First full day at sea.
Light breeze becomes a brisk northeasterly on a sunny journey.
Early morning. The weather is good, the sun shines, the seas are calm and the breeze is light. Europa gently sways and basically slowly drifts with most of her canvas set.
The New Zealand lands are still in sight, gradually disappearing at the horizon far behind as the day goes by and our speed increases in the rising winds, which pick up gradually during the morning. The seas slightly grow, though the swell is still low. Now her sails are filled by the 16 to 18 kn of northwesterly wind; now she sails at about 5 to 6 kn. Though we have not yet left the coastal New Zealand waters, already in the afternoon the islands are not visible anymore. We make way towards East Cape, leaving the Bay of Plenty on our starboard side.
A good day to start learning and practising sail-handling skills through the practice and repetition of striking and re-setting canvas. Knowledge that we will need during our trip, talents that had better be gathered now at the beginning of the voyage.
Ahead lies the vast expanse of the Pacific, the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. Nowadays, even in an old tall ship like the Europa, navigating on open waters like those relies on modern technology such as global positioning systems, radars and access to weather forecasts through an internet connection. Lands are mapped, the coastlines and water depths mostly all charted. A very different situation had to be faced by the first people who navigated these waters and reached the large number of remote islands that pepper this ocean, although mostly at lower latitudes than the ones we head for.
Polynesian mariners, skilled and with a deep knowledge of the stars, winds, currents, swells and waves, the different species of birds, their habits and migration patterns, and the differences in the clouds in the sky, could set sail on their double-hulled canoes across this large ocean. On their way they discovered and colonised plenty of new lands. Their incredible accomplishments and feats, their seafaring culture and social structure, didn’t go unnoticed by one of the great European explorers, Captain Cook, who met them during his voyages of exploration all over the Pacific Ocean in the 18th century.
Sailing their large canoes, some of them even larger than Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, and carrying just one or two sails, they quickly swept through Melanesia, Tonga and Samoa, and then after reaching the island groups in the Cook Islands and Tahiti area, they set sail north to Hawaii, east to Rapa Nui and southwards to New Zealand.
Cook, in turn, was impressed enough with both the practical seamanship and navigational skills of the Tahitians, and their wide geographical knowledge, to accept that which had been unthinkable to earlier European voyagers: that the ancestors of these islanders must have sailed into the Pacific on their own, covering great distances in their canoes, orienting themselves by observing the celestial bodies. Unfortunately, Cook never developed his thoughts beyond a few lines in his journal, which include elements basic to a modern theory of Polynesian settlement: an acceptance that Tahitian canoes were seaworthy and capable of sailing at least "two or three hundred leagues" (600 to 900 nautical miles), that the Tahitians had a "compass" provided by the sun, moon and stars and that they used this to orient themselves at sea, and that their ancestors could have employed this technology to move, from island to island, all the way from the "East Indias" (roughly modern Indonesia) to Tahiti.
William Henry Giles Kingston. “Captain Cook. His Life, Voyages and Discoveries”. 1871.
