Piailug, from Satawal Atoll in Micronesia, used the stars and wave patterns to guide outrigger canoes across thousands of miles of Pacific ocean. He is credited with helping revive traditional navigation among Hawaiians and guided the Hawaiian voyaging canoe Hokule’a on its landmark 2,500-mile voyage to Tahiti in 1976.
Piailug also navigated the Hawaiian canoe Makali’i from Hawaii to Majuro and then to Satawal in 1999.
Waan Aelon in Majel (Canoes of the Marshall Islands) Program Manager Alson Kelen sailed with Piailug on the Makali’i voyage and recalled the fanfare that surrounded the arrival of the double hulled canoe in Majuro after its three week, 2,300 mile journey.
“The date of our departure (from Hawaii) is still in my mind and heart,” Kelen said Wednesday in an interview. “It was the same date my wife gave birth of our daughter, Makali’i, on Feb. 7, 1999. Then 21 days later we arrived in Majuro. We were greeted by many people and boats. Then-President Imata Kabua and his whole cabinet, national museum officials, council of chiefs representatives, students from many Majuro elementary schools, and many, many people were there to greet us. It was a very touching moment.”
Kelen said he will long remember Piailug’s visit to the Marshalls because it raised appreciation among Marshall Islanders for a skill that still exists in this watery nation where canoe building and navigation skills have been honed over two thousand years.
“Because of this visit, it opened a lot of eyes here in Micronesia,” said Kelen, whose program teaches young Marshall Islands men and women how to build and sail canoes. “Cultural preservation became an important thing to do. For us in the Marshall Islands, the question was, ‘Why aren’t we sharing the little navigational knowledge that we still have?’ ”
The voyage and Mau’s presence helped to change people’s attitudes about sharing canoe skills that were once closely held secrets, shared only with a select few, Kelen said.
“The elders started to be more open, not just for canoe building but for navigation and other knowledge,” he said. “Mau’s work throughout the Pacific and the world has proven that our navigational knowledge that we said is of the past is actually of the future. It’s not technological, but magical and it is from the heart. Mau has shown us that the ocean doesn’t separate us, it connects us.”
American Dennis Alessio, who started an outrigger documentation project for the Marshall Islands national museum in the late 1980s that Kelen later took over, said he met Mau in Honolulu in early 1992 “when we brought our (Marshall Islands) crew to sail on Hokule’a and to meet the Hawaiian crew who we would be meeting up with in the Cook Islands (at the Pacific Festival of Arts).
“Mau was excited about our canoe program and even more that there would be a Micronesian outrigger at the Festival of Arts.”
Alessio, who now lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, said Mau “was one of those people who knew the importance of keeping traditional knowledge and skills alive and was a great inspiration for the work that we were doing in the Marshall Islands. We would see each other at canoe get-togethers over the next few years and always it was good to see him and talk story.”
When was in Majuro with the Makali’i in 1999, Alessio’s family cooked him a large sack full of baked breadfruit for the trip to Satawal.
“He really liked that and said he felt he was home,” Alessio said. “He told me that he wanted to make the Marshall Islands his first stop (on his way) home as this was a place where we were taking care of our canoe culture.”
