It’s 11 P.M., and I’ve just crawled from my bunk for my midnight to 6 A.M. watch. I arrive on deck to hear Sesario order everyone to drop the jib. He has made the decision to ride out a fierce storm with our sails down, what sailors call running under bare poles.

Running the jib

Running the jib

Sesario at his navigating post

Sesario at his navigating post

Turtle hunting

Turtle hunting

Island life

Island life

Captain Sesario Sewralur

Captain Sesario Sewralur

Balancing on a narrow plank in driving rain, two crew members struggle to gather the galloping jib as our boat rises and plummets down 15-foot waves. There are no winches and no roller to furl up the sail onto the headstay—only ropes, cleats, and brute strength. As a matter of pride, none of the crew wear life jackets. It looks as if the sail is going to get away and the two men will be flung out to sea, but somehow they wrestle it in and tie it off.Ìę

Tired, wet, and cold, they climb into their hammocks in the tomblike hulls of the Alingano Maisu, our 56-foot catamaran, a modern version of a traditional Hawaiian single-mast, double-hull sailing canoe. There is nothing left to do but rest and hope that our vessel holds up against the howling winds.Ìę

We’re in the Federated States of Micronesia, in the Caroline Islands, where people say that palu, local master navigators, have magic. They ply the waters of the Pacific in traditional hand-carved sailing canoes made of mahogany and breadfruit wood and talk to the clouds, currents, seabirds, waves, and, legend has it, ocean spirits, relying largely on the stars as their guide. The Maisu has no GPS unit to plot a course, no radar to help with navigational hazards, no fax machine with daily weather updates, and no satellite uplink for Internet access. I don’t know if our captain, Sesario Sewralur, a palu and the son of the great Mau Piailug, Micronesia’s most famous navigator, possesses magic or not, but if he does I want him to use it.Ìę

It’s our sixth night at sea, and malevolent black thunderheads have closed in around us from the north and the east. Earlier in the night, Tony Piailug, Sesario’s brother, did his best to tame the gathering storm. He stood at the rail whispering, chanting, and using his hand as a blade to separate the clouds, summoning whatever powers he’d inherited from his father. But minutes later, a wind began to blow with a predatory moan.

Kurt Ngiraked, one of Sesario’s two navigators in training, and I are now alone on deck. Kurt grew up on an island north of the Republic of Palau. He is a huge, craggy-faced, dark-skinned man who rarely speaks and reminds me of the Chief in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. With every star obscured by dark clouds, Sesario has instructed us to hold a compass course. My job is to shine the flashlight so that Kurt, using the 30-foot steering paddle, can point us due east.Ìę

The blinding rain beats down on us and finds its way under my rain gear. By 3 A.M., the wind has become Homer’s “yelping horror.” After four hours, its freight-train roar has worn me down physically and psychologically. I am soaked and freezing, hanging on to the rail, fearful that I will be blown off the canoe hundreds of miles from help. Kurt, holding the steering paddle firmly, struggles to keep the Maisu parallel with the cresting waves, to prevent them from rolling us.Ìę

At one point, Sesario opens the flap to his compartment. I crawl over to him. When we left Palau, he put me in charge of the emergency locator beacon without giving me any instructions about when to use it. “Should I press Help?” I yell to him. He cups his hand to his ear, and I yell again. “Not yet,” he answers. Then he zips his canvas cover and disappears.

THAT’S THE FIRST time I wonder about the wisdom of our journey. We are sailing across the Pacific via a route Sesario has never taken before, re-creating the exploratory journeys of his ancestors and the ocean’s pioneers.Ìę

Our goal is to sail a straight-line distance of 800 miles from Koror, an island in Palau, east across the open ocean and through the Caroline Islands, a region of iridescent lagoons, traditional cultures, and untouched white-sand beaches. After a stop on Woleai Atoll, we will travel nearly 200 miles east to Sesario’s home, the tiny island of Satawal. Under different circumstances, Sesario wouldn’t use a compass. When the Carolinians set off on an open-water adventure, they abide by no schedule. But we are on a quasi-Western timeline, attempting to reach Satawal in 12 days, by mid-April.

This is normally the season of stable winds and what the Carolinians call voyaging skies, when the islanders return to the ocean to travel up and down the island chain, fishing and hunting sea turtles. It is also a time of wanderlust, when the wind takes possession of young men’s souls. For the Carolinian people, confined to tiny spits of coral, the ocean has always been their grocery and their highway. But it is also their wilderness, a proving ground where young men, like those on Sesario’s crew, test themselves.Ìę

Stretching 1,800 miles from west to east, the Caroline chain is made up of approximately 600 islands, of which about 80 are inhabited. Roughly at its geographic center, Satawal is considered by many to be the heart of open-ocean wayfinding, or star navigation, in which sailors follow a course based on the rising and setting positions of 16 constellations or individual stars. Lying south of Magellan’s 1521 course through Micronesia and the trade routes that followed, Satawal escaped European influence and the magnetic pull of the compass. Later, as the modern world encroached, its navigators kept the tradition of star navigation intact. They remained proud outer islanders, re metau, people of the sea.

