Reading a Pacific navigator’s mysterious map may require a shift in perspective | Hacker News Reader

Reading a Pacific navigator’s mysterious map may require a shift in perspective

knowablemagazine.org

84 pointsonychomys23 comments

In the book Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson there is an entire chapter on Tupaia and Cook, as well as another chapter on Polynesia navigation:

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40536236-sea-people

Part of the mental model is (generally) that instead of the boat moving, it is the vessel that stays still and the ocean and islands 'flow' past it. Kind of how folks used to think the Earth was at the centre of the cosmos and the heavens moved (which is still used as the basis for celestial navigation with a sextant).

Huh. Did this inspire Futurama?

Phenomenally interesting; it reminds me of how hard reading a regular map is (cartesian N-S E-W) to someone who's never done it before, because I cannot visualize direction in Tupaia's map at all and would need hours of practice to make it work.

It also reminds of something sad, which is the tendency of westerners to assume that their culture and technology is "default" and "boring", whereas indigenous culture is "interesting" and "exotic". The truth is that almost every single type of technology is marvelous. I know many people who find the building of thick clay houses by the pre-colonial southwestern Americans fascinating, because the simple insulation delay was used to keep the house cool in the day and warm at night. Those same people would fall asleep at an explanation of an HVAC system.

> it reminds me of how hard reading a regular map is (cartesian N-S E-W) to someone who's never done it before

There’s a book by James C Scott, See Like a State, that talks (in part) about the notion of what you could consider human or experiential measures as opposed to surveyors or overseers measures - notions like distance for a human making the trip are better expressed in terms of time or difficulty (“A 3 days’ walk”) than actual map distance (“10 miles”), since 10 miles on a grassy plane is very different from 10 miles through mountains. Almost every way we talk about time, space, distance, and measures in the modern (western) world are in the style of surveyors, whereas premodern western cultures and other groups frequently spoke of things more experientially.

If the assessment of Tupaia’s map is correct, it’s solidly experiential - “look at the sun at noon, turn to where the next island is on this map, go that way.” Terrible for a surveyor, kind of brilliant for a sailor.

Reminds me of LineDrive [1], a feature of MapBlast that would give you directions in something that looked like how a human would write out directions, where roads were simplified. The overall result is reducing a map to only the parts that are important to someone that needs directions along a specific route.

A bit of a moot point in today's world where everyone has a GPS enabled device capable of giving them turn-by-turn directions interactively.

[1] https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/remember...

What an amazing technology, it's really a shame there's not a current version. Maybe given the original paper's algorithm and the OSM dataset we could recreate it?

I think this would be particularly useful for transit and other multi-modal trip maps. A Mercator might be mildly useful for driving (though as your link points out, not so obviously useful that it should be the only option), but there's really not much of a reason you need that for a bus or train trip. Individual bus or train lines very frequently have published maps in this style, and many subway system maps are reminiscent of it.

Bing Maps had an experimental feature like that as a print option at one time. It was a chicken scratch map and included the intersecting roads where you needed to change direction.

[ah, yes, as noted in the comments section, it was a showcase for silverlight]

I think because Maneesh Agrawala, who created LineDrive, was at Microsoft after completing his PhD thesis (which was basically LineDrive). He's done huge amounts of really interesting work -- one of my absolute favourite CS researchers. He's worked on cropping videos using gaze tracking, making architectural models from photographs, usability analysis and design systems for isometric assembly instructions, text editing of talking head videos, and more. Most things he does have an element of magic to them.

Current homepage: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~maneesh/

Wow! That’s pretty cool seeing how one person disseminates technology from place to place. It’s too bad no one has taken this navigational representation as a legitimate option and only see it as a curiosity of sorts. But it’s probably due to the reliance on mobile maps and voiced directions and the low usage of printed directions these days.

"A 3 days’ walk" has actually influenced place names in New Zealand!

Ninety Mile Beach is only 55 miles long. One theory is because it took 3 days for 30 mph horses to travel from one end to the other, but horses walk slower on sand.

https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/1kasdw/why_is_i...

https://www.dolphincruises.co.nz/bay-of-islands-info/ninety-...

I certainly agree that the proposed system is brilliant, whether it's what was originally intended by Tupaia or not. It's closer to a GPS turn-by-turn view rather than a birds-eye map view.

That's a great point, and I've wanted to read SLaS before, I guess this settles it.

I think that might explain why people think huts are interesting and HVACs are boring. There's technology that exists at the human scale, like Tupaia's map or saying things are "a 3 day's walk away", and technology that exists far beyond the human scale, like a Cartesian map of a continent or saying things are "15 miles away".

Exactly - when travelling on foot in the mountains, the only useful measurement is hours.

You can use topographical map information to estimate travel time, ascending a bush clad slope without a cut track, 100m height gain an hour is a reasonable rule of thumb.

> It also reminds of something sad, which is the tendency of westerners to assume that their culture and technology is "default"

I remember how surprised I was to learn that many ancient cultures oriented their maps so East (the direction of the rising sun) was at the top, instead of North (the direction a compass points) as we do. It had never occurred to me before that North being the default direction was cultural, but of course it is.

Indeed, that's literally what "orient" means. [0] To orient something to the North is an oxymoron.

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/orient

If you're interested in learning about this kind of navigational knowledge, about how Pacific Islander sailors could hop from island to island over the horizon without maps, I recommend reading The Last Navigator. It is also an interesting story told in the first person by the author going to learn the art of navigation and observing a culture being pushed aside.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/707571.The_Last_Navigato...

A third good book is Vaka Moana, Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discovery and Settlement of the Pacific

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3182068-vaka-moana-voyag...

We, the Navigators by David Lewis is another good book on the topic

It took me a while to understand what they meant by "north is in the centre". Here's my understanding, but correct me if I'm wrong:

- Compare the Tupaia map vs. conventional map shown in the middle of the article.

- On the conventional map, if you want to go from "Marqueses Group" to "O'ahu", you can see that you need to travel North-North-West.

- On Tupaia's map, start at the "Marqueses Group" point. A line through the centre of the map would mean you're travelling due north. The line to O'ahu has north slightly to your right, i.e. North-North-West.

Or take Uiha to Rarotonga.

- On the conventional map you can see it involves travelling East.

- On Tupaia's map if you start on Uiha, the line to Rarotonga would have north directly to your left. Therefore you're travelling East.

I do think I'm still missing something, because if I wanted to travel the other way, from O'ahu to Marqueses Group, I should be travelling south-southeast. But I don't see how that can work out on the Tupaia map.

Also remember that Polynesian navigation is a synthesis of sun/stars and wind/waves/currents - being able to sit at the bottom of a boat and looking at the subtle ways that it's rocking around you is an important part of knowing where you are in the world

Somewhat apocryphal, but I remember reading of a Polynesian elder, during the so-called age of discovery, who would (allegedly) warn of the approach of over the horizon sailing ships by observing changes in waves and air currents.

Purely from waves and air currents - that's impressively deep knowledge!

These days we have to ask birds to help.

Albatrosses detecting ships who turned off their beacons, possibly for illegal fishing:

https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/new-insights-close-encoun...

I'm surprised winds and currents weren't mentioned. To a sea traveler, I imagine distance is more about time than miles, which varies considerably based on what direction you point.

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