共用题干 Mau Piailug,Ocean NavigatorMau sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti using traditional methods.In early ...

共用题干
Mau Piailug,Ocean Navigator

Mau sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti using traditional methods.
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 Polynesian Voyaging Society had organised the expe-
dition. Its purpose was to find out if seafarers（海员）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.
At the time,Mau was the only man alive who knew how to navigate just by observing the stars,the wind and
the sea.
He had never before sailed to Tahiti,which was a long way to the south.However,he understood how the
wind and the sea behave around islands,so he was confident he could find his way.The voyage took him and
his crew a month to complete and he did it without a compass or charts.
His grandfather began the task of teaching him how to navigate when he was still a baby.He showed him
pools of water on the beach to teach him how the behaviour of the waves and wind changed in different
places.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.
The voyage proved that Hawaii's first inhabitants came in small boats and navigated by reading the sea
and the stars.Mau himself became a keen teacher,passing on his traditional secrets to people of other cul-
tures so that his knowledge would not be lost.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 rememnber everything as he
had done. Mau expected his students to remember the positions of the stars immediately.