Hokulea Voyage

Not directly related to island bio geography, but certainly related to islands and the Pacific region. The Hawaiian Voyaging Canoe, Hokulea, famous for navigating to Tahiti in the 1970s using only the stars as a navigation tool, is quite an amazing story of cultural wisdom that continues to inspire today. The techniques for navigating the open seas using only the constellations (celestial navigation) - no tools such as compasses or sextants, or even telescopes, as they were developed in ancient Polynesia was  lost to Hawaii, as there remained no skilled navigators back in the 1970s.

A Micronesian navigator, Mau Piailug, was the one to bring his navigation skills to Hawaii. The 1976 voyage was planned to demonstrate to the world that the ancient peoples of Oceania could have feasibly navigated the vast ocean without any instruments. This was held in much skepticism in academic circles in the day. Mau used his own navigation skills, as well as those he learned from Hawaiian archeology. Mr. Mau was hugely important: The success of the Micronesian-Polynesian cultural exchange, symbolized by Hōkūle‘a, had an impact throughout the Pacific. It contributed to the emergence of the second Hawaiian cultural renaissance and to a revival of Polynesian navigation and canoe building in Hawaii, New Zealand, Rarotonga and Tahiti. (2)

The Hokulea came to play an important part in the Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance of the 1970s, probably the single most important part of Native Hawaiian cultural history in the decade. Navigators like Mau and his student, Nainoa Thompson, became household names.

As was told me long ago, "Hokulea's name means "star of gladness" in Hawaiian, which refers to Arcturus, a guiding zenith star for Hawaiian navigators." (1) It is now on a very exciting circumnavigation voyage - it seeks to sail around the world, sill largely without the aid of modern technology. An unparalleled ambitious goal, it kicked off last year, has made stops in many Polynesian islands an dis currently moored in Gisborne, New Zealand. The  mission is called "Malama Honua" - "to care for the earth-" aiming to remind all people of their connectedness to the land.

(1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokulea
(2)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Piailug

-Zheng