The extraordinary story of two Pacific voyages of discovery a 1000 years apart | Hacker News Reader

The extraordinary story of two Pacific voyages of discovery a 1000 years apart

thenewatlantis.com

50 pointspseudolus18 comments

I've always been really been impressed by the Polynesians being able to navigate across vast distances, and to especially to find tiny islands and atolls in the middle of basically nowhere.

When exploring new areas, I wonder what success rate (%) was for folks going into the unknown and finding a bit of land to land on.

I'm guessing that they survived by harvesting rain water from squalls and by fishing?

As a possible comparison, some folks built a Viking ship as authentically as possible, and then sailed it across the Atlantic:

* https://www.youtube.com/c/DrakenHH/videos

The water supply is an interesting question indeed. To me it is of similar importance as the question of navigation.

Even if ancient proto-polynesians had a hunch that there was land somewhere, they must have known about the need of fresh water. And on top of that they either did not want to ever go home or they must have had an idea about how to log their route. Fascinating stuff.

I read on HN that they found islands over the horizon by looking at patterns in the waves and navigated by memorizing the position of stars. Yes to the harvesting of rain water.

By wave patterns (the island would reflect waves, and they could detect that in a canoe), by birds (land-based birds fly back to the island in the evening), and by clouds (certain cloud formations build up over land). Combine them all, and they could know where islands were that they couldn't see. The reflected wave thing worked even at night.

> Combine them all, and they could know where islands were that they couldn't see.

I'm curious as to the range that these things could be detected. No doubt there's some proportionality between island size and distance-detectability.

But there are a whole bunch (small) islands in the middle of a whole lot of nothing, so I'm curious to know how many were found on purpose and how many by accident.

The Hawaiian islands in particular are so large that they affect wind and cloud patterns for hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles away. You can see this happening in this satellite photo: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6b/Hawaje-N... Look at how the clouds and currents change from the top right down to the bottom left.

Modern editions of the Kon-Tiki expedition have a preface that says the assertions in the book have been shown to not be accurate, or something along those lines. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science-dna-shows-how-tho...

This link is paywalled.

Hōkūle‘a and Hikianalia are keeping the art alive:

http://www.hokulea.com/moananuiakea/

Fascinating read. Thanks for sharing.

Great quote: “Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.”

Also, I like this journal’s web design. Very well done for mobile.

I enjoyed reading Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia which is all about how Polynesia became populated.

https://www.amazon.com/Sea-People-Polynesia-Christina-Thomps...

Additional reading if you are interested in the topic of polynesian navigation- We, The Navigators by David Lewis. Highly recommended.

Second vote. This book made me want to implement autonomous celestial navigation: then I learned that's how ICBM's work. If you get in to the area, see also JPS @ http://www.jps.auckland.ac.nz/ and the umpteen trillion sailing channels on YouTube with people building or restoring boats on a budget for lifetime voyaging.

I remember reading Kon-Tiki and I, when I was a kid.

I think the journey (which was remarkable) was pretty much written off, in those days as "a bunch of proto-hippies, doing something," but these days, it would be a viral sensation.

first-person slang like "hippies" is most often spoken by those are "are not" and is derogatory IMO

citation: photo-journalistic Life Magazine cover article on San Francisco culture used the word Hippy and introduced it to the mass media (edit: could have been Look Magazine also, one of those two).. people directly involved at the time did not use that word. The word was further popularized primarily by antagonists in media and popular songs

Well, one of my older siblings was one. Sort of still is. They never called themselves that.

Fascinating person. We don't always see eye-to-eye on everything, but I have learned a great deal from them.

As Psychedelic Shop owner Ron Thelen put it in October of 1967 during the “Death of the Hippies” funeral:

“It must all go — a casualty of narcissism and plebeian vanity. ... (Haight-Ashbury) was portioned to us by the media-police, and the tourists came to the zoo to see the captive animals, and we growled fiercely behind the bars we accepted, and now we are no longer hippies and never were.”

https://www.sfchronicle.com/thetake/article/Death-of-the-Hip...

Heyerdahl's efforts were rewarded with a modern upgrade =>

https://www.reddit.com/r/WarshipPorn/comments/ms9onr/hnoms_t...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com