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Sea People
Christina Thompson
‘Wonderfully researched and beautifully written’ Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan‘Succeeds in conjuring a lost world’ Dava Sobel, author of LongitudeFor more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in human history.How did the earliest Polynesians find and colonise these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins, emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind.For Christina Thompson, this mystery is personal: her Maori husband and their sons descend directly from these ancient navigators. In Sea People, Thompson explores the fascinating story of these ancestors, as well as those of the many sailors, linguists, archaeologists, folklorists, biologists and geographers who have puzzled over this history for three hundred years. A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People is a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world.

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Copyright (#ulink_15e80482-6655-5756-9e3e-22da9f2a94e2)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://WilliamCollinsBooks.com) This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019 Copyright © Christina Thompson 2019 Cover photographs © Nuku Hiva pirogues, Marquesas Islands, Polynesia, engraving by Danvin and Boys / Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy / De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images; A View in Oheitepha Bay on the Island of Otaheite, from‘Captains Cook’s Last Voyage’, 1809 (coloured engraving), Webber, John (1750–93) (after) / Private Collection / Bridgeman Images Christina Thompson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Information on previously published material appears here (#litres_trial_promo). All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780008339012 Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008339036 Version: 2019-02-15
Dedication (#ulink_9d3c3759-f60a-5251-bf97-6dff954a92a1)
For Tauwhitu
Epigraph (#ulink_0907e7f6-ada0-59a0-a076-ea6ffaff3ecb)
For we are dear to the immortal gods,
Living here, in the sea that rolls forever,
Distant from other lands and other men.
—Homer, the Odyssey
(translated by Robert Fitzgerald)

Contents
Cover (#ulink_8069d8b8-cdb1-5b23-a2e0-03f9994dc16f)
Title Page (#ulink_381f5ea0-7d91-5e98-8e92-f3d2c11fcae3)
Copyright (#ulink_0cf93bec-c184-5993-a97a-488f58ca2686)
Dedication (#ulink_9dc3fe42-2612-5f44-8d2a-e6a120778b71)
Epigraph (#ulink_9992c240-0468-595c-80dd-9e9c56f47ba8)
List of Illustrations (#ulink_ecfbda1c-ffd8-5245-9d33-cf8f39b66b32)
Prologue: Kealakekua Bay (#ulink_e0fb864d-dbc2-5a45-bcdc-e541db023fcd)
Part I: The Eyewitnesses (1521–1722) (#ulink_93591b5d-fb5b-5ecb-8750-f02db503b809)
In which we follow the trail of the earliest European explorers as they attempt to cross the Pacific for the first time, encountering a wide variety of islands and meeting some of the people who live there. (#ulink_93591b5d-fb5b-5ecb-8750-f02db503b809)
A Very Great Sea: The Discovery of Oceania (#ulink_18f00bd0-204c-5d5a-9ac3-bb607c0d7764)
First Contact: Mendaña in the Marquesas (#ulink_35a87658-d357-54bd-97ff-4735a5c4a8a7)
Barely an Island at All: Atolls of the Tuamotus (#ulink_c8e23911-d39b-5b5a-9cfe-f7cd541008ae)
Outer Limits: New Zealand and Easter Island (#ulink_91c493f7-5642-58b4-a645-d3cc31322552)
Part II: Connecting the Dots (1764–1778) (#ulink_142a7220-89d7-5990-94fe-106ce9f5e3dc)
In which we travel with Captain Cook to the heart of Polynesia, meet the Tahitian priest and navigator Tupaia, and sail with the two of them to New Zealand, where Tupaia makes an important discovery. (#ulink_142a7220-89d7-5990-94fe-106ce9f5e3dc)
Tahiti: The Heart of Polynesia (#ulink_df03caf7-4983-523a-840a-20737f90a827)
A Man of Knowledge: Cook Meets Tupaia (#ulink_32e108f0-9160-52e6-b531-62e6493388d7)
Tupaia’s Chart: Two Ways of Seeing (#litres_trial_promo)
An Aha Moment: A Tahitian in New Zealand (#litres_trial_promo)
Part III: Why Not Just Ask Them? (1778–1920) (#litres_trial_promo)
In which we look at some of the stories that Polynesians told about themselves and consider the difficulty nineteenth-century Europeans had trying to make sense of them. (#litres_trial_promo)
Drowned Continents and Other Theories: The Nineteenth-Century Pacific (#litres_trial_promo)
A World Without Writing: Polynesian Oral Traditions (#litres_trial_promo)
The Aryan Māori: An Unlikely Idea (#litres_trial_promo)
A Viking in Hawai‘i: Abraham Fornander (#litres_trial_promo)
Voyaging Stories: History and Myth (#litres_trial_promo)
Part IV: The Rise of Science (1920–1959) (#litres_trial_promo)
In which anthropologists pick up the trail of the ancient Polynesians, bringing a new, quantitative approach to the questions of who, where, and when. (#litres_trial_promo)
Somatology: The Measure of Man (#litres_trial_promo)
A Māori Anthropologist: Te Rangi Hiroa (#litres_trial_promo)
The Moa Hunters: Stone and Bones (#litres_trial_promo)
Radiocarbon Dating: The Question of When (#litres_trial_promo)
The Lapita People: A Key Piece of the Puzzle (#litres_trial_promo)
Part V: Setting Sail (1947–1980) (#litres_trial_promo)
In which we set off on an entirely new tack, taking to the sea with a crew of experimental voyagers as they attempt to reenact the voyages of the ancient Polynesians. (#litres_trial_promo)
Kon-Tiki: Thor Heyerdahl’s Raft (#litres_trial_promo)
Drifting Not Sailing: Andrew Sharp (#litres_trial_promo)
The Non-Armchair Approach: David Lewis Experiments (#litres_trial_promo)
Hōkūle‘a: Sailing to Tahiti (#litres_trial_promo)
Reinventing Navigation: Nainoa Thompson (#litres_trial_promo)
Part VI: What We Know Now (1990–2018) (#litres_trial_promo)
In which we review some of the latest scientific findings and think about what it takes to answer big questions about the deep past. (#litres_trial_promo)
The Latest Science: DNA and Dates (#litres_trial_promo)
Coda: Two Ways of Knowing (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Illustration Section (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Christina Thompson (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Illustrations (#ulink_e43e9869-d9ad-5176-bff2-9b6c25740cd3)

1 “Map of the World (#litres_trial_promo), showing Terra Australis Incognita,” from Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas, by Abraham Ortelius, 1570. Wikimedia Commons.
2 Tattooed Marquesan (#litres_trial_promo), “Back View of a younger inhabitant of Nukahiwa [Nuku Hiva], not yet completely tattooed,” in G. H. von Langsdorff, Voyage and Travels in Various Parts of the World (London, 1813). Courtesy Carol Ivy.
3 Easter Island moai (#litres_trial_promo), “A View of the Monuments of Easter Island,” by William Hodges, ca. 1776. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Wikimedia Commons.
4 Nukutavake canoe (#litres_trial_promo), acquired in the Tuamotus in 1767 by Captain Samuel Wallis of H.M.S. Dolphin. British Museum.
5 Nukutavake canoe detail (#litres_trial_promo) showing repair.
6 Portrait of Captain (#litres_trial_promo) James Cook by William Hodges, 1775–76. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
7 Drawing by Tupaia (#litres_trial_promo) of a Māori trading crayfish with Joseph Banks, 1769. British Library.
8 Peter Henry Buck (#litres_trial_promo) (Te Rangi Hiroa) in academic robes, ca. 1904. Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand.
9 Felix von Luschan’s (#litres_trial_promo) Hautfarbentafel (skin color panel). Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
10 Richard Owen (#litres_trial_promo) standing beside Dinornis novaezealandiae (large species of moa) while holding the bone fragment he was given in 1839. From Richard Owen, Memoirs on the extinct wingless birds of New Zealand (London, 1879). Wikimedia Commons.
11 Moa egg found by Jim Eyles at Wairau Bar in 1939 (#litres_trial_promo). Photograph by Norman Heke, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
12 Necklace of moa bone reels and stone (#litres_trial_promo) “whale tooth” pendant, discovered at Wairau Bar. Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand.
13 “The Arrival of the Maoris (#litres_trial_promo) in New Zealand” by Louis John Steele and Charles F. Goldie (1898), Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of the late George and Helen Boyd, 1899. Based on Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), this painting depicts a vision of Polynesian voyaging not unlike that implied by drift voyaging theories.
14 Reconstructed (#litres_trial_promo) three-thousand-year-old Lapita pot from Teouma, Efate Island, Vanuatu. Photograph by Philippe Metois, courtesy Stuart Bedford and Matthew Spriggs.
15 Micronesian stick chart (#litres_trial_promo) from the Marshall Islands. Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
16 Hōkūle‘a passing the Statue of Liberty in 2016 (#litres_trial_promo) on the Mālama Honua voyage around the world. Photo by Na‘alehu Anthony, courtesy ‘Ōiwi TV and the Polynesian Voyaging Society.

Prologue (#ulink_54ac68a0-e959-54ea-8f2d-fcb38171a793)
Kealakekua Bay (#ulink_54ac68a0-e959-54ea-8f2d-fcb38171a793)


Map of the Sandwich Islands by Giovanni Cassini (Rome, 1798), based on Cook’s chart of Hawai‘i.
STORY OF HAWAII MUSEUM, KAHULUI, MAUI.
KEALAKEKUA BAY LIES on the west, or leeward, side of the Big Island of Hawai‘i, in the rain shadow cast by the great volcano Mauna Loa. It is a smallish bay about a mile wide, open to the southwest, with a bit of flat land at either end and a great wall of cliffs along the middle, where in ancient times the bodies of Hawaiian chiefs were hidden in secret caves. The name of the bay, Kealakekua, means in Hawaiian “the Path of the God,” and in the final centuries of Polynesian isolation, before the arrival of Europeans, it was a seat of power and the ancestral home of no less a personage than the first Hawaiian monarch, Kamehameha I.
To get to Kealakekua Bay, you take the main road south from Kailua, leaving behind the more heavily settled areas of the Kona Coast and passing through a series of small towns. The highway on this part of the island runs along the shoulder of the mountain, and the drive down to sea level is a steep one. Turning off at the Napo‘opo‘o Road, you wind down through an arid landscape of mesquite and lead trees interspersed with ornamental plantings of hibiscus and plumeria. Taking a right at the bottom and following the road to its end, you come at last to a little cul-de-sac under a pair of spreading jacarandas. The beach, with its jumble of boulders, is a stone’s throw away, the high red rampart of the Pali looms on the right, and, squinting into the distance, you can just make out the low, scrubby outline of the farther shore.
Immediately adjacent rises the wall of the Hikiau Heiau, a large rectangular platform neatly built of close-fitting lava stones. The first time we visited this spot, my husband, Seven, and I were at the end of a long trip across the Pacific with our three sons. We had seen these sorts of structures before, coming upon them half-hidden in the forests of Nuku Hiva and high on a headland on O‘ahu’s North Shore, and once on a beach like this on the island of Ra‘iatea. In many parts of Polynesia they are known as marae, and in the days before Europeans reached the Pacific they were places of great mystery and supernatural power. Presided over by chiefs and priests and dedicated to particular gods, they were sites of sacrifice—including, occasionally, of humans—and propitiation to ensure safe voyaging or good health or plentiful food or success in war. They were decorated with scaffoldings and carved wooden images, and often with skulls, and were governed by the incontestable law of kapu (known elsewhere as tapu and the source of our word “taboo”), the system of rules and prohibitions linking everyday existence to the world of the numinous, which permeated every aspect of ancient Polynesian life.
We picked our way around the outside of the heiau, trying to get a sense of what was there. What remained of the original structure was a raised dry-stone platform more than a hundred feet long and about half as wide, rising to a height of ten feet at the beach end. It was said to have been nearly twice this size when it was first seen by Europeans, in the late 1700s, and would have been an imposing edifice with a commanding view of the bay. Or so we imagined. The stone stairway up to the top of the platform was roped off, and no fewer than three separate signs reminded us that no trespassing was allowed. Visitors were admonished not to wrap or to remove any of the stones or to climb on the walls or in any other way to disrespect the site. Heiau on the islands of Hawai‘i have more signage than similar structures on other islands, and, given the number of visitors, it’s easy to see why. But encounters with the past are different when they are mediated in this way, and I was glad that our first experience of such places had been deep in a forest in the Marquesas, where we had wandered freely among the ruins, ruminating after our own fashion upon the passage of time.
Directly in front of the heiau was an obelisk built of the same black lava rock but cemented in a very un-Polynesian way. It was about ten or twelve feet high and was mounted with a bronze commemorative plaque that read:
In this heiau, January 28, 1779,
Captain James Cook R. N.
read the English burial service
over William Whatman, seaman,
the first recorded Christian service
in the Hawaiian Islands.
Here was a completely different story from the one the heiau had to tell. On the surface, it was the story of poor Whatman, dead of a stroke, whose last wish had been to be buried on shore, and of the almost accidental arrival of Christianity, the rippling effect of which would be felt in these islands for centuries to come. But the much larger story, only obliquely indicated here, was of the coming of Europeans to the Pacific—the most consequential thing to have happened in these islands since the arrival of the Polynesians themselves. And so, while we might have come simply to see the heiau, with its tantalizing glimpse of a remote and cryptic Polynesian past, it was, in fact, the intersection of these two histories that had brought us to Kealakekua Bay.
COOK’S ARRIVAL IN the Hawaiian Islands marks a turning point in the history of European understanding of the Pacific. It was January 1778, and he was a year and a half into his third voyage. In the course of the first two, Cook had explored much of the South Pacific, laying down the east coast of Australia, circumnavigating New Zealand, charting many of the major island groups, even making the first crossing below the Antarctic Circle. On his third and final voyage, he was headed into new territory: that part of the Pacific that lies north of the equator. He had set his sights on one of the great chimerical objects of European geography, the Northwest Passage, and when he chanced upon the island of Kaua‘i, he was bound for Nootka Sound.
At the time, the Hawaiian Islands were not yet marked on any European map. In hindsight, it is quite surprising that they remained undiscovered as long as they did. For more than two hundred years, beginning as early as the 1560s, Spanish galleons had plied the North Pacific, sailing from Acapulco to Manila and back again once or twice a year, passing just south of Hawai‘i on the westward journey and just north of it as they sailed back east, without ever realizing that the islands were there. Cook, on the other hand, was sailing north from Tahiti, along what would eventually be recognized as an ancient Polynesian sea road, when he accidentally encountered the Hawaiian chain in what would prove to be the last great Pacific discovery by any European explorer.
Cook stopped only briefly on this first pass. The window for northern explorations was narrow, and he had no time to spare. But that autumn, when the northern ice began to close in, he returned to examine the islands more carefully. Falling in with the north coast of Maui, toward the end of November, Cook turned east and saw the great island of Hawai‘i rising before him, its summit unexpectedly covered with snow. He decided to sail around the island in order to put its great bulk between him and the strong northeasterly winds and to look along the leeward side for a place where he might refresh his crew. The weather was squally and his progress slow, and for nearly two months the British ships crept round the Big Island. Finally, toward the end of January 1779, they reached Kealakekua Bay. And here something rather peculiar happened.
Cook at this moment probably knew more about the Pacific than any living European. He had made three voyages in ten years, each of several years’ duration, and had visited every major island group in Polynesia. He had witnessed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of gatherings, many occasioned by the arrival of his own ships, but nowhere, he wrote, had he ever seen so many people assembled in one place at one time. Cook estimated that no fewer than a thousand canoes came out to meet them, while “all the Shore of the bay was covered with people and hundreds were swimming about the Ships like shoals of fish.” But it was not just the numbers that impressed him; it was the mood. Early encounters between Europeans and Pacific Islanders were frequently tense; often there were skirmishes, sometimes people were killed. On this occasion, however, the atmosphere seemed strangely festive. As Cook and his officers noted with some surprise, the islanders were not even armed.
As soon as the Englishmen landed, they were escorted up the beach to the heiau, preceded by heralds who called out, “Orono, Orono.” Spectators, who had gathered in the hundreds along the shore, flung themselves to the ground as the strangers approached, prostrating themselves before the procession. Cook was led up onto the platform, draped in a red cloth, and presented with offerings of cooked pig. A pair of priests chanted, alternately addressing Cook and a collection of wooden images, while the crowd intoned “Orono” at intervals. Even within Cook’s extensive experience, this reception was unique, and it quickly became clear to everyone present—as it has been to every historian and anthropologist since then—that something quite out of the ordinary was going on.
There have been varying interpretations of these events over the years, but the most widely accepted view is that, by sheer chance, Cook had arrived in the Hawaiian Islands during a seasonal ritual cycle known as the Makahiki. The central event of this festival, which runs from October to February, is the return of the god Lono, who arrives from Kahiki (the Hawaiian name for Tahiti but also a word meaning “a faraway place”) and is ritualistically borne around the island in a clockwise fashion, visiting each district in turn and collecting tributes. Lono, a god of peace and fertility, is represented in this procession by a long pole with a crosspiece draped with white cloth.
By the queerest twist of fate, Cook himself had been slowly sailing around the island in a clockwise direction, in a ship with tall masts and white sails, during precisely these months and had come ashore at a place specifically consecrated to the god Lono. Thus it was that he was received as a temporal embodiment of the god. This is not to say that Cook was “mistaken” for the god Lono—a crude, if common, misinterpretation—but rather that, coming as he did, when he did, he was understood to be cloaked in the mantle of the deity’s power.
For two weeks, Cook’s ships remained in Kealakekua Bay, and for two weeks the extraordinary obeisances continued. At the end of January, Whatman died and was buried in the heiau with both Christian and Hawaiian honors, Cook reading the burial service and the Hawaiian priests contributing a pig to the grave. Three days later, the ships weighed anchor and sailed away. And that should have been the end of the story. But a few days out, the foremast of Cook’s ship split in a gale and he turned back to Kealakekua to make repairs. This time almost no one came out to meet them.
Cook himself had the feeling that they had outstayed their welcome, but what he could not have known was that there was a deeper, more metaphysical problem. As the embodiment of Lono, he was supposed to leave at the end of the Makahiki season, with a promise to return—but not until the following year. When, instead, he returned almost immediately, his reappearance proved impossible to explain. The then-reigning chief of Hawai‘i, Kalani‘ōpu‘u, dismissed the Englishmen’s account of technical difficulties, insisting, rather, that on his earlier visit Cook had “amused them with Lies.”
The air of festivity that had characterized the Makahiki was now at an end, and the mood in the bay was marked by irritability and mistrust. On shore, the carpenters worked away at the mast, but there were thefts and disagreements, punishments and disputes. Then, on the third day, in one of those fracases that so often erupted in these situations—a shout and a shove and a discharged weapon—Cook was killed. It was almost absurdly accidental, and it might so easily have happened at any time, in more or less this way, on any of a number of islands. But this was how and where it did happen, here in Kealakekua Bay.
THE SPOT WHERE Cook was killed lies about a mile from the heiau, across the bay at a place called Ka‘awaloa. A twenty-five-foot-high white obelisk, erected there in his memory in 1874, appears to the naked eye as a small white object on a low green promontory, or, with a bit of magnification, like the top of a tiny white church buried up to its steeple in the ground. There is no road down to Ka‘awaloa, and the only ways to reach the monument are by hiking down from the highway or sailing or motoring into the bay or paddling across in a kayak from the nearby Napo‘opo‘o pier.
Seven and the boys were curious about the kayaks, so we drove over to Napo‘opo‘o to have a look. Unlike the heiau, which retains much of the solemnity of a church, the Napo‘opo‘o pier is a hive of activity. The parking lot was full of vans loading and unloading kayaks in every imaginable color. Tanned, athletic-looking tourists milled about in bathing suits and life jackets while big Hawaiian guys with tattooed calves sauntered back and forth with armloads of bright yellow paddles. It was clear that the Hawaiians were in charge of the rentals, so Seven went over to have a word with one of them.
“Hey,” he said, “how much for a kayak?”
“Thirty dollars,” the guy replied. And then, “Twenty for you, brother.”
At this point, we had been traveling in the Pacific for almost eight weeks. We had had our passports stamped in six different countries, touched down on fourteen different islands, learned how to say hello in eight different (albeit closely related) languages, and in every single place there had been an encounter like this. Hey, brother, how’s it going? Hey, brother, where you from? Hey, brother, you need something? In Tonga, a man with whom we had only the most distant connection loaned us his car. In Hawai‘i, the cousin of an acquaintance offered us her house. On islands all over the Pacific, people stopped to ask my husband who he was and where he was from.
The reason for this is that Seven is Polynesian. He is Māori, which is to say that he belongs to the branch of the Polynesian family that settled the islands of New Zealand around the beginning of the second millennium A.D. Hawaiians are also Polynesians: they belong to the branch of the family that settled the Hawaiian Islands a bit earlier, around the end of the first millennium. Both groups can trace their roots back to the islands of central Polynesia—to Tahiti and the Society Islands, the Marquesas, and the Cooks—which were settled, in turn, by voyagers from islands farther to the west. So rapid and complete was this expansion, and so vast the territory across which it spread, that, until the era of mass migration, Polynesians were both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world.
Seven’s encounter with the kayak dealer was a legacy of this prehistoric diaspora, and, like the stonework of the Hikiau Heiau, we had encountered it before, thousands of miles away in the Tuamotus, on Tahiti, and Tongatapu. But the amazing thing is that we could have gone on traveling for thousands more miles and visited hundreds more islands and the experience would have been the same. Because the fact is that Seven can get on a plane in the country of his birth, fly for nine hours, and get off in a completely different country where he will be treated by the locals as one of their own. Then, if he wants, he can get on another plane, fly for nine hours in an entirely different direction, get off, and still be treated like a local. And then, if he wants to go back to where he started, it’s still another nine hours by plane.
This is what is meant by the Polynesian Triangle, an area of ten million square miles in the middle of the Pacific Ocean defined by the three points of Hawai‘i, New Zealand, and Easter Island. All the islands inside this triangle were originally settled by a clearly identifiable group of voyagers: a people with a single language and set of customs, a particular body of myths, a distinctive arsenal of tools and skills, and a “portmanteau biota” of plants and animals that they carried with them wherever they went. They had no knowledge of writing or metal tools—no maps or compasses—and yet they succeeded in colonizing the largest ocean on the planet, occupying every habitable rock between New Guinea and the Galápagos, and establishing what was, until the modern era, the largest single culture area in the world.
FOR MORE THAN a thousand years, Polynesians occupied these islands, and until the arrival of explorers like Captain Cook, they were the only people ever to have lived there. There are not many places on earth about which one can say this, and yet it is true of every island in Polynesia. Until the arrival of European explorers—of Mendaña in the Marquesas and Tasman in New Zealand and Roggeveen on Easter Island—every one of these Polynesian cultures existed in splendid isolation from the rest of the world. This long sequestration is part of what makes Polynesia so fascinating to outsiders—a natural laboratory, some have called it, for the study of language change and genetic diversity and social evolution.
What it means for insiders, on the other hand, is that there exists a great web of interconnectedness that continues to this day. According to New Zealand tradition, Seven, whose real name is Tauwhitu—whitu, or some cognate thereof (fitu, hitu, itu, hiku), being the universal word for “seven” in Polynesia—is descended from a voyager named Puhi, who sailed to New Zealand from the ancestral homeland of Hawaiki in one of a fleet of eight great canoes. Whether or not this is really what happened, it is certainly true that his ancestors came to Aotearoa (the Polynesian name for New Zealand) from an island in eastern Polynesia and that their ancestors came to that island from another island before that. The simplicity of this genealogy is stunning. No chaotic mixture of raiders and conquerors; no muddle of Vikings and Normans and Jutes. For centuries Polynesians were the only people in this region of the world, and thus the only people Seven can be descended from are the ones who figured out how to cross thousands of miles of open ocean in double-hulled voyaging canoes.
To me—and not just to me—this is a big part of the fascination with this story. Few of us can trace our own lineages with such certainty going back so far, and it pleases me to think that my children share in this breathtaking genealogy. But what makes the whole thing truly fantastic is what their ancestors had to do in order to find and colonize all of these islands. There is a reason the remote Pacific was the last place on earth to be settled by humans: it was the most difficult, more daunting even than the deserts or the ice. And yet, somehow, Polynesians managed not just to find but to colonize every habitable island in this vast sea.
We know they did it because when the first Europeans arrived in the Pacific, they found these islands inhabited. But we also know that by the time Europeans arrived, the epic phase of Polynesian history—the age of exploration and long-distance voyaging—was already over. The world of the ancient voyagers had blossomed, flourished, and passed away, leaving behind a group of closely related but widely scattered daughter cultures that had been developing in isolation from one another for hundreds of years. Once explorers and migrants, they had become settlers and colonists; they knew themselves less as Voyagers of the Great Ocean than, as in the Marquesan formulation, Enata Fenua (“People of the Land”). Of course, they were still a sea people, traveling within and in some cases among archipelagoes, taking much of their living from the sea. But at far reaches of the Polynesian Triangle—in New Zealand, Hawai‘i, Easter Island, even the Marquesas—they retained only a mythic sense of having ever come from someplace else.
To Europeans, who had themselves only just begun to master the enormous expanses of the Pacific, and then only at the cost of great suffering and loss of life, the discovery of people on these small and widely scattered islands was a source of wonderment. There seemed to be no obvious explanation for how they had gotten there, and, in the absence of any direct evidence, Europeans had difficulty envisioning a scenario that would explain how a people without writing or metal tools could, in the words of Cook, have “spread themselves over all the isles in this Vast Ocean.” This conundrum, which came to be known as “the problem of Polynesian origins,” emerged as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind.
Over the past three hundred years, all kinds of people have taken a stab at solving this mystery, and many harebrained theories have been proposed: that the islands of Polynesia are the peaks of a drowned continent and the inhabitants the survivors of a great deluge; that Polynesians are Aryans or American Indians or the descendants of a tribe of wandering Jews; that the islands were settled by castaways or fishermen blown thither by capricious winds. But the truth, if you stop to think about it, can hardly be less astonishing; as the New Zealand ethnologist Elsdon Best once put it, “Could the story of the Polynesian voyagers be written in full, then would it be the wonder-story of the world.”
The problem, of course, is that we are talking about prehistory. It is hard enough to know what happened in the past when there exists a documentary record, but there is no written record of these events. Here, the evidence is all partial, ambiguous, open to widely differing interpretations, and in some cases so technical that it is difficult for a layperson to judge. When I first set out to write this book, I imagined I would be recounting the tale of the voyagers themselves, those daring men and women who crossed such stupendous tracts of sea and whose exploits constitute one of the greatest adventures in human history. But, almost immediately, it dawned on me that one could tell such a story only by pretending to know more than can actually be known. This realization quickly led me to another: that the story of the Polynesian settlement of the Pacific is not so much a story about what happened as a story about how we know.
The evidence for what happened in the Pacific has taken different forms in different eras. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, it consisted of the eyewitness reports of European explorers, who left sketchy but fascinating accounts of Polynesian cultures before they had begun to change under the influence of the outside world. From the nineteenth century we have a different type of source material: Polynesian oral traditions, or what the islanders had to say about themselves. Then, starting in the early twentieth century, science began to deliver up whole new bodies of information based on biometrics, radiocarbon dating, and computer simulations. And, finally, in the 1970s, an experimental voyaging movement emerged, which added a completely different dimension to the story.
Because this evidence is complex—not to mention partial, fragmentary, and perennially open to reinterpretation—the story of what happened in Polynesia has not followed a single bearing to certainty from doubt. In fact, if you were to map it, it would look a lot like the track of a ship under sail, zigzagging and backtracking, haring off in one direction, only to turn and work its way back to an earlier course. There are difficulties with every kind of data—linguistic, archaeological, biological, folkloric—and aspects of the story that have nothing to do with the Pacific at all, for many of the arguments made about Polynesia have been driven by preoccupations originating in Oxford or Berlin.
But these, too, are part of the story, for the history of the Pacific is not just a tale of men and women (and dogs and pigs and chickens) in boats. It is also the story of all those who have wondered who Polynesians were, where they came from, and how they managed to find all those tiny islands scattered like stars in the emptiness of space. Thus, the book you have before you: a tale not just of the ancient mariners of the Pacific but of the many people who have puzzled over their history—the sailors, linguists, archaeologists, historians, ethnographers, folklorists, biologists, and geographers who have each, as it were, put in their oar.
Part I (#ulink_2c9199d2-a064-5e12-ac13-6d83996cca2e)
The Eyewitnesses (#ulink_2c9199d2-a064-5e12-ac13-6d83996cca2e)
(1521–1722) (#ulink_2c9199d2-a064-5e12-ac13-6d83996cca2e)
In which we follow the trail of the earliest European explorers as they attempt to cross the Pacific for the first time, encountering a wide variety of islands and meeting some of the people who live there. (#ulink_2c9199d2-a064-5e12-ac13-6d83996cca2e)
A Very Great Sea (#ulink_ac34452a-ac8e-59c5-b2cf-a3487f201dba)
The Discovery of Oceania (#ulink_ac34452a-ac8e-59c5-b2cf-a3487f201dba)


Globe showing the Pacific Ocean.
C. SCOTT WALKER, HARVARD MAP COLLECTION, HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
IF YOU WERE to look at the Pacific Ocean from space, you might notice that you would not be able to see both sides of it at the same time. This is because at its widest, the Pacific is nearly 180 degrees across—more than twelve thousand miles, or almost half the circumference of the earth. North to south, from the Aleutian Islands to the Antarctic, it stretches another ten thousand miles. Taken as a whole, it is so big that you could fit all the landmasses of earth inside it and there would still be room for another continent as large as North and South America combined. It is not simply the largest body of water on the planet—it is the largest single feature.
For most of human history, no one could have known any of this. They could not have known how far the ocean extended or what bodies of land it might or might not contain. They could not have known that the distances between islands, comparatively small at the ocean’s western edge, would stretch and stretch until they were thousands of miles wide. They could not have known that parts of the great ocean were completely empty, containing no land at all, or that the winds and weather in one region might be quite different from—even the reverse of—what was to be met with in another part of the sea. For tens of thousands of years, long after humans had colonized its edges, the middle of the Pacific Ocean remained beyond the reach of man.
The first people to reach any of the Pacific’s islands did so during the last ice age, when sea levels were as much as three hundred feet lower than they are today and the islands of Southeast Asia were a continent known as Sundaland. This meant that people could walk across most of what is now Indonesia, though only as far as Borneo and Bali; east of that, they had to paddle or swim. No one really knows how the first migrants did it—or, for that matter, who they were—but by at least forty thousand years ago they had reached the large islands of Australia and New Guinea, which were then joined together in a separate continent called Sahul.
They crossed water again between New Guinea and the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, reaching as far east as the Solomon Islands, where their progress appears to have been arrested. Perhaps they were stopped by rising sea levels or by the growing gaps of water between bodies of land or by the increasing poverty of plant and animal species as they moved farther out into the sea. Or perhaps they just petered out, like the Norse who tried to settle the island of Greenland and died there or gave up and retreated. In any case, this is how things stood for something like twenty to thirty thousand years. They had pushed out, as it were, to the edge of the shelf, but the vast expanse of the world’s largest ocean remained an insurmountable barrier.
Then, about four thousand years ago, a new group of migrants appeared in the western Pacific. A true seagoing people, they were the first to leave behind the chains of intervisible islands and sail out into the open ocean. They were perhaps the closest thing to a sea people the world has known, making their homes on the shores of small islands, always preferring beaches, peninsulas, even sandspits to valleys, highlands, and hills. They inhabited one of the richest marine environments in the world, with warm, clear tropical waters and mazes of coral in which hundreds of edible species lived. Most of their food came from the ocean: not just fish and shellfish, but eels, porpoises, turtles, octopuses, and crustaceans. They fished the quiet lagoon waters for reef species and trolled the open ocean for pelagic fish like tunas. They gathered sea snails and bivalves, Turbo, Tridacna, and Spondylus oysters, harvested slug-like sea cucumbers from the ocean floor, and pried spiny sea urchins from crevices in the rocks.
All their most ingenious technology—their lures, nets, weirs, and especially canoes—were designed for life at the water’s edge. They made hand nets and casting nets, weighted seine nets with sinkers and buoyed them with pumice floats. They shaped hooks and lures from turtle shell and the pearly conical shell of the Trochus snail. We refer to the vessels they built as “canoes,” but this barely begins to capture their character, something of which is reflected in the language they used. They had words for lash, plank, bow, sail, strake, keel, paddle, boom, bailer, thwart, anchor, mast, and prop. They had words for cargo, for punting and tacking, for embarking, sailing to windward, and steering a course. They had words for decking, for figureheads, and rollers; they even had a term, katae, for the free side of a canoe—the one opposite the outrigger—a concept for which we have no convenient expression.
They lived on the margin between land and sea, and their language was, not surprisingly, rich in terms for describing the littoral. Two of their key distinctions were between the lee side and the weather side of an island and between the inside and the outside of the reef. The principal axis of the directional system they used on land was toward and away from the ocean, and they had another system based on winds for when they were out at sea. They had countless words for water under the action of waves—foam, froth, billow, breaker, swell—and a metaphor in which open water was “alive” and sheltered water “dead.” They had a word for the kind of submerged or hidden coral that was attractive to fish but dangerous for boats, and another for smooth or rounded coral that translated literally as “blossom of stone.” They had words for pools, passages, and channels, and one for islets that was derived from the verb “to break off.” They had a word for the gap between two points of land (as in a passage through the reef), which evolved into a word for the distance between any two points (as in the distance between islands) and which, as these distances expanded, eventually came to mean the far, deep ocean, and even space itself.
The one thing they do not seem to have had is a name for the ocean as a whole, nothing that would correspond to our “Pacific Ocean.” They probably had names for parts of it, like their descendants the Tahitians, who referred to a region west of their islands as Te Moana Urifa, meaning “the Sea of Rank Odor,” and a region to the east as Te Moana o Marama, meaning “the Sea of the Moon.” But they seem not to have conceptualized the ocean in its entirety. Indeed, they could hardly be expected to have conceived of it as a discrete and bounded entity when, for them, it was not so much a thing apart as the medium in which they lived. It was tasik, meaning “tide” or “sea” or “salt water”; or it was masawa, meaning “deep or distant ocean” or “open sea.”
