
The Voyage of the Kon-Tiki Misled the World About Navigating the Pacific (2014) - pseudolus
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-voyage-kon-tiki-misled-world-about-navigating-pacific-180952478/
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NateEag
I have not read much of Heyerdahl's work, but I did read Kon-Tiki several
times.

The article may be right to dismiss Heyerdahl as wrong, but its depiction of
his approach is not in line with what he wrote himself in Kon-Tiki.

The article says:

> He made his bias particularly clear by designing his Kon Tiki raft to be
> unsteerable.

which makes it sound like a conscious decision to use the expedition to
mislead.

In fact, Heyerdahl says clearly that he and his crew were trying to preserve
their project's integrity by keeping the design of the ship as close as
possible to the original South American rafts he studied, even to the point of
preserving elements professional sailors said would sink the raft.

They did eventually discover that some pieces on the raft whose purpose they
didn't understand at first could be used for marginal steerage (though not for
sailing into the wind or current, certainly), so the article is factually
wrong that he did not include any steering mechanisms.

He might have been entirely wrong about where the Polynesians came from, but I
think the article paints him as more dishonest than he was.

~~~
DFHippie
For what it's worth I didn't read the article as portraying Heyerdahl as
dishonest, just wrong.

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mmaunder
Lost me at "Navigation is as much an art—and a spiritual practice—as it is a
science."

I'm a pilot and I've done coastal and ocean yacht navigation including coastal
at night in a new country. No art or spiritual practice. Bearings for coastal
nav, celestial angles if you want latitude at sea, accurate time source if you
also want longitude and the option to automate it all with GPS.

Next time you're boarding a commercial flight, go ask the pilot which deity he
summoned to select his IFR route. He'll tell you the frequency.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
You're correct. It's not magic. Papa Mau had an encyclopedic knowledge of the
sea. He knew the birds, the fish, the constellations, the currents. At high
noon on an overcast day Papa Mau could tell where they were by the way the
water moved the boat.

This is a massive amount of information passed on through oral tradition. It
takes a long time and if you ever visit, you'll often hear people call Papa
Mau the last navigator, because he was the last human to be taught this kind
of navigation from early childhood. Papa Mau passed before he could finish
training the next generation.

This tradition is very important to the nations of the pacific. I don't have
time to properly explain why right now. I have a meeting I need to get to.

~~~
weregiraffe
>At high noon on an overcast day Papa Mau could tell where they were by the
way the water moved the boat.

Sounds like a job for a neural network. Train it with video of the water as
input and coordinates as output.

~~~
snowwrestler
It was, in fact, the job of a neural network.

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curtis
The winds in the South Pacific predominately blow east to west. Since
Polynesian voyaging canoes have a very limited ability to sail into the wind,
it seemed impossible for them to have colonized Polynesia from west to east.
This appeared to be a pretty strong argument for a colonization of Polynesia
from South America, since South American voyagers (either intentional or
accidental) would be sailing with the predominate winds, not against them.

However, it turns out that during El Niño years the direction of the winds can
change so they are blowing from west to east, making it much easier to sail
east across the South Pacific.[1]

In 1947 Thor Heyerdahl didn't know about this possibility.

[1] Anomalous Westerlies, El Niño, and the Colonization of Polynesia -
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/677659?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...](https://www.jstor.org/stable/677659?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)
(I can't find the full text of the paper online, but I think this is the one I
remember.)

~~~
gerbilly
They sailed west to east on purpose, because it made it easier to get home if
they didn't make landfall.

The canoes they used were not tacked, they were shunted, which made it much
easier to said into the wind.

To get back home, they memorized a bunch of zenith stars for their home
latitude, went north or south till they put those stars at zenith and then
just let the wind carry them home.

Non instrument navigation to Hawaii, for example, involves overshooting the
island chain by going a bit too far east, putting Hokulea (Arcturus) at the
zenith then sailing west till you make landfall.

~~~
curtis
I don't think shunting buys that much. The crab claw sail is still limited in
how close it can sail to the wind. It's always going to be easier sailing when
the wind is favorable. And it turns out that in some parts of some years, the
winds are more favorable for sailing east in the South Pacific. Of course
sooner or later the prevailing winds will return, and then it will be easier
to get home.

