A RETURN VOYAGE BETWEEN PULUWAT AND SAIPAN USING MICRONESIAN NAVIGATIONAL TECHNIQUES

Abstract

The experiment reported here formed part of the research programme of an Australian National University Fellowship in Pacific History, whose terms of reference were to investigate indigenous Pacific Islands navigation. To this end, my son and I covered 13,000 miles of the western Pacific, during 1969, in the ketch Isbjorn. A proportion of this distance, 1,800 miles, was sailed under command of Polynesian and Micronesian navigators either in the yacht temporarily denuded of charts and instru ments, or in sea-going canoes.(1) The particular voyages we are considering were each about 550 miles long, between Puluwat in the Carolines and Saipan in the Marianas further north. After a stop at Pikelot, 100 miles from Puluwat, the route led across 450 miles of open sea to Saipan. The object was to test the continuing validity of sailing directions for crossing so substantial a seaway were exclusively in indigenous terms and had been handed down orally for something like three generations. We were fortunate our method left little room for ambiguity, all data being ultimately subject to the stern test of landfall. The question of the antiquity of Carolines-Marianas contacts is very germaine to our assessment of the significance of the experiment. We know there were 150 years of regular contact, up to the end of last century in which canoes were navigated exclusively by traditional methods, but because of the inevitable absence of documentation it is less easy to show conclusively this traffic antedated the advent of Europeans. In 1686, the Spaniards conquered the Marianas, practically depopulating all the islands save Guam. Refugees fled in their canoes south to the Carolines, which were mercifully then unknown to civilisation. It may be imagined, wrote Burney,(2) that the islanders had a general know

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.