Canoe exhibit ‘Voyages’ past

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Apparently, it's a heck of a show, and Hawaii's unique role in ancient Polynesian voyaging is well featured, but the Auckland Museum's massive traveling exhibition "Vaka Moana -- Voyages of the Ancestors" looks like it's going to sail right by Hawaii.

Currently at Taiwan's National Museum of Prehistory and the National Museum of Natural Science, "Vaka Moana" is the most ambitious touring exhibition yet curated by the Auckland Museum, and its biggest draw since the groundbreaking "Te Maori" exhibition in 1984, a show often credited with kick-starting modern interest in Maori culture.

And it's a source of national pride for New Zealand. When it opened, museum director Rodney Wilson stated, "We are the oldest museum in the country, with the strongest Maori and Pacific collections in the country ... and we are in the foremost Pacific island city in the world. No city has a bigger Pacific island population or a stronger Pacific identity." Take that, Honolulu.

The companion book to the traveling exhibit was recently published by University of Hawaii Press. The exhibit itself is headed to the mainland, Australia and Europe before returning to New Zealand in 2012.

The exhibit was offered to Bishop Museum, but the $250,000 license fee was prohibitive, said Mike Shanahan, of Bishop Museum's exhibitions committee.

"In meeting our mission, it would have been phenomenal," he said. "We seriously considered bringing it here, but we were not finding sponsors."

Bishop Museum's usual budget for a traveling exhibition is in the $80,000-to-$150,000 range, explained Shanahan. In addition to the license fee, there are high shipping expenses. "We'd be very interested in this exhibit down the line, if the right timing and finances come together."

The exhibit includes more than 200 objects from New Zealand museum collections, including priceless Polynesian carvings, multimedia displays and a variety of interactive kiosks drawing on a broad range of scientific specialties.

"The human settlement of the Pacific islands is not just a Pacific story," said professor Kerry Howe, of Massey University, editor of the companion book. "It is also the final chapter in the story of human exploration and settlement of our planet. With the settlement of the Pacific islands, we reached the end of our habitable world."

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It may be the last place settled, but it's the most recently forgotten. The vast stretches of the Pacific Ocean cover about a third of the planet, thousands of miles of featureless sea dotted with a few islands, most of which have eroded away to almost nothing. Settling these territories, even now, is a daunting prospect.

"Vaka Moana - Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discovery and Settlement of the Pacific" Edited by K.R. Howe (University of Hawaii Press) $59

So imagine yourself back several thousand years. The rest of the Earth has been settled by people simply walking here to there. The Pacific, however, required an adventurous technology. The voyagers who pushed out of southeast Asia, easterly, island-hopping until Hawaii and Easter Island and - maybe - the West coast of the Americas had been reached, relied on the wooden canoe.

People being people, these polyglot groups defined their own, indigenous styles of canoe building. Canoes defined cultures, just as cultures defined canoes, and the engineering was defined by local resources. Islanders with short trees designed canoes that could be pieced together. Islanders with forests of old-growth timber could hollow-out massive canoes, dozens of feet long.

Still, Pacific canoes are generally identifiable by a simple, uniquely engineered creation - the outrigger, whether it's a simple stabilizing float on the end of beams or two canoe hulls lashed together into a kind of catamaran. The outrigger tamed the Pacific.

"Vaka Moana - Voyages of the Ancestors" is a massive touring exhibition that originated in New Zealand. It's also the title of an equally substantial book about the exhibition. The University of Hawaii Press has published the U.S. edition, and a mighty fine experience it is, too.

Although the book is pretty scholarly - there's a whole section on Polynesian DNA, and how it is used to track the eastern diaspora, for example - it's also a very attractive package on the subject of Pacific canoeing, a field of study that has exploded in the last half-century.

Proper credit is afforded Ben Finney, Tommy Holmes and Herb Kane and their dream of creating an ancient Hawaiian canoe that could test theories of seafaring and navigation. The Polynesian Voyaging Society's creation of the canoe Hokule'a in the 1970s was the spark plug that ignited this relatively new field of scholarship, although there were similar, smaller efforts taking place elsewhere.

The book cannily points out that Hokule'a was partially built to counter armchair theorists like New Zealand historian Andrew Sharp, who believed ancient Polynesians built weak, poorly designed craft that settled the Pacific purely by accident, and that navigation was unknown to these primitive peoples. Hokule'a's voyages put a stop to that kind of academic havering.

On follow-up vessels like Hawai'iloa, PVS volunteers discovered that the ship sailed better backward, with the sails reversed! This is the sort of knowledge that can only be learned firsthand.

The book features chapters written by Finney, as well as many of Kane's handsome illustrations. It's clear that, in contrast to the deep-bellied fortresses from Europe that plowed through the water, Polynesian designs took a different tack - light, skimming vessels that raced over the surface of the sea instead of pushing against it. It's interesting how much ancient Polynesian canoe designs are mirrored in modern racing ships.

As a piece of popular scholarship, "Vaka Moana" is a must-have for those interested in the subject. I was particularly taken by the pictures, drawings, photographs and accounts of various canoe technologies taken by Western explorers in the 1800s, just as the knowledge of the Polynesian past was fading.

A PBS special some years ago pitted archaeologists against engineers in building an Egyptian pyramid. At one point, they had to get a big stone block around a corner, and the archaeologists claimed it would take weeks of massive effort, and some sort of enormous apparatus. An engineer picked up a smaller stone and a long crowbar, and maneuvered the block around the corner in a few seconds. "Do you think," snorted the engineer, "that the ancients didn't understand how a lever works?"

"Vaka Moana" reminds me of that encounter. The more we think we know, the less we do - and nothing beats hands-on experience.