Attuned to a world of natural signs—the stars, the winds, the curl of ocean swells—Polynesian explorers navigated for thousands of miles without charts or instruments. They sailed against prevailing winds and currents aboard powerful double canoes to settle the vast Pacific Ocean. And they did this when Greek mariners still hugged the coast of an inland sea, and Europe was populated by stone-age farmers.
Hawaiki Rising tells this story in the words of the men and women who created and sailed aboard the canoe Hōkūle‘a. We join a young Hawaiian, Nainoa Thompson, as he rediscovers the ancient star signs that guided his ancestors, navigates Hōkūle‘a to Tahiti, and becomes the first Hawaiian to find distant landfall without charts or instruments in a thousand years.
Hawaiki Rising is the saga of an astonishing revival of indigenous culture by voyagers who took hold of the old story and sailed deep into their ancestral past.
