polynesian navigation

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Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, British Empire, creative destruction, data acquisition, data science, Dava Sobel, different worldview, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, Eyjafjallajökull, Flash crash, friendly fire, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Ian Bogost, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, lone genius, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, place-making, polynesian navigation, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, skunkworks, smart grid, systems thinking, the map is not the territory, vertical integration

., 31. 11 “almost alone”: Ibid. 11 “I became his pupil”: Ibid. 12 the mysteries of Polynesian migration: On the history of the various Polynesian navigation theories, see Ben Finney, Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey Through Polynesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 18–23; and Finney, “Myth, Experiment, and the Reinvention of Polynesian Voyaging.” 12 “Most people believe”: Andrew Sharp, Ancient Voyagers in Polynesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 53. 13 “would be nothing for a seaman of his caliber”: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 355–6. 14 The Polynesian navigator’s primary tool: For an excellent concise overview of Polynesian navigation techniques, see Oliver Kuhn, “Polynesian Navigation,” CSEG Recorder, September 2008, http://csegrecorder.com/features/view/science-break-200809. 17 “embed the route”: Reginald G. Golledge, “Human Wayfinding and Cognitive Maps,” in Wayfinding Behavior: Cognitive Mapping and Other Spatial Processes, edited by Reginald G.

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Lewis, an Australian physician, adventurer, and master sailor, had won a university fellowship to sail the Pacific in search of anyone who still practiced the ancient art of Polynesian navigation. It was a dispiriting experience, as Lewis discovered that the practices had died out, superseded by modern methods. Then he met Tevake, a man in his seventies who had begun his navigational training when he was seven or eight years old. In his younger years, Tevake would regularly sail a 30-foot outrigger canoe on a journey of 300 miles or more. Age had slowed Tevake somewhat, but he still traveled solo between his atoll and nearby islands. Tevake was “the first Polynesian navigator I ever sailed with,” Lewis remembered, as well as “one of the greatest.”

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“The view that they were supermen is not satisfactory basis for a theory of Polynesian long navigation.” Rather than evidence of navigational prowess, Sharp believed Tupaia’s map reflected the accumulated geographic knowledge of people who had drifted to Tahiti, compiled and synthesized by the very clever Tupaia. In the postcolonial climate of the 1960s, Lewis and a few other like minds wanted to impart human agency to these seemingly mythic navigators of yore, to ground their migratory achievements in actual methodology. Lewis felt he had the seafaring knowledge—and, in Tevake, an invaluable resource—to discover the inner workings of Polynesian navigation that made the migration possible.

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

Indeed, these three subjects all went together. Polynesian navigators needed to be able to sail, sometimes for weeks, out of sight of land. They did so without the aid of charts or navigational instruments. Instead, Tupaia was trained to memorize sailing directions, based on lists of stars, through a series of chants. These sailing directions, passed down through the generations, often recalled the voyages of ancestors. Ancient Polynesians had first left Southeast Asia around 4,000 years ago, gradually spreading across the Pacific, reaching Tahiti in around the year 1000 ce.43 The idea behind Polynesian navigation was simple, but extremely effective.

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The best way to understand this is the difference between knowing your exact coordinates on a GPS versus remembering directions such as ‘travel down that road, straight across at the traffic lights, and then left at the next junction’. Polynesians preferred directions over coordinates. To travel between two islands, a navigator like Tupaia would first identify a specific star associated with that route. The star would need to be located relatively low in the sky, near the horizon. The navigator would then start sailing towards it. After a certain amount of time, the navigator might then need to switch to a different star, particularly if it was a long voyage. After days or even weeks at sea, they would eventually reach their destination.44 Polynesian navigators preferred to sail at night. But if they had to, a navigator like Tupaia could also sail by day.

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In the southern hemisphere, a shadow cast by the Sun at midday points due north. It was therefore relatively easy to get a good sense of the direction you were travelling in based on the position of the Sun. But Polynesian navigators didn’t just watch the heavens. They also paid close attention to the rise and fall of the ocean. These ocean swells are modified by land, bouncing back off a large island or sometimes bending around it. Polynesian navigators were trained to recognize these subtle differences in the rise and fall of the ocean, and the interaction between different swell patterns. In the Marshall Islands, navigators even made charts, constructed out of palm ribs and bound with coconut fibres, representing ocean swells.

Sextant: A Young Man's Daring Sea Voyage and the Men Who ... by David Barrie

centre right, colonial exploitation, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, GPS: selective availability, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lone genius, Maui Hawaii, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, polynesian navigation, South China Sea, three-masted sailing ship, trade route

To speak of the “discovery” by European navigators of lands that had long been inhabited by other peoples is obviously absurd, if not insulting, but since the focus of this book is a European invention, Europeans unavoidably take center stage. By way of contrast, I have mentioned briefly the extraordinary skills of the Polynesian navigators, who found their way across the wide expanses of the Pacific using neither instruments nor charts long before the arrival of Western explorers. Their achievements deserve to be better known, but they have been well described by others,10 and this is not the place in which to discuss them more fully.

