Sufficient has been said to demonstrate that in the Pacific, once the way was known, there were sufficient travellers. Maybe a voyage was not repeated for a century or so, but so long as the route by wave patterns and stars was remembered by the traditions in the schools of navigators, the way was open. It was fear of people, not fear of the sea, that kept the canoes near home.

Let us now consider the exploration of the unknown with the available boats. For much of the year, the winds anywhere in the Pacific came from the direction of unknown islands, so that flotsam would float ashore proving that more land lay to windward. The earliest Austronesian colonists in the Pacific were in the situation of the Vikings on the coast of Norway, the Portuguese and later the English and the Dutch, faced by the prevailing south-west winds of the Atlantic. The situation creates a continual stimulus for sailors. In periods when the winds are reversed you can sail out to sea if you are confident that you will be blown back near home, or past home to islands downwind from home. Irwin (1989, 1992) deals with the questions of accessibility and winds in great detail, and stresses that the known art of latitude sailing fits well into a pattern of progressive exploration eastwards with a carefully remembered return at each stage. The only condition is that you have seaworthy boats that sail reasonably well to windward, or even poorly to windward if time is not pressing. You can spend time, maybe centuries, improving your boats and ability to survive at sea. Even in the early exploration phase, colonists must have had fast watertight boats to carry food, plant shoots and seeds.

When we look at the large Micronesian single-outrigger canoes of historical times (see cover photograph), we notice the triangular sail, the outrigger construction, the double-ended arrangement for tacking, the deep well and sealed hulls for safety at sea, and the high speed when travelling light on the best point of sailing. Anson (1740-4), quoted by Haddon and Hornell (1936-38, I:415), noted that the single outriggers of the Marianas were “designed to sail as close as possible to the wind”, and “by the flatness of their lee side they lie much closer to the wind than any other vessel known, and have the advantage of being able to go faster than the wind, like the sails of a windmill.” He gave the speed as 20 knots for a hull of 12 metres. Lewis (1972:269) gives the average performance of a single outrigger as 75°-80° off the trade wind. Pâris (1841) described how the single outriggers of the Carolines sailed best when close to the wind and that otherwise they had difficulty in staying on course, even with the wind on the quarter. Pâris also reported that the double canoe of Tonga (the kalia) sailed badly with the wind behind, and the Tongan single outrigger (the hamatafua) was difficult to handle with the wind at the side or behind but easy when sailing as close to the wind as possible. Basically the triangular sail pivoted on a universal joint and behaved like that of a windsurfer, self-steering when balanced on the wind, but the hull sailed closer to the wind than a windsurfer because it gripped the water. The modern windsurfer gives some idea of the performance of a triangular sail on a flat hull; a canoe with the lee side flattened must have been an improvement on a windsurfer, if the materials could withstand the stresses.

Downwind from an undiscovered island there is a scent of land and an interference pattern of the wind-created waves converging behind the island, besides flotsam on the surface, as numerous sailors have described. Therefore Nature assists by providing clues of land on the approach side of the island exactly where they are needed. In contrast, remember how Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki raft (with a square sail) ended its journey by crashing helplessly on the windward side of a reef. That is not the way to explore or colonize. Sensible seamen approach land upwind and lay-off until they find a calm landing, as you could certainly do in an outrigger canoe with a tilting triangular sail. Those hypothetical younger sons of chiefs, looking for new land, had to sail eastwards because that is the direction their boats would naturally take them on the least foolhardy explorations with expectation of safe return. Let me add that, apart from the early explorers, who saw Pacific craft first-hand, it has been the smallboat sailors, notably Lewis (1972), Finney (1985) and Irwin (1989, 1992), who have the correct interpretation of Pacific sailing and colonization.