Breadfruit, after a drawing by Sydney Parkinson, in John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages (London, 1773).
DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY.
IF WE SET aside Magellan’s two little atolls, both of which were uninhabited at the time, the first Polynesian island to be sighted by any European was in the Marquesas. This is a group of islands just south of the equator and about four thousand miles west of Peru, a location that puts them at the eastern edge of the Polynesian Triangle, in a comparatively empty region of the sea. To the west and south they have neighbors within a few hundred miles, but you could sail north or east from the Marquesas along a 180-degree arc and not meet with anything at all for thousands of miles.
The islands of Polynesia come in different varieties, and the Marquesas are what are known as “high islands.” What this means to a layperson is that they are mountainous, rising in some cases thousands of feet from the sea; what it means to a geologist is that they are volcanic in origin. Some high islands occur in arcs, in places where one tectonic plate plunges underneath another. But those of the mid-Pacific are thought to be formed by hot spots, plumes of molten rock rising directly from the earth’s mantle. These islands typically occur in chains, grouped along a northwest–southeast axis, with the oldest at the northwest end and the youngest at the southeast, a pattern explained by the northwesterly movement of the Pacific plate. The idea is that over the course of millions of years, islands are formed and carried away as the slab of crust on which they are sitting drifts, while new islands rise out of the ocean behind them. The textbook case is the Hawaiian archipelago: the Big Island of Hawai‘i, with its active volcanoes, lies at the southeastern end of a chain of islands that get progressively older and smaller as they trail away to the northwest, ending in a string of underwater seamounts. Meanwhile, southeast of the Big Island, a new volcano is emerging, which will crest the sea sometime in the next 100,000 years.
The landscape of a high island has a sort of yin and yang about it. Composed almost entirely of basalt, high islands erode in quite spectacular ways, exposing great ribs and ramparts and pinnacles of rock. On their windward sides, where the mountains wring moisture from the passing air, they are lush and verdant, while on their leeward sides, in the rain shadow of these same mountains, they can be perfectly parched. But perhaps the greatest contrast is between the dark, heavy loom of the mountains and the bright, open aspect of the sea. Out from under the shadow of the peaks, the tangle of trees and vines in the uplands gives way to an airier landscape of grasses, coconut palms, and whispering casuarina. The ridges flatten to a coastal plain; the mountain cataracts slow to quiet rivers. At the tide line, the rocks and pools give way, here and there, to bright crescents of sand. The sea stretches out into the distance, broken only by a line of white breakers where the reef divides the bright turquoise of the lagoon from the darker water of the open ocean.
In some respects, the Marquesas are typical high islands, with their towering rock buttresses and fantastic spires, their deeply eroded clefts and fertile valleys. But in others they are quite unlike the Polynesian islands pictured in tourist brochures. Lying in the path of the Humboldt Current, which carries cold water up the South American coast, the Marquesas have never developed a system of coral reefs. They have no lagoons, few sheltered bays, and only a handful of beaches. Their ruggedness extends all the way to the coast, and their shores are largely grim and perpendicular.
The other thing missing in the Marquesas is the coastal plain. This is the part of a high island on which it is easiest and most natural to live. As anyone who has been to the islands of Hawai‘i knows, the standard way of navigating a high island is to travel around the coast. And it is easy to see how important this part of the island’s topography is—how it enables movement and communication, provides room for gardens, plantations, and housing; how even now the land between the ocean and the mountains is where the human population lives. In the Marquesas, however, there is none of this; the only habitable land lies in the valleys that radiate out from the island’s center, enclosed and cut off from one another by the mountains’ great arms.
To many Europeans, the Marquesas have seemed indescribably romantic. With their peaks shrouded in mist, their folds buried in greenery, their flanks rising dramatically from the sea, they have a brooding prehistoric beauty. Visiting in 1888, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson found them at once magnificent and forbidding, with their great dark ridges and their towering crags. “At all hours of the day,” he wrote, “they strike the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the same menacing gloom.”
It is tempting to imagine that the first Polynesians might have had similarly mixed impressions when they arrived. The discovery of any high island in the Pacific must have been a triumph: here was land, water, safety, sources of food. But archaeological sites in the Marquesas reveal a surprising variety of types of fishhooks from the very earliest settlement period, suggesting, perhaps, a surge of experiment and innovation prompted by the realization that fishing techniques brought from islands with more coral would not work in the deep, rough waters of the Marquesan coast. Still, the animals that were imported thrived (except for, maybe, the dog), the breadfruit trees grew, and the people prospered—so much so that by the time the first Europeans arrived, the Marquesas were “thickly inhabited” by a population that came out to meet the strangers in droves.
THE MARQUESAS WERE discovered in 1595 by the Spaniard Álvaro de Mendaña, who was en route with a shipload of colonists to the Solomon Islands. We say that Mendaña “discovered” the Marquesas, but of course this is not, strictly speaking, true. Indeed, the claim that any European explorer discovered anything in the Pacific—least of all the islands of Polynesia—is obviously problematic. As the Frenchman who later claimed the Marquesas for King Louis XV observed, it is hard to see how anyone could possess an island that is already possessed by the people who live there. And what is true for possession is even more true for discovery: In what sense can a land that is already inhabited be discovered? But what the word “discovered” means in the context of eighteenth-century Frenchmen or sixteenth-century Spaniards is not “discovered for the first time in human history” but something much more like “made known to people outside the region for the first time.”
This was Mendaña’s second voyage across the Pacific. Nearly thirty years earlier, he had led another expedition in search of Terra Australis Incognita, managing to reach the Solomon Islands before returning, in some disarray, to Peru. Despite the hardships of the journey, cyclones, scurvy, insubordination, shortages of food and water—at one point the daily ration consisted of “half a pint of water, and half of that was crushed cockroaches”—Mendaña was determined to try again. For twenty-six years he pestered the Spanish crown, and in 1595 they finally gave in.
The second expedition was, if possible, even more calamitous than the first. Confused and disorderly from the start, it was plagued by violence and dissension. Mendaña was on a zealot’s mission to bring the benighted heathen to God; his wife, an unlovable virago, caused trouble wherever she went; many of his soldiers were self-interested and cruel. Neither the commander nor any of his subordinates seem to have understood just how far away their destination was, despite—at least in Mendaña’s case—having been there before. In fact, they never did arrive. The colony, established instead on the island of Santa Cruz, was a disaster, with robberies, murders, ambushes, even a couple of beheadings. Mendaña, ill, broken, and “sunk in a religious stupor,” contracted a fever and died like something out of Aguirre,