Today, most people take completely for granted the fact that thousands of ships around the world take excursions and voyages almost whenever and wherever they please. What many of us don't realize is that the operators of those ships must take into account weather systems, air currents, water currents, changing tides, local geography, and more just to safely and successfully sail to their desired destinations. And to counter each complication they faced, different civilizations over very long periods of time had to come up with new kinds of tools: maps, compasses, tide tables, current charts, weather patterns, and so on. Just how long of a period of time are we talking? Try tens of thousands of years! Let's see what we know about where much of this began . . .
Roughly between 40,000-60,000 B.C., two ancient peoples migrated from Southeast Asia to nearby New Guinea and Australia. Then much later, during 1600-1200 B.C., these peoples spread into the islands of Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga, and there, the Polynesian civilization was born. Over the following 3,000 years, the Polynesians colonized islands across half of the Pacific from its center to eastern side, including New Zealand, Easter Island, and in 400 A.D., Hawaii. It has even been speculated that the Polynesians made it to South America around 1,100 A.D.!
From the beginning, these groups were great observers of the seas around them. They studied the directions waves came from, how waves rocked their canoes, the different Pacific birds and sea life present, and the stars in the sky. They created stick charts, with tied pieces of wood as frames, seashells or rope knots as locations of islands, and curved pieces of wood for ocean currents and wave intensities. They gained great expertise in fishing and farming, developed reliable canoes, and very accurately passed on their expertise in navigation and colonization from generation to generation. With these tools, they successfully crossed much of the Pacific and were able to build colonies on many of the islands they discovered, traveling back and forth with a high success that was, as history seems to tell, unrivaled by seafarers before their time.
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