A thousand years before the birth of Christ, while the mariners of the ancient world were still frightened of falling off the Earth's edge, Pacific islanders were sailing huge canoes on epic ocean voyages.
Guided only by the stars, these master seafarers sailed across vast expanses of uncharted ocean, waging war, doing business and building a Pacific civilization.Now, hundreds of their descendants are dying each year because they have lost their navigational and sailing skills.
Today, islanders chase fish over the horizon, lose sight of their atoll and can't find their way home, according to the South Pacific Commission, which assists the region's 22 island nations in social, economic and cultural research and training.
An average of 360 boats go missing each year and the crews of at least 60 are never seen again, says the commission, which this year produced a "Safety at Sea" radio and video campaign broadcast throughout the South Pacific.
"On average the commission found (South Pacific) officials working in the search-and-rescue operations received one distress call every day," a Commission official said. South Pacific island nations spend $5 million a year on search-and-rescue operations.
Only about five percent of Pacific islanders go to sea in anything more than a small dinghy, powered by a poorly maintained outboard engine, says the commission.
This stands in stark contrast to the sturdy, ocean-going canoes in which Polynesians and Micronesians migrated across the South Pacific from Southeast Asia.
The traditional Fijian Drua, a double hulled canoe, measured almost 130 feet long with steering oars 35 feet in length. It needed 50 to 100 men to control and could take 300 passengers.
To sustain crew and passengers on long voyages, pigs were carried and cooked on board. When cattle were introduced to Fiji by Europeans, some large canoes carried up to 12 head of cattle.
The log books of early European explorers in the South Pacific, like Britain's Capt. James Cook, the first European to reach Australia, mention entire fleets of speedy canoes.
Construction of a Drua took from three to seven years and was a bloody affair, drenched in the cannabalistic rituals that were part of Fijian culture until the latter half of the 1800s.
To appease the gods, canoes were "painted" with human blood using human body parts as paint brushes, men were killed when the mast was set, and the finished canoes were rolled into the sea over rows of dead bodies.
Kate Vusoniwailala, director of the Fiji Museum in Suva, says the Drua was such an efficient vessel that many other island nations adopted it, leading to the development of a complex, far-flung trading system linking Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Micronesia.
The last big Drua was built in 1913 by Fijians who still knew the 18th and 19th-century canoe-building skills.
But today, only a few elderly Fijians on the remote Lau group of islands still have these skills, says Vusoniwailala.
Many South Pacific nations have formed Voyaging Societies that stage ocean voyages aimed not only at preserving canoe-building knowledge but also traditional navigation by the stars.
The U.S. state of Hawaii has numerous "voyaging canoes," American Samoa is building a 64-foot canoe, and other island nations are planning to build their own by the year 2000.