Island. J. Edward Chamberlin

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.