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Tupia, as he was called, helped Cook explore the neighboring islands and later to communicate with the native Maori population of New Zealand—with whom, it turned out to everyone’s amazement, he shared a common language. Sadly he was among those who succumbed to illness contracted in Batavia. Cook and his colleagues do not appear to have made any serious attempt to understand Polynesian navigation, and it was only much later—when the traditional techniques had almost died out—that Westerners began to study the subject seriously. THE INVENTION OF the sextant allowed the navigator for the first time to attach a numerical value both precise and accurate to the height of a heavenly body above the horizon.

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CHAPTER 6: THE MARINE CHRONOMETER 1 Although they were certainly accomplished seafarers, we know little about the wayfinding techniques the Greeks and Romans employed and it has been assumed that they had no special navigational instruments, relying instead on their skill and experience—rather like the Polynesian navigators. However, recent research suggests that the hitherto mysterious Antikythera device, recovered in 1900 by sponge divers from a shipwreck off southern Greece that dates from the first century BCE, employed a remarkably complex system of gears to reveal how the sun, moon, and five planets known at that time behaved.

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

Instead, it was a largely interconnected world consisting of atolls, coral reefs and volcanic islands: a very diverse world, offering very different opportunities to those who settled, and thereby providing a great stimulus to local and even long-distance exchange.4 These Polynesians lacked the elaborate tools available to navigators, most importantly the art of writing. Their knowledge was passed down orally, and yet it was extremely detailed, very accurate and in many respects superior to the instruments of the western navigators, such as Magellan and Cook, for whom the Pacific was a sea of constant surprises and uncertainty. There is a simple point that sums up the mastery over the seas accomplished by the Polynesian navigators: apart from a northern route across the Atlantic, managed for several centuries by the Vikings and their descendants, western European sailors did not venture deep into their neighbourhood ocean until the end of the Middle Ages.

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As they developed these techniques over many centuries, they also learned the art of dead reckoning, judging distance as they sailed to gain some sense of longitude; they appear to have found this easier to do than European sailors, who had to await the invention of the chronometer in the eighteenth century to be sure of their longitude. Tupaia, a Polynesian navigator who accompanied Captain Cook, astonished Cook’s companions by his almost instinctive awareness of where the ship stood, without instruments or written records. The Polynesian navigators proved that one can solve some challenging problems without any technology at all, just the super-computer of the human brain.38 As for latitude, much easier to judge, they observed the stars: ‘to travel between the south of the main Solomons and the Santa Cruz group was as simple as following a zenith star path – east or west – with the seasonal winds.’39 Knowing the stars was the key to successful navigation.

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Environmental collapse provides the best explanation for the end of the era of prosperity that brought these platforms and statues into being – indeed, over the following centuries statues were cast down, the inhabitants went to war with one another, often living in caves, and competition for scarce resources intensified. Easter Island may well be the great exception to the general rule that islands were searched out deliberately; whether or not it was found by accident, it remained off the mental map of the Polynesian navigators. Like Hawai’i and New Zealand, it did not feature on the hand-drawn map the Polynesian navigator Tupaia prepared for Captain Cook, which only extended as far east as the Marquesas.26 Pitcairn Island too was cut off from the rest of Polynesia and was empty when the mutineers from the Bounty arrived in 1790; but it had been inhabited in the past, as stone remains were found – clearly there had been an extremely isolated population that had died out or emigrated.

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

It enabled Cook to plot a reliable course across his charts from his starting point to his destination, just as we do when we follow a map today. But in 2007, Di Piazza and Pearthree pointed out that this is not at all how a Polynesian navigator like Tupaia would have traveled. Generations of scholars with Western eyes and brains, they argued, had been looking at his chart all wrong. Although many aspects of Polynesian navigation are still poorly understood, a key concept is that of etak, or “moving island” navigation, in which a sailor thinks of his canoe as being stationary throughout a journey, while the surrounding water and islands flow past.* When we follow a Western map, we imagine ourselves looking down on it with a bird’s-eye view: the terrain stays still while we move across it.

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* * * Archaeologists now agree that the inhabitants of the Pacific did migrate by sea as Cook suggested, moving eastward from Southeast Asia from the second millennium BC, and fanning out in several stages to Tonga, Hawaii and Easter Island before eventually reaching New Zealand, perhaps as late as AD 1200. But although stories brought home by Cook and other explorers initially inspired romantic ideas about the Polynesians being expert ocean navigators guided by the stars, by the 1950s this was replaced by skepticism. Tupaia’s chart looked all wrong, for example. Once the geography of the Pacific was understood, most of the islands he showed were unidentifiable or wildly out of place. Meanwhile, explorers’ accounts of how priests like Tupaia navigated were sketchy, and in Polynesia itself, populations had crashed due to diseases introduced by the Europeans, with the loss of vast stores of cultural knowledge.

