Kon-Tiki: Thor Heyerdahl’s Raft
Drifting Not Sailing: Andrew Sharp
The Non-Armchair Approach: David Lewis Experiments
Reinventing Navigation: Nainoa Thompson
Part VI: What We Know Now (1990–2018)
The Latest Science: DNA and Dates
1 “Map of the World, showing Terra Australis Incognita,” from Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas, by Abraham Ortelius, 1570. Wikimedia Commons.
2 Tattooed Marquesan, “Back View of a younger inhabitant of Nukahiwa [Nuku Hiva], not yet completely tattooed,” in G. H. von Langsdorff, Voyage and Travels in Various Parts of the World (London, 1813). Courtesy Carol Ivy.
3 Easter Island moai, “A View of the Monuments of Easter Island,” by William Hodges, ca. 1776. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Wikimedia Commons.
4 Nukutavake canoe, acquired in the Tuamotus in 1767 by Captain Samuel Wallis of H.M.S. Dolphin. British Museum.
5 Nukutavake canoe detail showing repair.
6 Portrait of Captain James Cook by William Hodges, 1775–76. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.
7 Drawing by Tupaia of a Māori trading crayfish with Joseph Banks, 1769. British Library.
8 Peter Henry Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) in academic robes, ca. 1904. Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand.
9 Felix von Luschan’s Hautfarbentafel (skin color panel). Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
10 Richard Owen standing beside Dinornis novaezealandiae (large species of moa) while holding the bone fragment he was given in 1839. From Richard Owen, Memoirs on the extinct wingless birds of New Zealand (London, 1879). Wikimedia Commons.
11 Moa egg found by Jim Eyles at Wairau Bar in 1939. Photograph by Norman Heke, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
12 Necklace of moa bone reels and stone “whale tooth” pendant, discovered at Wairau Bar. Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand.
13 “The Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand” by Louis John Steele and Charles F. Goldie (1898), Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of the late George and Helen Boyd, 1899. Based on Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), this painting depicts a vision of Polynesian voyaging not unlike that implied by drift voyaging theories.
14 Reconstructed three-thousand-year-old Lapita pot from Teouma, Efate Island, Vanuatu. Photograph by Philippe Metois, courtesy Stuart Bedford and Matthew Spriggs.
15 Micronesian stick chart from the Marshall Islands. Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
16 Hōkūle‘a passing the Statue of Liberty in 2016 on the Mālama Honua voyage around the world. Photo by Na‘alehu Anthony, courtesy ‘Ōiwi TV and the Polynesian Voyaging Society.
Map of the Sandwich Islands by Giovanni Cassini (Rome, 1798), based on Cook’s chart of Hawai‘i.
STORY OF HAWAII MUSEUM, KAHULUI, MAUI.
KEALAKEKUA BAY LIES on the west, or leeward, side of the Big Island of Hawai‘i, in the rain shadow cast by the great volcano Mauna Loa. It is a smallish bay about a mile wide, open to the southwest, with a bit of flat land at either end and a great wall of cliffs along the middle, where in ancient times the bodies of Hawaiian chiefs were hidden in secret caves. The name of the bay, Kealakekua, means in Hawaiian “the Path of the God,” and in the final centuries of Polynesian isolation, before the arrival of Europeans, it was a seat of power and the ancestral home of no less a personage than the first Hawaiian monarch, Kamehameha I.
To get to Kealakekua Bay, you take the main road south from Kailua, leaving behind the more heavily settled areas of the Kona Coast and passing through a series of small towns. The highway on this part of the island runs along the shoulder of the mountain, and the drive down to sea level is a steep one. Turning off at the Napo‘opo‘o Road, you wind down through an arid landscape of mesquite and lead trees interspersed with ornamental plantings of hibiscus and plumeria. Taking a right at the bottom and following the road to its end, you come at last to a little cul-de-sac under a pair of spreading jacarandas. The beach, with its jumble of boulders, is a stone’s throw away, the high red rampart of the Pali looms on the right, and, squinting into the distance, you can just make out the low, scrubby outline of the farther shore.
Immediately