Mau Piailug - Legacy

Legacy

The success of Mau's navigational feats sparked cultural pride in Tahitians, Māori and Hawaiians and connected all Polynesians to stories their forebears told of similar voyages of generations past. The voyage of Hōkūle‘a attracted the interest of young students such as Milton "Shorty" Bertelmann and later Nainoa Thompson. Mau not only led Hōkūle‘a to Tahiti, but reconnected the people of the Pacific to their cultural roots. Revived interest in preserving traditional culture and navigation methods reinvigorated the art of canoe building and cultural studies in Hawaii, New Zealand, Rarotonga, and Tahiti, as well as Mau's homeland of Satawal.

Two centuries before Mau and the Hōkūle‘a, Captain James Cook, with the help of Tupaia, gained knowledge that otherwise would have been closely held. Before his death in 1779, Cook hypothesized that Polynesians shared common ancestry; he even pinned their origin to Asia. However, Cook's theory did not prevent debate among scholars. Before the Hōkūle‘a voyage in 1976, academic debate about the settlement of Polynesia was divided between several schools of thought.

Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl hypothesized that the Pacific was settled by voyages from South America and set out to prove this with his Kon-Tiki expedition. Scholars did not take Heyerdahl's hypothesis seriously. New Zealander Andrew Sharp proposed the accidental voyaging hypothesis in 1957 which argued that Oceania was too vast to have been settled by intentional voyaging, so migrations must have happened by accidental drift voyages. Sharp granted that Polynesians did likely settle the Pacific from Asia, but held the opinion that their crude vessels and navigational tools were no match for intentional sailing from Tahiti to Hawaii or New Zealand. He stated that voyages of more than three hundred miles were likely accidental voyages, with landfall at the mercy of wind and current. A 1973 study and computer simulation by Levison, Ward, and Web investigated the probability of Sharp's hypothesis, but found it improbable.

Finney disagreed with the accidental voyaging portion of Sharp's hypothesis. To investigate the problem he founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society with Herb Kane and Tommy Holmes in 1973, intent on building a voyaging canoe to sail from Hawaii to Tahiti to test whether intentional two-way voyaging throughout Oceania could be replicated. With the help of Mau's navigational knowledge guiding Hōkūle‘a, the Polynesian Voyaging Society demonstrated that intentional voyaging was not only possible, but that the ancestors of the Polynesians could have settled the Pacific on similar voyages using non-instrument wayfinding techniques such as Mau's. Finally, linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that the history of the Polynesian people does not originate in the east Pacific, but in the west. Recent developments in the field of DNA analysis have unequivocally settled the debate of Polynesian origin. They prove Polynesians share common ancestry with indigenous Taiwanese and East Asians.