Fifty years ago, a group of young men gathered at a beachfront on the windward side of Oahu and launched a canoe based on traditional Hawaiian designs. The modern fiberglass hulls were lashed together with ancient techniques—and six miles of cordage—a marriage of new and old that continued to be present at the core of everything the boat and her community would go on to achieve. The plan was to make it from Hawaii to Tahiti for America’s 1976 bicentennial celebration. The guys on the beach that day didn’t know it at the time, but Hōkūle‘a would still be voyaging half a century later, one of the most iconic Polynesian voyaging crafts and a symbol for Hawaii’s heritage.
It wasn’t as simple as commissioning and building a canoe to cross the ocean, though. Much of the requisite ancestral knowledge had been lost to time. When the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown in the 1890s, “there was a push for cultural amnesia, making the Hawaiian culture insignificant,” says Bruce Blankenfeld, a Pwo or master navigator, and sailor aboard Hōkūle‘a from her early days. “Growing up, there was a yearning, so to speak, to rediscover Hawaiian culture.”
Hundreds of years had passed since a double-hulled voyaging canoe had been built in Hawaii, so it took the expertise of artist and historian Herb Kane to draft the first designs of what a distinctly Hawaiian canoe would have looked like. Each Pacific voyaging culture built unique crafts, so they couldn’t just call up another community across the ocean and ask for help.
One thing they wouldn’t be able to figure out on their own was navigating. Pacific voyagers used a sophisticated, nature-centric system for wayfinding, and if they were going to make it to Tahiti without so much as a sextant, they would need someone to teach them how to do it. It wasn’t an easy thing to ask for. The techniques of Polynesian navigators were closely guarded secrets, and though there were six living master navigators in Micronesia, only one was willing to share his knowledge. Though he spoke little English and would have to leave his home and travel thousands of miles to train Hōkūle‘a’s crew, Mau Piailug believed that sharing his expertise might be the only way to save the old ways from extinction.
As the story goes, when Piailug was asked, he told a member of Hōkūle‘a’s team in his 20s “I can’t teach you what I know, you are too old. Send me your babies and I will teach them.” After all, finding an island less than 40 miles wide across an ocean without any modern technology is a skill that takes a lifetime to master. That young man, Nainoa Thompson, went on to become a Pwo and the president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, which still presides over Hōkūle‘a today.
The original crew consisted of Piailug as the navigator; Captain Kawika Kapahulehua; Clifford Ah Mow; Milton “Shorty” Bertelmann; Ben R. Finney; Charles Tommy Holmes; Sam Kalalau; Boogie Kalama; Buffalo Keaulana; John Kruse; Douglas “Dukie” Kuahulu; David Henry Lewis; Dave Lyman III; Billy Richards; and Rodo Tuku Williams.
“I was too young to go on that voyage,” Bruce remembers. “The guys were mostly in their 20s, some in their 30s or 40s. They looked for people who were capable watermen on the islands, people who were in rescue, or fishermen, lifeguards, big wave surfers. Those were the people who were leading the way. They were dreamers, but they weren’t deep sea sailors. And they only had a year from the launch on March 8, 1975, to train.”
The voyage was a success, and after 34 days at sea, they arrived in Tahiti.
Though the canoe had originally been built just for that voyage, by the time she completed her successful return trip (with Thompson aboard), Hōkūle‘a was so beloved that a small group committed to maintaining her and voyaging again. There were difficult times along the way. During a 1978 attempt to reach Tahiti, Hōkūle‘a capsized shortly into the journey. The crew held onto the inverted canoe through the night, but when efforts to contact help failed, crew member Eddie Aikau attempted to paddle over 10 miles to shore for help. The rest of the crew was rescued some 10 hours later, but Aikau was lost at sea.
But even this devastating tragedy didn’t blanket the desire to continue Hōkūle‘a’s voyaging. Piailug returned to Hawaii to train Thompson, and in 1980 Thompson became the first native Hawaiian in modern history to navigate to Tahiti by the old methods.
Reconnecting with the Past
Hōkūle‘a wasn’t the only cultural heritage project gaining momentum at the time. By the 1980s, the Hawaiian language was critically endangered. Hawaiian literacy had peaked just a hundred years prior, but due to suppression policies in schools and an influx of migrants who had shifted the population to make native Hawaiians a minority in their own land, English became the primary language in both public life and the home.
