The Wayfinders

The ancient Polynesians, Nainoa Thompson told me, were not navigators in a modern sense so much as wayfinders. Sailing from Tahiti for Oahu, for example, they did not set course for Pearl Harbor they set out to find a chain of islands, the Hawaiian Archipelago. Moreover, the distances in the Pacific are not as formidable as they appear on a chart. With the exception of the three most distant points of the Polynesian Triangle, Rapa Nui, Hawaii and Aotearoa (New Zealand), no voyage from Melanesia through Polynesia has to traverse more than 500 kilometres of open water, at least as the crow flies. And there is more land than the maps reveal. At sea one can see roughly 50 kilometres in any direction. Draw a circle with a radius of 50 kilometres around every landfall, and suddenly the ocean shrinks and the area effectively covered by land increases.

Clouds also provide clues to the wayfinder - their shape, colour, character, and place in the sky. Brown clouds bring strong winds high clouds no wind but lots of rain. Their movements reveal the strength and direction of winds, the stability of the sky, the volatility of storm fronts. There is an entire nomenclature to describe the distinct patterns clouds form as they gather over islands or sweep across the open ocean. Light alone can be read, the rainbow colours at the edge of stars, the way they twinkle and dim with an impending storm, the tone of the sky over an island, always darker than that over open sea. Red skies at sunrise and sunset indicate humidity in the air. A halo around the moon foreshadows rain, for it is caused by light shining through ice crystals of clouds laden with moisture. The number of stars within the halo anticipates the intensity of the storm if there are fewer than ten, expect trouble, high winds, and torrential rain. If a double halo surrounds the moon the weather will move in on the wings of a gale.

- Wade Davis