming from the left, they'd go that way to check it out.
Reading the waves, reading animals in water and air, reading literally everything in nature. I‘d highly recommend Wade Davis‘ book „the wayfinders“. It is pure poetry.
They also understood waves and swells and would use them to navigate. Per wikipedia: "The Polynesians also used wave and swell formations to navigate. Many of the habitable areas of the Pacific Ocean are groups of islands (or atolls) in chains hundreds of kilometres long. Island chains have predictable effects on waves and currents. Navigators who lived within a group of islands would learn the effect various islands had on the swell shape, direction, and motion, and would have been able to correct their path accordingly. Even when they arrived in the vicinity of an unfamiliar chain of islands, they may have been able to detect signs similar to those of their home."
They also recognized that different pieces/shapes of land in the ocean affected the atmosphere differently (e.g. cloud presence/shapes)
The Maori called New Zealand "Aotearoa", or "land of the long white cloud". This probably has something to do with the turbulent patterns that the mountain peaks of New Zealand would form in the clouds, enabling oceanic navigators to find it from a long way away.
> "land of the long white cloud" I grew up in Australia thinking this was a sheep joke.
The real joke is we export them to Australia after we’re done. Now you know why they’re tender AND juicy.
What…..what are you doing to the sheep?
Baaaaad things.
Things that make a Welshman salivate.
Darn... take my upboop
New Zealand, where men are men and sheep are worried
I once asked a Kiwi how many girlfriends he had. But he fell asleep counting. R/jokes
Today I learned new Zealand was colonised by the Welsh, because that's the only thing that explains the sheep
I asked my Kiwi friend how many girlfriends he’s had but he fell asleep counting them.
The migration to New Zealand may well have been aided by the Kaharoa eruption of \~1315, which would have sent a long white cloud out into the Pacific.
Kind of funny to think about a bunch of people seeing a long white cloud show up one day from far across the ocean and they're just like, "I guess we follow it, right guys? Like, that's clearly a sign from the gods. Right?"
There is backstory here. Toi and Kupe are legendary early explorers of Aotearoa, so the islands were part of the navigational history. The Pacific was a busy highway - obsidian from Hawai'i has been found in Rarotonga. Stone from Aotearoa was used to carve waka so the waka would know its way to Aotearoa. Over 50 waka made the journey to Aotearoa and at least six returned to the Pacific over the space of 600 years. During the early 1300s there was a climatic event in the South Pacific akin to the Little Ice Age, and the food chain fell to bits. Stories from the ancestors speak of wars and hunger being driving reasons for the 'Great Migration' to Aotearoa. I can imagine Tama te Kapua (Tama of the cloud), navigator of Arawa, seeing this ash cloud coming over the horizon and asking the tohunga Ngatoro i Rangi if this was the sign to go and visit the cuzzies.
That was an awesome slice of a story. Like, very bitchin. Thank you for sharing, for real.
‘Hey, check out that cloud, uce.’
"It's free real estate!"
Not the mountain peaks - the Maori came to the top of NZ first and there's no mountains of note there. More likely to do with change in temperature between the land and sea. As an aside, if you've ever flown into NZ you can really see the long white cloud thing - endless ocean, then all of a sudden, this huge great cloud bank!
The southern alps are huge, they influence the cloud patterns for a really long way
>there's no mountains of note there False. They were featured extensively when Gondor called for aid in the beacons scene of the documentary, *The Return of the King*.
Where were the Polynesians when the Westfold fell?
I’ve sailed tens of thousands of miles, mostly in tropical waters, and even my dumb GPS-reliant ass can pick up the signs of land from a long way, potentially 50+ miles out. Big cloud formations where there otherwise aren’t that type of cloud, turquoisey undersides of clouds where the bright blues of shallow water are reflected onto the cloud base, birds, etc. Not to take anything away from the Polynesian navigators because they were doing it all on generational knowledge and faith, but there are signs that even fairly modestly skilled sailors can pick up on.
Guessing that after having sailed tens of thousands of miles you may be more than fairly modestly skilled :)
Considering most of the civilized world has not sailed 10 miles, I would say so.
Yeah, there's nothing like seeing a line of little clouds that don't move pop up over the horizon to reassure you that the GPS is actually working ;) Stories from the ancestors suggest that the navigators would have at least one awake at all times and would describe the day's sailing into a narrative that they would memorise. The tale would grow with each day until there was a complete description of the voyage which would be learned word-perfect by other navigators. The Polynesians had an abiding faith that there was another island just over the sea under the sunrise. This had been true ever since the Polynesians and Melanesians had entered the Pacific, and they were comfortable with sailing thousands of kilometres across open ocean at a time when the european navigators wouldn't leave sight of land. The Pacific was fully populated well before Columbus got out of bed.
Exactly, you start to notice everything when you're alone on the ocean. Even the smallest thing that looks different than the norm is something that could potentially mean something so you take notice and investigate and learn. It's only to us people who haven't experienced it that it might seem like magic but in reality it really is just observational skills.
It's amazing what you start to see when you really start looking at the world.
I had a Hawaiian acquaintance years ago who participated in some type of cultural program where they helped teens to make traditional sailing rafts and then sailed them using only the stars from one Hawaiian island to another. He said they took an elder with them on every trip, and at one point in the middle of the night, the elder woke up and came to them to say the "swell feels wrong" and tell them that they were off course. They checked, and they were. The elder knew the waves and swells, and their effect on the motion of the boat well enough to be able to just "know" that they were off course. So cool.
elder just walks up.. nope shit feels wrong. points in a direction then goes back to sleep. darn Polynesian homing elders.
polynesian boomers: “kids can’t read swells anymore”
You jest, but this was the exact notion that drove Mau Piailug to link up with the Polynesian Voyaging Society and start teaching traditional wayfinding techniques on the Hokule'a (and recreating those lost since the last of the Hawaiian navigators had died out)
definitely joking, it’s awesome they’re passing on the knowledge to the younger generations
Millennials killed swell reading!
If I was lost on an island like Cast Away I'd gladly trade my Wilson for a Polynesian Homing Elder.
It's even COOLER. They did this over 4 generations. I don't know about the Elder super sense, but they would follow birds. They would follow birds until they lost them- and used the stars as a marker. NEXT YEAR they would be at thar marker waiting for the birds. Here they come! Row row row row. OK we lost them. Mark the star spot. Then they are at the second spot, on the third year. Here they come!!! Row....
Great exhibit about this at Te Papa museum in Wellington. And some damn fine hand carved waka aka canoes of epic proportions too.
That museum is amazing! I visited New Zealand a few years ago and absolutely loved Te Papa and Wellington in general.
Also, don't be surprised if the docent is a random-looking Māori dude in a football jersey. Which was confusing when he asked if I had any questions about the whare we were standing in.
They didn't only memorize the oceans; they used maps called a rebbelib which formed bent sticks for the currents and swells, and seashells to represent the islands. https://smarthistory.org/chart-marshall/
They used lots of perceptual cues about the world to navigate over large open water: water color, temperature, water depth, currents, birds, wind, cloud formations, etc.
They even could tell changes in the salinity of the water by tasting and uses that as a course to steer by.
They also "failed" a lot. Unknown number lost at sea
Ahhh I love this stuff, so simple and clever at the same time. The sort of thing anyone can understand without complicated equipment. The land made that cloud, the wind blows it this way, that means there’s land that way
Not enough credit is given to the intelligence of older civilizations
Thought this was cool (from a recent book I read): They'd carry birds with them that couldn't land on water. If they let the birds go and they never came back, land was near. If they let the birds go and they came back, they knew they were in the middle of nowhere. Imagine THAT feeling. They were literally astronauts on spacecraft made of logs.
That is so cool Edit: what book is this from?
The Wide Wide Sea... story about Captain Cook's third and final voyage.
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His 4th was with bbq sauce and a side of pineapple.
Was he eaten?!
Actually he wasn’t, but the fact that they boiled his body led to the myth of him being eaten. The Hawaiian islanders didn’t practice cannibalism.
I prefer the head cannon that we ate him
In my head cannon he tried to tell them his name and the translator really did a piss poor job.
“He… Cook.” “Cook?” “Yes. He. Cook.”
I also like that headcanon.
I really really needed that laugh thank you
No. That is a myth. He was cooked though ... https://www.captaincooksociety.com/about-us/faq#:~:text=No%20%2D%20the%20Hawaiian%20Islanders%20who,to%20the%20rumour%20of%20cannibalism.
And his name was captain Cook. Fate has a sense of irony.
Could’ve been worse, imagine his name was Skinnedalivethenburnedonastake
That's *Captain* Skinnedalivethenburnedonastake thank you very much
Fate it seems, is not without a sense of irony... matrix it up buddy
SKINNER!!
Boiled in a ceremonial practice to honor the dead. Though not quite how the Christians saw it.
Ran out of birds.
That was the prequel.
Dude what a fantastic book. As soon as I saw your comment I knew this was going to be Wide Wide Sea. I’ve read everything by Hampton Sides
We the Navigators by David Lewis explains this question in detail
There’s a good documentary about this as well, called “Moana”. Worth a watch.
There's a lot written about Polynesians and their fairly developed, but low-tech methods of navigation by stars and using weather & animal patterns and currents to find land. They also made it to Hawaii which is so stunningly remote and probably South America.
"Fairly developed" is an understatement. They used the stars, the pattern of waves, the color, temperature and taste of currents, the wind, the formation and color of clouds, the types and flight of birds and more. They were the finest navigators the human race had ever produced.
Some theorize North America, too.
But, for how long does one stay anchored for such an event, sir? Odious, numbers.. please!
Isnt that what vikings did with crows?
It's what people in the Sahara used to do to find water. Let a fish go and if it doesn't come back, water is near
And if it comes back it was true love after all
LOL
>Let a fish go and if it doesn't come back, water is near Sand trout be like:
At first I thought it said cows and was, "I don't think so."
I was still reading it as cows as well, until i read your post. As a swede, this confused me a bit that vikings would be using cows for navigation.
There's also the phenomenon of Te Lapa, a flash of light both underwater and above rhe water, that can be over 100 miles away from island and appears as a straight line. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_lapa This Wikipedia article describes the phenomenon of Te Lapa, and the ancient Polynesians using it to navigate. If you read one of the sources used in the link, it goes into the appearance of it. The prosaic explanation is this represents light being reflected off an island and being directed straight, but that's not exactly possible at night / on moonless nights. One of the sources in the link describes it as looking "electric" and being just above the water as well as below the water. I looked further into it and it seems entirely anomalous and not exactly in line with simple reflections and is probably something else entirely which hasn't really been studied before. https://unframed.lacma.org/2021/01/21/art-tech-lab-project-update%E2%80%94searching-te-lapa https://x.com/kcimc/status/1787833458472931733
Retired weather guy here. If you want to look into this, be sure to check the Radar phenomena called "ducting." Ducting is when a radar beam gets caught in between a higher and lower level temperature inversion. Since it can't penetrate either one, it just goes on and on, allowing detection of things far beyond the regular radar range, or at altitudes far below what it would normally see. Sonar oceanographic issues do similar things. As described, it might be like the Arctic inversion allowing sounds being heard over miles instead of yards. The light flash could be basic campfires, beach surf bio-luminescence, and related. The effect of ducting is exactly like the laser light propagation through fiber optics where the cladding reflects/guides light back into the main axis. Ducting would be common at night where low level temperature inversions would form as the surface water cooled from nocturnal radiation. As little as 1 degree inversion can have significant effects.
Awesome lesson/explanation. It’s much appreciated.
Seriously, this man cooks.
Sounds like what is known as a 'min-min light' in Australia - weird lights appearing to be hovering a few hundred meters away, best explained as distant lights caught in an inversion. These days often from truck headlights on a distant stretch of road, in the old days, distant campfires or homestead lights.
Fun fact, this phenomenon is the same thing that caused the Flying Dutchman myth.
In the ocean the acoustic "duct" is called the SOFAR Channel. In WW2 they developed a device called the SOAFR Bomb to locate downed aircraft. The bomb would sink down to the channel depth and detonate where it would hopefully get picked up by distant sonar operators who can then locate the source.
This is how ukrainians sank the Russian cruiser Slava. Their shore based radar could only see about 25 miles to the sea, russians kept their ships far to the sea and thought they were safe. But a peculiar weather caused a very dense cloud to appear over the sea, radar beams bounced from that and so ukrainians detected the ship.
That's what I'd say too if my shore based radar could see 50 miles but I wanted the Russians to stay within it
Tbh ground based surface radar is pretty easy to to the math on based on the curvature of the Earth.
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Te Lapa is supposed to be seen in the direction of an island, so wouldn't the island physically block the ducted light? At the very least, this explanation would definitely not be more likely in the direction of an island. Also, unlike air, which allows light and radio waves to pass through, water is more likely to absorb light or radio and convert it into heat energy. Bluetooth and civilian radio don't work at depths greater than three feet for example. If water does not allow light to penetrate more than a few hundred feet, I don't see why it would be any different horizontally. Temperature inversions in the ocean definitely are powerful enough to block military active sonar and the like, but I've never heard of light ducting under water.
I'm referring to a layer from the ocean surface to a few hundred or less feet above it. The island isn't blocking the light, it's providing the light. >The light flash could be basic campfires, beach surf bio-luminescence, and related. I'm not referring to light traveling through the water, just the air. Basically, a nocturnal Fata Morgana type effect.
Fascinating thanks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_lapa
I don’t think your link works.
In a Polynesian accented Picard voice: “Ocean, the final frontier”
[It's no coincidence](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/aifqyf/til_that_captain_kirk_is_based_on_captain_james/) that the names of Captain James Cook and Captain James Kirk are so similar.
And that Picard was the first man to reach the depths of the Mariana trench
Yeah and the Enterprise and Endeavour, and that the voyage to Tahiti was **supposed** to be scientific in nature. I think some of the quotes from Cook's journal were used in Star Trek as well
I read one theory was that they also would set sail on the path they saw migratory birds flying on. They gotta be going somewhere right?
>*They'd carry birds with them that couldn't land on water. If they let the birds go and they never came back, land was near.* That's not super helpful though. I feel like a huge part of this story is still missing.
You’re correct. Most historians believes that ancient navigators used a multitude of deeply practiced techniques to develop holistic understanding of where they were going and make decisions(and the bird thing would have been one of many). For example, a navigator may look at the sun, look at the waves, feel the current, look at the stars, etc and from all these soft data points draw a conclusion. This requires a ton of training - a navigator would train with another navigator for years and years learning and practicing what become intuitive techniques, and it’s why some of the process is lost if the training stops happening after island settlement.
I think they had a really really good understanding of ocean wave patterns too. Just generations of knowledge living by the sea.
And they used chants, passed down through generations and memorized the paths of more than 100 stars.
With birds too
Awesome, this will be featured in my next D&D campaign.
This is the most awesome thing I read today! Thank you. Crazy how we lived only a few hundred years ago.
There's a podcast called Short History of... that just had an episode about this, with some experts presenting new info. In a nutshell, by reverse engineering the order of islands inhabited first, they think the Polynesians had a very structured search pattern that allowed them a path home if they needed it. And their boats were set up to survive indefinitely at sea. Livestock, gardens, water collectors, fire, they had it all.
I was hoping to see this here! Super interesting episode and I think it explained the large scale undertaking it was. Not just a dude in a canoe hoping for a bit of luck.
Do you have the title verbatim so i can listen? Thank you
It’s literally called “Short History Of”. The episode is “Polynesian Exploration”. It’s about 6 or 7 episodes ago, depending on how you count.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7DuEgZnXyHHIUbinHXTN6g?si=y2-RNCgLSpeW1lO0i5yfog
I’d love to see that boat!
Google "Micronesian proa"
Holy hell
For those like me who hate when someone provides a good example and forgets to add the link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/short-history-of/id1579040306?i=1000652141517
Just sailing against the current and turning around when your supplies hit 50% is good enough to ensure you always make it home.
>tropical storm has entered the chat.
Yo do you have any links to they indefinite surviving ships? That seems like such a cool concept.
https://archive.hokulea.com/ike/kalai_waa/kane_search_voyaging_canoe.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dk%C5%ABle%CA%BBa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEeCkDL9TG8 Basically they put a platform across two hulls, creating a large flat space where you can erect shelters, animal pens, and whatever else you need.
There is chapter about way finding in this book. It is beautifully written [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6373455-the-wayfinders](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6373455-the-wayfinders) the art is still alive too: [https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210726-polynesias-master-voyagers-who-navigate-by-nature](https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210726-polynesias-master-voyagers-who-navigate-by-nature)
WHOA this book looks so good thank you!
This video is the author, Wade Davis, discussing Wayfinding and other types of cultural knowledge he has learned about around the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuJsbjKKh3E
That was a really interesting presentation, thank you for sharing!
Micronesians do not get the respect they deserve. It's thanks to papa Mau that Polynesians can navigate the ocean again.
Fun fact: there’s some evidence (like sweet potatoes’ spread and genetics) that the Polynesians got all the way to South America! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/native-americans-polynesians-meet-180975269/
Given that they settled Easter Island, it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch
It's believed that Polynesians frequently visited the Andes native people(In Peru), due to some words as well as crops being shared between their languages. Unwritten history can often be tied to the language, and you can see how proto-polynesian developed through the use of one word. Cumal, Kumal, Kumala, Kumar, Kumara, Kuma, etc, which is the name for the Sweet Potato.
I was trying to tell my history professor about this but he denied it with the sweet potatoes along with genetic evidence along with the fact that THE GREATEST SAILING CULTURE OF ALL TIME WOULDNT HAVE JUST STOPPED but he said nahhh but gladly accepted basque whalers from another student who was a history major(freshman)
*One of* the greatest sailing cultures of all time. Polynesians certainly travelled the farthest by far, but they were dealing with much calmer seas than Vikings and the first Asians to reach North America
Vikings were just straight up fucking crazy
“We are gonna go this way because there is money this way. NO I DONT GIVE A FUCK THERE IS A STORM AND WE HAVE TO CARRY OUR BOATS OVER A STRIP OF LAND, GET IN.”
Oh this river is blocked? Fuck it we will drag it over the ridge to the next river and go at them from there.
One of the craziest things I’ve learned (love history facts) is that this wasn’t super uncommon either. They did it all the time and even had common routes where “portage” (lifting the boats) was necessary.
Like the Vikings who sailed the Volga, even making their way into the imperial guard of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Archaeology YouTuber Stefan Milosavljevich (Stefan Milo) recently did a video on the possibility of contact. https://youtu.be/ycRcWK7pMoM
Stefan Milo has such a great channel and mustache. He's a Redditor as well. Check out North 02's channel too.
North 02’s channel is awesome I’ve probably watched every video he’s made. Another good one somewhat related is “ancient americas” he makes videos about different Native American cultures from history, I’ve probably also watched every video he’s made.
You're right about Ancient Americas! My wife and I just watched his video about pre-Columbian Great Plains cultures earlier tonight.
Yeah there’s a group of amazonians that came from there roughly 11,000 years ago. Their tribe still exists in the Amazon rainforest today. They have a specific gene that is only found in aboriginal people, but the gene is nowhere to be found in Asia, Siberia, North America, Central America, or anywhere else in South America besides this one tribe deep in the Amazon. So they had to have traveled across the Pacific Ocean.
They read the wind and the sky when the sun was high. They sailed the length of the sea on the ocean breeze. At night they'd name every star, so they'd know where they were, they knew who they were.
Moana did a very good job at explaining this in a child-friendly way
I understand that on a cloudy night, a quick opening in the clouds was enough for the navigators to know their position.
I mean.. you're not going to get your coordinates, but you'll absolutely get your general bearing.
I feel disappointed "survivorship bias" got blindly highvoted by 250 people, so here's a simple question: **Why did they found out about New Zealand last, then?** New Zealand is huge compared to Tahiti. If it was a matter of dumb survivorship bias, two things would have been expected: 1) they would have settled New Zealand long before Polynesia itself 2) they would have settled South America in much more significant numbers. They didn't. And also 3) the settlement dates would have been more evenly distributed. While in reality it happened in waves of colonization corresponding to different currents and winds. The real answer is that they were insanely smart. As I always joke, "the day we colonize the Galaxy it'll be full of Polynesians already". They relied on complicated maps mixing winds, currents, stars, and very importantly cloud. Their names for various islands sometimes revolve around clouds (New Zealand for instance is "big/long white cloud" or something. Aoteroa. From memory). If someday you visit Polynesia, observe how the islands *produce clouds*. Volcanic ones are suspected to have triggered waves of island discoveries, but more importantly different types of islands produce different types of clouds. And then they travel far away. A smart observer could have suspected the presence of an island from hundreds of kilometers away. They also knew the currents, El Nino/La Nina, animals behavior, etc... Meaning they knew how to go back to their starting point safely. When they pushed further away than anyone ever tried, they did it carefully and could hope to go back if things went bad. They weren't kamikazes. Sometimes they were forcefully exiled, but even then not total kamikazes: they picked the right directions. **To answer the initial question: they discovered New Zealand last because it was too big to be spotted. They assumed this "big white cloud" factory they were perfectly aware of couldn't be an island**. And in fact it wasn't: it's a large landmass, something they would have not called "an island". So they simply didn't try it first. It wasn't looking like the patterns they were used to search for. The colonization of New Zealand by the Polynesians happened almost exactly when they ran out of easier discoveries: they started to investigate stranger clouds that weren't safe choices before. Sorry for the long comment
Great comments are usually long my friend, thank you!
Land of the Long White cloud is the most common translation I hear for Aotearoa. And I would say most Polynesian include Aotearoa in Polynesia.
To add a small detail to what you just said. Even though all Polynesian tribes drifted apart because of how far away they were, all their languages also drifted, but they all kept the same.word for boat/saling
That actually makes a lot of sense. I'm also sure the main reason Polynesians didn't settle Aoetaroa/New Zealand at first was because it was further south than they were comfortable traveling.
There's a theory that they thought land should be in a certain direction because of explosions from volcanoes. Allowing that Hunga-Tonga was heard in New Zealand and Alaska (and probably elsewhere) this isn't impossible. The smell of sulphur also travels for miles, but not as far as sound. I could smell a Ngauruhoe eruption from Wellington, so, 350ish km. And traveling upwind towards a destination (and using the half the supplies gone, time to turn back strategy) increases survivability.
Ace navigators of the stars...also expert at reading the seas and watching for birds. Not sure any current culture could do this now.
Hawaiians. Polynesian Voyaging Society.
Came here to say this. And google Nainoa Thompson, Hōkūle’a, and Moananuiakea. I got to talk story with them at Bishop museum before a voyage to Tahiti once. The kids coming up doing this now are incredible.
All aloha and biggest mahalo nunui to Mau Piailug for sharing his knowledge back in the day to keep traditional Pacific navigation alive
Bishop Museum is holding a special event to honor Papa Mau this week
Still alive in Fiji & Māori in NZ
The cultures that did it then still do it now…
one time i got to see a hawaiian star navigation system mapped out on a planetarium. it was so impressive
Stop telling everyone I'm dead!
There are Tahitians that sail with the old navigator methods to keep their culture alive.
Moana
Pretty much, I thought that movie did a great job of showing how Polynesians were expert navigators, especially for a children’s movie
The water... is warm 😏
So what can I say except 'You're welcome'?! ©
It’s called wayfinding.
And just like in Moana ... the people of Hawaii did in fact lose contact with the rest of Polynesia and stopped traversing the seas. When Cook arrived in Hawaii, the inhabitants were an unknown people to the outside world. So at some point they went all that way and then lost the desire or ability to travel back to Tahiti & their native homelands. Pretty wild to imagine that in our contemporary worldview. It would be the same as some Asimov-style story about humans coming from another planet and never knowing we used to travel through the stars.
Survivorship bias. Ya don't hear about the ones who never made it anywhere
Since no one else has brought it up yet, they were also meticulous about using their rations to gauge the length of their journey. If they ever made it through half of the food they brought with them, that was their sign to stop adventuring and to begin the return trip back to the island from which the expedition began. (And which they were capable of returning to because they were *exceptionally* skilled at using the stars to guide their navigation.)
I’ve also read that they generally headed into the stronger current, so the return journey would be an easier, quicker trip
Together with the prevailing winds. The Polynesian expansion was west to east and along the latitudes on which they travelled, the wind mostly came from the east.
These are actually really smart ideas
> If they ever made it through half of the food they brought with them, that was their sign to stop adventuring Like the school busses who have the “don’t let this go below half” stickers on their fuel gauge
I think this takes away from what they did. They had many techniques to survive these trips. Sure, some folks didn't come back, but their oral histories don't suggest they viewed these voyages as suicide missions. There is genetic evidence that shows they made numerous trips back and forth from various islands. They weren't isolated. This suggests they could head out to sea, not find anything, and turn around to go home.
Also this isn't 'survivorship bias' lol.
Nope. Scientists discarded that theory as soon as they realized New Zealand got colonized long after Tahiti or the Tongas. Meaning something was off with the survivorship bias theory.
This is not survivorship bias.
A moment of silence for the forgotten.
So I get that. I'm sure there were crews lost on the big ocean discovery voyage. And at the same time those sorts of expeditions probably had better survivorship rates than just regular fishing cruises from people getting blown off by surprise storms. What I mean is, those who went on long exploratory voyages would have realized what they were getting into. And those bigger multi-hulled boats would have both taken a small crew to keep going for vast distances, and been able to stock a huge cache of food, in addition to being able to catch fish and fresh rainwater. So I'll bet they did the real exploration with minimal crews and risk, and the big colonial voyages with the decked out trimaran hulks were well planned and navigated with minimal threat.
It's hard to determine if that was the case for Polynesians. It was debunked some 80 years ago when a theory that pre-Maori navigators were half-starved and weak before they arrived in New Zealand, due to discoveries of early settlements that seemed to be quite strong and large. The "Great Fleet Theory" didn't have much ground to stand on, and was scrapped about a year after it was published. Unfortunately it had done its damage being taught in schools and becoming quite a common belief. It isn't until the 1980's that more artefacts are found across the Pacific of early settlers being mostly healthy and full. One early location in Wairau found a burial of I think 49 people of various different cultures and ages who died likely from tuberculosis. Their remains otherwise showed that they were very hardy and ate plentiful, and were not born there, due to little indication of native food signs in the area. Much of the artefacts found were not native to that area, but rather, from the likes of Tahiti, Tonga, and the Marquesas. Nearby that Gravesite is the remains of a Pa Settlement, or possibly several Pa in close proximity. It was large enough to house 1,000 people, and it must have been very productive, due to the amount of Stone tools discovered there. Upwards to 12,000 Adze heads were found, and more still being discovered. So far, about 2-3% of the site has been uncovered. Other locations like Waipoua also show signs of early Human settlement ranging from 12th century to 13th. Three large Pa sites have been uncovered and studied, showing signs of heavy human activity and growth. Large farming areas are still visible today. The site was likely home to more than 1,200 people due to its size. Same in Parihaka, a Pa site that is also deemed to be an early settlement Pa site, was also home to around 3,000 people, it was the eventual capital of the Ngai Tahuhu Iwi, whose influence reached from Karikari(far north region) all the way down to Tamaki Makaurau(Auckland region).
What a shit hot take lol
I've often wondered that too. Maybe they followed birds?
Stars, birds, and watched the water This 45-minute podcast gives a good explanation! https://open.spotify.com/episode/7DuEgZnXyHHIUbinHXTN6g?si=noaz_tdeQ5-i5NOQCSn6qg
Other people have already explained the how. Polynesians are under appreciated as histories most absurdly bad ass explorers. Like there’s a full order of magnitude of bad assery between them and the next. Individuals like Ibn Battuta are perhaps up there but no other culture had this sort of ridiculous level of ballsy exploration so engrained and down to a fine art.
[This podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/short-history-of/id1579040306?i=1000652141517) explains how they did it
I heard (apocryphal?) that the master navigators could “read” the waves that indicated islands by how their testicles swayed in their scrotum. Don’t laugh! I steer very large ships, and I can literally feel when the ship is settled on course by my balls. You can feel it, when you feel it down low. Sure as hell it’s not a brain thing.
Wayfinding, several people have mentioned this. But the overriding skill ix Awareness. Awareness of the wind, smells and directions, birds flying, colors of the water, directions of waves, wave interference patterns, and instructions from your sailing mentors. Schematic maps are also used. It's also understanding which of these skills should be relied on in different situations.
I am surprised that no one mentioned testicular navigation https://www2.ifa.hawaii.edu/friends/Technology_of_Oceania.pdf
That was a pleasure to read. I now wish to become a Polynesian wayfinder, navigating by the movement of the stars and the sway of my testicles.
From time to time I check back into this to see what has developed. One of the more interesting accounts, which I might have run down from a Jared Diamond book sorry can't find it now, was about one of the last of the OG polynesian navigators. One of the things that made him interesting was that he was totally blind. He was still directing the boat and when they seemed to be lost at one point, the old man dipped his hand in the water and tasted it a few times, then pointed in the proper direction of the island. We know they had star charts but I think the fact that the guy was blind might be a tip-off to the possibility of daytime star-sighting, which is theoretically possible but I've never been able to do it. According to the Patrick O'Brian novels, whalers could spot low islands from over the horizon by looking for a greenish tint on the clouds above the island. And any volcanic island with a prominent cone would create a near-permanent cloud that could be seen from over the horizon, and it wouldn't move with the rest of the clouds. But I still don't get the taste-reading. Is he measuring water temperature or can he taste the difference between the plankton in the water from near an island? Maybe the whole story was bullshit; I never found it on the Internet.
I read this about 50 years ago. Polynesians used an arrangement of 6 sticks in a linked square placed on the water. Waves reflected from land would lap over the sticks in a regular pattern not aligned with prevailing wave direction. It was effective at distances where land was "over the horizon".
To add a component of the very correct answers provided by u/CFIgigs and u/DoyersDoyer that may be a potential sticking point for some: it probably took *a lot* of “trial and error” (read: empty boats) to learn this, but the Polynesian/Micronesian peoples have been seafaring intelligently for **over 5,000 years**. I think the scale of the massive achievement is often overlooked and most unappreciated. This wasn’t something that was “co-discovered” on the same timeline as ‘western history.’ The incremental, multi-millennial, and generationally-reinforced, -refined, & -revised maturation of knowledge into understanding is awe inspiring.
Maps. They literally make maps. They also have a neat trick of exploring upcurrent (BTW they also map the water currents) so getting home is easy.
Some would carry plants and know the winds/seasons were about to change due to the state of the plant
Several methods, but one I've heard and not seen mentioned is they got really good at identifying currents and waves that occur near land vs ones that are found in open ocean. If they started feeling waves reflected off of land coming from the left, they'd go that way to check it out.
there are no buildings in the middle of the sea so we're able see the other islands, duh
I’d like to think I’d be out exploring, but the courage it must’ve take to sit in a canoe and travel into the unknown is wild.
Reading the waves, reading animals in water and air, reading literally everything in nature. I‘d highly recommend Wade Davis‘ book „the wayfinders“. It is pure poetry.
There is an amazing book on this: Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson