NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Ancient mariners enjoyed Hawaiian holidays
From: Carl Herzog
Date: 2007 Nov 01, 19:14 -0000
From: Carl Herzog
Date: 2007 Nov 01, 19:14 -0000
George Huxtable wrote: > As a habitual sceptic on such matters (and on most others), I would like to > learn a bit more detail. Where, exactly, was the voyage from, and to? How > many thousands of km? Did they REALLY have no GPS in a locker as a backup? > (If that was really the case, it would indeed show a convincing level of > self-confidence!). Was the exact intended destination announced in advance? > Was there radio contact, or the possibility of it? Were any on board > familiar with a chart of the Pacific? Were any such charts carried? Did they > really trust their lives to that "map of the Pacific recorded in the mind"? > >... > How was the (often dangerous) entry to the end-harbour made? Under sail? Was > the navigator familiar with the approach? These questions spring to mind. > Were they tackled, in the programme? George's questions are warranted and I would direct him to the website of the Polynesian Voyaging Society (http://pvs.kcc.hawaii.edu/ index.html), which operates the canoe Hokule'a that was featured in the TV documentary Mike referenced. The site specifically addresses the skills being used, as well as the types of training taught to crew of the boat, which has been sailing these voyages for more than 30 years now. In any effort to resurrect historic skills, we are naturally biased by our current knowledge. However hard we try, we cannot fully put ourselves into the mindset of the original practitioner and our results are skewed by our perspective. This is particularly true when approaching topics in which there is no clear historical chain of custody to the skills. I suspect we have a better sense of how lunar distances were calculated, for example, than we do of how early Polynesians made landfall. But even there, many historians suggest that there is little to be learned from attempting to try such things since our results, tainted by our modern perspective, may provide an unreliable or even misleading sense of historic reality. Personally, I believe there is great value. Any effort we make to put ourselves in the shoes of historic practitioners is worthwhile, as long as we critically appraise the effort, answering just the types of questions George raises, and as long as we steadfastly accept that the experience will not grant us any unequivocal knowledge of "how things were done". In the case of Hokule'a, a historian friend of mine who focuses on Pacific cultures has suggested that the biggest impact the canoe has had is not in its recreation of historical nav techniques, but the broadened sense of cultural identity it has brought to people in the region. Carl --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to NavList@fer3.com To , send email to NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---