What the world’s most remote islands were like before humans arrived | Hacker News Reader

What the world’s most remote islands were like before humans arrived

atlasobscura.com

59 pointsThevet40 comments

I've always been in awe of the navigational capabilities of the Polynesians. Sailing 2500 miles from the Marquesas to Hawaii, someone must have scouted it out and told everyone how to get there.

Maybe there was a civil war and a group just got exiled, then needed to find a new place?

For every tiny speck of land in Polynesia? Across like 20 million square miles of water? Over the course of thousands of years? Samoa was colonized like 1000 years before Rome was founded, and New Zealand wasn't discovered by humans until about 2500 years later.

Well, yeah, kinda, the general consensus in academia is that a decrease in the carrying capacity of settled islands, whether climate induced or manmade, tended to drive Polynesian expansion.

And yep, every speck that was habitable, and quite a few that weren't in the long term - e.g., Raoul Island in the Kermadecs, Norfolk Island, Campbell Island in NZ's Sub-Antarctic Islands, Pitcairn Island, Henderson Island, etc. etc.

Plenty of places Polynesians settled, or tried to settle.

The academic consensus is pretty much in agreement with you, not sure why you got downvoted.

Polynesian migrations tended to happen after a decrease in carrying capacity of settled islands that led to civil war over limited resources.

I can, if really needed to dredge up papers to back this, but I'm not making any promises for when.

Does it count as navigation if they didn't even know where they were going?

Yes, most places in the Pacific aren't islands.

I wonder how far from the islands a trained navigator could be and still notice them - via currents or birds or ?

I believe islands form distinctive cloud patterns. Birds seem like a likely indicator too.

Being able to see an island from 50 miles away would greatly increase the chance of finding it, even in an expanse as large as the ocean.

Polynesian navigators used wave patterns to detect islands at a distance IIRC, and even created woven maps based on wave refraction.

Maybe not if they only did it once but it was a pretty regular thing, no?

How do you know that the settlers who had packed a bunch of stuff to settle the new lands, didn't know where they were going?

Well, if I had to think of a relatively negative context, my suspicion would be that these missions were more about relieving population stress on an island rather than having a fair certainty that the mission would end in success. You send a party out, and if they make it - great. If they don't...well, at least your island has a little more living room now. Sort of like how medieval Europeans would have the firstborn inherit the kingdom, the second born maybe go into the church, and the rest maybe go crusading for glory in remote lands.

My understanding (happy to be corrected) is that with skills you can sail into and with the wind, at the cost of how much leeway you lose sailing into the wind.

Which means for exploration, you can go 1/3 to 1/2 the distance of your food "out" as long as you wear the risk of the sums going wrong "back"

The oceans have strong prevailing wind and wave patterns. I think this played to the compass-less navigation (stars and planets help) model: you did know "which way was up" for a single frame of reference view.

So it was awesome, but also awesome engineering of cost-optimisation.

I think it came down to successive waves of exploration. You do the limit of the craft, then you do a flotilla of craft with more stores, then you do portage of stores to intermediate places or send on a sub-team and eventually you "arrive" somewhere you know the cost of getting to, within acceptable water-limited margins of error.

Kon Tiki gets a bad rap, but some things they found workable like extracting drinkable non-salty water from fish (swim bladders? lymph system?) and the sustainability of sweet water in coconuts, go to how long you can go "out" for that magical 1/3 to 1/2 of your stores.

> at the cost of how much leeway you lose sailing into the wind

There is still vigorous debate concerning it, but IMO, the fastest tack is the close haul -- sailing into the wind (not directly into it, but the closer you get to it without pointing directly into it, the faster you go). I have a sailing buddy that swears the broad reach is the fastest tack (sailing at an angle away from the wind). Some say running is fastest... but of course they're mistaken. Seems to me this is a controversy that only Mythbusters could have designed an experiment for and revealed once and for all which sailing tack is fastest.

There’s no debate, just a lack of clarity around terms. The fastest point of sail is a broad reach as measured against the true wind angle. Naturally this leads to a close hauled point of sail measured by the apparent wind angle. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/186515/why-is-a-...

Unfortunately, your citation hardly supports your position, which by itself is unsupported. Well, it does in the 4th answer down, yet unconvincingly (focusing on drag, but does not eliminate the possibility of a tack with more drag still being faster, because, why not?), and with poor evidence (using America's Cup claiming the downwind tacks were much faster... buuuuut... the wind... it changes, and this is not accounted for in that answer, but clearly the upwind velocities will not be the same as the downwind, as they occur in different places at different times; even if the downwind and upwind (a boat tacking or jibing to roughly the opposite direction) are only separated by meters or seconds, they will always, always be different, thus it is foolishness to compare speeds of the same boats traveling upwind as opposed to downwind; it's inappropriate comparison because the wind is never constant).

The truth of the matter is not remotely as clear as you claim, and the debate continues in earnest, and right here right now before your very eyes. I haven't sailed everything, but I have sailed enough to form a strong opinion, and my opinion is close hauls are notably faster than a broad reach or any other tack.

I look forward to racing with you! When not limited by hull speed, speed over ground is highest when the apparent wind is highest. That means being ‘close hauled’ in apparent terms but reaching or broad reaching in true terms. Most sailors would describe a point of sail based on the true wind angle, because most boats are limited by hull speed, which most of the time is a lot less than wind speed. A typical cruising yacht might have a hull speed of 10 knots, while a strong wind would be 20 knots.

> I look forward to racing with you!

We'd be racing in different directions. ;) The answer of which tack is fastest could be closed in on using 2 identical sailboats with GPS starting in roughly the same position and heading off on their different tacks, but to account for wind being different in different places, the two boats would need to race over and over again... I think at least a thousand times.

Occurs to me the water itself at times has speed, and will also be different in different places and times. So it's harder than I imagined to figure it out.

fwiw I've sailed craft that will make 20 knots sailing almost directly into a 10 knot wind, and 30 knots in a 15 knot wind. Gotta love multihulls.

You have not sailed anything that will make 20 knots almost directly into a 10 knot wind. You may well have sailed a multihull that makes 20 knots on a reach or broad reach with a 10 knot wind. And when it did that the apparent wind would be at best 20 degrees off the bow.

I have indeed sailed 20kt close-hauled into a 10kt wind, and I don't believe the feat is all that incredible. But incredibly, I was on the crew that built the 35' racing cat (iirc John Marples' open salon design) that doubles wind speed (depending on conditions) in nearly any tack. Took 2 years (all wood hulls plus glass and snot), and I consider it a sabbatical from sysadmining. I was in the best shape of my life due to manually longboarding the hulls 5 days a week, fulltime, for 3 months straight, because I really had no shop skills, still don't. But I learned to screw, glass and snot, and bump and grind, and I especially learned how to longboard a hull. I already knew how to sail. Used to swim like a fish, but discovered during those 2 years that I had forgotten how to swim, and I nearly drown in the marina trying to swim across it. Maybe it was because when I learned to swim I was a little chubby, not much, but when I attempted that, idk, 150 yard swim across the marina... and back after a rest (getting back in after nearly drowning was about impossible, but there was no other way back), I did not have an ounce of fat on me, so I had to work a lot harder to keep my head above water. Scariest thing ever, the rational concern that I might drown for being an idiot.

Thinking more about it, water also moves a boat. Imagine a fast river flowing right into the wind, and you can sail a boat without sails at 20kt into a 10kt wind, that is, if the water is moving at 20kt. But that is a cheat, so all I can do is reassure you that a racing multihull can gracefully move into the wind on calmish water twice as fast as the wind itself.

My main objection to Kontiki was that it started from wrong assumptions - that it had to be South Americans who travelled to Polynesia, because of Heyerdahl's, well, lack of imagination, I guess?

The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) was identified in 1924 (but not really researched until the 80s, to be fair), and its effects on currents and more importantly prevailing winds well known to Chilean fishermen at the very least, nevermind the knowledge still retained in Polynesia.

