According to navigation's history, our great great ancestors called this carving human looking, "Wangopun". They said that this is the spirit of navigation. I don't know why, but I heard that in order for a sailing canoe to reach its desitnation, the captain has to take some lavalava, coconuts, local powder, and some other things to make the navigation spirit happy so he will protect them from natural disasters during their voyage.
Navigation is a very important subject to learn, but it is very hard to learn it unless you really want to learn and earn it. In Satawal, our parents teach us the basics of navigation when we still a kid. They must start out by telling us the name of the stars, and all the basics of navigation. If we know all the basics, they will start taking us on voyages. On our voyage, he'll start pointing at stars and identify the name of each one of the stars. If you know all these, they will try taking us and appoint each of us who's going to take us to which place we're going to. On our way to that place, they will ask us where the current coming from and what time we'll reach our destination. These are the most important thing for a person to know before he become a navigator. When the navigator thinks that you have mastered all the needs of navigation, he will be conducting an initiation ceremony that we call it bwo. The best navigator who knows how to conduct that ceremony will ask all the island's men to prepare a big bowl, and woman to make different kind of local food and put them in the big bowl for that ceremony. I believe the pictures and its discription below will help you understand more about navigation.
The other navigator, the `last navigator' of the title, is Mau Piailug. He is the most experienced and venerated navigator on the island. His craft is as much a way of life as a means of travel and he has watched with anguish the beauty and importance of island navigation dying away as his society becomes inexorably drawn into a world of modern communication. During his second voyage to Hawaii, he agreed to teach Stephen Thomas because he hoped it would be a means of preserving and recording his traditional methods. Ironically, Stephen's presence provoked and brought into the open the anger and jealousy between Piailug and his vision of the importance of tradition, and the younger islanders who prefer to learn about modern techniques from the Americans. For Piailug, this voyage is a final journey of protest. Across 500 miles of sea via the Mariana straights, he takes a crew including Stephen Thomas from the traditional island of Satawal to the modernised tourist center of Saipan where his people are fully immersed in a new and different culture. It was with Saipan that Piailug's ancestors traded before the Spanish conquest. It was a precarious and dangerous route across the deepest part of the world's ocean, but which resulted in many Caroline Islanders settling in Saipan and forming permanent links between the two communities. Piailug reconstructs the voyage his ancestors made as a symbolic gesture of the importance of his islands' traditions, particularly the navigational traditions.
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