Micronesia and Polynesia are the names for two regions of the southwest Pacific Ocean which have a unique culture of their own. Micronesians and Polynesians do not live on any large land masses. Rather, they live on tiny islands, which are hundreds of miles apart in a vast and empty ocean.
These Pacific Islanders are really smart people. For reasons that no one yet understands, a written language did not develop in their culture. Formal mathematics, which also depends on writing, did not develop either. However, they were able to find their way from one tiny island to another quite reliably. How did they do it? This web page points you to some other web pages which describe the answer.
And the Pacific Islanders were not only able to find their way across vast oceans. From my perspective, Polynesian Wayfinding was more effective than Western celestial navigation before about 1800. Westerners could find their latitude, but had real difficulties with longitude. (See separate page on Western celestial navigation.)
http://www.museum.upenn.edu/Navigation/intro.html is an on-line version of a magazine article, divided up (as good websites often are) into a series of short webpages. Particularly important webpages are "Introduction", "Micronesia," "The Sidereal Compass," "Living Seamarks," "Putting the System to Work," and "The Search for Pattern."
http://leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu/org/pvs/aboutpvs.html describes the Polynesian Voyaging Society and some of the fantastic voyages that this group makes today, in traditional craft and often using traditional navigating techniques.
http://leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu/org/pvs/ is an absolutely magnificent website for the Polynesian Voyaging Society, an organization determined to discover and preserve the cultural heritage of the Polynesian navigators. We are now in an era where it is much easier to buy a GPS receiver for a few hundred dollars than learn how it was really done. If you get hooked by the mysteries of Polynesian Wayfinding (as I am), you could spend hours exploring the pictures and text on this site.
http://www.celestialnavigation.net/wayfinding.html is a really nice short website with a lot of links to websites where you can spend hours and hours figuring out how smart people, who had not developed a written language, could navigate tiny boats from one island to another across the entire Pacific ocean.
http://www.hawaii-nation.org/gis/4-history.html Geographers and others with an interest in the human concept of space might find this chapter, which is pretty technical and specialized, to be interesting.
This page is maintained by Harry Shipman (harrys@udel.edu)
Last modified: April 26, 2001 (4:07PM)