page_title: Polynesian navigation
hierarchical_section_title: Polynesian navigation
caption_attribution_description: English: Priests traveling across Kealakekua bay for first contact rituals. Each helmet is a gourd, with foliage and tapa strip decoration. A feather surrounded akua is in the arms of the priest at the center of the engraving. It is not known what the purpose of the ritual surrounding first contact with Westerners was.
context_page_description: Traditional Polynesian navigation was used for thousands of years to make long voyages across thousands of kilometres of the open Pacific Ocean. Navigators travelled to small inhabited islands using wayfinding techniques and knowledge passed by oral tradition from master to apprentice, often in the form of song. Generally, each island maintained a guild of navigators who had very high status; in times of famine or difficulty, they could trade for aid or evacuate people to neighbouring islands. As of 2014, these traditional navigation methods are still taught in the Polynesian outlier of Taumako in the Solomons.
  Polynesian navigation used some navigational instruments, which predate and are distinct from the machined metal tools used by European navigators. However, they also relied heavily on close observation of sea sign and a large body of knowledge from oral tradition.
  Both wayfinding techniques and outrigger canoe construction methods have been kept as guild secrets, but in the modern revival of these skills, they are being recorded and published.
context_section_description: Traditional Polynesian navigation was used for thousands of years to make long voyages across thousands of kilometres of the open Pacific Ocean. Navigators travelled to small inhabited islands using wayfinding techniques and knowledge passed by oral tradition from master to apprentice, often in the form of song. Generally, each island maintained a guild of navigators who had very high status; in times of famine or difficulty, they could trade for aid or evacuate people to neighbouring islands. As of 2014, these traditional navigation methods are still taught in the Polynesian outlier of Taumako in the Solomons.
  Polynesian navigation used some navigational instruments, which predate and are distinct from the machined metal tools used by European navigators (such as the sextant, first produced in 1730; the sea astrolabe, from around late 15th century; and the marine chronometer, invented in 1761). However, they also relied heavily on close observation of sea sign and a large body of knowledge from oral tradition.
  Both wayfinding techniques and outrigger canoe construction methods have been kept as guild secrets, but in the modern revival of these skills, they are being recorded and published.
caption: Hawaiian navigators sailing multi-hulled canoe, c. 1781
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