Te Puke author Kinglsey Smith on 50,000 years of navigation

Kingsley Smith has written Navigation: Kupe & Cook.

Two of the "discoverers" of New Zealand book-end a new hardback written by Te Puke's Kingsley Smith.

In Navigation: Kupe & Cook, Kingsley examines the beginnings of travel by boat as man migrated out of Africa 50,000 years ago and arrived in the prehistoric continent of Sahul that would eventually become mainland Australia, eastern Indonesia, New Guinea and Tasmania.

Kupe was the legendary Polynesian explorer and navigator who is thought by many to have been the first human to discover Aotearoa New Zealand. Kupe features prominently in the mythology and oral history of some iwi.

The book finishes with Cook's voyages to the South Pacific where he was aided by the master Polynesian navigator Tupaia.

The seeds for Navigation: Kupe & Cook were sewn when Kingsley was living in Whitianga. The town's original name is Te Whitianga-Nui-a-Kupe, the crossing place of Kupe.

In 2012, the town centre underwent an upgrade and Kingsley's idea to develop a navigation-based theme was adopted.

"There are streets named after Kupe and after Cook and his crew - so I proposed a navigation theme for the town. I did some research and submitted it and they agreed."

His interest piqued, Kingsley carried on with his research, eventually starting a blog he wrote until three years ago.

"I thought, 'I'm interested in this and I need something different to do than what I've been doing for a long time because I was getting bored, so I started writing a book."

He began comparing the navigational systems of the original explorers and those of the European explorers.

"So essentially it's European or Western v the Pacifika people - I just delved into it.''

He says Europeans were fixated on finding exactly where they were so they could go from that point to another specific point.

The early navigators used the stars to travel both east-west, and north-south.

"The Polynesians weren't too worried about that. They had to get somewhere close to where they were heading - maybe 200-300km - and then use much more local things to get to where they wanted to go. So the stars were a very broad guide."

Locally they would use birds, changes in swell patterns that were mapped into stick charts, changes in temperature, changes in the salinity of the water and floating seaweed to indicate the proximity of land.

Kingsley says the book will appeal to anyone interested in the sea and believes people in schools and libraries will be interested in it.

■ Kingsley will have a book signing at Te Puke Paper Plus on June 10 between noon and 1pm.