Kelly Prime

Like, yeah, I can't like actually picture any of these characters not wearing powdered reds, you know?

And since the problem of finding longitude was essentially the problem of figuring out a way to safely travel long distances at sea, I was really curious about how other cultures managed to do that.

And the most extraordinary version that I found comes from the Pacific Islands, where navigators have been traveling between these, like,

teensy tiny islands separated by thousands of miles of ocean for millennia, like centuries and centuries before the Longitude Act.

So to find out more, I called up probably like one of the coolest people I've ever met.

Lehua Kamalu is based in Honolulu and works on the canoes Hokulea and Hiki Analia.

And she's one of the few people on Earth using traditional skills to navigate vast distances at sea, which means no GPS and definitely no marine chronometer.

Yeah, well, I'll say first that a lot of the original techniques for this kind of navigation have been lost over the years because of colonization.

But Lihua and her colleagues use their own interpretation of the methods that Pacific islanders used thousands of years ago.

Back then, navigators in the Pacific Islands had a lot of the same challenges as Europeans.

Basically, there's only so much information you can easily get from the sun and the stars.

And so it kind of makes sense that the starting point for Polynesian wayfinding is actually pretty similar to the European concept of dead reckoning.

Ultimately, though, this approach isn't enough.

LaHua says it gets you in the right direction, but the longer the journey, the more errors can add up.

So you need a way to get more confident in where you are and where you're going at sea.

And so instead of using something like latitude and longitude, Polynesian wayfinders take a more holistic approach.

Okay, so what Lahua told me is that even when you're out at sea, way out of sight of land, that doesn't mean you don't have information.

In fact, your natural surroundings provide a lot of data that can be used to figure out where you are and where you're going.

Great question.

And one example that Lahua gave me was birds, specifically land birds.