To Europeans, who had themselves only just begun to master the enormous expanses of the Pacific, and then only at the cost of great suffering and loss of life, the discovery of people on these small and widely scattered islands was a source of wonderment. There seemed to be no obvious explanation for how they had gotten there, and, in the absence of any direct evidence, Europeans had difficulty envisioning a scenario that would explain how a people without writing or metal tools could, in the words of Cook, have “spread themselves over all the isles in this Vast Ocean.” This conundrum, which came to be known as “the problem of Polynesian origins,” emerged as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind.
Over the past three hundred years, all kinds of people have taken a stab at solving this mystery, and many harebrained theories have been proposed: that the islands of Polynesia are the peaks of a drowned continent and the inhabitants the survivors of a great deluge; that Polynesians are Aryans or American Indians or the descendants of a tribe of wandering Jews; that the islands were settled by castaways or fishermen blown thither by capricious winds. But the truth, if you stop to think about it, can hardly be less astonishing; as the New Zealand ethnologist Elsdon Best once put it, “Could the story of the Polynesian voyagers be written in full, then would it be the wonder-story of the world.”
The problem, of course, is that we are talking about prehistory. It is hard enough to know what happened in the past when there exists a documentary record, but there is no written record of these events. Here, the evidence is all partial, ambiguous, open to widely differing interpretations, and in some cases so technical that it is difficult for a layperson to judge. When I first set out to write this book, I imagined I would be recounting the tale of the voyagers themselves, those daring men and women who crossed such stupendous tracts of sea and whose exploits constitute one of the greatest adventures in human history. But, almost immediately, it dawned on me that one could tell such a story only by pretending to know more than can actually be known. This realization quickly led me to another: that the story of the Polynesian settlement of the Pacific is not so much a story about what happened as a story about how we know.
The evidence for what happened in the Pacific has taken different forms in different eras. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, it consisted of the eyewitness reports of European explorers, who left sketchy but fascinating accounts of Polynesian cultures before they had begun to change under the influence of the outside world. From the nineteenth century we have a different type of source material: Polynesian oral traditions, or what the islanders had to say about themselves. Then, starting in the early twentieth century, science began to deliver up whole new bodies of information based on biometrics, radiocarbon dating, and computer simulations. And, finally, in the 1970s, an experimental voyaging movement emerged, which added a completely different dimension to the story.
Because this evidence is complex—not to mention partial, fragmentary, and perennially open to reinterpretation—the story of what happened in Polynesia has not followed a single bearing to certainty from doubt. In fact, if you were to map it, it would look a lot like the track of a ship under sail, zigzagging and backtracking, haring off in one direction, only to turn and work its way back to an earlier course. There are difficulties with every kind of data—linguistic, archaeological, biological, folkloric—and aspects of the story that have nothing to do with the Pacific at all, for many of the arguments made about Polynesia have been driven by preoccupations originating in Oxford or Berlin.
But these, too, are part of the story, for the history of the Pacific is not just a tale of men and women (and dogs and pigs and chickens) in boats. It is also the story of all those who have wondered who Polynesians were, where they came from, and how they managed to find all those tiny islands scattered like stars in the emptiness of space. Thus, the book you have before you: a tale not just of the ancient mariners of the Pacific but of the many people who have puzzled over their history—the sailors, linguists, archaeologists, historians, ethnographers, folklorists, biologists, and geographers who have each, as it were, put in their oar.
Globe showing the Pacific Ocean.
C. SCOTT WALKER, HARVARD MAP COLLECTION, HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
IF YOU WERE to look at the Pacific Ocean from space, you might notice that you would not be able to see both sides of it at the same time. This is because at its widest, the Pacific is nearly 180 degrees across—more than twelve thousand miles, or almost half the circumference of the earth. North to south, from the Aleutian Islands to the Antarctic, it stretches another ten thousand miles. Taken as a whole, it is so big that you could fit all the landmasses of earth inside it and there would still be room for another continent as large as North and South America combined. It is not simply the largest body of water on the planet—it is the largest single feature.
For most of human history, no one could have known any of this. They could not have known how far the ocean extended or what bodies of land it might or might not contain. They could not have known that the distances between islands, comparatively small at the ocean’s western edge, would stretch and stretch until they were thousands of miles wide. They could not have known that parts of the great ocean were completely empty, containing no land at all, or that the winds and weather in one region might be quite different from—even the reverse of—what was to be met with in another part of the sea. For tens of thousands of years, long after humans had colonized its edges, the middle of the Pacific Ocean remained beyond the reach of man.
The first people to reach any of the Pacific’s islands did so during the last ice age, when sea levels were as much as three hundred feet lower than they are today and the islands of Southeast Asia were a continent known as Sundaland. This meant that people could walk across most of what is now Indonesia, though only as far as Borneo and Bali; east of that, they had to paddle or swim. No one really knows how the first migrants did it—or, for that matter, who they were—but by at least forty thousand years ago they had reached the large islands of Australia and New Guinea, which were then joined together in a separate continent called Sahul.
They crossed water again between New Guinea and the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, reaching as far east as the Solomon Islands, where their progress appears to have been arrested. Perhaps they were stopped by rising sea levels or by the growing gaps of water between bodies of land or by the increasing poverty of plant and animal species as they moved farther out into the sea. Or perhaps they just petered out, like the Norse who tried to settle the island of Greenland and died there or gave up and retreated. In any case, this is how things stood for something like twenty to thirty thousand years. They had pushed out, as it were, to the edge of the shelf, but the vast expanse of the world’s largest ocean remained an insurmountable barrier.
Then, about four thousand