EUROPEAN UNDERSTANDING OF the Pacific has been quite different, in part, because it has a recorded starting point. It begins on the 25th (or possibly the 27th) of September 1513, when the Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa climbed over the Isthmus of Panama and caught sight of what he called the Mar del Sur. He referred to it as la otra mar, meaning “the other sea,” and for Europeans, who were already acquainted with both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, this is precisely what the Pacific was. It was another ocean, defined by its relationship to already known bodies of water and land. If the Atlantic, also known as the Mar del Norte, was the ocean between Europe and the Americas, then the Mar del Sur was the ocean between the New World and the East. This was an essentially geographical perspective, and from the very beginning the principal questions for Europeans were: How big was this ocean, where were its boundaries, and how difficult might it be to cross?
The first European to cross the Pacific was the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, who set sail from Spain in 1519 in search of a western route to the Spice Islands. Magellan had an idea that there might be a passage through South America, and after crossing the Atlantic, he picked up the South American coastline near what is now Rio de Janeiro and followed it south. He was at 52 degrees south latitude, nearly to the tip of the continent, before he found it: the winding, tortuous strait that now bears his name. To the north lay Patagonia, or the Land of Giants; to the south, Tierra del Fuego, or the Land of Fire. After thirty-eight difficult days, he emerged into an ocean that, thanks to a rare spell of good weather, was surprisingly calm. It was Magellan who gave the Pacific the name by which it is still known (though many storm-tossed travelers have since disputed its fitness).
But this was only the beginning of Magellan’s journey. Like other navigators of his era, he labored under a misapprehension about the size of the earth and the relationships of its landmasses to one another. He believed that once he reached the Mar del Sur it would be but a short distance to the Indies. In fact, it was a very great distance indeed. For over three months they sailed without sight of land, excepting a glimpse of two little atolls, that he named Los Desventurados, or the Unfortunate Isles. They had been short of provisions when they began their crossing; before it was over, the crew was reduced to eating rats, sawdust, and the leather on the ships’ yards. The voyage was marked by every possible calamity—mutiny, shipwreck, scurvy, starvation, not to mention the death of its commander, in a melee on an island in the Philippines. When, three years later, the expedition finally returned, it was with just one of the five original ships and eighteen of the original 188 men. They had, however, crossed the Pacific and discovered just how big it really was. They had also established that it was possible to reach the Indies by traveling west from Europe, though to do so, one would have to traverse “a sea so vast that the human mind can scarcely grasp it.”
And not only so vast, but so empty. Maps of the Pacific can give the impression that parts of the great ocean are filled with bits of land. But what looks like a V-shaped scattering of islands concentrated in the west and stretching across the tropics—as if some giant standing on the Asian mainland had taken a handful of earth and tossed it out in the direction of Peru—is really a kind of cartographic illusion. While there are a great many islands in the Pacific—some twenty to twenty-five thousand, depending on what you count—the vast majority are so minuscule that on most maps, if they were represented to scale, they would be too small to see. Indeed, the space taken up by the names of these islands is often many times greater than the land area they represent, and there are enormous stretches of ocean to the north, south, and east where there are no islands at all. So, while much is often made of the fact that Magellan managed to “miss everything” between the coast of Chile and the Philippines (and it is true that he succeeded in threading a number of archipelagoes without spotting any of the islands they contain), when you truly grasp how very little land there is and how much water, it’s almost more surprising that anyone ever found anything at all.
One of the few survivors of Magellan’s voyage, Antonio Pigafetta, wrote an account of his experience; it is from him that we know about the rats—traded, he tells us, at half an écu apiece—and the weevily biscuit powder, and the rank, revolting water they had to drink. His description of this part of the voyage is economical, as though perhaps it had been more horrible than he cared to recall, and he ends his chapter on the crossing of the Pacific with the following remark: “If our Lord and the Virgin Mother had not aided us . . . we had died in this very great sea. And I believe that nevermore will any man undertake to make such a voyage.” In this, however, he was mistaken. Magellan was followed into the Pacific by a series of navigators from several European nations. Drawn both by the known wealth of the Indies and by the tantalizing prospect of the unknown, they embarked on an ocean about which they knew almost nothing. But each one who returned brought back new information, and little by little, over the course of the next few centuries, a picture of the Pacific began to emerge.
THE PACIFIC WAS so large, and its exploration so difficult, that it took Europeans nearly three hundred years to complete it, and during this period the contact between islanders and outsiders was random and sporadic. Nevertheless, the accounts of these early explorers—our first eyewitnesses—have a unique value. Privileged observers, they see Polynesia at the moment of contact with the outside world, and they can tell us things that are hard to discover in any other way.
Take, for example, the size of Polynesian populations. This has been an enduringly difficult number to pin down, in part because one of the things outsiders brought to the Pacific was disease. Epidemics—of smallpox, influenza, measles, scarlet fever, dysentery—affected virtually every island group and dramatically increased Polynesian mortality. So, even before any kind of official census could be taken, many island populations were already in decline. But we can look to the early eyewitnesses for a sense of how densely populated the islands were before any of this had happened. Their estimates are hardly scientific, and scholars continue to debate their validity, but they are a key piece of evidence nonetheless.
We can see other things, too, through the eyes of the early explorers. It is helpful, for example, to learn what animals they found on different islands. Polynesians brought four main animals with them into the remote Pacific: the pig, the dog, the chicken, and the rat. These animals, sometimes referred to as “commensals” because they exist in a symbiotic relationship with people, are an interesting proxy for human movement in the Pacific. Since they were unable to travel from island to island on their own, their presence tells you something about where the people who must have transported them went.
Not all of these animals made it to all of the islands. There were only rats and chickens on Easter Island when Europeans arrived (no pigs or dogs), and only rats and dogs (no pigs or chickens) in New Zealand. In the Marquesas, they had pigs, chickens, and rats, but there is no early record of dogs. And then there are the islands on which Europeans puzzlingly found dogs but no people. On some islands, the animals may have died out (this appears to have been the case with the Marquesan dog, which turns up in archaeological digs); in other cases, they may never have arrived. Either way, their absence suggests something about the difficulty of successfully transporting animals about the Pacific. It may also tell us something about the frequency of prehistoric voyaging, because if you were missing both chickens and pigs and you had the chance to get them from another island, wouldn’t you do it?
Of course, there were lots of things the early explorers did not see, and many of their accounts are maddeningly superficial. Early visitors to the Marquesas saw none of the monumental architecture and sculpture that links that archipelago to both Tahiti and Easter Island. Early visitors to Easter Island reported the presence of “stone giants” but were confusing on the question of how easy it was to grow food. And the first European visitors to New Zealand saw nothing, being too scared of the Māori to go ashore.
Much has been made in histories of the Pacific about the problem of observer bias. Early European explorers saw the world through lenses that affected how they interpreted what they found. The Catholic Spanish and Portuguese of the sixteenth century were deeply concerned with the islanders’ heathenism; the mercantile Dutch, in the seventeenth century, were preoccupied by what they had to trade; the French, coming along in the eighteenth century, were most interested in their social relations and the idea of what constituted a “state of nature.” Still, the project on which these explorers were embarked was, very broadly speaking, an empirical one; their primary task was to discover what was out there and report back about what they had seen. Naturally, there were other agendas: territorial expansion, political advantage, conquest, commerce. But on a quite fundamental level, the project was one of observation and reportage, and, for the most part, they got better at it as the centuries wore on.
There was, however, one really big mistake that all the early European explorers in the Pacific made, one that blinded them to the true character of the region for ages. It was essentially a geographical error, and the best way to understand it is by looking at early European maps.
THE FIRST EUROPEAN maps of the world, the so-called Ptolemaic maps of the fifteenth century, do not even include Oceania, or what Cook would later call “the fourth part” of the globe. Their focus is on the known, inhabited regions of the world, which means, at this stage of history, that there is nothing west of Europe, east of Asia, or south of the Tropic of Capricorn. This all changed with the discovery of the Americas, and maps of the sixteenth century show a world that is already quite recognizable. The outlines of Europe, Asia, and Africa all look surprisingly correct, and even the New World, though distorted, bears a better-than-passing resemblance to North and South America as we know them today.
The Pacific in this period is still something of a cipher. Virtually all the major archipelagoes are missing, California is sometimes depicted as an island, and the continent of Australia is often drawn as though it were a peninsula of something else. The large island of New Guinea is frequently represented at twice its real size, and the Solomon Islands, discovered in 1568 and then lost for almost exactly two hundred years, are not only grossly exaggerated but seemingly untethered. On some maps they are located in the western Pacific, where they belong, but on others they have floated right out into the middle of the ocean, a clear reflection of the fact that for centuries no one had the foggiest idea where they actually were.
But the most remarkable feature of maps from this period is the presence of an enormous landmass, greater than all North America, Europe, and Asia combined, wrapped around the southern pole. This continent, known as Terra Australis Incognita, or “the Unknown Southland,” occupies nearly a quarter of the globe. It is as if Antarctica included both Tierra del Fuego and Australia, stretched almost to the Cape of Good Hope, and reached so far into the Indian and Pacific Oceans that it entered the Tropic of Capricorn.
Terra Australis Incognita was one of the great follies of European geography, an idea that made sense in the abstract but for which there was never any actual proof. It was based on a bit of Ptolemaic logic handed down from the ancient Greeks, which held that there must be an equal weight of continental matter in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, or else the world would topple over and, as the great mapmaker Gerardus Mercator envisioned it, “fall to destruction among the stars.” This idea of global symmetry was inherently appealing, but it also made intuitive sense to Europeans, who, coming from a hemisphere crowded with land, found it difficult to imagine that the southern reaches of the planet might be as empty as they really are.
Like many imaginary places, Terra Australis Incognita—or, as it was sometimes more optimistically known, Terra Australis Nondum Cognita, “the Southland NotYet Known”—represented not just what Europeans thought ought to exist in the Pacific but what they wanted to find. It was conflated with a whole range of utopian fantasies: lands of milk and honey, El Dorados, terrestrial paradises. Almost from the beginning, it was linked with the land of Ophir, the source of the biblical King Solomon’s wealth, which explains why there are Solomon Islands in the neighborhood of New Guinea. Other rumors connected it with the mythical lands of Beach, Lucach, and Maletur, said to have been discovered by Marco Polo, and with the fabled islands of the Tupac Inca Yupanqui, from which he was said to have brought back slaves, gold, silver, and a copper throne.
For nearly three hundred years, the idea of Terra Australis Incognita drove European exploration in the Pacific, shaping the itineraries and experiences of voyagers, who were convinced that if they just kept looking, they would find a continent somewhere in the southern Pacific Ocean. Of course, there is a continent there—Antarctica—but it is not the kind of continent that Europeans had in mind. They were hoping for something bigger and more temperate, greener and more lush, richer and more hospitable, inhabited by people with fine goods for trade. They were dreaming of another Indies, or, failing that, another New World. But despite the “green drift” reported at 51 degrees south by the Dutch explorer Jacob Le Maire, and the birds he claimed to have seen in the roaring forties, and the mountainous country resembling Norway reported at 64 degrees south by Theodore Gerrards, despite the buccaneer Edward Davis’s rumors, and Pedro Fernández de Quirós’s claim of a country “as great as all Europe & Asia,” no continent resembling Terra Australis Incognita ever appeared.
What European navigators found in the Pacific instead was water—vast, unbroken stretches of water extending in every direction as far as the eye could see. For days on end, for weeks, sometimes for months, they sailed on the great circle of the ocean with nothing above them but the vault of the sky and nothing between them and the horizon but “the sea with its labouring waves for ever rising, sinking, and vanishing to rise again.” No distant smudges, no piles of clouds, no sea wrack, sometimes not even any birds. And then, just when they had begun to think they might sail onward to the end of eternity, an island would rise up over the rim of the world.
First Contact (#ulink_a6a20604-a872-5c88-8199-8bb3712574a5)
Mendaña in the Marquesas (#ulink_a6a20604-a872-5c88-8199-8bb3712574a5)


Breadfruit, after a drawing by Sydney Parkinson, in John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages (London, 1773).
DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY.
IF WE SET aside Magellan’s two little atolls, both of which were uninhabited at the time, the first Polynesian island to be sighted by any European was in the Marquesas. This is a group of islands just south of the equator and about four thousand miles west of Peru, a location that puts them at the eastern edge of the Polynesian Triangle, in a comparatively empty region of the sea. To the west and south they have neighbors within a few hundred miles, but you could sail north or east from the Marquesas along a 180-degree arc and not meet with anything at all for thousands of miles.
The islands of Polynesia come in different varieties, and the Marquesas are what are known as “high islands.” What this means to a layperson is that they are mountainous, rising in some cases thousands of feet from the sea; what it means to a geologist is that they are volcanic in origin. Some high islands occur in arcs, in places where one tectonic plate plunges underneath another. But those of the mid-Pacific are thought to be formed by hot spots, plumes of molten rock rising directly from the earth’s mantle. These islands typically occur in chains, grouped along a northwest–southeast axis, with the oldest at the northwest end and the youngest at the southeast, a pattern explained by the northwesterly movement of the Pacific plate. The idea is that over the course of millions of years, islands are formed and carried away as the slab of crust on which they are sitting drifts, while new islands rise out of the ocean behind them. The textbook case is the Hawaiian archipelago: the Big Island of Hawai‘i, with its active volcanoes, lies at the southeastern end of a chain of islands that get progressively older and smaller as they trail away to the northwest, ending in a string of underwater seamounts. Meanwhile, southeast of the Big Island, a new volcano is emerging, which will crest the sea sometime in the next 100,000 years.
The landscape of a high island has a sort of yin and yang about it. Composed almost entirely of basalt, high islands erode in quite spectacular ways, exposing great ribs and ramparts and pinnacles of rock. On their windward sides, where the mountains wring moisture from the passing air, they are lush and verdant, while on their leeward sides, in the rain shadow of these same mountains, they can be perfectly parched. But perhaps the greatest contrast is between the dark, heavy loom of the mountains and the bright, open aspect of the sea. Out from under the shadow of the peaks, the tangle of trees and vines in the uplands gives way to an airier landscape of grasses, coconut palms, and whispering casuarina. The ridges flatten to a coastal plain; the mountain cataracts slow to quiet rivers. At the tide line, the rocks and pools give way, here and there, to bright crescents of sand. The sea stretches out into the distance, broken only by a line of white breakers where the reef divides the bright turquoise of the lagoon from the darker water of the open ocean.
In some respects, the Marquesas are typical high islands, with their towering rock buttresses and fantastic spires, their deeply eroded clefts and fertile valleys. But in others they are quite unlike the Polynesian islands pictured in tourist brochures. Lying in the path of the Humboldt Current, which carries cold water up the South American coast, the Marquesas have never developed a system of coral reefs. They have no lagoons, few sheltered bays, and only a handful of beaches. Their ruggedness extends all the way to the coast, and their shores are largely grim and perpendicular.
The other thing missing in the Marquesas is the coastal plain. This is the part of a high island on which it is easiest and most natural to live. As anyone who has been to the islands of Hawai‘i knows, the standard way of navigating a high island is to travel around the coast. And it is easy to see how important this part of the island’s topography is—how it enables movement and communication, provides room for gardens, plantations, and housing; how even now the land between the ocean and the mountains is where the human population lives. In the Marquesas, however, there is none of this; the only habitable land lies in the valleys that radiate out from the island’s center, enclosed and cut off from one another by the mountains’ great arms.
To many Europeans, the Marquesas have seemed indescribably romantic. With their peaks shrouded in mist, their folds buried in greenery, their flanks rising dramatically from the sea, they have a brooding prehistoric beauty. Visiting in 1888, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson found them at once magnificent and forbidding, with their great dark ridges and their towering crags. “At all hours of the day,” he wrote, “they strike the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the same menacing gloom.”
It is tempting to imagine that the first Polynesians might have had similarly mixed impressions when they arrived. The discovery of any high island in the Pacific must have been a triumph: here was land, water, safety, sources of food. But archaeological sites in the Marquesas reveal a surprising variety of types of fishhooks from the very earliest settlement period, suggesting, perhaps, a surge of experiment and innovation prompted by the realization that fishing techniques brought from islands with more coral would not work in the deep, rough waters of the Marquesan coast. Still, the animals that were imported thrived (except for, maybe, the dog), the breadfruit trees grew, and the people prospered—so much so that by the time the first Europeans arrived, the Marquesas were “thickly inhabited” by a population that came out to meet the strangers in droves.
THE MARQUESAS WERE discovered in 1595 by the Spaniard Álvaro de Mendaña, who was en route with a shipload of colonists to the Solomon Islands. We say that Mendaña “discovered” the Marquesas, but of course this is not, strictly speaking, true. Indeed, the claim that any European explorer discovered anything in the Pacific—least of all the islands of Polynesia—is obviously problematic. As the Frenchman who later claimed the Marquesas for King Louis XV observed, it is hard to see how anyone could possess an island that is already possessed by the people who live there. And what is true for possession is even more true for discovery: In what sense can a land that is already inhabited be discovered? But what the word “discovered” means in the context of eighteenth-century Frenchmen or sixteenth-century Spaniards is not “discovered for the first time in human history” but something much more like “made known to people outside the region for the first time.”
This was Mendaña’s second voyage across the Pacific. Nearly thirty years earlier, he had led another expedition in search of Terra Australis Incognita, managing to reach the Solomon Islands before returning, in some disarray, to Peru. Despite the hardships of the journey, cyclones, scurvy, insubordination, shortages of food and water—at one point the daily ration consisted of “half a pint of water, and half of that was crushed cockroaches”—Mendaña was determined to try again. For twenty-six years he pestered the Spanish crown, and in 1595 they finally gave in.
The second expedition was, if possible, even more calamitous than the first. Confused and disorderly from the start, it was plagued by violence and dissension. Mendaña was on a zealot’s mission to bring the benighted heathen to God; his wife, an unlovable virago, caused trouble wherever she went; many of his soldiers were self-interested and cruel. Neither the commander nor any of his subordinates seem to have understood just how far away their destination was, despite—at least in Mendaña’s case—having been there before. In fact, they never did arrive. The colony, established instead on the island of Santa Cruz, was a disaster, with robberies, murders, ambushes, even a couple of beheadings. Mendaña, ill, broken, and “sunk in a religious stupor,” contracted a fever and died like something out of Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The rest of the expedition disbanded and sailed for the Philippines.
We have the story from Mendaña’s pilot, Pedro Fernández de Quirós, who recorded that just five weeks after setting out from the coast of South America, they sighted their first body of land. Believing this to be the island he was seeking, Mendaña ordered his crew to their knees to chant the Te Deum laudamus, giving thanks to God for a voyage so swift and untroubled. This, of course, was ridiculous; the Solomons were still four thousand miles away, at a minimum another five weeks’ sailing. But it does illustrate just how poorly these early European navigators understood the size of the Pacific and how easily misled they could be. Eventually, Mendaña realized his mistake and after some consideration concluded that this was, in fact, an entirely new place.
The island, which was known to its inhabitants as Fatu Hiva, was the southernmost of the Marquesas, and as the Spanish approached, a fleet of about seventy canoes pulled out from shore. Quirós noted that these vessels were fitted with outriggers, a novelty he carefully described as a kind of wooden structure attached to the hull that “pressed” on the water to keep the canoe from capsizing. This was something many Europeans had not seen, but the development of the outrigger, which can be traced back as far as the second millennium B.C. in the islands of Southeast Asia, was the key innovation that made it possible for long, narrow, comparatively shallow vessels (i.e., canoes) to sail safely on the open ocean.
Each of the Marquesan canoes carried between three and ten people, and many more islanders were swimming and hanging on to the sides—altogether, thought Quirós, perhaps four hundred souls. They came, he wrote, “with much speed and fury,” paddling their canoes and pointing to the land and shouting something that sounded like “atalut.” The anthropologist Robert C. Suggs, who did fieldwork in the Marquesas in the 1950s, thinks they were telling Mendaña to bring his ships closer inshore—“a friendly bit of advice,” as he puts it, “from one group of navigators to another.” Or maybe it was a strategy to get them to a place where they could be more effectively contained.
Quirós wrote that the islanders showed few signs of nervousness, paddling right up to the Spanish ships and offering coconuts, plantains, some kind of food rolled up in leaves (probably fermented breadfruit paste), and large joints of bamboo filled with water. “They looked at the ships, the people, and the women who had come out of the galley to see them . . . and laughed at the sight.” One of the men was persuaded to come aboard, and Mendaña dressed him in a shirt and hat, which greatly amused the others, who laughed and called out to their friends. After this, about forty more islanders clambered aboard and began to walk about the ship “with great boldness, taking hold of whatever was near them, and many of them tried the arms of the soldiers, touched them in several parts with their fingers, looked at their beards and faces.” They appeared confused by the Europeans’ clothing until some of the soldiers let down their stockings and tucked up their sleeves to show the color of their skin, after which, Quirós wrote, they “quieted down, and were much pleased.”
Mendaña and some of his officers handed out shirts and hats and trinkets, which the Marquesans took and slung round their necks. They continued to sing and call out, and as their confidence increased, so did their boisterousness. This, in turn, annoyed the Spanish, who began gesturing for them to leave, but the islanders had no intention of leaving. Instead they grew bolder, picking up whatever they saw on deck, even using their bamboo knives to cut slices from a slab of the crew’s bacon. Finally, Mendaña ordered a gun to be fired, at which the islanders all leapt into the sea—all except one, a young man who remained clinging to the gunwale, refusing, either out of obstinance or terror, to let go until one of the Spaniards cut him with a sword.
At this, the tenor of the encounter changed. An old man with a long beard stood up in his canoe and cried out, casting fierce glances in the direction of the ships. Others sounded their shell trumpets and beat with their paddles on the sides of their canoes. Some picked up their spears and shook them at the Spaniards, or fitted their slings with stones and began hurling them at the ship. The Spaniards aimed their arquebuses at the islanders, but the powder was damp and would not light. “It was a sight to behold,” wrote Quirós, “how the natives came on with noise and shouts.” At last, the Spanish soldiers managed to fire their guns, hitting a dozen or so of the islanders, including the old man, who was shot through the forehead and killed. When they saw this, the islanders immediately turned and fled back to shore. A little while later, a single canoe carrying three men returned to the ships. One man held out a green branch and addressed the Spaniards at some length; to Quirós he seemed to be seeking peace. The Spanish made no response, and after a little while the islanders departed, leaving some coconuts behind.
THE ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN the Marquesans and Mendaña’s people were filled with confusion, and many “evil things,” wrote Quirós, happened that “might have been avoided if there had been someone to make us understand each other.” In this, it was like many early encounters between Europeans and Polynesians: everything that happened made sense to someone, but much of it was baffling, offensive, or even deadly to those on the other side.
In one incident, four “very daring” Marquesans made off with one of the ships’ dogs; in another, a Spanish soldier fired into a crowd of canoes, aiming at and killing a man with a small child. On shore, Mendaña ordered a Catholic mass to be held, at which the islanders knelt in imitation of the strangers. Two Marquesans were taught to make the sign of the cross and to say “Jesus, Maria”; maize was sown in the hope that it might take. Mendaña’s wife, Doña Isabel, tried to cut a few locks from the head of a woman with especially beautiful hair but was forced to desist when the woman objected—the head, being tapu, should not have been touched, as hair was known to be useful for sorcery.
Three islanders were shot and their bodies hung up so that the Marquesans “might know what the Spaniards could do.” Mendaña envisioned establishing a colony, leaving behind thirty men along with some of their wives. But the soldiers adamantly refused this mission. Perhaps they understood, no doubt correctly, that it would have been more than their lives were worth, for by the time the Spanish finally departed, they had killed more than two hundred people, many, according to Quirós, for no reason at all.
Quirós was distressed by the cruel and wanton behavior of Mendaña’s men. In the islanders, on the other hand, he found much to admire. Indeed, it is through Quirós’s eyes that we get our first glimpse of a people who would come to epitomize for many Europeans the pinnacle of human beauty. One later visitor described the Marquesans as “exquisite beyond description” and the “most beautiful people” he had ever seen. Even Cook, a man never given to exaggeration, called them “as fine a race of people as any in this Sea or perhaps any whatever.”
The islanders, wrote Quirós, were graceful and well formed, with good legs, long fingers, and beautiful eyes and teeth. Their skin was clear and “almost white,” and they wore their hair long and loose “like that of women.” Many were naked when he first saw them—they were swimming at the time—and their faces and bodies were decorated with what Quirós at first took to be a kind of blue paint. This, of course, was tattooing, a practice common across Polynesia—the English word “tattoo” is derived from the Polynesian tatau—but carried to the peak of perfection in the Marquesas, where every inch of the body, including the eyelids, tongue, palms of the hands, even the insides of the nostrils, might be inscribed. Quirós found the Marquesan women, with their fine eyes, small waists, and beautiful hands, even more lovely “than the ladies of Lima, who are famed for their beauty,” and characterized the men as tall, handsome, and strong. Some were so large that they made the Spaniards look diminutive by comparison, and one made a great impression on the visitors by lifting a calf up by the ear.
Ethnographically speaking—remembering that this is the earliest recorded description of any Polynesian society that we have—Quirós’s account is slim but interesting. The Marquesans, he wrote, had pigs and chickens (“fowls of Castille”), as well as plantains, coconuts, calabashes, nuts, and something the Europeans had never seen, which they described as a green fruit about the size of a boy’s head. This was breadfruit, a plant that would enter Pacific legend two centuries later as the cargo carried by Captain William Bligh of the Bounty when his crew mutinied off the island of Tahiti. (Bligh was carrying the breadfruit seedlings to the West Indies, where, it was envisioned, they would provide an economical means of feeding African slaves.) They lived in large communal houses with platforms and terraces of neatly fitted stone and worshipped what the Spanish referred to as an “oracle,” an enclosure containing carved wooden figures to whom they made offerings of food. Their tools were made of stone and shell; their primary weapons were spears and slings. Their most significant manufactures were canoes, which they made in a variety of sizes: small ones with outriggers for three to ten paddlers, and large ones, “very long and well-made,” with room for thirty or more. Of the latter wrote Quirós, “They gave us to understand, when they were asked, that they went in these large canoes to other lands.”
What lands these might have been remained a mystery, however. In one curious incident, the Marquesans, seeing a black man on one of the Spanish ships, gestured toward the south, making signs “to say that in that direction there were men like him, and that they went there to fight, and that the others had arrows.” This is a baffling remark, and quite typical of the sort of misdirection that is rampant in these early accounts. While it might describe any number of people in the islands far to the west, the bow was never used as a weapon in Polynesia. The only places south of the Marquesas are the Tuamotu Archipelago, and, even farther away, Easter Island—all of whose inhabitants are culturally and physically quite similar to Marquesans. They might well have been perceived as enemies, but they were not archers and they were not black.
But while we have no idea which islands Quirós was referring to, we do know that there were “other islands” in the Marquesans’ conceptual universe. Later visitors heard tell of “islands which are supposed by the natives to exist, and which are entirely unknown to us.” It was also reported that in times of drought, “canoes went out in search of other islands,” which may help explain why, when Cook reached the Marquesas in 1775, the islanders wondered whether he had come from “some country where provisions had failed.”
MENDAÑA REMAINED IN the Marquesas for about two weeks, in the course of which he identified and named the four southernmost islands in the archipelago. (A second cluster of islands lay undiscovered to the north.) He called them, after his own fashion, Santa Magdalena, San Pedro, La Dominica, and Santa Cristina, names that have all long been replaced by the original Polynesian names: Fatu Hiva, Motane, Hiva Oa, and Tahuata. The archipelago as a whole he named in honor of his patron, Don García Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Cañete and viceroy of Peru, and in all the years since 1595 the Marquesas have never been known as anything else. Except, of course, among the islanders themselves, who know their islands collectively as Te Fenua, meaning “the Land,” and themselves, the inhabitants of Te Fenua, as Te Enata, meaning simply “the People.”
When Mendaña’s ships finally sailed away, the Marquesas were lost again to the European world for nearly two hundred years. They had been none too securely plotted to begin with, and their location was further suppressed by the Spanish in order to forestall competition in the search for Terra Australis Incognita. Privately, if the Spanish concluded anything, it was that the Marquesas, with their large, vigorous population of beautiful people, their pigs, their chickens, and their great canoes, proved the existence of a southern continent. Lacking “instruments of navigation and vessels of burthen,” Quirós concluded, the inhabitants of these islands could not possibly have made long-distance ocean crossings. This meant that somewhere in the vicinity there must be “other islands which lye in a chain, or a continent running along,” since there was no other place “whereby they who inhabit those islands could have entered them, unless by a miracle.” Thus the irony of first contact between Polynesia and Europe: that it served to reinforce a hallucinatory belief in the existence of an imaginary continent while obscuring the much more intriguing reality of the Marquesans themselves.
Barely an Island at All (#ulink_f2208721-df3e-5dc1-a7fa-5df55b656098)
Atolls of the Tuamotus (#ulink_f2208721-df3e-5dc1-a7fa-5df55b656098)


Winds in the Pacific, based on “Map of the prevailing winds on earth,” in Het handboek voor de zeiler by H. C. Herreshoff, adapted by Rachel Ahearn.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
MENDAÑA DISCOVERED THE Marquesas because he sailed west in roughly the right latitude from the port of Paita, in the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru. But those who came after set sail from different ports and followed different routes and, thus, discovered different sets of islands. This was not so much a matter of intention: European explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries did not have the freedom to go wherever they wished. On the contrary, for some centuries virtually all their discoveries were determined by the distinctive pattern of the winds and currents in the Pacific Ocean and by the limited points of entry into the region from other parts of the world.
The weather in the Pacific is dominated by two great circles of wind, or gyres, one of which turns clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, while the other turns counterclockwise in the Southern. Across wide bands from roughly 30 to 60 degrees in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the winds are predominantly westerly, that is, they blow from west to east. In the north, these winds sweep across the continents of Europe, Asia, and North America. But in the Southern Hemisphere, where there are few landmasses to impede them, they can reach fantastic speeds—hence the popular names for the far southern latitudes: the “roaring forties,” “furious fifties,” and “screaming sixties.”
From the equator to about 30 degrees north and south—roughly across the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer—the winds predominantly blow the opposite way. These are known as the trade winds, a reliable pattern of strong, steady easterlies with a northeasterly slant in the Northern Hemisphere and a southeasterly slant in the Southern. In between, in the vicinity of the equator itself, is an area known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone, or ITCZ, a region of light and variable winds and frequent thunderstorms more commonly known as the Doldrums and greatly feared by early European navigators for its deadly combination of stultifying heat and protracted calms. Anyone who has flown across the equator in the Pacific—say, from Los Angeles to Sydney—may remember a bumpy patch about halfway through the flight; that was the ITCZ.
The major ocean currents in the Pacific follow basically the same pattern, flowing west along the equator and peeling apart at the ocean’s edge, turning north in the Northern Hemisphere and south in the Southern and circling back around in two great cells. There is, however, also something called the Equatorial Countercurrent, which flows eastward along the equator in between the main westward-flowing northern and southern currents—just to make things confusing.
What all this meant for ships under sail was that near the equator things could be quite chaotic, and often there would be no wind at all. In the tropics, the winds and currents would, generally speaking, speed a ship on its way west, permit it to sail on a north–south axis, and effectively prevent it from sailing east the vast majority of the time. Thus, if one wanted to proceed eastward across the Pacific, the only sure way to do it was to travel in higher, colder latitudes (that is, farther north or south), where sailors typically encountered the opposite problem: the inability to make any westing at all.
The other major constraint on early Pacific navigation for Europeans was the problem of entry points. In the days before the man-made shortcuts of Panama and Suez, European ships bound for the Pacific were forced to sail to the very bottom of the world and around either Africa or South America in order to reach the Pacific Ocean. The eastern route, by way of Africa, was by far the longest; not only did one have to sail all the way south and around the Cape of Good Hope, but then there was still the whole Indian Ocean to cross, and beyond that the mysterious impediment of Australia. The western route, by way of South America, was shorter and therefore more attractive, but it also presented the greatest danger, in the form of a passage around the dreaded Cape Horn. Here, where the long tail of South America reaches almost to the Antarctic ice, lies one of the most fearsome stretches of ocean in the entire world. It combines furious winds, enormous waves, freezing temperatures, and a shelving, ironbound coast to produce what can only be described as a navigator’s nightmare: a maelstrom of wind, rain, sleet, snow, hail, fog, and some of the world’s shortest and steepest seas.
Stories of dreadful passages around Cape Horn are legion. Leading a squadron of eight ships around the Horn in the early 1740s, Britain’s Commodore George Anson was battered for a biblical forty days and forty nights by a succession of hurricanes so wild they reduced his crew to gibbering terror. Two of the squadron’s ships went missing, effectively blown away by the wind, and Anson was ultimately forced to resort to the hideous expediency of “manning the foreshrouds,” that is, sending men into the rigging to act as human sails, the wind being too ferocious to permit the carrying of any actual canvas. Needless to say, at least one seaman was blown from his perch. A strong swimmer, he survived for a while in the icy water, but such was the intensity of the storm that his shipmates were forced to watch helplessly as he was swept away by the mountainous seas.
Forty-odd years later, Captain Bligh of the Bounty encountered a similar series of storms as he tried to round the Horn on his way to Tahiti, on the voyage that would famously end in mutiny. For a month he battled winds that boxed the compass and was drenched by seas that broke over his ship. At the end of a titanic struggle against “this tempestuous ocean,” he finally surrendered. Turning east, he got the wind behind him and bore away for Africa and the Cape of Good Hope, a decision that would add ten thousand miles to his voyage.
There was an alternative to rounding the Horn, and that was to pass through the Strait of Magellan, the route pioneered in 1520 and the earliest known pathway into the Pacific from the Atlantic side. But this narrow, twisting passageway of some 350 miles, which separates the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego from mainland South America, presents navigational challenges of its own. Here the problem is not so much exposure as the complicated nature of the passage itself and unpredictable winds and currents. Magellan himself had been unusually fortunate, making the passage in only thirty-eight days, but the British navigator Samuel Wallis spent more than four months trying to clear the strait in 1767, giving him an effective sailing rate of less than three miles a day.