Satawal has produced no greater star navigator than Sesario’s father, Mau Piailug. Mau was six years old when his grandfather began teaching him about the constellations by arranging 32 pieces of coral in a circle to represent the points of the star compass, a demonstration called unfolding the map. Then he explained to Mau how the stars rose in the sky and traveled from east to west. Mau memorized the course of each and eventually learned the paths of more than a hundred.

Papa Mau, as he is known on Satawal, was recruited in 1976 by the nascent Honolulu-based Polynesian Voyaging Society to teach its members celestial navigation, an art the Hawaiians had lost five centuries before. Mau guided them in the ±áŽÇ°ìłÜ±ô±đ‘a, a replica of a traditional eastern Polynesian voyaging canoe, on an exhausting 2,500-mile trip from Hawaii to Tahiti, retracing one of the historic migration routes of Oceania from a time when blue-water sailors in vessels bigger and faster than Captain Cook’s Endeavour explored the unknown Pacific. The ±áŽÇ°ìłÜ±ô±đ‘a—from the Hawaiian name for Arcturus, the star that once led Polynesian canoes north to Hawaii—arrived in Tahiti 34 days later. Seventeen thousand islanders turned out for the reception. Since then, many more people in the Hawaiian Islands have embraced the traditional ways of sailing, and in 2009, the U.S. Congress earmarked $238,000 to the Polynesian Voyaging Society to continue its efforts to preserve them.

Originally, I’d hoped that Mau or Uurupa, his brother, also an accomplished navigator, would lead our voyage. I’d met 78-year-old Uurupa on a scouting trip to Saipan in 2009, after he’d led a small fleet of sailing canoes 450 miles north from Satawal. But Uurupa’s health was failing, and Mau had died in 2010 after a long battle with diabetes.

Mau’s legacy now lies in the hands of his 42-year-old son, our captain. Sesario has five children, a charming wife, and an easy way about him—if there is drinking, dancing, and singing, he’ll likely be in the middle of it. When not on the Maisu or teaching a navigation course at , he does maintenance work for the school.

“When I was young,” Sesario says, “my father wanted to teach me navigation, but I was not interested. In my twenties, I was doing traditional dancing for tourists at high-priced hotels in Saipan. When I got sick of that, I was ready to learn the old ways. Now my goal is to keep our culture alive.”Ìę

For our journey, Sesario has put together a crew of 12, including photographer Philipp Engelhorn and me. Serving as deckhands are Noah, a young man from the island of Ifalik; Calson, a sweet-natured 20-year-old kid from Palau who has never been at sea; and Peter, David, and Mianu, young men from Satawal who dream of becoming voyagers. Kurt Ngiraked and Frank Pedro are Sesario’s apprentice navigators, who must study for more than 20 years before being allowed to take a solo voyage. Finally, there is Phillip Sablan, a sculptor and tattoo artist from Guam who is transporting a headstone he carved for Mau’s grave; Kazuyoh Hayashi, a Japanese writer who has been visiting Satawal for seven years and was adopted by Mau’s eldest daughter, who is dying of cancer; and Tony, Sesario’s elder brother, whose resemblance to his father is remarkable.Ìę

Although Tony is an accomplished navigator, sailor, fisherman, and canoe builder, it is clear who our leader is. Sesario has dozens of voyages to his credit, including a 45-day, 3,500-mile journey from Hawaii to Satawal in 2007. Like his father, Sesario has undergone the sacred pwo ceremony, a distinction that places him among an exclusive class of star navigators whose ancestors pioneered the remote islands and atolls of Micronesia.Ìę

Thankfully, he employs this knowledge the morning after the storm.

“Big one last night,” he says, sitting on a bucket near the rail.

“Yeah, scary,” I say, although what I want to say is “Where were you?” But I keep my mouth shut. On land, navigators pay respect to chiefs, elders, and contemporaries from higher clans, but at sea they are afforded godlike status. The Carolinians also have a superstition about disharmony aboard ship. Dissent can send a crew to a watery grave every bit as fast as high winds and waves.

“The weather is changing,” Sesario says, scanning the sky, which is now streaked with fragile strands of light. “Things are not the same as they once were.”

Sesario employs a sophisticated form of dead reckoning using a variety of natural signs—including star paths, reference islands, the shapes and colors of clouds, ocean swells, the sun, the flight paths of birds, and the salinity of the water—to determine his position on the ocean. His ability to locate himself at sea is born of intimacy and skills unknown to modern sailors.

It takes Sesario the better part of the morning to figure out where we are. By his estimation—and the presence of a frigate bird, whose range can reach up to 75 miles from land—we are 50 to 60 miles south of Woleai. This is considerably farther south than he’d hoped, so we are changing course. Instead of heading for Woleai, we will aim for the small island of Ifalik.

ALTHOUGH THE MAISU looks huge, its size is misleading. Its deck space is only half the length of its 56-foot hulls and is crowded with coiled ropes, anchors, coconuts, bananas, bunches of betel nut leaves (which the crew chews incessantly), and water jugs. Each person on board has a six-hour shift, with four people to a crew, pending the weather. During a shift, we adjust the mainsail and execute an occasional tack, but mostly we fish, drink instant coffee to stay awake, pump out the pontoons, which collect water, and sit on deck listening to crew members’ stories.Ìę

Tony entertains us for hours with jokes and memories of growing up on Satawal. “When I was a little boy,” he says, “I would cover myself with coconuts or a palm mat and sneak away in the bottom of Mau’s sailing canoe. They wouldn’t find me until we were out at sea. I’d go with Mau whenever I could. At school the teachers called me Absent because I was rarely there. The women scolded Mau, telling him I was too young to voyage.”

He told us about the tradition of sending sailors off with gifts to accompany them into the next world if they perished. Years ago, death was common on long voyages. (Now fewer long voyages are taken, and not as many Carolinians die, but open-ocean sailing is still very dangerous.) Tony also told us about the bizarre display of love and relief with which Satawalese women welcome home returning voyagers, holding them underwater. “You will see,” Tony says. “You cannot escape the women. There are too many. When they catch you, they will hold you under until you almost drown.”

Our first six days at sea were relatively uneventful. There were no islands or birds to break the endless horizon of ocean; only fierce evening storms shook up the monotony. Sesario seemed confounded by the ferocity of the weather and was often quiet. Sometimes he’d watch the sky for hours, stopping only to give occasional instructions to his crew.Ìę

On the morning of the seventh day, I ask Sesario how we will reach Ifalik. Using his index finger to point, he shows me. “We will begin by following Maragar,” he says, or Pleiades. “When it reaches here—” he pauses, looking up at the sky—“we will steer by the next rising star.”

To get from point A to point B, a navigator chooses a reference island, point C, and divides the journey into stages, or etak.ÌęIsland C might be close or 100 miles in the distance, but seeing it is not important because he knows the star it lies beneath. As he proceeds, it will fall under a succession of navigating stars depending upon the length of the trip. In his mental picture, the sailing canoe is a stationary object in a moving sea beneath fixed star points. The islands, too, are said to move. When a navigator reaches a point where the star under which the reference island lies is off the vessel’s stern, he knows that he has almost arrived. (To stay on course during the day, a navigator tracks the path of the sun and uses his knowledge of ocean swells, which also guide boats on cloudy nights.)

That night I wake for my graveyard shift at 11:30. The stars are spread thick across a coal black sky. It’s easy to see why the Carolinians still make their way across the Pacific with their heads craned toward the heavens. Their ancestors were the descendants of seafarers who had abandoned their homes in the southwestern Pacific to explore and colonize the central Pacific. Until recently, many archaeologists called all of their pioneering ancestors the Lapita people and thought that the human settlement of the central and eastern Pacific had been part of an ancient migration from China, Taiwan, and the islands of Southeast Asia some 6,000 years ago. John Terrell, a curator of Pacific anthropology at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, notes, however, that “people had already been sailing from island to island in the southwestern Pacific for more than 40,000 years, and sailors had already become well accustomed to finding new places to call home on previously uninhabited islands.” One thing most archaeologists today agree on is that somewhere around 1000 B.C., voyagers intent on finding new landfalls grew bold and reached the Fiji islands in the central Pacific, covering hundreds of miles of open ocean. By the time of Christ, people were making bluewater jumps into the void of the eastern Pacific using outrigger canoes. A thousand years later, they were carving and standing up huge statues on Easter Island, while others pressed east and north to discover Hawaii.

It is easy, too, to dismiss the skepticism of archaeologists like Atholl Anderson, who believes that, without the aid of sextant, map, or telescope, the people of the Pacific did not have the navigational skills to make deliberate migrations against prevailing winds. Professor of prehistory at the Australian National University, Anderson suggests that, driven out of their homes by war, environmental overexploitation, and the hope of finding a new place to sustain them, they arrived accidentally or opportunistically, drifting with currents or blown by El Niño winds that, for brief periods, reversed the east-west course of the trades. Others, including Geoffrey Irwin, a professor of archaeology at the University of Auckland, don’t deny that possibility but argue that these people were more often brave pioneers with, he’s said, “sophisticated traditions of seafaring.” Mau’s 1976 journey—the longest open-water voyage in more than 600 years—proved to many that these ancient mariners were capable of long-distance exploration. Even so, some archaeologists and historians continue to doubt their ability to mount long, intentional voyages.

At midnight, Noah, who hasn’t been back to Ifalik since he left in 2007, is tending the steering paddle and singing love songs. David adds the harmony. When I ask Noah why he has chosen such sad songs, he explains that he has just broken up with his longtime girlfriend. He is quiet for a moment and then brightens. “But there are many women. Just like the stars.”

The night is beautiful and calm, and morning comes slowly. A pod of dolphins and a flock of terns greet us, but what amazes me most is the ocean. Barely a wave breaks its surface.Ìę

Shortly after sunrise, Sesario and Tony try to locate Ifalik. Tony explains that over land, clouds move slowly. Often, too, they are V-shaped and greenish in color. Birds and driftwood become more prevalent. The rest of us are standing on tiptoe trying to catch sight of the island. Everybody’s money is on Kurt. The crew says that the huge Palauan has the eyes of a fish eagle and can see forever. Carolinians say that experienced navigators can detect subtle changes—larger swells and waves caused by landforms—in their testicles.Ìę

Sure enough, Kurt spots the island at 8 A.M. A half-hour later, I see Ifalik’s faint outline.

IFALIK’S VILLAGERS, paddling brightly hued dugouts and maneuvering small single-hull sailing canoes painted red and black to mimic the colors of the male frigate bird, greet us. Curious boys tie up to the Maisu, climb aboard, and shyly examine us from a distance.Ìę

Sesario goes ashore first to present Ifalik’s chief with a gift. At noon we get word that we can join him. Cradling my drybag, I lower my weight into a dugout, nearly swamping it. The Ifalik boys laugh so hard they fall out of their canoes. With the water lapping at our gunwales, my helmsman, Jesse, strains to keep the dugout moving forward. He grunts and then says, “You bik man, Jems.”

Later, we’re eating in the village when a sailing canoe glides into the shallow water of the lagoon. The men have been out fishing since before dawn. Children swarm the boat, whooping and shouting. The fishermen have returned with a hull full of tuna.

“We can’t rely on the fish anymore,” one villager tells me as I help haul his catch from the canoe. Islanders have long been committed to sustainability; chiefs will shut down certain types of fishing if they feel the villagers are overharvesting. “Every year, because of unregistered foreign purse seiners and longliners fishing illegally, it gets harder,” the villager continues. “They take as much as they can and then flee before the authorities can catch them.”Ìę

After the fish have been brought ashore, the fishermen retire to the canoe house for a brief rest before cleaning the tuna. One of the men sits down next to me and introduces himself as Henry. As a young man, Henry left the island to work on fishing boats in South America. He is back now and happy to be home.Ìę

After I express surprise that the villagers still use sailing canoes, he explains that the island’s chief is intent on preserving his people’s self-sufficiency. “Once, the canoe was a necessity for trading, fishing, turtle hunting, and finding a mate outside of one’s clan, but many of the islands have switched to powerboats,” Henry says. The problem, he continues, is that when there’s no gas, no one can go anywhere. With just one government ship serving the Carolines, boats are often left stranded on the beach for long -periods of time. Although Ifalik has three boats with 40-horsepower engines, the chief has declared that they can be used only for health emergencies (the closest airstrip is on Falalop Island in Ulithi Atoll, more than 500 miles northwest) or, if the wind does not cooperate, to help fishermen transport their catch to the island before it spoils.

“The simple life is good,” Henry says. Then he adds with obvious pride, “We sail, also, because we are men.”Ìę

“TURTLES,” MIANU SAYS excitedly. “We will hunt turtles!”

The next morning, the ninth day of our trip, we are leaving Ifalik when Sesario announces another change to our itinerary. Because of strong southeast winds, we will go on a turtle hunt before heading for Satawal.

For hundreds of years, spring has been the season when Carolinians hunt green and hawksbill sea turtles, which after their long migratory journeys often come ashore to mate and lay their eggs on the uninhabited islands of the Caroline chain. Roughly coinciding with our winter, lefung is a time of hunger, three months of sparseness when there are few fish, little taro, and no breadfruit. The outer islanders grow thin and look forward to the time when meat is again plentiful, often celebrating with an island-wide feast. Steeped in centuries-old conservation practices, the islanders use traditional hunting methods, rarely capturing more than ten to twenty turtles or taking eggs. Although organizations such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature go to great lengths to protect the now endangered green and hawksbill turtles, and although turtle hunting and trading are illegal in many countries, most Micronesians abide by the laws in their states—laws that include closed seasons and minimum sizes for turtles to be caught. A traditional hunt is often regulated by an island’s chief, who makes decisions about when and how many turtles can be captured based on sustainability and other factors. While turtle populations in Micronesia are decreasing, some scientists say the larger culprits are modern ships from the main islands that enable poachers to take hundreds of turtles each year, not outer islanders’ practices.

It takes us three days of open-ocean sailing from Ifalik to find the turtle island. Two days out, we’re sitting under the scorching equatorial sun, fishing and praying for clouds or a rain shower, while Tony, Sesario, Cal, and David, impervious to the heat, play spades. The sun is riding along the surface of the ocean when one of our lines sings out. Tony jumps up, seizes the rod, and, after a short fight, pulls in a small rainbow-colored mahi-mahi. He bites it behind the eyes to kill it and then cuts open its belly and pops the heart and liver into his mouth. Frank digs his fingers into the fish, scoops up the roe, and slurps it down. Then Tony expertly fillets it and cuts it into bite-size chunks. Next he mixes a marinade of wasabi, soy sauce, and black pepper. Minutes later, we are eating the finest, freshest sashimi the Pacific has to offer.

At dawn the next morning, Sesario points to a kettle of birds, brilliant blotches of white against an electric blue sky. “The island is there,” he says. Twenty minutes later, Kurt sights it. As we approach, Frank sees turtles swimming gracefully just below the surface of the water. Everybody is chattering now, “They’re here—the turtles are here!”

We anchor outside the reef. Frank and -David grab their spearguns while Noah, Peter, and new crew member Norman, who joined us in Ifalik, dive in and swim for shore. Before looking for turtles, they beeline for a grove of coconut palms to make an offering to the -island spirit. Then I see them sprint across the beach in the direction of a large piece of driftwood. As they near it, the wood moves. They are on it in seconds, flipping the turtle over onto its back.

By the time I get inside the reef, Noah, Peter, and Norman have a green sea turtle trapped in a small, shallow bay. As they close in on it, it surfaces, dives, and surfaces again. The turtle looks frantic, its big eyes bulging. David yells for me to shut off its escape route. I wade in reluctantly just as it dives and propels itself into deeper water.

A few minutes later, Peter is wrestl-ing a third turtle, a 200-pound male hawksbill, which is lying upside down and gasping for air. Norman hustles down the beach to help. By the time he grabs hold, the turtle is in three feet of water. Peter rides it, and Norman, who is built like a noseguard, pushes with all his might and turns the turtle onto its back. Then he and Peter tug it to shore.Ìę

On the beach, Tony has pried open the lower portion of a small female’s shell and has extracted 20 feet of intestines, which he stretches out in the shallow water. Amazingly, the turtle is still blinking and breathing. I turn my head. The sheer brutality of the hunt is hard to witness.

When Tony finishes stripping and cleaning the intestines, he builds a fire on the turtle’s shell and roasts them. When they’re done, he cuts them into bite-size pieces and scoops them up in his hand. “Here, Jems,” he says. The intestines are rich and chewy, like grilled calamari soaked in a vat of butter.

Having bound and tied the turtles’ flippers, Tony and the boys are ready to float them out to the Maisu. “Watch out for sharks,” Tony warns. “They will smell the blood.” A minute later, he yells, “Sharks!” I feel something large bump my leg and I try to stay calm, though my heart is pounding. When we make it back to the Maisu, Mianu loops a heavy rope around one turtle’s shell and then instructs us to lift. The rope tightens, and slowly we raise the turtle out of the water. It makes an irritated hissing sound, like a giant snake. By the time we get the other three aboard, Frank and David are back with five more turtles. The boys are jumping with excitement. We will arrive on Satawal in a day with nine turtles and well over a ton of meat.

ALL NIGHT LONG, the turtles grunt and puff. When I ask Frank why we don’t take a club and hit them over the head, he explains that they are kept alive so that the meat stays fresh. “Turtles are tough,” he says. “They can stay alive for a week.”

I want nothing more than to cut their ropes and push them out to sea, but these turtles are meat for hungry islanders, and no part of it will be wasted. In addition to the meat, which the people of Satawal will boil, grill, or eat raw, the intestines and head will be devoured. The islanders will use the blood for cooking and make belts from the shell.

That night, the smell of the dying turtles drifts into my compartment. I leave my hammock and come out on deck. Stars that seem close enough to touch cover the sky. Sesario has been up since dawn. He is animated now, telling jokes and stories, relieved to be so close to Satawal. He explains how we will get there. “We will use Sarapul, Tumur, and Mesaru,” he says—Corvus, Antares, and Shaula. “And Lamotrek will be our reference island.”Ìę

Tuesday afternoon, April 13, we anchor 400 yards off Satawal. As the sun sets, Sesario goes ashore to present the turtles to Satawal’s chief. The rest of us stay aboard the Maisu.

Later, two fires burn on the beach. We see forms moving back and forth in front of the flames. “Tumur, Mesaru, Taelup, Mache-meias, Wulewel!” we hear them shout, calling out the names of the stars that have led their people home for thousands of years.

We spend a week on Satawal with Sesario’s remaining family. Uurupa, Mau Piailug’s only living sibling, tells us about his voyaging days. We watch a master canoe builder construct a sailing canoe and go on an octopus hunt with the villagers for an Easter feast.

I am relieved to arrive on Satawal safely, but I miss being at sea. Sailing hundreds of miles with Sesario and his crew convinced me that the tradition of star navigation is essential to the cultural identity of Carolinians. They are explorers—it’s what they’ve always been. If Sesario and the people of Satawal have their way, young boys will grow up dreaming of voyaging for centuries to come. “Our people have always relied on the stars,” says Innocenti Eraekaint, Mau’s nephew and a master navigator who has led numerous voyages, “and we always will.”

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ÌęÌę

Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea

Porters descend the treacherous slopes of Ghost Mountain.

Papua New Guinea

Local guide Berua crosses the Mimani River with his hunting dog, ax, machete, and boar spear.

Papua New Guinea

Laruni village, where the author rejoined the trek via helicopter

I’m lying in a bark hut surrounded by strange men. One sits smoking pungent tobacco rolled into a long, fat spear, a caricature of a Rastaman’s joint. Two others chew betel nut, their mouths a bright, frothy red. Curled up in the corner, my friend George Houde is sleeping the sleep of the dead while rats play at his feet.

Sidelined by a steep, muddy trail and a bad fall, we’re here because I tore my ACL while attempting a 130-mile trek across Papua New Guinea. Now George, a reporter on leave from the Chicago Tribune and part of our eight-person team, and I are back in the inland village where we started our trek on foot. My goal of following in the footsteps of a group of World War II soldiers via what they called the Kapa Kapa Trail (a mispronunciation of Gabagaba, the coastal village where the route begins), which runs across Papua New Guinea from its south coast to its north, is in serious peril. It’s the first day of the trip.

In October 1942, during a march considered one of the cruelest in modern military history, 1,200 ill-equipped, untrained American troops from the 32nd Infantry Division endured more than a month of suffering on the Kapa Kapa en route to the north-coast battlefields at Buna, where the Imperial Japanese Army was waiting.At least two men died of exhaustion during the crossing, and the rest were physically shattered by the trek. Remarkably, after nine weeks of fighting in stinking, hip-deep swamps full of floating corpses bloated by the heat, the Allied troops finally dislodged the Japanese from Buna. But the victory came at a cost. According to General Robert Eichelberger, the commanding officer, fatalities “closely approached, percentage-wise, the heaviest losses in our own Civil War battles.”

The soldiers’ memories are still searing. “If I owned New Guinea and I owned Hell, I would live in Hell and rent out New Guinea,” says Buna veteran Bob Hartman.

I’m beginning to see what he means. Three years ago, while researching a book on the soldiers’ experience, I hatched the idea of repeating the WWII march. If the trek succeeds, it will be the first time in 64 years that a team from outside Papua New Guinea has hiked the trail in its entirety. I’d visited New Guinea four previous times, the last trip just ten months ago, when I came to scout the area. I was advised then by former Australian colonial patrolmen, the Papua New Guinea Defense Force, and a number of trekkers familiar with the New Guinea bush not to attempt the crossing. Even if the route had not been consumed by jungle or erased by torrential rains, I was told, it was at best nothing more than a narrow hunting-and-trading trail that traversed some of the country’s most formidable territory. One villager looked into the mountains and whistled through his teeth, “Long way too much.” A former government patrolman challenged my sanity. “You’re delusional,” he said.

The Australians had counseled General Douglas MacArthur against sending men on this route, too the mountain passes were too high, the terrain too rough, the rivers too fast, the tribes unpredictable.

But they went, and now so have I. The sun drifts below the mountains, and the evening is stifling. Dela, the hut’s owner, inexplicably refuses to prop open the thin bamboo boards that serve as windows. When I persist, he explains in a mix of English and Motu that there are sorcerers who roam the hills at night, cast deadly spells, and will try to kill me. Just then I hear soft voices outside the hut. Dela opens the door and villagers file in with bowed heads, as if in prayer. They begin to sing, in two-, three-, four-part harmony. It’s as if angels have descended.

Perhaps our luck is turning, I think. The next morning, George and I walk out of Dela’s village to a rutted road and jump in the back of a truck. After a series of bone-jostling rides we arrive back in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea’s capital city, where I buy anti-inflammatories and painkillers and plot with George about how we can continue the trek. Could we meet up with the rest of our group by plane? “Impossible,” a pilot we approach tells us. With a helicopter, though, he thinks we stand a chance.

Seventy-two hours later, as we hover in a chopper over a vast jungle canopy broken only by rivers spilling out of murky mountains, the sight of so much raw wilderness has me second-guessing my decision. I’ve never seen the likes of the Kapa Kapa Trail.

DESPITE ITS PROXIMITY to Australia, New Guinea is geologically a much younger land. Shaped by the explosive tectonic forces of the Pacific Ring of Fire and carved by near constant rain into a tangle of swamps, trackless ravines, and 12,000-foot mountains, it is one of the most rugged and mysterious places on earth.

The world’s second-largest island, New Guinea is divided between two countries. The western half, originally colonized by the Dutch, has been part of Indonesia since 1969 and is called Papua (the name was changed from Irian Jaya in 2002). Since gaining its independence from Australia in 1975, the eastern half, roughly the size of California, has been an independent nation called Papua New Guinea (PNG). Though tourism is still in its infancy, adventurous travelers visit PNG for wreck and reef diving, sea kayaking along its incredible coastline, and the chance to see birds found nowhere else in the world. For the ultra-adventurous, New Guinea offers challenging treks, mainly on the Kokoda, a 60-mile WWII trail, 40 miles northwest of the Kapa Kapa.

Still, vast swaths of the island remain unknown, and it’s hard to imagine what WWII soldiers might have encountered here. In 1942, the Japanese landed 11,000 troops on the Papuan Peninsula’s north coast, hoping to use New Guinea as a stepping stone to invade Australia, or at least to disrupt the supply lines from the United States to the South Pacific. MacArthur, who had been spirited out of the Philippines in March 1942 to command the Allied forces in the southwest Pacific and lead the Army effort against the Japanese, sent in Australian soldiers to stop them. Two months later, with the Japanese gaining a stronger foothold on the peninsula, MacArthur ordered a battalion of the American 32nd Division to cross the treacherous Owen Stanley Range and fight them at Buna. None of the men had spent a single day in the jungle.

Nor had I, but our team contained no slouches. I had logged hundreds of miles on foot and snowshoe through Arctic Alaska while researching my first book, and had been hiking with an 80-pound pack for eight months prior to this trip. Besides George, a 58-year-old long-distance runner and biker, our expedition group consisted of Dave Musgrave, 54, a wilderness expert and professor of oceanography at the University of Alaska Fairbanks; Philipp Engelhorn, a fit 37-year-old Hong Kong based photographer; Lee Ticehurst, a 55-year-old Aussie expat living in Port Moresby and an accomplished jungle trekker who has completed the Kokoda three times; a young three-man film crew (Cal Simeon, Jack Salatiel, and Kenneth “Samu” Pasiu) from Port Moresby based POM Productions, there to shoot a documentary; and teams of porters hired in various villages along the way to carry our food and camping gear.

