1/2How was Polynesia populated? － Book-Review by Simon Winchester May 24 2019 ポリネシア (書評)
See People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson
Endeavor: The Ship That Changed the World by Peter Moore
It is an old, coral-encrusted question, puzzled over for the last three centuries, and usually posed in three parts. It concerns the inhabitants of the 10-million-square-mile triangle of blue-water Pacific real estate now known as Polynesia, which is bounded by New Zealand, Easter Island and the Hawaii archipelago. The people who live there, seemingly magically marooned in a tropic Arcadia in the middle of a vast oceanic nowhere: Where did they come from, when did they get there, and how?
Christina Thompson, by virtue of being American-Australian and married to a Maori (a courtship related in her alarmingly titled memoir “Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All”), is perhaps ideally placed to try to answer the question － and in “Sea People,” her fascinating and satisfying addition to an already considerable body of Polynesian literature, she succeeds admirably.
First, she identifies the crucial nudge from history, the initial hint that the Polynesians were far-flung people who might be blessed with a curious set of pan-oceanic characteristics. This came in the summer of 1769 when Capt. James Cook － a British imperialist adventurer to be sure, but perhaps not so dastardly a figure as some today would have it － met and coopted as part of his crew a remarkable Tahitian islander named Tupaia. This priestly figure － a man whose expertise according to Thompson included “cosmology, politics, history, medicine, geography, astronomy, meteorology and navigation” － would transform Cook’s knowledge and understanding of the Pacific, and hasten his “discovery” of other Pacific islands, which of course included Australia and New Zealand.
Tupaia traveled with Cook on the Royal Navy’s bark Endeavour (of which more later), gave him written lists of scores of faraway islands with which he was familiar, and drew for him a chart (the original sadly lost) that showed, with uncanny accuracy, where these islands lay, out in an ocean then quite uncharted by European cartographers. Thus equipped, and after many weeks of sailing, with Thompson keeping up the gripping pace of this particularly exciting part of story, Cook comes to what the chapter heading identifies as his “aha moment.”
The ship’s anchor is dropped in a bay in northern New Zealand, a group of armed and unfriendly-looking Maoris promptly gather on the beach, and everyone aboard the ship, Cook included, expects a disagreeable outcome. But then, to the crew’s astonishment, “Tupaia stepped forward and addressed the warriors in a fluent Tahitian and, to the surprise of everyone present, he was immediately understood.”
Separated by 3,500 miles of open ocean, and yet the people spoke a recognizably similar language. This revelation, which was to be confirmed many times over during the rest of the 1769 expedition and in later years of crisscrossing many more miles of sea, displayed that whoever these people were, they are effectively one, and to get where did, they must be possessed of extraordinary navigation skills.
Their customs, their clothing, their languages － and the design of their long-distance sailing canoes － turned out to be common to scores of South Pacific places. They had settled themselves on islands as distant from each other as Maui and Tokelau, Samoa and Mangareva, the Cooks and Kermadec, Easter Island and Norfolk Island. Exactly how they had done so was central to solving the enigma.
It was an enigma that nearly didn't get solved at all. The success of Captain Cook’s expeditions soon opened the door to flotillas of other European sailor-conquerors － such that eventually, by the beginning of the last century, thd millions of square miles of what had been free and open ocean had been effectively closed off by invisible colonial boundaries.
A Polynesian navigator could once sail the South Seas as he liked. No longer. It would be impossible for him to travel at will from Hawaii (which had been seized by the Americans) to Tahiti (colonized by the French), or to Samoa (which until 1914 was German) or to Tonga (which was run for the local monarch by the British), without having both permission and more ludicrously, a passport. The sailing skills that had flourished for centuries seemed all of a sudden quite valueless to a people who were now being corralled into what were de facto highseas reservations, which they couldn't easily leave.
But in 1976, a group of remarkable young Hawaiians decided they would seek to save these ancient skills － to blow forcefully on the embers of a dying ocean fire. They first hand-built, as their bicentennial tribute, a 60-foot-long twin-hulled traditional sailing canoe, naming it Hokulea, for Arcturus, the bright “star of joy,” the zenith star of the Hawaiian Islands. They then sought out, down in the tiny island of Satawal in the Caroline chain, an elderly canoe-builder named Mau Piailug, who still knew and practiced the traditional ways. They flew him up to Honolulu, whereupon he readily agreed to sail with them, to try to get their vessel down to Tahiti, 2,500 miles away.
Crucially for the experiment, they would undertake their voyage without any modern navigational aids whatsoever － no chart, no compass, no sextant, no timekeeper and (not that it existed in 1976) no GPS. Piailug was, in his own way, like Cook’s Tupaia, and he well knew that he was on a mission. “I made that trip,” Thompson quotes him, “to show those people what their ancestors used to know.”
The wise man of Satawal showed the crew, mostly youngsters, mostly native Hawaiians, how the Polynesians used to navigate － how they listened to the heartbeat of the sea, how they watched and learned the patterns of the swells, how they read the flights of sea birds, looked for drifting plants and land birds, measured the rise and fall of the daytime sun and, at night, how they performed complex mensurations on the geography and geometries of the southern stars.
It was an enigma that nearly didn't get solved at all. The success of Captain Cook’s expeditions soon opened the door to flotillas of other European sailor-conquerors － such that eventually, by the beginning of the last century, thd millions of square miles of what had been free and open ocean had been effectively closed off by invisible colonial boundaries.
A Polynesian navigator could once sail the South Seas as he liked. No longer. It would be impossible for him to travel at will from Hawaii (which had been seized by the Americans) to Tahiti (colonized by the French), or to Samoa (which until 1914 was German) or to Tonga (which was run for the local monarch by the British), without having both permission and more ludicrously, a passport. The sailing skills that had flourished for centuries seemed all of a sudden quite valueless to a people who were now being corralled into what were de facto highseas reservations, which they couldn't easily leave.
But in 1976, a group of remarkable young Hawaiians decided they would seek to save these ancient skills － to blow forcefully on the embers of a dying ocean fire. They first hand-built, as their bicentennial tribute, a 60-foot-long twin-hulled traditional sailing canoe, naming it Hokulea, for Arcturus, the bright “star of joy,” the zenith star of the Hawaiian Islands. They then sought out, down in the tiny island of Satawal in the Caroline chain, an elderly canoe-builder named Mau Piailug, who still knew and practiced the traditional ways. They flew him up to Honolulu, whereupon he readily agreed to sail with them, to try to get their vessel down to Tahiti, 2,500 miles away.
Crucially for the experiment, they would undertake their voyage without any modern navigational aids whatsoever － no chart, no compass, no sextant, no timekeeper and (not that it existed in 1976) no GPS. Piailug was, in his own way, like Cook’s Tupaia, and he well knew that he was on a mission. “I made that trip,” Thompson quotes him, “to show those people what their ancestors used to know.”
The wise man of Satawal showed the crew, mostly youngsters, mostly native Hawaiians, how the Polynesians used to navigate － how they listened to the heartbeat of the sea, how they watched and learned the patterns of the swells, how they read the flights of sea birds, looked for drifting plants and land birds, measured the rise and fall of the daytime sun and, at night, how they performed complex mensurations on the geography and geometries of the southern stars.