The Strait of Magellan opens out into the Pacific between 52 and 53 degrees south latitude. Cape Horn lies at approximately 56 degrees south, and navigators who decided to sail around it were routinely obliged to sail into the high fifties; Cook reached as far as 60 degrees south on his first passage round the Horn. But, either way, once they had made it into the Pacific, navigators found it almost impossible to advance. They could make no headway in these latitudes against the ferocious westerly winds. Southward lay the ice and snow—they were nearly to the Antarctic Circle—east was the coast of South America, and the only direction open to them was north.
It is this particular set of circumstances—winds, distances, continental obstacles, and sailing capacity—that explains a curious fact about early European encounters in the Pacific, which is that, even with the whole, wide ocean before them, almost all the early navigators followed variants of the same route. With one or two exceptions, they crossed the South Pacific on a long northwesterly diagonal, or, more properly, a dogleg, sailing north and then turning west once they picked up the trades. They did this not because they thought it was the path most likely to yield important discoveries—as the historian J. C. Beaglehole drily observed, “sailing on some variant of the great north-west line, of necessity a ship made through a vast deal of empty ocean”—but because it was the path dictated by the currents and the winds. As a consequence, many important islands that lie off this route, like Hawai‘i, were not encountered for centuries, while others, some of them minuscule, like the tiny atoll of Puka Puka in the Tuamotu Archipelago, were discovered over and over again.
THE TUAMOTUS, ALSO known as the Low or Dangerous Archipelago, feature in almost every early European account of the Pacific, for the simple reason that they lie directly across most variants of the great northwest line. A screen of some seventy-eight “low islands,” or atolls, the Tuamotus stretch for eight hundred miles along a northwest–southeast axis about halfway between the Marquesas and Tahiti. Most of these atolls are comparatively small, on average perhaps ten to twenty miles wide, but their key feature, at least from a navigator’s point of view, is their height. None of these islands reach an elevation of more than twenty feet; most are barely twelve feet above the tide line at their highest point. They are, as Stevenson put it, “as flat as a plate upon the sea.” What this means for sailors is that they are invisible until one is all but upon them, and later navigators, who knew more about what they were getting into, tended to avoid this maze of reefs and islands that was also sometimes known as the Labyrinth.
From the air, the Tuamotus are a dazzling sight: bright circlets of green and white floating like diadems in a sapphire sea. But, as the early explorers quickly discovered, up close there is not much to an atoll. Barely an island at all, it is really a necklace of islets, or motu, to use the Polynesian word, strung along a circle of reef. The motu are composed entirely of coral: sand, cobbles, coral blocks, and a kind of conglomerate known as beachrock. Verdant from a distance, they in fact have only the thinnest layer of topsoil and can support just a few salt-tolerant species of shrubs and trees. There are no natural sources of fresh water apart from rain, though there is an interesting phenomenon known as a Ghyben-Herzberg lens. This is a layer of fresh water which floats on top of the seawater that infiltrates the porous coral rock. Under the right conditions—the island cannot be too small, it cannot be in a state of drought, the well cannot be dug too deep—it is possible to extract fresh water from a pit dug into the sand, as a group of seventeenth-century Dutch sailors accidentally discovered on an atoll they named Waterlandt.
It was Charles Darwin who first articulated the theory of how coral atolls are formed. On his way across the Pacific in the Beagle, Darwin sailed through the Tuamotu Archipelago, recording his first impression of an atoll as seen from the top of the ship’s mast. “A long and brilliantly white beach,” he wrote, “is capped by a margin of green vegetation; and the strip, looking either way, rapidly narrows away in the distance, and sinks beneath the horizon. From the mast-head a wide expanse of smooth water can be seen within the ring.” It was already understood in Darwin’s day that corals were creatures—“animalcules,” as one writer put it—and that they could grow only in comparatively shallow water. And yet, here they were in the middle of the ocean, in a place where the water was so deep it could not be measured by any conventional means. (The Dutch named a second atoll Sonder Grondt, i.e., “Bottomless,” because they could find no place to anchor.) The obvious question concerned their foundation, or, as Darwin put it, “On what have the reef-building corals based their great structures?”
One theory popular at the time was the idea that atolls grew up on the rims of submerged volcanic craters. There were good reasons for associating them with vulcanism—high islands and low islands are found in close proximity throughout the Pacific. But there were also problems with the crater idea: some large atolls exceed the size of any known volcanic craters; some small atolls exist in clusters that cannot easily be envisioned as craters; and many volcanic islands are closely surrounded by coral reefs, which, if the theory were correct, would make them volcanoes within volcanoes—an explanation that seems unlikely at best.
Darwin’s notion, still the most widely accepted view, was that there is an association between atolls and volcanic islands, but that atolls begin life not on the rims of extinct craters but in the shallow waters of an island’s shores. Like many of Darwin’s ideas, his theory of coral atoll formation had the virtue of explaining not just how atolls are formed but how that process is linked to other kinds of coral formations, thus neatly accounting for all instances of what is essentially the same thing. He recognized that fringing reefs (on the shores of islands), barrier reefs (surrounding islands at some distance from the shore), and atolls (rings of coral without any island at all) are, in fact, a series of stages. The key to connecting them was the concept of subsidence—the idea that an island gradually sinks while the coral encircling it continues to grow. Thus, in the course of time, a fringing reef would become a barrier reef, and a barrier reef would eventually become an atoll.
AN ATOLL IS a very natural habitat for anything that swims or flies through the air. Atolls are home to more than a quarter of the world’s marine fish species, a mind-boggling array of angelfish, clown fish, batfish, parrotfish, snappers, puffers, emperors, jacks, rays, wrasses, barracudas, and sharks. And that’s without even mentioning all the other sea creatures—the turtles, lobsters, porpoises, squid, snails, clams, crabs, urchins, oysters, and the whole exotic understory of the corals themselves. Atolls are also an obvious haven for birds, both those that range over the ocean by day and return to the islands at night and those that migrate thousands of miles, summering in places like Alaska and wintering over in the tropics.
For terrestrial life, however, it is quite a different matter. A typical atoll in the Tuamotus might support thirty indigenous species of plants and trees—as compared with the more than four hundred native plant species that might be found on a high island like Tahiti, or the many thousands that grow on a large continental island like New Zealand—and, among land animals, only lizards and crabs. While there are places on an atoll where one might, for a moment, imagine oneself to be surrounded by land—places where one’s line of sight is blocked by trees or shrubs—a few minutes’ walk in any direction will quickly dispel the illusion. Strolling the length of even a largish motu, you eventually come to a place where you can see water on both sides. At such moments it becomes breathtakingly clear that the ground beneath your feet is not really land in the way that most people understand it, but rather the tip of an undersea world that has temporarily emerged from the ocean. The real action, the real landscape, is all of water: the great rollers that boom and crash on the reef, the rush and suck of the tide through the passes, the breathtaking hues of the lagoon.
And yet, when Europeans first reached the Pacific, they found virtually all the larger atolls inhabited. Even those that were clearly too small to support a permanent population often showed signs of human activity. On one tiny, uninhabited atoll, an early explorer found an abandoned canoe and piles of coconuts at the foot of a tree; on another there was the puzzling presence of unaccompanied dogs. Even the pit in which the Dutch sailors found water had almost certainly been dug by someone else. What all this appeared to suggest was that even the most insignificant and isolated specks of land were being visited by people who could come and go.
There are not many good early descriptions of these people. The Tuamotus offered almost none of the things that European sailors needed—namely, food, water, and safe ports—and their complex network of reefs was dangerous to ships. With so little to be gained and so much to be lost, Europeans tended not to linger, and the early eyewitness reports are correspondingly slight. What they did manage to observe about the inhabitants of the Tuamotus was this: they were tall and well proportioned (Quirós referred to them as “corpulent,” presumably meaning something like “robust”); their hair, which they wore long and loose, was black; their skin was brown or reddish and, according to the Dutch explorer Le Maire, “all over pictured with snakes and dragons, and such like reptiles,” an unusually vivid description of tattooing. Europeans, it is worth noting, had a famously difficult time identifying the color of Polynesian skin; a later Dutch navigator would describe the inhabitants of Easter Island as pale yellow where they were not painted a dark blue.
For food, the inhabitants of the low islands had coconuts, fish, shellfish, and other sea creatures; for animals, it is clear that at least they had dogs. Their knives, tools, and necklaces were made of shell (later investigators would also discover basalt adzes, which could only have been transported from a high island, there being no local sources of volcanic rock). Their principal weapons were spears, with which they armed themselves at the approach of strangers. Many Europeans who sailed past these islands reported seeing the inhabitants standing or running along the beach with their weapons in hand. Some interpreted their shouts and gestures as an invitation to land, others as an exhortation to depart, but, as “both sides were in the dark as to each other’s mind,” it was difficult to know for sure.
Later observers would describe the “roving migratory habits” of these atoll dwellers, noting that they wandered from place to place, “so that at times an island will appear to be thickly peopled, and at others scarcely an individual is to be found.” Census taking proved almost impossible, because some portion of the population was always “away,” hunting turtles or collecting birds’ eggs or gathering coconuts or visiting in some other corner of the archipelago. All of which raises an interesting question: Since there are almost no trees on an atoll, and certainly none of the larger species that in other parts of the Pacific provided wood for keels and planks and masts, what did the inhabitants of the low islands do for canoes? It being inconceivable that they could ever have lived in this watery world without them.
We have an early description, from 1606, of a fleet of canoes that came out “from within the island,” meaning presumably from across the lagoon, on the Tuamotuan atoll of Anaa. The vessels were described as something like a half galley—that is, a boat with both oars and masts—and were fitted with sails made of some kind of matting. Most had room for fourteen or fifteen men, though the largest carried as many as twenty-six. They were made, wrote the observer somewhat enigmatically, “not of one tree-trunk, but very subtly contrived.”
There is a picture in A. C. Haddon and James Hornell’s Canoes of Oceania that sheds some light on this remark. It shows a small canoe from the island of Nukutavake, in the southern Tuamotus, which was brought to England in the 1760s by Captain Samuel Wallis. Now held in the British Museum, it is described as “by far the oldest complete hull of a Polynesian canoe in existence.” At just twelve feet long, it is not nearly big enough to carry fourteen or fifteen men and was probably a small fishing boat, to judge by the burn marks on its upper edge, which are thought to have been made by the friction of a running line.
The amazing thing about the Nukutavake canoe is the way it’s constructed. It is composed of no fewer than forty-five irregularly shaped pieces of wood ingeniously stitched together with braided sennit, a kind of cordage made from the inner husk of a coconut. Close up, it looks like nothing so much as a crazy quilt whose seams have been decoratively overstitched with yarn. It is difficult to believe that such neat and painstaking rows of sewing could be made with something as rough as rope; or that what they are holding together could be something as stiff as wooden planks; or that anyone would think of making something as solid and important as a boat using such a method. Everything about it suggests cleverness and thrift and also, plainly, necessity. You can even see where the boards have been patched with little plugs or circles of timber held in place with stitches radiating out like the rays of a sun, and at least one plank shows signs of having been repurposed from another vessel.
It was said, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that the inhabitants of the Tuamotus were the finest canoe builders in the eastern Pacific, and that when chiefs on the high island of Tahiti wanted to build a great canoe, “they had need of the help of men from the low islands.” One eighteenth-century British commander described a double-hulled canoe that he saw in the Tuamotus as having hulls that were thirty feet long. The planks, which were sewn together, he wrote, were “exceedingly well wrought,” and over every seam was a strip of tortoiseshell, “very artificially fastened, to keep out the weather.” All Polynesians gave proper names to different parts of their canoes, including the thwarts, paddles, bailers, anchors, and steering oars. But in the Tuamotus it is said that even the individual boards were sometimes named, the old timbers serving as “reminders of the courage, endurance, and success” of those who had preceded them upon the sea.
Europeans greatly admired the craftsmanship of these vessels, but they also felt there was something a little startling about the idea of people putting to sea in boats that had been stitched together from scraps of wood. One early-eighteenth-century explorer recalled seeing a man some three miles out to sea in a craft so narrow it could accommodate only one person, sitting with his knees together. It was made, like the Nukutavake canoe, of “many small pieces of wood and held together by some plant,” and was so light it could be carried by a single man. Watching the progress of this canoe on the ocean was something of a revelation. “It was for us wonderful,” he wrote, “to see that one man alone dared to proceed in so frail a craft so far to sea, having nothing to help him but a paddle.” It was the merest inkling that here was a people with a different relationship to the ocean—people who could make their home on an atoll, people who could sail out to sea in a stitched ship—but, having little time or inclination to ponder the matter, the recorder of this interesting little tidbit turned and sailed on.
Outer Limits (#ulink_320e29fd-cf99-5b88-b095-9640cee64e1d)
New Zealand and Easter Island (#ulink_320e29fd-cf99-5b88-b095-9640cee64e1d)


Murderers’ Bay, New Zealand, 1642, from Abel Janszoon Tasman’s Journal (Amsterdam, 1898).
DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY.
ALL THE ISLANDS in the mid-Pacific are either high or low, volcanic or coralline. But down in the southwest corner, near the ocean’s edge, there is a large and important group of islands with an entirely different geologic history. New Zealand is one of the anchoring points of the Polynesian Triangle and a key piece of the Polynesian puzzle, but it differs from other Polynesian islands in several ways. It lies much farther south, in latitudes comparable to the stretch of North America that extends from North Carolina to Maine. It is temperate, not tropical; it can be hot in summer, but in the winter, at least in the south, it snows. New Zealand is also vast by comparison, with plains, lakes, rivers, fjords, mountain ranges, and a land area more than eight times that of all the other islands of Polynesia combined.
The islands of New Zealand are also unique in Polynesia in that they are, geologically speaking, “continental.” New Zealand is part of the ancient southern supercontinent of Gondwana, which once included all the Southern Hemispheric landmasses of Africa, South America, Antarctica, and Australia, as well as the Indian subcontinent. About a hundred million years ago, this supercontinent began to break up, and a piece of it drifted off into what is now the Pacific Ocean. Most of this fragment was submerged beneath the sea, but near the junction of the Australian and Pacific Plates, some of it was thrust up by tectonic forces. The result was the landmass we now know as New Zealand, or, to use its modern Polynesian name, Aotearoa. New Zealand still sits on this tectonic boundary, which is why it has earthquakes and active volcanoes.
Because it was part of old Gondwana and because it is insular and was isolated for tens of millions of years, New Zealand has a quirky evolutionary history. There seems to have been no mammalian stock from which to evolve on the Gondwanan fragment, and so, until the arrival of humans, there were no terrestrial mammals, nor were there any of the curious marsupials of nearby Australia—no wombats or koalas or kangaroos, no rodents or ruminants, no wild cats or dogs. The only mammals that could reach New Zealand were those that could swim (like seals) or fly (like bats), and even then there are questions about how the bats got there. Two of New Zealand’s three bat species are apparently descended from a South American bat, which, it is imagined, must have been blown across the Pacific in a giant prehistoric storm.
Among New Zealand’s indigenous plants and animals are a number of curious relics, including a truly enormous conifer and a lizard-like creature that is the world’s only surviving representative of an order so ancient it predates many dinosaurs. But the really odd thing about New Zealand is what happened to the birds. In the absence of predators and competitors, birds evolved to fill all the major ecological niches, becoming the “ecological equivalent of giraffes, kangaroos, sheep, striped possums, long-beaked echidnas and tigers.” Many of these birds were flightless, and some were huge. The largest species of moa—a now extinct flightless giant related to the ostrich, the emu, and the rhea—stood nearly twelve feet tall and weighed more than five hundred pounds. The moa was an herbivore, but there were also predators among these prehistoric birds, including a giant eagle with claws like a panther’s. There were grass-eating parrots and flightless ducks and birds that grazed like sheep in alpine meadows, as well as a little wren-like bird that scampered about the underbrush like a mouse.
None of these creatures were seen by the first Europeans to reach New Zealand, for two very simple reasons. The first is that many of them were already extinct. Although known to have survived long enough to coexist with humans, all twelve species of moa, the Haast’s eagle, two species of adzebills, and many others had vanished by the mid-seventeenth century, when Europeans arrived. The second is that, even if there had still been moas lumbering about the woods, the European discoverers of New Zealand would have missed them because they never actually set foot on shore.
AS WITH THE other islands of Polynesia, the European discovery of New Zealand was essentially a function of geography and winds. The vast majority of early European explorers entered the Pacific from the South American side. But there was another way in, from the west, and in 1642 a captain in the service of the Dutch East India Company sailed this route for the first time.
The Dutch East India Company, which was headquartered in Batavia (now the Indonesian capital of Jakarta), was the great mercantile engine of the seventeenth century, and all the major geographic discoveries in the Pacific during this period were made by Dutch captains in search of new markets and new goods for trade. One of these was a commander named Abel Janszoon Tasman, who, in 1642, set out with a pair of ships bound for the southern Pacific Ocean. Tasman followed what looks, on the face of it, like the most unlikely route imaginable. Departing from the island of Java, he sailed west across the Indian Ocean to Mauritius, a small island off the coast of Madagascar, which itself is a large island off the coast of southeastern Africa. There, he turned south and continued until he reached the band of powerful westerlies that would sweep him back eastward, all the way across the Indian Ocean, until he finally reached the Pacific. Tasman followed this lengthy and unintuitive route—sailing nearly ten thousand miles to reach an ocean that was less than twenty-five hundred miles from where he had begun—because the winds and currents in the Indian Ocean operate the same way they do in the Pacific, circling counterclockwise in a similar gyre.
The main obstacle between the Indian and Pacific Oceans is the continent of Australia, and the earliest Dutch discoveries in the seventeenth century were off Australia’s west coast. But Tasman’s route took him so far south that he missed the Australian mainland altogether, and the first body of land he met with after leaving Mauritius was the island, later named in his honor, of Tasmania. Continuing on to the east, he crossed what is now the Tasman Sea, and about a week later he sighted a “groot hooch verheven landt”—“a large land, uplifted high.” It can be difficult to tell how large a body of land is from the sea—European explorers were constantly mistaking islands for continents—but this time it was unmistakable. The land before them was dark and rugged, with ranks of serried mountains receding deep into an interior overhung with clouds. A heavy sea beat upon the rocky coast, “rolling towards it in huge billows and swells,” offering no obvious place to go ashore. So Tasman turned and followed the land as it stretched away to the northeast.
For four days they sailed with the wind from the west, keeping their distance for fear of being driven onto the rocks. From the sea, the country looked dark and desolate. But at last, on the fourth day, they came to a long, curving spit bending round to the east, enclosing a large bay. Here they saw smoke rising in several places—a sure sign that the country was inhabited. Tasman and his officers decided that they would go ashore, and by sunset on the following day they had brought the ships to anchor in the bay. From there they could see fires burning on shore and several canoes, two of which came out to meet them in the gloom. When they had come within hailing distance, the islanders called out in “a rough loud voice,” but the Dutch could not understand them. They had been equipped at Batavia with a vocabulary, almost surely the word list assembled twenty-five years earlier by the explorers Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire, but the language spoken by these people did not seem to match it. The islanders blew on something that sounded to the Dutch like a Moorish trumpet—no doubt a conch shell—and a pair of Dutch trumpeters responded in turn. Then, as darkness was falling, the parley ended, and the islanders paddled back to shore.
Early the next morning, a canoe came out to the ships. Once again, the islanders called out, and this time the Dutch made signs for them to come aboard, showing them white linen and knives. The men in the canoe could not be persuaded, however, and after a little while they returned to shore. Tasman held a second council, at which it was decided to bring the ships closer inshore, “since there was good anchoring-ground and these people (as it seems) are seeking friendship.” But before the ink was even dry on this resolution, a fleet of seven canoes set out from shore. Two of these took up positions nearby, and when a small boat ferrying men from one of the Dutch ships to the other passed between them, they attacked it, ramming the boat, boarding it, stabbing and clubbing the men, and throwing the bodies overboard. The attack was fast, furious, and effective; three of the Dutch sailors were killed instantly, one was mortally wounded, and three more were eventually rescued from the sea. The sailors on board the ships fired their guns, but they were too far away or too late or just too inaccurate, and the islanders escaped to safety, taking the body of one of the Dutch sailors with them as they went.
Tasman was shocked by the audacity of this attack and by the steady increase in the number of canoes gathering in the bay—first four, then seven, then eleven, and finally twenty-two—and he ordered his men to set sail as quickly as they could. But the islanders were equally determined not to let their quarry escape, and they pursued them right across the bay, abandoning the chase only when a man standing in one of the leading canoes was shot. Tasman christened the place Murderers Bay and made no further attempts to land in New Zealand. He never grasped that the bay in which he had been attacked (now known as Golden Bay) lay at the opening of the large strait that separates the North and South Islands of New Zealand, or that the “continent” he had discovered was in fact two large islands. Thinking that he might have chanced upon some corner of Terra Australis Incognita, he named it Staten Landt and proposed that it might be connected to the Staten Landt named in 1616 by Schouten and Le Maire. This, however, was unlikely, as Schouten and Le Maire’s Staten Landt was an island off the tip of South America, more than five thousand watery miles away.
TASMAN DID AT least get a look at the inhabitants of New Zealand, the people we know today as Māori. He described them as average in height “but rough in voice and bones,” with a complexion that was something “between brown and yellow” and long black hair, which they wore tied up on the tops of their heads in the fashion of the Japanese. Their boats were made from two narrow canoes, “over which some planks or other seating was laid, Such that above water one can see through under the vessel.” Each carried roughly a dozen men, who handled their craft “very cleverly.”
Interestingly, these double-hulled vessels sound a lot like canoes observed by seventeenth-century Europeans in other parts of Polynesia, but by the time the next European reached New Zealand, more than a century later, they were few and far between. What later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visitors to New Zealand commonly reported were the great waka taua: enormous single-hulled war canoes—up to a hundred feet long, with a breadth of five or six feet—which could carry as many as seventy or eighty men. Nowhere else in Polynesia were single-hulled vessels of such prodigious dimensions ever seen, for the simple reason that nowhere else in Polynesia did trees grow to this size. Carved, whenever possible, from a single trunk, they were designed as coastal and river vessels and were never intended for transoceanic travel.
This apparent evolution in canoe design is a salutary reminder that cultures are not static and that there is a logic to their transformations. If the Māori stopped making double-hulled oceangoing canoes, it must have been because they were no longer sailing across the ocean. But Tasman’s evidence suggests that as late as the mid-seventeenth century, at least in the South Island, the inhabitants of New Zealand were still using vessels of a type that linked them to the rest of Polynesia and to the tradition of long-distance ocean travel.
Tasman departed New Zealand with little more than a dramatic tale about the “detestable deed” committed by its inhabitants and set his ships on a northeast course, which would bring him, in about two weeks’ time, to the islands of Tonga. He was now entering a region of the Pacific with a much higher concentration of islands, a greater population density, and a complex set of relationships among contiguous archipelagoes. Tonga lies a few hundred miles from Samoa, at the western edge of the Polynesian Triangle. Together they constitute the western gateway to Polynesia; here are the oldest Polynesian languages, the longest settlement histories, the deepest Polynesian roots.
Tasman was not the first European to reach this region. The Dutch explorers Schouten and Le Maire had passed through the northern edge of the Tongan archipelago in 1616, stopping at a pair of islands where they traded for coconuts, pigs, bananas, yams, and fish and collected words for their vocabulary. Tasman, coming from the south, made landfall at the southern end of the archipelago, on the island of Tongatapu, where the people he met seemed friendly and eager to trade. He described them as brown-skinned, with long, thick hair, rather taller than average, and “painted Black from the middle to the thighs.” They came out to the ships in large numbers, readily climbing aboard, and relations between the two groups were generally amicable. Tasman was glad of the opportunity to get fresh food and water, but he was careful to keep his men armed, since, as his recent experience in New Zealand had taught him, it is difficult to know “what sticks in the heart.” The Tongans, however, seemed focused on trade, and much of Tasman’s account is given over to detailing the terms: a hen for a nail or chain of beads; a small pig for a fathom of dungaree; ten to twelve coconuts for three to four nails or a double medium nail; two pigs for a knife with a silver band plus eight to nine nails; yams, coconuts, and bark cloth for a pair of trousers, a small mirror, and some beads.
Once again, Tasman tried to use the vocabulary collected by his Dutch predecessors. He reported that he asked specifically about water and pigs—while somewhat confusingly displaying a coconut and a hen—but that the islanders did not seem to understand him. Reading his account, one longs to be able to go back and observe these transactions. Was he using the right part of the vocabulary? How was he pronouncing the words? Did his gestures merely confuse the situation? The story is all the more tantalizing because parts of Schouten and Le Maire’s word list had been collected just a few hundred miles away. For “hog” they had recorded the word “Pouacca,” a quite respectable rendering of the common Polynesian word puaka, meaning “pig.” For “water” they suggested “Waij.” Adjusting for Dutch spelling and pronunciation, this gives something like the English “vie,” which closely resembles a word for “water” in several Polynesian languages. It should have worked, but it didn’t, and a connection that might have been made slipped through the cracks.
IT WAS LEFT to the last of the early Pacific explorers to finally put two and two together. Sailing from the Netherlands in 1721, the Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen rounded Cape Horn and began making his way up the South American coast. For decades there had been talk of an island, or a chain of islands, or even a high continental coast somewhere in the southeastern Pacific. Many had gone looking for the country known as Davis’s Land (after a putative sighting by a seventeenth-century English buccaneer), and Roggeveen was determined to find it. Leaving the coast of South America, he plowed on through seventeen hundred miles of empty ocean, and on Easter Sunday 1722 he caught sight of what would turn out to be the most isolated inhabited island in the world.
Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, to use its modern Polynesian name, lies in the middle of a three-million-square-mile circle of empty sea. Its nearest neighbors, more than a thousand miles to the west, are tiny Henderson Island and even tinier Pitcairn, neither of which was inhabited when Europeans reached the Pacific, though both showed signs of prehistoric occupation. Easter Island is nominally a high island, but it is small, old, heavily weathered, and dry; it has no rivers, uncertain rainfall, and no protective coral reef. Difficult to inhabit and even more difficult to find, it constitutes the southeastern vertex of the Polynesian Triangle and represents the farthest known extension of Polynesian culture to the east.
At first, Roggeveen believed it to be “the precursor of the extended coast of the unknown Southland,” but the Dutch were destined to be disappointed on numerous fronts. What looked from a distance like golden dunes turned out to be “withered grass” and “other scorched and burnt vegetation.” The fine, multicolored clothes in which the islanders at first appeared to be dressed proved, on closer inspection, to be made of pounded tree bark dyed with earth, while the “silver plates” the Dutch thought they saw in their ears were made from something resembling a parsnip. Roggeveen wrote that he was struck by the “singular poverty and barrenness” of the island. It was not that nothing would grow—the inhabitants seemed well enough supplied with bananas, sugarcane, taro, and sweet potato—but rather that the island was entirely devoid of trees. This was puzzling on many fronts, but especially because it was unclear how, without any kind of strong and heavy wood to use as levers, rollers, or skids, the islanders could have erected their great stone statues—the famous moai of Easter Island.
These monolithic sculptures, with their long, sloping, oversize heads, upturned noses, and thin, pouting lips, are by now almost as familiar as the pyramids of Giza and perhaps more challenging to explain. The average moai stands about fourteen feet tall and weighs around twelve tons, but some are twenty to thirty feet in height, and the largest, had it been completed, would have stood seventy feet tall and weighed 270 tons. They are made from a kind of solidified ash known as volcanic tuff, and nearly half of the roughly nine hundred known statues still lie in the quarry where they were carved. A third were transported to various locations around the island, where they were erected on stone platforms and topped with stone hats, while the remainder lie scattered about the island, seemingly abandoned en route.
Roggeveen may have been the first, but he was by no means the last person to wonder how these statues had been erected. Indeed, the mystery of the Easter Island moai—what they meant, why they were carved, why their production abruptly ceased (there are half-finished moai in the quarry that are still attached to the rock), but especially how they were maneuvered into place—has inspired all kinds of speculation. People have tried to show how the statues might have been moved using only locally available materials: rocking them from side to side and walking them forward; sliding them on banana palm rollers; dragging them along on sledges suspended under wooden frames. The main problem, as Roggeveen noted in 1722, is the absence of everything that might have been needed to move a ten- or twenty- or thirty-ton block of stone: wheels, metal, draft animals, cordage, but most obviously timber.
Although Roggeveen found the island essentially barren of trees, modern studies of pollen found in sediment cores and archaeological finds of fossil palm nuts, root molds, and fragments of charcoal show that Easter Island was once home to a variety of tree species. Some twenty-two now vanished species have been identified, including the oceanic rosewood, the Malay apple, and something resembling the Chilean wine palm, which on the South American mainland grows to a height of sixty-five feet. Some of these trees would have produced edible fruit, others would have been good for making fires, at least two are known to have been suitable for making canoes, and still others produce bark that is used for making rope in other parts of Polynesia. Taken together, they would have constituted an entire arboreal foundation for human existence, not to mention a habitat for many now extinct species of birds.
Exactly what happened to all these trees is unknown, and there is a vigorous debate about the cause of what has been described as “the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world.” One argument points to the island’s ecological fragility and its vulnerability to changes brought about by humans. Sediment cores on Easter Island reveal dramatic increases in erosion and charcoal particles around A.D. 1200. This is often taken as a proxy for human activity in the Pacific, where slash-and-burn agriculture was widely practiced, and it has been used to support the argument that Easter Island’s ecological collapse began with the arrival of the first Polynesian settlers.
According to this view, the original colonizers began felling trees and clearing land for gardens and plantations as soon as they arrived. On a different island—one that was wetter, warmer, younger, larger, or closer to other landmasses—such activities might have altered the island’s ecology without destroying it. But Easter Island is a uniquely precarious environment. The slow-growing trees were not quickly replaced, while the loss of the canopy exposed already poor soils to “heating, drying, wind, and rain.” This, in turn, led to erosion, the loss of topsoil, and a general decrease in the island’s fertility. Each step in the degradation of the environment led to the next, and once the damage reached a certain level, there was no going back. Others—partly in response to the disturbing image of some desperate and improvident Easter Islander chopping down the last palm tree—have argued that the island’s deforestation was caused not by the islanders themselves but by their commensals, in particular the Polynesian rat. It was the rat, they argue, with its taste for nuts, seeds, and bark, its lack of predators, its climbing ability, and its fast rate of reproduction, that spelled doom for the virgin forests on Rapa Nui.
But however it came about, the loss of trees must have reached catastrophically into every aspect of the islanders’ lives: no shade, no nuts, no bark for cloth or cordage, no wood for houses or fuel. One of the most disturbing implications is that without wood, the inhabitants of Easter Island would have had no way to make canoes, especially the large, oceangoing kind they would have needed if they ever wanted to leave. For an island off the beaten track, with no near neighbors, this was a potentially ruinous reality. If one consequence of deforestation was that it brought to an end the age of monumental sculpture, an even more poignant implication is that it also spelled isolation from the rest of the world.
FOLLOWING THEIR BRIEF stop at Easter Island, Roggeveen and his men set sail again to the northwest, and May found them wandering among the northern Tuamotus. The hazards of this archipelago were forcefully brought home to them when one of the ships, the Afrikaansche Galei, ran aground on the atoll of Takapoto—the very island that, in one of history’s little jokes, Schouten and Le Maire had named “Bottomless.” Not so bottomless after all, as it turned out. Sailing on, Roggeveen came to the uplifted coral island of Makatea, where he found people who seemed “in all respects similar to those of Paaslant” (a version of the Dutch name for Easter Island), and then to Samoa, at the western edge of the Polynesian Triangle, where he again observed how “like the Paaschlanders in sturdiness and robustness of body, also in painting themselves,” the islanders were.
Thus, by 1722, there was finally enough history between Europe and the peoples of the remote Pacific for someone to begin thinking about the big picture. Europeans were still fixated on Terra Australis Incognita, but another poser had at last occurred to them. “To make an end and conclusion of all the islands which we have discovered and found to be peopled,” wrote Roggeveen, “there remains merely the presenting of the following speculative question, which seems to me must be placed among those questions which exceed the understanding, and therefore are to be heard, but answered with silence.” This question, which is almost completely obscured by Roggeveen’s tortured syntax—a sign perhaps of how difficult it was for him even to think—was, in essence: Who are all these people and how did they end up here?
Roggeveen appears to have been the first European to note the similarity of one group of Polynesians to another, but what interested him most was the question of how they had gotten to the islands. The problem, as Roggeveen saw it, was one of isolation and distance, something he now understood from hard personal experience—having rounded the Horn in mid-January, he did not reach the far side of the Pacific until the following September. On the grounds that the mysteries of navigation had only recently been unraveled, Roggeveen argued that no one could possibly have sailed such distances in the days before the Spanish and Portuguese. To suggest otherwise, he argued, “would resemble mockery rather than serious thought.”
This left only two possibilities. First, that the islanders of the remote Pacific had been brought there by the Spanish and left as colonists, though it was hard to imagine why the Spanish would go to the trouble of setting up “colonies of Indians in these distant regions” when there was nothing obvious to be gained by it. Then, too, the Spanish had always claimed that the islanders were already there when they arrived. That left just one possible solution, in Roggeveen’s view: that “the Indians who inhabit these newly discovered islands,” the people we now know as Polynesians, had not in fact come from anywhere but had been created in situ by God.
It is probably safe to say that the suggestion that Polynesians were autochthonous—that is, that they had first sprung into being on the islands on which they lived—was almost as absurd in 1722 as it seems to us today. But it does suggest how perplexing Europeans found the issue of Polynesian origins. In truth, it was not yet entirely clear how very puzzling a problem this was, since large swaths of Polynesia had yet to be discovered. Although European explorers had been crisscrossing the ocean for more than two centuries, long-standing political rivalries meant that knowledge of the region was still largely piecemeal—the Spanish knew some things, the Dutch knew others, no one was interested in sharing information, and everyone remained dazzled by visions of Terra Australis Incognita. All this, however, was about to change.