I've read that the the Hawaiian islands disrupted ocean swells in ways that Polynesians could detect even 1000+ miles away. In addition, the Hawaiian islands are huge and lush, and dumped a large amount of plant debris into the water, some of which Polynesian sailors would occasionally notice while at sea. I'm skeptical that those signs would have been noticable all the way from the Marquessas islands, but the Marquessas Polynesians were likely ranging 1000+ into the ocean themselves, which evidently was enough for them to deduce the existence of large islands in the general direction of Hawaii long before they discovered it. Evidently according to oral tradition, the discoverers of Hawaii arrived equipped with plants, animals and other gear to establish a new settlement- they knew the islands were there before anyone set foot on them.

It's the same for the settlement of NZ, they brought kūri, kūmara, uhi, and aute.

That's dogs (for hunting and food), sweet potatoes, yams, and paper mulberry, used to make tapa cloth in the Pacific.

(We're not sure if they didn't bring the pigs and chickens widespread in Polynesia, or if they didn't survive the voyage or the initial landings, or their bones didn't end up in excavated middens. Maybe a flu virus got in there?).

The aute didn't really flourish in Aotearoa, and the cloth derived from it wasn't that warm, so clothing as well as fish hook styles, canoe styles etc. from Polynesia were rapidly adapted, but it's clear that the Polynesian settlers who became the Māori, they came prepared.

Birds seem to have provided evidence of land too - migrating birds consistently appearing from one direction suggest that land could be in that direction.

Polynesians also seem to have taken birds on their voyages - when a bird is released and comes back there's no land nearby, if it flies off in one direction follow it to find land.

The Wayfinders, by Wade Davis, is a great book on the topic.

Well, not the MOST remote. Wikipedia has a list[1]. Maybe Marquesas is the furthest from a continental landmass (3000mi to Mexico). But it's much closer to Tahiti than many of the other islands on the list.

Remote islands became a casual study of mine during the pandemic... for some reason. Happy to learn more about French Polynesia.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremes_on_Earth#Remoteness

> What the world’s most remote islands were like before humans arrived

They were the ultimate example of NIMBYism; zero people per square mile: no density at all. 3000 miles of swimming or paddling to get the nearest store or library. Shitloads of fossil fuels required to deliver supplies. Totally unlivable. All the resident animals cared about were their property values, ocean views, and their god forsaken current way of life and character of their neighborhood.

For many years I've been searching for the perfect beach; the one with the white sand and palm trees from the postcards. I've gone half way around the world on this quest, sailed to places few will ever see.

I've come to the conclusion this beach does not exist; beaches are only ever free of pollution when they are regularly cleaned by humans, regardless of how remote it is.

You're not trying hard enough then... They're out there.

Reminds me of a conversation I had with a guy on a plane once. We were staring out the window over central Australia and he commented that it's almost impossible to find a place so remote that you can't see a sign of human occupation from the air. And he was right, even 500+ km from anywhere there were still a few roads, sheds etc. visible at any given time.

I think the sign of human activity that is the most visible from the furthest out into space is forestry clearcuts.

They are much bigger than cities. Farms fade and start to blend together and their perfect geometric shapes are harder to see.

But clearcuts are more haphazard but spread over hundreds of kilometers, so even when you zoom out really far, it just looks like someone spilled a bunch of salt on the map.

never sailed to French Polynesia I assume?

Not yet, will get there eventually but it's a slow journey at 6 knots even if you are not working most of the time...

Plenty in the Hawaiian islands. Only Oahu has a major city on it. The other islands are pretty sparse.

> Only Oahu has a major city on it.

And even that only bt an extremely broad reading of “major city”.

You can find that on the islands near whitehaven beach if you hire your own boat.

San Blas / Kuna Yala - I've been there on a literal cartoon island. 30 yards across, white sand, 4 palm trees. Nothing else. Zero trash.

Some parts of Bastimentos aren't bad eiher.

Any favourites along the way?

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