Less than a month before the voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa‘ completed its epic journey around the globe, Ben Finney completed his own last voyage. Ben Rudolph Finney died at the age of 83. A University of Hawaii Professor Emeritus in Anthropology, he was the first president and the last surviving founder of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. Finney’s research and vision helped to make the voyage of the Hōkūleʻa’ possible and to forever put to rest the claim that that Polynesians had drifted to Hawaii by chance.

In 1973, Finney and waterman Tommy Holmes and artist Herb Kane founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society and set out to build to build Hōkūleʻa‘, a traditional sailing canoe. In 1976, they would demonstrate that ancient Hawaiians could transit the Pacific, including sailing to windward, by successfully sailing on a voyage of more than 2,000 miles from Hawaii to Tahiti using traditional navigation techniques.  Finney was one of the crew on that first epic voyage.

The Star Advertiser quotes the current Polynesian Voyaging Society President,  Nainoa Thompson who said, “The voyage changed the whole identity of the Hawaiian people. We went from being castaways…to being children of the world’s greatest navigators. We owe it to our visionaries … and Ben was the first.”  Thompson said the Hokule’a owes much to Finney and and other visionaries. “He was responsible for changing history,” he said.

Since the 1976 voyage, Hōkūleʻa’ has completed nine additional voyages to Micronesia, Polynesia, Japan, Canada and the mainland United States. In its recent three year circumnavigation, Hōkūleʻa’ sailed 47,000 nautical miles with stops at 85 ports in 26 countries.

Ben Finney earned a masters degree in anthropology at the University of Hawaii and a doctorate in anthropology from Harvard University where he was a senior fellow at the East-West Center. He later served as a professor at the University of Hawaii from 1973 through 2000, including nine years as chairman of the Department of Anthropology.