CBMM Speaker Event: The Last Navigator: A Young Man, an Ancient Mariner, the Secrets of the Sea

Explore a world of ocean navigation largely unknown to the West, a world in which the traditional navigator’s only directional tools are the stars, the ocean swells and the flight paths of birds. In 1983 and 1984, Steve Thomas spent eleven months on Satawal Island and in the Western Carolines as an apprentice to Mau Piailug, then one of the last paliuw, captains fully initiated in the Talk of Navigation, the closely guarded, ancient practices around reading the cosmos and the seas. He chronicled his experiences and the navigational techniques in the book “The Last Navigator,” first published in 1987, and a documentary film of the same title for PBS in 1988. Now some forty years on, he has updated the stories with a new generation of Satawalese islanders and researchers in the revised and…