Long before the era of the great geographical discoveries made by European navigators in the 15th - 18th centuries, peoples living on numerous islands, later called Polynesian, were already sailing the World Ocean. Excellent sailors, they crossed the Pacific Ocean in all directions, and in very unpretentious vessels.
The islanders knew long before the arrival of the Europeans that the Earth was round, and they had words to designate such abstract concepts as the equator, the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. They gave names to two hundred fixed stars and six planets, which they called wandering stars. Their experienced navigators knew in which part of the sky a certain star was located at a given time of the year and at a given hour of the night - the sky was for them a clock, a calendar and a compass. They also knew the sextant. They were served by an ordinary pumpkin, called "sacred".
The core of the “sacred gourd” was cleared; in its upper part, four holes were drilled at equal distances from each other. Water was poured into the pumpkin, which is why it took a strictly vertical position. Observations were made through the holes. The course of the vessel was determined in relation to the North Star. Pumpkins were called "sacred" because they were made and used exclusively by priests. They also studied astronomy and made tables, using which one could swim at any time of the year.
The islanders studied the sea lakes; they found that certain directions of currents corresponded to certain times of the year. This phenomenon was later noticed by the Europeans in the Celebes Sea and the Molucca Strait near the Caroline Islands and the island of Samoa.
Taking advantage of the currents, the natives were ahead of the European ships sailing on a straight course for whole weeks on the way, which surprised the captains of the ships. The Polynesians built ships of two types: balance boats and twin boats. The boat, hollowed out of wood, to which the balance bar supporting it is connected, is a simple but reliable design. Usually the balancer in the form of a long piece of light wood was connected to the hull of the boat by means of two transverse jumpers, which were attached at one end to the upper edges of both sides of the boat, and at the other end to the balancer. In order for such a float to stay on the surface of the water, the jumpers must either bend towards the balancer, or, if they are straight, be connected to it using special wooden fasteners.
The rebuilt boat was given a name, and usually it was dedicated to the god Tanya - the patron saint of seafarers. The vessel was equipped with a mast, sails, oars - paddles, buckets and stone anchors. Some boats were equipped with up to three masts. The sails were made of pandanus mats, which were sewn into a triangle and pulled over wooden yards to reinforce the long sides of the sail.
During the resettlement, when women and children also went sailing with the men, large double boats, reaching 25 meters in length, accommodated more than 60 people. This amount was quite enough to form the nucleus for the settlement of the island. They took with them on the voyage dried fish, baked and dried sweet potatoes, seeds and tubers of plants, pigs, dogs and poultry. They also carried firewood with them, and the fire was made in a boat on a bed of sand. Fresh water was kept in special vessels made from coconuts, pumpkins and bamboo trunks. However, Hawaiian and New Zealand legends tell us the memories that the participants of large sea crossings in advance brought up the ability to endure hunger and thirst. With severe discipline, it was easy to feed any team for 3 to 4 weeks,and this time was enough to cross the widest sea distances between the two archipelagos of Polynesia.
The greatness of the feat accomplished by the ancestors of the modern islanders, who searched for and inhabited all the numerous pieces of land in the largest ocean in the world, is best understood when you remember that the Polynesian triangle of Hawaii - New Zealand - Easter Island is four times the size of Europe.
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There are various assumptions explaining where the migration waves came from and where they moved, but there is no consensus. The Polynesians themselves tell the ancient legend of Tiki, the god and leader who brought their ancestors, in particular, to the Marquesas Islands. "Until then," they said, "our people lived across the seas, in a large country in the east." This version was taken up by the Norwegian traveler Thor Heyerdahl. By his sea voyages and searches on land, he attempted to prove that at least part of the archipelagos of the Pacific Ocean was inhabited by newcomers from South America.
Nevertheless, most researchers agree that the ancient ancestral home of the Polynesians was the Hawaiian Islands. They were inhabited already in the 5th century. From this center, the Polynesians subsequently settled on other islands. Surprisingly, discovering new lands, they often met … with the locals! Legends call them mene-hune; these are blue-eyed, blond men who love red. On many islands one could see entire families with unusually fair skin, red to light brown hair, gray-blue eyes, and aquiline-nosed faces.
The redheads called themselves Urukehu and claimed to be descended from the first chiefs on the islands - white-skinned gods named Tangaroa, Kane and Tiki. The god Tiki in the myths of the islanders is either the creator of man, or the first man is the progenitor.
In the 50s, Thor Heyerdahl in the jungle of Fatu-Khiva from the Marquesas group discovered two powerful stone slabs with images on one of a two-meter fish, on the other a man and a woman. The islanders called them "tiki". Nearby lay a stone platform, bordered by a wall, on which huge eyes were carved. Since then, ethnographers and archaeologists have continued their research. It is possible that over time they will come to a certain agreement, and then we will be able to imagine with some certainty the first adventure of people in the Pacific Ocean, fearlessly setting off on a long voyage on a wooden boat with a balance beam.