I did.
I put down the computer and walked out the front door of the Dubois house.
It was a moonless night, and the black heavens were ablaze with stars. It hurt my neck to look up at them, so I lay on the ground, facing the night sky. It felt close instead of far, a black dome right above me.
I found the Big Dipper, a stark pattern that seemed so human, of our design. It did look like a cart without wheels. Something a vagabond might push, a tinker selling his wares.
I followed Bruno’s instructions. I drew an imaginary line from the two front corners of the tinker’s cart to the next star above. This was Polaris.
I had assumed the North Star was the brightest star in the sky, but it wasn’t. It was just a star, but one with special powers. That I had located it, and it wasn’t obvious, made me proud.
Bruno, I found it.
I went back inside.
Our standard story, Bruno said, is that seafaring would not have been possible without that North Star you’ve just gone out to locate and behold, to ponder a little.
But a certain eighteenth-century Polynesian shows us this is wrong.
The man’s name was Tupaia, Bruno said, and I need to delve a bit into his story for context, so that you can appreciate what he taught us.
Tupaia was a high priest and artist. He fled his own island for Tahiti, where he ingratiated himself with Tahiti’s high chieftess, a woman named Purea. They were lovers. Around the time the English explorer Captain Cook landed in Tahiti, Purea’s power was undermined. The benefits of being her lover had vanished, and so Tupaia asked Captain Cook to take him on board Captain Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, when it departed. Captain Cook agreed. They sailed south, all the way to New Zealand, where Captain Cook watched Tupaia address the local native chiefs and speak easily to them, and in Tupaia’s own language. Captain Cook and his men could not speak to Frenchmen across the English Channel, and yet Tupaia and these Māori, half an ocean away, somehow shared one language.
And strangely, Bruno wrote, they also shared fishing techniques, stone tools, canoe type, hut construction, food preparation, clothing style, jewelry, and tattoo art, even lovemaking preference—outdoors, in fresh air.
And yet, between the island that Tupaia was from and the island where the Māori lived stretched a quarter of the globe’s surface. It seemed impossible to Captain Cook that these people shared a culture.
The price for sex with the Māori women was the same, Captain Cook noticed, as it had been for women in Hawaii and in Bora Bora and Tahiti and Easter Island: one iron carpenter’s nail per union. Captain Cook had threatened to shackle his crew, Bruno wrote, in order to stop his men from prying all the nails out of the Endeavour, reducing their own vessel to scrap in order to pay for love.
Some of the ship’s crewmembers, Bruno wrote, were convinced that Tupaia’s ability to talk to the Māori was proof of God, who had created all people from molds or templates, but each island people in its location, so that they developed quite similarly and yet without contact or intermingling, consistent as a single variety of perennial, flowers from seeds scattered near and far.
Captain Cook sensed this wasn’t true—that separate from God’s intent, there had been contact among these people, over a huge watery stretch. Tupaia had guided them to New Zealand and seemed capable of navigating over the whole of Polynesia, and yet he was from a culture with no charts or maps or any of the navigational instruments that Captain Cook and his crew possessed.
Captain Cook asked Tupaia to draw him a map of the Pacific, Bruno said, and Tupaia did. But Tupaia never explained the map, and then he died from fever in an illness-riddled port.
Captain Cook made his own copy of Tupaia’s map and brought it to London. It exists still, in a library. For two hundred years, Bruno said, it was considered an oddity. The islands of the Pacific were in all the wrong places. Had Polynesians really been seafarers, as Cook had been convinced? Historians decided that if they had traveled long distances across the Pacific, they were landing hither and yon by accident and luck.
But we are beginning to understand, Bruno wrote, that historians did not know how to read Tupaia’s map.
Captain Cook had added compass directions and a scale to the copy of the map he had drawn. To Captain Cook, a map was a bird’s-eye view of fixed landmasses that were overlaid with longitude and latitude. With such a map, and his knowledge of maritime astronomy, his sextant, quadrant, and telescope, a navigator like Cook would be able to chart a reliable course so long as the map was correct. This is our own culture still, Bruno said. It’s what a map is to us as well. But Tupaia’s map was not this kind of map. It was not wrong. It was made wrong by the addition of cardinal directions, by the assumption it was a map in a European tradition.
