如何在太平洋找到方向 | 经济学人

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How to find your way in the Pacific

太平洋之敢问路在何方

英文部分选自经济学人202301223圣诞特辑

原文在公众号：一天一篇外刊翻译

How to find your way in the Pacific

太平洋之敢问路在何方

Oceania's wayfinding skills

大洋洲的寻路技能

The art of getting a vessel and its occupants from one place on a vast ocean to another

茫茫大海，舟楫驶达目的地技巧几何

Quite how the Pacific Ocean’s early long-distance mariners found their way so impressively will never be precisely known. Islanders had no written language, and by the time Europeans arrived in the Pacific, the colonisation of the last habitable islands of Oceania had all but ended. Widespread open-ocean voyaging between archipelagoes using traditional wayfinding techniques still persisted—European mariners were greatly impressed by Polynesian seafarers’ knowledge of the night sky and of their maritime environment. But the voyaging soon came to an end—due to, among other things, catastrophic population crashes in Polynesia caused by introduced diseases.

早期的远洋航海者何以能够在茫茫太平洋上出色地找准航线，世人恐已无法确知。岛上的原住民没有文字，而等到欧洲人到达太平洋时，大洋洲最后几个宜居岛屿也已几近殖民化。在当时，运用传统导航技术航行于公海群岛之间的行为依然十分普遍——波利尼西亚航海者对夜空和海洋环境了如指掌，令欧洲水手叹服不已。不过，外来疾病导致波利尼西亚人口锐减，再加上其他种种原因，此类航行很快便绝迹了。

Only in parts of Micronesia did an active body of navigation knowledge persist just long enough into the modern age to be systematically recorded and learned. Thanks to that luck, and to parsing oral narratives of migration, Western ethnological records, archaeological evidence and, in recent years, trial-and-error efforts on the water, an understanding of how Pacific voyagers accomplished their navigational feats has deepened.

大量活跃的航海知识体系只在密克罗尼西亚部分地区留存到了现代，可供人们系统记录和学习。得益于此，再加上对移民口述故事、西方民族学记录、考古证据的解析，以及近年来在海上的反复试验，人们更加深入地了解了太平洋航海者完成航海壮举的方法。

Pacific navigators had none of the essentials of Western navigation: no compass for following a course, no sextant for estimating latitude, no chronometer for longitude. That fact has led observers to notice the dissimilarities between Western and Pacific seafaring. In reality, the key stages of making a traditional Pacific voyage are recognisably the same as those of a Western one. Nicholas Thomas sums them up in “Voyagers: the Settlement of the Pacific” as: orientation or course-setting; maintaining a course once it has been determined; and making landfall. Any modern sailor, even one reliant on GPS, would recognise them.

太平洋航海者没有西方人航海的必备品：没有指明航向的罗盘，没有测量纬度的六分仪，也没有测量经度的经线仪。观察员也因此注意到西方航海与太平洋航海的不同之处。实际上，传统太平洋航海与西方航海的关键步骤是相同的。尼古拉斯·托马斯（Nicholas Thomas）在《航海者：定居太平洋》（voyager: the Settlement of Pacific）一书中将这些步骤总结为：定位或航线设定；坚持确定好的航线；以及登陆。任何现代水手，即使是依赖GPS的水手，都认可这几点。

Still, the potential for mutual confusion starts at the beginning. For course-setting, a modern sailor will use the abstraction of laying a course on her paper chart or, more likely these days, her laptop. But Pacific navigators had no charts. Mr Thomas reports how in 1821 an English missionary, John Williams, called at Atiu in the Cook Islands. A local chief, Rongomatane, offered to direct the Europeans to Rarotonga. The largest of the Cook Islands lay a day-and-a-half’s sail away on a course of south-west by west, yet Rongomatane was pointing in all sorts of directions, to the Europeans’ bafflement.

