Rating: 8.4/10.
Book covering the history of the Polynesians and how we came to know about them. The prologue begins in the Hawaiian Islands, first discovered by Cook in 1778 (one of the last major European discoveries. Cook’s arrival coincided with a festival, so he was initially warmly welcomed, but he was later killed there. The author starts with an anecdote about her partner, who is a Maori from New Zealand, yet was treated as a local by the Native Hawaiians, even though Hawaii and New Zealand are separated by a nine-hour flight. The book is about how the Polynesians managed to spread over such a vast area of the Pacific Ocean, and despite such great distances, they are still considered the same people.
The first part of the book starts with the physical discovery of the Pacific islands by European explorers. The first European to cross the Pacific was Magellan, and he was surprised at how vast it was, crossing from Chile to the Philippines without seeing any land. This was not too surprising because of how few islands there are in the Pacific compared to its area; many early explorers expected to see the southern continent but only found a vast ocean. The first European contact with the Polynesians was at the Marquesas Islands in 1595, a jagged series of volcanic islands, and not much was understood culturally. These islands were forgotten for the next 200 years since pinpointing location precisely was difficult with the technology at that time.
Early European explorers mostly followed the same route, going around Cape Horn of South America and up the coast of Peru before heading west. This was due to the trade winds, which blew to the east until more tropical latitudes, then it was possible to travel westward. The first islands that were discovered were small, low-lying atolls that had little interest to the Europeans, but the Polynesian inhabitants were ingenious at crafting canoes from small pieces of very limited wood since the islands were so small and had very few trees. The Dutch explorer Tasman reached New Zealand from the west instead of from South America, but he was met with violence by the Maoris and did not explore further. The Dutch also reached Easter Island but found it was poor and completely absent of trees due to deforestation and ecological disaster at an earlier time period before Europeans arrived.
Tahiti is the largest of the Society Islands and was discovered by the British. It is most notable for being the site of Cook’s observation of the transit of Venus in 1769. Initially, the two groups had a violent skirmish, but eventually, trading terms were established and on Tahiti, Cook engaged in a long period of cultural exchange and recorded the names of dozens of islands that were vaguely claimed to be known. He took on a skilled navigator named Tupaia, a knowledgeable man who volunteered to join the voyage despite it being with strangers and into the unknown. Tupaia and Banks, a scientist on the expedition, collaborated on a map that combined Tahitian and European knowledge. This map still exists today as a copy, and on it, many of the islands actually existed but were in the wrong places; some attempts have been made to explain the map with various relative navigational system understood by the Tahitians, instead of the fixed positions used by the Europeans, but it is hard to say definitively about this interpretation. Surprise occurred when Tupaia was unexpectedly able to communicate with the Maoris of New Zealand; the languages were mutually intelligible. By examining the word lists, Banks realized that many languages in the Pacific were related to Tahitian, including those spoken as far away as Madagascar.
After all of the major Pacific islands were discovered, the next big question was how the Polynesians got there. The winds from South America were the most favorable, but there is no cultural or linguistic similarity, and so Europeans began to probe Polynesian oral knowledge. Initially there were difficulties due to the language barrier, but gradually the Europeans understood enough of their language to study their origin stories. Nonetheless, the cultures were still very different, which often led Europeans to be confused about Polynesian explanations for various phenomena, eg: what is meant when someone claims that a specific rock is his ancestor? Some ideas floated around that Polynesians were descended from the Aryans from Central Asia, and many attempts were made to connect the languages to Sanskrit and ancient Greek, but those were far-fetched.
Fornander tried to reconstruct their histories based on oral narratives; this is inexact because the narratives are imprecise about dates and times and have no equivalent of the European concept of a year, so he counted generations in the narratives, since ancestry was important to the Polynesians, to get a rough timeline of various events. The Polynesians told stories of long voyages and how they would prepare a lot of food. During these long voyages, the food would run out, and people would die. They had an idea of a mythical place called Hawaiiki, from where they believed they came, and several islands have variants of that name, the most famous of which is the island of Hawaii. Tracing the names of these islands also gives an idea of the Polynesian origin.
The next phase of the story is about scientific attempts to investigate Polynesian origins. In the 1920s, anthropologists attempted to make body measurements of various Polynesian groups to trace their origins, but the data was messy and inconclusive, and the statistical methods to analyze it properly did not exist yet. An anthropologist named Te Rangi Hiroa, who was a mixed-race Maori, tried to trace the essential origins of the Polynesians. He rejected the idea of a Melanesian origin since these people had much darker skin. In fact, humans had been in Melanesia for much longer, about 4,000 years, whereas Polynesians were of more recent origin. The discovery of an ancient bird, the moa, in New Zealand led to some debate about who the initial hunters of the moa were, but anthropologists concluded that it was the ancestors of the Maori and not some other group.
Radiocarbon dating, invented in the 1960s, was the first way to date prehistoric organic material, although there were some practical issues affecting accuracy. However, pottery found on the Marquesas that was about 2,000 years old was much older than expected for people to have lived there. It was discovered that the Lapita culture were the makers of pottery and the ancestors of the Polynesians who colonized many islands around 1000 BC. They spoke Oceanic languages, from which we can trace words for various foods and names of navigational terms and parts of the canoe, and it is likely that they had a culture that valued expansion.
The fifth section of the book discusses attempts to replicate ancient Polynesian voyages to understand their methods. The first attempt occurred in 1947 when Thor Heyerdahl popularized the idea of Native American origins of the Polynesians. He demonstrated this experimentally by constructing a wooden boat, the Kon-Tiki, and sailing from Peru to the nearest Polynesian islands, proving that such a journey was possible. However, academics were largely skeptical of the theory for numerous reasons.
Some early reports, such as those from James Cook, indicated that Polynesians occasionally drifted off course during storms and ended up on unintended islands. This led to the theory that the Polynesian islands were settled mostly by chance. However, computer simulations in the 1960s showed that several islands, including Hawaii and New Zealand, could not have been reached randomly but were accessible through intentional navigation, even if imprecise and subject to being blown off course. Therefore, human direction was necessary to reach these islands.
Collaboration with Polynesian informants revealed extensive navigational knowledge. Some of this knowledge, such as following the star path, was familiar to Europeans and easily understood. Other techniques were more obscure, such as interpreting ocean swells, recognizing weather patterns indicating nearby land, and following birds that returned to land at various times of the day.
In 1976, the Hōkūleʻa made a journey from Hawaii to Tahiti, aided by a traditional navigator from Micronesia, and was welcomed by a huge crowd upon arrival. While some subsequent attempts failed due to bad weather, others succeeded. In the following years, various voyages were made using Polynesian navigational techniques to prove their efficacy. Some techniques, like the concept of a reference imaginary island, proved difficult to teach to Europeans or nontraditional cultures. The book ends with recent evidence from DNA that is starting to be examined, taken from modern Polynesians, ancient graves, and animals they brought along, like rats, which suggests they arrived early in Samoa and Tonga around 3,000 years ago. However, other islands were reached much more recently, around 1000 AD.
Overall, this book is intriguing and weaves together many different perspectives on the Polynesian people over 500 years, each chapter is quite detailed. From their first contact to oral traditions, archaeology, and the reinvention of their navigational techniques, each perspective uncovers a new piece of the puzzle that is still evolving.
