The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (6 page)

What prompted the Lapita people to work their way into the open waters of the Pacific is unknown. Population pressures were probably not a factor, and the distances involved were too great and the volume and value of goods too modest to make trade worthwhile, at least on a scale we can comprehend from this vantage. A more likely possibility depends on the nature of Lapita society, in which birth order and rules of inheritance may have forced or prompted
generations of the disinherited to make their way in the world on their own. It may have been mere curiosity, but if the Polynesian voyages were a case of discovery for its own sake, they would have no real parallel—at least on a sustained level—until the polar
explorations of the nineteenth century. Whatever their rationale may have been, as in any exploration the crucial underlying factor was the confidence that they could return to their point of origin. By and large, the human settlement of the Pacific was the result of deliberate calculation and not of accident or “
splendid recklessness,” a fact borne out in the oral traditions of Oceania.

Fishing is a major leitmotif in Polynesian mythology, one that accounts for the very existence of the islands and for humans’ discovery of places from Hawaii to New Zealand. According to one tradition, the first expedition to New Zealand was led by a
fisherman named
Kupe from Hawaiki, which in this instance probably refers to the Society Islands. The story relates that the fishermen of Hawaiki kept losing their bait to a school of octopi until their leader, Kupe, decided to give chase—all the way to New Zealand. Kupe evidently anticipated a long voyage and his canoe,
Matahorua,
carried sixty-seven people, including his wife and their five children. After killing the octopus in Cook Strait, Kupe named several islands in the strait for his daughters, visited South Island, and then returned to Hawaiki from a peninsula near modern Auckland called
Hokianga nui a Kupe, “Great returning place of Kupe.”

Kupe reported the islands as uninhabited, but other traditions and archaeological evidence suggest that when the first Polynesians arrived, the islands had already been settled, possibly by Melanesians from Fiji.
Although New Zealand is closer to the Solomon Islands than the Society Islands or Hawaii, they were more difficult to reach, and over time both the Melanesian and Polynesian settlers lost touch with their homelands. That the most extensive, visible, and fertile islands in the South Pacific did not attract a constant flow of sailors from a much earlier date can best be explained by the patterns of navigation imposed by the Polynesians’ environment.

Sailing the Pacific with any expectation of being able to return to one’s point of departure or making remote landfalls requires navigational ability of a high order. The combined landmass of the islands east of New Guinea amounts to less than one percent of the area of the Pacific—and this is divided among about twenty-one thousand islands and
atolls the
average size of which is less than sixty square kilometers (about twenty-three square miles), although most are much smaller. Just as the exploration and settlement of Oceania were
unique accomplishments in world history, so were the
navigational practices employed. At the most basic level, the essential elements are shared by navigators everywhere: observation of heavenly bodies (celestial navigation), reading the wind and water, and tracing the behavior of birds, fish, and whales. What distinguishes the Pacific argonauts is the relative importance they attached to these phenomena, and the degree to which they consolidated their observations in a coherent body of knowledge without recourse to writing.

Between the equator and 15°S to 25°S, depending on the season, the prevailing winds are the southeast
trade winds, so called not because they were used by trading ships—so were all winds—but from an archaic use of “trade” meaning steadily and regularly. Sailors setting out from the Solomon Islands exploited periodic wind shifts to sail downwind fully confident that if they did not find new land, the trade winds would eventually return and enable them to run home to the west. (Europeans employed a comparable strategy in their exploration of the Atlantic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.) Thus exploration was for the most part the product of two-way intentional voyaging; only occasionally were new islands discovered as a result of being lost at sea. The initial expansion from the Solomon Islands toward the
Santa Cruz Islands and
New Caledonia, which lie east-southeast, conforms to this model, as does the pattern of settlement for the rest of Polynesia between the equator and about 20°S.

The settlement of New Zealand is an exception that proves the rule. Although the top of North Island lies at 35°S, about two thousand miles from the Solomons, it is on the far side of a belt of variable winds that is difficult to probe from central Polynesia with any reliable expectation of safe return. Thus it was relatively less accessible than the Marquesas, which lie about twice as far to the east of the Solomons but which were reached several centuries earlier. New Zealand also lies in a higher (and colder) latitude, nine hundred miles farther from the equator than Hawaii, in an area more subject to inclement weather. These conditions are thought to explain why the original settlers eventually abandoned the sea road, or
ara moana,
back to Polynesia. Even so, the
Maori did not turn their backs to the sea altogether: around 1500 they reached Chatham Island, 430 miles east of New Zealand and probably the last island settled by Polynesian sailors.

That people were able to make so many minute landfalls again and again was due to their outstanding familiarity with the ocean environment and their ability to “
expand” the size of their intended landfalls by relying on phenomena other than direct visual contact with their destination. This esoteric knowledge was transmitted orally to a select few from one generation to the next. Some of these techniques are common to other maritime traditions—
following birds that feed at sea but nest on land, noting where different species of fish or sea mammals are found, looking for smoke generated by natural fires, or discerning changes in water color over reefs. In the Pacific, sailors developed the ability to read the patterns of
ocean swells and how these change as they are deflected when passing islands. Clouds can announce the presence of islands lying below the horizon by shifts in color, speed, and shape. Finally, there is the “loom” of an island, a faint but telltale column of light above islands, especially
atolls with
lagoons. Taken together, these phenomena widen the range at which sailors can sense the presence of land by as much as thirty miles, which increases dramatically the likelihood of finding even the smallest speck in the sea.

But locating land at a distance is not the same as purposefully navigating from one island to another, which the sailors of Oceania accomplished by observation of both the environment and the heavens. Their approach to celestial navigation requires memorizing “
the direction of every known island from every other one.” An island’s bearing relative to another is determined by the rising or setting star under which the island lies relative to the observer. When sailing between two islands, a third is chosen as the
etak
, or reference island. The navigator knows the stars under which the
etak
lies in relation to the islands of departure and destination, as well as the stars under which the
etak
lies at various stages of the passage between them. Thus a passage is broken into a series of
etak
stages. Using
etak
depends on knowing how all known islands are related to one another with respect to different stars, so a navigator sailing between, for example, the
Caroline Islands of Woleai and Olimarao (117 miles apart) would use Faraulep (70 miles to the north) as the
etak;
but when sailing from Olimarao to Faraulep, Woleai would be the
etak.

Sailors in different areas of the Pacific tended to apply different methods of traditional navigation. Among the few remaining practitioners today,
Marshall Islanders pay most attention to ocean swells, while sailors in the Federated States of
Micronesia rely more on the rising and setting of stars. Starting in the 1970s, researchers began interviewing and sailing with the last adepts of traditional navigation to learn their secrets and determine whether these were reliable enough for the sorts of voyages necessary to maintain contact between islands separated by many hundreds of miles of open water. In 1976, the
Polynesian Voyaging Society built the
Hokule’a,
a
double canoe rigged with claw
sails, which sailed from Hawaii via the Tuamotus to
Tahiti, about twenty-four hundred miles.
Mau Piailug, a wayfinder from Satawal (an island of about four square kilometers) in the Carolines, navigated the
Hokule’a
across the northeast trade winds, the equator, and then into the southeast trades before they made Tahiti, thirty-four days out from Maui. In 1985, a Hawaiian student of
Piailug’s named
Nainoa Thompson navigated the
Hokule’a
on an expedition that covered many of the old routes within Polynesia—sixteen thousand miles’ worth—between the
Cook Islands, New Zealand,
Tonga,
Samoa, Tahiti, and the Tuamotus. In 1999, the Polynesian triangle was closed with a voyage from Hawaii to
Easter Island via the Marquesas. The successful completion of these voyages, among others, proved that early sailors relying on an orally transmitted body of navigational knowledge were able to explore the far-flung islands of the Pacific methodically and deliberately, and that given vessels of adequate size and speed they could easily transport the people and goods necessary to populate these islands and maintain communications between them.

By the time of her passage to Easter Island in 1999, the
Hokule’a
was the oldest of a fleet of at least six traditional deepwater craft that had been built in Hawaii, the Cook Islands, and New Zealand. Archaeological remains of ancient vessels in the Pacific are few and the people of Oceania had no written language, so our understanding of ancient boatbuilding practice depends on interpreting written descriptions and illustrations by European voyagers of the sixteenth century and later, in light of surviving practices. Vessels tended to be built of planks lashed together to achieve the desired hull shape after which frames or ribs were inserted to strengthen the hull, a process called shell-first construction. Single-hull vessels were used for fishing in Tonga, Tuamotu, and the
Society Islands, and in New Zealand to carry warriors into battle, but these were not stable enough for ocean passages. Shipwrights compensated for this either by adding
outriggers or by yoking two hulls with transverse beams on which they could erect a sheltered platform. Outriggers consist of two or more poles laid between the hull and a small piece of wood called a float on the outboard end, and they are found not only in Oceania but throughout Southeast Asia—where they were probably developed—as well as in the Indian Ocean.

Double canoes were the largest and most important vessels used in the colonization of the Pacific. In addition to being more stable, the deck spanning the hulls created more space and protection from the elements for crew, passengers, and cargo. Captain Cook observed double canoes carrying between 50 and 120 people and measuring up to twenty-one meters long and nearly four meters across. In settling the Pacific, Polynesians likely sailed double canoes of between fifteen and twenty-seven meters in length and
capable of carrying the people, supplies, and material goods necessary for establishing sustainable communities on uninhabited islands after voyages lasting as long as six weeks. These included edible plants for crops (yams, taro, coconut, banana, and nut-bearing trees); domesticated dogs, pigs, and chickens; and tools and
ceramics.

The chronology of Oceanian settlement shows that long-distance voyaging and
migration expanded and contracted in centuries-long cycles. When
Europeans began mapping the Pacific in the eighteenth century, the forces of expansion had been spent for some time, but Polynesians had not abandoned the sea or lost the ability to navigate long distances. During Cook’s first voyage,
Joseph Banks recorded that the Tahitian
Tupia could locate scores of remote islands and that journeys of twenty days were not uncommon. But communication between the Polynesian heartland of
Hawaiki and the extremes of Easter Island, Hawaii, and New Zealand had stopped. At some point people would have taken to their boats again to strike out for far horizons, and in so doing they likely would have initiated a demonstrable and sustained interaction with the continents to their east and introduced the people of the Americas to their innovative forms of seafaring. As it happened, the people of the
Americas developed a variety of discrete maritime traditions in isolation from one another, although they never exploited the sea to the same degree that people in many other parts of the world did.

Boats of the Friendly Islands [Tonga]
by John Webber, an artist who accompanied Captain James Cook’s third expedition to the Pacific (1776–80). In the foreground is a small sailing canoe with an outrigger and a platform for passengers. Farther off is a larger double canoe for long-distance passages. “There cannot be a doubt,” wrote a nineteenth-century observer, “that the peculiar shape of the Tongan kalia, or double canoe, and the arrangement of its large and single [wishbone] sail, are conducive to the attainment of great speed in ordinary weather.” (Quoted in Paul Johnstone, The Sea-Craft of Prehistory, 205.) Courtesy of the British Museum, London.