Ben Finney

The son of a United States Navy pilot, Ben Finney was born in 1933 and grew up in San Diego, California. ==Polynesian voyaging==

When Ben Finney was a University of Hawaii graduate student in 1958, working toward his Master of Arts degree and writing his dissertation on surfing, scholars were not yet in agreement that any canoe voyages over great distances on the Pacific Ocean had been intentional. The prevailing view was exemplified by a New Zealand historian with a low opinion of Polynesian navigation methods and canoes, Andrew Sharp, who believed that such voyages could only have been accidental. Finney did not agree with this view and became determined to disprove it. He built the first 40-feet-long replica of a Polynesian sailing canoe while he was teaching at University of California, Santa Barbara in the 1960s. When it was finished, he shipped it to Hawaii, where ancient Hawaii scholar Mary Kawena Pukui named it Nalehia, which in the Hawaiian language means The Skilled Ones, because of the grace with which its twin hulls rode the sea. In 1973, Finney co-founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society with artist Herb Kawainui Kane and sailor Charles Tommy Holmes. Within three years, they had designed, built, and sailed the Hōkūleʻa on its first historic voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti with a crew led by captain Kawika Kapahulehua and navigator Mau Piailug. ==Awards==

The awards that were bestowed upon Finney include: • 1994: Royal Institute of Navigation Bronze Medal for the outstanding paper, "Rediscovering Polynesian Navigation through Experimental Voyaging" in the Journal of Navigation, Volume 46, 1993 • 1995: French University of the Pacific Medal for contributions to the revival of traditional voyaging and the study of Polynesian culture and society • 1995: Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics Tsiolkovsky Medal for contributions to the study of cosmonautics and the exploration of space • 1997: University of Hawaiʻi Regents' Medal for Excellence in Research • 2004: Hawaiʻi Book Publisher's Ka Palapala Po'okela Award for writing nonfiction • 2007: Honorary Doctorate, University of French Polynesia ==Publications==

(These are incomplete listings.) Selected books • 1966: Surfing: The Sport of Hawaiian Kings. With James D. Houston. Tokyo and Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle Company. . • 1996 30th anniversary edition: Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian Sport. Petaluma: Pomegranate Communications. . • 1976: Pacific Navigation and Voyaging. Auckland, New Zealand: The Polynesian Society. . • 1979: Hokulea: The Way to Tahiti. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. . • 1985: Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience. Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press. . • 1992: From Sea to Space (The Macmillan Brown Lectures 1989). Palmerston North: Massey University. Distributed by the University of Hawaiʻi Press. . • 1994: Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey through Polynesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. . • 2003: Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors: Reviving Polynesian Voyaging. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press. . Selected articles • 1977: "Voyaging Canoes and the Settlement of Polynesia", Science, Volume 196, Number 4296: pages 1277–1285. • 1981: "Exploring and Settling Pacific Ocean Space—Past Analogues for Future Events?" Space Manufacturing 4: Proceedings of the Fifth Princeton/AIAA Conference May 18–21, 1981 (page 261). New York: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. • 1988: "Voyaging Against the Direction of the Trades: A Report of a Canoe Voyage from Samoa to Tahiti". American Anthropologist, Volume 90, Number 2: pages 401–405. • 1991: "Myth, Experiment, and the Reinvention of Polynesian Voyaging." American Anthropologist, Volume 93, Number 2, June 1991, pages 383–404. • 1994: "The Other One-Third of the Globe". Journal of World History, Volume 5, Number 2. • 1994: "Polynesian Voyagers to the New World". Man and Culture in Oceania, Volume 10: pages 1–13. • 1995: "A role for Magnetoreception in Human Navigation". Current Anthropology, Volume 36, Number 3: pages 500–506. • 2001: "Voyage to Polynesia's Land's End". Antiquity, Volume 75: pages 172–181. • 2007: "Tracking Polynesian Seafarers". Science, Volume 317: pages 1873–1874. Selected chapters in other books • 1985: "Lunar Base: Learning to live in space" (pages 731–756) in Wendell Mendell, ed., Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century. Houston: Lunar and Planetary Institute. . • 1988: "Will space change humanity?" (pages 155–172) in J. Schneider and M. Leger-Orine, eds., ''Frontiers and Space Conquest: The Philosopher's Touchstone''. Bingham: Kluwer Academic Press. . • 1996: "Colonizing an Island World" (pages 71–116) in Ward H. Goodenough, ed., Prehistoric Settlement of the Pacific. Philadelphia: Diane Publishing Co. • 2007: Three chapters in Vaka Moana, Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discovery and Settlement of the Pacific. Kerry Howe (Massey University School of Social and Cultural Studies), ed. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. . • 2007: "Polynesia, Micronesia and Eastern Melanesia: the Exploration and Settlement of Remote Oceania". In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History, Volume 3, pages 154–162. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ==In popular culture==

A character in Launch Out, a Philip Robert Harris science fiction novel that is set in the year 2010, is based on Finney, a University of Hawaiʻi professor of anthropology who is also the president of the fictional Unispace Academy. ==References==