Latest / Skeptoid / Skeptoid #1008: Facts and Fiction of Polynesian Navigation, Part 1

Transcript

Skeptoid #1008: Facts and Fiction of Polynesian Navigation, Part 1 · Skeptoid

• 0:03
  If you had no compass at all, and certainly not a GPS, and not even a
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  chart, could you navigate a small boat to an island that's beyond the horizon and
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  that you don't even have a heading for?
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  The ancient Polynesians could.
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  At least those among them trained in wayfinding could.
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  Or so we've been told.
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  Is this all truth, all fiction, or a mixture?
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  And that's coming up right now on Skeptoid.
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  You're
• 0:38
  listening to Skeptoid.
• 0:39
  I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
• 0:43
  Facts and Fiction of Polynesian Navigation Part One.
• 0:49
  This episode was sponsored by Frederic Raña Skeptoid's Earl of Elixirs.
• 0:55
  To personally sponsor your own episode, come to skeptoid.com/sponsor.
• 1:03
  Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience,
• 1:08
  real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions
• 1:13
  by knowing what's real and what's not.
• 1:15
  Today I have the great pleasure of presenting an episode on a topic
• 1:19
  that has fascinated me for almost my entire life, which is how the ancient
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  Polynesians were able to navigate their way to islands that were either beyond
• 1:28
  the horizon or that were completely unknown as they were exploring
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  where nobody had ever gone before.
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  Somehow they did it.
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  And moreover, maintained routes between distant island groups for many centuries,
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  all without any instruments at all.
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  And suspiciously, there's always been a bit of a cloak of magic or
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  a sixth sense over this subject.
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  So today we're gonna dive in, no pun intended, and separate the
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  science from the sensationalism surrounding Polynesian navigation.
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  Traditionally, the term Polynesia refers to a 10 million square mile region of
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  the Pacific Ocean, bounded by Hawai'i in the north, New Zealand in the
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  Southwest, and Rapa Nui in the east.
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  Beginning around 1000 BCE and completing around 1250 CE, Polynesia was completely
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  settled on every habitable island and land mass by humans who represented
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  hands down the very best skilled navigators on the planet at the time,
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  perhaps at any time, because they did it all without instruments of any
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  kind, not even a system of writing.
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  They had only experience-driven knowledge to go on, and as we'll discuss
• 2:49
  today, this was not trivial to learn.
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  To navigate these vast distances safely, required decades of training from elders.
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  But for the past couple hundred years, there has been little need for the
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  traditional skills, and given how difficult the skills were to develop,
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  they'd become almost entirely lost.
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  European authors had documented what they did, but with only
• 3:15
  a certain level of accuracy.
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  As far as actual Polynesians who still possessed master-level
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  wayfinding abilities, they had become almost completely extinct
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  by the middle of the 20th century.
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  Not entirely, but nearly.
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  This allowed mythology to fill the gap.
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  Beliefs arose that the ancient Polynesians had had some kind of sixth sense -- an
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  almost magical ability -- things like all they had to do was stick a
• 3:44
  hand or a foot in the water and could glean all the information they needed.
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  In part, this readiness to believe in some kind of metaphysical superiority
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  of an ancient race had its roots in the western esotericism movement,
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  which saw the rebirth of New Age and a hunger in western cultures
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  for all things ancient and mystical.
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  Within such a context, it seemed almost a given that an ancient people would have
• 4:11
  a superior connection to Mother Earth.
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  One that eluded the corrupted materialistic westerners -- as the New
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  Agers of the day might have put it.
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  And so, the passage of time, and the loss of the need for the skills, saw them
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  fade away among 20th-century Polynesians.
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  Regardless of whatever perceived elevated skills the western/European culture
• 4:36
  of the day wished to confer upon them.
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  However, there was at least one aspect of traditional wayfinding that
• 4:43
  survived this erosion of information.
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  It was a detail from the true histories of wayfinders that,
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  probably due to its bawdy nature, also resonated with Western readers.
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  Some refer to it as testicular navigation, and it is exactly what it sounds like.
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  Navigators would hang off the side of the canoe and drag their testicles in
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  the water sensing temperature and wave movement, or would sit on the bottom
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  of the canoe with their testicles in direct contact with the boat's hull.
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  The idea being that testicles as extraordinarily sensitive parts of the
• 5:20
  anatomy were the best organs to use to detect the subtlest of movements.
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  Testicular navigation first came to the attention of Europeans with the
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  1972 publication of the book We, the Navigators by Dr. David Lewis, who
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  spent two years sailing the Pacific with two traditional navigators from
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  the Santa Cruz and Caroline Islands.
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  He documented all their techniques, including this one.
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  Although Lewis's book was popular enough to bring the subjects to the
• 5:52
  public's attention, it certainly wasn't the first, and Lewis
• 5:56
  extensively referenced earlier texts.
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  One of these was a book that also served as the inspiration for the title We,
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  the Tikopia, A massive 1936 Chronicle by anthropologist Sir Raymond Firth.
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  Ever since, testicular navigation is found in virtually all modern writing
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  on the subject; its presence today is blatantly outsized and sensationalized.
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  We do have documented evidence that this was a real technique.
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  However, it's not clear at all that it was either widely used or
• 6:30
  even played a significant role.
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  In fact, there's some debate on whatever role it did have was merely an attempt
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  to keep women out of the profession.
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  If so, it was not successful.
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  It's widely documented that women were equally represented
• 6:44
  in the crews of voyaging canoes.
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  Regardless, the technique does hint toward one of the most important
• 6:51
  skills needed in wayfinding: the precise sensing of the directions and
• 6:56
  magnitudes of multiple ocean swells.
• 6:59
  More on that later.
• 7:02
  There's another really interesting bit of quasi-pseudoscience called te lapa.
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  Te lapa means a flashing light, and it's the one thing that some
• 7:11
  wayfinders talk about, but that modern science does not confirm.
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  The claim is that on some nights an underwater ray of light will flash
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  out to sea from an island indicating its direction, and some say this can
• 7:26
  be visible up to 150 kilometers away.
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  David Lewis, who did report seeing such lights himself on rare occasions
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  speculated -- and it was pure speculation -- that perhaps the
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  light was created by bioluminescence close to shore, focused into a beam
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  by a sort of natural lens formed by waves refracting around an island.
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  Some modern researchers have spent considerable time searching for te
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  lapa and have always come up empty handed, but even the staunchest of
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  its believers state that it's very rare and as such could hardly be
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  considered a useful tool for navigating.
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  Regardless, it can't be said that any replicable observation exists,
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  so any attempt at even hypothesizing an explanation is premature.
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  The real problem with preserving the unique knowledge base of
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  wayfinding was misinformation that became far more popular.
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  The source of a lot of this was Thor Heyerdahl, a darling
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  of National Geographic.
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  Heyerdahl was a Norwegian botanist, and while living in the Marquesas, developed
• 8:38
  a pseudoscientific conjecture that the South Pacific had been populated not
• 8:44
  eastward from Southeast Asia as we know today, but westward from South America.
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  He believed people from Peru made rafts out of balsa wood and other
• 8:54
  native materials and floated across the Pacific to populate it.
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  Rafts driven west by the southeast trade winds and the south equatorial current.
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  To prove his notion was possible, Heyerdahl made the voyage himself in
• 9:09
  such a raft, the Kon-Tiki, in a 1947 voyage that was widely publicized.
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  He also did the same thing across the Atlantic with the Ra and the Ra II to
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  prove his other pseudoscientific belief that Egyptians sailed across to South
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  America to become its founding population.
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  If Ancient Aliens had been on TV in the mid 20th century, Thor
• 9:33
  Heyerdahl would've been a regular.
• 9:36
  What National Geographic conveniently glossed over was that in Heyerdahl's
• 9:41
  pseudohistory, these founding populations were white-skinned,
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  bearded, God-like characters.
