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So, as others have mentioned, waves bounce off of islands, so that’s one method.
Another is that clouds tend to accumulate over islands (different air patterns over land than water), and *birds* were a big help.
They figured that if they spotted a bird at sea, it was either headed *from* or *toward* land, or food, since it had to have nests somewhere. They could easily use other methods to determine if the birds were leaving land, though time of day was a big factor. (If it was morning, they were leaving the nest to hunt. If it was evening, they were returning to the nest to sleep.)
Combine this with eventual familiarity with local currents, and likely *generations* of experience passed down through oral tradition and recordkeeping (they didn’t do it overnight, after all.), and there you have it.
I am by no means an expert on this topic, so I likely missed some things, but I did look into it at some point in the past year or two.
Edit: As some people pointed out, *yes*, at night, they could navigate using the stars and night sky. This could be as simple as following the correct stars for a direction, to as advanced as measuring how high a constellation has risen over the horizon relative to global position and time of night to track progress, using nothing more than your hand, the star and the horizon as a measuring stick and points of reference, and the positioning of the moon to track time of night.
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I asked this same question in an anthropology class @ University of Hawaii.
prof: well, how have humans usually found new places?
me: by just… exploring? you can’t blindly wander the ocean tho, it’s too dangerous
prof: and exploring the land isn’t? i think the issue is you look at the ocean as an obstacle, whereas polynesians do not. in their eyes, the ocean is a highway
Hi Everyone,
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For Hawaii, which is one of the more remote groups of islands, two possibilities come to mind:
Pumice. Hawaii is volcanic, and while most eruptions are the familiar rivers of lava [there are exceptions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keanakakoi_eruption). The maps I see online show a current flowing westwards from Hawaii, so if the Polynesians encountered relatively fresh pumice coming from the east they would suspect there might be land there.
Those same currents would carry rafts of terrestrial vegetation torn loose by heavy rains, which would be an even stronger indication of land to the east.
They didn’t have magnetic compass so they used stars or bright planets such as Venus and Jupiter to navigate during the night. During day time they use the sun to navigate.
When near an island there would be birds and cloud formation. The Māori name for New Zealand is Aotearoa with one literal translation as ‘the land of the long white cloud’ given by them when they discovered the North Island.
The Māori voyagers also used whales to find land in this case it was the Humpback whale. They believed that by following whales they would be led to land as whales give birth in calmer water near atolls or islands. Whales travel slowly at around 3 to 5 knots thus making them easy to follow.
This is the [source](https://teara.govt.nz/en/canoe-navigation/page-3) about finding land.
[Here](https://teara.govt.nz/en/maori-origins-and-arrivals) are the different stories about the Māori origins and arrival.
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