The Last Navigator - Hardcover

Thomas, Stephen

4.13 out of 5 stars

85 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0091726131 ISBN 13: 9780091726133

Publisher: Henry Holt, 1987

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This account of the author's experiences with the people of Micronesia explains how this culture's ancient skills of navigation are at risk as its young people turn to Western ways

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From the Back Cover

As a young man piloting a small sailboat across the Pacific, Steve Thomas developed a fascination with ancient methods of navigation. He learned of a seafaring culture which 6,000 years ago, used arcane navigation arts to guide initiates unerringly across the Pacific wih no compasses, no charts. By the time of Christ, these navigators were pushing on through all of Oceania, populating nearly a quarter of the Earth's surface. Thomas ventured to the tiny coral atolls of Micronesia in search of these mysteries, this ancient language of the sea. There he found the last navigator.

Mau Piailug, one of the last surviving palu, belongs to a dying breed of navigators who used only natural signs--stars, waves, birds--to guide their sailing canoes across thousands of miles of open ocean.

Thomas and Piailug voyage together on the frail ship of human memory in an attempt to preserve for future generaions an ancient, mysterious, and beautiful kinship with the sea before it is lost forever. Theirs is an unforgettable journey.

"An unusually self-revealing, honest and moving book." --Scientific American.

"Finely crafted and compellingly written. . . . A deeply saddening book about the fast approaching death of an ancient and beautiful way of life." --Aloha Magazine

Steve Thomas by thirty-one years of age had already logged more than 30,000 blue-water miles as a professional navigator and skipper before setting out to study Micronesian navigation. He is currently the host of the PBS television series "This Old House."

About the Author

Emmy Award-winning Steve Thomas is the host of Renovation Nation on Discovery’s Planet Green. Before that he hosted This Old House, for 14 years. Beginning in 1977, Steve logged many blue-water miles sailing a 43-foot wooden sloop from England to San Francisco via the Panama Canal, Galapagos, Marquesas and Hawaii. In the early 1980s, he journeyed to the remote Micronesian island of Satawal to learn the ancient technique of star path navigation under the master navigator Mau Piailug. Steve's research resulted in this book, The Last Navigator, published in 1987 and a documentary for PBS’s Adventure series. Steve received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Steve has renovated a number of old houses, including the 1836 Colonial revival in which he currently resides with his wife and son in a seaport town north of Boston.

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