Currently, the origin and direction of hurricanes are recorded by satellites, and the crews of ships are notified of impending storms by radio. In ancient times, for Polynesian sailors, the role of such satellites was played by … shells. In their noise, specially trained sorcerers could “hear” the approach of a storm.
Captain Cook's amazing luck
European sailors who visited the Philippines and Indonesia knew about people who, by the noise in the shell, could predict not only the approach of a storm, but even its strength and direction, as early as the 17th century. The first European who actually encountered this amazing phenomenon and its carriers, the tauru sorcerers, was Captain James Cook. In 1769, while visiting Tahiti, he met a certain Tupia, a descendant of the famous Polynesian sailors from the island of Raiatea, who provided him with a lot of valuable information about the Polynesian islands and the peculiarities of ancient navigation. In particular, he drew a map of Oceania for Cook, on which he plotted 74 islands, indicating the distances in relation to the island of Tahiti. The vast majority of these islands have not yet been discovered by Europeans. The accuracy of the Tupia map is evidenced by the factthat literally a couple of days after leaving the sea, the British, guided by the instructions of the map, found four islands unknown to them. He also told them about the tauru - sorcerers who can predict bad weather by the noise in the sink.
There is a written testimony from Bens, a companion of Cook, where he claims that during his second visit to Tahiti in 1770, the captain begged the local leader Otu to let the tauru go with him. And from then until 1777, as Cook's biographers note with bewilderment, the famous traveler managed to never get into a more or less significant storm, although he repeatedly crossed the "roaring forties" known for his storms. After the death of Cook in 1779, Bens, in a letter to the British Admiralty, strongly advised the tauru to be hired on Her Majesty's ships as pilots.
Ancient Polynesians sail to America
Modern researchers studying the religion and culture of the peoples of Polynesia have long come to the conclusion that the ancient inhabitants of Oceania in the art of navigation were far superior to their contemporaries in the West. Nowadays, no serious scientist will deny that long before Columbus, there were real ties between the inhabitants of Polynesia and South America. In addition to legends and archaeological finds, this conclusion is also based on the fact that in Polynesia since the 1st millennium A. D. a typical South African plant grows - sweet potatoes, or yams. The homeland of sweet potato is the mountainous regions of the Andes, more precisely - Bolivia and Peru. Tubers of sweet potatoes cannot stay on the surface of the water for any long time, they simply sink. Consequently, sweet potatoes were brought to Polynesia by people,which crossed the Pacific Ocean at its widest and most desolate part.
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The only, but very significant obstacle to such contacts, which still confuses specialists, is the impossibility of crossing the Pacific Ocean from Asia to the east due to the powerful equatorial current and constant trade winds. Almost the only way to reach the shores of America is to descend south to 40 degrees, where powerful westerly winds blow, and enter the Humboldt Current, which can lead directly to the Peruvian coast. But the forties is known as a region of almost never-ending storms. Today's ships sailing in this part of the ocean must, more than anywhere else, rely on weather reports and satellite observations of the origin of storms, regularly transmitted by radio. And in this regard, there is no doubt that the ancient Polynesians, entering these turbulent waters on their sailing boats,crossed them solely thanks to the amazing abilities of the tauru.
Worshipers of the "spirit of the sea"
Legends point to the island of Rarotonga as the place where the art of "listening" to shells originated. This happened, apparently, in the first centuries of our era during the heyday of Polynesian navigation, and the peculiarities of the religious practice of the Polynesians played an important role in this. In the absence of a single god for each of the peoples of Oceania, each community and each family had their own patrons - deities and spirits. The cult of chiefs was widespread and were treated as demigods.
And, of course, magic flourished in lush color. It was subdivided into a number of types. There was harmful magic, healing, economic, military, sea, etc. And, in addition to the official priests - tohungu, many free practicing healers, fortune-tellers, fortunetellers, shamans and other specialists in this field were engaged in it. The Polynesians believed that all these people were associated with the wuy - the spirits of various objects and places. One of the most powerful was the wuy of the sea. The sorcerers associated with him enjoyed the greatest honor.
On many islands, magicians united in the so-called "men's houses", or "houses of secret alliances", where the training of sorcerers took place and rituals were performed. (They still exist on the Solomon Islands.) The "men's house" on the island of Rarotonga was dedicated to the spirit of the sea, here the tauru sorcerers learned the art of "listening" to shells. Tauru learned to "decode" their noise, to recognize in subtle vibrations of air the passage of winds and storms many kilometers away. This was especially important during many days of sailing in the open ocean, where sometimes the only salvation from the storm was not to get into its epicenter. Tauru, listening to the shell, even in the solid wall of the storm, looked for a relatively quiet loophole through which the boat could slip.
Forgotten art of witchcraft
Europeans, sailing in the Pacific Ocean, eagerly took Polynesian storm predictors on their ships. It is believed that the tauru was constantly aboard the fastest ship of the era - the Cutty Sark, which almost never got into violent storms.
It is known that one such sorcerer is Dua Tara. nephew of a Tahitian leader, somehow ended up in England. However, Britain greeted the overseas visitor coldly: his shell was stolen, and during his stay in England, the tauru was in dire need. He returned to Polynesia as a simple sailor and died at the age of 28.
The fashion for tauru was very widespread, and as a result, there were many scammers posing as such. Therefore, it happened more and more often that ships fell into a storm because of these pseudo-predictors. Faith in the tauru was finally undermined when an entire fleet fell into the Indian Ocean in a sudden storm and sank. whose admiral was too trusting in the instructions of the swindler.
By the end of the 19th century, the tauru was completely forgotten. Interest in them revived in the 30s of the XX century, and then only in a narrow circle of specialists studying the religion and culture of the Polynesians. It was at this time that ancient documents and letters were found, in which sailors reported on the tauru and their wonderful art.
Several interesting publications have appeared on this topic in recent years. Australian researcher K. Arkham even published a book about tauru sorcerers. In her opinion, they existed at the beginning of the 20th century, which is supported by the following case. In 1925, European missionaries living on the island of Haruai received a radio message about an impending powerful typhoon. They warned the locals. But they remained calm and did not take any action. The radio continued to report that the typhoon was heading straight for Haruai. The natives did not even stop fishing off the coast. Indeed, the main flow of the typhoon passed to the south, practically without touching the island.
K. Arkham cites several more similar examples of the amazing foresight of the weather by the Polynesians that took place at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. But by the end of the 20s of the XX century, such predictions stopped. The last tauru had probably died by then.
The researcher comes to the conclusion that the noise emitted by the shell does not seem to play the main role. It's all about the psychic abilities of the tauru. While learning how to handle the sink, they performed special exercises aimed at sharpening their hearing and acquiring sensitivity to changes in the atmosphere. By now, the tradition of such training has been interrupted. In Tahiti, local priests showed shells to Arkham, claiming that they were used by the tauru during the time of Cook. Now they were just old shells. There is no one to "listen" to them.
Igor Voloznev. Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" No. 18 2010