The voyaging-canoe revival examined in new book


The Advertiser reviews "Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors: Reviving Polynesian Voyaging" by Ben Finney; Bishop Museum Press $19.95 softcover (sale proceeds support Bishop Museum).

University of Hawai'i anthropologist Ben Finney was an early proponent of the theory that Polynesians navigated their ways across the Pacific, countering the idea that the Pacific people were only technologically capable of "drift voyages."

Finney has built and sailed double-hulled voyaging canoes and is one of the founders of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. As such, he's uniquely qualified to discuss the revival of voyaging.

He has done so in a clear-eyed volume constructed around the remarkable 1995 sail in which six voyaging canoes from all over Polynesia followed the ancient route from the Marquesas to Hawai'i, five of them navigating without modern instruments.

Whether that event will have sparked a sustainable Pacific-wide renaissance of Polynesian voyaging remains to be seen, but in Hawai'i, the tradition appears well developed. There are several voyaging canoes now built in the Islands. Each county now has a big ocean-going canoe either sailing or under construction.


Posted: Sun - June 13, 2004 at 03:29 AM    
   
 
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Published On: Dec 27, 2005 10:15 PM
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