Navigation as Inherited Knowledge

Wayfinding in the Caroline Islands is held by named navigators, taught in schools with their own initiations and their own obligations, and it is religious as well as technical. A navigator learns the rising and setting points of the stars as a compass, the behaviour of swells refracting around islands, the flight of birds at dawn and dusk, and a system of reckoning that tracks position against a reference island the crew cannot see. That knowledge came close to disappearing in the twentieth century, and the fact that it did not is largely due to a small number of navigators on Satawal and neighbouring islands who continued to teach it, and to the Polynesian Voyaging Society's request in the 1970s that one of them, Mau Piailug, navigate the Hokulea from Hawaii to Tahiti without instruments. He did, and then taught what he knew to Hawaiians, which was a decision on his part with consequences for the whole Pacific. The atlas records this because it is the clearest modern instance of a body of sacred technical knowledge being deliberately passed outside the community that held it, by a holder who judged that letting it die was the worse outcome. That was his call to make and nobody else's.