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I was listening to some podcasts on the subject. In addition to what other people said, they sent out active explorers looking for new islands and even had a standard way of organizing a new colonial fleet. It was very purposeful. The explorers did in some cases set off in random directions, but they had ways of looking for land as other people had already explaining, and knew now to reliably return.
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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.
Couldn’t they follow birds? (Asking not telling)
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