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The name is perfect. "Etak" refers to a system of navigation used by Micronesian and Polynesian seafarers to navigate from island to island in the vast Pacific
by SamBam 3y ago
The name is perfect. "Etak" refers to a system of navigation used by Micronesian and Polynesian seafarers to navigate from island to island in the vast Pacific Ocean. Much like this device, it operates by "augmented dead reckoning" (as it says in TFA).
The etak system of navigation involves navigating by stars and ocean swells to get the heading, but a key issue when navigating by dead reckoning over long distances is that if you're a fraction of a degree off you may miss your destination and never know it, so it's also vitally important to know how far you've gone. This is hard when there are no landmarks. The navigators estimated their distance by using intermediary islands off to the side, which they viewed as coming towards them (from their point of view, the navigator stays motionless on the open ocean while the world moves towards them) and past them. These reference islands were called etaks.
However, confusingly, the etaks were generally not visible, being beyond the horizon, and sometimes did not even exist. The navigators would have named etaks that they pictured being just over the horizon, whether they were there or not, and would track their procession past their boat. When the set number of etaks had passed, they would know they were in the vicinity of the destination island. If they were not at the right time of day for birds to be out, they would then hang out in the area waiting to spot the birds leaving or returning at dawn or dusk.
So the system involves dead reckoning plus a system of turning the navigators' own well-developed intuition of how far they had travelled into a formalized system of generally-invisible islands that they used as a mental model to externalize this intuition.
(My knowledge of this is from Cognition in the wild, Hutchins, E., 1995.)
Edit: D'oh, I should have finished TFA. This is described at the end, although more roughly.
- Affric 3y agoThank you for the fascinating comment and book recommendation. Felt the article was heavy on ad copy and graphics.
- Thtjifiti 3y agoThis sounds very romantic, but they were mostly at drift. Most very using rafts without any form of propulsion. "Navigation" across wast distances was one way road with no return ticket. They had to do it for overpopulation, not for some explorative spirit.
- niccl 3y agoI think there's a large Maori population in Aotearoa that would disagree with this. Heyerdahl's theory was discredited a while ago
- 082349872349872 3y agoGranted, overpopulation drove much, but if it was all one way drifting, then why would the Hawai'ians have a channel named "the way to Tahiti"? see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hōkūleʻa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hōkūleʻa
- Affric 3y agoDo you have a source for your claims?
- jollyllama 3y ago>They had to do it for overpopulation, not for some explorative spirit. Navigation methods aside, those aren't mutually exclusive.
- wiml 3y agoI don't have references easily to hand but I don't think that's true. Polynesian navigators were able to make repeat journeys to the same destination reliably enough to return home and build maps and train successors in their craft.
- SamBam 3y agoThere is plenty of evidence that Pacific Islanders were able to navigate from island to island, for example in the book I cited above. Here's more [1]. What's your evidence for them not being able to? Honestly, this sounds like some crap spread by people who can't bring themselves to believe that non-Western "primitive people" could have highly developed skills. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation
- ianburrell 3y agoThe Polynesians used double-hulled canoes not rafts. King Kamehameha conquered the Hawaiian island using giant canoes with accounts from Westerners. The system of navigation was recorded orally. People in living memory retained the knowledge. Anthropologists got it from them, built replica canoes, and then sailed around discovering that it worked. Captain Cook used Polynesian navigator who was well traveled. Maybe the rafts are coming from Easter Island losing the technology and using rafts instead.
- Anotheroneagain 3y agoIt only happened in the late middle ages, after possibly millenia of experience navigating easier waters. They simply didn't teach their methods to anyone
- mauvehaus 3y agoAnother book specifically about the Polynesian navigators is The Last Navigator. Having no experience navigating at sea, parts of it were a bit over my head, but it was a great read. It also goes into the culture of the people who are the subject of the book.
- stavros 3y agoOh, I thought it was just the name "Kate" reversed.
- btbuildem 3y agoI've read somewhere that part of the method they intuited their way was to read the waves. As faraway land masses can affect the shape of waves, supposedly these navigators could "see" beyond the horizon due to how the swell was behaving. I can sort of see that in a mind's eye, with rings of waves spreading as they bounce off obstacles in water. But that's bird's view of a miniature -- and seeing that from the surface would be a very different story.
- bix6 3y agohttps://worldhistorycommons.org/marshall-islands-stick-chart https://worldhistorycommons.org/marshall-islands-stick-chart It’s amazing they can read such nuance.
- Akronymus 3y agoLook at something long enough, and you begin to intuit the patterns instinctively.
- sneak 3y agoInstinctive things are things the entire species are born with. Things you pick up via experience (“nurture”) can never be “instinctive”.
- resolutebat 3y agoInstincts are not limited to natural instincts. > 1. A natural or inherent impulse or behaviour. > 2. An intuitive reaction not based on rational conscious thought.
- dhosek 3y agoI’m reminded of something that I heard someone say once in an interview—intuition is just memory in disguise. Certainly, in some areas of my life, my strategy is to learn things and forget them to be able to use them. It doesn’t work in all arenas (mathematics really demands explicit remembering much of the time, but I find programming and writing both work well with forgotten remembering).
- zeteo 3y agoThat sounds fascinating, but it's not really clear to me how imagining islands beyond the horizon can help with dead reckoning. Maybe there are changes in observable phenomena, such as ocean currents, that are associated with these unseen islands? It does sound like a very complex system based on the beginning of this article; I'm wondering if anyone here has read the books mentioned in it: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20705519 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20705519
- zeteo 3y agoI've found a bit more information about the topic in a publicly available research article [1]: "A depth of only 25 fathoms is quite enough to give some surface indications: coloration, wave phenomena, perhaps fauna. Is this the explanation of the ghost island? Some lost traveller, perhaps en route from Yap to Guam, seeing and remembering these phenomena, later reifying them as an inhabited land? Or is it possible that a real island once existed here, as the Carolinians say? [...] Any Carolinian navigator worthy of the name can give a whole set of radiating courses under all the navigation stars from every island of the Carolines, not just from Kaafiror. [... N]avigators do learn them, together with the courses from real islands, and they make no distinction among them. It is perhaps not altogether in the realm of fantasy to speculate that the curriculum of the schools of navigation was established in a time when Kaafifor was more than a discolored patch of water." [1] https://micronesica.org/sites/default/files/the_ghost_islands_of_the_carolines_by_riesenberg_s.h._-_micronesica_vol.11_no.1_jul._1975_o.pdf https://micronesica.org/sites/default/files/the_ghost_island...
- giraffe_lady 3y agoYou know how if you turn the light on for a second you can then move through a dark room without touching anything? The boundary between "imagining" and "visualizing" is somewhere between these two experiences but conceptually they are not that different.
- mrandish 3y agoYeah, this surprised me as well. I get how reading ocean swells, sea life, birds, ocean color (indicating depth and/or plant life below) could give a general sense of position. And I can see how stars, prevailing currents and maybe even estimates based on the relative movement of clouds (adjusted for ambient wind direction and weather conditions) could give a general sense of distance traveled. But on a completely cloudless day (or fully overcast night) gauging distance traveled seems like it could be catastrophically imprecise often enough to make for short navigation careers. I'm not sure how the concept of tracking virtual islands over the horizon really helps. The only thing I can think of is maybe the idea of it encourages the navigator to stay focused on estimating the passage of proxy points on the far horizon based on whatever composite of wind, current and swell signs they are intuiting from. While still quite variable, I assume gauging distance estimates on the far horizon is better than the alternative of trying to estimate distance traveled from the immediate surroundings of the craft (which are only useful for estimating velocity).
- sisyphus_coding 3y agoWhat is TFA?
- hollerith 3y agoThe fine article. In this case, https://maphappenings.com/2024/04/11/story-of-etak/ https://maphappenings.com/2024/04/11/story-of-etak/
- sisyphus_coding 3y agoAh, thank you