Author’s note: In the late 1970s I assisted the government of the Marshall Islands to prepare the development plan used to negotiate its independence from the USA. With 750,000 square miles of territory and only 56 square miles of land, you can imagine the role the sea plays in the economy and the culture of the Marshallese. One of my counterparts was a traditional navigator, probably the last in his clan.
The king mackerel struck the gunnel hard as it came flailing into the canoe. When exhaustion finally overtook it, the young Marshallese pinned the fish beneath his foot and removed the hook. Then he reached down and, with both hands, lifted his catch into the air.
“Thank you,” he said, looking from the fish to the sea.
“It’s a good fish, Grandfather. Now my aching belly won’t keep me from seeing the Way.” There was no reply from the large bundle strapped to the platform between the canoe and the outrigger. Amata placed his thumb at the base of the mackerel’s head and, using a rag to protect his hand from the jagged teeth, forced the head back and dispatched the fish.
He had eaten the last of the Spam with some broken pieces of soda cracker two days earlier, so the bite-sized chunks of firm flesh that he cut from the fish went down too easily. He had passed ‘enough’ and was well on the way to ‘too much’ before the Wisdom spoke. Three days from the nearest land, at least three to his destination. He couldn’t afford to get sick and he needed to preserve his food. Reluctantly, he wrapped the mackerel in the canvass gunny sack and placed it beneath the forward seat. If he was lucky, he would get another day of eating out of it before it turned.
“I think I’ll rest a while before I raise the sail again,” he said to the bundle.
His grandfather had been the Navigator of the Grouper Clan and, from the age of ten, Amata had spent hundreds of hours at the feet of the old man, learning the old ways: how currents, waves and wind weave an intricate pattern of movement for anything drifting on the water, how clouds and birds tell a tale of land beyond the horizon, and how seaweed reveals the secrets of a nearby reef. To travel in this world, all the People needed were a sail and a rudder. And with each nightfall the stars would report their location and point the way to their destination. Tonight, Amata knew that Hoku’ula would appear just above the horizon, off the stern, and Ka Mole Hanna directly abeam on the left side.
Remembering all that his grandfather taught him had been difficult enough, but the hardest part of becoming a Navigator had been teaching his eyes to see and his body to feel the subtle changes in the sea. Those changes could mean the difference between reaching a destination and disappearing in the vast expanse of the Nema.
Sometimes the old man would lower the sail and let the little tipnol canoe drift in the open sea. “Tell me when something changes,” he would say.
“Like what?” Amata had asked the first time.
“That’s not for me to say,” his grandfather countered. “If someone has to bait your hook, are you really a fisherman? Just tell me when something changes.” And there had followed many times, many days when the youngster would fidget and look about impatiently as the canoe drifted and the old man sat in silence. The nights were better because at least he could track the stars as they were reeled across the sky between Polaris and the Southern Cross.
Then came the day when he first felt the kaelib. “There! There!” he whispered excitedly as the subtle ocean swell nudged the tipnol, so gently that even the fishermen of the clan could not have detected it. When they beached the canoe near the village that evening, his grandfather had said, “Now I know that one day you will be a Navigator”.
Amata checked the lashings on the bundle and rested his hand where his grandfather’s shoulder would be. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you some of the fish,” he said, and then added with a chuckle, “But you probably weren’t hungry anyhow.” His eyes wandered toward the horizon. “By the way, I know we’re a little off course, but don’t worry about it; the sun will set soon, just to the right of Ajna, so it will be easy to adjust our heading.”
The gentle lap of water against the hull of the canoe marked the minutes as the sun settled toward the sea. Nightfall would come quickly now, and Amata used the time to make sure everything on board was in order.
In recent years, as his grandfather began to fail, he had talked of a place far to the south-west, beyond the Atolls of the People, beyond the navigation charts that he had come to know. Lijinmaloklok, he called it, the Place Where the Seas Meet, and wistfully he would say, “That’s where I will go on my final journey”.
If it wasn’t on the traditional navigation charts, Amata thought, and no one else had ever spoken of it, maybe Lijinmaloklok only existed in the old man’s imagination. So he hadn’t pursued the subject when it came up, beyond a polite question or two. But then one day when they were returning to the village from a lesson in the lagoon, his grandfather had said, “Wait a minute. There’s something I want to show you”.
Amata had waited on the front step of the little frame house until his grandfather returned, carrying an old navigation chart. Handing the intricate platter-sized mat of palm leaf ribs and shells to the boy, he had said, “Tell me what you see”.
There was some damage to the chart; it looked like a stick or two might be missing, but Amata began to recount the story it told of winds and currents around the islands.
“Never mind all that,” his grandfather said impatiently. “Look over here”, and he pointed to one side of the chart, far beyond the Atolls of the People, where two sets of thin arched ribs converged in a pattern Amata had never seen.
“But such a thing is not possible,” he said, “The chart must be wrong. Maybe it was made by a coconut planter to sell to the tourists”.
“No, it was first made by my grandfather’s grandfather. The seas do meet at Lijinmaloklok,” he said. “They descend together beyond the reef and when they are reborn they leave as one in a new direction. The ancestors passed that way on the Great Journey. It was there that the seas told the Navigator how to find the Atolls of the People.”
Long moments had passed in silence as Amata absorbed what he had heard, and the old man waited. Finally, he had reached to take the chart from Amata and, as he turned to go back inside, had said, “I hope the next Navigator of the Grouper Clan will take me to Lijinmaloklok on my final journey”.
A change in the sea swell during the night had pushed the tipnol to the west so, as the stars faded in the pre-dawn light, Amata steered gently back toward the south and settled the bow beneath the last glow of Ke Ali’i.
“There, Grandfather. We’re back on course,” he said. Stowing the last of the gear for the day’s sailing, he continued. “I wish you could be there when I get home, to explain to the elders why I took you from the viewing place, and why I stole the tipnol. Maybe they will say ‘thank you’ to me for giving you your final wish, but I don’t think so. I think I will be sleeping with the pigs for many seasons.” He chuckled to himself. “By the way,” he added, “there was so much celebration at your party that everyone had fallen asleep. It wasn’t difficult to carry you away from them”. After another pause he shrugged and said, “At least I will have a good story to tell my grandchildren someday.”
With sunrise, the breeze freshened. The sail filled gently, and the little hull began to cut purposefully through the water once again, as surely as if it could still see Ke Ali’i over the bow.
