Polynesia Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Polynesia. Here they are! All 100 of them:

breeds of dogs were developed and raised for food in Aztec Mexico, Polynesia, and ancient China.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel)
I was thinking about people," said Polynesia." People make me sick. They think they're so wonderful. The world has been going on now for thousands of years, hasn't it? And the only thing in animal language that people have learned to understand is that when a dog wags his tail he means 'I'm glad'! It's funny isn't it? You are the very first man to talk like us. Oh, sometimes people annoy me dreadfully - such airs they put on, talking about 'the dumb animals.' Dumb! Huh! Why I knew a macaw once who could say 'Good morning' in seven different ways.
Hugh Lofting (The Story of Doctor Dolittle (Doctor Dolittle, #1))
As I walked up toward the band kids, Ben shouted, ''Jacobsen, was I dreaming or did you-'' I gave him the slightest shake of my head and he changed gears mid sentence- ''and me go on a wild adventure to French Polynesia last night, traveling in a sailboat made of bananas?'' ''That was one delicious sailboat,'' I answered.
John Green (Paper Towns)
Christ will never more come down to earth nor will there be any law-giver, nor will murder cease nor theft, nor rape, and yet... and yet one expects something, something terrifyingly marvellous and absurd, perhaps a cold lobster with mayonnaise served gratis, perhaps an invention, like the electric light, like television, only more devastating, more soul rending, an invention unthinkable that will bring a shattering calm and void, not the calm and void of death but of life such as the monks dreamed, such as is dreamed still in the Himalayas, in Tibet, in Lahore, in the Aleutian Islands, in Polynesia, in Easter Island, the dream of men before the flood, before the word was written, the dream of cave men and anthropophagists, of those with double sex and short tails, of those who are said to be crazy and have no way of defending themselves because they are outnumbered by those who are not crazy.
Henry Miller (Tropic of Capricorn (Tropic, #2))
Are today's fears more or less founded than the fears of that time? When it comes to the future, we are just as blind as our fathers. Swiss and Swedes have their anti-nuclear shelters, but what will they find when they come out into the open? There are Polynesia, New Zealand, Tierra del Fuego, the Antarctic: perhaps they will remain unharmed. Obtaining a passport and entry visa is much easier than it was then, so why aren't we going? Why aren't 'we leaving our country? Why aren't we leaving "before"?
Primo Levi (The Drowned and the Saved)
Polynesians were both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world. Seven’s
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
This is what is meant by the Polynesian Triangle, an area of ten million square miles in the middle of the Pacific Ocean defined by the three points of Hawai‘i, New Zealand, and Easter Island.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Therefore, men of Polynesia and Boston and China and Mount Fuji and the barrios of the Philippines, do not come to these islands empty-handed, or craven in spirit, or afraid to starve. There is no food here. In these islands there is no certainty. Bring your own food, your own gods, your own flowers and fruits and concepts. For if you come without resources to these islands you will perish... On these harsh terms the islands waited.
James A. Michener (Hawaii)
It’s understandable, then, that pretty much every human culture independently developed some version of the belief that a special animating force makes living things alive. The Romans called it spiritus and the Greeks pneuma (both words also meaning “breath”). In China it is called chi, which also translates to “blood” because they felt the life force was carried in the blood. In Japan it is ki, in India prana, in Polynesia mana, and in Arabic it is baraka.
Steven Novella (The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How To Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake)
Although oral traditions often seem focused on the past, they are actually quite present-centered. In an oral culture, only what matters to the living is retained.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Hawai‘i, for example, you go mauka, toward the mountain, or makai, toward the sea—directions that can point north, south, east, or west, depending upon where you are standing
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Vision is not so much about just looking but knowing what to look for. It's experience.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
They had a constellation known as Big Bird, which overlaps our constellations Orion and Canis Major, and they gave the same name to the planet Venus that we give it: Morning Star. Not
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
But what was really surprising was how early the dates were: at 2,800 years before the present, they pushed the occupation of New Caledonia back to the end of the first millennium B.C. IN
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Vast tracts of ocean, whether Polynesia, Micronesia or Melanesia, contain island populations that remain outside the modern world. They know about it, they may have traveled to it, they appreciate artifacts and medical help from it, but they live their daily lives much as hundreds of generations of ancestors before them, without money, electricity, phones, TV or manufactured food.
Andrew Rayner (Reach for Paradise)
perhaps to keep out the pigs. They had a large number of words for types of wind, including strong wind, storm wind, light wind, dry wind, winds from various directions, and wind bringing rain.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
In a world without writing, there are no inventories or statistics; in fact, writing, so far as anyone knows, was invented in order to make accurate lists of commodities like she-goats and oxen and amphorae of wine.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Whoever they were, the so-called Lapita people appeared to be the first people on the scene in these places, and this, in turn, meant that not only were they the true pioneers of the remote Pacific—the first people to sail over the horizon to islands that were too far away to see—but they were also the first people to reach the Polynesian Triangle. And this meant that they were the immediate precursors and ancestors of the Polynesians.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
But it does have the merit of asking whether there is knowledge encoded in Tupaia’s chart that might be difficult for us to see because it is based on unfamiliar assumptions about how information is most usefully organized.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
In some traditions, Te Pō is associated with Te Kore, a word that in common speech expresses simple negation but here is elevated to mean something like “Nothingness” or “the Void.” Like Te Pō, Te Kore can be qualified—Kore-nui (the Vast Void); Kore-roa (the Far-Extending Void); Kore-para (the Parched Void); Kore-rawea (the Void in Which Nothing Is Felt)—suggesting that it is less a matter of true absence or emptiness and more a kind of liminal space between being and nonbeing—a “realm of potential being,
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
The first is that the relationships among all forms of matter are ones of kinship; everything that exists is, in a fairly literal sense, related to everything else. The stone that is the ancestor Raukawa is also, in its own right, an ancestor, being part of the same continuum of creation as the man and the ancestral hero. The second is that the mechanism of creation for everything in the world—not just humans, animals, and gods but even things that we would describe as inorganic, like sand and stones—is a form of sexual reproduction. Creation in traditional Polynesian myths is, fundamentally, a matter of procreation.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
All the islands inside this triangle were originally settled by a clearly identifiable group of voyagers: a people with a single language and set of customs, a particular body of myths, a distinctive arsenal of tools and skills, and a “portmanteau biota” of plants and animals that they carried with them wherever they went. They had no knowledge of writing or metal tools—no maps or compasses—and yet they succeeded in colonizing the largest ocean on the planet, occupying every habitable rock between New Guinea and the Galápagos, and establishing what was, until the modern era, the largest single culture area in the world.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
According to many Polynesian creation stories, the origin of the universe begins in something known as Te Pō. Typically described as a period of chaos or darkness or a kind of night, Te Pō is what existed before any gods, sky, land, sea, plants, animals, or humans had come into being. It is associated not just with the dim beginnings of the world but with the time before birth, the time after death, and the mysteries of the spirit world. In the dualistic philosophy of the Polynesians, it is opposed to Te Ao, the world of light and ordinary human endeavor. We live in Te Ao, but it is from Te Pō that we come, and to it that we ultimately return. The
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
In 1951, the first radiocarbon date from the Pacific was reported by Willard F. Libby’s lab at the University of Chicago. Based on a sample of charcoal from the lowest layer of an excavation of the Kuli‘ou‘ou rock-shelter, on the island of O‘ahu, it fixed the earliest occupation of this Hawaiian site at A.D. 1004, plus or minus 180 years.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
They were polytheistic, and the name for their most securely reconstructible deity relates to the word for “sky.” Their word for human, on the other hand, was derived from their word for “earth” or “land.” Their poetry revolved around themes of fertility, reciprocity, immortality, and heroic deeds; a single famous phrase, best known to us from the Homeric epics, is glossed as “imperishable fame.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
References to Te Pō occur in myths and chants throughout Polynesia, including one of the most famous of all, a two-thousand-line Hawaiian creation chant known as the Kumulipo, meaning “Beginning in deep darkness.” Composed at the beginning of the eighteenth century to mark the birth of the high chief Lonoikamakahiki, it begins, in Queen Lili‘uokalani’s translation: At the time that turned the heat of the earth At the time when the heavens turned and changed At the time when the light of the sun was subdued To cause light to break forth At the time of the night of Makalii [winter] Then began the slime which established the earth, The source of deepest darkness Of the depth of darkness, of the depth of darkness, Of the darkness of the sun, in the depth of night, It is night, So night was born.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
The officer argued that even if they managed to find “a desert island,” they would certainly perish from starvation or thirst. Emory pointed out that Polynesians had been managing just fine for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and that there was food and water to be had on even the smallest islands if you knew where to look. Coconuts alone provided food, water, containers, and fuel for a fire; the problem was that most American servicemen had no idea how to husk one. Asked if he could teach them, Emory replied, Of course—all that was needed was a pointed stick. And so began his stint as survival instructor to the U.S. military in the Pacific theater. Emory compiled a little manual of the basics, entitled South Sea Lore (known in its first incarnation as the Castaway’s Baedeker to the South Seas).
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
The city of Gregoria was ahead. The boys were sleeping, and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of the Yellow Robe and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted walls of Cádiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depths of Benares the Capital of the World.
Jack Kerouac (On the Road)
Te Po-nui The great night Te Po-roa The long night Te Po-uriuri The deep night Te Po-kerekere The intense night Te Po-tiwhatiwha The dark night Te Po-te-kitea The night in which nothing is seen Te Po-tangotango The intensely dark night Te Po-whawha The night of feeling Te Po-namunamu-ki-taiao The night of seeking passage to the world Te Po-tahuri-atu The night of restless turning Te Po-tahuri-mai-ki-taiao The night of turning towards the revealed
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
But what was really surprising was how early the dates were: at 2,800 years before the present, they pushed the occupation of New Caledonia back to the end of the first millennium B.C. IN THE YEARS that followed, Lapita sites would be discovered on the Mussau Islands off Papua New Guinea, the Reef and Santa Cruz Islands, Tikopia Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Futuna, and Samoa—in other words, virtually everywhere between the Bismarck Archipelago and the western edge of Polynesia. Dates from these sites confirmed the age of the culture represented by these ceramics, but they also revealed an unexpected pattern: Lapita settlements across a 2,500-mile swath of the western Pacific—from roughly the Solomon Islands to Samoa—seem to have appeared almost simultaneously around 1000 B.C. Furthermore, east of the Solomons, they appeared to represent a cultural horizon: no one predated them in these islands, archaeologically speaking; no cultural artifacts underlay theirs.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
One of Libby’s key assumptions had been that the quantity of carbon-14 in the atmosphere was constant, but this, as it turned out, was not true. Changes in the earth’s magnetic field, sunspot activity, even human activities like burning fossil fuels, exploding atom bombs, and testing nuclear weapons, altered the atmospheric concentration of radiocarbon. Unless radiocarbon dates were corrected using a known formula (i.e., calibrated), they could be off by significant amounts (as much as seven hundred years in the case of dates around 3000 B.C.). Gradually
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Proto-Oceanic is the theoretical mother tongue of the Oceanic peoples and the language from which all the Oceanic languages are thought to descend. It is a huge family, encompassing more than 450 languages, including those spoken on all the islands of Polynesia, most of the smaller islands of Melanesia, and all the islands of Micronesia except two. It is itself a branch of the larger Austronesian language family, a truly stupendous grouping of more than a thousand languages, which includes, in addition to all the Oceanic languages, those of the Philippines, Borneo, Indonesia, Timor, the Moluccas, and Madagascar. The very oldest Austronesian languages—and thus, in a sense, their geographic root—are a group of languages known as Formosan, a few of which are still spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of Ilha Formosa (Beautiful Island), an old Portuguese name for the island of Taiwan. Thus, at least from a linguistic point of view, the path back from Polynesia to the ultimate homeland proceeds through the Melanesian and Southeast Asian archipelagoes to an island off the coast of China, where the trail goes cold around 5000 or 6000 B.C.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Then one day, as he was watching one of his workers sift a shovelful of earth, something among the rocks and sand caught his eye, “a flat fragment of some brick-red substance,” which appeared briefly and then disappeared. It looked, thought Suggs, exactly like a piece of pottery. But that couldn’t be—pottery was found throughout Island Southeast Asia and much of Melanesia, but it had never been seen east of Samoa. And yet, there it was: an unmistakable potsherd from the lowest level of the dark band of sand that indicated human habitation. Almost immediately, a second, larger fragment emerged, then a third: a piece of an ancient pot rim with a grooved and rounded lip and marks on the inner and outer surfaces, “from the hand of the potter who had smoothed this vessel in the dim past.” In all, five fragments of pottery were discovered, belonging to just three vessels: a poorly fired, crumbly brown pot with a coarse temper; a well-fired reddish-brown bowl with a flared rim; and a fine-tempered fragment, also reddish brown, with marks that showed it had been polished using some kind of tool. Modest though they were, these ceramic tidbits changed “the complexion of Polynesian prehistory”—though, as was so often the case, it was not immediately clear in precisely what way.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
It was the artifact of choice for a technique called seriation, which involved sorting objects by shape or style or some other formal feature and then ranging them in series, on the principle that things that are alike probably belong to the same period and that changes in style are often incremental. Like stratigraphy, seriation is a means of establishing relative chronologies; combined with the new technique of radiocarbon dating, it could be used to nail down whole stretches of cultural time. There was, however, no pottery in Hawai‘i, and Sinoto wondered what else could be used as a “diagnostic” artifact. The answer was fishhooks. Like
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Two possible reasons for this might be that, like politics, all navigation is local, and that what is true in one geographical region is not necessarily true in another. The night sky in New Zealand is not the same as the night sky in Papua New Guinea, which is not the same as the night sky in Hawai‘i. The winds and currents in the Solomons are not the same as those around Rapa Nui or in the Marquesas. A second consideration might be that in many Oceanic societies, navigational knowledge is believed to have been privileged and known to only a few, which may mean that it was especially easy to lose once it was no longer central to a society’s survival.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
them—or something like it. They even got the Doctor some tobacco one day, when he had finished what he had brought with him and wanted to smoke. At night they slept in tents made of palm leaves, on thick, soft beds of dried grass. And after a while they got used to walking such a lot and did not get so tired and enjoyed the life of travel very much. But they were always glad when the night came and they stopped for their resting time. Then the Doctor used to make a little fire of sticks; and after they had had their supper, they would sit round it in a ring, listening to Polynesia singing songs about the sea, or to Chee-Chee telling stories of the jungle. And many of the tales that Chee-Chee told were very interesting. Because although the monkeys had no history books of their own before Doctor Dolittle came to write them for them, they remember everything that happens by telling stories to their children. And Chee-Chee spoke of many things his grandmother had told him—tales of long, long, long ago, before Noah and the Flood—of the days when men dressed in bearskins and lived in holes in the rock and ate their mutton raw because they did not know what cooking was, never having seen a fire. And he told them of the great mammoths, and lizards as long as a train, that wandered over the mountains in those times, nibbling from the treetops. And often they got so interested listening that when he had finished they found their fire had gone right out, and they had to scurry around to get more sticks and build a new one. Now, when the King’s army had gone back and told the King that they couldn’t find the Doctor, the King sent them out again and told them they must stay in the jungle till they caught him. So all this time, while the Doctor and his animals were going along toward the Land of the Monkeys, thinking themselves quite safe, they were still being followed by the King’s men. If Chee-Chee had known this, he would most likely have hidden them again. But he didn’t know it. One day Chee-Chee climbed up a high rock and looked out over the treetops. And when he came down he said they were now quite close to the Land of the Monkeys and would soon be there. And that same evening, sure enough, they saw Chee-Chee’s cousin and a lot of other monkeys, who had not yet gotten sick, sitting in the trees by the edge of a swamp, looking and waiting for them. And when they saw the famous doctor really come, these monkeys made a tremendous noise, cheering and waving leaves and swinging out of the branches to greet him. They wanted to carry his bag and his trunk and everything he had. And one of the bigger ones even carried Gub-Gub, who had gotten
Hugh Lofting (The Story of Doctor Dolittle (Doctor Dolittle Series))
The way a star compass works is this: You begin by envisioning the horizon as a circle marking the meeting point of the earth and the sky—which, of course, is exactly how it looks from a boat on the ocean or the high point of a small island. In the mind of an experienced navigator, this circle is dotted with points marking the rising and setting positions of particular stars. When the navigator imagines himself at the center of this circle and his destination as a point on the horizon, the star compass becomes a plotting diagram, giving the bearing of his target island in terms of the rising and setting points of particular stars. A “star path” is a course defined by the series of stars that rise over the course of a night in a particular direction.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
The splitting off of the Oceanic branch of this language family is thought to have taken place in the neighborhood of the Bismarcks around the time of the first Lapita settlement, and it is strongly linked with the rapid colonization of the islands between there and Samoa between 1500 and 1000 B.C. Thus, the reconstruction of Proto-Oceanic opens a window onto the otherwise fairly mysterious Lapita world. Little survives in archaeological contexts in the tropics—none of the baskets or cordage or wooden housewares, no foodstuffs or clothing, no buildings apart from stone foundations and the dark impressions left by long-decayed posts. But something of the texture of these people’s lives can be extracted from their reconstructed vocabulary, working back through the ages via whatever was essential enough to pass on.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
It is almost impossible to imagine such a world today: one without books or calendars or accounts, never mind the Internet, one in which nothing has ever been documented and all the information that can be possessed is held in the minds of a few. But literacy has emerged only in the past five or six thousand years, and for most of human history this was how knowledge was stored and communicated. The advent of writing is often seen as one of the watershed developments in human history, and it can be argued that the presence or absence of writing shapes cultures in fundamental ways—some would even say it shapes consciousness itself. But even if that is too great a claim, it is certainly true that the ability to document what is known changes the way knowledge is constructed, including the kinds of information that can be transmitted and the shape that information takes.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
The birds had multiplied. She'd installed rows upon rows of floating melamine shelves above shoulder height to accommodate the expression of her once humble collection. Though she'd had bird figurines all over the apartment, the bulk of her prized collection was confined to her bedroom because it had given her joy to wake up to them every morning. Before I'd left, I had a tradition of gifting her with bird figurines. It began with a storm petrel, a Wakamba carving of ebony wood from Kenya I had picked up at the museum gift shop from a sixth-grade school field trip. She'd adored the unexpected birthday present, and I had hunted for them since. Clusters of ceramic birds were perched on every shelf. Her obsession had brought her happiness, so I'd fed it. The tiki bird from French Polynesia nested beside a delft bluebird from the Netherlands. One of my favorites was a glass rainbow macaw from an Argentinian artist that mimicked the vibrant barrios of Buenos Aires. Since the sixth grade, I'd given her one every year until I'd left: eight birds in total. As I lifted each member of her extensive bird collection, I imagined Ma-ma was with me, telling a story about each one. There were no signs of dust anywhere; cleanliness had been her religion. I counted eighty-eight birds in total. Ma-ma had been busy collecting while I was gone. I couldn't deny that every time I saw a beautiful feathered creature in figurine form, I thought of my mother. If only I'd sent her one, even a single bird, from my travels, it could have been the precursor to establishing communication once more. Ma-ma had spoken to her birds often, especially when she cleaned them every Saturday morning. I had imagined she was some fairy-tale princess in the Black Forest holding court over an avian kingdom. I was tempted to speak to them now, but I didn't want to be the one to convey the loss of their queen. Suddenly, however, Ma-ma's collection stirred. It began as a single chirp, a mournful cry swelling into a chorus. The figurines burst into song, tiny beaks opening, chests puffed, to release a somber tribute to their departed beloved. The tune was unfamiliar, yet its melancholy was palpable, rising, surging until the final trill when every bird bowed their heads toward the empty bed, frozen as if they hadn't sung seconds before. I thanked them for the happiness they'd bestowed on Ma-ma.
Roselle Lim (Natalie Tan's Book of Luck & Fortune)
The archaeologist attached to the Bayard Dominick’s Marquesan team had reported in 1925 that the Marquesas offered “few opportunities for archaeological research.” But in 1956, a new expedition set out to reexamine the possibilities in these islands at the eastern edge of the Polynesian Triangle. An energetic Columbia University graduate student named Robert Suggs was sent ahead to reconnoiter, and he quickly discovered that the previous generation had gotten it all wrong. Everywhere he looked, he saw archaeological potential. “We were seldom out of sight of some relic of the ancient Marquesan culture,” he writes. “Through all the valleys were scattered clusters of ruined house platforms. . . . Overgrown with weeds, half tumbled down beneath the weight of toppled trees and the pressure of the inexorable palm roots, these ancient village sites were sources of stone axes, carved stone pestles, skulls, and other sundry curios.” There were ceremonial plazas “hundreds of feet long” and, high on the cliffs above the deep valleys, “burial caves containing the remains of the population of centuries past.” The coup de grâce came when Suggs and his guide followed up on a report of a large number of “pig bones” in the dunes at a place called Ha‘atuatua. This windswept expanse of scrub and sand lies on the exposed eastern corner of Nuku Hiva. A decade earlier, in 1946, a tidal wave had cut away part of the beach, and since then bones and other artifacts had been washing out of the dunes. Not knowing quite what to expect, Suggs and his guide rode over on horseback. When they came out of the “hibiscus tangle” at the back of the beach and “caught sight of the debris washing down the slope,” he writes, “I nearly fell out of the saddle.” The bones that were scattered all along the slope and on the beach below were not pig bones but human bones! Ribs, vertebrae, thigh bones, bits of skull vault, and innumerable hand and foot bones were everywhere. At the edge of the bank a bleached female skull rested upside down, almost entirely exposed. Where the bank had been cut away, a dark horizontal band about two feet thick could be seen between layers of clean white sand. Embedded in this band were bits of charcoal and saucers of ash, fragments of pearl shell, stone and coral tools, and large fitted stones that appeared to be part of a buried pavement. They had discovered the remains of an entire village, complete with postholes, cooking pits, courtyards, and burials. The time was too short to explore the site fully, but the very next year, Suggs and his wife returned to examine it. There
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
That’s what I like about Polynesians. They wear their hearts on their sleeve knowing that, for adults, there are better games to play than hiding their emotions from each other
Carol Vorvain (Why Not?: The island where happiness starts with a question)
for by the time the Spanish finally departed, they had killed more than two hundred people, many, according to Quirós, for no reason at all.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
When Mendaña’s ships finally sailed away, the Marquesas were lost again to the European world for nearly two hundred years. They had been none too securely plotted to begin with, and their location was further suppressed by the Spanish in order to forestall competition in the search for Terra Australis Incognita.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Terra Australis Incognita was one of the great follies of European geography, an idea that made sense in the abstract but for which there was never any actual proof. It was based on a bit of Ptolemaic logic handed down from the ancient Greeks, which held that there must be an equal weight of continental matter in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, or else the world would topple over and, as the great mapmaker Gerardus Mercator envisioned it, “fall to destruction among the stars.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
also made intuitive sense to Europeans, who, coming from a hemisphere crowded with land, found it difficult to imagine that the southern reaches of the planet might be as empty as they really are.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
In what sense can a land that is already inhabited be discovered?
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Ghyben-Herzberg lens. This is a layer of fresh water which floats on top of the seawater that infiltrates the porous coral rock.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Atolls are home to more than a quarter of the world’s marine fish species, a mind-boggling array of angelfish, clown fish, batfish, parrotfish, snappers, puffers, emperors, jacks, rays, wrasses, barracudas, and sharks. And that’s without even mentioning all the other sea creatures—the turtles, lobsters, porpoises, squid, snails, clams, crabs, urchins, oysters, and the whole exotic understory of the corals themselves. Atolls are also an obvious haven for birds, both those that range over the ocean by day and return to the islands at night and those that migrate thousands of miles, summering in places like Alaska and wintering over in the tropics.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Some interpreted their shouts and gestures as an invitation to land, others as an exhortation to depart, but, as “both sides were in the dark as to each other’s mind,” it was difficult to know for sure.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Census taking proved almost impossible, because some portion of the population was always “away,” hunting turtles or collecting birds’ eggs or gathering coconuts or visiting in some other corner of the archipelago.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Because it was part of old Gondwana and because it is insular and was isolated for tens of millions of years, New Zealand has a quirky evolutionary history. There seems to have been no mammalian stock from which to evolve on the Gondwanan fragment, and so, until the arrival of humans, there were no terrestrial mammals, nor were there any of the curious marsupials of nearby Australia—no wombats or koalas or kangaroos, no rodents or ruminants, no wild cats or dogs. The only mammals that could reach New Zealand were those that could swim (like seals) or fly (like bats), and even then there are questions about how the bats got there. Two of New Zealand’s three bat species are apparently descended from a South American bat, which, it is imagined, must have been blown across the Pacific in a giant prehistoric storm. Among New Zealand’s indigenous plants and animals are a number of curious relics, including a truly enormous conifer and a lizard-like creature that is the world’s only surviving representative of an order so ancient it predates many dinosaurs. But the really odd thing about New Zealand is what happened to the birds. In the absence of predators and competitors, birds evolved to fill all the major ecological niches, becoming the “ecological equivalent of giraffes, kangaroos, sheep, striped possums, long-beaked echidnas and tigers.” Many of these birds were flightless, and some were huge. The largest species of moa—a now extinct flightless giant related to the ostrich, the emu, and the rhea—stood nearly twelve feet tall and weighed more than five hundred pounds. The moa was an herbivore, but there were also predators among these prehistoric birds, including a giant eagle with claws like a panther’s. There were grass-eating parrots and flightless ducks and birds that grazed like sheep in alpine meadows, as well as a little wren-like bird that scampered about the underbrush like a mouse. None of these creatures were seen by the first Europeans to reach New Zealand, for two very simple reasons. The first is that many of them were already extinct. Although known to have survived long enough to coexist with humans, all twelve species of moa, the Haast’s eagle, two species of adzebills, and many others had vanished by the mid-seventeenth century, when Europeans arrived. The second is that, even if there had still been moas lumbering about the woods, the European discoverers of New Zealand would have missed them because they never actually set foot on shore.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
The Dutch East India Company, which was headquartered in Batavia (now the Indonesian capital of Jakarta), was the great mercantile engine of the seventeenth century, and all the major geographic discoveries in the Pacific during this period were made by Dutch captains in search of new markets and new goods for trade. One of these was a commander named Abel Janszoon Tasman, who, in 1642, set out with a pair of ships bound for the southern Pacific Ocean. Tasman followed what looks, on the face of it, like the most unlikely route imaginable. Departing from the island of Java, he sailed west across the Indian Ocean to Mauritius, a small island off the coast of Madagascar, which itself is a large island off the coast of southeastern Africa. There, he turned south and continued until he reached the band of powerful westerlies that would sweep him back eastward, all the way across the Indian Ocean, until he finally reached the Pacific. Tasman followed this lengthy and unintuitive route—sailing nearly ten thousand miles to reach an ocean that was less than twenty-five hundred miles from where he had begun—because the winds and currents in the Indian Ocean operate the same way they do in the Pacific, circling counterclockwise in a similar gyre.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
The main obstacle between the Indian and Pacific Oceans is the continent of Australia, and the earliest Dutch discoveries in the seventeenth century were off Australia’s west coast. But Tasman’s route took him so far south that he missed the Australian mainland altogether, and the first body of land he met with after leaving Mauritius was the island, later named in his honor, of Tasmania. Continuing on to the east, he crossed what is now the Tasman Sea, and about a week later he sighted a “groot hooch verheven landt”—“a large land, uplifted high.” It can be difficult to tell how large a body of land is from the sea—European explorers were constantly mistaking islands for continents—but this time it was unmistakable. The land before them was dark and rugged, with ranks of serried mountains receding deep into an interior overhung with clouds. A heavy sea beat upon the rocky coast, “rolling towards it in huge billows and swells,” offering no obvious place to go ashore. So Tasman turned and followed the land as it stretched away to the northeast. For
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
From there they could see fires burning on shore and several canoes, two of which came out to meet them in the gloom. When they had come within hailing distance, the islanders called out in “a rough loud voice,” but the Dutch could not understand them. They had been equipped at Batavia with a vocabulary, almost surely the word list assembled twenty-five years earlier by the explorers Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire, but the language spoken by these people did not seem to match it.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
But before the ink was even dry on this resolution, a fleet of seven canoes set out from shore. Two of these took up positions nearby, and when a small boat ferrying men from one of the Dutch ships to the other passed between them, they attacked it, ramming the boat, boarding it, stabbing and clubbing the men, and throwing the bodies overboard.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Interestingly, these double-hulled vessels sound a lot like canoes observed by seventeenth-century Europeans in other parts of Polynesia, but by the time the next European reached New Zealand, more than a century later, they were few and far between
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Tonga lies a few hundred miles from Samoa, at the western edge of the Polynesian Triangle. Together they constitute the western gateway to Polynesia; here are the oldest Polynesian languages, the longest settlement histories, the deepest Polynesian roots.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
ability of Tahitian vessels. Interestingly, Cook seems not to have considered a sailing rate of 120 miles a day overly optimistic for a Tahitian pahi, noting that these large canoes could sail much faster than a European ship.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
The island of Tahiti, famous name, the heart of Polynesia.” Tahiti is the largest of a group of high islands known collectively as the Society Islands. They are located in the very center of the Polynesian Triangle and consist of two clusters: a windward group, which includes Tahiti and Mo‘orea, and a leeward group, which includes Ra‘iatea and Bora Bora. While not objectively large, they are large for islands in this part of the sea; Tahiti itself, though less than forty miles long, is the largest landmass for a thousand miles in any direction. To the modern eye, the Society Islands are perhaps the most striking omission on early maps of the Pacific—the islands it is hardest to believe no one had yet found.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
In fact, Magellan, Mendaña, Quirós, Schouten and Le Maire, and Byron had all sailed right past them, sometimes at a distance of less than a hundred miles. Roggeveen even caught sight of the peaks of Bora Bora, assumed it was an island discovered by someone else, and inexplicably sailed on.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Tasman christened the place Murderers Bay and made no further attempts to land in New Zealand.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
He never grasped that the bay in which he had been attacked (now known as Golden Bay) lay at the opening of the large strait that separates the North and South Islands of New Zealand, or that the “continent” he had discovered was in fact two large islands. Thinking that he might have chanced upon some corner of Terra Australis Incognita, he named it Staten Landt and proposed that it might be connected to the Staten Landt named in 1616 by Schouten and Le Maire. This, however, was unlikely, as Schouten and Le Maire’s Staten Landt was an island off the tip of South America, more than five thousand watery miles away.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
What later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visitors to New Zealand commonly reported were the great waka taua: enormous single-hulled war canoes—up to a hundred feet long, with a breadth of five or six feet—which could carry as many as seventy or eighty men. Nowhere else in Polynesia were single-hulled vessels of such prodigious dimensions ever seen, for the simple reason that nowhere else in Polynesia did trees grow to this size. Carved, whenever possible, from a single trunk, they were designed as coastal and river vessels and were never intended for transoceanic travel.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
This apparent evolution in canoe design is a salutary reminder that cultures are not static and that there is a logic to their transformations. If the Māori stopped making double-hulled oceangoing canoes, it must have been because they were no longer sailing across the ocean. But Tasman’s evidence suggests that as late as the mid-seventeenth century, at least in the South Island, the inhabitants of New Zealand were still using vessels of a type that linked them to the rest of Polynesia and to the tradition of long-distance ocean travel.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
History, as Fornander understood it, required “sequence, precision, and clarity,” none of which was particularly characteristic of Polynesian oral traditions, which were densely poetic, elliptical, evocative, and occasionally obscure even to those who could recite them.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Fornander’s history demanded dates, but there are no dates in Polynesian traditions. There is no absolute system of time beginning at some specified moment and proceeding at regular intervals. There are cyclical calendars tied to the seasons and the phases of the moon, but there is nothing like the term “1850” or any kind of conceptual system that might generate such a term.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
But Polynesians cared enormously about their lineages and scrupulously maintained information about who was descended from whom, making their genealogies extremely valuable as historical sources. The only problem was that, as they went back in time, Polynesian genealogies moved seamlessly from what we might consider the “historical” through the “legendary” to the “mythological.” Some of the genealogies Fornander used ran to as many as ninety-nine generations, which meant a span of nearly three thousand years. Even the much more common twenty- or thirty-generation genealogies that were routinely used to date Polynesian events span periods of six hundred to nine hundred years—three or four times the conventionally accepted time frame for accurate transmission of oral information.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Before they depart, Ru looks about him and names the directions: “The east he called Te-hitia-o-te-ra (The-rising-of-the-sun), the west Te-tooa-o-te-ra (The-setting-of-the-sun), the south he named Apato‘a, and the north Apatoerau”—terms we have encountered before, in the margins of Tupaia’s chart. Then, sailing from the west toward the Society Islands, Ru and Hina draw their canoe to each of the islands in turn, naming them in their proper geographic order: first Maupiti, then Bora Bora, then Taha‘a, then Ra‘iatea. A similar sequence occurs in the well-known Hawaiian story of the volcano goddess Pele, who sets out from her home in Kahiki in a canoe belonging to her brother Whirlwind, with Tide and Current as paddlers. Approaching the Hawaiian Islands from the northwest, she reaches first Ni‘ihau, then Kaua‘i, then O‘ahu, then each of the others in turn—following the correct geographic sequence—until, finally, she settles in a crater on the island of Hawai‘i.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
In one version, the voyage is recounted, as in the stories of Pele and Ru, as a series of island stops within the Marquesan archipelago. But in another it is described as a series of legs, each defined by the appearance of a star in the sky who challenges the voyagers with a question about their identity. Only when they give the correct answer—“We are Pepeu and Utunui, Mahaitivi’s boys, like the wind, like the wind we glide behind the sky, our hair darts into the air, we go to Aotona”—does the star permit them to move on. This idea of sailing under a series of stars perfectly matches the concept of a star path—a sequence of stars rising at roughly the same point on the horizon, each of which is used, in turn, to maintain a constant heading—one of the presumed techniques of ancient Polynesian navigation.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
One of the central problems for European interpreters of Polynesian voyaging traditions was the location of a place known in the lore as Hawaiki. In stories from the central and eastern Pacific, Hawaiki, or one of its cognates—Havaiki, Havai‘i, Avaiki—is the name of the land from which the great voyagers depart. It is often described as an ancestral homeland, but in many cases it is much more than that. In cosmogonies from the Society Islands, it is the first land to be created: “Havai‘i, the birthplace of lands, Havai‘i, the birthplace of gods, Havai‘i the birthplace of kings, Havai‘i the birthplace of men.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
In a story from Manihiki, the hero Maui brings back fire from Havaiki; in tales from the Marquesas, men follow their dead wives to Hawaiki or travel there in search of lost sons. A homeland and a source, it is both a paradisal land of plenty and, like Te Pō, a land of spirits and of generations waiting to be born. In
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
In a story from Manihiki, the hero Maui brings back fire from Havaiki; in tales from the Marquesas, men follow their dead wives to Hawaiki or travel there in search of lost sons. A homeland and a source, it is both a paradisal land of plenty and, like Te Pō, a land of spirits and of generations waiting to be born. In most stories, Hawaiki is described as lying somewhere in the west—the direction associated in Polynesia with the passage of the dead to their last resting place—though sometimes it is said to be in the east or in the sky, or even underground. But there are also a number of real islands in the Pacific that go by the name of Hawaiki (or one of its cognates), most obviously the Big Island of Hawai‘i and the Samoan island of Savai‘i, but also the island of Ra‘iatea, in the Society Islands, which was formerly known as Havai‘i.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
recorded in 1865, of two eminent East Coast tohunga. It begins in the year A.D. 925 in the ancient homeland of Hawaiki and concerns a man named Kupe, who becomes embroiled in an argument about an octopus. The octopus—a giant with eyes like abalone shells and arms “five fathoms long”—is interfering with Kupe’s fishing grounds and Kupe decides that he will have to kill it. So he prepares a great canoe and tells his men to gather plenty of provisions. When everything is ready, he embarks with his wife and his friend Ngahue. Out at sea, Kupe spies the octopus, which he knows by the reddening of the ripples on the water, but as soon as the canoe draws near, the monster swims away—so straight and fast that Kupe knows it is leading them to some strange country. Eventually, when they have been at sea for quite some time, Kupe’s wife catches sight of land, “like a cloud on the horizon.” Thus the name Aotearoa, which Smith interprets as “the long white cloud.” (Other interpretations include “the cloud hanging over a body of land discovered at the end of a long journey” and “the distant land to windward
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
He makes an exploratory circuit of the islands, and when this is done he sails back to Hawaiki and reports what he has found. There he lives out his life, for, according to the story, Kupe never returns to Aotearoa. Thus the rhetorical question E hoki Kupe? (Will Kupe return?), which is an ironical proverb signifying that one has no intention of revisiting a place.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
the Great Fleet is a cherished piece of modern New Zealand mythology. It recounts the arrival of an armada of seven great voyaging canoes carrying men, women, and children—as many as seventy to a vessel—with all their gods, plants, animals, food, water, implements, and tools. The canoes, which arrive more or less together, separate once they reach Aotearoa, each one traveling to a different part of the coast, where the occupants alight and settle, thereby establishing the land rights and lineages of people who would later trace their descent from these founding figures. For most of the twentieth century, the arrival of the Great Fleet was considered to be “the most famous event in Māori history because,” as one eminent Māori scholar put it, “all tribes trace their aristocratic lineages back to the chiefs of the voyaging canoes.” It was also the capstone of the Polynesian migration story and the end of the great voyaging era. New Zealand was the last of the Polynesian islands to be settled; following the arrival of the Great Fleet, in the words of a Māori proverb, “The tapu sea to Hawaiki is cut off.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Oral narratives (one can think here of the Iliad or the Odyssey) are famously non-chronological, beginning in the middle of an action and unfolding in a zigzag fashion, frequently detouring from the main events to fill in background or explain important information. Traditional Māori narratives were similar, and when they were edited by Europeans (with a European audience in mind), many of these structural kinks were ironed out. The effect was to turn “terse, cryptic and audience-centred originals” into smooth, exegetical narratives, making them more like history and less like myth.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Some somatological studies were purely descriptive—studies of the angle of the elbow, for instance, or the comparative growth rates of girls and boys. But many were driven by sociological questions: attempts, for example, to establish links between physical attributes (like stature or head shape) and mental states (like insanity) or social conditions (like poverty or being firstborn) or cultural customs (like nomadism). The idea that complex questions about the human condition could be answered by measuring people’s bodies was not new.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
One of the many pernicious aspects of this research was the way it was used to classify human “races.” In biology and anthropology, race has long been abandoned as a meaningful category; indeed, although the term has been in use since the seventeenth century, it has never been precisely defined.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
There has never been any agreement about the number of human races, or what the definitive characteristics of a race might be: skin color, hair type, head shape, etc. Genetic research in the twentieth century has shown that there are no genes that correspond to racial types and that the range of variation within so-called races is greater than the variation across them.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
But scientists in the early 1920s were working with an essentialist model of race as something immutable, definitive, and grounded in biological reality.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
The framework within which the anthropologists of the Bayard Dominick Expedition operated was that there existed a certain number of “pure” human races. The minimum was generally considered to be three: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. But many of the world’s peoples did not fit clearly into any of these categories, and scientists frequently invented additional racial types—Malayan, Indonesian, Austronesian, Negrito—or argued that these unclassifiable people represented populations that were “racially mixed.” Polynesians (along with Native Americans, Melanesians, and Australian Aborigines) were one of the ambiguous groups, and one goal of the Bayard Dominick Expedition was to ascertain, using anthropometric data, what unique medley of existing races had “combined to make the Polynesian physical types.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
(It is worth noting that Tongans were considered one of the “purest” Polynesian populations. Tonga, which is the only island nation in the Pacific never to have been ruled by outsiders, had a population in 1920 of more than 23,000 Tongans and only 347 Europeans. Compare this with the 1920 census for Hawai‘i, which lists 41,000 Hawaiians, 54,000 Europeans, and more than 150,000 combined Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese.)
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, a lot of this work looks creepy, and for good reason. Physical anthropology in the early twentieth century was closely associated with eugenics and with attempts to legitimize racist claims using scientific methodologies.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
But this is not to say that the whole project was irredeemably flawed. Later scientists, using better tools and larger data sets, would succeed in deriving statistically meaningful information from biometric information, and with the sequencing of the human genome, the role of biological evidence in the search for answers about human history would leap to the fore.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
THE QUESTION OF who Polynesians were—in a biological sense—was of particular interest to one of the period’s leading anthropologists, a man who went by the names of both Peter H. Buck and Te Rangi Hiroa.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
He believed that theorizing should begin with evidence, and that the best evidence was material.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
This idea of two distinct varieties of people (which quickly hardened into a Polynesian/Melanesian divide) turns what is, in fact, a spectrum of skin tones and peoples across the Pacific into a more or less binary division between black and white. With this binary came a tangle of other ideas about morality, intelligence, temperament, beauty, social and political complexity, even depth of time. Melanesians were routinely described by Europeans as not just dark-skinned, but “primitive” in their political, economic, and social structures. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts, they are depicted as small, dark, and mistrustful, the women “ill-favoured” and “ugly,” the men “despotic” and cruel. Banded together in small, autonomous groups, they appeared to Europeans to lack any form of law, government, or organized religion and compared unfavorably with their larger, fairer-skinned, more hierarchical neighbors the Polynesians, differing from them, in one unforgettable formulation, “as the wolf from the dog.” The term “Melanesian” had thus long served in European discourse as a marker for otherness and inferiority, and in the racially charged climate of the early twentieth century, Te Rangi Hiroa could hardly fail to be aware of this. When the anatomist J. H. Scott (the probable author of the Otago Medical School notice offering to buy Māori skeletons) asserted, “We know the Maoris to be . . . the result of the mingling of a Polynesian and a Melanesian strain,” or when Sullivan argued for a “Melanesian element” in his Tongan or Samoan data sets, Te Rangi Hiroa would certainly have recognized the subtext. And in his own early somatological studies, which were written explicitly with the work of these other men in mind, you can see him struggling with the problem.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
As he put it to Ngata, “the Pakeha [European] attitude towards the native races is on the whole saturated with the deepest hypocrisy. . . . Even in ethnology, I doubt whether a native people is really regarded as other than a project to give the white writer a job and a chance for fame.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
But Polynesians, too, had their own systems of ranking and classification. Te Rangi Hiroa described “Melanesian” physical characteristics as conflicting with “the Polynesian idea of beauty” and wrote that among Māori, “a fair skin was admired,” while those at the darker end of the spectrum had “to put up with the humorously disparaging remarks of their lighter tinted friends.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
We now know that the islands of western Melanesia (New Guinea and the Bismarck and Solomon Islands) have been occupied for tens of thousands of years—ages and ages longer than the islands of Polynesia. Modern archaeological evidence reveals that New Guinea and Australia, which were joined by a land bridge when sea levels were much lower, were settled at least forty thousand years ago, by people who then managed to spread themselves right out to the end of the Solomons. So there is an ancient substrate to this population. But forty thousand years is a long time, and it is quite inaccurate to suggest that the modern inhabitants of Melanesia can simply be equated with this very ancient population.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Curiously enough, Forster, way back in the 1770s, had proposed what would prove to be a strangely prescient idea. He hypothesized that the darker-skinned peoples of the western Pacific, many of whom lived in the mountainous interiors of the larger islands, were “the more antient inhabitants,” while the lighter-skinned coastal peoples, who were related, he thought, “to the various tribes of Malays,” had arrived in the region more recently. No one would be able to prove it for nearly two centuries, but there was actually something to this idea.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
There are not now, as Forster suggested, two great varieties of people in the Pacific: there is one quite homogeneous group in the central and eastern Pacific (Polynesians), and, thanks to the incredibly long time they have had to diversify, a hugely complex and heterogeneous mix of peoples and cultures in the Melanesian islands to the west.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
One index of this complexity was actually recognized by both Forster and d’Urville, though neither of them understood it at the time. This was the extraordinary proliferation of languages in Melanesia. It had been the similarity of languages across the islands of Polynesia that had first led to the idea of a single Polynesian “nation,” but no such unity exists in the islands to the west. Even today on New Caledonia—an island roughly the size of New Jersey—between thirty and forty languages are spoken. One hundred and ten languages have been recorded in the islands of Vanuatu. And in New Guinea, which is famous for being the most linguistically diverse place on earth, there are more than 950 languages belonging to a still unknown number of language families. To a linguist, what such extreme diversity indicates is depth of time. Languages are always changing—splitting and morphing and turning into new languages—and the more time they have in which to do this, the more languages there are. Consider the changes that have occurred in English just since Chaucer’s day, and then imagine what might happen if this process were to continue for, say, forty thousand years.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Missionary attempts to translate The Pilgrim’s Progress into Tahitian were similarly confounded. The Tahitians described it as “a very dark book,” not because of its emphasis on the wages of sin but because it “did not relate to any person but was entirely a ‘parau faau,’ figurative account. That is, a tale without foundation.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
In whaling stories of the nineteenth century, the harpooner is a man of unusual strength and daring who is often depicted as an outsider, set apart from the rest of the crew by the danger and difficulty of his job. The four pagan harpooners in Moby-Dick are good examples of the type: Daggoo the giant African, Tashtego the Indian from Gay Head, Fedallah the Zoroastrian, and, of course, Queequeg the tattooed South Sea Islander.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Fornander, who was tall and broad-chested, could almost have been a character in one of Melville’s books, as the two men actually crossed paths in the spring of 1843, the one shipping out of the port of Lahaina just as the other arrived.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
Inhabitants of isolated or remote regions where there has been little or no contact with the outside world are often described as “epidemiologically naive.” What this means is that they have limited immunity to diseases like influenza and measles that are endemic in other parts of the world, and when exposed to them they often suffer high rates of death. One of the best-known examples comes from the pandemic of 1918, in which certain populations, notably indigenous Alaskans and Pacific Islanders, died at rates that were four, five, and in some cases even ten times those of other populations. The pandemic is thought to have killed between 3 and 6 percent of the global population; in Western Samoa, 20 percent of the population died. In the nineteenth-century Pacific, this scenario played itself out over and over.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
As early as the 1830s, missionaries in the Society Islands were already beginning to speak of depopulation. There were major epidemics in Tahiti of smallpox in 1841, dysentery in 1843, scarlet fever in 1847, measles in 1854. Much the same story can be told of Hawai‘i, which was also subject to wave after wave of imported disease. In 1848 and 1849, when Pinao was pregnant with her first child, a series of devastating epidemics struck the Hawaiian Islands. Measles, arriving from Mexico on an American frigate, and whooping cough, on a ship from California, hit at the same time, killing an estimated ten thousand people. Whole villages were prostrate, wrote one observer, “there not being persons enough in health to prepare food for the sick,” while “a large portion of the infants born in the Islands in 1848, even as large a proportion as nine-tenths in some parts, are supposed to be already in their graves.” No doubt there were other diseases in the mix as well; mumps, which had been in the islands some years earlier, was reported again, as were “pleurisy,” “bilious fever,” and something that was probably dysentery. The combined assault was especially hard upon the very young and the very old. “The aged,” wrote one observer, “have almost all disappeared from among us.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)
From a high of something like 250,000 at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the population of the Hawaiian Islands had been reduced to less than 40,000 by the century’s end. In New Zealand, the Māori population declined by nearly two-thirds over the same period. And in the Marquesas, where estimates put the number of inhabitants before contact with Europeans at approximately 50,000, the population crashed so completely that by 1926 there were just 2,225 Marquesans left.
Christina Thompson (Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia)