Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 7, Number 9, 1 September 1990 — The Hawaiian Navigator [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The Hawaiian Navigator

By Clarence F.T. Ching Trustee, O'ahu

When the Hokule'a arrived home after its historic 1976 voyage to some of our ancestors' former southerly homelands, it marked the first time in hundreds of years that a Hawaiian eanoe had ventured forth in the element for whieh it was designed — the open oeean.

The voyage of the Hokule'a stirred up something inside of me. I somehow knew and felt what had gone on so many centuries ago. Something that I could feel in my na'au; maybe even something I could feel in my genes. My feelings were not isolated. Similar feelings were being experienced all over this Hawaiian land. The feelings spread to the far reaches of the Pacific and beyond. Something happened to all of us that day. It was a new feeling. We were all Hawaiians again. We had another reason to be proud. It was like the phoenix rising out of the ashes. An almost totally forgotten part of our culture had been reborn before our eyes. The voyage helped to bridge the shadowy memory of our past to a new reality. The wonderful event also provided modern-day Hawaiians with a rare species: a real live Hawaiian navigator. You can't get it any rarer. There is only one in the whole wide world. Nainoa Thompson is destined to fill an important spot in Hawaiian history. This quiet, young Hawaiian man has earned his honored plaee. He must have spent many hours being tutored by experts in astronomy and open oeean navigational methods. Somewhere in the process fact had to be separated from fiction and reality from myth. He had to leam the position of certain key stars as they passed through our Hawaiian sky at the different times of the year and he had to develop a high-level sensitivity to the clouds, wind and waves. His mind had to be trained and disciplined. It had to take the observations of his senses, blend them together, and always know the position and heading of his eanoe on the vast Pacific during every leg of the route. His mind had to be in gear the whole time. Chances are that he never enjoyed the deep sleep that we enjoy every night while he was out there. He had to be conscious and in tune. He had to be one with every element that made up his universe. He had to have confidence that his calculations were done correctly, that the adjustments for shifting currents and changing winds were all

properly weighed. He had to guard the possibility that every mental calculation he made would not create little deviations that would accumulate into one large error at the end of the journey; an error so large that he would miss his target. Simply put, he had to have smarts and guts. I will always be a fan of this man who ean perform such modern-day miracles. Others who eall the Pacific home recognized the accomplishments of the relatively small Hawaiian sailing eanoe, its brave navigator and courageous crew. They all became celebrities in Tahiti. Not only did mobs of people eome to greet the eanoe and meet the crew, they wrote songs and danced dances about the event. It was marvelous. As a result of the Hokule'a's numerous voyages, eanoe building projects are proliferating all over the Pacific. The Maoris are building a eanoe. The Tahitians are either building one or are contemplating building one. Others are making voyages across international boundaries, many times without the official sanctions of the nations involved. The Eskimos of Alaska are crossing the Bering Sea under the auspices of the Alaska-Siberia Society for Innovation to visit family members they haven't seen in decades. The Russians were unhappy about these activities initially, but I understand that they now tend to look the other way. And last year, some Northwest Coast Indians successfully crossed over the U.S.-Canadian border from Canada to Hydaburg by eanoe without proper documentation and in disregard of the threats of arrest by border officials. But this year, Sealaska Corp., one of the few successful native corporations organized under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, whose stockholders are mostly Tlingit and Haida, has donated two gigantic 65-foot Sitka spruce logs for a new Hawaiian double-hulled eanoe to be built under the sponsorship of the federally-funded Native Hawaiian Culture and Arts Program. These logs are similar to the drift logs in ancient days brought here by the prevailing currents and winds from the northwest and used for eanoe construction. Since our canoes ean be sailed upwind, wouldn't it be interesting for the new eanoe to voyage back to the source of its logs in North America? Such a trip would cause the development of new theories about canoes and eanoe voyaging in this part of the Pacific and may even support certain radical theories of contact between Polynesia and the American continents. The archaeologists and anthropologists of the majority school would probably not want their boat rocked by such academical!y upsetting possibilities.

But why get upset about such revolutionary thoughts when one ean sit back, close one's eyes and feel the feelings of our ancestors who risked their lives every time they got out there. Many of them didn't make it. But some did. And because of those that did, we're here. One ean possibly imagine that a typica! landfall would go something like this: After leaving the Marquesas and heading north to Hawai'i, the navigator had a lot of time to contemplate the conditions encountered so far on his passage as his eanoe barely drifted through the doldrums near the equator. He had to make certain to steer towards an imaginary point one or two hundred miles east of the islands. Except for the map in his head, the sun, the wind, the oeean and a great knowledge of the stars that seasonally crossed the friendly sky over his home islands, he had no instruments. As the eanoe got enough to the north for the navigator to recognize the familiar stars, he knew he was on Hawaii's latitude. Now he would turn the eanoe directly west. With the help of the prevailing currents and winds, the observation of flights of birds as they headed for home after a day's fishing, the cloud formations and the feel of the wave patterns under the eanoe, he would finally arrive safely at home after traversing many miles of open oeean and transporting his eanoe, himself and his crew from the southern hemisphere to the northern. That is how they did it in the ancient days — without instruments. This is also how Nainoa does it now. But why go so far to the east? Although Hawaiian navigation had been developed as close to a science as possible, if one headed directly north to Hawai'i, a course error of a degree or two and/or the effects of a stray current over those thousands of milescould mean that the navigator could miss his target. If all systems failed, he would have the predicament of not knowing whether he was east or west of the islands and so would not know whieh way to turn to get home. If he were indeed west of Hawaii, the turn to the west that he would normally take would take him into the vast stretches of waters of the western Pacific. He might not see land until he got asfaras Taiwan or Hong Kong. When and if he discovered he was west of the islands, he would have to head back to the east and laboriously beat upwind and upcurrent to get home. No self-respecting navigator would choose to be in the predicament of not knowing whether he was east or west of his target. He would make sure he was east of the islands so that he would always end up at home after the westward turn. If the rules were not followed, the seemingly trivial errors that result could mean the loss of the eanoe and death to its crew. For these reasons, the Hawaiian navigator was of the ultimate importance.