It took the WWII soldiers seven weeks to reach the north coast. They walked for more than half of those days; the rest of the time, they recuperated in villages and waited for food and supply drops. The Army’s decision to let the men rest seemed practical at the time, but it backfired. The soldiers were already suffering from dysentery, trenchfoot, and jungle ulcers when malaria hit them like a bomb. Eventually, 70 percent of the division would contract the disease.We decided to walk considerably faster, even if it meant putting in 10- and 11-hour days on the trail. Concerned about malaria and battery power for the film equipment, our plan was to reach the end at Buna village in two to three weeks, limiting our exposure to the jungle.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO AVOID superlatives when talking about New Guinea. Four days into the trek, the team enters a rainforest whose biodiversity is nearly unmatched worldwide. Among its avian species is the bird of paradise approximately 38 of the world’s 40-odd species live here. It is also home to more than 3,000 species of orchids, the world’s largest butterfly, its largest moth, the smallest parrot, the largest pigeon, and the world’s longest crocodile. The jungles of New Guinea’s Papuan Peninsula, in particular, support such an astonishing assortment of trees, ferns, mosses, bromeliads, frogs, butterflies, and rare, night-loving marsupials that the World Wildlife Fund has submitted a proposal to UNESCO to include the entire Owen Stanley Range on its list of World Heritage sites.

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Joining our team to guide us over the mountains is Berua, a bone-thin, jungle-wise man whose parents served as carriers for the GIs on the Kapa Kapa. Only seven years old at the time, Berua struggled with them across the spine of the Owen Stanleys en route to the remote community of Jaure. Berua’s tattooed 65-year-old wife, Bima, and his hunting dog also join us.

With Berua at the front, we follow the rushing Mimani River into the sodden heart of the rainforest, where sunlight dimmed by a dense mesh of trees, leaves, vines, and fronds has turned the jungle into an immense boiler room. If I was worried about Berua and Bima keeping pace, I shouldn’t have been. Papua New Guineans spend their lives walking. For most, it is their only mode of transportation.

We bivouac at the river’s edge. Our bush camp consists of a large, blue plastic tarp thrown over a ridgepole, supported by two more poles and tied down to ground pegs. We clear the area of sticks, rocks, and roots and then lay large leaves over the moist ground. I can see George, who is playing the role of expedition skeptic, eyeing the shelter, wondering what is going to keep the snakes out. Twenty-foot pythons and “one-cigarette” snakes like the taipan whose bite will kill you before you have time to finish a smoke lurk on the Papuan Peninsula.

Soon darkness presses in, tight and coal black. As if to underscore our vulnerability, the forest becomes an opera house as millions of crickets, cicadas, frogs, “singing” worms, and other strange, boisterous insects and animals wake from their afternoon slumber. As we place our sleeping bags under the tarp, Dave stumbles out of the bushes. He’s spent the past 25 years exploring Alaska’s remote wilderness areas, but he’s never seen a night like this. It is so dark, he says with a laugh, that he couldn’t find his pecker to piss with.

Concerned about my knee, I begin walking early the next morning while the team breaks camp. We face a grueling hike to the 9,500-foot summit of what the locals call Mount Ororo. As I climb, a maze of spiderwebs tickles my hands and face. Massive trees, with trunks the size of silos, adorned with lianas and wrapped in a swarm of vines resembling large pythons, reach for the clouds. Less than an hour into the hike, though, I am incapable of admiration. I’m on all fours, pushing through the mud, grabbing at roots, trees, ferns, bushes, leaves, anything I can clasp with outstretched fingers to keep from falling backwards down the steep, slippery mountain. In a cruel twist, everything I reach for is equipped with spurs, thorns, tiny sharp bristles, or swarms of red ants, and my hands sting and bleed.

The porters approach behind me, calling to one another in excited, high-pitched voices, and skip by as if their 40-pound loads weigh nothing. They are off-trail, jumping over downed trees while trying to locate Berua’s dog. They do all this without shoes, on broad, thick-skinned feet that make a mockery of my new jungle boots.

Entering the cloudforest, I encounter a scene that inspired the spooked American soldiers to dub Mount Ororo “Ghost Mountain.” In the heavy fog, the huge, moss-draped beech trees look like apparitions. Ghost Mountain is soggy, sunless, and silent, suspended in perpetual twilight. The team has caught up with me, and we crest the mountain together. At the top, George quickly notices that the trail catapults down the mountain alongside a steep cliff. “That’s comforting,” he says. “We might as well throw ourselves off right now.”

Cal, one of the young cameramen, apparently takes this as a cue. He grabs a vine as thick as my arm, lets out a deep-woods yodel, and swings out over the cliff and back. He beams. I decide he’s been driven mad by the jungle.

To lessen the punishment of the descent, I ride the stream of mud on my backside. Tiny leeches attach themselves to any bare skin they can find and gorge on my blood. Even the porters are tired when we make camp late that afternoon on the slopes of Ghost Mountain, but it’s clear they don’t want to stop here for the night. It’s cold, the wood is wet, fires are hard to start. What’s more, they believe that high mountain regions are populated by masalai, or evil spirits. Through the night I wake periodically to find the porters smoking tobacco out of flute-like bamboo pipes, unwilling to sleep.

BY DAY TEN WE’RE NEARING SUWARI, the most remote mountain village we will encounter. Our 1:100,000 scale topographic map shows a dense jumble of contour lines and three large white patches that read OBSCURED BY CLOUD. The map was compiled by the Royal Australian Survey Corps more than three decades ago and has not been updated.

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As we walk through fields of sweet potato, corn, and banana trees, a sentry spots us and blows on a conch horn to announce our arrival. Drums boom, rattles cackle, and in a small dirt opening a group of people begin to dance. The men are decorated in elaborate bird-of-paradise headdresses and necklaces of pigs’ tusks, their bodies rubbed with black oil; they lunge at us with wooden spears, their tongues shooting serpentlike from their mouths. The women dance bare-breasted in woven grass skirts, shrieking as they swing axes over our heads. The soldiers never got to see such a display. In fact, American WWII maps list Suwari as deserted. When the villagers saw the soldiers coming, they fled to nearby caves.

One of the dancers approaches and introduces himself as Giblin. In broken English he explains that the village had learned that a group of taubada, or white men, was on its way, and they had organized the ceremony in our honor. At one time, he says, the dance was performed as a celebration after a successful raid. Having captured or killed their enemies, warriors would return to dance and to feast on human flesh. Smiling, he assures me that his people have no intention of eating us.

That night, crowded into the open-sided “house of wind,” Giblin lights the village’s only lamp, a sure sign that we are honored guests kerosene is a four-day walk away. We are, he says, the first outsiders to visit Suwari since 1975, when Papua New Guinea gained its independence. Prior to ’75, Australian colonial patrols used to make infrequent visits, imposing on the distant mountain villages a Western economic structure and the British system of law. The patrolmen occasionally doled out harsh justice, but they also brought medicine, tools, and contact with the outside world. Now the village is suffering no school for the children, no employment opportunities, and a high incidence of malaria, tuberculosis, skin diseases, and infant mortality. Had Suwari been more accessible, Giblin’s people might have sold their pristine forests to logging operations. Because of its location, though, Suwari is putting its hope in the Kapa Kapa Trail. Perhaps it will bring taubada with money.

After years of promotion, the Kokoda Trail, on which the Australians fought the Japanese, now draws 2,000 trekkers a year to Papua New Guinea. The World Wildlife Fund and the Kokoda Track Authority have joined forces to begin turning the trail into a model of sustainable ecotourism. Though there have been problems erosion, siltation, the clearing of forests for firewood and though the track authority worries about the loss of cultural identity among the people of the Kokoda, the trail has been a success. A new plan calls for the training of guides in expedition skills, English, history, environmental stewardship, and the promotion of native culture, architecture, and craftsmanship.

Giblin is not aware of any of this, yet he already has a plan for the Kapa Kapa. His village will build a guesthouse, the young men will make money as carriers, the women will sell fruits and vegetables, the villagers will take trekkers on birding expeditions, they will don traditional tribal costumes and dance and sing. The question is, will the taubada come?

Giblin tries to convince us to stay an extra day. It is mating season for the bird of paradise, and soon the gaudy males will be dancing on their forest perches, courting females. Although tempted by the chance to see one of the world’s rarest birds, we press on.

GEORGE HAS-ALL OF US WORRIED. He has developed dangerous skin ulcers on both legs. Despite the pain, he insists on trying to complete the remaining three days of the trek, but we need to get him out of the jungle fast. Jack isn’t in great shape either. His feet are cracked and bleeding. Cal’s knee is giving him trouble. Lee looks pale and tired (is it the onset of malaria?). For all intents and purposes, I’m walking on one leg. Only Dave, Samu, and Philipp are holding up, but if the trail lives up to its reputation, their turn is bound to come.

The thing about the jungle is that often you can see nothing but more jungle. But on day 14, having negotiated the fierce currents of the Musa River and the crumbling, volcanic slopes of 5,512-foot Mount Lamington which erupted in 1951, killing 3,000 people we reach the Girua River. The clouds have lifted, and we look up the river valley, getting our first glimpse of the territory we’ve covered. Ahead, the flat coastal plain sprawls north under a battering tropical sun. Though the worst is behind us, from here the trail slices through fields of head-high, razor-sharp kunai grass and wanders back and forth across the river. It will not be easy, but the end is in sight.

Two days later, after 16 days in the jungle, we reach Buna.

The Kapa Kapa, which we’ve renamed the Ghost Mountain Trail, is, as Lee concludes, “the Kokoda on steroids.” For the weary soldiers and the hundreds of New Guineans who served as carriers and scouts for the Army, the end of the trail was the beginning of a long nightmare. When they arrived in Buna, they entered tangled, tea-black swamps and a battle that General MacArthur described as a “head-on collision of the bloody, grinding type.”

Papua New Guinea tourism officials told me that they hope to promote this history and, in light of our success, turn the route into something like a national historic trail. The World Wildlife Fund currently has plans to incorporate the Ghost Mountain Trail into its blueprint for conservation and tourism in the Owen Stanley Range.

For their part, the WWII veterans can’t imagine anyone ever choosing to walk across Papua New Guinea. “Are you kidding?” 32nd Division member Stanley Jastrzembski said to me. “I would have taken an enemy bullet before going back into those mountains.”

But none of us regretted a mile of it.

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