How Was Polynesia Populated? Two New Books Explore the Pacific’s Mysteries
Sketches from an early-1700s workbook, calculating the distance between two islands.Credit...National Library of Australia
I’ve just finished reading these two books…. I’ve enjoyed many histories of the Pacific. David Lewis’ books were one of the reasons I started sailing, and people like Johnny Wray inspired me to adventure in my own, very timid way.. But when it comes to a balanced, sensitive and thoroughly researched account of how and why the Pacific was settled, nothing I have read rings truer than Christina Thompson’s “Sea People.”
Moore, the author of “ENDEAVOUR, The Ship That Changed the World” focuses on the wood that became the ship Endeavour, and in doing so is able to connect a far-flung cast of characters and places, pulling into his story politicians, philosophers, sailors, ship-builders and the natural history of Britain, Australia and New Zealand.
But my mediocrity as an adventurer is matched by my skills as a book reviewer, so I’m handing over to one of the best of our era, Simon Winchester.
Review by Simon Winchester from the New York Times
SEA PEOPLE
The Puzzle of Polynesia
By Christina Thompson
ENDEAVOUR
The Ship That Changed the World
By Peter Moore
It is an old, coral-encrusted question, puzzled over for the last three centuries, and usually posed in three parts. It concerns the inhabitants of the 10-million-square-mile triangle of blue-water Pacific real estate now known as Polynesia, which is bounded by New Zealand, Easter Island and the Hawaiian archipelago. The people who live there, seemingly magically marooned in a tropic Arcadia in the middle of a vast oceanic nowhere: Where did they come from, when did they get there, and how?
Christina Thompson, by virtue of being American-Australian and married to a Maori (a courtship related in her alarmingly titled memoir “Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All”), is perhaps ideally placed to try to answer the question — and in “Sea People,” her fascinating and satisfying addition to an already considerable body of Polynesian literature, she succeeds admirably.
First, she identifies the crucial nudge from history, the initial hint that the Polynesians were a far-flung people who might be blessed with a curious set of pan-oceanic characteristics. This came in the summer of 1769 when Capt. James Cook — a British imperialist adventurer to be sure, but perhaps not so dastardly a figure as some today would have it — met and co-opted as part of his crew a remarkable Tahitian islander named Tupaia. This priestly figure — a man whose expertise according to Thompson included “cosmology, politics, history, medicine, geography, astronomy, meteorology and navigation” — would transform Cook’s knowledge and understanding of the Pacific, and hasten his “discovery” of other Pacific islands, which of course included Australia and New Zealand.
Tupaia traveled with Cook on the Royal Navy’s bark Endeavour (of which more later), gave him written lists of scores of faraway islands with which he was familiar, and drew for him a chart (the original sadly lost) that showed, with uncanny accuracy, where these islands lay, out in an ocean then quite uncharted by European cartographers. Thus equipped, and after many weeks of sailing, with Thompson keeping up the gripping pace of this particularly exciting part of the story, Cook comes to what the chapter heading identifies as his “aha moment.”
The ship’s anchor is dropped in a bay in northern New Zealand, a group of armed and unfriendly-looking Maoris promptly gather on the beach and everyone aboard the ship, Cook included, expects a disagreeable outcome. But then, to the crew’s astonishment, “Tupaia stepped forward and addressed the warriors in fluent Tahitian and, to the surprise of everyone present, he was immediately understood.”
Separated by 3,500 miles of open ocean, and yet the people spoke a recognizably similar language. This revelation, which was to be confirmed many times over during the rest of the 1769 expedition and in later years of crisscrossing many more miles of sea, displayed that whoever these people were, they were effectively one, and to get where they did, they must be possessed of extraordinary navigation skills.
Their customs, their clothing, their languages — and the design of their long-distance sailing canoes — turned out to be common to scores of South Pacific places. They had settled themselves on islands as distant from each other as Maui and Tokelau, Samoa and Mangareva, the Cooks and Kermadec, Easter Island and Norfolk Island. Exactly how they had done so was central to solving the enigma.
It was an enigma that nearly didn’t get solved at all. The success of Captain Cook’s expeditions soon opened the door to flotillas of other European sailor-conquerors — such that eventually, by the beginning of the last century, the millions of square miles of what had been free and open ocean had been effectively closed off by invisible colonial boundaries.
A Polynesian navigator could once sail the South Seas as he liked. No longer. It would be impossible for him to travel at will from Hawaii (which had been seized by the Americans) to Tahiti (colonized by the French), or to Samoa (which until 1914 was German) or to Tonga (which was run for the local monarch by the British), without having both permission and, more ludicrously, a passport. The sailing skills that had flourished for centuries seemed all of a sudden quite valueless to a people who were now being corralled into what were de facto high-seas reservations, and from which they couldn’t easily leave.
But in 1976 a group of remarkable young Hawaiians decided they would seek to save these ancient skills — to blow forcefully on the embers of a dying ocean fire. They first hand-built, as their bicentennial tribute, a 60-foot-long twin-hulled traditional sailing canoe, naming it Hokulea, for Arcturus, the bright “star of joy,” the zenith star of the Hawaiian Islands. They then sought out, down in the tiny island of Satawal in the Caroline chain, an elderly canoe-builder named Mau Piailug, who still knew and practiced the traditional ways. They flew him up to Honolulu, whereupon he readily agreed to sail with them, to try to get their vessel down to Tahiti, 2,500 miles away.
Crucially for the experiment, they would undertake their voyage without any modern navigational aids whatsoever — no chart, no compass, no sextant, no timekeeper and (not that it existed in 1976) no GPS. Piailug was, in his own way, like Cook’s Tupaia, and he well knew that he was on a mission. “I made that trip,” Thompson quotes him, “to show those people what their ancestors used to know.”
The wise man of Satawal showed the crew, mostly youngsters, mostly native Hawaiians, how the Polynesians used to navigate — how they listened to the heartbeat of the sea, how they watched and learned the patterns of the swells, how they read the flights of seabirds, looked for drifting plants and land birds, measured the rise and fall of the daytime sun and at night, how they performed complex mensurations on the geography and geometries of the southern stars.
And to universal delight, they got to Tahiti, spot on and right on time. “The governor of French Polynesia had declared the day of their arrival a public holiday … over half the population of the island had come to witness Hokulea’s arrival … there was cheering and the beating of drums, then, as the canoe approached, a silence fell over the crowd and a church choir lifted up its voice in a Tahitian hymn of welcome composed especially for the day.”
Unwittingly, perhaps, that one 2,500-mile voyage helped also to restore a sense of pride to Polynesians, and especially to those in Hawaii who had been long reduced to second- or third-class citizens on their own islands. A renaissance of sorts got underway, an upwelling of pride that became ever more energized as the canoe’s navigational achievements and successes — all still performed with no instrumental help — accumulated. There were subsequent journeys to California, to Chile, to Japan, to New Zealand, and to all the islands that others had long ago seized and come to think of as theirs.
Suddenly it seemed as though the Pacific was at last coming into its own, shrugging off the malign influence of outsiders (Atomic bombs! Garbage gyres! Coral bleaching!) and helping to recreate a Pacific Ocean run by and for Pacific peoples.
And never more so than when, in 2014, the crew of Hokulea decided to employ their Polynesian skills to sail the craft clear around the entire world, guided by the spirit of malama honua, a Hawaiian saying (understood oceanwide) meaning to care for our island earth. It took them three years, and was by all accounts a consummate success, both in terms of its symbolism and its brave achievement: I only wish it had been better known and appreciated by outsiders.
So we know how they did it. Nowadays cascades of sciences, pursuits less romantic than blue-water sailing, and ranging from archaeology to microbiology, have essentially answered the other questions too. The Polynesians appear to be genetically connected, ultimately, and by way of an ancient culture known as the Lapita people, with the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. It took them and their canoes several thousand years to get to their ultimate destinations, mysteriously waiting for eons in the jumble of islands east of Indonesia before setting out into the wide Pacific itself, like tentative youngsters at the yawning mouth of a water slide.
They eventually took the plunge only in modern times — their canoes reaching Hawaiian waters perhaps around A.D. 900, Rapa Nui (the Polynesian name for Easter Island) some while later, and eventually the arrivistes of New Zealand settling as recently as A.D. 1200 in what they still like to call Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud. Just why the Lapitans paused on the western edge of the ocean for thousands of years is the sole remaining mystery: Perhaps, sensing its vastness, they were simply frightened.
The same can hardly be said of the crew who ventured into the 18th-century Pacific under the command of James Cook. For while he was a brilliant sailor and by most accounts a decent and humane ship’s captain (which, pace Captain Bligh, was not always the case in the Royal Navy), he also commanded for this first expedition a splendid ship, H.M.S. Endeavour. “Endeavour,” Peter Moore’s fantastically detailed story of this tough little Yorkshire-built coal-carrier, which was purchased by the Admiralty for little more than 2,000 British pounds for its South Seas expedition — the official primary purpose of which was to observe the transit of Venus — is a joy of a biography, offering up a blizzard of maritime and political fascinations.
The vessel was first launched as the collier Earl of Pembroke, but its oak-built strength impressed the admirals, who changed her name to Endeavour and dispatched her to the tropics, where she performed her unforgettable feats (and was nearly destroyed when Cook mistakenly took her inside the Great Barrier Reef). After her sterling Pacific service she was then remaindered and renamed the Lord Sandwich, and ended up carrying Hessian troops to New York in a vain attempt to counter the American Revolution. Being by then too worn to return to England, she was compelled to lie up in Newport harbor as a prison hulk. Finally, in 1778, she was broken up and scuttled, and only last September was apparently identified as lying 50 fathoms beneath the Rhode Island fairways, where sleek racing yachts now careen by above, heeling on the stiff Rhode Island breezes, unaware.
But her name remains, British spelling intact, memorializing a craft of equal exploratory purpose — the NASA Space Shuttle Endeavour, the last of the operational crew-carrying spacecraft, now at rest in a museum in Los Angeles. A numerical comparison of the achievements of the two craft is instructive: The shuttle worked for 19 years and ran through tens of millions of miles of airless space. The ship that helped make Captain Cook so famous, for good or ill, lumbered for 14 years and covered a paltry few tens of thousands of miles of ocean blue. There can be little doubt, however, which craft more truly changed the world, and Moore has written a book that makes the case for his little ship both compelling and irrefutable — and offers up besides an immense treasure trove of fact-filled and highly readable fun.
Simon Winchester is the author, most recently, of “The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World.”
SEA PEOPLE
The Puzzle of Polynesia
By Christina Thompson
Illustrated. 380 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers.
ENDEAVOUR
The Ship That Changed the World
By Peter Moore
Illustrated. 420 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.