I don’t think the average modern person understands just how completely insane it must have been to be on the high seas on a moonless night in a ****ing canoe.
Your average person, if they’ve ever been on a boat in the actual ocean not near shore, have done it in the context of a cruise ship or charter boat where things are all lit up and you’re sitting way up above the water. Imagine being right down on the water, surrounded by absolute pitch blackness, and the heaving of the swells, for… however long that must have taken.
The technological feat of surviving that journey is crazy enough, but the psychological experience of it must have been a next-level ordeal akin to space travel or spending a month in a cave. The fact that enough people chose to do it (and survived it) to populate the Pacific Islands is a hell of a thing.