Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Polynesian Navigators

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

The ancient world created many incredible wonders. The Pyramids of Giza, The Great Wall of China, and the Colosseum are just a few of the great wonders which are still standing.  However, one of the greatest achievements is one that didn’t leave any physical monuments. Its legacy is the people who live on the remote islands in the Pacific Ocean.  Learn more about the Polynesian navigators and how they explored the Pacific on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ancient world had many great accomplishments. The Pyramid Zegiza, the Great Wall of China, and the Coliseum are just a few of the great wonders which are still standing. However, one of early humanity's greatest achievements is the one that didn't leave any physical monuments. Its legacy is in the people who live on the remote islands of the Pacific Ocean. Learn more about the Polynesian navigators and how they explored the Pacific on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us every week on the Thuline podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by rerouted. Let's face it, outdoor gear can be expensive. If you're into camping, climbing, skiing, or hiking, you can spend a lot of money indulging in your hobby. Wouldn't to be great if you could save some money as well as cut down and resource use at the same time? Well, you can. R rerouted is the place to buy, sell, or donate your used outdoor gear. They make shopping for used gear as easy as shopping for new gear. Rerouted believes that each piece of gear has a story, and they want to help tell yours.

If you're actively involved in outdoor activities, or just looking to get into it, you can save money by shopping at rewrouted.co. Once again, that's rerouted.c.O. Or click on the link in the show notes. While humanity has been traveling by sea for thousands of years, there was always one thing that defined ancient seafaring. They stuck close to land. Ancient ships weren't very large in the big scheme of things, and navigation techniques were quite primitive.

Sailing within eyesight of the shore was safer, the seas were calmer, and it was much easier to navigate if you could always see land. Even if they knew it was on the other side of the water, like in the Mediterranean or the Aegean Sea, staying close to land was always preferable. And even if they could cross a sea, they would never, ever sail into the unknown of the deep ocean. However, there was one major exception to this rule,

the Polynesians. Polynesia is a region in the Pacific Ocean located in an area known as the Polynesian Triangle. The Polynesian Triangle is roughly defined as the area bounded by Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island, aka Rapa Nui. The islands enclosed by this triangle include the likes of Samoa, Tonga, French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, and many other smaller islands. Most importantly for this discussion, these islands are very far away from any continental landmass.

In fact, the middle of the Pacific is the furthest place on Earth from continents. 10,000 years ago, humans had settled most of the Earth which was reachable by foot. This includes areas such as Australia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, which were connected to the Eurasia, landmass when sea levels dropped during the last ice age. We know from genetic evidence that the ancient Polynesians originally came from Southeast Asia. Human remains from a pre-Polynesian people known as the Lapita have been found in Samoa dating back to about 3,000 BC. From Samoa, they migrated eastward to what is today French Polynesia, and from there

there was expansion in all directions to Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island. The expansion into the fringes of Polynesia happened rather recently in the big scheme of things. Hawaii saw its first humans arrive around the years 3 to 600, and New Zealand had its first human footprints around the year 1300. So how did these islands so far away from the coast of any continent get settled when humans were so reluctant for so long to sail into the open ocean? Moreover, how did they do it without the compass, sextant, or maps? The short answer is that they were extremely skilled navigators. Not every Polynesian was a navigator. It was a skill that was passed on from generation to generation,

and it was a very high status position in their society. It required a lot of learning and a lot of time to master the techniques. Moreover, it was considered a secret tradition that was only passed along in certain families. One of the biggest tools was the development of a mental map. The map divided the night sky into four quadrants, and then further divided it into 32 houses. The boat was always defined to be at the center of this mental map. Based on what time of year it was, they knew which stars would be where on the horizon,

and from that they could determine their direction. I should note that most of Polynesia is in the southern hemisphere, where the north star isn't visible. They were aware of the north star and the southern cross, but their celestial navigation system was far more elaborate than just trying to find north or south in the sky. This system would have been incredibly difficult to learn, as you have to learn the locations of a lot of stars and how they change through. throughout the year. Moreover, maps of islands were passed down from generation to generation. When Captain James Cook made his first voyage to the Pacific, which is another story for another

