Mau sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti using traditional methods. In early 1976, Mau Piailug, a fisherman, led an expedition in which he sailed a traditional Polynesian boat across 2,500 miles of ocean from Hawaii to Tahiti. The Polynesian Voyaging Society had organized the expedition. Its purpose was to find out if seafarers in the distant past could have found their way from one island to the other without navigational instruments, or whether the islands had been populated by accident. At the time, Mau was the only man alive who knew how to navigate just by observing the stars, the wind and the sea. He had never before sailed to Tahiti, which was a long way to the south. However, he understood how the wind and the sea behave around islands, so he was confident he could find his way. The voyage took him and his crew a month to complete and he did it without a compass or charts. His grandfather began the task of teaching him how to navigate when he was still a baby. He showed him pools of water on the beach to teach him how the behavior of the waves and wind changed in different places. Later, Mau used a circle of stones to memories the positions of the stars. Each stone was laid out in the sand to represent a star. The voyage proved that Hawaii’s first inhabitants came in small boats and navigated by reading the sea and the stars. Mau himself became a keen teacher, passing on his traditional secrets to people of other cultures so that his knowledge would not be lost. He explained the positions of the stars to his students, but he allowed them to write things down because he knew they would never be able to remember everything as he had done.

Patrick Malone is a traveler, writer and broadcaster. He was born in 1968 in Basel, Switzerland, where his British parents were working for a pharmaceutical company. His family left Switzerland when he was twelve, and returned to their home in Britain. For the next six years, Malone attended the local secondary school. He then went to Leeds University to do a course in Human Geography. He wanted to become a town planner. However, the only work he could find was as a teacher at a local school.

During his holidays and free time, he went walking, often covering very long distances very quickly. On one occasion he walked the entire length of Britain, a distance of over 1,400 kilometers, in less than a month. He enjoyed the experience and the challenge so much that he started walking in different parts of the world, usually in fairly remote areas away from major population centers. The people he met and the experiences he had on these trips provided him with some excellent material for his classes.

It was during one trip that he met his old university tutor, Don Perkins. At the time, Perkins was putting together a team of geographers and biologists for a research trip to the Amazon, and asked Malone if he would like to go with them. The expedition was for a whole year, and so he had to give up his job at the school, but Malone did not hesitate to accept Perkins' offer. He sold his car to make some money, bought an airline ticket for Brazil and set off.

Patrick Malone (Part 2)

The Amazon expedition, which took six months and covered a distance of almost 2,500 kilometers, was a great success. The group discovered some new plant and insect species, as well as a forest tribe which people had never heard of. Malone enjoyed the trip so much that he decided to become a full-time explorer. He earned money by writing travel articles for magazines and newspapers, which he illustrated with his own photographs.

In 1996, he married Margaret Logan, an American doctor he had met while travelling around Africa. In 1998 they had Adam, the first of three children (twins Amelia and Jennifer were born a year later). Many families at this stage would settle down, but Margaret and Patrick decided to keep travelling, spending two years walking around India and another twelve months exploring the islands of Indonesia.

When they returned home, they wrote a magazine article about travelling with small children. It was so popular that they were asked to write several more articles on the same subject. This was followed by an offer from a television company to present a TV series about travelling with children. The series ran for 12 years, and won several television awards. Today they still make the most of every opportunity to travel, and have recently returned from the South Pacific.

She has spent her working life studying the world's oceans

Sylvia Earle is an underwater explorer and marine biologist who was born in the USA in 1935. She became interested in the world's oceans from an early age. As a child, she liked to stand on the beach for hours and look at the sea, wondering what it must be like under the surface.

When she was 16, she finally got a chance to make her first dive. It was this dive that inspired her to become an underwater explorer. Since then, she has spent more than 6,500 hours under water, and has led more than seventy expeditions worldwide. She has also made the deepest dive ever, reaching a record-breaking depth of 381 meters.

In 1970, she became famous around the world when she became the captain of the first all-female team to live under water. The team spent two weeks in an underwater 'house'. The research they carried out showed the damage that pollution was causing to marine life, and especially to coral reefs. Her team also studied the problem of over-fishing. Fishing methods meant that people were catching too many fish, Earle warned, and many species were in danger of becoming extinct.

Since then she has written several books and magazine articles in which she suggests ways of reducing the damage that is being done to the world's oceans. One way, she believes, is to rely on fish farms for seafood, and reduce the amount of fishing that is done out at sea. Although she no longer eats seafood herself, she realizes the importance it plays in our diets. It would be wrong to tell people they should stop eating fish from the sea, she says. However, they need to reduce the impact they are having on the ocean's supplies.