The circumstances have varied, but the song itself has been much the same across the millennia. It was recited by Andrew Marvell in the 1600s, imagining a group of Puritans rowing to a fortunate isle they had heard about, the island of Bermuda—which had undergone a sea change in the century since it had first been named the Isle of Devils by the Spanish—and singing an elegant sea chanty to thank the God who “gave us this eternal spring / Which here enamels every thing, / And sends the fowls to us in care, / On daily visits through the air. / He hangs in shades the orange bright, / Like golden lamps in a green night; / And does in the pomegranates close / Jewels more rich than Ormus shows. / He makes the figs our mouths to meet / And throws the melons at our feet.” And to remind us that they went by boat, Marvell added: “And all the way, to guide their chime, / With falling oars they kept the time.” Three centuries later another English islander, John Masefield, dreaming of “the gull’s way and the whale’s way,” wrote the famous poem “Sea Fever” (1902): “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.”
Some seafarers have ventured over stormy seas and some through sheltered passages, but all of them have experienced the strangeness of sea voyages and, often enough, the sudden rightness of islands. The greatest migration in human history, when our early ancestors moved from Africa north and east through Asia, involved a major island expedition: as habitat and hunting capacities and climates changed and the exponential effects of population increase became overwhelming, some of them left the Asian mainland and traveled across the sea on rafts and dugouts to what is now New Guinea (the world’s second largest island, after Greenland), which at that time—fifty or sixty thousand years ago—was part of the Australian landmass. Although we now call Australia a continent, it must have seemed like an island to the Aboriginal travelers who established one of humanity’s earliest civilizations there.
Vagabondage—feeling “bound to go,” in that wonderfully contradictory phrase—has probably been a part of life for people in all times and places. Ancient peoples would have heard stories about islands “out there,” with a storyteller’s assurance that if you traveled in a good way—whatever that might mean—you would sooner or later come across one of them; and setting out for one of the many islands on Earth would have been, in some circumstances, like going down the road in modern life. Rogue storms and outlaw escapades will have always played a role in fostering island travel, along with conflict at home and tales about life abroad. Extraordinary circumstances account for people taking astonishing risks, and we have lots of contemporary evidence for this, often with tragic results: people getting into rickety boats to seek refuge and a better life across the sea—from Cuba and Haiti to Florida; from northern Africa to southern Europe; and from Southeast Asia to Australia and North America.
At certain times, there may even have been a cultural bias toward going to sea, which over time would have become more like riding a horse or (in our day) driving a car or flying in an airplane. That may have been the case for the Arawak and Taino and Carib voyagers, and it was almost certainly so for the peoples who lived around the islands of Indonesia—there are seventeen thousand of these islands, with six thousand of them named and nearly a thousand now inhabited—where island hopping must have been bound into the human psyche, just as it was for peoples in the eastern Mediterranean where so much of Western literature had its beginnings. In East Africa, the name Swahili means “shore people”; and the various island chains in that part of the Indian Ocean framed by Africa and South Asia would have encouraged people to use the sea as a network of roads. “Whale roads” was the familiar phrase among ancient Scandinavians, who also traveled along archipelagoes, the sea connecting rather than dividing. People of the Atlantic, north and south, thought of themselves as shore people for millennia; and for Inuit (Eskimo) peoples, the ice islands of the Arctic continue to be as much a part of their world as the sun and the moon and the stars. Even the Pacific Ocean, greater in size than all the land on Earth, was understood by its Polynesian peoples as a “sea of islands.”
It is one thing to dream or talk about traveling to islands across the sea. Actually doing so is something else, no matter what the circumstances, and it represents one of humanity’s most remarkable accomplishments and most extraordinary acts of faith. A covenant in wonder with the world. And a triumph of craft.
“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,