“There’s different numbers that estimate it was, you know, down to a few hundred speakers,” says Lehua Kamalu, a captain, navigator, and Voyaging Director of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. “Around the time that Hōkūle‘a completed her maiden voyage, there was also an amazing group that was reviving language and started to establish both immersion preschools called Pūnana Leo and immersion elementary and high schools, called Kula Kaiapuni.
“The teachers who were leading them were really on the front edge of ‘how do we reintroduce language into this space that has been dominated by English?’ ” she says. Her parents, who did not speak Hawaiian themselves, enrolled her as one of the early students. “It was a little experimental at the time. People really doubted whether or not there was any value to sending a child to a school that taught them their native language, but you couldn’t even measure how much it inspired each of us.
“There was an exceptional focus on all things Hawaiian culture because there was a very clear recognition that in order for us to understand language and understand the meaning of words, phrases, and where they came from, we needed to understand what culture they were born out of.”
Hōkūle‘a was out voyaging for much of Kamalu’s childhood, but she still remembers the day the canoe returned and going out to greet it with her classmates. “It was like watching a space shuttle take off. It’s amazing, cool, inspiring, sure, but with all the paths that life can take you, I wasn’t thinking at the time, you know, that I was going to be an astronaut someday.”
It wouldn’t be until she was in college that she returned to the canoe and officially joined the program full-time in 2013. Over years of training, she became a navigator and ultimately, in 2022, the first woman to lead-captain and lead-navigate Hōkūle’a from Hawaii to Tahiti.
A Growing Family
Things have changed a lot in the decades since canoe’s first voyage, most notably in that she no longer voyages alone. Thompson and his contemporaries went on to train the next generation of sailors and navigators from across Polynesia, and several other Pacific nations have since built their own canoes. Hōkūle‘a also now has a sister ship, Hikianalia, which has modernized communications and electronics plus the capacity to tow the engineless Hōkūle‘a in and out of port. She primarily sails as a buddy boat to Hōkūle‘a, whose navigator continues to plot the course in the old way.
“It is so bizarre when I think about how many cultural standards or traditions were broken, in a way, in order to allow this to happen,” Kamalu says of people from different nations coming together to preserve their shared ocean-going heritage. “They all trained together in their early days, learned the navigation, learned about canoes, learned what it was like to manage the leadership decisions that have to be made. And so really, I’d say pretty undisputedly, Hōkūle‘a is acknowledged as sort of the mama canoe of all of them.”
“Before Hōkūle‘a got to those islands, they had no clue what we were doing,” remembers Blankenfeld, who first crossed the Pacific in 1978. “But to see this voyaging canoe that represents them, because this is our shared culture, on their own island, that was quite the awakening. I liken it to when years ago everyone was trying to break the four-minute mile. People are killing themselves to do it for so long. Roger Bannister finally does it, and within a year hundreds of people have done it.” Sometimes it’s just a matter of showing others what is possible.
The Māori people of Aotearoa (New Zealand), for example, now have carved their own traditional double-hulled canoes out of native kauri trees, something not possible in Hawaii because of the depletion of natural resources.
“A canoe is probably one of the most amazing definitions of cultural wealth,” says Kamalu. “Not in dollars, necessarily, but when you think about the kauri tree and talk about the wealth of having healthy trees, tall and large enough that they could have been carved into these canoes. That is not true everywhere, and certainly not anymore. We’ve redefined what value is.
“The cordage that was used for lashing Hōkūle‘a came from these very temperamental plants here in Hawaii. And they say it’s the strongest natural fiber in the world, but good luck trying to cultivate that plant to the quantities you need it. And so, any time you see it, it’s sort of like if someone were to open a chest of gold in front of you. I’m like, oh my gosh, that’s priceless.”
For the communities building these boats, it’s impossible to put a value on the work or resources that go into them, because as with the generational knowledge passed from Piailug to Thompson to the next generation of navigators, once the natural resources are lost, they are lost forever. This is why for the past 30 years Hawaiians have been working hard to regrow native forests on the islands, and maybe a canoe with traditional materials, like the Māori ones, will be possible in Hawaii some day.