~~~
gerbilly
IIRC shunting meant that they could keep the outrigger down wind at all times,
which is supposedly more efficient than sailing an outrigger canoe 'the wrong
way' half the time.

~~~
curtis
I had to look "shunting" up -- I'd heard of it before but then forgotten.

The big oceangoing voyaging canoes like Hokule'a are double canoes so they are
symmetric, unlike outrigger canoes. There still might be an advantage to
shunting depending on what kind of sail the canoe is using. According to
Wikipedia, some types of lateen sails (of which the crab claw sail is a
variant[1]) suffer from a "bad tack" due to the position of the mast[2], which
shunting would address.

I don't think hokule'a is shunted, but I'm not actually clear on that.
Hokule'a isn't a perfect replica anyway since it's built of modern materials.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_claw_sail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_claw_sail)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateen)
(look for "bad tack")

~~~
gerbilly
Hokulea is not shunted, but it _is_ a decent replica of a double hulled
Polynesian ocean canoe.[1]

The craft that were shunted were the smaller outrigger canoes.

[1] When it is rigged with lateen sails. It often is rigged with a Bermuda
sail.

------
curtis
When Nainoa Thompson was learning/re-inventing Polynesian navigation one of
the techniques he used was too spend time at a planetarium where he could
learn what the skies looked like at different latitudes.[1]

[1]
[http://archive.hokulea.com/index/founder_and_teachers/will_k...](http://archive.hokulea.com/index/founder_and_teachers/will_kyselka.html)

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Taniwha
Missing from the article is the recent DNA evidence linking Polynesian peoples
to the aboriginal inhabitants of Taiwan ... Making the west to east theory
even more likely ... Essentially the Polynesians spread across the Pacific
above the equator, the travelled back south of it, finally discovering New
Zealand around 900AD (probably the last inhabitable land discovered by any
humans)

~~~
keithnz
this article from a while back provides a nice summary of current thinking
(there's a bunch of waffle at the top of the aritcle before getting into the
guts of it about midway through )
[https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/destinations/asia/67390585/nu...](https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/destinations/asia/67390585/null)

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shams93
There was certainly contact between the polynesians and native americans. The
Chumash got their tomolo design after contact with ancient polynesians who
sailed to the channel islands. Before that contact they used reed based boats
to travel between the channel islands, after that contact and the adoption of
polynesian style sewn boats they were able to radically increase the scale of
their commercial activities by being able to transport far more goods than
with the older boat design.

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macintux
> On one voyage where he was not the master navigator, Mau woke out of a dead
> sleep and told the steersman that the canoe was off course, just by the feel
> of the swells hitting the hulls of the canoe.

That is an astonishing level of mastery.

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andyv
There was a part in Kon-Tiki where Heyerdahl says that after a month or so out
in the ocean, they realized that it was easy to navigate between islands.
First sail north or south to the latitude of your destination. Then sail east
or west, maintaining the latitude to the destination. If you were confident
about your position and heading, you could mix N/S and E/W motion to get there
faster.

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gerbilly
This is totally true.

See the book Vaka Moana for the real story.

Polynesians populated the pacific islands from west to east.

They probably are the best navigators on the planet.

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lisper
Wow.

This story is worth reading all the way to the end, where some of the
traditional navigation techniques are briefly described. It's mind-blowing.

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NelsonMinar
If you want to learn more about Polynesian voyaging, the book Vaka Moana is a
great introduction to the various technologies. Navigation, boat-building,
colonization, etc. It's a bit pricy at $70 but you can also find it in a lot
of libraries.

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/vaka-moana-voyages-of-the-
anc...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/vaka-moana-voyages-of-the-ancestors-
the-discovery-and-settlement-of-the-
pacific/oclc/929920261&referer=brief_results)

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JoeAltmaier
The issue (can Polynesian navigators navigate by stars and swells) was
actually settled and documented in 1967. See
[http://naturedocumentaries.org/14031/master-navigators-
pacif...](http://naturedocumentaries.org/14031/master-navigators-pacific/)

Curiously, all it took was going to Polynesia, and asking them. Something 18th
and 19th-century 'scientists' could not imagine doing I guess.

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mnemotechny
It is not seaweed on the "wooden carving" in one of the photos, but lā'ī,
maile and other lei plants from the land/forest.

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virgakwolfw
It is not seaweed on the "wooden carving" in one of the photos, but lā'ī,
maile and other lei plants from the land/forest.