不过，传统太平洋航海与西方航海互不理解的可能性从一开始就存在。在设定航线时，现代水手会抽象化地在纸质海图或者当今更为流行的笔记本电脑上绘制航线。但是太平洋航海者没有海图。托马斯讲述了1821年英国传教士约翰·威廉姆斯（John Williams）曾在库克群岛的阿提乌岛短暂停泊的故事。当时，当地酋长朗格马塔尼（Rongomatane）主动提出愿意带领这些欧洲人前往库克群岛最大的岛屿拉罗汤加岛。这个岛屿在西南偏西的航线上，航程一天半，而令欧洲人感到困惑的是，朗格马塔尼指向了各种方向。

What they failed to understand was the importance of jumping-off points, with specific landmarks essential for orientation. For instance, the summit of a hill would have to be in line with a spit of land on the shore or even with a rock that had been moved to a particular spot. Rongomatane took Williams’s schooner down the coast to the starting-point, where he had the vessel manoeuvred into place. “When his marks on the shore ranged with each other,” Williams wrote, “he cried out, ‘That’s it! That is it!’ I looked immediately at the compass, and found the course to be S.W. by W.” Today a rising Hawaiian navigator, Kala Baybayan Tanaka, explains how prominent rocks long known to be essential to course-setting have sacred value to her island communities.

欧洲人没有理解起始点的重要性；特定地标对确定方向至关重要。例如，山顶要与海岸边的岬角对齐，乃至与一块被移到特定地点的岩石对齐。朗格马塔尼带着威廉姆斯的纵帆船沿着海岸来到起始点，然后再把船只调整就位。“他在岸边的标记重合以后，”威廉姆斯写道，“他大喊，‘就是这样！就是这样！’我立即看向罗盘，发现对准的航向就是西南偏西。”如今，新晋夏威夷航海者卡拉·贝巴岩·塔娜卡（Kala Baybayan Tanaka）向人们解释了长久以来那些众所周知对航向设定至关重要的石头对她的岛屿有何等重要的神圣价值。

Using a back-transit (ie, lining up two features behind you and keeping them in line as you sail away) serves for as long as landmarks are visible astern. After that, stars take over. Because of Earth’s rotation, stars rise in the east and set in the west, each one meeting pretty much the same point on the horizon at any given latitude. And so at night ocean navigators orient themselves using rising or setting stars and constellations. When a star rises too high in the night sky to be of use, another one on the horizon is pressed into service.

只要从船尾还看得见地标，那么就采用“背后航线法”（即将身后两处地标连线，再一直沿着它们的延长线航行）即可。之后，可借用星星定位。地球自转造成星星东升西落，在任意纬度观察，每颗星与地平线几乎都交于同一点。所以，航海者在夜间便可以根据星星和星座的升落来定位。某颗星在夜空中的位置过高、不便使用时，从地平线上再选一颗就可以了。

Star courses are laid down for different destinations. A big part of a navigator’s training is in learning the night sky and star courses. On land, a “star-compass” is laid out rather like a compass rose to aid memorisation of stars and their positions when they rise and set. Where there is a cross-wind or known cross-current, the star course makes allowance for leeway (the sideways component of a sailing boat’s movement) or set. Peia Patai, a Cook Islands navigator, has a star-compass motif tattooed impressively around his belly button. He knows to recognise and steer by many dozens of stars, many of whose traditional names have been forgotten. Earlier navigators knew and used perhaps 120 stars.

不同的目的地有不同的星航图。航海者训练的一大重头戏就是学习观测夜空和星航图。陆用“星罗盘”布局很像指南针方位图，有助于使用者记住群星及其升落的位置。如果存在侧风或已知的侧向洋流，星航图则可以考虑到偏航（帆船位移的侧向分量）、风向或水向。库克群岛的航海者佩亚·帕泰（Peia Patai）在肚脐周围纹了星罗盘的图案，很惹眼。他能够辨认并借助数十颗星星导航，其中许多星星旧时的名字已被人遗忘。更早的航海者认识并使用的星星大约有120颗。

Dead reckoning is a means of tracking a vessel’s progress that is well-known to Western sailors—using bearing and speed to estimate position. In the Caroline Islands a remarkable variant exists, known as the etak system, as Ben Finney in “Vaka Moana”, a compendium on Pacific voyaging and settlement, explains. When travelling to a distant island a “reference” island is chosen roughly mid-way between starting-point and target, but well off to one side—indeed, it is usually invisible. With the vessel heading to his destination, the bearing of the reference island changes, as do the chosen stars that rise or set beyond it. The exercise usefully divides the voyage into segments, or etak. In a further, impressively abstract, evolution, Peia explains, if no physical reference island exists, you simply invent one, to serve the same purpose.