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More recent archaeological and genetic findings are revealing that the Polynesians once routinely sailed and traded between far-flung Pacific islands and even as far as the Americas, long before the arrival of Columbus. Meanwhile, researchers have been studying the few clues that are left to work out how they did it. In one of the most influential accounts, the sailor and Polynesian scholar David Lewis studied historical descriptions of Polynesian wayfinding and interviewed surviving Micronesian navigators to discover a system almost unimaginably different from the Western approach. Polaris, so crucial for European sailors, is not visible in the southern hemisphere, and instead of measuring altitudes, Pacific sailors used a “star compass,” taking their bearings from the rising and setting points of stars on the horizon.* When setting sail for a destination, navigators aimed their canoes toward the appropriate star.

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, BRICs, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, colonial rule, company town, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Easter island, Frank Gehry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, Monroe Doctrine, ocean acidification, oil shock, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, The Day the Music Died, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

The white mess into which all this eventually disintegrates is the surf—from the Anglo-Saxon term suff, indicating the inrush of water toward the shore. 2 Heyerdahl wanted to show that Polynesia could have been settled by South American boatmen who drifted with the currents, and that the cultural basis for the Pacific islands is thus all incontrovertibly Incan. Later research showed that Polynesians knew very well how to navigate without instruments, and had long sailed the often considerable distances between the ocean’s islands. DNA results disprove Heyerdahl’s theories, and show that Polynesia was settled from the west, from Asia. His 1947 expedition is seen now as little more than an amusing, though courageous, stunt. 3 The first of three, whose grandson, Hiram Bingham III, was an early claimant to finding the ruins of the Incan citadel of Machu Picchu, in the Peruvian Andes. 4 Ireland has tried hard, though with scant success, to claim George Freeth.

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EPILOGUE The journey of the Hawaiian wa’a Hokule‘a is being reported until 2017, and in great daily detail, by the Polynesian Voyaging Society in Honolulu. Much background to the story can be found in Sam Low’s book on the Hawaiian Renaissance, Hawaiki Rising; in Ben Finney’s explanations of Polynesian navigation, Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors; and most fascinating of all, in David Lewis’s account, We, the Navigators. BIBLIOGRAPHY Armitage, David, and Alison Bashford, eds. Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Bain, Kenneth. The Friendly Islanders. London: Hodder, 1967.

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See also Taiwan Chinese migrants, 21, 441 Australia and, 295 Hawaii and, 5 Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 182, 394, 407–25 Chinese Politburo, 393 Chouinard, Yvon, 148 Christian, Fletcher, 216, 219 Christian, Steve, 219 Christian missionaries, 44, 50, 130–31, 212 Christmas Island (later Kiritimati Island) nuclear tests, 18, 37 refugee camp, 300–302 tragedy of 2010, 302 Churchill, Sarah, 108 Churchill, Winston, 108, 203–5 Chuuk Island, 4, 10–11, 434 Cicero, 24 Ciliberti, Vincent, 108 Cincinnati Enquirer, 75 clams, deep-sea, 319–21, 324, 328–29 Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, 333 Clark, George “Grubby,” 143–47 Clark Air Base, 381–86, 384, 389 Clark Foam, 145–46 climate change, 262–65, 364, 366 coral reefs and, 342, 346–48 El Niño (ENSO) and, 254, 262 Madden-Julian Oscillation, 263 typhoons and cyclones and, 242–47 Clinton, Bill, 295 Clipperton Island, 216n coal, 270, 348–50 Cocos Plate, 313, 316 Cohen, Albert, 85 Cold War, 33, 153, 381 Cold War, term introduced, 153n Colombia, 21, 316 colonialism. See also specific colonies and colonial powers end of, 27–28, 201, 190, 211–29 Hawaii and, 351–52 Micronesia and, 8–9, 43–45 Polynesian navigation and, 433–34 Columbia Pictures, 123 Communism. See Cold War; and specific countries Compact of Free Association, 16 computers, 111 consumer electronics, 110–19 container shipping, 19, 117–18, 200, 363, 392, 393n continental drift, 311–14 Cook, James, 3, 130, 212, 343n, 352, 431–32, 437 Cook Islands, 6 Copland, Aaron, 290n copra plantations, 9, 19 coral polyps, 345 Coral Princess (ocean liner), 5 coral reefs, 22, 339–50 bleaching events, 340–42, 341, 345–47, 443 Chinese building on, 399 Coral Sea, 342 Coriolis, Gustave, 263 Corliss, Jack, 320–22 Corona del Mar, California, 140 Coward, Noël, 108 Cowpens, USS (destroyer), 407–9 crabs, deep-sea, 321, 324 Crescent Group, 396 Crick, Francis, 102 Crosby, Bing, 210 Crowley, Aleister, 291 crown-of-thorns starfish, 347–48 Cruise of the Snark, The (London), 133 Cuba, 347n, 401n Cunard Line, 190–95, 191, 199–200 currents, 255 Curtiss, USS (seaplane tender), 70 Cyana (minisubmarine), 328 cyclones, 22, 232–37, 246–48, 253, 261.

The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World―and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, British Empire, disinformation, Easter island, financial innovation, Google Earth, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, polynesian navigation, seigniorage, South China Sea, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

The important exceptions were Muslim navigators who used sextants, and the Chinese, who were making magnetic shipboard compasses just around the year 1000. Skilled Polynesian and Viking mariners were able to set their course by careful observation of waves, seaweed, birds’ flying patterns, and the contours of land. Mau Piailug, a Micronesian who studied the traditional Polynesian system of navigation, taught it in the 1980s to Steve Thomas, then an avid navigator, and later the host of the television show This Old House. When the weather was clear, he used the stars to navigate, Mau explained, and when the sky was cloudy, he used the shapes of the waves to determine his course. Like the Polynesian explorers, the Vikings used no instruments.

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With multiple masts and sails, these vessels have been archeologically recovered in the South China Sea and Southeast Asian waters. The Phanom Surin shipwreck, the largest boat of this type found so far, measured some 115 feet (35 m) long. At present we have no way of knowing whether these early sailors used double canoes or larger boats with multiple sails. We are certain that Polynesian navigators ventured east into the Pacific at the same time as the Malay voyages to Madagascar. Starting from Micronesia, the Polynesians gradually fanned out, reaching Fiji, Samoa, Hawaii, Easter Island (Rapa Nui), and New Zealand, the last place on earth to be occupied by humans, in around AD 1300. The settlers left behind shards of distinctive pottery, which make it possible to trace their route, though controversy still surrounds the exact date when each island was settled.

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In the late 1700s, Cook’s men noticed that the Polynesians were traveling great distances on fishing expeditions for large mammals, probably orca or bottlenose dolphins. When they made their map together, Cook realized how knowledgeable Tupaia was about local geography, but Cook didn’t record precisely how the Polynesian found his way around the islands. Detailed information about Polynesian navigation techniques came in the late twentieth century from anthropologists working on the more remote Pacific islands. These scholars recorded traditions that had died out on the more centrally located islands. One of the best informed mariners was Mau Piailug. He was born in 1930 and grew up on the Micronesian island of Satawal in the Caroline Island chain, where he learned how to navigate from tribal elders.

Fodor's Big Island of Hawaii by Fodor’s Travel Guides

Airbnb, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, Easter island, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, polynesian navigation, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

TOURS Arnott’s Lodge and Hiking Adventures SPECIAL-INTEREST TOURS | This outfitter takes small tours (maximum nine guests) to the summit of Maunakea for sunset and then stops on the way down the mountain, where guides give visual lectures (dependent on clear skies) using handheld lasers. They focus on major celestial objects and Polynesian navigational stars. The excursion departs from Hilo, offers pickup from Hilo hotels, and includes hot beverages. The company also offers a traveler’s lodge and a number of volcano park and Puna eruption site adventure hikes. Private tours are available, as are alternate trips to the mountain for sunrise, when the summit is far less crowded.

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HImiloa Astronomy Center SCIENCE MUSEUM | Part Hawaiian cultural center, part astronomy museum, part planetarium, this center provides community outreach for the astronomy program at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. With its interactive exhibits, full-dome planetarium shows, and regularly scheduled talks and events, the center is a must-see for anyone interested in the stars and planets, Hawaiian cultural history, and early Polynesian navigation. Admission includes one planetarium show and an all-day pass to the exhibit hall, which features more than 100 interactive displays. The lunch buffet at the adjoining Sky Garden Restaurant is popular and affordable. A five-minute drive from downtown Hilo, the center is located above the main campus at the university’s Science and Technology Park.

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Kurlansky

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Khyber Pass, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, working poor

But in a remote corner of the far-flung British Empire, there was a people who took on the British with classic nonviolent activism. The far South Pacific seems to have been one of the last places settled by humans. The few islands beyond Australia are not near anyone else nor on the way to anywhere. The first people to go there were Polynesians. In 950, a Polynesian navigator named Kupe discovered the islands, which are today New Zealand. Following his discovery there was a sizable migration of Polynesians to these un-inhabited islands. Polynesians are usually portrayed in movies as a gentle, peaceful people. But this was often not the case, and certainly not the case with the ones who settled New Zealand and called themselves the Maori, which means “Children of Heaven.”

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission by Jim Bell

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Virgin Galactic

After moving to Hawaii from Caltech, I was doubly fortunate to find two amazing families there in the islands—one made up of close friends and mentors who helped me in my work world at the university, and the other made up of close friends and mentors who helped me after hours when I learned how to paddle as part of a Hawaiian outrigger canoe club. Paddling with my brothers and sisters in the waves off Waikiki Beach, learning about ancient Polynesian navigation and other local traditions, and kicking back afterward to soak in some “island style” music and food taught me not just a new word—ohana, Hawaiian for “family”—but the inner spirit behind the word as well. If any one person was the embodiment of ohana, it was Fraser Fanale, a professor (now retired) of planetary science who specialized in thinking about the history of water and other “volatile” molecules in the solar system—on Mars, on the satellites of Jupiter . . . anywhere.

