2/2How was Polynesia populated? － Book-Review by Simon Winchester May 24 2019 ポリネシア (書評)
And to universal delight, they got to Tahiti, spot on and right on time. “The governor of French Polynesia had declared the day of their arrival a public holiday...over half the population of the island had come to witness Hokulea’s arrival...there was cheering and the beating of drums, then, as the canoe approached, a silence fell over the crowd and a church choir lifted up its voice in a Tahitian hymn of welcome composed especially for the day.”
Unwittingly, perhaps, that one 2,500-mile voyage helped also to restore a sense of pride to Polynesians, and especially to those in Hawaii who had been long reduced to second- or third-class citizens on their own islands. A renaissance of sorts got underway, an upwelling of pride that became ever more energized as the canoe’s navigational achievements and successes － all still performed with no instrumental help － accumulated. There were subsequent journeys to California, to Chile, to Japan, to New Zealand, to all the islands that others had long ago seized and to think of as theirs.
Suddenly, it seemed as though the Pacific was at last coming into its own, shrugging off the malign influence of outsiders (Atomic bombs!, Garbage gyres!, Coral bleaching!) and helping to recreate a Pacific Ocean run by and for Pacific peoples.
And never more so than when, in 2014, the crew of Hokulea decided to employ their Polynesian skills to sail the craft clear around the entire world, guided by the sprit of malama honua, a Hawaiian saying (understood ocean-wide)
meaning to care for our island earth. It took them three years, and was by all accounts a consummate success, in terms both of its symbolism and its brave achievement：I only wish it had been better known and appreciated by outsiders.
So we know how they did it. Nowadays cascades of sciences, pursuits less romantic than blue-water sailing and including archaeology and microbiology, have essentially answered the other questions, too. The Polynesians appear to be genetically connected, ultimately, and by way of an ancient culture known as the Lapita people, with the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. It took them and their canoes several thousand years to get to their ultimate destinations, mysteriously waiting for eons in the jumble of islands east of Indonesia before setting out into the wide Pacific itself, like tentative youngsters at the yawning mouth of a water slide.
They eventually took the plunge only in modern times － their canoes reaching Hawaiian waters perhaps around A.D. 900 and Rapa Nui (the Polynesian name for Easter Island) some while later, with the arrivistes of New Zealand settling as recently as A.D. 1200 in what they still like to call Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Clould. Just why the Lapitans paused on the western edge of the ocean for thousands of years is the sole remaining mystery: Perhaps, sensing its vastness, they were simply frightened.
The same can hardly be said of the crew who ventured into the 18th-century Pacific under the command of James Cook. For while he was a brilliant sailor and by most accounts a decent and humane ship’s captain (which, pace Captain Bligh was not always the case in the Royal Navy), he also commanded for this first expedition a splendid ship, H.M.S. Endeavour. “Endeavour,” Peter Moore’s fantastically detailed story of this tough little Yorkshire-built coal-carrier, which was purchased by the Admiralty for little more than 2,000 British pounds for its South Seas expedition － the official primary purpose of which was to observe the transit of Venus － is a joy of a biography, offering up a blizzard of maritime and political fascinations.
The vessel was first launched as the collier Earl of Pembroke, but its oak-built strength impressed the admirals, who changed her name to Endeavour and dispatched her to the tropics, where she performed her unforgettable feats (and was nearly destroyed when Cook mistakenly took her inside the Great Barrier Reef). After her sterling Pacific service, she was then remaindered and renamed the Lord Sandwich, and ended up carrying Hessian troops to New York in a vain attempt to counter the American Revolution. Being by then too worn to return to England, she was compelled to lie up in Newport harbor as a prison hulk. Finally, in 1778, she was broken up and scuttled, and only last September was apparently identified as lying 50 fathoms beneath the Rhode Island fairways, where sleek racing yatchts now careen by above, heeling on the stiff Rhode Island breezes, unaware.
But her name remains, British spelling intact, memorializing a craft of equal exploratory purpose － the NASA Space Shuttle Endeavour, the last of the operational crew-carrying spacecraft, now at rest in a museum in Los Angeles.
A numerical comparison of the achievements of the two craft is instructive: The shuttle worked for 19 years and ran through tens of millions of miles of airless space. The ship that helped make Captain Cook so famous, for good or ill, lumbered for 14 years and covered a paltry few tens of thousands of miles of ocean blue. There can be little doubt, however, which craft more truly changed the world, and Moore has written a book that makes the case for his little ship both compelling and irrefutable － and offers up besides an immense treasure trove of fact-filled and highly readable fun.
