Hōkūleʻa sails to Tahiti
No compass, no charts: only stars, swells and birds
In 1976 the double-hulled canoe Hōkūleʻa, built on ancient lines, sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti, some 4,000 km, without a single navigation instrument. It was guided by Mau Piailug of Satawal atoll in Micronesia, one of the last keepers of traditional wayfinding. The voyage undercut the theory that Polynesia was settled by accidental drift and spurred the Hawaiian cultural renaissance.
Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 4 years later
Europe
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 23 years earlier
- 1968 May 1968 in France — 8 years earlier
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 13 years later
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 13 years later
- 1990 German reunification — 14 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 19 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — 15 years earlier
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — 9 years later
- 1989 Revolutions of 1989 — 13 years later
- 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union — 15 years later
Middle East
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 3 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 4 years later
- 1990–1991 Gulf War — 14 years later
Africa
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 13 years earlier
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 9 years earlier
- 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War and Biafra — 9 years earlier
- 1974 Lucy is discovered — 2 years earlier
- 1983–1985 The Ethiopian famine — 7 years later
Asia
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 23 years earlier
- 1971–1971 Bangladesh Liberation War — 5 years earlier
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 1 year earlier
- 1976 Tangshan earthquake — same year
- 1978 Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening-up — 2 years later
Americas
- 1969 Moon landing — 7 years earlier
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 6 years earlier
- 1973 Chilean coup d'état — 3 years earlier
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 7 years later
- 2001 September 11 attacks — 25 years later
Alive at the time
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 87)
- Mao Zedong (aged 83)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 58)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 46)
- Golda Meir (aged 78)
- Jorge Luis Borges (aged 77)
- Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa) (aged 75)
- Leonid Brezhnev (aged 70)
- Mother Teresa (aged 66)
- Ronald Reagan (aged 65)