When European explorers first ventured into the Pacific in the early 1500s, they found people on all the major islands. How the people got there was a mystery to them. They had no idea that they had happened upon a people who were the greatest explorers and navigators in the world — people so skilled that they needed no maps or instruments to find their way across the vast ocean.
The last of these great traditional navigators was Mau Piailug, who guided the Hawaiian voyaging canoe Hokule’a on its first trip to Tahiti, using only non-instrument navigation in 1976.
Mau Piailug was born in 1932. When he was still a little baby, his grandfather put him in a tide pool as though he were putting him in a cradle. There the sea gently rocked him back and forth with the rhythm of the tides.
When Mau was six, his grandfather began to teach him about navigation. He started by telling him about the stars.
The grandfather made a star compass out of a circle of coral rocks, and in the center he put a little canoe he had made of palm fronds. Then he explained how the stars rose in the sky and traveled from east to west.
As he grew older Mau spent his evenings in the canoe house. There he asked the elders to teach him about navigation. In this way, and with his grandfather’s help, he learned the paths of more than a hundred stars. He also learned that when clouds covered the sky, he could use the direction of the ocean waves to guide the canoe. He could also follow the birds toward land when they headed home in the evening, and he studied the creatures of the sea, for in times of trouble they, too, could help him find land.
