The question the 1976 voyage was built to answer had been argued since the eighteenth century. Were the Pacific islands settled by deliberate voyaging, or by canoes blown off course? Andrew Sharp had argued the drift case forcefully in the 1950s, and the argument mattered because it decided whether Pacific peoples were credited with a navigational science or with luck.
By the 1970s no Hawaiian held the traditional knowledge. It survived in the Caroline Islands, where a handful of navigators still practised, and Mau Piailug agreed to sail. In 1976 he took Hokule'a, a double-hulled canoe built for the purpose, from Hawaii to Tahiti, roughly two and a half thousand miles, with no instruments of any kind.
The method he used is a system, not an intuition. Stars are held in a mental compass of rising and setting points around the horizon, and a course is steered by keeping the appropriate star on the appropriate part of the canoe, changing star as each rises too high. When cloud hides the sky the swells serve, distinguished by direction and feel. Birds, cloud formations over land and the colour of the water give landfall. Position is tracked by etak, in which a reference island off to one side is imagined moving backwards along the star points as the canoe advances, so the voyage is reckoned in segments rather than in miles.
The canoe arrived. Seventeen thousand people met it in Papeete.