And to universal delight, they got to Tahiti, spot on and right on time. “The governor of French Polynesia had declared the day of their arrival a public holiday...over half the population of the island had come to witness Hokulea’s arrival...there was cheering and the beating of drums, then, as the canoe approached, a silence fell over the crowd and a church choir lifted up its voice in a Tahitian hymn of welcome composed especially for the day.”
Unwittingly, perhaps, that one 2,500-mile voyage helped also to restore a sense of pride to Polynesians, and especially to those in Hawaii who had been long reduced to second- or third-class citizens on their own islands. A renaissance of sorts got underway, an upwelling of pride that became ever more energized as the canoe’s navigational achievements and successes － all still performed with no instrumental help － accumulated. There were subsequent journeys to California, to Chile, to Japan, to New Zealand, to all the islands that others had long ago seized and to think of as theirs.
Suddenly, it seemed as though the Pacific was at last coming into its own, shrugging off the malign influence of outsiders (Atomic bombs!, Garbage gyres!, Coral bleaching!) and helping to recreate a Pacific Ocean run by and for Pacific peoples.
And never more so than when, in 2014, the crew of Hokulea decided to employ their Polynesian skills to sail the craft clear around the entire world, guided by the sprit of malama honua, a Hawaiian saying (understood ocean-wide)
meaning to care for our island earth. It took them three years, and was by all accounts a consummate success, in terms both of its symbolism and its brave achievement：I only wish it had been better known and appreciated by outsiders.
So we know how they did it. Nowadays cascades of sciences, pursuits less romantic than blue-water sailing and including archaeology and microbiology, have essentially answered the other questions, too. The Polynesians appear to be genetically connected, ultimately, and by way of an ancient culture known as the Lapita people, with the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. It took them and their canoes several thousand years to get to their ultimate destinations, mysteriously waiting for eons in the jumble of islands east of Indonesia before setting out into the wide Pacific itself, like tentative youngsters at the yawning mouth of a water slide.
They eventually took the plunge only in modern times － their canoes reaching Hawaiian waters perhaps around A.D. 900 and Rapa Nui (the Polynesian name for Easter Island) some while later, with the arrivistes of New Zealand settling as recently as A.D. 1200 in what they still like to call Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Clould. Just why the Lapitans paused on the western edge of the ocean for thousands of years is the sole remaining mystery: Perhaps, sensing its vastness, they were simply frightened.
The same can hardly be said of the crew who ventured into the 18th-century Pacific under the command of James Cook. For while he was a brilliant sailor and by most accounts a decent and humane ship’s captain (which, pace Captain Bligh was not always the case in the Royal Navy), he also commanded for this first expedition a splendid ship, H.M.S. Endeavour. “Endeavour,” Peter Moore’s fantastically detailed story of this tough little Yorkshire-built coal-carrier, which was purchased by the Admiralty for little more than 2,000 British pounds for its South Seas expedition － the official primary purpose of which was to observe the transit of Venus － is a joy of a biography, offering up a blizzard of maritime and political fascinations.
The vessel was first launched as the collier Earl of Pembroke, but its oak-built strength impressed the admirals, who changed her name to Endeavour and dispatched her to the tropics, where she performed her unforgettable feats (and was nearly destroyed when Cook mistakenly took her inside the Great Barrier Reef). After her sterling Pacific service, she was then remaindered and renamed the Lord Sandwich, and ended up carrying Hessian troops to New York in a vain attempt to counter the American Revolution. Being by then too worn to return to England, she was compelled to lie up in Newport harbor as a prison hulk. Finally, in 1778, she was broken up and scuttled, and only last September was apparently identified as lying 50 fathoms beneath the Rhode Island fairways, where sleek racing yatchts now careen by above, heeling on the stiff Rhode Island breezes, unaware.
But her name remains, British spelling intact, memorializing a craft of equal exploratory purpose － the NASA Space Shuttle Endeavour, the last of the operational crew-carrying spacecraft, now at rest in a museum in Los Angeles.
A numerical comparison of the achievements of the two craft is instructive: The shuttle worked for 19 years and ran through tens of millions of miles of airless space. The ship that helped make Captain Cook so famous, for good or ill, lumbered for 14 years and covered a paltry few tens of thousands of miles of ocean blue. There can be little doubt, however, which craft more truly changed the world, and Moore has written a book that makes the case for his little ship both compelling and irrefutable － and offers up besides an immense treasure trove of fact-filled and highly readable fun.