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In a little less than 300,000 years, Voyager 2 will pass about 270,000 AU (about 4.3 light-years) from the famous young, hot, blue star called Sirius. Sirius is famous partly because it is the brightest star in the sky, aside from the sun, and partly because ancient civilizations, such as the Egyptians, Greeks, and Polynesians used Sirius for timekeeping and navigation. Voyager 2 will be half as far away from Sirius as we are now, and so what many of us call the Dog Star (the heart of the constellation Canis Major) will be four times brighter to the spacecraft. An impressive sight that would be, if we could somehow plan to turn the cameras back on in the year 298,015.

Discover Kaua'i Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

carbon footprint, Easter island, G4S, haute couture, land reform, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, profit motive, union organizing, white picket fence

The 1970s introduced a cultural awakening, due largely to two events: in 1974 a small group called the Polynesian Voyaging Society (http://pvs.kcc.hawaii.edu/) committed themselves to building and sailing a replica of an ancient Hawaiian voyaging canoe, to prove that the first Polynesian settlers were capable of navigating the Pacific without the use of Western technology such as sextants and compasses. When the Hokule'a made its maiden 4800-mile roundtrip voyage to Tahiti in 1976, it instantly became a symbol of rebirth for Hawaiians, prompting a cultural revival unparalleled in Hawaiian history.

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PREPARATIONS Book Na Pali sea tours as early in your trip as possible, as high surf or foul weather may lead to cancellations. If you are prone to seasickness – a very real issue – inquire about sea conditions, take medication ahead of time, and opt for the catamaran. Morning trips generally have the calmest seas. Sailing Given all of those Polynesian navigators, you might think that Kaua'i would be a great place to rent a sailboat. But the mighty Pacific is no Caribbean Sea, friendly to bareboaters. The lack of harbors and anchorages, and the magnitude of the waves, particularly in winter, translates into no sailboat rentals. That does not mean there is no sailing to be had; there are numerous companies who will take you on a catamaran tour of the Na Pali Coast, and this is a wonderful experience, as long as your stomach agrees ( Click here ).

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester

Beryl Markham, British Empire, cable laying ship, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, financial engineering, friendly fire, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

All the early navigational academies of Europe regarded the sea beyond Bojador as quite impassable. Its very existence stands as one of the reasons why the central Atlantic Ocean, despite having almost certainly the world’s most populous shores, was the last of the great seas to be properly navigated. Polynesian navigators had long before crisscrossed the Pacific; Persians and Gulf Arab sailors had taken their reed-and-creosote sailing craft across upper parts of the Indian Ocean; Chinese sailors knew the intricacies of the eastern Indian Ocean and their various littoral seas; and the Vikings knew the navigational complexities of the far north.

Lonely Planet Kauai by Lonely Planet, Adam Karlin, Greg Benchwick

call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Easter island, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Paradox of Choice, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, union organizing

Pohaku T'sCLOTHING ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %808-742-7500; www.pohaku.com; 3430 Poʻipu Rd; h10am-6pm Mon-Sat, to 5pm Sun) Spot the Kauaʻi-made clothing hanging out on the lanai (when it's not raining), including unique aloha shirts, and a grab bag of souvenirs indoors. Stonewashed (pohaku means stone in Hawaiian) T-shirt designs are printed with Hawaiian themes such as petroglyphs, Polynesian carvings and navigational maps. 8Information Koloa Post OfficePOST ( GOOGLE MAP ; %808-742-1319; www.usps.com; 5485 Koloa Rd; h9am-4pm Mon-Fri, to 11am Sat) Serves both Koloa and Poʻipu. First Hawaiian BankBANK ( GOOGLE MAP ; %808-742-1642; www.fhb.com; 3506 Waikomo Rd; h8:30am-4pm Mon-Thu, to 6pm Fri) Has a 24-hour ATM. 8Getting There & Away Kauaʻi Bus stops in Koloa on its route between Poʻipu and Kalaheo; the latter has onward connections to Lihuʻe and the Westside.

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The 1970s introduced a cultural awakening, due largely to two events: in 1974 a small group called the Polynesian Voyaging Society (http://pvs.kcc.hawaii.edu/) committed themselves to building and sailing a replica of an ancient Hawaiian voyaging canoe, to prove that the first Polynesian settlers were capable of navigating the Pacific without the use of Western technology such as sextants and compasses. When the Hokuleʻa made its maiden 4800-mile round-trip voyage to Tahiti in 1976, it instantly became a symbol of rebirth for Hawaiians, prompting a cultural revival unparalleled in Hawaiian history.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

GPS depends on an array of satellites that orbit Earth twice a day, traveling through the near vacuum of space at 8,724 miles an hour at an altitude of 12,550 miles. Every time your phone gets a GPS fix to help you navigate to your next destination, it’s a combination of wayfinding—pioneered by Polynesian maritime navigators, who used it to travel thousands of miles with no technology more sophisticated than their powers of observation and a detailed mental map of the positions of stars and the sun—and Einstein’s discovery of relativity. On account of traveling so quickly and the reduced gravity at their altitude, the precise atomic clocks on board each of the world’s twenty-four GPS satellites tick just a bit slower than their counterparts on the ground, which is a relativistic effect predicted by Einstein.

