I have not read much of Heyerdahl's work, but I did read Kon-Tiki several times.
The article may be right to dismiss Heyerdahl as wrong, but its depiction of his approach is not in line with what he wrote himself in Kon-Tiki.
The article says:
> He made his bias particularly clear by designing his Kon Tiki raft to be unsteerable.
which makes it sound like a conscious decision to use the expedition to mislead.
In fact, Heyerdahl says clearly that he and his crew were trying to preserve their project's integrity by keeping the design of the ship as close as possible to the original South American rafts he studied, even to the point of preserving elements professional sailors said would sink the raft.
They did eventually discover that some pieces on the raft whose purpose they didn't understand at first could be used for marginal steerage (though not for sailing into the wind or current, certainly), so the article is factually wrong that he did not include any steering mechanisms.
He might have been entirely wrong about where the Polynesians came from, but I think the article paints him as more dishonest than he was.
Lost me at "Navigation is as much an art—and a spiritual practice—as it is a science."
I'm a pilot and I've done coastal and ocean yacht navigation including coastal at night in a new country. No art or spiritual practice. Bearings for coastal nav, celestial angles if you want latitude at sea, accurate time source if you also want longitude and the option to automate it all with GPS.
Next time you're boarding a commercial flight, go ask the pilot which deity he summoned to select his IFR route. He'll tell you the frequency.
You're a western pilot. Polynesians had none of that.
Here is the essence of how Polynesians navigated. Lie on your back in the canoe. Pay attention to the main swell. During the day, use the swell to keep a straight direction. During the night use the points where specific stars rise and set to be sure you're still going in the right direction. When you get close to the target island, you know that by a variety of signals ranging from the movements of birds that nest on that island, to the waves bouncing back from the swell hitting the island. These make it OK to miss your target by a bit, you'll find it and still be able to steer towards it.
Note what is missing. No latitude. No longitude. No time source. No GPS. No instruments. And yes, the whole thing is done lying on your back.
For Polynesians, navigation was spiritual. Ranging from being able to keep yourself in a trance to keep from losing track, to the stories you told yourself to remember what each star told you about where you were going, to years of guild training.
I learned about this back in university. Included was a comparison of the safety record for sea voyages in the South Pacific conducted by western ships with western navigation and Polynesians during the 1950s and 1960s. The Polynesians did better.
You're correct. It's not magic. Papa Mau had an encyclopedic knowledge of the sea. He knew the birds, the fish, the constellations, the currents. At high noon on an overcast day Papa Mau could tell where they were by the way the water moved the boat.
This is a massive amount of information passed on through oral tradition. It takes a long time and if you ever visit, you'll often hear people call Papa Mau the last navigator, because he was the last human to be taught this kind of navigation from early childhood. Papa Mau passed before he could finish training the next generation.
This tradition is very important to the nations of the pacific. I don't have time to properly explain why right now. I have a meeting I need to get to.
The article is a summary, and doesn't go into the details, but navigation was also spiritual practice to the original Polynesian navigators. Skills at modern navigation, which if poor simply result in an emergency beacon to Inmarsat and a pickup by the next passing freighter cannot be compared to those needed by the navigator of a Polynesian ocean-going colonization canoe - whose passengers, most likely part of the same family group, would certainly all die along with the navigator if he failed.
Sure, that's one way of doing it. But as the article discusses at length, there have been people navigating long-distance ocean voyages long before such technologies existed. Understanding something of how they did this is (to some of us, at least) quite fascinating.
I think it is well-known that Polynesians, probably the greatest navigators in history, considered navigation to be a spiritual endeavour. I always thought that this is possibly where the whole "spice-eating space navigator" idea in "Dune" came from, but I have not been able to confirm this.
I have another reply to this in this thread, and I stand by it, but I thought this might explain the use of the terms 'art' and 'spiritual' used in the article.
Western navigation is typically learned explicitly, meaning that it consists of a set of techniques that can be explained and carried out by that rational part of the brain.
This has many advantages, except that the rational part of the brain has less 'bandwidth' than the rest of the brain. The brain is a massively parallel machine that can respond to patterns in myriad ways, with the rational part being just one late addition, kind of like a calculator grafted on.[1]
The tiny bandwidth of the rational part of the brain is why we need calculators, why we take notes, have books, devise theorems and notations. We do this because it reduces the bandwidth required to reason about a given problem.
That integral you are trying to solve for homework in university, has just about as many 'parts' as the algebra problems you used to solve in grade 7.[2] Theres'a huge intellectual scaffolding underneath that integral sign, and many revisions of that scaffolding were developed, of course, but your brain in university does not have a bigger bandwidth than it did in grade 7.
But there are other ways of learning and knowing. And it's not so woo woo: implicit learning.
I bet you now how to catch a ball. How hard would it be for you to rationally[3] explain to me how ta catch a ball if I've never done it?
But you could trivially teach me to catch a ball, you'd toss it to me and give me hints until I caught it, and then I'd practice that till it became automatic. Then I'd have trouble explaining that to someone, but I could teach them in the same experiential way and so the skill can be passed on.[4]
This is why it's harder to teach a computer to catch a ball than it is to teach it to navigate.
So this 'spiritual' word, is hinting that the Polynesian navigators learned their navigation skills implicitly.
Relying much more on non rational (but not irrational) parts of the brain: recognizing patterns in nature, the position of stars yes, but tons of other clues that westerners have the luxury of ignoring because our charts and tables and GPS can just get us there already without all of that messy stuff.
Once a skill is acquired in this manner, it can be very hard to explain to someone else making it look uncanny to outsiders perhaps.
I think the word mystical might have been better than spiritual. But art fits pretty well for a skill learned in this way.
[3] I mean a list of instructions that can be carried out so that success is guaranteed when correctly executed.
[4] A better example might be a sport like say surfing. It takes years to learn, and good surfers have a hard time explaining certain things. You just have observe nature (waves) and develop an intuition.
The winds in the South Pacific predominately blow east to west. Since Polynesian voyaging canoes have a very limited ability to sail into the wind, it seemed impossible for them to have colonized Polynesia from west to east. This appeared to be a pretty strong argument for a colonization of Polynesia from South America, since South American voyagers (either intentional or accidental) would be sailing with the predominate winds, not against them.
However, it turns out that during El Niño years the direction of the winds can change so they are blowing from west to east, making it much easier to sail east across the South Pacific.[1]
In 1947 Thor Heyerdahl didn't know about this possibility.
They sailed west to east on purpose, because it made it easier to get home if they didn't make landfall.
The canoes they used were not tacked, they were shunted, which made it much easier to said into the wind.
To get back home, they memorized a bunch of zenith stars for their home latitude, went north or south till they put those stars at zenith and then just let the wind carry them home.
Non instrument navigation to Hawaii, for example, involves overshooting the island chain by going a bit too far east, putting Hokulea (Arcturus) at the zenith then sailing west till you make landfall.
Something I recall from reading "Sail Performance", the crab claw is way better then most people expect. In fact for a smaller boat it may just be the best shape when averaged over all the points of sail. Modern sail plans are targeted more towards large boats and racing boats, which does not reflect the reality of what most people are sailing most of the time.
When Nainoa Thompson was learning/re-inventing Polynesian navigation one of the techniques he used was too spend time at a planetarium where he could learn what the skies looked like at different latitudes.[1]
Missing from the article is the recent DNA evidence linking Polynesian peoples to the aboriginal inhabitants of Taiwan ... Making the west to east theory even more likely ... Essentially the Polynesians spread across the Pacific above the equator, the travelled back south of it, finally discovering New Zealand around 900AD (probably the last inhabitable land discovered by any humans)
There was certainly contact between the polynesians and native americans. The Chumash got their tomolo design after contact with ancient polynesians who sailed to the channel islands. Before that contact they used reed based boats to travel between the channel islands, after that contact and the adoption of polynesian style sewn boats they were able to radically increase the scale of their commercial activities by being able to transport far more goods than with the older boat design.
