By the twentieth century the long voyaging art had lapsed in Hawaii and across most of Polynesia, and a school of Western scholarship doubted it had ever existed, arguing the islands were settled by drift. The reply was practical. In 1973 the Polynesian Voyaging Society was founded in Honolulu to build a replica voyaging canoe and sail it to Tahiti by traditional means, and the double hulled Hokule'a was launched in 1975.
No Hawaiian then living held the navigational knowledge, so the society turned to Micronesia, where the art survived: Mau Piailug, a master navigator of Satawal, agreed to guide the 1976 voyage, and Hokule'a reached Tahiti without instruments, to a welcome of thousands. Piailug then made a decision his own tradition did not require of him: he taught. His Hawaiian students, Nainoa Thompson foremost among them, systematised what he transmitted into a teachable star compass, and in 1980 Thompson became the first Hawaiian in centuries to navigate the Tahiti route himself.
Hokule'a has since sailed throughout the Pacific and, between 2014 and 2017, around the world, and the society trains new navigators openly. The revival is inseparable from the wider Hawaiian cultural renaissance, and it is documented by the society itself and by participants, which is why the atlas can describe a living tradition here without presuming to speak for it.