Kealakekua / Big Island, Hawaii

Four thousand kilometres of empty water

No compass. No sextant. No map. No clock.

The Polynesian navigators who reached Hawaii around the year 1200 sailed from the Marquesas Islands across 4 000 kilometres of open Pacific. The voyage took them roughly thirty days. They sailed by stars — knowing where on the horizon a given star rose and set in each season — and by swell patterns, reading the way a long ocean swell refracted around invisible islands beyond the horizon. They sailed by birds, watching for the species (mostly manu-o-Kū, the white tern, and the iwa frigatebird) that flew out to fish each morning and returned to land each evening.

It was the longest unsupported open-ocean voyage that any human society had yet undertaken.

The wa'a kaulua

The boat was a wa'a kaulua — a twin-hulled sailing canoe.

Two parallel dugout hulls, each fifteen to twenty-five metres long, lashed with coconut-fibre sennit to a central platform deck that carried the passengers, water, food, and the live cargo of an intended colony. A single boom-sail of woven pandanus matting, in the shape of a crab's claw, set on a central mast that could be tipped flat in heavy weather. No metal anywhere in the construction. Stone adzes had cut the hulls. Pearl-shell drills had punched the lashing holes. The natural buoyancy of breadfruit-tree wood kept the whole thing afloat.

A wa'a kaulua of average size carried about thirty people on a month-long crossing.

What you take when you cross the world

Founder cargo, by category.

The starches — taro corms, sweet potato cuttings, breadfruit shoots, ti roots. The flavourings — kava root for ceremony, sugar cane. The materials — paper-mulberry for bark cloth, candlenut for oil and torchlight. The containers — gourds. The animals — chickens; a small short-haired Polynesian dog (later extinct in Hawaii); pigs. The unintended — rats, as stowaways.

What the founder colony did not carry tells you about the deep geography of human food. No rice, the Asian staple, never adopted in Polynesia. No horses, no goats, no cattle — the Old World draught animals that Europe and Asia depended on. Every domesticated plant and animal in pre-contact Hawaii came in these canoes across the equator.

The tradition that died and was rebuilt

The Hawaiian islands were settled — and then the two-way voyaging tradition that had brought the settlers ended.

Sometime around AD 1300, the regular voyages between Hawaii and the Marquesas, between Hawaii and Tahiti, ceased. Hawaiian society turned inward. The navigation chants — the memorised sailing directions to every other Polynesian island, encoded in poetry — were no longer taught. By the time Captain Cook's ships reached Hawaii in 1778, the islanders had no clear memory of where their ancestors had come from.

The recovery began in 1973. A group of Native Hawaiian and other Polynesian scholars formed the Polynesian Voyaging Society and built a double-hulled voyaging canoe — Hōkūleʻa — using only traditional methods. The Micronesian master navigator Mau Piailug, of Satawal, who was one of the last living practitioners of non-instrumental Pacific navigation, agreed to navigate her.

In 1976 the Hōkūleʻa sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti and back. No compass. No GPS. No charts. The crossing took thirty-four days. Mau Piailug brought her in on his predicted landfall, by stars and swell patterns, on the date he had calculated before leaving Hawaii.

The voyages, the recovery proved, had been deliberate. Not drift.