No Nā Mamo
Carlos Andrade
Click here for an audio file of No Na Mamo.
Hoʻolohe mai, e nā mamo, hele i ka huakaʻi me ka Hōkūleʻa.
E maliu mai, e nā kamaliʻi, hele i ka holokai me ka Hōkūleʻa.
Lele i lalo i Rarotonga, lele i Tahiti, lele paha, i Nukuhiwa
E hāhai ana i nā poʻe kūpuna.
ʻAu i ka moana uliuli, ʻau i ke kai, ke kai kuakea,
nānā i nā hōkū i ka lewa, nā Makaliʻi o ka lani ākea.
A laila,
E aʻo mai i nā makani, mai hea mai e pā mai ana,
E aʻo mai i nā ʻau moana, mai hea mai e holo mai ana,
E aʻo mai i nā mokupuni, ʻāina kahiko o nā poʻe kūpuna
I hele mai ai i Hawaiʻi nei,
Me ka naʻauʻao, me ka wiwoʻole,
Me ka ʻike a me ka mana loa,
Hoʻolohe mai, e nā mamo, hele i ka holokai me ka Hōkūleʻa.
Lele, lele e nā manu, lele, lele Hōkūleʻa
Lele, lele, Hawaiʻi Loa, lele, lele Makaliʻi
Lele, lele, e lele lele, lele lele, e lele lele, lele lele, e lele lele e.
Translation
Listen in, all you descendants of Hawaiʻi, let us go on a journey with Hōkūleʻa.
Pay attention now, all the younger generations, let’s go sailing with Hōkūleʻa.
We’ll sail down under to Rarotonga, sail to Tahiti, maybe sail to Nukuhiwa,
Following in the footsteps of our ancestors.
Sail on the ocean the deep blue ocean, sail on the sea, the white-backed sea,
Watching the stars up in the heavens, little bright eyes in the sky above,
And then we’ll
Learn about the many winds, where they blow from where they come from,
Learn about the ocean currents, where they flow from, where they run from,
Learn about the many islands, ancient homeland of our ancestors,
that sailed away to far Hawaiʻi, with wisdom, and courage to guide them.
With knowledge, faith and spirit too.
Listen to me all the younger generations, sail on this voyage with Hōkūleʻa.
Fly, fly seabirds fly, Fly, fly, Hōkūleʻa,
Fly, fly, Hawaiʻi Loa, Fly, fly Makaliʻi
Fly, fly, Fly, fly, Fly, fly, Fly, fly, Fly, fly, Fly, fly, Fly, fly, Fly, fly.
No Nā Mamo
The rain poured down in the inky darkness as waves sloshed at us from multiple directions. The wind blew hard enough that we had to reduce sail area. The clouds were so thick that not a single star was visible. Was this really the “Doldrums”? We were in the ITCZ, the area of the ocean midway between the Society islands to the south and the Hawaiian archipelago in the north which is our home and destination of this voyage.
Every once and a while, a hole in the towering mass of thunderheads filling the sky in every direction would open and the constellation "Ka Heihei o Nā Keiki" [Orion's Belt] was visible. We were smack dab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean making our way north to Hawaiʻi and had been at sea for two weeks without any glimpse of land. No compass or other instruments! How would we be able to find our way through this maelstrom?
In 1992, the Festival of Pacific Arts was held in Rarotonga. The theme of the festival was voyaging and the replica voyaging canoe, Hōkūleʻa from Hawaiʻi was invited to participate in this gathering of canoes along with representative canoes from various other island groups in Oceania. I was fortunate to be chosen as one of the crewmembers to sail her back from Rarotonga to Hawaiʻi. It was to fulfill a long time dream of mine, to experience first hand a long ocean voyage.
I had previously sailed from Waitangi in Aotearoa (New Zealand) through the Tongan archipelago and on to Pagopago, Samoa on board Hōkūleʻa (Voyage of Rediscovery 1985). However, the longest passage that we experienced on that sail was eight and a half days between Waitangi and Nukualofa in Tongatapu, capitol of the island nation of Tonga. Although we did not stop on that leg of the journey, halfway through the passage we sighted the island of Raul, one of several almost entirely uninhabited rocks that make up the Kermadec chain used as a weather station for the New Zealand government. So up until the Rarotonga voyage, the longest period I had been out of sight of land was the four and a half days it had taken us to reach Raul and the four and a half remaining days that it took for us to raise the island of Tongatapu (see "Hōkūleʻa Hula," Pacific Tunings album by Nā Pali). In contrast, this, the voyage from Rarotonga to Hawaiʻi was to be an ocean passage of more than thirty days out of the sight of land.
I decided to go to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands a few weeks early in order to visit their schools and see how they handled the issue of including the Native Cook Island Maori language within the school system there. In Hawaiʻi historically, we had come very close to losing our Native tongue. There is only one Native speaking community remaining in Hawaiʻi numbering less than five hundred or so people whose numbers are diminishing rapidly. I was involved with the Hawaiian language Immersion program in Hawaiʻi working to restore our language through initiatives in the public school system. Cook Islanders were in much better shape as they still had a vibrant language culture and their population still had many native speakers especially on the outlying islands. However, the emphasis on English in the New Zealand based school system, especially in Rarotonga, the main island had created a generation of Cook Islanders who could not speak their own language much as had been done in Hawaiʻi.
Hoʻolohe mai, e nā mamo, hele i ka huakaʻi me ka Hōkūleʻa.
Listen in, you younger generations, come and go on a Hōkuleʻa voyage.
E maliu mai, e nā kamaliʻi, hele i ka holokai me ka Hōkūleʻa.
Listen in you young ones, come on an ocean voyage with Hōkūleʻa.
No Nā Mamo (For the Mamo) as this expedition was called was a voyage dedicated to the youth of Hawaiʻi. Mamo are a species of forest birds endemic to Hawaiʻi and have all but disappeared in contemporary times as a result of introduced diseases and pressure from the many alien species from other places in the world and have taken up residence in the Hawaiian archipelago. Similarly, the Hawaiian people are being inundated and displaced by population and migration pressures resonating with those that endanger the Mamo. The reference to these birds is a traditional Hawaiian language metaphor for succeeding generations of Hawaiian youth as they emerge into the world. This passage was to be a "first" for Hōkūleʻa in that Hōkūleʻa had never made a voyage directly to Hawaiʻi from the Cook Islands before. It was a route that had never been documented in traditional stories and chants so far as anyone knew today. For the benefit of the young students in Hawaiʻi schools, modern technology, radio and satellite communications, made it possible for them to follow the day to day events of the voyage closely and to be in contact with the crewmembers of Hōkūleʻa satellite phone.
Lele i lalo i Rarotonga, lele i Tahiti, lele paha, i Nukuhiwa
Fly on down to Rarotonga, fly to Tahiti, Fly! Maybe even to Nukuhiwa!
Rarotonga in the Cook Islands could almost be thought of as a geographic twin of the island of Kauaʻi, my home island, in the Hawaiian group. Both islands are located at approximately the same latitude and longitude, Kauaʻi in the north, Rarotonga in the south. Rarotonga is much smaller than my home island. It is possible to pedal around the entire island on a bicycle in a couple of hours without much strain. I had made two previous trips there, both times to play music, once with a band in a hotel and once to accompany Kindy Sproat, a legendary singer of Hawaiian songs who hails from Kohala on Hawaiʻi Island. I had made friends in “Raro” as they called it. Tua Pitman and his young family had opened their home and hospitality to me for the time before Hōkūleʻa had arrived from the the north. The Cook Island people are friendly, hospitable and beautiful. And although it was extremely enjoyable to be there, it was also a great feeling to be sailing home again to friends and family.
We departed Muri lagoon immediately after a formal ceremony welcoming canoes from all over the Pacific from as far south as Aotearoa (NZ), from Tahiti in the east and others from Micronesia and Melanesia in the north and west. The crew that had sailed Hōkūleʻa down from Hawaiʻi left the canoe in our hands and stayed for the rest of the ceremonies fulfilling protocol responsibilities there and enjoying the rest of the festivities. We sailed off into a freshening wind in order to make sure we would have the canoe back in Hawaiʻi before the winter season of storms in the Northern Pacific commenced in full force.
Our navigators had laid out a reference course designed to take us directly north to Hawaiʻi from the Cook islands, but the wind had a different agenda. We sailed as close to the wind as the canoe was capable towards the north for three days but the passage of the weather systems in the southern hemisphere caused the wind to push the bow of the canoe inexorably more and more easterly each day. The canoe seemed to have a mind of its own as it wended its way north and east. We coasted south of Borabora, Raʻiatea, Tahaʻa and Huahine known to the Tahitians as Raro Mataʻi (below the wind). Although within sight of those tantalizing islands, landfall there was not to be as the wind pointed us further eastward towards what would become our interim destination, Papeʻete in Tahiti. There we waited for the better part of a week for the wind to turn again in our favor before setting off northward again towards far Hawaiʻi. Adventures there in the storied island of Tahiti are part of another chronicle.
On a favorable southeasterly we sailed northward past Tetiaroa (Marlon Brando island), skirting the edge of the Tuamotu archipelago. As we sailed northward into the great expanse of ocean, the wind slowly shifted north compelling us to tack several times, off the direct route home. On the second day, while on an eastward path, climbing up through the eye of the wind working our way slowly northward we came within a couple of hundred miles of the islands now known as the Marquesas group in which Nukuhiwa is one of the primary islands. Favorable winds commencing on the third day of tacking allowing us to head directly northward towards home making the landfall at Nukuhiwa something that would have to be put off for another time.
E hāhai ana i nā poʻe kūpuna.
ʻAu i ka moana uliuli, ʻau i ke kai, ke kai kuakea,
nānā i nā hōkū i ka lewa, nā Makaliʻi o ka lani ākea.
Following in the pathways laid down by our ancestors,
sailing in the deep ocean, sailing in the sea, the white backed seas,
watching the stars up in the sky, the Pleiades, little eyes in the great expanse of sky
For more than four thousand years our ancestors traveled the great seaways of Oceania from island to island in this greatest ocean on planet Earth. They did it for centuries without any instruments except for an intimate knowledge of sea and sky long before other nations ventured beyond the sight of land. We were continuing a legacy that had almost entirely disappeared in Hawaiʻi but was now being revived through the work of Mau Pialug, Nainoa Thompson and others who were learning, practicing and passing these skills of non-instrument navigation on to another generation.
A laila,
E aʻo mai i nā makani, mai hea mai e pā mai ana,
E aʻo mai i nā ʻau moana, mai hea mai e holo mai ana,
E aʻo mai i nā mokupuni, ʻāina kahiko o nā poʻe kūpuna
I hele mai ai i Hawaiʻi nei,
Me ka naʻauʻao, me ka wiwoʻole,
Me ka ʻike a me ka mana loa,
and then we’ll
learn about the winds and where they come from
learn of the ocean currents and where they flow from
learn of the islands, ancient homeland of our ancestors
who came here to Hawaiʻi
with
knowledge, and courage,
with
power of mind and spirit.
We, the younger siblings of islands, were once again “bending the wind” out upon, as Sam Kaʻai says, “the bosom of Papahānaumoku (earth mother who gave birth to islands) beneath Wakea (the broad sky father studded with stars)” in intimate contact with Kai Popolohua a Kāne (the deep blue ocean of Kāne). The same stars floating in the heavens that had guided those bygone ancestors were now assisting in guiding us on to our homeland.
The ocean road north led through Ka Houpo o Kāne (the diaphram of Kane – the inter tropic conversion zone aka ITCZ or the “Doldrums”). In this part of the sea, where stories of hot, thirsty, becalmed sailors in the doldrums have become standard fare for ocean stories, we encountered storm winds, rain and the highest thickest cloud cover and most gigantic thunderheads I had ever seen. However, a powerful groundswell generated somewhere near the Aleutians undulated directly out of the north showing us the right direction to steer whenever we lost sight of stars, sun and moon. We had seen the beginnings of this swell when we were well south of the cloud strewn equatorial region. All of the surfers on board exchanged knowing glances sharing the thought that this was a big winter swell which probably was producing some giant waves at the premier surf spots on our home islands. The continuing presence of this dominant groundswell provided a much appreciated clue enabling us to hold our northerly course despite the unremitting cloud cover almost constantly obliterated our view of the stars. Even the local winds and rain storms generated by the ever present thundercloud formations could not wipe away the presence of these dominant swells.
After more than four weeks at sea, in the early morning hours before dawn, the lights of Hilo town loomed into sight reflecting off the bottom of heavy cloud cover. The next morning we breached the massive cloud trains enshrouding the mountains hiding the islands from sight until we got close up to them. We passed up going into the safe harbor at Hilo, rounded the blue black cliffs of Hamakua and rocketed down the vortex of wind and swells compressed and magnified in the ʻAlenuihaha channel between Hawaiʻi island and Maui bound for Hōnaunau. Mauna Kea, covered with snow, glistened in the sun as we wrestled the heavy steering paddles trying to keep Hōkūleʻa on a steady course as we surfed down the mountainous swells pouring between the majestic white mountain of ʻĀkea and Haleakalā, House of the Sun, its companion on Maui. Even with stiff winds pushing vigorously at our stern, it would still be a few more days before we would rejoin our families at Kualoa on Oʻahu, after shorts stops at Hōnaunau in Kona and Kaunakakai on Molokaʻi.
Hoʻolohe mai, e nā mamo, hele i ka holokai me ka Hōkūleʻa.
Lele, lele e nā manu, lele, lele Hōkūleʻa
Lele, lele, Hawaiʻi Loa, lele, lele Makaliʻi
Lele, lele, e lele lele, lele lele, e lele lele, lele lele, e lele lele e.
Listen closely younger generations, come on a sea voyage with Hōkūleʻa.
Fly, Fly birds. Fly fly, Hōkūleʻa.
Fly fly, Hawaiʻi Loa, Fly fly, Makaliʻi!
Fly fly, Fly fly, Fly fly, Fly fly, Fly fly, Fly fly, Fly fly, Fly fly!
More canoes were abuildin’. Hawaiʻi Loa, a canoe which I would assist carving was being made out of two gigantic Spruce logs. Makaliʻi, a smaller. sleeker, faster waʻa kaulua (double hulled) being built by the Hawaiʻi island contingent were soon to replicate the earlier voyages of Hōkūleʻa. Smaller canoes were also being built and used to extend the sailing legacy of our Polynesian ancestors on shorter passages between islands and around the coastal waters of Hawaiʻi. The birds (a Polynesian metaphor for canoes) were flocking together and flying again. Already, another generation of sailors is taking the canoes down the ala moana (ocean highways) of the ancestors, celebrated in chant, song and story.