Lonely Planet Best of Hawaii by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, G4S, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, low cost airline, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation

It shows how the peoples of Oceania are diverse, yet deeply connected, and is filled with cultural treasures such as canoes, woven mats and contemporary artwork. Planetarium The Bishop Museum is also home to Oʻahu’s only planetarium, which has an ever-changing range of shows, including traditional Polynesian methods of wayfaring (navigation). Check the museum website for upcoming shows. Star projector, planetarium | CLEANFOTOS/SHUTTERSTOCK © Other Exhibit Areas The eye-popping, state-of-the-art multisensory Science Adventure Center is based on better understanding Hawaii’s environment. You can explore areas of science in which Hawaii has gained international recognition, including volcanology, oceanography, and biodiversity.

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This would mark the northern reach of their migrations, which were so astounding that Captain James Cook – the first Western explorer to take their full measure – could not conceive of how the Polynesians did it, settling ‘in every quarter of the Pacific Ocean’ and becoming one of the most widespread nations on earth. Although the discovery of Hawaiʻi may have been accidental, subsequent journeys were not. Polynesians were highly skilled seafarers, navigating over thousands of miles of open ocean without maps, and with only the sun, stars, wind and waves to guide them. In double-hulled wooden canoes, they imported to the islands over two dozen food plants and domestic animals, along with their religious beliefs and social structures.

Fodor's Hawaii 2012 by Fodor's Travel Publications

big-box store, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Easter island, gentrification, global village, Maui Hawaii, new economy, off-the-grid, out of africa, place-making, polynesian navigation, urban sprawl

But Hawaiians are resilient people, and with the rise of the civil rights movement they began to reflect on their own national identity, bringing an astonishing renaissance of the Hawaiian culture to fruition. The people rediscovered language, the hula, the chant or mele, and even the traditional Polynesian art of canoe building and wayfinding (navigation by the stars without use of instruments). This cultural resurrection is now firmly established in today’s Hawaiian culture, with a palpable pride that exudes from Hawaiians young and old. The election of President Barack Obama has definitely done its share of fueling not only Hawaiian pride but also ubiquitous hope for a better future.

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A bit cheaper than the others at $125 per person, Arnott’s tours leave from Hilo; their tour does not include dinner, they do not bring warm clothing for guests, and they do not have their own telescope. Focusing more on the experience of the mountain than astronomy, Arnott’s brings binoculars for each guest and provides an informative lesson on major celestial objects and Polynesian navigational stars. | 808/969–7097 | www.arnottslodge.com. Hawai‘i Forest & Trail. This outfitter stops for dinner along the way at a historic ranch, and brings parkas, gloves, and their own telescope along. Cookies and hot chocolate make cold stargazing more pleasant. The price is $189 per person. | 808/331–8505 or 800/464–1993 | www.hawaii-forest.com.

Fodor's Hawaii 2013 by Fodor's

big-box store, carbon footprint, Easter island, gentrification, global village, Maui Hawaii, new economy, off-the-grid, out of africa, polynesian navigation, three-masted sailing ship, urban sprawl

But Hawaiians are resilient people, and with the rise of the civil rights movement they began to reflect on their own national identity, bringing an astonishing renaissance of the Hawaiian culture to fruition. The people rediscovered language, hula, chanting, and even the traditional Polynesian arts of canoe building and wayfinding (navigation by the stars without use of instruments). This cultural resurrection is now firmly established in today’s Hawaiian culture, with a palpable pride that exudes from Hawaiians young and old. The election of President Barack Obama definitely increased Hawaiian pride and inspired a ubiquitous hope for a better future.

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Excursion fees range from $90 to $189. Going With a Guide Arnott’s Lodge & Hiking Adventures. Arnott’s Mauna Kea summit tour focuses more on the experience of the mountain than astronomy. Each guest gets to use a pair of binoculars while the guide provides an informative lesson on major celestial objects and Polynesian navigational stars. The excursion departs from Hilo and costs $175 per person, including parkas and hot beverages. The outfitter also offers lava and waterfall tours. | Hilo | 808/969–7097 | www.arnottslodge.com. Hawaii Forest & Trail. This outfitter leaves from Kona and also picks up guests at the Hilton Waikoloa Resort and at the Paniolo Greens Condominiums in Waikoloa Village.

You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall by Colin Ellard

A Pattern Language, call centre, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, congestion pricing, Frank Gehry, global village, Google Earth, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, job satisfaction, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, peak oil, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Snow Crash, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban sprawl

HUMAN TRAVELERS BUILD GRADIENT MAPS WITH SNOW, SAND, AND STORY In the Arctic, reliable landmarks or inukshuks that can be used to guide trekkers on the tundra are not always around. In the huge central Arctic Barrens, a traveler is more likely to be confronted with nothing more than flat fields of white ground that extend as far as the eye can see in all directions. In this sense, Barrens navigators are in a situation not very different from that of Polynesian seafarers. Though Inuit navigators can use some simple celestial information such as the position of the sun or moon for navigation, they rely less commonly on sophisticated star maps than their more southerly counterparts. One reason for this is that much travel takes place in the summer months, when the periods of darkness can be very short or even nonexistent.