Part II (#ulink_64b68a49-0d4c-5fab-a5ea-1311702c6e32)
Connecting the Dots (#ulink_64b68a49-0d4c-5fab-a5ea-1311702c6e32)
(1764–1778) (#ulink_64b68a49-0d4c-5fab-a5ea-1311702c6e32)
In which we travel with Captain Cook to the heart of Polynesia, meet the Tahitian priest and navigator Tupaia, and sail with the two of them to New Zealand, where Tupaia makes an important discovery. (#ulink_64b68a49-0d4c-5fab-a5ea-1311702c6e32)
Tahiti (#ulink_d1c652bb-97b3-5053-b408-e4d4600d516b)
The Heart of Polynesia (#ulink_d1c652bb-97b3-5053-b408-e4d4600d516b)


“A View taken in the bay of Oaite Peha [Vaitepiha] Otaheite [Tahiti]” by William Hodges, 1776.
NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH, LONDON. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
BETWEEN MENDAÑA’S VOYAGE of 1595 and the midpoint of the eighteenth century, there were just five European expeditions that intersected in any significant way with the Polynesian world. But beginning in 1764, the number and intensity of these “visitations” increased dramatically, with ships coming thick and fast from England, France, Spain, and Russia—so many that there were sometimes two or three expeditions in the Pacific at one time—and encounters that lasted not days but weeks and months.
The reasons for this were many, but one important factor was the conclusion, in 1763, of the Seven Years’ War, a messy international conflict involving all the great European powers and several colonies, from which Britain emerged as a dominant power with the world’s most formidable navy. No longer tied up fighting its enemies, the British crown quickly set out to secure new territories and new routes, dispatching Commodore John Byron in 1764 on the first of a series of expeditions to the Pacific. Byron sailed in His Majesty’s Ship Dolphin, and when he returned in 1766, the Dolphin was immediately sent out again under the command of Captain Samuel Wallis. When Wallis returned in 1768, a third expedition was on the verge of departure. The aim of the first two voyages was largely strategic: Byron was to stake a claim to the Falkland Islands, examine the coast of New Albion (California), and look for a Northwest Passage; Wallis was to search for a continent between New Zealand and Cape Horn. But the goal of the third voyage was explicitly scientific: to carry a crew of scientists to a location from which they would be able to observe a celestial event known as the transit of Venus.
A transit of Venus occurs when the planet Venus passes between the earth and the sun. It was of interest to eighteenth-century astronomers because accurate measurements of the event’s duration could be used to calculate the size of the solar system, thereby answering one of the burning astronomical questions of the age. Unfortunately, the transit of Venus occurs only infrequently: twice in a period of eight years and then not again for a century or more. It was observed for the first time in 1639 (having passed unnoticed in 1631) and did not occur again in the seventeenth century. Late-eighteenth-century astronomers knew they would have two bites at the cherry—one in 1761 and another in 1769—after which their chances would be over, since it would not come again until 1874. A major international effort to document the transit of 1761 had produced disappointing results, and in the years leading up to 1769, members of the international scientific community, including Britain’s Royal Society, mounted a major campaign to ensure that the last opportunity of their lifetimes would not be lost.
An important consideration in all of this is where on the earth the transit can be seen, since it is fully visible only from those places that are in daylight for the duration of the event. In 1761, this had included most of the Eurasian continent, but in 1769 the ideal place from which to observe it was, most inconveniently, the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The only suitable islands known to fall within the “cone of visibility” were, on the eastern end, the Marquesas, last seen in 1595 and none too securely charted, and, in the west, the islands of Tonga, last visited by Abel Tasman in 1642. Between these, so far as anyone knew, there were only low coral atolls with terrible reefs and not a single safe harbor, and no reliable sources of food or water. Still, the Royal Society was committed, and plans were drawn up for an expedition with a final destination to be determined.
The man chosen to lead this expedition was a little-known lieutenant with a solid if undistinguished naval career and a reputation for being extremely good at survey work. At forty years of age, James Cook was not young, nor was he a man of rank or birth. He was tall, strong-featured, intelligent, disciplined, and extremely hardworking. Though largely self-taught, he was known as a talented mathematician and admired for his astronomical work, including an observation of a solar eclipse made while he was surveying the coast of Newfoundland. The voyage for which he had been selected was also somewhat out of the ordinary for a Royal Naval expedition. With only one ship (and a small one at that) and a very great distance to be covered, across a vast and largely uncharted sea, there was potential for glory but also significant risk.
The commander appointed, a suitable vessel was selected and rechristened the H.M.S. Endeavour, and a complement of sailors, scientists, and supernumeraries were named. These included the lively and observant young gentleman Joseph Banks—“one of the spoilt children of fortune,” as his biographer affectionately dubs him—who traveled as a passenger at his own expense, with an entourage consisting of two artists, a secretary, four servants, and a pair of dogs. But with just two and a half months to go before the Endeavour’s departure, the expedition still had no clear destination. And then, out of the salt-stained blue, the Dolphin returned, bringing news of an unexpected discovery.
THE DOLPHIN HAD been sent out under the command of Captain Wallis to scour the southern reaches of the Pacific Ocean. Wallis’s instructions directed him to sail west from Cape Horn for 100 to 120 degrees of longitude (some four to five thousand miles), a course that, had he been able to maintain it, would have brought him all the way to New Zealand. This was plainly impossible, given the strength and direction of the prevailing winds. Emerging into the Pacific from the Strait of Magellan, he was pushed north even as he tried to sail west, and his first sight of anything at all was in the Tuamotus. There was nothing surprising about this—a landfall in the Tuamotu Archipelago was by now to be expected. But Wallis’s path intersected the island chain at a point somewhat south of the routes taken by his predecessors, and this put him on the path to one of the most significant landfalls of the eighteenth century: “The island of Tahiti, famous name, the heart of Polynesia.”
Tahiti is the largest of a group of high islands known collectively as the Society Islands. They are located in the very center of the Polynesian Triangle and consist of two clusters: a windward group, which includes Tahiti and Mo‘orea, and a leeward group, which includes Ra‘iatea and Bora Bora. While not objectively large, they are large for islands in this part of the sea; Tahiti itself, though less than forty miles long, is the largest landmass for a thousand miles in any direction. To the modern eye, the Society Islands are perhaps the most striking omission on early maps of the Pacific—the islands it is hardest to believe no one had yet found. In fact, Magellan, Mendaña, Quirós, Schouten and Le Maire, and Byron had all sailed right past them, sometimes at a distance of less than a hundred miles. Roggeveen even caught sight of the peaks of Bora Bora, assumed it was an island discovered by someone else, and inexplicably sailed on.
From the European point of view, the discovery of Tahiti was a dramatic and fortuitous event. Not only had Wallis located an island that was right in the center of the cone of visibility for the 1769 transit of Venus, it was the island of a navigator’s dreams. Tahiti is mountainous, like the Marquesas, but, with its habitable coastline, fringing reef, and long stretches of crystalline blue lagoon, its topography is considerably more congenial. Its location, about 2,500 miles due south of Hawai‘i, is also meteorologically ideal: not too hot, not too dry, not too wet, not overly subject to hurricanes or typhoons. To the modern visitor it is delightful; to the eighteenth-century voyager it was a paradise on earth.
But, of course, such an island was bound to be inhabited, as indeed it was. When the crew of the Dolphin first sighted Tahiti, it appeared to them as a great cloud-covered mountain rising out of the sea. It was still many miles away at that point and, as evening was coming on, Wallis decided to put off his approach until morning. At daybreak he steered again for the island, but when the ship had come within six or seven miles, it was suddenly engulfed in fog. This, wrote the Dolphin’s master, George Robertson, “made us all very uneasy,” for by now they were close enough to hear the sea breaking and “making a great noice, on some reefs of Rocks.” This was nothing, however, next to the shock they received when the fog suddenly lifted to reveal not just a deadly row of breakers between the ship and the land but more than eight hundred men in canoes between the breakers and the ship.
Estimates of the pre-contact populations of Pacific islands vary widely, but in Tahiti at the time of the Dolphin’s arrival, there were probably something like 60,000 to 70,000 people, with perhaps 300,000 in the archipelago as a whole. Certainly enough to supply thousands of warriors and hundreds of canoes—Robertson would later describe the ship as being surrounded by more than five hundred canoes, manned, “at a Moderate Computation,” by four thousand men. The risks of trying to land on so populous an island were obvious, and there were those who believed—rightly, as it turned out—that “nothing could be hade without blows.” At the same time, many of the crew were so debilitated by scurvy that the prospect of sailing on was unthinkable, especially when the tantalizing scent of tropical vegetation wafted out to the ship during the night.
The Tahitians in their canoes paddled round Wallis’s ship, holding up plantain branches and making speeches and throwing the fronds into the sea. The British showed trinkets and made friendly signs and tried to entice the islanders on board. The Tahitians seemed cheerful and talked a great deal in a language that sounded to Robertson like that of the Patagonians of Tierra del Fuego (with which it had no relationship whatsoever). More and more canoes continued to arrive, and eventually a “fine brisk young man” scrambled up by the mizzen chains and leapt out of the shrouds onto an awning, where he stood, laughing and looking down on the quarterdeck. Soon more Tahitians were climbing aboard, looking around at everything and snatching whatever they could. After a while—the story is familiar—the Tahitians began to be “a Little surly,” the British grew nervous, and the next thing was the firing of a nine-pound gun. At this, the Tahitians all jumped overboard and swam away to their canoes. Wallis ordered his men to make sail, and the islanders returned to shore.
Wallis was not leaving Tahiti, however; he was just circling in search of a safe place to land. As the Dolphin sailed round the island, the two sides engaged in a series of tactical maneuvers. At one moment, the Tahitians would be visiting the ship, bringing quantities of pigs, chickens, coconuts, breadfruit, and bananas; at the next they would be hooting and hollering, trying to make off with the ship’s anchors, or ambushing its boats. The meaning of all this was obscure to the Europeans, who alternated between trying to make friends with the Tahitians and aggressively fending off what they perceived as attacks.
The Tahitians, meanwhile, were also trying to make sense of what was going on. According to the Reverend James Cover, who lived in Tahiti some three decades later and who talked to descendants of people who had witnessed these events, the Tahitians were astonished by their first sight of a European ship, and “some supposed that it was a floating island,” an idea with some basis in Polynesian myth. On closer inspection, they realized that it was, in fact, a vessel, though one unlike any they had ever seen—while the largest Tahitian war canoes were almost as long as the Dolphin, they did not have anything like its breadth or height or its huge masts with their elaborate complex of rigging and sails.
How the Tahitians interpreted these events is, as many historians have noted, “by any standard of objective discourse, nothing more than informed guess,” since there are no contemporary sources that capture their point of view. But it seems likely that, at least in the beginning, they viewed the Dolphin as something come from the realm of the ancestors—a vessel from the mythic homeland of Hawaiki or the netherworld of Te Pō. Some have suggested that—as with Cook’s encounter at Kealakekua Bay—the Tahitians may have associated the strangers with an incarnation of the war god ‘Oro. The color red, which was prominently displayed on the sides of the ship, on the coats of the marines, and on the pennant that the British planted to symbolize their possession of the island, was linked with this deity, while lightning and thunder (cannon and gun fire) were signs of his terrible power. Then there were the many “wanton tricks” performed by women and girls, who stood on the rocks and in the prows of the canoes exposing their genitals—gestures that were interpreted by the British as “erotic enticement” but that, according to the anthropologist Anne Salmond, were actually a form of ritual behavior that “opened a pathway to Te Po, the realm of the ancestor gods, channelling their power” against the strangers.
When at last the Dolphin stopped circling and came to anchor in Matavai Bay, the skirmishing that had marked these first days came to a head. According to those on board the ship, the morning began quite ordinarily. Canoes came out to the ship to trade—nails and “Toys” for hogs, fowls, and fruit—all conducted “very fair.” An audience of thousands had gathered on the shore, and the bay was filled with hundreds of canoes. Many of these had a girl in front who “drew all our people upon the Gunwells to see them,” and although some of the sailors were worried about the large numbers of stones they could see lying in the bottoms of the canoes, most did not believe that the islanders had “any Bade Intention against us,” especially as “all the men seemd as hearty and merry as the Girls.”
Then a large double canoe carrying an obviously important figure put off from shore, and, at the same time, a silence fell upon the Tahitian crowd. The dignitary pulled on a red mantle and thrust a staff wrapped in white cloth into the air, and all at once the Tahitians began pelting the Dolphin with rocks—so many that in a few seconds “all our Decks was full of Great and small stones, and several of our men cut and Bruisd.” The British were slow to react, but when the Tahitians “gave another shout and powerd in the stones lyke hail,” they collected their wits and fired the great guns. The effect was dramatic. The explosion of sound, the flash of fire, and the rattle of shot on the canoes struck the Tahitians with “terror and amazement,” and they cried, so the Revered Cover tells us, “as with one voice, Eatooa harremye! Eatooa harremye! The God is come! The God is come! as they supposed, pouring thunder and lightning upon them.”
The battle was fierce but short. The British fired grape and shot into the canoes, hitting even those who had retreated to what the Tahitians clearly believed was a safe distance. The gunners took aim, in particular, at the large ceremonial canoe, hitting it squarely amidships and cutting it in two. At this, the Tahitian armada disbanded—so fast, wrote Wallis, that within half an hour there was not a single canoe left in the bay.
ALTHOUGH THE BATTLE of Matavai Bay mirrored European contact experiences in many parts of Polynesia—New Zealand, Rurutu, and Hawai‘i, to name just a few—the story that ultimately made its way back to Europe was not one of attacks and ambushes and fleets of stone-throwing warriors in canoes. It was a tale—familiar to us even now—of beauty and fascination, a story, for the most part, about Polynesian girls.
After the failure of their assault on the Dolphin, the Tahitians made no further attempts to attack the British and instead sought to engage and placate them. Wallis struck up a friendship with a powerful local chiefess named Purea, who had a political agenda of her own and who seems to have been interested in co-opting this new and awful form of power. The rest of the crew went from openly fearing the Tahitians to openly consorting with them. On his arrival in Tahiti, Wallis had established an official market for foodstuffs, based on a currency of different-sized nails. But once his sailors had begun to recover from scurvy, what they wanted even more than fruit and vegetables was sex, and by the end of their second week in Tahiti a black market had emerged. The currency of choice was nails, inflation quickly set in, and within a matter of weeks the whole thing was so out of hand that every cleat in the Dolphin had been drawn, two-thirds of the men were sleeping on the deck (having traded away the nails used to sling their hammocks), and the carpenter was saying to anyone who would listen that he feared for the integrity of the ship.
It is possible that, had Wallis been the only European to return with stories of Tahiti, the narrative might have been somewhat more nuanced: a story of light and dark, of amity and aggression, of both love and war. But the era of Polynesian isolation was over: just eight months after Wallis’s appearance, a second group of ships arrived, this time from France. They were commanded by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, whose name lingers on in the beautiful bougainvillea, and although they remained in Tahiti for just nine days, it was long enough to form a vivid impression. The Tahitians, now experienced in the ways of Europeans, did not even try to attack the French ships but instead moved quickly to engage the strangers, and the French experience was largely one of hospitality.
Everything about Tahiti enchanted the elegant, erudite Bougainville: “The mildness of the climate, the beauty of the scenery, the fertility of the soil everywhere watered by rivers and cascades.” “I thought,” he wrote, “I was transported into the garden of Eden.” He saw the landscape in terms of the picturesque—“nature in that beautiful disorder which it was never in the power of art to imitate”—and the inhabitants as children of nature. The islanders, he wrote, “seemed to live in an enviable happiness,” and the worst consequence—for the French—of shipwreck in these parts “would have been to pass the remainder of our days on an isle adorned with all the gifts of nature, and to exchange the sweets of the mother-country, for a peaceable life, exempted from cares.” Writing for an audience of cosmopolitan Parisians, Bougainville cast the Polynesian inhabitants of Tahiti as innocent sensualists. Wallis had taken possession of Tahiti on behalf of the British, dutifully, if unimaginatively, naming it King George the Third’s Island. In the first shimmer of what would come to be known as le mirage tahitien—that constellation of images of indolence and hedonism that still cluster about Polynesia today—Bougainville rechristened the island New Cythera, after the place at which the goddess Aphrodite had risen from the sea.
A Man of Knowledge (#ulink_ca0a3eb5-d345-5c6b-9251-1bb2b536e5d6)
Cook Meets Tupaia (#ulink_ca0a3eb5-d345-5c6b-9251-1bb2b536e5d6)


“Review of the war galleys at Tahiti” by William Hodges, 1776.
NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH, LONDON.
WALLIS ARRIVED BACK in England in May 1768, and Cook sailed for Tahiti in August. The end of January found him off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, on the Pacific side of Cape Horn. From then until the end of March, when the first unmistakable signs of land began to appear, the Endeavour was abroad on the great ocean. They were making anywhere from twenty-five to one hundred forty miles a day, keeping to a general northwesterly direction, though periodically the wind would force them round to the southwest. Cook logged the distance and direction traveled, the speed and strength of the wind, the latitude and longitude of their position. But as January bled into February, and February gave way to March, there was little else to report. Mile upon mile of ocean slipped by; masses of cloud swept in and were torn away by the wind; the sea rose, whipped to a froth, and then fell to a smooth, flat calm. There were creatures of the deep—porpoises and bonitos—and of the air: red- and white-tailed tropic birds replacing the high-latitude shearwaters and petrels as the Endeavour plowed steadily northward, enclosed in the great circle of sea and sky.
Inside the great cabin, Cook plotted their progress, aware that oceans were known for their deceits. Others passing this way had written of cloud banks looming in the distance like high land, and one of the maps he consulted—Alexander Dalrymple’s “Chart of the South Pacifick Ocean, Pointing Out the Discoveries Made Therein Previous to 1764”—showed numerous “signs of continent” in this quadrant of the sea. This chart, and the history in which it appeared, had been drafted in support of Dalrymple’s fervid belief in the existence of Terra Australis Incognita and thrust into Joseph Banks’s hands on the eve of their departure. It detailed all the known landfalls of the previous two centuries, as well as all the unsubstantiated rumors, but Cook encountered none of these. Keeping his ship’s head pointed for Tahiti, he tracked steadily through the emptiness of the southeastern Pacific, making a long, clean, northwesterly run of more than four thousand miles.
The atmosphere on board the Endeavour was increasingly one of anticipation as each day brought them closer to the island they had all heard so much about. At 39 degrees south latitude, Banks reported that the weather had begun to feel “soft and comfortable like the spring in England.” The next day the ship was surrounded by killer whales. On March 1, Banks wrote that he had begun the new month “by pulling off an under waistcoat,” and the next day he “began to hope that we were now so near the peacefull part of the Pacifick ocean that we may almost cease to fear any more gales.” Soon, however, they discovered a new kind of discomfort: the weather turned hot and damp, and everything began to mold. When, a few days later, the wind increased, they thought briefly they had picked up the trades. But there was more troublesome weather ahead: heavy squalls of rain and hot, damp air and days of frustratingly light wind.
Toward the end of March, Cook reported some egg birds, a kind of tern seen only in the vicinity of land, as well as some man-of-war (i.e., frigate) birds, which were never known to rest at sea. “All the birds we saw this Day went a way to the NW at Night,” observed the master’s mate. A few days later, a log of wood floated past the ship. The next day someone spotted a piece of seaweed—all noteworthy events after fifty-eight days of blue-water sailing. About this time, a disturbing incident occurred: a young marine named William Greenslade threw himself overboard. Caught in a minor act of thieving while on duty, he had been hounded by his fellow marines and, according to Banks, was so demoralized that, on being called to account, he slipped over the side instead. Poor Greenslade—just nine days later their first Pacific island hove into view.
It was an atoll about four miles long, with an oval lagoon, a handful of small islets, and long stretches of barren beach and reef. At one end there was a clump of trees, and near the middle a pair of tall coconut palms, which, with their fronds flying before the easterly wind, reminded Cook of a flag. It was inhabited by men who “March’d along the shore abreast of the Ship with long clubs in their hands as tho they meant to oppose our landing.” Cook sounded but found no bottom, and in the absence of an anchorage, he ordered the ship to sail on. He named this, his first Pacific atoll, Lagoon Island—a lot of them would have lagoons, as it turned out. Historians have concluded that it was Vahitahi, an island at the southeastern end of the Tuamotu Archipelago.
As he picked his way through the reefs and islands over the next few days, Cook sighted several of the Tuamotus, naming them mostly according to shape: Bow Island, Chain Island, Two Groups. Some were inhabited, and on a couple of occasions he slowed the ship and waited to see if the islanders would come off in their canoes—they did not. From a distance, he admired the palms and the reef-enclosed bodies of water, which, with a kind of persistent Englishness, he described as “lakes” and “ponds.” But there was nowhere to stop, and in any case he was not particularly interested in stopping, for they were now getting close to their destination. Then, on the morning of April 11, they sighted Tahiti, rising dark and rugged from the sea, a dramatically different vision from the flat, bright rings of coral in their wake.
Cook quickly established himself in the same bay that Wallis had occupied, setting up camp on a point of land that he named Point Venus—not for the reasons that had inspired Bougainville but in honor of the event they had come to observe. No one would have missed the double entendre, however; even before the ship had come to anchor, Cook implemented a prohibition against the giving of “any thing that is made of Iron . . . in exchange for any thing but provisions.” The Tahitians showed no signs of aggression, welcoming Cook and his officers and leading them on a pleasant ramble through the woods. The shade, wrote Banks, was deep and delicious among “groves of Cocoa nut and bread fruit trees loaded with a profusion of fruit.” Houses were scattered picturesquely here and there. It was, he wrote, “the truest picture of an arcadia . . . that the imagination can form.”
And yet, something was amiss. Four of the Endeavour’s men had been to Tahiti with Wallis, and it was clear to them that something had happened in the intervening years. Several of the large houses and canoe sheds that had formerly lined the bay were gone, and many of the people they had expected to see were nowhere to be found. One of these was Purea, the chiefess whose star had been in the ascendant in 1767. She had since been defeated by a rival and forced to flee to another part of the island, but once word got around of the Endeavour’s arrival, she put in an appearance, accompanied by her counselor Tupaia.
And here steps onto the stage one of the most intriguing figures in this story. Tupaia, who is variously described as Purea’s right-hand man, her chief priest, and her lover, was a tall, impressive man of about forty, with the bearing and tattoos of a member of the chiefly class. He belonged to an elite society of priests and performers known as the ‘arioi and was an expert in the arts of politics, oratory, and navigation. Banks considered him “a most proper man, well born,” and “skilld in the mysteries of their religion.” Cook admired him but was inclined to think him proud. Georg Forster, who sailed with Cook on his second voyage and knew of Tupaia only secondhand, described him as “an extraordinary genius.” Richard Thomson, a missionary writing some seventy years later, observed that he was “reputed by the people themselves . . . to have been one of the cleverest men of the islands.”
Although he is generally referred to as a “priest,” a better term, as Banks suggested, might be “Man of Knowledge.” The Tahitian word is tahu‘a (tohunga in Māori, kahuna in Hawaiian), and its core meaning is something like “an adept,” that is, a master, expert, or authority. The idea can be narrowly associated with a particular craft or specialization, like canoe building or oratory, but when used in a general sense it implies a remarkable constellation of different types of knowledge. A man like Tupaia might be responsible for maintaining not only the history and genealogy of the ruling family to which he was attached, including their sacred rituals and rites, but all the esoteric knowledge of the people in general—“the names and ranks of the different . . . divinities, the origin of the universe and all its parts,” as well as the “Practise of Physick and the knowledge of Navigation and Astronomy.” His fields, if one can refer to them as such, included cosmology, politics, history, medicine, geography, astronomy, meteorology, and navigation, all of which, in a world with no clear division between natural and supernatural, were inextricably entangled with religion. But Tupaia was not just a repository of information; he clearly had a deep and inquiring mind. The anthropologist Nicholas Thomas describes him as an “indigenous intellectual with experimental inclinations”—a phrase that seems to capture something of both the man and the age in which he lived.
WALLIS’S FIVE-WEEK SOJOURN in Tahiti had been long by comparison with those of other European explorers, but Cook’s was of another order altogether. The Endeavour remained in the Society Islands for a full four months, arriving in April, in good time to observe June’s transit of Venus, and not leaving until the beginning of August. This meant that there was ample time for the visitors to learn about Tahitian ways, and Banks, with no official duties, was at leisure to explore. In the end, he compiled a substantial account of Tahitian manners and customs, based both on what he himself had observed and what Tupaia and others told him. As with much ethnography, it is heavily weighted in favor of the observable—how to make fishing nets and breadfruit paste, the distribution of houses, procedures for tattooing, varieties of tools, weapons, and musical instruments, the dimensions of various structures, and so on.
Many of Banks’s observations are fascinating for their novelty, like his claims that “a S[outh]-Sea dog was next to an English lamb” in tenderness and flavor, that Tahitians bathed three times a day, and that both men and women plucked “every hair from under their armpits” and looked upon it “as a great mark of uncleanliness in us that we did not do the same.” He observed that while Tahitians were often ribald in gesture and conversation—one of the most popular entertainments for young girls was a dance that mimicked copulation—they observed the strictest of food taboos, expressing “much disgust” when told that in England men and women ate together and shared the same food. But he also made a number of valuable technical observations, including remarks on the size, shape, and seaworthiness of different types of canoes.
Banks described both the regular va‘a—a single-hulled canoe with an outrigger, used for fishing and shorter trips—and the larger pahi, a double-hulled vessel with V-shaped hulls, a large platform, and one or two masts, which was used both for fighting and long voyages. Pahi, wrote Banks, ranged in length from thirty to sixty feet, but the midsize ones were said to be the best and least prone to accidents in stormy weather. “In these,” he adds, “if we may credit the reports of the inhabitants[,] they make very long voyages, often remaining out from home several months, visiting in that time many different Islands of which they repeated to us the names of near a hundred.”
Much of this information came from Tupaia, who gave lists of islands to both Cook and the Endeavour’s master, Robert Molyneux, along with information about whether the islands were high or low, whether they were inhabited and, if so, by whom, whether they had reefs or harbors, and how many days’ sail they were from Tahiti. As evidence of Tahitian geographic knowledge, these lists are unparalleled—no other European in the first two-hundred-odd years obtained anything of the kind—but they are not without complications. To begin with, there is no single authoritative version: Cook’s list contains seventy-two island names, Molyneux’s fifty-five, and the two lists share thirty-nine names between them. Cook reported that Tupaia had at one time given him an account of nearly one hundred thirty names and that he had collected some seventy-odd from other sources, but that all of these accounts differed in both the number of islands and their names.
Then there is the problem of transcription. Both Cook and Molyneux wrote the names phonetically, but English is a terrible language in which to try to represent sounds—think of the number of sounds represented by the letters ough—uff, oh, ow, oo, and so on. The result of Cook’s and Molyneux’s efforts is a list of words that is quite mystifying at first glance. The name Fenua Ura, for example, appears as “Whennuaouda”; the island of Tikehau is rendered as “Teeoheow”; the island of Rangiroa as “Oryroa.” The British also frequently made the mistake of attaching the grammatical prefix “O” to the beginnings of proper nouns. Thus, “O Tahiti,” meaning something like “the Tahiti” or “this is Tahiti,” was heard as “Otaheite,” Cook’s standard name for the island. A third complication arises from the fact that Tahitian is short on audible consonants; a name like Kaukura might be rendered in some dialects as “‘Au‘ura,” where the k’s have been replaced by glottal stops and then written down by an eighteenth-century Englishman as “Ooura.” One of the islands on Cook’s list is actually spelled “Ooouow.”
Some of the islands on these lists might not even be specific locations. They might be islands with no cartographic equivalent—“non-geographic” or “ghost” islands, mythological locations, or names taken from stories of ancestor gods. Some of the names begin with a prefix meaning “border” or “horizon,” while others include terms meaning “leaning inward” or “leaning away,” suggesting that perhaps these are concepts or ideas rather than actual locations. Still others may belong to an earlier era, for even within the historical period the names of many Polynesian islands have changed.
But even when you set aside all of the islands on the list that, for one reason or another, cannot be identified, quite a number remain. Fifty of the names on these lists can be correlated with islands that we can identify today. The implication is striking: Tupaia and his fellow Tahitians appear to have had knowledge of islands stretching east–west from the Marquesas to Samoa, a distance of more than two thousand miles, and south some five hundred miles to the Australs. Tupaia did not claim to have visited all of the islands whose names he knew; he told Cook that he himself had firsthand knowledge of only twelve. But he had second- or thirdhand knowledge of several more; he spoke at one point of islands that were visited by his father. The rest may have been islands that no one in living memory had seen but that were known to have been visited at some point in the past. They may, in other words, have belonged to a body of geographical knowledge that was handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation.
Cook’s reaction to Tupaia’s list of islands was composed, in almost equal parts, of admiration and skepticism, and here it helps to know a little something about Cook. In the years before he was picked for the Endeavour command, he had been engaged in a detailed survey of the coast of Newfoundland. This was one of Cook’s areas of expertise; his biographer, J. C. Beaglehole, wrote that “nothing he ever did later exceeded in accomplishment” his surveys of the Canadian coast, which is saying something, given his achievements. And so, when Cook looked at the Pacific, it was not, as Keats would later have it, with “a wild surmise,” but with the eyes of a surveyor. Everywhere he went, he examined the coastlines, often going beyond the call of duty and far beyond what any of his predecessors had done. Seen from this perspective, Tupaia’s information was tantalizing but awkward. Cook felt that it was “vague and uncertain,” lacking as it did any fixed coordinates or objective measures of distance, and he was not sure how far it could be trusted. At the same time, it was clear to him that Tupaia knew “more of the Geography of the Islands situated in these seas . . . then any one we had met.”
Tupaia, for his part, also appears to have taken an interest in the ways in which these strangers conceived and represented the physical world. A striking example of this, which has only fairly recently come to light, is a series of watercolors depicting various subjects in Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia. For two centuries it was assumed that these sketches had been painted by Joseph Banks, since they were found among his papers. But in 1997, a letter surfaced in which Banks made it clear that “Tupia the Indian who came with me from Otaheite” was the artist. This information was oddly startling; seeing the work of Tupaia’s own hand brings him close in a way that secondhand accounts of his actions have never been able to do. But the watercolors are also interesting from an anthropological perspective. Polynesia is famous for its decorative arts, but there was no naturalistic tradition of illustration in the islands. Tupaia’s paintings, while stylistically naive, are closely observed and seem to confirm what was so often said about him: that he was a man of boundless curiosity and a natural experimenter.
Nothing proves this point so conclusively, though, as the fact that when Cook decided it was time for the British to leave Tahiti, Tupaia announced that he would like to go with them. He was not the first Polynesian to sail away on a British ship; a Tahitian named Ahutoru had joined the French expedition under Bougainville and was, at that very moment, being feted in France. And there would be others—both of Cook’s ships on his second voyage carried Tahitian passengers part of the way, and on his third voyage he gave passage to a pair of Māori boys. But the insouciance with which Polynesians, including Tupaia, sailed away from their islands in the eighteenth century is quite stunning. No doubt it seems more so to us than it did to them—they were seagoing people, and the idea of sailing off to a new place may not have struck them as exceptionally adventurous. In truth, though, it was hideously dangerous—especially for them. Of the first three Tahitians to join European expeditions, only one returned. Beyond the rigors of the voyages themselves, which could last years and which exposed the islanders to a whole range of unfamiliar hardships, including extreme cold, unfamiliar and often undigestible food, loneliness, and social isolation, there was the very real danger of contact with diseases to which they had no immunity.
One wonders whether they understood how far they were going, how long it would take, what kinds of risks they were running. It is hard to see how they could have, and yet they certainly knew they were going farther than they had ever been, to places that until recently they had never heard of, with people they had only just met. This speaks to the daring of men like Tupaia, but it also says something about the cultures of Polynesia. Within a very few decades, Polynesians of all stripes would be crisscrossing the ocean—Tahitians, Marquesans, Hawaiians, Māori—signing on as deckhands on ships out of Sydney, San Francisco, Nantucket, Honolulu. Described by one European traveler as “cosmopolites by natural feeling,” with “a disposition for enterprise and bold adventure,” they quickly became ubiquitous in sea stories of the nineteenth century. One has only to think of Richard Henry Dana’s Hawaiians camped out on the California coast, or Melville’s Queequeg the harpooner.
Cook was not, at first, very interested in the idea of taking on a passenger. He had no need of extra hands, and he worried about what would happen when they got back to England. He himself was not a man of means, and he did not think the government would thank him for bringing back someone it would be obliged to support. Banks, however, had other ideas. “Thank heaven,” he wrote, “I have a sufficiency and I do not know why I may not keep him . . . the amusement I shall have in his future conversation, and the benefit he will be of to this ship . . . will I think fully repay me.” With this aspect of the problem solved, Cook relented, acknowledging that, of all the Tahitians they had met, Tupaia “was the likeliest person to answer our purpose.”
That purpose was to lay down as much geography as possible, and the first order of business after leaving Tahiti was a survey of the “islands under the wind,” the Leeward Society Islands. This was Tupaia’s home territory; originally from Ra‘iatea, he had been forced to flee when his island was overrun by warriors from neighboring Bora Bora. On the voyage there, Tupaia proved himself an excellent navigator, each of the islands appearing precisely when and where he said it would. He further impressed Cook when, on their arrival at Huahine, he instructed a man to dive down and measure the Endeavour’s keel to make sure it would clear the passage into the lagoon. He was useful in all kinds of ways: piloting the ship, mediating with the chiefs, instructing the British on how to behave. There is a suggestion that he may have had his own motives, that perhaps he was hoping Cook would help him exact vengeance on the Bora Borans who were still in control of his ancestral lands. But Cook would not be drawn into local politics. He had other objects in mind, and on the tenth of August, under cloudy skies, he bade adieu to the Society Islands and, as Banks put it with characteristic brio, “Launchd out into the Ocean in search of what chance and Tupia might direct us to.”

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