The journal Science Alert weighs in with a nice long column on the various seemingly subjective methods Polynesian navigators used to sail sea-going outrigger canoes thousands of miles and reach destinations maybe not much bigger than an mile wide in the planet's most vast ocean.
The amount of remembered signs and portents and the modifiers to each were enormous, and the sensory awareness of quite subtile variations in star patterns and wave types and directions seem to almost defy belief.
All of this accomplished with zero precision instruments, and total reliance on memory retention and sensory hypersensitivity. I'm surprised the early European explorers of the region didn't attribute Polynesian navigation excellence to witchcraft or pacts with the devil. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.
