Mau Piailug

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Mau Piailug : biography

01 January 1932 – 12 July 2010

For a traditionally trained navigator, these inputs include physical signals from the sea, skies, and stars, memory signals from his knowledge of star, swell, and wind compasses; and cultural knowledge recorded in chants, dances, and stories. Examples of physical signals include the color, temperature, and taste (salinity) of seawater; floating plant debris; sightings of land-based seabirds flying out to fish; cloud type, color, and movement; wind direction, speed, and temperature; the direction and nature of ocean swells and waves; the position of stars in the sky, and his estimation of the speed, current set, and leeway of his sailing craft. The "compass" he carried was not magnetic, but a mental model of where islands are located, and the star points which one could use to navigate between them. This mental model would have taken years of study to build; dances, chants (rong), and stories help him to recall complex relationships of geography and location. The stars give him highly reliable position information when visible, but navigators such as Mau managed to keep their position and tracks in mind even when blocked by clouds, using other references such as wind and swell as proxies.

Mau’s Carolinian star compass (pictured) is the basis for Nainoa’s modern Hawaiian star compass. Apart from the bulk of training which happens at sea, historically boys were taught in the men’s house with pebbles, shells, or pieces of coral, representing stars, laid on the sand in a circular pattern. Which bits of shell or coral are chosen to represent which star or constellation is arbitrary, but generally, larger pieces are used for points of the compass while smaller pieces represent important stars between those points. In Mau’s star compass, these points are not necessarily equidistant. The outer circular formation represents the horizon, with the canoe its center point. The eastern half of the circle depicts reference stars’ rising points on the horizon (tan) while the western half depicts their setting points (tupul). Swell patterns of prevailing trade winds are represented by sticks (not depicted here) overlaying the star compass in the form of a square. All knowledge is retained by memory with the help of dances, chants, and stories, wherein the stars are enumerated as people or characters in the stories.

Technique

One aspect of the Carolinian method of estimating longitude on inter-island sailings is to visualize the target island relative to a second reference island’s alignment with a succession of selected stars, points of the star compass. This is a refined system of dead reckoning whereby the navigator constantly synthesizes his position relative to the reference island’s location in his mental model. The most remarkable thing about this is that the reference island (lu pongank) may be over the horizon, unseen, even imaginary.

In its simplest form the star compass describes thirty-two points at which key stars rise on the eastern horizon and set on the western horizon. North latitude is fairly easy to determine because the North Pole has a zenith star easily seen with the naked eye, called Polaris (Wuliwulifasmughet). Polaris’ height above the horizon (declination) indicates the viewer’s southward displacement from Polaris’ nadir—the North Pole. Traveling further north, Polaris appears higher in the sky. Only at the true north pole is Polaris directly overhead at nearly 90 degrees declination.: Polaris’ declination is 89.3° at the North Pole. Traveling south toward the equator, Polaris appears to descend toward the northern horizon. At 45 degrees north latitude, Polaris is 45 degrees above the northern horizon. Near the equator, Polaris’ declination approaches zero degrees, but for the viewer just farther south, Polaris will have disappeared below the northern horizon.

Continuing south from the equator, though Polaris is no longer visible, Crux (Luubw), the "Southern Cross," will have risen above the southern horizon. Traveling further southward, Crux rises higher in the sky. Through Crux’s longest axis, an imaginary line bisecting Gacrux and Acrux points southward toward the southern celestial pole. But the South Pole has no true zenith star from which direct readings of south latitude may be taken. As a proxy, the southern celestial pole lies at the end of that imaginary line extended southward through Gacrux and Acrux, at a distance about 4.5 times the distance between them. Nainoa Thompson notes that at Hawaii’s latitude, the distance between Gacrux and the southerly Acrux is equal to Acrux’s declination above the southern horizon.: "At the latitude of Hawai‘i, the distance from the top star to the bottom star is the same distance from that bottom star to the horizon, about 6 degrees. This configuration only occurs at the latitude of Hawai‘i."