Hawaii Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, bike sharing, British Empire, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Easter island, Food sovereignty, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, James Watt: steam engine, Kula ring, land reform, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, Silicon Valley, tech billionaire

Across the Great Lawn, the eye-popping, state-of-the-art multisensory Science Adventure Center lets kids walk through an erupting volcano, take a minisubmarine dive and play with three floors of interactive multimedia exhibits. The Bishop Museum is also home to Oʻahu’s only planetarium, which highlights traditional Polynesian methods of wayfaring (navigation), using wave patterns and the position of the stars to travel thousands of miles across the open ocean in traditional outrigger canoes, as well as modern astronomy and the cutting-edge telescope observatories atop Mauna Kea on the Big Island. Shows usually start at 11:30am, 1:30pm and 3:30pm daily except Tuesday, and are included in the museum admission price.

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Pohaku T'sCLOTHING ( GOOGLE MAP ; %808-742-7500; www.pohaku.com; 3430 Poʻipu Rd; h10am-6pm Mon-Sat, to 5pm Sun) Spot the Kauaʻi-made clothing hanging out on the lanai (when it's not raining), including unique aloha shirts, and a grab bag of souvenirs indoors. Stonewashed (pohaku means stone in Hawaiian) T-shirt designs are printed with Hawaiian themes such as petroglyphs, Polynesian carvings and navigational maps. Art HouseARTS & CRAFTS ( GOOGLE MAP ; %808-742-1400; www.arthousehawaii.com; 3440 Poʻipu Rd; h11am-6pm) Local artists show their plein-air paintings, mixed media and groovy handicrafts such as sweet silver jewelry and art boxes at this brightly lit gallery. Owner Julie Berg's acrylic images shine with an unusual additive: surfboard resin. 8Information First Hawaiian BankBANK ( GOOGLE MAP ; %808-742-1642; www.fhb.com; 3506 Waikomo Rd; h8:30am-4pm Mon-Thu, to 6pm Fri) Has a 24-hour ATM.

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This would mark the northern reach of their migrations, which were so astounding that Captain Cook – the first Western explorer to take their full measure – could not conceive of how the Polynesians did it, settling 'every quarter of the Pacific Ocean' and becoming one of the most widespread nations on earth. Although the discovery of Hawaii may have been accidental, subsequent journeys were not. Polynesians were highly skilled seafarers, navigating over thousands of miles of open ocean without maps, and with only the sun, stars, wind and waves to guide them. In double-hulled wooden canoes, they imported to the islands over two dozen food plants and domestic animals, along with their religious beliefs and social structures.

Frommer's Hawaii 2009 by Jeanette Foster

airport security, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, Easter island, glass ceiling, gravity well, haute couture, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, place-making, polynesian navigation, retail therapy, South China Sea, sustainable-tourism, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Yogi Berra

The world’s only remaining fully rigged, four-masted ship is on display as a After viewing the Falls of Clyde, wander over National Historic Landmark. Still afloat, to the: the 266-foot, iron-hulled ship was built 5 Hokulea in 1878 in Glasgow, Scotland. Matson If you’re lucky, the 60-foot Polynesian Navigation bought the ship in 1899 to canoe will be docked, but it’s often out on 09_285558-ch05.qxp 222 8/11/08 10:39 PM Page 222 C H A P T E R 5 . OA H U, T H E G AT H E R I N G P L AC E jaunts. In 1976, this reproduction of the traditional double-hulled sailing canoe proved to the world that the Polynesians could have made the 6,000-mile roundtrip from Tahiti to Hawaii, navigating only by the stars and the wave patterns.

The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, it's over 9,000, Kuiper Belt, Kwajalein Atoll, lolcat, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, the scientific method

Top 10 Maui, Molokai and Lanai by Bonnie Friedman

airport security, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, G4S, Maui Hawaii, polynesian navigation, Ronald Reagan

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

These voyages, unrecorded and unrecalled, rank among the greatest of human explorations. How did they manage such remarkable journeys without so much as a compass? Sailors relied on nature, reading the subtle but plentiful signs of wind, waves, and wildlife. Anthropologist David Lewis, who worked with modern Polynesians trained in traditional navigational techniques, witnessed their ability to steer in part by the rolling of the sea. Years of experience had taught them to sense their location and direction by feeling the motions of the waves.3 Residents of the Marshall Islands recorded this profound knowledge of the sea in three-dimensional maps of sticks and shells.

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Burning Man, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Webb Space Telescope, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, overview effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Sammy used to be a small version of a spiral galaxy with a strong bar connecting the arms in the middle—you can still see remnants of a bar if you look with one of your telescopes—but I got a bit miffed one day and tried to use my gravitational pull to rip Sammy apart. I swear it wasn’t jealousy! I hadn’t eaten anything in a few millennia. Even galaxies get hangry. Both Larry and Sammy are so easy to see with your weak eyes—often together—that ancient humans knew and told stories about them long before anyone cared to write them down. Polynesian seafarers knew how to navigate by Larry and Sammy, the Maori in your modern New Zealand marked the clouds’ return in their sky to predict weather, and some groups native to Australia looked to them as the resting place for the spirits of their loved ones. The knowledge of how the two dwarf galaxies could be used was passed from generation to generation by word of mouth, wrapped in stories to make them easier to remember.

