The sea casts up Vavau (Borabora), the first-born, with the fleet that consumes both ways, and Tupai, islets of the King.
Strike on! The sea casts up Maupiti, again it casts up Maupihaa, Scilly Island [Manuae] and Bellinghausen (Motuiti).
Bear thou on! Bear on and strike where? Strike east! The sea casts up Huahine of the fleet that adheres to the Master, in the sea of Marama.
Bear thou on and strike north! The sea casts up little Maiao of the birds in the sea of Marama.
Bear thou on! Bear on and strike where? The star Spica flies south, strike north-east!
The sea casts up Long-fleet in the rising waves of the Shaven-sea—the Shoal-of-Atolls (Paumotu) [Tuamotu Archipelago].
Bear thou on! Bear on and strike where? The vapour flies to the outer border of the Shaven-sea, strike there?
The sea casts up Honden Island, strike far north! The sea casts up the distant Fleet-of-clans (Marquesas) of the waves that rise up into towering billows! [. . .]
The sea of the Sooty Tern casts up the Island Cleared-by-the-heat-of-Heaven. There is cast up again the People’s Headland. [. . .]
Bear thou on! [. . .] Redness will grow, it will grow on the figurehead of the mountain at thine approach, as the sea ends over there!
Angry flames shoot forth, redness grows, it grows upon the figurehead, as the sea ends over there.
That is Aihi [the Hawaiian Islands], land of the great fishhook, land where the raging fire ever kindles, land drawn up through the undulation of the towering waves from the Foundation! Beyond is Oahu.
The first people to settle on what we now call Tahiti, about fifteen hundred years ago, were originally from the mainland of East Asia and Southeast Asia—though seafaring in the Pacific had flourished for thousands of years already, accelerated by cycles of climate change that caused the sea levels to rise and fall and dislocated coastal peoples. Some of them took to the ocean in search of new lands—islands—to call home, and over time they settled the atolls and islands and archipelagoes of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. In the words of one ethnographer writing early in the twentieth century, these Pacific seafarers were “the champion explorer[s] of unknown seas of Neolithic times. For [. . .] long centuries the Asiatic tethered his ships to his continent ere he gained courage to take advantage of the six months’ steady wind across the Indian Ocean; the Carthaginian crept cautiously down the West African coasts, tying his vessel to a tree each night lest he should go to sleep and lose her; your European got nervous when the coastline became dim, and Columbus felt his way across the Western Ocean while his half-crazed crew whined to their gods to keep them from falling over the edge of the world.”
The sheer size of the Pacific made seafaring a special challenge. Winds and currents, which complicate all ocean travel, become major obstacles over such long distances if one doesn’t have the knowledge or the technology to sail against these natural forces. European sailors, until late in the day, had neither, and so they found it hard to credit the Polynesians with the nautical and navigational expertise that they themselves lacked—but which the Polynesians would have needed to sail across the open ocean and colonize the Pacific islands. Instead, beginning in the eighteenth century, the Europeans made up a story that this colonization never happened, and that the supposed Pacific seafarers were really mainlanders who had retreated to the mountaintops when, once upon a time, the waters rose. Encouraged by the geological and fossil evidence of land bridges that once joined South America, Africa, and India, and by a religious conviction that land connections were the only way to account for the distribution of humans from a common origin, Europeans conjured up “lost continents,” long ago sunken: Mu and Lemuria were two of them (still favored today in some New Age circles). These apologists for European shortcomings cast Polynesians as wild remnants of an imaginary ancient Asian civilization, or perhaps a lost tribe of Jews, or Athenian Greek voyagers—anything but the actual people who developed a nautical culture without peer in the history of the world, and a political culture that withstood the perils of isolation as well as any we know.
And just to be sure that the Polynesians were not credited with navigating the open ocean, the Europeans offered yet another theory to account for the settlement of the Pacific, based on a map from the mid-seventeenth century by the cartographer Arnold Colom that showed a string of islands sweeping southeast from New Guinea toward Cape Horn. The idea behind it was that only by means of such closely connected stepping-stone islands could the Polynesians have reached as far as they did. And then, after the map had turned out to be pure fiction, Thor Heyerdahl came along in the late 1940s with his Kon-Tiki raft expedition (and the extraordinarily popular book he wrote about it) to demonstrate that the Polynesian islands had been settled by westward-drifting South Americans. But linguistic, botanical, and cultural evidence was so unfriendly to his theory—as it has been to that of sunken continents—that it has now been thoroughly discounted.
The most important evidence of the migration of peoples throughout the Pacific islands comes in the form of oral histories and the languages in which they are told, which describe many of the voyages in remarkable detail and display similar linguistic and literary features throughout the region. There is also ancient pottery, in particular a type called Lapita, named for a beach on the west coast of New Caledonia where open-fired vessels, often with red-banded decoration, were found in the 1950s—and seen to be similar to pieces found thirty years earlier on Tonga, nearly fifteen hundred miles to the east. Ancient Lapita pottery was also identified on New Guinea and Fiji and most islands in between, confirming the existence of a civilization that had spread east into the Pacific over several millennia, peopling the islands and establishing traditions of story and song, of oceangoing craft and navigation, of music and dance and crafts, of food production and house construction and the harvesting of resources from the sea—traditions that are now seen as definitively Polynesian. The complex pattern of social relations between Pacific islanders, more communal than in the Caribbean, was illuminated early in the twentieth century by one of the greatest European island anthropologists, Bronislaw Malinowski, and described in his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). From the Trobriand Islands (east of New Guinea), where he lived for several years, he identified trade routes that were used to exchange not only commercial commodities but also items of little intrinsic, but of substantial symbolic, value—specifically necklaces and armbands—in a maritime cycle of gift-giving (called the Kula ring) that included islanders spread widely throughout the archipelagoes of the region. Such ceremonial traditions are part of both the ancient and the modern history of the Pacific islands, and they are emblematic of the larger ceremony of belief celebrated by getting into a boat (Malinowski described sailing in Trobriand canoes as floating, as if by a miracle) and heading out to sea. That is what the argonauts of the various Pacific isles have in common with each other—and what they share with island seafarers all over the world, including the Phoenician traders who sailed from the Middle East throughout the Mediterranean and beyond thousands of years ago, perhaps even reaching out to the archipelagoes of the Atlantic.
We are now sure that the Polynesians did indeed sail (rather than step from one disappearing mainland mountaintop to another) across the vast Pacific to its innumerable islands; and although they may have reached some by accident, evidence from the plants and animals they carried with them, as well as from the stories they told and the songs they sung, clearly shows that there were many deliberate island journeys. Their motives, as well as some of their methods, are still not fully understood—but neither are many of humanity’s great adventures and achievements. Some Pacific islanders imagined the horizon as the eaves of a house, and if you went beyond them, you would find new dwelling places. Believing that theirs was a sea of islands, they expected to find more islands out there. Chance, but also their cosmologies and creation stories, would
