The crew is 12 hours out of port when they hit heavy weather. Like all Polynesian voyagers,
they carry no maps or compasses relying on the natural world for navigation. Heavy seas pitch their 60-foot vessel
and they capsize.
They cling to the hull. They fire flares, but no one answers their distress signal. For this is not an ancient voyage. It is
1978 and the Hokulea, a reproduction of a Polynesian voyaging canoe, is on its second navigation from Hawaii to Tahiti.
Their mission is to rediscover the lost art of Polynesian Wayfinding and sailing. One crewman, Eddie Aikau,
is a champion big wave surfer and legendary lifeguard. Known for pulling distressed surfers out of 30 foot waves. And a surfboard
survived the capsize! He volunteers to try to paddle to the nearest island, over ten miles
upwind in rough seas. And at dawn, after the crew runs out of options,
Eddie goes for help. 10 hours later a Coast Guard rescue ship arrives; a passing plane had spotted the stricken craft.
But Eddie Aikau, a hero to his friends and the Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance, is never seen again...
*Intro Music*
It was Ferdinand Magellan who first called The Pacific "The Peaceful Ocean". And while the description stuck, it certainly didn't fit.
Within months, Magellan and most of his remaining crew... were dead. Some due to conflicts with indigenous peoples,
but most from Scurvy and malnutrition. Killed essentially by the great distances between
resupply. The Pacific is not peaceful; it sits on a moving tectonic plate, its rim surrounded by a ring of the world's most active
volcanoes. It's a hot zone for eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis.
Frequent hurricanes and tropical storms pound its shores. And it has vast stretches of nothing with little to no sustenance. Yet
3,000 years ago, humans embarked into the great blue to explore, discover, and settle the tiny chain of islands amidst all that water in
double-hulled canoes only 60 feet long!
This is that story, but it's also the story of those who came after. To tell the tale of exploration in the Pacific,
we'll have to look at the history in two parts. First the settlement of the Pacific by the
Austronesians and their descendants, and then second, the Europeans arrival to the islands, and the
consequences that would have. It's a story not just about discovery, but of
rediscovery. Because much of what we know about early Pacific voyages, comes from both careful research and study of
traditional sailing techniques by groups like the Polynesian Voyaging Society.
Because the tragic loss of Eddie Aikau was not Hokulea's final voyage.
Indeed, not only has the ship recreated multiple Pacific voyages, but between 2014 and 2017,
it sailed around the world! The Polynesian Voyaging Society has also built and sailed other canoes long distances using navigational techniques
learned from a Micronesian master navigator. But before we talk about the voyages themselves,
we have to get to know the territory. Because while geography is going to be really important to this story,
The Pacific Ocean itself is really the central character in this millennia-long drama. For to understand Pacific voyaging,
whether by the people who had settled the islands or later Europeans,
you have to understand the sheer scale of the ocean itself, and that is not easy!
Even today with minds used to the concept of traveling to outer space, it's still difficult to really grasp
how big the Pacific is.
This is partially due to the fact that maps
usually break it up at the edges and the distortion of flattening the round globe to two dimensions minimizes
its great size. But stretching 63 million, eight hundred
thousand square miles, The Pacific is the largest ocean on Earth.
It takes up about a third of the planet's surface and most of one hemisphere.
In fact, all of the Earth's land
could fit on its surface with space left over, and all of the other oceans and seas on earth could fit in its depth.
Due to its great size and strong cycling currents, its temperatures can vary considerably.
From below freezing in the Arctic, to bathwater warm at the Equator.
It also has different weather patterns at its eastern, western, northern, and southern extremes. So much
so, the tropical storms are classed by region, with there being multiple basins for forming tropical cyclones.
It's also the deepest ocean. So deep in fact, it conceals the largest mountain on the planet! Mount
Kea on the Island of Hawaii is six thousand feet taller than Everest if measured from the ocean floor. In
fact if you were sitting on a boat over the deepest part of the Mariana Trench and you looked up to see a jet flying overhead at a normal cruising altitude of 35,000 feet,
you would be closer to that jet than the ocean floor below you.
Even today, it's one of the last unexplored places on our planet.
Extremes of depth, pressure, and
darkness making it difficult to map and investigate even with modern technology.
But to the Pacific voyagers, the ocean's depth were almost entirely a mystery.
Even European devices used to take soundings, a method of sampling the bottom of the ocean and
cross-referencing the water depth and type of sediment with a chart, were often defeated by the enormous depth.
So all these sailors knew of the undersea realm was what came up on their fishing hooks or swam to the surface.
This could include anything from leaping schools of finger-length Flying Fish,
which the Pacific voyagers caught in their sails when able, to the breaching, rolling forms of Humpback Whales.
Apart from these visitations from below, and the occasional rain that could be captured and funneled into gourds,
no food or fresh water could be obtained along the way. The Pacific is, in many ways, a great salty desert.
But it was a desert that moved! Trade winds made for predictable sailing season. Currents and gyres,
enormous circular vortexes that collected debris, could to be read and ridden by a skilled sailor. And they sometimes even brought
unexpected gifts. When Captain James Cook arrived in Hawaii, the most remote and northernmost tip of the Polynesian Triangle,
he was shocked to learn that the people there, despite having no contact with outsiders and
lacking the knowledge to forge iron, knew what iron nails were.
In fact, they even possessed several daggers made from reshaped nails.
And that was because though European and Asian seafarers had not been to Hawaii, their nails had!
Pacific currents picked up shipwreck debris, cycled it around the ocean, and deposited it on Hawaii's shores. The Hawaiians then
extracted the nails and refashioned them for their own use.
This was ironically also how many plants and animals had originally populated these volcanic islands, so that they were inhabitable
when early voyagers arrived. Formed by volcanic
hotspots that built undersea mountains, birthing island chains as the tectonic plates slid over the outpouring of molten magma. The roughly
25,000 Pacific Islands consist mostly of volcanic high islands and low coral atolls.
The former are the newest ones, some still being built due to volcanic
eruption. And the latter are former islands that have eroded back into the sea,
leaving only a low circle of coral reef that plants and animals colonized as a habitat. And it was during this
geographic formation, long before humans, that some of pacific history was already being set in motion.
Hawaii in particular,
standing nearly in the center of The Pacific, and with excellent natural
harbors, would become at various times a major supply station for shipping, the center of the global whaling industry, a
military fortress, and a meeting point between the Americas and Asia. And these Pacific Islands are generally grouped into three archipelagos.
Micronesia, meaning small islands, sits just east of The Philippines and
includes the Mariana Islands of Guam and Saipan, as well as Palau and The Marshall Islands.
Melanesia meaning black islands and uh... yeah that was originally named for the darker-skin of the indigenous people
there, not kidding.
They include New Guinea, The Solomons, and Fiji. And finally,
there's Polynesia, often called The Polynesian Triangle due to its anchor points of New Zealand, Easter Island, and Hawaii.
But despite clustering together in chains and archipelagos,
look in a map and you'll notice that compared to the amount of water around them,
the land area of these islands is very small. Tiny in many cases! And
when you consider that the early voyagers found them without charts or maps, crossing thousands of miles of open ocean,
not even knowing if an island was going to be there in the end. It just drives home
how brave the Austronesian voyagers were as they struck out from Asia, down through Southeast Asia, and out into the watery world.
So set sail with us next week when we take a look at the technology and methods they used;
from the double-hulled voyaging canoe, to celestial navigation, and
observational skills that told them that an island was over the horizon before they can even see it!
*Music*
Well, hello there Ahmed Ziad Turk, Alicia Bramble, Casey Muscha, Dominic Valenciana, Gunnar Clovis, Kyle Murgatroyd, and Orels1!
Thanks so much for being legendary patrons!
*Music*