43_Navigator

This film follows a remarkable clash between cultures in the South Pacific. It is the story of two men, both navigators, who are attempting to come to terms with a changing world.

For one, American navigator Stephen Thomas, the film traces his extraordinary experience as he leaves the US east coast to find deeper meaning and greater skills on one of the most isolated of the Micronesian islands. Forgoing all his learning based on compass, maps, mathematical calculation, professional forecasts, radio, etc., Stephen spent nine months learning to use traditional island methods that in the past enabled the Satawal islanders to travel vast distances in outrigger canoes across dangerous, typhoon- and shark-ridden seas.

The other navigator, the `last navigator' of the title, is Piailug. He is the most experienced and venerated navigator on the island. His craft is as much a way of life as a means of travel and he has watched with anguish the beauty and importance of island navigation dying away as his society becomes inexorably drawn into a world of modern communication. According to the film-maker, he agreed to teach Stephen Thomas because he hoped it would be a means of preserving and recording his traditional methods. Ironically, Stephen's presence provoked and brought into the open the anger and jealousy between Piailug and his vision of the importance of tradition, and the younger islanders who prefer to learn about modern techniques from the Americans.

For Piailug, this voyage is a final journey of protest. Across 500 miles of sea via the Mariana straights, he takes a crew including Stephen Thomas from the traditional island of Satawal to the modernised tourist centre of Saipan where his people are fully immersed in a new and different culture.

It was with Saipan that Piailug's ancestors traded before the Spanish conquest. It was a precarious and dangerous route across the deepest part of the world's ocean, but which resulted in many Caroline Islanders settling in Saipan and forming permanent links between the two communities. Piailug reconstructs the voyage his ancestors made as a symbolic gesture of the importance of his islands' traditions, particularly the navigational traditions.

The journey is a symbolic link between the new and the old, highlighting what the Carolinians are losing and the new world they are joining. Produced for Channel Four Television's Fragile Earth series, this film won the `Rassengna Internazionale du Documentary del Mare' (silver medal) in Sardinia. Catalogue number (VHS): RA/VHS183 £8.

G. Ashby (ed.), 1975. Some Things of Value: Micronesian Customs as Seen by Micronesians. Rainy Day Press, Eugene, Orlando.

K. Brower, 1983. A Song for Satawal. Harper and Row, New York.

S. Low (film-maker) The Navigators. [16mm film on a similar topic.] Reviewed by B. Finney in American Anthropologist, Vol. 86, 1984, pp. 518-519.

S.D. Thomas, 1971. `A Return Voyage between Puluwat and Saipan using Micronesian Navigational Techniques.' Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol. 80, pp 437-48.

S.D. Thomas, 1972. We, the Navigators. The Ancient Art of Land Finding in the Pacific. Australian National University Press, Canberra.

S.D. Thomas, 1987. The Last Navigator. Hutchinson, London.