Thursday, June 4, 2015

David Lewis, We the Navigators **** 1/2

My most substantial souvenir from our recent trip to Hawaii, We, the Navigators explores The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific. In other words, it explains how South Sea islanders navigated their watery world without instruments. How does one sail 1000 miles across open ocean and arrive at a tiny atoll?

The book provides practical details about many specific techniques, such as using star compasses, reading swells, identifying land clouds, and following birds. (Flying fish always head into the current just before re-entering the water!) More impressively, it presents the conceptual worldview of the traditional navigator, which is quite different from the modern Western approach.

Lewis writes the book in a very academic style. He culls data from many sources, but the clearest and most entertaining illustrations of the techniques come from voyages he undertook himself with actual practitioners of the art.

Like Thinking in Jazz, We, the Navigators elucidates a complex and esoteric skill in a way that makes it simultaneously less mysterious and more impressive. 

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