An All-Female Crew Sailed 1,000 Miles in a Traditional Voyaging Canoe to Help Save Humpback Whales

“My people are called the whale riders,” says Māori conservationist Mere Takoko.

Whales not only hold cultural and spiritual significance for the Māori, the Indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand, but they are also often seen as ancestors. “Whales symbolize strength, wisdom and resilience, and they are deeply respected as guardians of the ocean,” says Takoko.

Each year in June and July, humpback whales will pass New Zealand as they migrate north from Antarctica to the warmer waters of Tonga to mate, give birth and nurse their calves. They will stay there until October before they return south.

The humpback population that uses New Zealand’s waters once stood at 20,000, but whaling at the turn of the century saw it drop to a few hundred. Since New Zealand whalers harpooned their last whale in 1964, it has steadily risen to 10,000. As a keystone species, they play a large part in the ecosystem. The nutrients they release fertilize a food web.

“My community would see them more regularly when I was younger,” says Takoko, a Gisborne resident who is now in her 40s. “It’s very difficult to see them now, as they don’t come as close to the coast. The migratory patterns have been changing.”

In 2023, Takoko was part of a team who helped bring together an all-female Pacific crew, which would sail 1,000 miles along the humpback highway from New Zealand to Tonga to help raise awareness of the plight of the whales. Along the way, the Hinemoana Halo Waka Moana Initiative crew would collect environmental DNA (eDNA) data, namely mucus, larvae, feces or skin cells, which researchers could then use to confirm what species are present or are missing from the water.

The Hinemoana Halo Waka Moana Initiative recruited 12 crew members from the Cook Islands, New Zealand, Samoa and Tonga. It included veteran sailors, such as Aunofo Havea, the first Tongan woman licensed as a sea captain, and Fealofani Bruun, the first Samoan woman to qualify as a yacht master, as well as a new generation of voyagers.

The team knew that if this marine conservation project were to be truly Indigenous, it would need to feature a waka hourua. The traditional, wooden, double-hulled ocean-going canoe typically has two sails and measures nearly 60 feet long. Polynesians have used the vessels for voyaging for thousands of years.

“The voyaging canoes are the heartbeat of Polynesian culture; they are really what helped us to connect deeply with nature,” says Takoko. “From the understanding of the movement of the tides, to the stars and the winds, we can’t really talk about ocean conservation in a way that’s truly authentically Polynesian-led without including waka hourua.”

While the journey’s aim was to help save the whales, it would also help heal, in some small part, one country’s voyaging history.

The history of voyaging in New Zealand

The first people to arrive in New Zealand are thought to have traveled from Hawaiki (Polynesia) between 1200 and 1300 C.E. They navigated the ocean by the tides, moon and stars.

“They were oceanic people. The ocean is their highway—it’s not a barrier,” says Lisa Matisoo-Smith, an anthropologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, who is not involved with the project.

Early New Zealanders would make a very systematic exploration of the Pacific. Using the consistency of the trade winds, they would sail from west to east across the ocean. While voyaging was male-dominated, if better land were found, women and children would also make the journey to set up new communities. “Routes [between the new land and homeland] were maintained until the new society was established and complicated enough politically that those links weren’t useful anymore,” says Matisoo-Smith.

The earliest evidence of voyaging in New Zealand is a 600-year-old waka that was found buried in Golden Bay in 2012. While it was made from native New Zealand wood, it featured an intricate carving of a turtle on the hull, reminiscent not of Māori culture, but of Polynesia.

In 1769, a Finnish explorer sketched a drawing of a waka off the coast of New Zealand. Yet, Matisoo-Smith says: “There’s no evidence that they were continuing to voyage those long distances. They didn’t need to anymore. They developed their own culture; they became people from Aotearoa [a Māori-language name for New Zealand].”

Takoko says: “We don’t exactly know when the practice ended [long voyaging], but we know the waka hourua was a victim of that, and colonization ensured we didn’t practice it again.”

The past 30 years have brought a resurgence in voyaging in New Zealand. This was largely done thanks to Micronesians who shared what they knew about the tradition and pioneers, such as the late Hekenukumai Busby. The Māori navigator and traditional waka builder helped promote education about the vessels. People started to crew the wakas that Busby built.

Around the same time, the Cook Islands Voyaging Society was established. More voyaging societies then launched in Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. earlier, in 1992. The voyaging societies started to build wakas using ancient techniques. Voyages are now taking place to retrace ancestral routes, strengthen connections between Pacific communities, highlight environmental issues and help teach the next generation traditional navigation skills.

Restoring a canoe

In August 2023, one of the sailors of the all-female crew heard there was a traditional waka more than 3,000 miles away in the Marshall Islands. The vessel was in a dilapidated state, but they really didn’t have another option. If they were to build a traditional double-hulled voyaging canoe from wood, it could take up to four years to complete and cost up to $1.6 million.

“It was a leap of faith,” says Takoko.

It took six months for the nearly 50-foot-long waka hourua, which they named Hinemoana II after the Māori goddess of the ocean, to be shipped to New Zealand. The team sought sponsorship for the cost of the waka from individual philanthropists and companies such as Rolex. The Tonga Voyaging Society and Te Whānau a Apanui iwi in New Zealand became the canoe’s guardians.

