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imagination, an oral and written language composed of the memories of
countless elders and healers, warriors, farmers, fishermen, midwives, poets,
and saints — in short, the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual expression
of the full complexity and diversity of the human experience. Quelling this
flame, this spreading inferno, and rediscovering a new appreciation for the
diversity of the human spirit as expressed by culture, is among the central
challenges of our times.

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    THE WAYFINDERS
    “That’s why we sail. So our children can grow up
and be proud of whom they are. We are healing our souls
by
reconnecting to our ancestors. As we voyage we
are creating new
stories within the tradition of
the old stories, we are literally
creating a new
culture out of the old.” — Nainoa Thompson
    LET’S SLIP FOR A MOMENT into the largest culture sphere ever brought
into being by the human imagination. Polynesia: 25 million square
kilometres, nearly a fifth of the surface of the planet, tens of thousands
of islands flung like jewels upon the southern sea. Some months ago I was
fortunate to join a good friend, Nainoa Thompson, and the Polynesian
Voyaging Society on a training mission on board the Hokule’a , a beautiful and iconic vessel named after
Arcturus, the sacred star of Hawaii. A replica of the great seafaring canoes
of ancient Polynesia, the Hokule’a is a double-hulled open-decked catamaran 62
feet long, 19 feet wide, lashed together by some 8 kilometres of rope, with
a fully loaded displacement of some 24,000 pounds. First launched in 1975,
the Hokule’a has since criss-crossed the Pacific, visiting
over the course of some 150,000 kilometres virtually every island group of
the Polynesian triangle, from Hawaii to Tahiti to the Cook Islands and
beyond to Aotearoa or New Zealand, east to the Marquesas, and south and east
to Rapa Nui, or Easter Island. Even more distant voyages have taken her to
the coast of Alaska and the shores of Japan. The Hokule’a carries a crew of ten, including captain and
wayfinder, two quite distinct roles. On board is not a single modern
navigational aid, save a radio only to be used in case of dire emergency.
There is no sextant, no depth gauge, no GPS, no transponder. There are only
the multiple senses of the navigator, the knowledge of the crew, and the
pride, authority, and power of an entire people reborn.
    When European sailors first entered the Pacific
in the sixteenth century they encountered a new planet. Among the Spaniards
it was not Cortés but Vasco Núñez de Balboa who first stood silent upon a
peak in Darien and with eagle eyes stared with “wild surmise” upon an ocean
so vast it dwarfed the western islands, Homer’s realms of gold, and all the
“goodly states and kingdoms seen.” The poet John Keats, writing two
centuries later, imagined with awe what the first Spaniards must have felt.
Ferdinand Magellan in 1520 took thirty-eight days to round the horn, the
southern tip of South America, and with half his men dead, slipped into a
void he took to be a peaceful sea. He sailed on, and in four months upon the
water, with the surviving sailors dying by the day, he managed to miss every
populated island group in the Pacific. Finally on April 7, 1521, he landed
on the island of Cebu in what we now know as the Philippines. Magellan was a
brave man, ruthless in many ways, but also stubborn. In his desperation and
blindness he had by circumstance bypassed an entire civilization that might
have taught him a great deal indeed about the open water.
    The first sustained contact between Polynesians
and the Spanish occurred three generations later, when in 1595 Álvaro de
Mendaña de Neira, following the easterly trades, came upon an archipelago of
ten volcanic islands rising as sentinels out of the equatorial sea. Before
even making landfall, he named them the Marquesas, after his patron, García
Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Cañete, then viceroy of Peru. They comprised
the most