episode, he had a Polynesian navigator named Tupaya. Tupaya came from the island of Raiatia, in what is today French Polynesia. Tupaya was able to map out 130 islands within a 2,000 kilometer radius from Riatia. He personally had only visited 13 of them. The rest were all handed down from his father and grandfather. This knowledge of island locations would have been built up over generations and probably shared between islands when they made contact with each other. However, this mental map method wasn't exact. It could get you close to where you needed to go, but it wasn't like using a GPS. There were other techniques that were used to know when they were close to land. Certain bird species, like a white turn, could only be found a certain distance

from land. They would go in the morning to fish and then return to the island that they came from. If navigators saw these birds, they would just have to follow it back to get to land. There are some rumors that some navigators would take a frigate bird with them and then release it when they thought they might be close to land. Frigot birds can't get wet, so they would fly directly to land, and then you could just follow it. Another technique which they used was learning how to read waves and swells. Waves behave differently when there's land nearby. Waves in the deep ocean are more undulating, whereas closer to land, they can be sharper. A navigator would have spent years learning to read the subtle behavior of waves. Clouds were also a signal. Certain

types of clouds would only form over islands. The color of the underside of the cloud would also determine if there was dark vegetation below it or not. The ships used by Polynesians were double-hulled canoes with a sail. The space between the halls was the main storage space where they would store fishing nets, tools, and also animals for the voyage such as chickens. So how far did the Polynesians get? There's evidence of Polynesians getting to some of the sub-Antarctic islands, which are south of New Zealand. However, there's no evidence, either physical or via oral tradition, of Polynesians ever reaching Antarctica itself. There's a growing belief that they may have reached the coast of South America sometime around the year 1300.

There's DNA evidence from chicken remains found in Chile. The remains of the remains of the remains were from before Europeans arrived and were not from European breeds of chicken. Also, there were sweet potatoes found in the Cook Islands, which were native to South America. Much of the knowledge of Polynesian navigation was lost after Europeans arrived. There was little reason to use it when Europeans arrived with their larger ships and their navigation instruments. However, there's been a revival of this ancient art over the last few decades. In the 1970s, a Hawaiian group called the Polynesian Voyaging Society created a double-hulled Polynesian ship and sailed it from Hawaii to Tahiti from May 1st to June 3rd, 1976,

using only traditional techniques. Since then, they've built other ships and have sailed to other Polynesian islands using the same traditional techniques. From 2014 to 2017, another double-held canoe managed to sail around the world. At this point, even if you can accept that the Polynesians were able to navigate from island to island, just using the stars and nature to guide them, there still might be one, nagging question. How did they know that these islands were there in the first place? There's a lot of evidence showing that the Hawaiian islands were settled by people from Tahiti.

However, how did the people from Tahiti know that Hawaii existed? They're 2,700 miles away from each other. The best guess at this point is, they didn't know. Either these islands were discovered by accident when boats were thrown off course by storms, or people set out not knowing if they would find anything. Rapa Nui is a thousand miles away from the nearest speck of dry land. If you just look at a map of the Pacific, there are a whole lot of directions people could have traveled where they wouldn't have encountered anything. The implication is that over the centuries and millennia, it's quite probable that hundreds of thousands of people may have died at sea searching for land which they never found. I think there's really no question that

Polynesian navigation has to go down as one of the greatest achievements of the ancient world. They managed to achieve what no other culture was able to, and they did so in a dramatic fashion. The legacy of their accomplishment isn't found in ancient ruins, but in the lives of all the people living across the islands of the Pacific. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. Today's five-star review comes from Apple Podcasts in the United States. Listener Jim M. writes, Well researched and fun. My wife and I have walked a lot for exercise in the last year, for obvious reasons.

It helps to listen to a podcast to pass the time, using Airplay so we can both listen to the same thing on our AirPods. Our walk is usually one to one and a quarter hours long. We listen to some longer podcasts, but like to fill it in with shorter ones towards the end of the walk. This podcast fills that need perfectly. It's well-produced, excellent sound, and covers a wide variety of historical and scientific topics. Whenever Gary has crossed paths with something I already knew about, he's been spot on. Unfortunately, we've gone through the whole catalog. Yes, I listen to every single podcast.

The one about, did Shakespeare write the works of Shakespeare, was probably my favorite. I had a professor back in college talk about it, but not as clearly as Gary. Thank you very much, Jim. I'm glad I can be of help during your walks. As always, if you keep listening, I'll keep making them. Remember, if you leave a five-star review, you too can have your review read on the show.