Angelica's Grotto

39 By The Swells, By The Stars

‘Dying sea skills cost islanders their lives,’ said the headline over an Associated Press report in The Times:

Suva, Fiji: Possibly hundreds of Pacific islanders die slow agonising deaths from sunstroke, thirst and starvation every year because they have lost the seamanship skills of their ancestors, it was claimed yesterday.

‘Today, about ninety-five per cent of Pacific islanders who fish at sea do so in small dinghies powered by poorly maintained outboard motors … They chase fish over the horizon, lose sight of their island and can’t find their way back,’ said Michael Blanc, who teaches basic sea safety skills in the South Pacific Commission’s fisheries programme.

Klein spent about an hour searching through his video collection until he found a documentary called The Last Navigator that he’d once taped from Channel 4. It had been filmed in Micronesia, which at the time had massage parlours and Burger Kings but no Disneyland. On the island of Satawal in the Carolines the navigator, Mau Piailug, was first seen with a circle of stones on a mat and a group of less-than-keen children whom he was attempting to teach the star-compass memorised by his ancestors. ‘I’ll continue to voyage,’ he said, ‘and if I’m not disabled, or too old or dead I will pass my knowledge to the next generation.’

As a demonstration of the traditional skills, Piailug had organised the building of a sailing canoe for a 500-mile voyage with an adult crew from Satawal to Saipan in the Marianas. Piailug was perhaps in his forties; his compact brown body was sea-tempered and ready, his face intense with the island-finding spirit. ‘We men should think only of our strength,’ he told his crew, ‘we are not children. When we’re on the canoe it is my role to tell you the talk of the sea. Remember the canoe is our mother and the navigator is our father.’

The vessel herself seemed as eager as Piailug; she was a creature of quickness and memory, a magic of wind and wood, winged with a landfall-hungry sail, rigged with ropes of nothing-forgotten, keeled with the shape of answer-the-sea. At the start of the voyage Piailug, at the helm of the outrigger canoe, sang to his crew:

I sing of this canoe, our canoe,

of the life of the spirits, the life of people.

Be with me, spirit,

on the small beach, on the wide beach,

on the beach of my island -

I sing of this canoe, our canoe.

Out of sight of land Piailug’s eyes were attentive day after day to the colours and shapes of clouds, to the winds that shifted or were steady, and to the swells. At night he steered by the stars that successively rose over the horizon on the chosen course, each night bringing the mother canoe and her children closer to the loom in the sky, the reflected light of the island landfall, and the tiny speck of land in the wide, wide sea. He had no instruments, only himself, his thousandfold memory and the dead who sailed with him, chanting the names of winds and swells and stars.

The outrigger canoe seemed less a man-made thing than a natural part of sea life, the sail as inconspicuous against the sky as the wing of a tern. Watching that swift and urgent vessel hissing through the blue water Klein was riveted. Saipan safely reached, he shook his head, then sat for a while whispering into his hand. He didn’t want to hear what he was saying.