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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

diagram of canoe with stars in the sky

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, November 2, 2015 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Doug Herman

"The Art of Oceanic Navigation and Landfinding"

ABSTRACT -- The settling of the Island Pacific over 1000 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 2500 miles to find tiny dots of land in the middle of an ocean covering one third the surface of the planet. Then they traveled back, and forth, and back, and forth to settle those islands. With no maps, instruments or written texts, how did they do it? Until the 1976 voyage of the Hōkūle'a, scholars did not believe that such intentional navigation and landfinding had been possible. In this engaging presentation, Doug Herman reveals the intricate arts of Oceanic navigation and landfinding that enabled this amazing feat. Tales recounted from dozens of interviews with contemporary Hawaiian navigators, voyagers, artisans and canoe builders testify to the skills involved in building and navigating deep-sea voyaging canoes.

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. In 2000 he created Pacific Worlds, a web-based cultural documentation and education project for Hawai'i and the American Pacific using Indigenous voices. Excited by the voyaging canoe as the central object of Pacific Island culture, Doug conducted research from 2009-2011 for a proposed exhibition on the voyaging canoe as a teacher 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