Hawaii, if you’ve never been there or don’t own a map, is isolated. REALLY isolated; it’s a long way from anywhere, and it’s not a big place.
Yet the Polynesians found it. It’s not known exactly when, but it was at least a thousand years ago and maybe centuries before that, at a time that finding North America was still a long way off to Europeans.
By any standard, the Polynesians achieved feats of navigation without compasses or, hell, writing, that would challenge an experienced sailor today. It’s not just Hawaii, of course - prior to 1492 they were probably the most geographically dispersed civilization in the history of humanity and they had to do it by finding small islands, not just wandering around on foot. How the hell did they do that?
Some methods listed here. Not mentioned is that for the active volcanic islands you could see the smoke/fire. Also, you know about the Polynesians that did find islands. You don’t know about the ones that wandered around at sea until they died.
It is said the Polynesians could locate islands past the line of sight by the effect on the wave pattern. Someone would lie in the bottom of a dugout and sense a direction of swell in the water by the way the boat rocks, indicating the presence of an island. Hawaii is remote, but it is a chain of islands that will create a noticeable pattern of a much larger island. I don’t know how far away this would work and the first people there probably were lucky enough to run across it while being way too far out to sea.
IMO the human migration through the Pacific islands was a great feat. It has been some time since I studied the area and time.
When humans started the migration out of the Bismarck Archipelago sea levels were lower and moving to many islands was pretty easy. Many of those early sites have been lost as water levels rose. However, the people had thousands of years to learn and perfect open water navigation. The ability to read currents and various bird and sea life help them navigate to where land was going to be.
Of course once they found new islands they were also able to get back to where they had come from and this allowed trade to flourish. IIRC, obsidian in the pacific was one of the most widely traded commodities in that time period.
The OP seems to presume that the ancients navigated to Hawaii repeatedly. Do we know that to be the case? Is it possible that they simply arrived there once by accident (i.e., random boating) and all the later populations were descended from that lone ship?
That seems unlikely. The Polynesians were skilled at traveling long distances across the ocean. Finding a new island might have been due to some element of luck but once they found one and settled on it, there’s no reason they wouldn’t trade with the old islands they already knew the locations of and no reason why more people wouldn’t arrive at the now known island to settle.
They also had the technology to collect water in their canoes (from rain) and to catch fish, so they could survive for very long periods at sea. But it’s an amazing story of human ingenuity and perseverance.
Yes. It is possible that the initial discovery was accidental, but the colonization itself was unquestionably deliberate. The colonists brought with them pigs, chickens, dogs, and many non-native crops, including taro, breadfruit, bananas, and sugarcane. These are not things that would have routinely been present in a random canoe.
The Polynesians were clearly expert navigators, and as I understand navigating the open ocean was a trade like fishing, farming, and building things. How Hawaii was found is debatable, but I believe the navigators were able to read ocean currents and other signs (stars, sea birds, types of fish, winds, cloud formation, floating debris) in order to detect far-off islands. If you look closely at a map of the central Pacific, it is not open ocean but dotted with many islands and atolls (Johnson Atoll is only about 850 mi from Hawaii). Once they started hopping from island to island it was just a matter of time before they found Hawaii. If given more time it’s not out of the question they could have made it to North America (there is some evidence they made it to South America).
Of course, it could have just been a group of explorers blown off-course by a storm and finding Hawaii (or any of the islands) was accidental and pure luck. But, there is no doubting their navigation skills, because they clearly went back and forth among known islands.
I believe the Polynesian Triangle (New Zealand, Hawaii, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) was an established trade network among inhabited islands in the area. Not only did they discover new islands, but settled them and incorporated them into the network.
Hawaii seems incredibly remote from most of Polynesia but the Kingman Reef in the Line Islands is only 1000 mi. from Hawaii. These small islands are much closer to larger inhabited islands and the chain points to Johnston Atoll which is a little over 700 mi. from Hawaii. For the seagoing Polynesians these distances weren’t daunting, but the first voyage must have been anxious one.
I wonder if the currents would give them signs of an island so far away like floating vegetation seen after storms, something they would have seen from other known islands. That might have been enough motivation to chance that first long voyage.
ETA: see that snowthx talks about floating debris above.
Of course, there are also some extra techniques available for navigating to known islands, as opposed to discovering new ones. You can determine latitude quite well from the stars-- better with a sextant, of course, but fairly well even without. Longitude is harder, of course, but you still know things like how long the journey took and what your heading was, which help. And then there’s something called the Principle of the Deliberate Error: You aim for a point that’s, say, significantly west of your actual target point, and then, when you get to the right latitude, you know you need to go due east.
The first discovery probably did involve a fair bit of luck, and explorers taking risks that not all of them survived. But it wouldn’t have taken very long for it to become routine (at least, safe enough to bring whole families).
Of course, there are also some extra techniques available for navigating to known islands, as opposed to discovering new ones. You can determine latitude quite well from the stars-- better with a sextant, of course, but fairly well even without. Longitude is harder, of course, but you still know things like how long the journey took and what your heading was, which help. And then there’s something called the Principle of the Deliberate Error: You aim for a point that’s, say, significantly west of your actual target point, and then, when you get to the right latitude, you know you need to go due east.
The first discovery probably did involve a fair bit of luck, and explorers taking risks that not all of them survived. But it wouldn’t have taken very long for it to become routine (at least, safe enough to bring whole families).
Agree. And if you look at typical wind patterns in Hawaii - the Trade Winds - they blow pretty much in the direction of Johnson and Kingman from Hawaii. It not too hard to imagine a group of people seeing palm fronds and coconuts and maybe other debris drifting in from the northeast and thinking “where did this stuff come from - probably another island over there.”
In his book, “Song of the Sky,” Guy Murchie says that the South Sea islanders used several aids for navigation. An important one of these was wave patterns. He says the Marshall islanders even constructed charts of coconut palm leaf ribs tied with fiber to map winds, swell systems and eddy junction lines where swells meet. They also paid attention to birds (since some can’t rest on the water), clouds, debris drifting on the water, and others.
(Murchie’s book, written in 1954, is just a little behind the times on any navigation methods newer than LORAN. But it’s still a good read if you like the things of our atmosphere, airplanes and navigation and weather.)
In 1976, a re-created Hawaiian sailing canoe made the trip from Hawaii to Tahiti in 35 days. A master navigator from Micronesia piloted the voyage entirely without modern instruments. In 2014-2017 the canoe made a circumnavigation of the Earth using the same techniques.