Reading Traces

1.2.1.4. DOCUMENTARY STUDY

One result of the combined literary and practical approach I have used in this book has been that it has proved possible to reinterpret a number of written accounts in the light of the teaching of contemporary navigators and of sea-going experience. For instance, one regular Carolinian voyage could be analysed and conclusions drawn as to permissible tracking error. Then again, fresh light is shed on the voyages of the Tongan Kau Moala (Mariner, 1817: vol. I, 317) by knowing the capabilities of canoes such as he used and by recognising his special status in the Tongan navigational hierarchy, as revealed by Tuita.

The Main Documentary Sources on Actual Methods of Navigation

For Polynesia these are unbelievably sparse. Significant original descriptions and examples number less than a dozen.

One of the few really outstanding accounts is that of the Spanish captain of the Jupiter, Andia y Varela, who [Page 39]
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couldbe? was in Tahiti in 1774-5 (Corney, 1914: vol. II, 285). Then there are the writings of Cook’s companions, especially Banks and the Forsters, for example Banks’s Endeavour journal (ed. Beaglehole, 1962: vol. I, 368) and J. R. Forster’s book (1778: 501-31). In Tahiti too the missionary Orsmond collected chants of astronomical and navigational significance, which were published by his granddaughter, Teuira Henry. They include ‘The Birth of New Lands’ (1894), and ‘Birth of Heavenly Bodies’ (1907). William Wyatt Gill, another missionary, has left us with a detailed picture of the Cook Islands’ ‘wind compass’ orientation system (1876b: 319). The two Hawaiians, Kepelino (1932: 82) and Kamakau (1891: 142), despite the incorporation of some European ideas, provide valuable source material.

In the present century there has been Augustin Kramer’s valuable though ambiguous report on Samoan navigation (1902: vol. II, 244-7), Collocott’s work on Tongan astronomy (1922), the Beagleholes’series ofrelatively detailed star course sailing directions from Pukapuka (1938), and Raymond Firth’s similar material from Tikopia and Anuta (193L 1954)-

For the rest, there are but snippets of information—a sentence here, a few words there, scattered through innumerable works.

Concerning Micronesia we are rather more fortunate, for in spite of the early discovery of at least one of the archipelagos (Magellan came on the Marianas in 1521), more intimate contacts tended to lag about a century behind Polynesia, so that much of the old lore survived. Happily for purposes of comparison, navigational accuracy in both the sections of Oceania seems to have been comparable.

In the Gilbert Islands uniquely detailed and comprehensive navigational data were collected by Sir Arthur Grimble (1924, 1931, 1943, and MSS. in possession of Maude and of Rosemary Grimble). There is also a solitary, but most valuable, account of a zenith star observation, that was recorded by Fr Sabatier (1939).

The Carolines are also well served. In the eighteenth century there was Fr Cantova (1728) and in the nineteenth Sanchez (1866). The observations of Kramer, [Page 40]
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Marshallese navigation received mention in the sixties of last century from the American missionary Gulick (1862) and his Hawaiian counterpart Aea (1948), but the outstanding exposition was that of Captain Winkler of the German Navy (1901). This has been supplemented by Erdland (1914), Raymond de Brum (1962), and Davenport (1964b).

Documentary Sources on the Wider Aspects of Indigenous Sea-Going

The general field of voyaging, whereof the navigational arts proper are but a part, is much better documented. Compared with the strictly technical information we have been considering, the volume of data recorded in both Polynesia and Micronesia about particular voyages, contact patterns, and geographical horizons appears almost limitless.Indeed, the sources are so numerous that reference to even the most important would be quite impracticable and they will be left entirely to the bibliography.

We will, therefore, leave primary sources at this point and turn to some of the commentators whose role in the study of navigation has been primarily interpretive.

Commentators

Smith and Sharp have already been mentioned in the first part of this chapter as have the experimental studies of Ward and Finney. A symposium of Polynesian navigation was edited by Golson (1963). There are some works that are more than merely interpretive, like Makemson’s review of Pacific astronomy (1941) and the canoe studies of Haddon and Hornell (1936-8) and Fr Neyret (1962-3 and 1965-6). Deserving of close attention are the views of the experienced master mariners Reche (1927), Hops (1956), Hilder (1959, 1963a and b), Heyen (1963, 1966), V. Ward (pers. comm., 1969) and Douglas [Page 41]
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validity? (pers. comm., 1969) as well as those of the air-sea navigator Gatty (1943, 1958). The technical analyses of Frankel (1962), Lemaitre’s mathematical simulations(1970) and Akerblom’s synthesis of documentary sources (1968) are significant.

Our evidence has been discussed at such length to show how fragmentary it is and how imperfect must be the picture revealed by either documentary sources or demonstrations alone. The problems and methods involved in seeking sea-borne instruction needed to be described so that the quality of the results obtainable might be evaluated. All this becomes very relevant to the material presented in the following chapters, since the components of the navigational arts we shall be considering have had, for the most part, to be reconstructed from data of both kinds.

[Hipour steering his canoe by the sheet between Puluwat und Pulusk, Caroline Islands]