The last navigator

by Stephen D. Thomas

Six thousand years ago, a seafaring people left their homeland in Southeast Asia to voyage into the Pacific. They moved down the chain of Melanesian islands to Samoa and Tonga, then north to Micronesia. At about the same time as Christ, they pushed eastward to the Marquesas and then outward to the uttermost reaches of the Pacific : Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand. In most of the Pacific the navigational skills that led these people on this great adventure no longer exist. But on the tiny coral atolls of Micronesia they live on. There, men still navigate without charts or instruments, using only their knowledge of stars, waves, and birds to guide their huge, hand carved canoes. Widely scattered and barely self sustaining on their isolated islands, these people carry on a seagoing tradition that weaves myth, magic, ethics and metaphysics into a seamless web, the centre of which is navigation. Mau Piailug lives on the small Caroline Island of Satawal ... It was to Piailug and Sataw