twelve broad. Both are surrounded by a reef of coral rocks, and the whole island is forty-four miles in circumference [. . .] The soil of the low maritime land, and of the valleys, is a rich blackish mould, remarkably fertile; but, in ascending the mountains, it changes into various veins of red, white, dark, yellow, and bluish earth. The stones exhibit everywhere the appearance of the action of fire; and the island has evidently had a volcanic origin [. . .] The more fertile spots, and even the mountainous districts, are covered with various useful vegetable productions, most of which grow spontaneously, and supply the natives with wholesome food. The most important of these are: the breadfruit tree, which seems peculiar to the Pacific Ocean, and which is found in the highest perfection at Otaheite; the coconut, which affords at once meat, drink, cloth, and oil; the plantain of various kinds; the chestnut, different in shape and size, but resembling that of Europe in taste; the evee, a yellow apple, a stone fruit, resembling a peach in flavour; yams, which grow wild in the mountains, from one to six feet in length; sweet potatoe, in great abundance, of an orange colour, resembling in taste the Jerusalem artichoke; tarro, a root from twelve to sixteen inches in length, and as much in girth, which is cultivated in wet soils, and the leaves of which are used like spinach; besides, a number of other roots and potatoes, made into pastes and puddings.”
—Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1830)
“TAHITI WAS CALLED Tahiti-nui, but first Havaiki by mistake, for our ancestor Maui [Polynesian trickster hero] [. . .] fished it up from the darkness of the deep ocean with the kanehu [bright, shining] fishhook which belonged to Tafai [a hero of ancient times]. The name of the hook was Marotake [to cause to be dry]. It was made from an uhi shell. Maui thought the land was the top of Fakarava Island [an atoll in the nearby Tuatomo archipelago], and as the name of Fakarava at that time was Havaiki, and it had lost its top from the anger of Pere [a localized version of Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess], Maui thought the land he had fished up was the top of Fakarava. So he called it Havaiki at first. But seeing it was a new land, a land not known before to men, a land not of one peak—as Havaiki had been—but of many sharp points, he called it Tahiti-nui [from hi, to fish with hook and line]. He called it so because it was a new land, the one raised up by him, the one he fished up.”
—From a story told by the Tuamotu islander Marerenui to J. L. Young, and written down in The Journal of the Polynesian Society, June 1898
Almost all islands share one thing: until the twentieth century, humans could only get to them by boat. And although leaving land and following a chain of islands in the Mediterranean or Caribbean or Indonesian seas was always an adventure, and seafarers from Europe and Africa and Asia and the Americas traveled to islands along their coastlines with remarkable skill and success for millennia, sailing on the open ocean was another story altogether. It still is; and sailing to the far islands in the Pacific has always been the ultimate test. Which leaves little doubt that Polynesians, who peopled those islands, were among the greatest ocean navigators in the history of the world.
The story of sea travel might not have begun with Pacific islanders, but it did take flight with them several thousand years ago, and their extraordinary seafaring has its counterpart in modern space travel. They needed to find their way to and from islands hundreds, even thousands, of miles apart and sometimes scarcely breaking the surface of the sea. And they needed craft to get back against the prevailing winds and currents that might carry them wide under sail. So the people of Polynesia (which is a modern term, meaning “many islands”) had boats with remarkably stable design and construction, with sails that could catch the wind from different directions, and with the security that paddling provided. The particular oceangoing craft with which Polynesian seafaring is often associated—the outrigger canoe, where a separate float is attached to the main hull for stability—probably originated in South Asia. It seems to have been first used on the coasts of India and Sri Lanka, making its way eastward to the Torres Strait islands north of Australia and eventually throughout Polynesia (and also westward to Madagascar and the coast of East Africa). Two types were common: a small outrigger canoe, around thirty feet in length, used primarily for fishing or traveling short distances; and a larger vessel, either a double outrigger or two hulls connected by crossbeams (not unlike a modern catamaran), from fifty to a hundred feet long and capable of carrying a cargo of passengers and provisions sufficient for voyages of well over a month. The nautical technologies developed by the ancient Polynesian seafarers, still understood only in bits and pieces, allowed them to sail thousands of miles across the open ocean, even against the westerly currents and the east-to-west winds (generated by the rotation of the earth toward the east).
There would have been much local travel in the smaller craft, and the ability to launch and land boats safely would be learned by most members of any island community. Details of boat design, including wood type and sail rigging, varied across the region—which covers almost a third of the earth’s surface and includes many thousands of islands—but construction with wood held together by fiber (to provide flexibility) was probably universal, allowing for give and take with big loads in heavy seas. The sails could swing about at different angles to the keel of the boat so that they would catch the wind coming from various directions (as distinct from sails fixed to the mast, more or less at a right angle to the keel, to catch the wind from behind). The canoes were sometimes leaky, so bailing out the water was crucial, and carefully carved wooden bailers were standard equipment. Many men and women would have participated in the makeup of these boats, bringing together the crafts of woodworking (for hull, mast, deck, and outrigger) and weaving (for sails and ropes). The Polynesian canoe, in all its many forms, ranks as one of the great triumphs of human technology.
It was exceptionally seaworthy, and Polynesian navigation was truly remarkable. The skills of open ocean navigation were probably mastered by only a few, as was also true for their European counterparts. But mastered they were, allowing the Polynesians to undertake long voyages deliberately, and successfully. They did not measure angles between stars and planets to determine latitude, as European navigators did (with instruments that developed from the astrolabe and quadrant into the modern sextant), but took direction from the passage of the sun during the day and the movement of the moon, the planets, the stars and their constellations at night. Some Polynesians also used a kind of wind compass, it is said, though its particulars seem to have been forgotten. But technologies aside, there was one fundamental difference between European and Polynesian navigation. For the Polynesian navigator, the boat was fixed while everything else was in motion, with the sun and the moon and stars as guides and a matrix of islands rather than the mainland providing points of reference, like a plotline. For the European navigator, on the other hand, the boat was moving, with everything else fixed at any given moment on a map or in relation to the sun or stars in the sky. Polynesian navigation identified “here” as where the boat was seen to be on the ocean, with reference points observed and observations coordinated on that ocean to bring traveler and destination—another island—together. In European navigation, “here” was where the boat was determined to be on the map, with reference points established on that map according to scheduled observations, or “fixes.”
For the Polynesian navigator, then, even the ultimate point of reference—the island destination—moved through the stages of the voyage in relation to the boat, even though the navigator “knew” perfectly well that it did no such thing. Likewise a European navigator, using one of the various mapping “projections” that represented the curved surface of the earth on a plane surface, knew how to interpret the distortions that resulted. For example, in the Mercator projection (a map design invented by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in the mid-sixteenth century) the straight lines are lines of compass bearing, a mapmaking illusion achieved by gradually increasing the distance between lines from the equator to the poles, which puts the size of land out of scale (with Australia seeming smaller than Greenland, when it is in fact three times as large). These are tricks of the trade. Sailors around the world work with them and live with the illusions they require. So do we all, in fact, imagining that we are living on a flat earth, standing right side up, and that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
Of course, there were many other signs that the
