now believe that “becoming Polynesian took place in Polynesia,” in the words of Patrick Kirch, the preeminent Pacific archaeologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. According to this view, ancestral Polynesian culture evolved in situ first, from Melanesian and “Austronesian” Southeast Asian antecedents, up to thirty-five hundred years ago in what is called the Lapita cultural cradle area in eastern Melanesia. From there, these peoples reached Fiji and then Tonga and Samoa by perhaps 880 BC, where, over the next millennium, the fully formed Polynesian cultural complex incubated. It was a lifestyle based on crops—the Melanesian suite of vegetatively propagated roots such as aroids (taro, or kalo in Hawaiian) and yams—supplemented with orchard crops, such as coconuts and breadfruit, and fish and other products of the surrounding sea. In maintaining links between these neighbor islands, Polynesians effectively created a “voyaging nursery”: the small, outrigger canoes of Melanesia and Southeast Asia became large oceangoing vessels equipped with double hulls and lateen sails, sailed by large crews and guided by a supple science of navigation by stars, winds, currents, swells deflected between islands, and the signs of birds and other creatures.2 In the face of the near-constant easterly trade winds at this latitude, Polynesians perfected the art of sailing upwind to remote landfalls and then returning to their islands of origin. When, after one thousand years, the cultural conditions coalesced in favor of purposefully searching for new lands to colonize, the skills and technologies required were in place, allowing Polynesians to reach nearly every (not yet populated) inhabitable island in the Pacific Ocean and establish themselves on them.
The first waves of settlement out from the Fiji-Tonga-Samoa-Futuna core reached the Society group and the Marquesas; later migrations traced northward up the Line Islands to Hawai‘i; eastward to Easter (Rapa Nui); and southward to Mangareva, the Southern Cooks, and finally, New Zealand (Aotearoa) by AD 1200–1300—making it “one of the last places on earth to be settled by preindustrialized humans,” in Kirch’s words.3 The addition of the South American sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) to the crop repertoire of the last-settled islands also indicates Polynesian contact with that continent.4 Polynesians went—and stayed—everywhere, occupying even rocky, inhospitable Pitcairn and Henderson in the Eastern Pacific, and remote islets like Necker and Nihoa in the Hawaiian chain northwest of Kaua‘i, for as long as six hundred years.5 Linguistic and material evidence shows that they maintained links between islands across formidable distances for centuries, before isolation returned for unknown reasons.6
When Europeans ventured into Polynesia in numbers in the eighteenth century, they immediately recognized that the widely dispersed people they encountered, from Tahiti to Easter Island to New Zealand to Hawai‘i, belonged to a single group closely related by race, language, religion, technology, and cultural patterns and organization from agriculture to architecture.
This expansion was not just a question of boats and navigation: the islands of the Pacific east of the Solomons had few edible plant or animals species, especially on atolls.7 Prospective settlers had to bring almost everything with them, providing a textbook example of what the anthropologist Edgar Anderson called “transported landscapes” and the historian Alfred Crosby called a “portmanteau biota”: all the biological resources necessary to long-term survival, without which the technological and cultural skills of the voyagers would have proven useless.8 Settlers in Hawai‘i would eventually import dogs, pigs, chickens, rats, and the Hawaiian horticultural complex (differing only in emphasis from that of elsewhere in Polynesia): taro (kalo), sweet potato (‘uala), yam (uhi), banana (mai‘a), sugarcane (kō), breadfruit (‘ulu), coconut (niu), paper mulberry (wauke), kava (‘awa), gourd (ipu), ti (ki), arrowroot (pia), turmeric (‘olena), and bamboo (‘ohe).9
All across Polynesia, the colonizers adapted to fit the diverse environmental circumstances they found. In a general sense, these can be divided into the three principal kinds of islands in the Pacific: atolls, makatea islands, and high islands. Their origins can be either from “arc” islands or “hot spot” islands. All Pacific islands are volcanic or tectonic in origin; most on its western margin are arc islands, accretive products of plate margin subduction, wherein pieces of crust sitting atop the diving plate are scraped off onto the overriding plate. Arc islands, such as New Zealand, Fiji, and New Caledonia, are often large and mountainous. In the mid-ocean, including most of Polynesia, islands are products of midplate hot spots—plumes of molten magma rising from the earth’s mantle that pierce the crust to form volcanic shields; as the plates move over the stationary plume, islands string out like beads on a necklace, leaving lines, arcs, or clusters of islands diminishing in size as they recede in distance and time from their point of origin and erode back into the sea. High islands, such as Tahiti, Rarotonga, and the main Hawaiian islands, are examples of relatively recently formed hot-spot islands. Built of volcanic basalts and lavas, younger islands often lack surface water because of extreme rock porosity and lack fringing reefs because of steep slopes into the surrounding depths. Older high islands, removed by plate motion from the building process of the hot spot, gradually erode, developing deeply incised stream valleys, broad coastal flats, and fringing or barrier reefs. Atolls are formerly high islands that have been lowered, through a combination of erosion and subsidence under their own weight, to near or below sea level, leaving fringing reefs surrounding a volcanic core that eventually disappears, leaving no dry rock, just a barrier reef surrounding a lagoon. Makatea islands are older atolls or subsided high islands where previously submerged portions have been partially raised above water, either by falling sea levels or by tectonic forces. Typically, the uptilt is caused by the weight of a nearby, related volcanic shield formation. Makatea means “white stone,” after the exposed limestone of former reefs elevated to become limestone ramparts and plateaus. These are often marginal environments for cultivation because rainfall disappears into their porous limestone karsts and thin soils. Mangaia and Henderson, both islands with histories of socioenvironmental stress, are examples.10
Within environmental limits, most Polynesian societies thrived—and evolved. The ability of Polynesian societies to adapt their main crop, taro (Colocasia spp.), to highly varying circumstances is the most significant “event” in Polynesian prehistory, second only to success at voyaging. All of these adaptations involved the control of water. On atolls, which are typically dry zones because of high soil porosity and low rainfall, taro was grown by pit cultivation: digging down through the sand or coral to the thin freshwater lens overlying the seawater. On high islands and makatea islands with swampy coastal valleys, it was by raised-bed cultivation: digging drainage canals through the swampy flats and heaping the spoils up into mounds where taro, yams, sugarcane, and other crops were planted. On high islands with well-developed stream valleys, irrigated pondfields were constructed, with streams diverted through barrages and ditches to a series of linked, walled paddies, in which flooding and drainage were controlled by means of headgates.
Several writers have pointed to a seeming paradox of Polynesians’ existence: though accomplished at seafaring and fishing, the majority of them derived their subsistence from the land. The dominance of the land over the sea would have profound effects on the history of Hawai‘i, as we will see later; here I will list just a few examples. E. S. and Elizabeth Handy, with Mary Kawena Pukui, in their classic study Native Planters in Old Hawaii, cite much evidence that most common Hawaiians were farmers, not fishers.11 Suggestively, the word for an island or a division of land, moku, is also that for a ship or a boat. The sea as highway is a frequent metaphor in legend and oral tradition, and it is even reported that some Polynesian navigators talked about the moving sea passing by the stationary canoe.12 In an agricultural society with a severely limited land base that practiced a form of primogeniture, younger sons would be pushed to sea in search of tillable land: as it was for many of the Scandinavian Vikings who sailed off in search of new lands, oceanic expansion was a farmer’s imperative.13
NATURAL HISTORY OF THE PACIFIC ISLANDS
The discoverers of Hawai‘i found the largest piece of unclaimed island real estate in the Pacific, excluding New Zealand: an area of 16,692 square kilometers (6,424 square miles) 30 percent larger than Connecticut.14 It was also the most remote: 2,557 miles from Los Angeles, 5,541 miles