The Voyage of the Kon-Tiki Misled the World About Navigating the Pacific (2014)

For what it's worth I didn't read the article as portraying Heyerdahl as dishonest, just wrong.

Sure, that's one way of doing it. But as the article discusses at length, there have been people navigating long-distance ocean voyages long before such technologies existed. Understanding something of how they did this is (to some of us, at least) quite fascinating.

I'm sure Captain Cook in 1778 just plugged the coordinates for Hawaiian islands into his GPS and let autopilot navigate him there.

The article spends some time rationalising the navigation techniques used so it is not clear what the deal with "spiritual practice" is.

The article is a summary, and doesn't go into the details, but navigation was also spiritual practice to the original Polynesian navigators. Skills at modern navigation, which if poor simply result in an emergency beacon to Inmarsat and a pickup by the next passing freighter cannot be compared to those needed by the navigator of a Polynesian ocean-going colonization canoe - whose passengers, most likely part of the same family group, would certainly all die along with the navigator if he failed.

You're correct. It's not magic. Papa Mau had an encyclopedic knowledge of the sea. He knew the birds, the fish, the constellations, the currents. At high noon on an overcast day Papa Mau could tell where they were by the way the water moved the boat.

This is a massive amount of information passed on through oral tradition. It takes a long time and if you ever visit, you'll often hear people call Papa Mau the last navigator, because he was the last human to be taught this kind of navigation from early childhood. Papa Mau passed before he could finish training the next generation.

This tradition is very important to the nations of the pacific. I don't have time to properly explain why right now. I have a meeting I need to get to.

> Bearings for coastal nav, celestial angles if you want latitude at sea, accurate time source

Right, that's the western way.

But non instrument navigators could find tiny islands on purpose thousands of years ago without any of that.

I'd call that an art. Maybe you don't practise it as an art, but others have and still do.

I have another reply to this in this thread, and I stand by it, but I thought this might explain the use of the terms 'art' and 'spiritual' used in the article.

Western navigation is typically learned explicitly, meaning that it consists of a set of techniques that can be explained and carried out by that rational part of the brain.

This has many advantages, except that the rational part of the brain has less 'bandwidth' than the rest of the brain. The brain is a massively parallel machine that can respond to patterns in myriad ways, with the rational part being just one late addition, kind of like a calculator grafted on.[1]

The tiny bandwidth of the rational part of the brain is why we need calculators, why we take notes, have books, devise theorems and notations. We do this because it reduces the bandwidth required to reason about a given problem.

That integral you are trying to solve for homework in university, has just about as many 'parts' as the algebra problems you used to solve in grade 7.[2] Theres'a huge intellectual scaffolding underneath that integral sign, and many revisions of that scaffolding were developed, of course, but your brain in university does not have a bigger bandwidth than it did in grade 7.

But there are other ways of learning and knowing. And it's not so woo woo: implicit learning.

I bet you now how to catch a ball. How hard would it be for you to rationally[3] explain to me how ta catch a ball if I've never done it?

But you could trivially teach me to catch a ball, you'd toss it to me and give me hints until I caught it, and then I'd practice that till it became automatic. Then I'd have trouble explaining that to someone, but I could teach them in the same experiential way and so the skill can be passed on.[4]

This is why it's harder to teach a computer to catch a ball than it is to teach it to navigate.

So this 'spiritual' word, is hinting that the Polynesian navigators learned their navigation skills implicitly.

Relying much more on non rational (but not irrational) parts of the brain: recognizing patterns in nature, the position of stars yes, but tons of other clues that westerners have the luxury of ignoring because our charts and tables and GPS can just get us there already without all of that messy stuff.

Once a skill is acquired in this manner, it can be very hard to explain to someone else making it look uncanny to outsiders perhaps.

I think the word mystical might have been better than spiritual. But art fits pretty well for a skill learned in this way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory

[3] I mean a list of instructions that can be carried out so that success is guaranteed when correctly executed.

[4] A better example might be a sport like say surfing. It takes years to learn, and good surfers have a hard time explaining certain things. You just have observe nature (waves) and develop an intuition.

You're a western pilot. Polynesians had none of that.

Here is the essence of how Polynesians navigated. Lie on your back in the canoe. Pay attention to the main swell. During the day, use the swell to keep a straight direction. During the night use the points where specific stars rise and set to be sure you're still going in the right direction. When you get close to the target island, you know that by a variety of signals ranging from the movements of birds that nest on that island, to the waves bouncing back from the swell hitting the island. These make it OK to miss your target by a bit, you'll find it and still be able to steer towards it.

Note what is missing. No latitude. No longitude. No time source. No GPS. No instruments. And yes, the whole thing is done lying on your back.

For Polynesians, navigation was spiritual. Ranging from being able to keep yourself in a trance to keep from losing track, to the stories you told yourself to remember what each star told you about where you were going, to years of guild training.

I learned about this back in university. Included was a comparison of the safety record for sea voyages in the South Pacific conducted by western ships with western navigation and Polynesians during the 1950s and 1960s. The Polynesians did better.

I think it is well-known that Polynesians, probably the greatest navigators in history, considered navigation to be a spiritual endeavour. I always thought that this is possibly where the whole "spice-eating space navigator" idea in "Dune" came from, but I have not been able to confirm this.

They sailed west to east on purpose, because it made it easier to get home if they didn't make landfall.

The canoes they used were not tacked, they were shunted, which made it much easier to said into the wind.

To get back home, they memorized a bunch of zenith stars for their home latitude, went north or south till they put those stars at zenith and then just let the wind carry them home.

Non instrument navigation to Hawaii, for example, involves overshooting the island chain by going a bit too far east, putting Hokulea (Arcturus) at the zenith then sailing west till you make landfall.

Something I recall from reading "Sail Performance", the crab claw is way better then most people expect. In fact for a smaller boat it may just be the best shape when averaged over all the points of sail. Modern sail plans are targeted more towards large boats and racing boats, which does not reflect the reality of what most people are sailing most of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_claw_sail

this article from a while back provides a nice summary of current thinking (there's a bunch of waffle at the top of the aritcle before getting into the guts of it about midway through ) https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/destinations/asia/67390585/nu...