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Chapter Two

Islands on the Horizon

CROSSING THE WATERS

“OTAHEITE, OR TA[H]ITI, an island in the Pacific Ocean [. . .] consists of two peninsulas, united by an isthmus about three miles in breadth. The greater of these is circular, and about twenty miles in diameter; and the latter about sixteen miles long and 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 Polynesian navigators relied upon, in addition to the night sky and the sun. They knew the currents, the wave configurations, and the prevailing winds in their region. They recognized land breezes and “sea markers,” which were indicated not only by lines of seaweed and driftwood and the presence of types of fish, but also by the color of the water, especially near contrary currents. Precise directions, in shorter voyages, were given by birds returning to land every night after fishing, or taking off in the mornings; by sea turtles heading for shore; and by marine mammals such as dolphins on their way back from work or play. And smells would be noted, with breezes bringing the scent of green growth as early as a day before land was sighted. Skilled navigators would also feel and hear different wave configurations affecting the movement of the boat, and some of these would indicate the proximity of an island or the influence of a current. Reflections, such as the green of underwater atolls on the underside of clouds, would also help, along with the character of the clouds themselves. On longer voyages, migrating birds (such as the kohoperoa, or long-tailed cuckoo, which is well known on Samoa and Tonga and Raiatea and Tahiti and flies to New Zealand every October) could lead a Polynesian sailor to the island destination.

Every corner of the world has known island sailors, including Britain and Ireland and Iceland and the Mediterranean, as well as many South Asian and East Asian and African countries, and we sometimes score differences between them much too quickly. Seafarers everywhere share many of the same cognitive and cultural abilities—and an awareness of their fallibilities. Signs at sea are recognized by them all. James Cook, who learned much from Polynesian navigators during his three Pacific voyages (in the late 1760s and the 1770s), was successful because he brought his practices into line with their knowledge. Seagoing indicators similar to those the Polynesians relied on would have carried the Phoenicians across the Mediterranean and the Vikings to Iceland and the Amerindians to Jamaica. What distinguished each of these seafaring traditions was how they used the universal signs at sea to set their course. For any navigator, it is never just a matter of noticing signs. Like trackers in the desert or readers in the library, they need to interpret these signs—and the ways of interpretation, like the scripts of different languages, vary widely and need to be learned in different locations and different cultures. Furthermore, navigational directions are always relative rather than absolute, like sounds in a word or words in a sentence; and as with languages, these relationships are specific to each situation. So navigators would need to remember the movements of the signs (the “words” of their watery worlds) and the relationships between them (their “grammar” and “syntax”). “All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another,” said the Egyptian-Roman philosopher Plotinus in the third century CE, writing about what he called “the non-discursiveness of the intelligible world.”

The Polynesians knew that the ocean was full of signs, and they knew how to interpret one thing from another at sea. To do this, their memories would have been finely tuned, often aided by mnemonic devices such as knotted strings. And stories and songs played a part in this remembering. Rua-nui, described as a “clever old Tahitian woman, then bent with age and eyes dim,” in 1818 recited the following account of the birth of the heavenly bodies. It provided not only a genealogy but also a geography of the skies, and began: “Rua-tupua-nui (source-of-great-growth) was the origin; when he took to wife Atea-t’ao-nui (vast-expanse-of-great-bidding), there were born his princes, Shooting-stars; then followed the Moon; then followed the Sun; then followed the Comets; then followed Fa’a-iti (Little Valley / [i.e., the constellation] Perseus), Fa’a-nui (Great Valley / Auriga), and Fa’a-tapotupotu (Open Valley / Gemini), in King Clear-open-sky, which constellations are all in the North.

“Fa’a-nui (Auriga) dwelt with his wife Tahi-ari’i (Unique Sovereign / Capella in Auriga), and begat his prince Ta’urua (Great Festivity / Venus), who runs in the evening, and who heralds the night and the day, the stars, the moon, and the sun, as a compass to guide Hiro’s ship at sea [Hiro was a Polynesian god who, like the Greek Hermes, specialized in trickery]. And there followed Ta’ero (Bacchus or Mercury), by the sun.

“Ta’urua (Great Venus) prepared his canoe, Mata-taui-noa (Continually-changing-face), and sailed along the west, to King South, and dwelt with his wife Rua-o-mere (cavern-of-parental-yearnings / Capricorn), the compass that stands on the southern side of the sky.”

