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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, October 20, 2014 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Polynesian voyaging canoe 
Hawai'iloa, north shore of Moloka'i.
Photo credit: Monte Costa

Douglas Herman

"How to Bootsrap Technology: Building an Ocean-Going Polynesian Canoe from Scratch"

ABSTRACT -- The settling of the Island Pacific more than 1,000 years ago is one of the greatest adventures of human history. Using double-hulled voyaging canoes built with Stone-Age tools and navigating by stars and swells, Pacific Islanders journeyed as far as 2,500 miles to find tiny dots of land in the middle of a vast ocean that covers a third of the surface of the planet. Then they repeatedly traveled back and forth to settle those islands.

This presentation looks at the arts involved in building a large canoe in traditional times, from the making of the stone tools to the weaving of the sails and the lashing and gluing of the parts. It demonstrates the ingenuity of Pacific Islanders, living on volcanic islands with no usable metals, in determining the best materials and methods for using only what they had at hand to make these amazing vessels.

There will be materials for hands-on examination.

SPEAKER -- Doug Herman is senior geographer at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. In 1984 he went to the University of Hawaii Department of Geography to do a Masters degree, and coming to appreciate the traditional culture of the islands, stayed to do a PhD. After working for a Pacific Islands educational project in Australia, he created Pacific Worlds, a web-based cultural documentation and education project for Hawaii and the American Pacific. He conducted community-based research in three Hawaiian and four Micronesian communities to produce culturally rich website that you can view at PacificWorlds.com.

The canoe is the central object of Pacific Island culture, and Doug quickly became intrigued by the voyages of the Hokule`a, the contemporary Hawaiian voyaging canoe that proved the ability of Pacific islanders to navigate across long distances without instruments. From 2009-2011 he did research in Hawaii for a proposed exhibition on the voyaging canoe as a lesson for how to live in finite environments such as planet Earth. He has interviewed numerous canoe builders and navigators, artisans and craftsmen, and in summer 2013 built his own 16-foot outrigger sailing canoe.




Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov