Stephen D. Thomas
List Price: $15.95
By: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6
Average rating: 4.5 of 5
Maritime anthropology as adventure travel, with drama. 4 out of 5 stars.
19 of 19 people found this review helpful.
This book is one of the few good 1980's attempts to document the voyaging culture of the Caroline Islands of Micronesia. It follows Kenneth Brower's 'Song For Satawal', which is now out of print! Plenty of authentic stuff to make this a good read even if you get queasy at the insecurities and soul-searching and quest for meaning that pervades this account of one man's unique adventure in the Pacific.
There is lots of interesting anthropology (or is it sociology?) here, such as the system for ownership and preservation/protection of marine resources. Good background for anyone working in resource management in the Pacific.
The image that sticks in my mind after reading this book is the agonizing, slow-motion demise of traditional society in the small islands of the Carolines. The Carolines had centuries of Spanish/German/Japanese/USA stepping on their culture, still they managed to resurrect the voyaging skills, but now face the competition of outboards, charts, technological changes. Their oral tradition recorded vast local knowledge of this part of the pacific ocean, but the younger generations for some reason don't have the desire to avail themselves. Youngsters move away, they choose to join the workaday world instead of developing their skills at the traditonal systems that proferred self-sufficiency to their ancestors. The youngsters don't want the old way.
The few remaining navigators are at a loss how to preserve the sailing traditions, so one of them accepts a student from Boston, Mass. This guy (the author, Steve) goes to Satawal, home of the greatest surviving ocean-voyaging practitioners, and he spends a LOT of time learning the language, learning the rules, getting informants to tell him about the legends, secret knowledge and systematics of ocean navigation according to the hand-me-down skills of these descendents of the sailors who populated the pacific ocean islands. In the process he manages to get in unpleasant binds over taboos, local politics, and even gets to go fishing and sailing with the natives. The book is liberally salted with the concepts, specifics, and vocabulary of native voyaging, and there is an appendix at the end that gives glossaries, diagrams, etc.
Editorial Review:
Nonfiction account of a young American man's sojourn in the South Pacific, on the Micronesian island of Satawal in the Caroline archipelago, studying traditional navigation with Mau Piailug, the last of the palus. It was Piailug who navigated a Polynesian vessel from Hawaii to Tahiti without compass or charts, as documented by a PBS film of the voyage. Thomas learns how to navigate by stars, wind, swell, birds, and memory. It is a story of seafaring, a dying culture, and self-discovery.
