What the Navigators Knew
27th October 2026
By the late 1960s, physician, sailor and navigator David Lewis had become increasingly concerned that a remarkable body of human knowledge was in danger of disappearing forever. Across the Pacific, the last generation of traditional deep-sea navigators—whose orally transmitted knowledge allowed them to guide canoes across thousands of miles of ocean—were ageing and dying. Determined to record what they knew before it was lost, Lewis spent years sailing with these master mariners, attempting to understand how they navigated.
The result was We, the Navigators, first published in 1972. Drawing on his research among traditional sailors in Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia, Lewis documented in meticulous detail the techniques by which Pacific sailors found their way across the open seas without the charts and instruments of modern navigation. This landmark account of how a traditional knowledge system worked in practice also helped illuminate one of history’s great puzzles: how ancient peoples had crossed and settled an ocean covering almost a third of the Earth’s surface. In the decades since Lewis’s original research, archaeology, linguistics and, most recently, genetics have revealed ever more detail about this extraordinary feat.