~ Sustainable Seafaring from Oceania. History, Design, and Relevance ~

March 29, 2016

Paafu: The Star Compass

As a adjunct to the post of a few days ago, here is the drawing of the star compass from Stephen Thomas's book, The Last Navigator.


March 25, 2016

"East is Not a Big Bird"

(This post needs some cleaning up....)

Ever since I began reading about Micronesian celestial navigation many years ago, I've read that the cardinal point, so to speak, was East, where the constellation Mailap, "the big bird" rises.  The sources cited below all basically asserted this.  But I just came across a piece published by these guys - Gary Holton, Calistus Hachibmai, Ali Haleyalur, Jerry Lipka, and Donald Rubinstein - which asserts otherwise.   

It's found here:
https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/oceanic_linguistics/v054/54.2.holton.pdf

I can't read it, nor can I excerpt from it here because it's published on one of these private scholarly sites which require a paid subscription.  But I did find a Powerpoint (?) presentation here and captured a bunch of screenshots.  This is all I can scrape together but I'd really like to read this thing...


The screenshots here -














March 18, 2016

Internet resources

Couple of internet resources here.  You may already be utilizing these, I may be "behind the curve".

Firstly,  I just learned how easy it is to search for similar images by simply opening a couple of windows side by side and then dragging and dropping an image you like into a Google Images searchbox.  See below.


 This will quickly and easily lead you to "similar" images.

Secondly, consider starting a Pinterest account.  There are a surprisingly lot of people "pinning" pictures of proas, boats, design, Pacific life, etc.  Watch out, though - browsing here can be addictive...

March 11, 2016

Ghosting

After coming across an old photo of Voyager and fiddling with the color, I couldn't resist posting it.  Still had the old tacking rig at the time - hadn't yet discover the brilliance of the proa rig!

Ghosting on a foggy morning on Lake Long

Stamps and Scenes

Nauru
Yap
Pohnpei
Kosrae

March 06, 2016