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  Only the whites were wise enough to voyage from Egypt to South America, and
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  only the whites were wise enough to sail thenceforth westward across the Pacific.
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  In Heyerdahl's day the skills of wayfinding were already almost
• 10:02
  entirely lost, and seeing their lack of ability, he reasoned that for Polynesia
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  to have been populated, a higher intelligence must have been responsible.
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  So it all fit neatly together in his mythology: the generally west-moving
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  trade winds, his white supermen from Egypt there to take advantage,
• 10:23
  and Heyerdahl's own semi-successful experiments with the Ra and Kon-Tiki
• 10:28
  boats to convince him of his correctness.
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  Luckily, before National Geographic could persuade the world that Thor
• 10:37
  Heyerdahl was right and all the world's anthropologists were wrong, a movement
• 10:42
  arose in the 1960s that came to be known as the Hawaiian Renaissance, a
• 10:47
  period of reclaiming and celebrating the Pacific Islander identity and culture.
• 10:52
  To mainland Americans, this manifested as surging interest in hula dancing and luaus
• 10:58
  with leis and famous Hawaiian musicians.
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  And while all this played out fine on The Brady Bunch, much more serious aspects
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  were brewing on the islands themselves.
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  It was a time of political unrest and even some violence of battles over
• 11:14
  land ownership and usage, and renewed calls for Hawaiian independence.
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  This Renaissance was one driver of the 1973 formation of the Polynesian
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  Voyaging Society, founded to perpetuate the art and science of
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  traditional Polynesian wayfinding and to teach it to the next generation.
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  In 1975, they launched Hōkūle'a, a traditional double-hulled voyaging canoe.
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  For safety, it was built with more durable modern materials such as fiberglass -- in
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  fact, it still sails today -- because its primary purpose was to reintroduce
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  traditional Polynesian navigation, and it even now has a sister ship the Hikianalia.
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  Toward this end, the society cast a wide net over Polynesia and finally located
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  one of the last surviving wayfinding masters and made him the ship's navigator.
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  He was the Micronesian traditional Voyager Mau Piailug.
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  Using no navigational equipment at all except Mau's knowledge, Hōkūle'a made
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  its inaugural voyage from Hawai'i south to Tahiti, an estimated 2,500 nautical miles
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  traveled in 34 days, much of it upwind.
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  The scientific impact of this voyage shouldn't be understated because
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  it brought us out of the era of pseudoscience and pseudohistory about
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  Polynesian wayfinding and Polynesian history in general, and into an era
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  where solid science explains and confirms the real techniques that
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  were used and can still be used today.
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  Through our refreshed knowledge of these techniques, thanks in large part to the
• 12:56
  Polynesian Voyage Society and Mau Piailug and many others like them throughout
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  Polynesia, we now have yet one more line of evidence supporting the known
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  history of the peopling of Polynesia.
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  Originally, I had no thought that this might expand into a rare two-part episode,
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  but once I got into the techniques of wayfinding, I quickly saw that they would
• 13:19
  take up an entire episode by themselves.
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  And really, they obviously deserve far more than that, which would've left
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  no room at all for discussion of the pseudoscience or the historical context.
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  And once I got into those, I quickly saw the same thing.
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  All that stuff is a minimum of one full show.
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  So that's what I gave you today, which saves the best part for last.
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  Next week in part two, we're gonna talk about all the real
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  tricks of the wayfinding trade.
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  There are so many ways to obtain knowledge about which way is the nearest
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  island, where you're located, how far you've come, and how far you have to go.
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  It is a weird and wonderful science, and taken altogether, it becomes
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  completely unsurprising that the ancient Polynesians were able to do what they did.
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  They expanded throughout the ocean, sailing off into directions nobody
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  had ever gone before until they filled every single habitable land
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  mass, which was a bit of cruel irony.
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  Accomplishing this feat made the feat unnecessary.
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  There was nowhere left to find.
• 14:27
  We continue with a look at an early western advocate for the reality of
• 14:32
  te lapa and her experiences with it and theories to explain it in the
• 14:36
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