Now we know, Bruno told the Moulinards, that the Polynesians were not landing hither and yon. They were the world’s most advanced sailors. They sailed much of the globe, long before the Europeans had achieved any such thing. They went all the way to the Americas, and before Columbus. We know they did it, Bruno said, but how, and how their maps functioned, remain something of a mystery, but there are theories. These theories suggest new directions for all of us, Bruno said, using lost skills that these Polynesians cultivated for charting their course.
The North Star upon which I have asked you to gaze—and I can lead a horse to water, Bruno wrote, but drinking is up to you—if you drank in the location of our lodestar, you have beheld the most critical point in the sky for seafaring, but only in the Northern Hemisphere. This star is not visible in the Southern Hemisphere, Bruno said. They have no North Star. So how did the Polynesians sail?
Some think they used “a star path,” of stars that rise and set on the horizon in succession, and that they aimed their canoes toward this series of stars. But, Bruno said, they used more than mere stars. They used all of their senses. The smell and taste of the sea. The shapes and position of clouds. The direction of waves as they broke over the prow of a boat. If Polynesian sailors could not see the waves approaching their canoe, on account of fog or nighttime darkness, they stood up in their boat, their legs apart, so as to interpret swell patterns, Bruno said, by the sway of their own testicles.
Go ahead and laugh, Bruno told the Moulinards (told me). But these people settled six million square miles of ocean.
Bruno said that Tupaia and sailors like him would have been taught navigation as babies. These sailor-priests, as Bruno referred to them, were steeped in knowledge handed down over thousands of years. They lived alone from the age of three, in a tent-pole structure whose roof was a model of the cosmos, for learning star position and sea lane. To look up and grasp and locate and know would be second nature to a sailor-priest-in-training, whose domestic world was a model of the sky.
When you look at stars, Bruno said, you merge into the flow of time, the right-now and the before and the to-come.
If it were true, Bruno said, that instead of greedy dreams of conquest, H. sapiens had been drawing star constellations on the walls and ceilings of caves, surfaces whose curved lineaments became a model of the heavens, this could recast Bruno’s views on early man, or rather late man, Homo tardissimus.
Sailor-priests-in-training had plied the heavens on the fabric of their tent ceilings. And perhaps Tardie had been engaged in a similar study, but more abstract and less schematic: Tardie had coded the stars as earthly creatures, had projected into the heavens a wild menagerie of beasts. His intention, to navigate not the seas but the zodiac.
Of astrology, Bruno said it touched him that long ago people had thought up categories of human “type” and attempted to map those types to the universe, a universe that did involve us, pertain to us. They had that part right, he said. To look up and see stars is to look inward and see ourselves.
All attempts to categorize people, Bruno said, whether by astrology or anthropology or blood, answer to a root desire: to know the future. And by knowing it, we hope that we might prepare for it, or even control it.
If astrology was built upon myths, Bruno was now coming to see that he himself had clung to a different set of myths, painful as it was for him to admit it. He had looked to species to locate where we’d gone wrong. He had believed it was Better Before, and he was beginning to suspect that this was a kind of reverse teleology, a mystification of the past, and a presumption that progress is bad, that progress itself is not progress.
He had been vaguely aware of a flaw in his thinking. But the logical “fix” was not an embrace of outcomes, to love the shiny driverless car headed toward extinction, and to presume that the technological prowess that had designed the car could design a viable future, solve the nihilism of progress with yet more progress.
Was it Better Before? I honestly can’t say, he wrote. In looking back, what I really wanted was to know how we navigate with the knowledge we have. What future do we imagine for our present?
When I reframe, he said, and think of Homo sapiens putting star maps on his cave ceilings, his attempt to imagine his own future, and of Neanderthals, with their handprints of the Milky Way, doing the same, my insistence on difference dissolves. These two iterations of human were both beset, and deeply, by a need to know, the same need that plagues me, now.
No sailor-priest am I, he said. In fact, I have altogether forsaken the sky, and thus the future, in my attempts to sort the past.
In my reassessments, he said, I have lost my bearings, and I will have to find new ones.
With that, he signed off.
I lay down on my bed and looked out the open window.
A wind had come up, creating a rushing sound as it gusted, pushing the trees. Stars were coming in and out of view as the tree boughs separated and moved. In the dark dynamism of wind and trees and night, I wanted to address Bruno. To tell him he was not alone.
