It won’t get us to the stars, but the navigation practiced by ancient Polynesians — sailing by the stars — continues to fascinate a new generation. And since Centauri Dreams often cites the remarkable voyages of these people as they populated the Pacific, it seems appropriate to focus today on an Australian Broadcasting Company story about an art that has been all but lost. A man named Hoturoa Kerr, who is a lecturer at the University of Waikato (Auckland, NZ), is teaching celestial navigation in an oceanic context to his students.

Finding your way over ocean swells on a body of water as big as the Pacific sounds all but impossible, particularly if your vessel is a small, double-hulled canoe. But Kerr took a GPS with him on a canoe journey from New Zealand to the Cook Islands in a vessel called the “Te Aurere”, checking the work of a navigator aboard the craft who used the old methods. At the end of the journey, he found that at any time, the navigator was no more than twelve miles off the GPS reading.

The Polynesians call it ‘way-finding,’ and it’s a method that relies on more than stars. As the night ends, the navigator takes a final bearing based on star positions, then checks the motion of the canoe as it travels over the ocean swells. During the daylight hours, he will keep the canoe in the same position with regard to the swells, which will usually change little before the Sun sets and the stars again emerge.

Way-finding was good enough to direct the diaspora that began 5000 years ago as the ancestors of the Polynesian peoples pushed eastward into the Pacific. 3,500 years ago they occupied in less than a half-dozen generations the island chains of Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. The next wave took them, now using larger double canoes, to Tahiti and the Marquesas, then across thousands of miles of open water to Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand, navigating just by the stars, the wind, the ocean swells, and the flight of birds.

Te Aurere has thus far journeyed over 30,000 nautical miles using way-finding alone. “Spiritually it’s a canoe that carries us in terms of our mind and our thinking and everything else,” says Kerr. “And when you sail a canoe, you sail for distant horizons. So what I’m hoping is that with these young people it makes them look towards distant horizons as goals for them in their life.” Such horizons are always worthwhile. And perhaps they’re not so different from the far more distant horizons we may one day embark for out in the Orion Arm.