> On one voyage where he was not the master navigator, Mau woke out of a dead sleep and told the steersman that the canoe was off course, just by the feel of the swells hitting the hulls of the canoe.
There was a part in Kon-Tiki where Heyerdahl says that after a month or so out in the ocean, they realized that it was easy to navigate between islands. First sail north or south to the latitude of your destination. Then sail east or west, maintaining the latitude to the destination. If you were confident about your position and heading, you could mix N/S and E/W motion to get there faster.
If you want to learn more about Polynesian voyaging, the book Vaka Moana is a great introduction to the various technologies. Navigation, boat-building, colonization, etc. It's a bit pricy at $70 but you can also find it in a lot of libraries.
[+] [-] NateEag|7 years ago|reply
The article may be right to dismiss Heyerdahl as wrong, but its depiction of his approach is not in line with what he wrote himself in Kon-Tiki.
The article says:
> He made his bias particularly clear by designing his Kon Tiki raft to be unsteerable.
which makes it sound like a conscious decision to use the expedition to mislead.
In fact, Heyerdahl says clearly that he and his crew were trying to preserve their project's integrity by keeping the design of the ship as close as possible to the original South American rafts he studied, even to the point of preserving elements professional sailors said would sink the raft.
They did eventually discover that some pieces on the raft whose purpose they didn't understand at first could be used for marginal steerage (though not for sailing into the wind or current, certainly), so the article is factually wrong that he did not include any steering mechanisms.
He might have been entirely wrong about where the Polynesians came from, but I think the article paints him as more dishonest than he was.
[+] [-] DFHippie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmaunder|7 years ago|reply
I'm a pilot and I've done coastal and ocean yacht navigation including coastal at night in a new country. No art or spiritual practice. Bearings for coastal nav, celestial angles if you want latitude at sea, accurate time source if you also want longitude and the option to automate it all with GPS.
Next time you're boarding a commercial flight, go ask the pilot which deity he summoned to select his IFR route. He'll tell you the frequency.
[+] [-] btilly|7 years ago|reply
Here is the essence of how Polynesians navigated. Lie on your back in the canoe. Pay attention to the main swell. During the day, use the swell to keep a straight direction. During the night use the points where specific stars rise and set to be sure you're still going in the right direction. When you get close to the target island, you know that by a variety of signals ranging from the movements of birds that nest on that island, to the waves bouncing back from the swell hitting the island. These make it OK to miss your target by a bit, you'll find it and still be able to steer towards it.
Note what is missing. No latitude. No longitude. No time source. No GPS. No instruments. And yes, the whole thing is done lying on your back.
For Polynesians, navigation was spiritual. Ranging from being able to keep yourself in a trance to keep from losing track, to the stories you told yourself to remember what each star told you about where you were going, to years of guild training.
I learned about this back in university. Included was a comparison of the safety record for sea voyages in the South Pacific conducted by western ships with western navigation and Polynesians during the 1950s and 1960s. The Polynesians did better.
[+] [-] jacobwilliamroy|7 years ago|reply
This is a massive amount of information passed on through oral tradition. It takes a long time and if you ever visit, you'll often hear people call Papa Mau the last navigator, because he was the last human to be taught this kind of navigation from early childhood. Papa Mau passed before he could finish training the next generation.
This tradition is very important to the nations of the pacific. I don't have time to properly explain why right now. I have a meeting I need to get to.
[+] [-] yborg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfk13|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerbilly|7 years ago|reply
Right, that's the western way.
But non instrument navigators could find tiny islands on purpose thousands of years ago without any of that.
I'd call that an art. Maybe you don't practise it as an art, but others have and still do.
[+] [-] freehunter|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sn41|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sorokod|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerbilly|7 years ago|reply
Western navigation is typically learned explicitly, meaning that it consists of a set of techniques that can be explained and carried out by that rational part of the brain.