“They now have seven or eight deep ocean voyaging canoes in New Zealand,” Kamalu says, “and those are led by the leadership that was formed around Hōkūle‘a, that were trained and taught under Mau [Piailug], many of whom received a very special distinction from him acknowledging their role not just as leaders in the voyaging, but also as a light, as the beacon of inspiration for these places.”
“New Zealand is one place that I always think about as having a very special relationship with us, but, you know, Tahiti, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, they all now have canoes that really stemmed from the original work of Hōkūle‘a. We really acknowledge that whole family in our celebration of the 50th anniversary. We tried to get as many of them as possible here for the celebration, and it was magical.”
The multinational community that has come together around Hōkūle‘a is hard to wrap your head around. Kamalu says it can be summed up with an anecdote from the boat’s 2014-2017 circumnavigation. When they were almost ready to leave Hawaii, one of the final things they needed to do was the departure ceremony, which was both a spiritual rite and an opportunity to share the voyage with other Hawaiians and show them how to follow along. They had the ceremony, waited for the right weather window, then headed out for the first leg of the journey—the now-classic Pacific passage to Tahiti.
“Tahiti is a place we go back to in almost every voyage. This is our ancestral homeland,” says Kamalu. “There’s a very special place called Taputapuātea that is acknowledged as sort of the center of the navigational school and where all canoes seek spiritual permission for voyaging and reconnect with their ancestral past. We get there and are welcomed by our family there who have welcomed us for the past 50 years.”
Their Tahitian cousins embraced them and hosted them for a visit, and when it was time to leave, said, “You’re about to depart on a voyage from home, because this is also your ancestral home.” Despite the first departure ceremony in Hawaii and several thousand miles at sea, Hōkūle‘a’s crew was again celebrating departing, this time from their ancestral home. “We were like, ‘Oh, OK, now we’re actually leaving to start the voyage. Here we go, on to New Zealand and Samoa and Tonga.’ ”
But when they got ready to leave New Zealand, Hector Busby, one of the elders and navigators instrumental to the traditional canoes in Aotearoa, said, “I need to do the karakia,” a chant to bless and send them off on this voyage around the world,“because you’re leaving home, and this your home also.”
“I’m just like, OK, we’ve been gone for a year, and we still haven’t left,” Kamalu laughs. “We’re all the way down here, all the way in the southern hemisphere, about to head off to Australia, and they’re still sending us off.”
So they sailed on to Bali, which is part of the Austronesian and Balaic canoe culture as it spread out into the ocean. “And so they were like, ‘You guys, you’re home here, and now we’re sending you off into the Indian Ocean.’ I was just mind blown. I remember always thinking, ‘Are we ever going to leave? We’re going to get all the way back home and have never left.’
“That is one of the beautiful lessons that sticks with me. We might look different, sound different, speak different, act different, but everyone embraced us and the canoe. We went all the way around the world, without leaving home.”
A Boat’s Birthday
On March 8, 2025, exactly 50 years after Hōkūle‘a first splashed, her family all returned to Kualoa beach to celebrate. “This legacy of 50 years is based on everyone’s input, and their aloha, and their sharing of themselves, their skills, their time. It couldn’t have been done without all of that,” says Blankenfeld.
“Some of these guys we haven’t seen since the ’90s, the ’80s even, and we’ve had some people, like one older couple, their son was one of our young navigators, and he passed away years ago. And they came by, and it was so nice to see them here representing their son. A lot of our old captains and navigators came out from Aotearoa, Rarotonga, friends from Rapanui, from all over the Pacific, and it was so nice to share in the continued legacy.”
They brought the canoe back to the beach where it all began, and Kamalu says they did extensive homework to find out who would have been there in the beginning and what their cultural rituals would have looked like, revived alongside the canoe half a century ago. They shared in the memories of friends lost along the way.
“Hōkūle‘a was only designed for that one single voyage in 1976, so the fact that she’s still ready to take that voyage today is incredible,” Kamalu says. For the 50th anniversary celebration “we’ve really thought about all the people that were part of that. Anyone who’s worked on boats knows that these are all labors of love and many hands. Volunteers and members of our community who came together during the good times, during the rough time, we really wanted to celebrate them.”
MHP&S Summer 2025
