Oceania’s wayfinding skills

QUITE HOW the Pacific Ocean’s early long-distance mariners found their way so impressively will never be precisely known. Islanders had no written language, and by the time Europeans arrived in the Pacific, the colonisation of the last habitable islands of Oceania had all but ended. Widespread open-ocean voyaging between archipelagoes using traditional wayfinding techniques still persisted—European mariners were greatly impressed by Polynesian seafarers’ knowledge of the night sky and of their maritime environment. But the voyaging soon came to an end—due to, among other things, catastrophic population crashes in Polynesia caused by introduced diseases.

Only in parts of Micronesia did an active body of navigation knowledge persist just long enough into the modern age to be systematically recorded and learned. Thanks to that luck, and to parsing oral narratives of migration, Western ethnological records, archaeological evidence and, in recent years, trial-and-error efforts on the water, an understanding of how Pacific voyagers accomplished their navigational feats has deepened.