At night, when stars (and planets) were the most important indicator for a Polynesian sailor and were followed closely, each in turn would be replaced by another “guide star” when one rose too high or went below the horizon. Stars were like the songlines of the Aborigines in Australia. Not all stars, of course, were to be counted on. Some were known to be tricksters or troublemakers or just plain trivial; and contemporary navigators from the island of Anuta, between the Solomon and Fijian archipelagoes, still refer to stars in the major constellations as “carriers,” while unnamed stars are called “common” or “foolish.” Knowledge of the night sky was detailed, and laced together with lyric, narrative, and dramatic anecdotes of both natural and supernatural presences, with traits that many of us would recognize from the melodrama of Mediterranean and Scandinavian mythology. A Samoan celestial catalog, for example, not only described red-faced Mata-memea (Mars) but also slow-goer Telengese (Sirius) and the balance-pole Amonga (Orion’s Belt)—all of which showed the way for voyagers traveling from Samoa to Tonga. Cloudy weather or fog could of course interfere, but in most of the Central and South Pacific the visibility is exceptionally clear and cloud coverage limited to a few months. The early European explorers all confirmed this, and recent reports from the region suggest that clear skies can be expected at least two thirds of the year, with certain stars visible almost every night.

So even without the ability to determine east or west longitude (a disability shared with Europeans until the eighteenth century), Polynesians had techniques as trustworthy as those of the Europeans for determining direction. Also, exact navigation was not always necessary when islands were indicated by the character of currents and clouds, the movement of fish and birds, the sight and smell of drifting plants and leaves, and the keen eyes of seafarers (especially useful just before sunrise and just after sunset, when land is most easily spotted). And indeed, the same approximation was standard for European sailors during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when both nautical charts and navigation involved estimates, and when no sailor relying on them could ever be sure precisely where he was, much less where the island he was looking for might be.

All navigators are storytellers as well as wayfinders, reading and interpreting both natural and man-made signs; and knowledge of these signs, passed down from generation to generation, has always been a crucial part of a navigational heritage. The principle is the same everywhere, though the medium may differ. Seafarers have relied on such songs and stories to tell them where—and sometimes why—to go and how to get there, taking them along on their voyages in memory or aided by drawings or knotted strings or manuscripts, or by ship’s logs and sailor’s journals. The best guide for navigation worldwide has often been the latest story told by those who have traveled that way before—after all, if they hadn’t found a way, they wouldn’t be telling the story.

Polynesians made their way by the quality of their attention to their stories as well as to the sea; and that attention had to be exquisitely focused. Order and relationship are everything at sea, and songs and stories guided them through as surely as the stars.

A traditional chant from Raiatea, near Tahiti, shows the detailed geographical knowledge of people in the South Pacific; it speaks of islands that are part of the Society Islands, the Tuamotu Archipelago, and the Marquesas Islands, as well as Hawaii. Such a song would have provided navigational direction as surely as a European nautical chart.

Let more land grow from Havai[k]i! [Often identified with Raiatea, an island in French Polynesia and the legendary birthplace of the Polynesian people.] Spica is the star, and Aeuere is the king of Havai[k]i, the birthplace of lands.

The morning Apparition rides upon the flying vapour, that rises from the chilly moisture.

Bear thou on! Bear on and strike where? Strike upon the Sea-of-rank-odour in the borders of the west!

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 have played a part in an adventure—the game of their island-hopping lives—that had been carefully assessed and consciously joined. (As an analogy, we know from the analysis of oil exploration that once a general geological arena of hydrocarbons has been identified, random drilling is just as effective as targeted exploration.) The Polynesians would have recognized the same about their islanded ocean. What one chronicler describes as their fundamentally optimistic attitude toward ocean travel, and their confidence in their boat-building and navigational technology, would have made social contact across the sea as much a part of their lives as a trip across the city or to the neighboring town is for many of us. Of course there would occasionally have been other factors. Exile for the violation of a local taboo, for example, may have put some Polynesians to sea, just as it happened to the early British outlaws who were transported to Australia.

The seafaring peoples who populated the Pacific islands traveled distances on the open ocean that surprise even seasoned sailors today. Around 1300 BCE, they reached Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, well over two thousand miles away from the islands off eastern New Guinea where their ancestors had settled, developing new spiritual and material relationships with Moana, the Great Ocean. Then, for reasons we don’t yet understand, a millennium passed before there was settlement further east in the Pacific—though the appealing climate and geography of the Fijian, Tongan, and Samoan islands could be part of the reason, perhaps along with cycles of climate change (and there were several dramatic changes during this period) that altered wind patterns and sea levels. In the sixth century CE, Polynesians settled what we now know as the Cook Islands and French Polynesia, including Tahiti; in the seventh century, the Hawaiian Islands and Easter Island; and eventually, around the thirteenth century, New Zealand. About that time there came another round of climate change, this time apparently taking a more terrible toll. Nothing nourishes fear and loathing more surely than famine; and what we know from both the written records and the oral traditions of these islanders gives us a grim sense of the crisis that was created when the sea level fell by almost three feet, creating food shortages, severe conflicts, and malevolent cultural practices.