航位推算是西方水手熟知的船只航程追踪方法，即用方位和速度来估计位置。这个方法在加罗林群岛有一种独特的变体，称为伊塔克(Etak)系统。本·芬尼(Ben Finney)在关于太平洋航行和定居的《海上独木舟》(Vaka Moana)一书中介绍过伊塔克系统：前往一座遥远的岛屿时，要选择一座“参照”岛屿，它大致位于起点与目标的中间位置，但会明显偏向一侧——的确，通常也无法亲眼看到这个参照岛屿。随着船只渐渐靠近目的地，参照岛屿的方位会改变，而参照岛屿方向上升落的选定星星也随之发生变化。这种操作把航程划分成多个部分，每一个部分就叫一个“伊塔克”，非常管用。佩亚说，伊塔克系统可以朝更抽象的方向演变——如果没有具体的参照岛屿，你大可以想象一个，也可以达到同样的目的。

注：Vaka Moana: Moana is the common word for ‘ocean’ in all the Austronesian languages of the Pacific and vaka is the common word for ‘canoe’, the vessel developed for the exploration and settlement of the whole region. (Culture and Sustainable Development in the Pacific, Chapter 16. Vaka Moana – the ocean roads)

During the day, or when the night-sky is clouded over, wayfinders must steer in relation to a swell. These are travelling waves, a form of energy imparted by distant wind and weather systems. Disparate swells may overlap with each other, as well as with the waves being generated by the present wind driving the craft. Few Western-style sailors are even remotely as attuned to the complex interplay of swells as are Pacific navigators. Pacific teachers these days often make their students drift on the ocean for hours on their backs, to gain a more visceral feel of swell movements.

在白天或者乌云密布的夜晚，舵手要根据涌浪调整方向。涌浪是一种流动的波浪，也是一种受远处的风和天气系统驱动的能量形式。不同的涌浪可能相互叠加；当前驱动船只的风会产生风浪，也可能与涌浪叠加。西方水手很少能像太平洋航海者那样敏锐地察觉涌浪间复杂的相互作用。如今太平洋的航海训练师经常会让学生仰面在海上漂流几个小时，更直观地感受涌浪的运动。

注：风浪（Wind Wave）涌浪（Swell），见“中山大学海洋科学”公众号《海洋科普260》

Waves are also important for landfinding. A sea that flattens might suggest that an out-of-sight island is blocking the long ocean swell (atolls are rarely visible more than ten miles out, but their dampening effect on upwind swells reaches farther). What is more, swells can refract around invisible land or bounce back to criss-cross with the incoming swell—an effect you can observe in miniature by watching how waves bounce off a harbour wall. Other signs of land include cloud formations and even the green of coconut stands reflected on the underside of distant clouds. Seabirds, too, give vital clues about the presence of land: fairy terns and noddies rarely fly further than 30 nautical miles (55.6km) from land, frigate birds and boobies considerably more. Evening flights of nesting birds can point the way to land.

波浪对寻找陆地也很重要。平静的海面或许意味着视野外有岛屿挡住了长浪（人们很难看见10英里以外的环礁，但它们对逆风涌浪的阻尼效应却能达到更远的距离）。另外，涌浪会在看不见的陆地周围发生折射或反射，与其他来袭的涌浪纵横交错——你可以观察海浪在港口大堤上撞击反弹的方式，了解这种效果的微观表现。存在陆地的其他迹象还包括云的形状，甚至是远处云层底部反射出椰树林的绿色。海鸟也是判断存在陆地的重要线索：白玄鸥和燕鸥的活动范围很少离开陆地30海里（55.6公里），军舰鸟和鲣鸟的活动范围则大得多。夜间飞行的筑巢类海鸟可以指明陆地的方向。

Like aiming for a bigger target, finding a cluster of atolls is always easier than making for a single speck. But that Pacific navigators routinely did both, over great expanses of ocean, remains staggering. No wonder great status accrued to them on finding new land. A modern-style navigator at the end of a voyage is lucky if she is stood the first round at theBar du Port.

和瞄准一个更大的目标类似，寻找一群环礁总比寻找一小片陆地来得更加容易。但是在浩瀚的大海上，太平洋航海者们通常既能抓大也能抓小，至今仍令世人惊叹。难怪他们在寻找新陆地方面富有盛名。而对于现代航海者来说，如果在航行结束时，有人能在港口酒吧（Bar du Port）请客第一轮酒，就算是运气好了。

Lee，爱骑行的妇女之友+Timberland粉

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Nikolae，新手人民教师，声优探索者，乃木坂47与AKB49

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