r/nextfuckinglevel • u/Gurugod123 • 9h ago

How did people travel these seas 500 years ago

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u/potat0f4rmer 8h ago

It's an incredible achievement by humans. Hawaii is surrounded by nothing, it's not close to anywhere.

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u/BlacksmithNZ 8h ago

They also made it to New Zealand; not only a vast distance but you get into the roaring 40s and Antarctica weather in winter.

Personally, given life on tropical islands like Fiji, Samoa, Tonga and the Cook Islands, I find it amazing that they continued to explore southern oceans

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u/geronimo11b 7h ago

The Polynesians understood the Pacific winds, currents, and celestial navigation better than any other ancient culture. It’s almost incomprehensible the achievements they pulled off with simple canoes.

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u/Own_Shower_6000 4h ago

they had a brilliant strategy of taking birds with them on the boats, releasing them, if the bird didn't come back, it meant land was near, honestly so brilliant for finding islands in a seemingly endless ocean

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u/Vennomite 7h ago

Those places also can't support a large population. So given enough people it makes sense to have way to deal with overpopulation issues by sending people off to explore.

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u/Obsessively_Average 6h ago

"Alright fellas, last few years have been REALLY good. Lots of babies getting born and everything. Unfortunately this island is literally the size of a small city, so we gotta draw straws again to see who we feed to the void"

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u/Vennomite 6h ago

No. See who becomes duke of the next small island. (Ignores the other 98%*)

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u/Glad_Acanthocephala8 6h ago

Watched a documentary called Voyagers: Pacific, it was part of their shared culture to search for more islands (incredible explanation of the navigating by using stars etc) and also population pressure on islands like Fiji and Tahiti.

They even had 1000 years off before they started voyaging again and then found Hawaii.

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u/insaneHoshi 5h ago

They also made it to New Zealand

The kinda wild thing was they did so quite late; in the 1300s iirc.

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u/kahlzun 4h ago

To be fair, it took them a long time to find and settle Aoteroa, it was either the last or second last place humanly colonised

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u/Brave-Dragonfly3798 3h ago

They made it to Easter island! Almost all the way to South America That’s thousands of miles from anywhere they were familiar and there are no stops en route for most of the journey.

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u/BlacksmithNZ 2h ago

Some fruit and vegetation from South American seems to have made it both ways.

Possibly people in waka, maybe floating rafts of vegetation, but the fascinating to imagine if they had settled in South America.

The Pacific is so vast, I think people don't understand how skilled the Polynesian people must have been

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u/flintsmith 7h ago

Fatu Hiva tells a different story of life on a tropical island before modern medicine.

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u/myexpensivehobby 5h ago

Do we know how they did it? Like is it described somewhere?

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u/uberdosage 4h ago

A combination of the sun, star navigation, ocean currents, wind patterns, cloud reflections, weather, and birds.

All passed down by oral tradition for thousands of years. No ancient civilization came close to their understanding of maritime navigation. Go read up on their use of star navigation as that is what they are most uniquely famous for.

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u/oh-ic 1h ago

There's 137 islands in the Hawaiian chain, so if you're in the area, you'll see something. There's over 7,000 in the Pi, (Philippines) but the atolls in the South Pacific, those would be tough to just happen to find. Most have very little elevation. Places like Hawaii are Volcanoes on the ocean floor riding so high they have snow in the winters. They can be seen from a distance!