The team finally started to restore the double-hulled canoe this February. An artisan restored the whakairo (carvings) in the steering paddle, while the crew helped patch the holes in the boat and restring the catamaran-like netting. It took six months before it was seaworthy.

Whilst they were working on the waka, Conservation International connected them to Citizens of the Sea, a charity co-founded by the Cawthron Institute. Citizens of the Sea taught the crew members how to gather eDNA for research. The crew collected the eDNA with a torpedo-shaped device that is fitted with a 20-micron nylon filter, which collects plankton, biofilm and eDNA. Each day they would need to drag it behind the waka for five minutes at a time to sample the biodiversity of the ocean.

“The eDNA will be going into the bigger pool of data for the region, seeing what species are present and absent,” says Schannel van Dijken, a marine biologist and Conservation International’s marine and heritage senior director.

Whales not only digest and store large quantities of carbon-rich prey, but they also exhale very little carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. This means they can act like a carbon sink and help protect against climate change. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one whale can capture 33 tons of carbon dioxide over its lifetime.

The women would need to set sail during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter if they wanted to arrive in Tonga in time for the whales’ arrival from Antarctica in July. The crew made sure they were as prepared as they could be. Those who weren’t already qualified sailors took their day skipper exams. They would help break up the monotony of studying with Tongan folk songs that helped them remember what they had learned.

“It helped keep things fun, but song is the way we’ve always passed down information,” says the Cook Islands' crew member Tee Wells.

At the beginning of July, the crew managed to complete a four-day, 144-mile sea trial from Tauranga to Auckland. A swell hit, lifting the boat to 45 degrees and one of the experienced sailors, Wells, slipped on the deck and fractured her ribs, which meant she wouldn’t be able to join the main voyage. The waka handled the trial with ease. The only issue they had was a modern one, as the internet system they installed went down.

The voyage begins

As the waka departed from Auckland on the morning of July 22, Takoko offered a Māori prayer from the shoreline. “It was so beautiful. It was a leaving chant to safeguard us along the waters,” says co-captain Joelene Busby Cole from New Zealand. “I replied to her with, ‘One footstep, one heartbeat, one waka …’”

Over the next ten days, the crew would follow the humpback highway from New Zealand, along the Kermadec Trench, through the Kermadec Islands to Tonga. The waters of these volcanic islands are one of the few places in the Pacific Ocean where whales, particularly humpbacks, gather.

“There was huge element of uncertainty crossing the Kermadecs. It’s a big deal that they even undertook the voyage at the time of year that they did,” says Takoko.

The crew worked tirelessly in shifts throughout the nights. But on some nights, the 16- to 22-foot swells crashing down on the deck meant that none of the crew got any sleep.

More inexperienced members of the crew, who were yet to find their sea legs, battled seasickness in the first couple of days. Busby Cole, an accomplished sailor who was taught how to sail by her great uncle, Hekenukumai Busby, distracted the less experienced members of the crew with techniques on how to read the signs in clouds or stars, which could be used for navigation, while her co-captains steered.

Some signs are spiritual, while others are practical. An albatross shows that you’re on the right track and your ancestors are along with you on the journey, Busby Cole explains. A ngoi bird would show the crew they were about 250 nautical miles off land. “At dusk, he’ll make a beeline straight for land,” she says.

At every important landmark on the journey they would see a humpback whale breaching, a reminder of why they were making the trip.

Alarmingly, it looked as if their journey might come to an end when their steering paddle broke toward the end of their voyage. However, the three co-captains were able to lash it together and make some rudimentary repairs at sea, which held it in place until they made it to shore.

On August 1, the Hinemoana II finally arrived in Nukuʻalofa, Tonga, where a welcome party, including family, friends and people from Tonga Tourism, waited. The sailors were gifted garlands as they came ashore.

For the crew from Tonga, it was a homecoming. For the other members of the group, it was a chance to create new bonds. The crew are now preparing the boat for the return journey in November, when they will capture eDNA as the whales migrate. When the waka arrives in New Zealand, it will be used as a floating classroom and research platform that will conduct citizen science, eDNA research, and species monitoring of whales and other marine mammals. And once licensed, visitors will be able to join them onboard.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Pacific Islanders helping to protect the whales. Māori and Pacific leaders are calling for the whale to be given legal personhood. The data gathered from Hinemoana II will help paint a full picture of the threat to the whales. The proposal, which was put forward by the Hinemoana Halo and backed by the late Māori king Tūheitia Pōtatau Te Wherowhero VII, would give whales rights, including freedom of movement and a right to continue to enjoy their habitats free of pollution. The Māori have already shown how nature can receive personhood in law. In 2017, after a decades-long fight, the Māori gained legal personhood for New Zealand’s Whanganui River.

Once the whale is identified as a person, a ship could then be penalized for maiming, hurting or killing that person.

The Hinemoana II is the beginning of this vision. The aim is to use more wakas to help promote the restoration of whales as ecosystems. Takoko believes that if they can help save the whales, the whales could then help save the island communities.

“As Indigenous people who are most vulnerable to climatic changes, no one is coming to save us,” says Takoko. “We have to come up with our own ways of being able to adapt to these huge changes that are going to [impact] our communities. Our survival is at stake.”

Claire Turrell | READ MORE

Claire Turrell is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Singapore. Her work has been published by Insider, National Geographic, The Guardian and BBC.