This has many advantages, except that the rational part of the brain has less 'bandwidth' than the rest of the brain. The brain is a massively parallel machine that can respond to patterns in myriad ways, with the rational part being just one late addition, kind of like a calculator grafted on.[1]
The tiny bandwidth of the rational part of the brain is why we need calculators, why we take notes, have books, devise theorems and notations. We do this because it reduces the bandwidth required to reason about a given problem.
That integral you are trying to solve for homework in university, has just about as many 'parts' as the algebra problems you used to solve in grade 7.[2] Theres'a huge intellectual scaffolding underneath that integral sign, and many revisions of that scaffolding were developed, of course, but your brain in university does not have a bigger bandwidth than it did in grade 7.
But there are other ways of learning and knowing. And it's not so woo woo: implicit learning.
I bet you now how to catch a ball. How hard would it be for you to rationally[3] explain to me how ta catch a ball if I've never done it?
But you could trivially teach me to catch a ball, you'd toss it to me and give me hints until I caught it, and then I'd practice that till it became automatic. Then I'd have trouble explaining that to someone, but I could teach them in the same experiential way and so the skill can be passed on.[4]
This is why it's harder to teach a computer to catch a ball than it is to teach it to navigate.
So this 'spiritual' word, is hinting that the Polynesian navigators learned their navigation skills implicitly.
Relying much more on non rational (but not irrational) parts of the brain: recognizing patterns in nature, the position of stars yes, but tons of other clues that westerners have the luxury of ignoring because our charts and tables and GPS can just get us there already without all of that messy stuff.
Once a skill is acquired in this manner, it can be very hard to explain to someone else making it look uncanny to outsiders perhaps.
I think the word mystical might have been better than spiritual. But art fits pretty well for a skill learned in this way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory
[3] I mean a list of instructions that can be carried out so that success is guaranteed when correctly executed.
[4] A better example might be a sport like say surfing. It takes years to learn, and good surfers have a hard time explaining certain things. You just have observe nature (waves) and develop an intuition.
[+] [-] theothermkn|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] curtis|7 years ago|reply
However, it turns out that during El Niño years the direction of the winds can change so they are blowing from west to east, making it much easier to sail east across the South Pacific.[1]
In 1947 Thor Heyerdahl didn't know about this possibility.
[1] Anomalous Westerlies, El Niño, and the Colonization of Polynesia - https://www.jstor.org/stable/677659?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont... (I can't find the full text of the paper online, but I think this is the one I remember.)
[+] [-] gerbilly|7 years ago|reply
The canoes they used were not tacked, they were shunted, which made it much easier to said into the wind.
To get back home, they memorized a bunch of zenith stars for their home latitude, went north or south till they put those stars at zenith and then just let the wind carry them home.
Non instrument navigation to Hawaii, for example, involves overshooting the island chain by going a bit too far east, putting Hokulea (Arcturus) at the zenith then sailing west till you make landfall.
[+] [-] opwieurposiu|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_claw_sail
[+] [-] curtis|7 years ago|reply
[1] http://archive.hokulea.com/index/founder_and_teachers/will_k...
[+] [-] Taniwha|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithnz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shams93|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macintux|7 years ago|reply
That is an astonishing level of mastery.
[+] [-] andyv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerbilly|7 years ago|reply
See the book Vaka Moana for the real story.
Polynesians populated the pacific islands from west to east.
They probably are the best navigators on the planet.
[+] [-] lisper|7 years ago|reply
This story is worth reading all the way to the end, where some of the traditional navigation techniques are briefly described. It's mind-blowing.
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|7 years ago|reply
https://www.worldcat.org/title/vaka-moana-voyages-of-the-anc...
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|7 years ago|reply
Curiously, all it took was going to Polynesia, and asking them. Something 18th and 19th-century 'scientists' could not imagine doing I guess.
[+] [-] mnemotechny|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] virgakwolfw|7 years ago|reply