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Our curiosity and intrepid spirit has led people to explore beyond the safety net of their known world, and into the deepest seas, around the poles and to outer space. Migrations have distributed people across the Earth’s landscapes, spreading our genes, cultural practices, beliefs and technologies. For thousands of years, Polynesians used migration to deal with overpopulation and civil wars in their restricted island environments. Polynesian wayfinders were able to expertly navigate across thousands of kilometres of open ocean using the stars and their unparalleled knowledge of ocean currents, occupying remote islands from Hawaii to Indonesia. By contrast, European navigators discovering New Worlds (and new parts of Old Worlds) often found them already peopled.

Collapse by Jared Diamond

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, prisoner's dilemma, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

A much wider gap of ocean separates those West Polynesian islands from the islands of East Polynesia: the Cooks, Societies, Marquesas, Australs, Tuamotus, Hawaii, New Zealand, Pitcairn group, and Easter. Only after a "Long Pause" of about 1,500 years was that gap finally breached—whether because of improvements in Polynesian canoes and navigation, changes in ocean currents, emergence of stepping-stone islets due to a drop in sea level, or just one lucky voyage. Some time around A.D. 600-800 (the exact dates are debated), the Cooks, Societies, and Marquesas, which are the East Polynesian islands most accessible from West Polynesia, were colonized and became in turn the sources of colonists for the remaining islands.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, California energy crisis, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Donner party, Easter island, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, new economy, North Sea oil, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, unemployed young men

A much wider gap of ocean separates those West Polynesian islands from the islands of East Polynesia: the Cooks, Societies, Marquesas, Australs, Tuamotus, Hawaii, New Zealand, Pitcairn group, and Easter. Only after a “Long Pause” of about 1,500 years was that gap finally breached—whether because of improvements in Polynesian canoes and navigation, changes in ocean currents, emergence of stepping-stone islets due to a drop in sea level, or just one lucky voyage. Some time around A.D. 600-800 (the exact dates are debated), the Cooks, Societies, and Marquesas, which are the East Polynesian islands most accessible from West Polynesia, were colonized and became in turn the sources of colonists for the remaining islands.

Felaheen by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Boeing 747, bread and circuses, haute cuisine, polynesian navigation, sensible shoes

Hawaii by Jeff Campbell

airport security, big-box store, California gold rush, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, company town, creative destruction, Drosophila, Easter island, G4S, haute couture, land reform, lateral thinking, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, risk/return, sustainable-tourism, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence

Displays on early tourism include a reproduction of a Matson liner stateroom and historical photos of Waikiki from the early 20th century, when only the Matson-built Moana and Royal Hawaiian hotels shared the horizon views with Diamond Head. The museum’s centerpiece is Hokule′a, a traditional double-hulled sailing canoe that has repeatedly sailed from Hawaii to the South Pacific and back, retracing the routes of the islands’ original Polynesian settlers using only ancient methods of wayfaring (navigation that relies on the sun, stars and wind and wave patterns; Click here). Outside, climb aboard the Falls of Clyde, the world’s last four-masted, four-rigged ship. Built in 1878 in Glasgow, the ship once carried sugar and passengers between Hilo on the Big Island of Hawai′i and San Francisco, then oil, before finally being stripped down to a barge.

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Across the Great Lawn, the state-of-the-art, family-oriented Science Adventure Center uses interactive multimedia exhibits and demonstrations to explain Hawaii’s natural environment, letting kids walk through an erupting volcano or take a minisub dive. The museum is also home to O′ahu’s only planetarium (848-4136), which highlights traditional Polynesian methods of wayfaring (navigation), along with astronomy and the telescope observatories atop Mauna Kea. Shows are usually held at 11:30am, 1:30pm and 3:30pm, and are included in the museum admission price. A gift shop off the lobby sells books on the Pacific not easily found elsewhere, as well as some high-quality Hawaiian crafts and souvenirs.

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

California gold rush, Easter island, index card, Maui Hawaii, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steve Jobs, trade route

For instance, the New Zealand natives call themselves Maori, while native Hawaiians’ name for themselves is Kanaka Maoli. “Same language, same people, same culture,” the Hawaiian activist Kekuni Blaisdell told me. Cook asked, “How shall we account for this Nation spreading itself so far over this Vast ocean?” Answer: the ancient Polynesians were some of the most skilled and talented natural-born navigators the world has ever known. Which is how the natives of Tahiti and the Marquesas settled the Hawaiian Islands at least a millennium ago—eyeballing stars from their double-hulled canoes for 2,600 miles. The missionary Hiram Bingham dismissed the Polynesians’ sailing expertise, writing off the migration to Hawaii as dumb luck, supposing that they arrived “without much knowledge of navigation” just as “trees from foreign countries repeatedly land on their shores.”

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British by Jeremy Paxman

British Empire, call centre, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Etonian, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kibera, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, mass immigration, offshore financial centre, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade