She Sails the Seas Without Maps or Compasses | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

Foreign, I like to think of the voyage and canoes as taking us back in time on the ocean. The Hua Kamalu is a navigator with the Polynesian Voyaging Society. I'll often ask my crew, like, what do you think it would have been like to show up in Hawaii as the very first navigator on the first canoe? Imagine sort of a stunning nature that we would have seen because, of course, Hawaii has changed since we found it and since we’ve been here. But yes, I think we think of the early navigators more often than people probably realize.

Lihua and her fellow navigators don't use maps or modern instruments to navigate across the ocean. They use the stars, ocean waves, and other natural signs to guide them— a method that Pacific voyagers have used for thousands of years known as wayfinding. It's broadly wayfinding, for us, really is that idea that with the naked eye, with all of your senses, and with your complete abilities to immerse yourself into the signs of the natural world that are around you, leaning on the learnings and the knowledge of our ancestors and all the people who have come before us. We have so much knowledge and the ability to use that information to find our way on canoes.

As we travel across the ocean, where there are no street signs, we navigate aboard a Polynesian voyaging canoe called Hokulea. Hokulea translates to the star of gladness, and it's a large double-hulled canoe, 62 feet long, with triangular crab claw sails. This is the style of the sailing vessels that the Hawaiians' voyaging ancestors used to travel between islands in the Pacific. We have all of these modern comforts that help us out these days, you know, and yet still I always say, gosh, our ancestors were either way more rugged and tough than us, or way smarter, or all of the above to be able to do these voyages in those times.

I'm Eli Chen, senior editor of audio, and this is Overheard, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. This week, we're setting sail with National Geographic Explorer Lihua Kamalu. She'll tell us what it's like to spend weeks out on the open ocean retracing the roots of our ancestors, as well as the harrowing and sleepless journey she took on her first voyage as captain. We'll talk about her next big adventure: a four-year voyage that will take her crew to dozens of communities around the Pacific. Out at sea, the ground is moving; everything's moving. So before you leave, you really need to get familiar with all the things that might be out there and then be ready to totally not have any idea what you're going to find. More after this.

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Centuries ago, early Polynesians used wayfinding to discover New Zealand, Hawaii, Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, and to navigate between islands in the Pacific. But following Captain Cook's arrival in Hawaii during the 16th century, and later the U.S. annexation of the islands in 1886, colonization suppressed Hawaiian cultural practices, and Native people eventually lost wayfinding knowledge. In the 20th century, Western thinkers circulated and published their ideas for how they believed people settled in Polynesia. That included Andrew Sharp and his accidental drift theory, claiming that early Polynesians accidentally drifted to Rapa Nui and other islands. There is also Thor Heyerdahl and The Voyage of the Contiki, which tried to prove that ancient humans sailed west from South America to colonize the islands.

Hawaiian cultural scholars say theories like these discredited the navigational skills and achievements of early Polynesians. Then, in the 1970s, there was this cultural renaissance among the Hawaiian community that was focused on reviving the native language, performing music and hula, and teaching Hawaiian culture to younger generations. You can actually hear the voices of this movement in the 1977 National Geographic TV special, Voyage of the Hokulea.

In "Coming Back to My Game," Unity—that's what we need is unity, come on, you Hawaiians, to our great-great ancestors that we have never known. The revival of Polynesian voyaging was very much a part of this renaissance. The idea to build Hokulea came from artist Herb Kane, who also appears in the Nat Geo TV special. In his studio, a Hawaiian artist paints the images of a past that now seems as insubstantial as a dream. But one time expatriate illustrator in Chicago, Herb Kane, has returned to the islands with a dream of his own: to recreate a Polynesian voyaging canoe and follow the supposed path of ancestral mariners, sailing from Hawaii to Tahiti and back.

Along with anthropologist Ben Finney and sailor Tommy Holmes, Kane founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society with the mission of demonstrating that early Polynesians were intentional voyagers and purposefully settled in Hawaii and other parts of the Polynesian Triangle. But in the 1970s, there were no living Hawaiians with wayfinding knowledge, so they enlisted the help of Mau Piailug, a master navigator from the island of Satawal in Micronesia, schooled in ancient methods of navigation by star and ocean swell. It is Pierre Mau Piailug who must try without instruments to guide Hokulea to Tahiti across 3,000 miles of open sea. Mau has voyaged alone across hundreds of miles of empty ocean, guided only by the computer in his mind.

On May 1st, 1976, the crew embarked from Honolulu Bay in Maui and made it to Papeete Harbor in Tahiti four weeks later. On June 4th, thousands of people cheered for their arrival. Foreign, I think the meaning of the canoe is very deep and powerful here in Hawaii and across Polynesia and beyond. I think it heralded a time that marked a space where everyone was able to remember how amazing and how incredible the history of this place was. And that was a marked difference from, you know, I think the decades prior, where there was this continuous removal of culture, practice, and traditions.

The Hua Kamalu was born in New York to parents who were both part Native Hawaiian. When she was little, they moved to Honolulu and enrolled Lihua and her sisters in a Hawaiian immersion program, where the curriculum was taught in the native Hawaiian language. And I think Hokulea is sort of not just the visual physical symbol of that we'd like to talk about here but really just this living manifestation of a reminder that you come from great people and a wonderful history. Lihua says she thought of the voyaging canoes as the space shuttle of her Pacific ancestors. She remembers what it was like when she and her classmates got to visit the Hokulea after it returned from a voyage in 1992.

And our whole school went to greet it at the beach when it returned from a very long voyage down to the Cook Islands back through Tahiti. So not only did we learn about it by watching videos in class and reading about it, we actually got to go down and touch the canoes and see them in action. So it was really inspiring, and it has always really been something that I think a lot of us grew up admiring from a distance mostly. But the reality was it was right there in our backyard, and how amazing that we get to be so close to this thing.

When Lihua grew up and went to college, she studied mechanical engineering, and she also started getting involved with the Polynesian Voyaging Society. I was like, you know, I have some nerdy skills, maybe that can help you guys. And that progressed rapidly into the training, getting out on the water. I had never really gone sailing much at all before that, really. Learning all the ins and outs of how a sailing vessel worked, the engineering of it. And then I think I started to see, sort of, engineering and everything that I was doing. I was like, you know, this is exactly all the things that I'm passionate about in my studies and my academia, and it's really not that far away from where I thought I was headed. And layer on to that what I knew was a huge impact on Hawaii and its community and its children, so it just slowly washed over in waves over the course of years.

Yeah, so help us imagine what it’s like to be, you know, on one of these canoes. Sure. As I mentioned, Hokulea is sort of the example I'll use. She's a very special canoe and special to everyone because she really was the first built in modern times. This is a double-hulled vessel, so each hull is 62 feet long, and they're identical, and they're lashed together with eight cross beams we call iyako that tie together both hulls. We call it the precursor to the modern catamaran.

Some people will say, "Hey, what's that catamaran?" You guys say, "Ah, well, it's kind of a big sister." And, you know, we like to think— and we don't have what people would say probably is more traditional in terms of sleeping in a hale or a house that sits at the center of the deck. We've sort of adapted it so that you actually sleep on the hulls themselves, with a little bit of a canvas that hopefully keeps out some of the sun and some of the waves and the rain, but not super effectively sometimes, depending on...

Yeah, so you're really exposed to the elements. It sounds like you are absolutely pretty exposed, and something I always tell new people is if you want to sort of experience what it's like, you can just kind of maybe go stand outside and then just stay out there for like a day and then a night, and then a day and then a night, and just kind of stay outside in your yard for like three weeks straight. And my very first voyage, I did not have a good respect for how much sun that actually was, and, you know, I was almost unrecognizably dark when I came back.

I think I was almost matching with my mom, who's very lovely and dark. But, uh, and it's very exposed, and a lot of times just being on board and sort of doing your day-to-day things is very uncomfortable. Right? Every single task involves being in an uncomfortable position or holding on so you don’t get knocked down as the waves hit the canoe. Going to the bathroom, using... you know, taking a shower, you just sort of do that in front of everybody. In the early days, you did.

We've developed sort of a more— and now that we have much more diversity on board, particularly me, we have a little private area that you can take care of all of your business, and that's towards the rear of the canoe. We have a little, like, cute little curtain that you can use, but everyone is respectful of it. You just let us know where you are, and I will talk to you if you’re using the restroom area because just making sure you’re still connected to the canoe. It's a very dangerous place to be where people can't see you, and we're going very fast on the ocean.

So I'm curious how wayfinding works out on the sea. How do you know where to go when you don’t have a GPS or even a compass? The most popular example that will be brought up in wayfinding is understanding really strongly the heavens above, the celestial sphere, if you will, the layout of all of the constellations and stars in the sky. And you don’t have to know all the astronomical information about all of them, but you need to know how to find them, where they are, and where they are in relation to one another—what sort of paths they take as they rise and set across the sky, which changes by your latitude.

The easiest example is always Mintaka, which is sort of the first star that will rise in the belt of Orion. And we have different names for them in Hawaiian. I’d say if you wanted to give yourself the minimum amount of time to be ready to see the stars in the right way, start one year before your voyage is going to happen and understand how the sky is moving as you look out every night.

So when you don’t have the stars, though, like when it’s during the day and the sun is out, like what do you look for? You have the sun. You have the sun from before sunup 'til sundown. You have the dawn sky; you have probably your most reliable thing, which is the ocean itself. If you’re sailing, hopefully, you’re on the ocean—hopefully, hopefully, you’re in an ocean that also has wind. I know that sounds super obvious, but some days we just have no wind and no waves, and we just sit there.

And that’s just something that happens when you're sailing. Anyone who sails will appreciate that. But waves are governed by wind, and waves create regular, readable patterns in the ocean that are long-range and very consistent, particularly in the tropics, particularly here in Polynesia, and they are very reliable to find your way. It means you're constantly needing to pay attention to them each hour and through the night.

So the navigator's job is to spend as little time sleeping as possible and as much time watching for consistency, watching for patterns in the sky and in the ocean, and also for changes and comparing what's going on between the two. Yeah, um, just do looking at birds help at all, and like looking at wildlife? Yes, um, birds are very special, and in fact, when we start to get closer to land, it's really the land-based birds that guide us to their islands.

And so it's another thing that you are looking carefully for when you approach them. Also, know what not to follow. Others, it's important to know what birds are followable and not followable. Yeah, because, you know, you have pelagic birds, you have birds that sleep at sea, and so you might follow them, but they might not get to land for like two to four years. So if you've got enough provisions, by all means, enjoy the journey, but you want to stick to the ones—and the specific ones I'm thinking about are our terns. They live on land; they either live in the trees or in the rocks or on the beaches, and these they go home every day. You want to find the birds that are reliably back home for supper, if you will.

[Music] Legend has it that long ago, Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of fire, sailed on a canoe from Tahiti to Hawaii, opening up a route between the islands. But even though folklore depicts a woman navigating by canoe to Hawaii, Polynesian voyaging has traditionally been passed down from grandfather to grandson. And since the first voyage to Tahiti in 1976, the Hokulea's journeys have been captained and largely navigated by men. That was until 2018 when the Polynesian Voyaging Society planned to sail Hokulea's sister canoe, the Hikianalia, 2,800 miles from Hawaii to California with the organization to meet with members of the Muigama Oloni tribe in San Francisco to ask for permission to arrive.

Before the voyage, on the flight home, I literally remember looking out the window of the Wineland flight at the ocean coast of California, and you could still see the ocean from the window. It was wild, like the waves were super crazy, there was white water and whitewash; you could tell it was very windy and very rough down there. And I think I said—I turned to my co-worker and said, "Wow, I'm so glad I'm not having to do this voyage because that looks so rough down there. I wouldn't want to be in that," which of course is going to haunt me later on because then we go home and my teacher, and I know what Thompson, he says, "I'm gonna ask you to captain this voyage," which is a huge, huge honor and responsibility.

I instantly thought of that picture I took in my mind—raging ocean off of San Francisco. I was like, "Oh, that way." And I remember, without, like, almost skipping a beat, I was like, "I'll take it all the way up there if you take it the rest of the way through that," because I'll take it through the calm waters. That, of course, was not part of the deal. And I had to, I think, sit with it for a little while before accepting that because a little bit of it, I think, is convincing yourself that you're ready to do this.

It seems always sometimes in this world, people can see that possibility and that potential before maybe I have. But the journey itself was both spectacular and terrible all at once because those exact ocean conditions that I had joked about on the airplane were what we got when we arrived. Yeah, so what was it like when you were out in the water dealing with all that? So this is actually the first voyage the Polynesian Voyaging Society had ever sent a canoe into the North Pacific to the West Coast. We leave out of Honolulu; we're in a little place called Kehi.

We circle around the east side of the island, around Diamond Head, around Makapu, and we head up, and our plan is to go straight north as long as we need to until we can get some wind behind us in what's sort of the North Pacific High, the high-pressure system. So the route and the plan and the navigation is to take us up north and then tack east and then find our way to California. The first about nine days, I would say, were perfect wind, perfect weather, clear skies, no rain. We caught fish every single day. I was almost— it was blissful, very surreal, dolphins playing on the bow day in and day out—just on schedule, they were there; it was like The Breakfast Club of dolphins.

And then we have to sort of cut our way over this high-pressure system, which is very hard to do in the middle of these wind systems. You get lulls, sort of like giant eyes of hurricanes, but obviously not the intensity of hurricanes. So we have very, very low wind, and we're moving at like one and a half to two knots—like we could walk that faster. You could probably just get out and crawl that fast, and so it's very slow going. But still with good weather. And the whole way we are practicing, and we are training young navigators as we go; this is now nine days, ten days, twelve days, fifteen days, nineteen days into the voyage, and we're getting closer and closer to California.

Partly because, like I said, we've been keeping track of where we came from, how fast we've been going, how far, how long, and what direction. And we're honing in on what we think of as San Francisco Bay. And in a matter of about twelve hours, we go from full sails sailing really fast, having a great time, to okay, it’s now a much heavier wind condition, it's very strong, and the waves are starting to build. We have to reef down the sails to just close them up a little bit more so that you're not catching as much wind, and it's not pushing you as fast. You do it little by little, and so I'm like, okay, close the back sail, close the front sail, okay, let's just go on this little tiny storm sail that we have.

We are going as slow as possible, and I said we average five knots as slow as possible in these wind conditions where the ocean, the sea was about—I'd say 20, 25 feet reasonably, and the wind was at about 20-25 knots. And for us, that was very not fun.

Yeah, it sounds like a roller coaster. It is; it's a roller coaster if someone took the roller coaster and smushed it closer together so that the downs are much more down, and the ups are much more up. Oh man, and these were the harshest conditions I had ever been on that canoe with, that I'd ever sailed with. And there's a little bit of maybe the internal, you know, you are the captain of this ship, and you need to have a plan for whatever happens. And there's this realization at some point of, you know, your role, and also to some degree, the futility you have in certain situations. There's only so much you can do to react to what's going on, and you just have to make your best course.

There was a lot going on, and so it was a couple days of severe, you know, storm-level winds and waves, and we took a lot of waves over the deck, over the canoe. One of my crew, just trying to get up and out to get on his watch to be able to steer and do all of that, was badly injured—a few broken bones. And the whole time, I know we are very close to California; it’s like, where is this thing, like, where is the end? And just like that, it's almost like the movies where, you know, the clouds part, and the sun comes out, and we're in the pristinely calm flat Half Moon Bay.

So I was like, how did that happen, you know? And it’s morning time, and we emerge from this weather. It was incredible, and we had been up, a lot of folks for a couple of days by that point; we were exhausted. There were greeting canoes and boats that were coming out to see us that were expecting us, and we have a little tracker thing, so they were watching us come along, and it’s sort of this exhausted joy when you arrive.

And you immediately transition out of this voyage that was you, that was your team, that was this canoe, to, "All right, now what are we doing for this community?" And so even though you're exhausted, we will do any number of things to make sure that we allow them to welcome us properly, and that we have these ceremonies that are very special and important, and cultural exchanges.

And it wasn’t until we arrived in San Francisco that, you know, a little girl came up to me and said, "You know, I want to take my picture with you, the first woman captain navigator." And I'm looking at my crew like, "What? Like who's running this narrative here, the first, you know, woman captain?" I'm just, I'm just the captain navigator. And they're like, "No, no, you're the first woman." She was so sweet; I like gave her my hat, and it was this really cute moment that I remember of, you know, maybe accepting where you are in life and remembering those that are looking at the example that you're setting and what it means to do this.

And I usually take a long time to get to that point, probably the few months after getting home from that voyage to reflect on the meaning of it in that way.

[Music] It is Saturday, April 30th, 2022. All right, this is day 12 of our voyage of Kelly Kahiki from Hawaii to Tahiti. It has been a good day getting back easting. In 2022, the Hua and her crew sailed the two sister canoes to Tahiti, retracing the route that Hokulea traveled during its maiden voyage nearly 50 years earlier. It took them about three weeks to travel roughly 3,000 miles to Tahiti. I asked Lihua about the kind of conversations she had with the Tahitians when they arrived: "The first were very special. They were honoring our relationship—the long-standing relationship that Hokulea has had to connect these two island spaces and honoring the leaders—honoring that we are trying to carry forward the tradition to a new generation.

It's important that if this voyaging is going to continue, that the next generation is connecting to these people and places because, you know, this isn't an organization and a canoe that goes from island to island. These are people connecting to people, and those relationships carry on well past the voyage itself. So there’s a lot of recognition of that heritage. There are groups that come with us from Hawaii to celebrate that, and so there’s a lot of work that goes on to ensure that everyone understands that we are one of the same people.

That usually takes a couple of days, actually, and usually involves ceremonies and things of that nature. And then we get into the why we're sailing today. Beyond just the perpetuation of our practice and beyond reconnecting with family, and a realization that as one family sharing this house of the Pacific, there are things that are affecting us equally across the ocean.

And so one event that was actually coinciding with our arrival there was the blue climate summit, and that allowed us to get into conversations about what was going on in the oceans and all of the different ways that our communities are reacting to or trying to proactively address these situations. You know, we sail, we go out on the ocean; we’re the ones actually living on these sea roads. What is our responsibility to that as people who live on these islands? What are we doing with our economies and our tourism and our agriculture, our fisheries, to think about whether or not these oceans are going to be healthy for our children to be sailing in?

And so these discussions happen alongside these recognitions of unity and family, and they're very powerful because most of it will invoke stories of memories of what life was like, what the abundance of the sea was like, and growing in our understanding of what it means to be a leader on the ocean and back in the community again. You know, speaking of, I guess, finding that unity among Pacific communities, you know, when this interview comes out, you'll be about to embark on a circumnavigation of the Pacific. So tell us about that journey: how far and how long is this voyage expected to be? Yep, we are headed out again; I’ll find no shortage of reasons to voyage across the ocean.

So we're going to be starting our next voyage; it’s called Moana. Yeah, it’s a long winding word, but it really is meant to honor this one ocean and the people that doesn’t have to be specifically in the Pacific Ocean, but that is where this journey is going to take us. So we're going to be starting in Alaska in June of this year and make our way around and across the ocean port by port.

Yeah, so you're starting in Alaska. You see, you're starting pretty cold, actually. Yeah, we're starting; we're starting in Alaska in the only time we could reasonably go to Alaska. And so the last time we had a bunch of Hawaiians up there on a canoe was 1995, which was reminiscent of how our relationship with Alaska began. It’s very special.

And what ultimately happened was when we talk about the traditional materials that allow us to build these vessels of discovery and exploration and these canoes, Hawaii back in the late 80s tried to build a second canoe, chocolate, with all of the traditional materials and trees and plants and with all the artisans that would have been needed in ancient past. And there was a realization that they were gone. A lot of work has happened since then to revitalize the actual land and realizing that canoes are really the healthy products of healthy communities and islands.

And Alaska stepped in to help and say, "We will gift you two trees from our children from the forests of Southeast Alaska." And those were sent down to Hawaii to build a canoe that is now Hawaii, and that celebrates this beautiful relationship that started with Alaska. And so we are actually starting off in the birthplace of three of the elders who made that happen. And, yes, it is going to be cold. I'm a little worried about the cold; we're gonna bring some of our Alaskan crew as well to join us on that journey!

But that will be sort of the launch that takes us for the next three years around the Pacific, through Central and South America, through our South Pacific Islands, back to the island of our teacher and navigator Mau Piailug, and all the way back up and around into Asia, to Japan. Yeah, that's so exciting!

I've read that one of the goals for this voyage is to educate 10 million navigators. I'm wondering what that means exactly and how that would be accomplished. Yeah, the word educated—education always seems to do one of two things: get people really inspired or like they turn around and say, "Oh gosh, education." So, yeah, I think navigators come in all different types.

And we might be, you know, traditional wayfinding navigators of canoes, but a lot of the, I think, value sets and the priorities and the ways that we are able to conduct these voyages in these canoes and lead these crews on these voyages are relevant to someone who might just be trying to navigate some part of their life or a project or community. This is both a celebration of those navigators and finding those 10 million navigators, but also allowing a pathway for people to find their way into navigators.

I always feel like there's almost this direct synergy and overlap with what we appreciate and joy about explorers, and layered into that the ability to dive into your own culture, your own history, your own practice, and have a unique way of navigating unto yourself.

Foreign, if you want to learn more about the Polynesian Voyaging Society, head to their website, which is Hokulea, H-O-K-U-L-E-A.com, and you can read more about Hokulea's 2022 journey to Tahiti in a piece that writer Jordan Salama reported for Nat Geo. That's all in the show notes right there in your podcast app.

This week's Overheard episode is produced by Kyrie Douglas and me, Eli Chen. Our senior producers are Brian Gutierrez and Jacob Pinter. Our manager of audio is Carla Wills, who edited this episode. Our executive producer of audio is Tavar Ardalon. Our photo editor is Julie Howe. Hansdale Su's sound design this episode and composed our theme music. The voyaging tape you heard was shared with us by the Polynesian Voyaging Society. This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners. The National Geographic Society is committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world.

Funds the work of National Geographic Explorer Lihua Kamalu. Michael Tribble is the vice president of integrated storytelling. Nathan Lump is National Geographic's editor-in-chief. And I'm your host and senior editor, Eli Chen. Thanks for listening, and see you next time.

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