Mau Piailug's Polynesian Voyage Quiz

In early 1976, Mau Piailug, a fisherman, led an expedition in which he sailed a traditional Polynesian boat across 2,500 miles of ocean from Hawaii to Tahiti.

• The fisherman Mau Piailug guided a team on a journey between two Pacific islands using an old-style boat.

• Mau Piailug was in charge of a journey from Hawaii to Tahiti using both traditional and modern methods.

• Mau Piailug's boat journey in 1976 was filmed by a documentary crew to show traditional sailing methods.

Its purpose was to find out if seafarers in the distant past could have found their way from one island to the other without navigational instruments, or whether the islands had been populated by accident.

• The journey aimed to test whether early island settlers could have found new lands if they had not relied on any devices.

• The main goal was to show that modern ways of sailing are much better than old methods.

• The members of expedition thought recreating the exact route taken by the first people who came to Hawaii was impossible.

At the time, Mau was the only man alive who knew how to navigate just by observing the stars, the wind and the sea.

• Nobody else living during that period had mastered the skill of finding direction using only natural signs except Mau.

• Mau was among the people who could use traditional ways to find paths across the ocean.

• Mau spent twenty years learning his special navigation skills by relying on the stars.

He had never before sailed to Tahiti, which was a long way to the south.

• The journey to Tahiti was Mau's first trip to this distant southern island.

• Mau knew the waters around Tahiti well from his previous sailing experiences.

• Before the trip to Tahiti, Mau spoke with older sailors who had visited this place to learn about the journey.

However, he understood how the wind and the sea behave around islands, so he was confident he could find his way.

• Despite never visiting Tahiti, Mau felt sure about finding it because he knew how natural elements act.

• Mau was worried about getting lost because he didn't understand ocean patterns in the southern waters.

• To find his way, Mau built a small model of Tahiti's coastline to help him recognize the island when approaching it.

The voyage took him and his crew a month to complete and he did it without a compass or charts.

• Mau's team finished their journey in about four weeks using only natural signs.

• The boat trip lasted one month because of the helpful modern tools.

• During the journey, Mau and his crew members experienced some dangerous storms.

His grandfather began the task of teaching him how to navigate when he was still a baby.

• Mau's early lessons in finding his way across water started when he was very small.

• Mau's father taught him the important skills of navigation during his formative years.

• The teaching method used by Mau's grandfather was passed down through six generations of their family.

Later, Mau used a circle of stones to memorise the positions of the stars. Each stone was laid out in the sand to represent a star.

• As part of his learning, Mau arranged rocks in a pattern on the beach to help remember where stars appear in the sky.

• Mau preferred to use seashells to create his own visual of star patterns.

• Mau created different stone patterns for summer and winter star positions to track seasonal changes.

He explained the positions of the stars to his students, but he allowed them to write things down because he knew they would never be able to remember everything as he had done.

• While teaching star knowledge, Mau let people make notes since he understood they couldn't keep all details in their heads like he could.

• Mau insisted his students must remember all navigation information without writing anything down.

• Mau's classes about using natural signs to navigate became popular with university students studying ancient Pacific cultures.