[Thirty-four days after leaving Honolua Bay, in Maui, on May 1, the Hokulea reached its destination, affirming the navigational expertise of the ancient Polynesians and throwing additional cold water on Thor Heyerdahl’s conjecture that settlers had come from South America, a theory he hoped to prove in his famous 1947 voyage aboard the raft Kon-Tiki.]
By
William Grimes
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From “Surfing: The Sport
of Hawaiian Kings,” by Ben Finney and James D. Houston,
a nook that grew out of
Mr. Finney’s master’s thesis.
Credit Bettmann Archive,
via Getty Images
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On
June 4, 1976, the Hokulea, a
double-hulled sailing canoe of ancient design, glided into Papeete Harbor in
Tahiti, greeted ecstatically by a crowd of 17,000 — more than half the island’s
population. For the first time in six centuries, a traditional Polynesian
sailing vessel had made the voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti, covering more than
2,700 miles without instruments.
For Ben Finney, an anthropologist at the
University of Hawaii, it was sweet vindication. In an effort to prove that the
settlement of Polynesia came about through deliberate exploration, rather than
aimless drifting — the so-called accidental settlement hypothesis — he oversaw
the construction of a 62-foot double canoe based on 18th-century illustrations
made by members of Capt. James Cook’s crew.
He then found a master navigator from the
Caroline Islands, Mau Piailug, who was capable of guiding the Hokulea (the name
means “Star of Joy”) in the age-old way: using the rising points of the stars,
supplemented by observations of the sun, the moon and ocean swells, as a
natural compass.
Thirty-four days after leaving Honolua Bay,
in Maui, on May 1, the Hokulea reached its destination, affirming the
navigational expertise of the ancient Polynesians and throwing additional cold
water on Thor Heyerdahl’s conjecture that settlers had come from South America,
a theory he hoped to prove in his famous 1947 voyage aboard the raft Kon-Tiki.
In an account for the Polynesian Voyaging
Society, Mr. Finney wrote, tersely, “The voyage went as planned.”
Professor Finney died on May 23 in Honolulu.
He was 83. His son Sean said the cause was complications of a stroke.
Ben Rudolph Finney was born on Oct. 1, 1933,
in San Diego, where his father, Leon, a Navy pilot, had recently been
transferred from Hawaii. His mother, the former Melba Trefzger, was a
homemaker.
The family relocated to Rio de Janeiro when
Leon Finney was assigned to be the pilot for the Navy’s attaché in Brazil
during World War II, but Ben grew up mostly in San Diego.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in history,
economics and anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in
1955, he worked as a statistician at Kaiser Steel in Fontana, Calif., and a
manufacturing analyst in the Convair division of General Dynamics in San Diego.
A year of active duty in the Navy followed.
He enrolled in the University of Hawaii and
earned a master’s degree in anthropology in 1959. His master’s thesis, on
surfing and Polynesian culture, evolved into a book, “Surfing: The Sport of
Hawaiian Kings” (1966), written with James D. Houston. An updated edition was
published in 1996 with the title “Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian
Sport.”
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Ben Finney in 2012.
Credit Honolulu Star Advertiser
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In 1964, the year he received his doctorate
in anthropology from Harvard, he married Ruth Sutherlin. The marriage ended in
divorce. In addition to his son Sean, he is survived by his wife, the former
Liudmila Alepko; another son, Gregory; a stepdaughter, Anna Alepko; two
grandchildren; and two step-grandchildren.
After teaching at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, and the Australian National University, Professor
Finney joined the anthropology department at the University of Hawaii in 1970.
He retired in 2000.
His other early books — “Polynesian Peasants
and Proletarians: Socio-Economic Change Among the Tahitians of French
Polynesia” (1965) and “Big-Men and Business: Entrepreneurship and Economic
Growth in the New Guinea Highlands” (1973) — offered no hint of an interest in
Polynesian navigation. But the topic soon took over.
“How the Polynesians, sailing in canoes hewed
with stone adzes and setting their course by the stars, winds and ocean swells,
were able to explore and colonize their island realm has long been one of the
most intriguing questions about the spread of humankind over our planet,” he
wrote in “Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey Through Polynesia” (1994).
With Herbert Kawainui Kane, an artist, and
Tommy Holmes, a local waterman, Professor Finney founded the Polynesian
Voyaging Society in 1973 to study traditional Polynesian techniques of sailing
and navigation. In 1974, he and several colleagues, including David Lewis, a
New Zealand anthropologist who was an expert on ancient Micronesian navigation
methods, set about recreating a facsimile of the double-hulled canoes used in
ancient Polynesia, assembling a mostly Hawaiian crew and taking the vessel on
test runs around Hawaii.
If the navigation went according to plan, the
voyage did not. The canoe confronted fierce storms and becalmed seas. Even
worse, cultural tensions arose.
Soon after setting sail, several of the
Hawaiian crew members staged a mutiny, resentful that the Hokulea was not
sailing around the Hawaiian Islands in a show of ethnic pride. They called
Kawika Kapahulehua, the Hawaiian captain, a coconut — brown on the outside,
white on the inside. When the canoe reached Tahiti, they threw punches at him
and threatened to burn the boat.
Mr. Piailug, the navigator, threw up his
hands in disgust and returned home. Guided by modern instruments, the Hokulea
returned to Honolulu, without Mr. Finney and with a new crew.
Despite the uprising, the voyage, described
by Mr. Finney in “Hokulea: The Way to Tahiti” (1979), was a triumph. “The
voyage changed the whole identity of the Hawaiian people,” Nainoa Thompson, the
president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, told The Honolulu Star-Advertiser
recently. “We went from being castaways to being children of the world’s
greatest navigators.”
A voyage two years later, this time all
Hawaiian, came to grief when the Hokulea capsized off Molokai six hours after
setting sail. The big-wave surfing legend Eddie Aikau, a member of the crew,
perished while trying to paddle 15 miles to summon help.
The Hokulea successfully repeated its maiden
voyage in 1980 and undertook a more ambitious voyage in 1985, to New Zealand by
way of Tahiti and the Cook Islands, returning via Tonga and Samoa. It
accomplished many more voyages over the years, some described in “Voyage of
Rediscovery.” It was scheduled to reach Hawaii on Saturday after a three-year
tour of 85 ports in 26 countries.
When he was not looking at the oceans, Mr.
Finney was pondering the stars. He maintained a deep interest in space
exploration and the potential for life on other planets, reflected in his books
“Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience” (1985) and “From Sea to
Space” (1992). He frequently lectured at the International Space University.
