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COOK’S ARRIVAL IN the Hawaiian Islands marks a turning point in the history of European understanding of the Pacific. It was January 1778, and he was a year and a half into his third voyage. In the course of the first two, Cook had explored much of the South Pacific, laying down the east coast of Australia, circumnavigating New Zealand, charting many of the major island groups, even making the first crossing below the Antarctic Circle. On his third and final voyage, he was headed into new territory: that part of the Pacific that lies north of the equator. He had set his sights on one of the great chimerical objects of European geography, the Northwest Passage, and when he chanced upon the island of Kaua‘i, he was bound for Nootka Sound.
At the time, the Hawaiian Islands were not yet marked on any European map. In hindsight, it is quite surprising that they remained undiscovered as long as they did. For more than two hundred years, beginning as early as the 1560s, Spanish galleons had plied the North Pacific, sailing from Acapulco to Manila and back again once or twice a year, passing just south of Hawai‘i on the westward journey and just north of it as they sailed back east, without ever realizing that the islands were there. Cook, on the other hand, was sailing north from Tahiti, along what would eventually be recognized as an ancient Polynesian sea road, when he accidentally encountered the Hawaiian chain in what would prove to be the last great Pacific discovery by any European explorer.
Cook stopped only briefly on this first pass. The window for northern explorations was narrow, and he had no time to spare. But that autumn, when the northern ice began to close in, he returned to examine the islands more carefully. Falling in with the north coast of Maui, toward the end of November, Cook turned east and saw the great island of Hawai‘i rising before him, its summit unexpectedly covered with snow. He decided to sail around the island in order to put its great bulk between him and the strong northeasterly winds and to look along the leeward side for a place where he might refresh his crew. The weather was squally and his progress slow, and for nearly two months the British ships crept round the Big Island. Finally, toward the end of January 1779, they reached Kealakekua Bay. And here something rather peculiar happened.
Cook at this moment probably knew more about the Pacific than any living European. He had made three voyages in ten years, each of several years’ duration, and had visited every major island group in Polynesia. He had witnessed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of gatherings, many occasioned by the arrival of his own ships, but nowhere, he wrote, had he ever seen so many people assembled in one place at one time. Cook estimated that no fewer than a thousand canoes came out to meet them, while “all the Shore of the bay was covered with people and hundreds were swimming about the Ships like shoals of fish.” But it was not just the numbers that impressed him; it was the mood. Early encounters between Europeans and Pacific Islanders were frequently tense; often there were skirmishes, sometimes people were killed. On this occasion, however, the atmosphere seemed strangely festive. As Cook and his officers noted with some surprise, the islanders were not even armed.
As soon as the Englishmen landed, they were escorted up the beach to the heiau, preceded by heralds who called out, “Orono, Orono.” Spectators, who had gathered in the hundreds along the shore, flung themselves to the ground as the strangers approached, prostrating themselves before the procession. Cook was led up onto the platform, draped in a red cloth, and presented with offerings of cooked pig. A pair of priests chanted, alternately addressing Cook and a collection of wooden images, while the crowd intoned “Orono” at intervals. Even within Cook’s extensive experience, this reception was unique, and it quickly became clear to everyone present—as it has been to every historian and anthropologist since then—that something quite out of the ordinary was going on.
There have been varying interpretations of these events over the years, but the most widely accepted view is that, by sheer chance, Cook had arrived in the Hawaiian Islands during a seasonal ritual cycle known as the Makahiki. The central event of this festival, which runs from October to February, is the return of the god Lono, who arrives from Kahiki (the Hawaiian name for Tahiti but also a word meaning “a faraway place”) and is ritualistically borne around the island in a clockwise fashion, visiting each district in turn and collecting tributes. Lono, a god of peace and fertility, is represented in this procession by a long pole with a crosspiece draped with white cloth.
By the queerest twist of fate, Cook himself had been slowly sailing around the island in a clockwise direction, in a ship with tall masts and white sails, during precisely these months and had come ashore at a place specifically consecrated to the god Lono. Thus it was that he was received as a temporal embodiment of the god. This is not to say that Cook was “mistaken” for the god Lono—a crude, if common, misinterpretation—but rather that, coming as he did, when he did, he was understood to be cloaked in the mantle of the deity’s power.
For two weeks, Cook’s ships remained in Kealakekua Bay, and for two weeks the extraordinary obeisances continued. At the end of January, Whatman died and was buried in the heiau with both Christian and Hawaiian honors, Cook reading the burial service and the Hawaiian priests contributing a pig to the grave. Three days later, the ships weighed anchor and sailed away. And that should have been the end of the story. But a few days out, the foremast of Cook’s ship split in a gale and he turned back to Kealakekua to make repairs. This time almost no one came out to meet them.
Cook himself had the feeling that they had outstayed their welcome, but what he could not have known was that there was a deeper, more metaphysical problem. As the embodiment of Lono, he was supposed to leave at the end of the Makahiki season, with a promise to return—but not until the following year. When, instead, he returned almost immediately, his reappearance proved impossible to explain. The then-reigning chief of Hawai‘i, Kalani‘ōpu‘u, dismissed the Englishmen’s account of technical difficulties, insisting, rather, that on his earlier visit Cook had “amused them with Lies.”
The air of festivity that had characterized the Makahiki was now at an end, and the mood in the bay was marked by irritability and mistrust. On shore, the carpenters worked away at the mast, but there were thefts and disagreements, punishments and disputes. Then, on the third day, in one of those fracases that so often erupted in these situations—a shout and a shove and a discharged weapon—Cook was killed. It was almost absurdly accidental, and it might so easily have happened at any time, in more or less this way, on any of a number of islands. But this was how and where it did happen, here in Kealakekua Bay.
THE SPOT WHERE Cook was killed lies about a mile from the heiau, across the bay at a place called Ka‘awaloa. A twenty-five-foot-high white obelisk, erected there in his memory in 1874, appears to the naked eye as a small white object on a low green promontory, or, with a bit of magnification, like the top of a tiny white church buried up to its steeple in the ground. There is no road down to Ka‘awaloa, and the only ways to reach the monument are by hiking down from the highway or sailing or motoring into the bay or paddling across in a kayak from the nearby Napo‘opo‘o pier.
Seven and the boys were curious about the kayaks, so we drove over to Napo‘opo‘o to have a look. Unlike the heiau, which retains much of the solemnity of a church, the Napo‘opo‘o pier is a hive of activity. The parking lot was full of vans loading and unloading kayaks in every imaginable color. Tanned, athletic-looking tourists milled about in bathing suits and life jackets while big Hawaiian guys with tattooed calves sauntered back and forth with armloads of bright yellow paddles. It was clear that the Hawaiians were in charge of the rentals, so Seven went over to have a word with one of them.
“Hey,” he said, “how much for a kayak?”
“Thirty dollars,” the guy replied. And then, “Twenty for you, brother.”
At this point, we had been traveling in the Pacific for almost eight weeks. We had had our passports stamped in six different countries, touched down on fourteen different islands, learned how to say hello in eight different (albeit closely related) languages, and in every single place there had been an encounter like this. Hey, brother, how’s it going? Hey, brother, where you from? Hey, brother, you need something? In Tonga, a man with whom we had only the most distant connection loaned us his car. In Hawai‘i, the cousin of an acquaintance offered us her house. On islands all over the Pacific, people stopped to ask my husband who he was and where he was from.
The reason for this is that Seven is Polynesian. He is Māori, which is to say that he belongs to the branch of the Polynesian family that settled the islands of New Zealand around the beginning of the second millennium A.D. Hawaiians are also Polynesians: they belong to the branch of the family that settled the Hawaiian Islands a bit earlier, around the end of the first millennium. Both groups can trace their roots back to the islands of central Polynesia—to Tahiti and the Society Islands, the Marquesas, and the Cooks—which were settled, in turn, by voyagers from islands farther to the west. So rapid and complete was this expansion, and so vast the territory across which it spread, that, until the era of mass migration, Polynesians were both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world.
Seven’s encounter with the kayak dealer was a legacy of this prehistoric diaspora, and, like the stonework of the Hikiau Heiau, we had encountered it before, thousands of miles away in the Tuamotus, on Tahiti, and Tongatapu. But the amazing thing is that we could have gone on traveling for thousands more miles and visited hundreds more islands and the experience would have been the same. Because the fact is that Seven can get on a plane in the country of his birth, fly for nine hours, and get off in a completely different country where he will be treated by the locals as one of their own. Then, if he wants, he can get on another plane, fly for nine hours in an entirely different direction, get off, and still be treated like a local. And then, if he wants to go back to where he started, it’s still another nine hours by plane.
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. 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.
FOR MORE THAN a thousand years, Polynesians occupied these islands, and until the arrival of explorers like Captain Cook, they were the only people ever to have lived there. There are not many places on earth about which one can say this, and yet it is true of every island in Polynesia. Until the arrival of European explorers—of Mendaña in the Marquesas and Tasman in New Zealand and Roggeveen on Easter Island—every one of these Polynesian cultures existed in splendid isolation from the rest of the world. This long sequestration is part of what makes Polynesia so fascinating to outsiders—a natural laboratory, some have called it, for the study of language change and genetic diversity and social evolution.
What it means for insiders, on the other hand, is that there exists a great web of interconnectedness that continues to this day. According to New Zealand tradition, Seven, whose real name is Tauwhitu—whitu, or some cognate thereof (fitu, hitu, itu, hiku), being the universal word for “seven” in Polynesia—is descended from a voyager named Puhi, who sailed to New Zealand from the ancestral homeland of Hawaiki in one of a fleet of eight great canoes. Whether or not this is really what happened, it is certainly true that his ancestors came to Aotearoa (the Polynesian name for New Zealand) from an island in eastern Polynesia and that their ancestors came to that island from another island before that. The simplicity of this genealogy is stunning. No chaotic mixture of raiders and conquerors; no muddle of Vikings and Normans and Jutes. For centuries Polynesians were the only people in this region of the world, and thus the only people Seven can be descended from are the ones who figured out how to cross thousands of miles of open ocean in double-hulled voyaging canoes.
To me—and not just to me—this is a big part of the fascination with this story. Few of us can trace our own lineages with such certainty going back so far, and it pleases me to think that my children share in this breathtaking genealogy. But what makes the whole thing truly fantastic is what their ancestors had to do in order to find and colonize all of these islands. There is a reason the remote Pacific was the last place on earth to be settled by humans: it was the most difficult, more daunting even than the deserts or the ice. And yet, somehow, Polynesians managed not just to find but to colonize every habitable island in this vast sea.
We know they did it because when the first Europeans arrived in the Pacific, they found these islands inhabited. But we also know that by the time Europeans arrived, the epic phase of Polynesian history—the age of exploration and long-distance voyaging—was already over. The world of the ancient voyagers had blossomed, flourished, and passed away, leaving behind a group of closely related but widely scattered daughter cultures that had been developing in isolation from one another for hundreds of years. Once explorers and migrants, they had become settlers and colonists; they knew themselves less as Voyagers of the Great Ocean than, as in the Marquesan formulation, Enata Fenua (“People of the Land”). Of course, they were still a sea people, traveling within and in some cases among archipelagoes, taking much of their living from the sea. But at far reaches of the Polynesian Triangle—in New Zealand, Hawai‘i, Easter Island, even the Marquesas—they retained only a mythic sense of having ever come from someplace else.
To Europeans, who had themselves only just begun to master the enormous expanses of the Pacific, and then only at the cost of great suffering and loss of life, the discovery of people on these small and widely scattered islands was a source of wonderment. There seemed to be no obvious explanation for how they had gotten there, and, in the absence of any direct evidence, Europeans had difficulty envisioning a scenario that would explain how a people without writing or metal tools could, in the words of Cook, have “spread themselves over all the isles in this Vast Ocean.” This conundrum, which came to be known as “the problem of Polynesian origins,” emerged as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind.
Over the past three hundred years, all kinds of people have taken a stab at solving this mystery, and many harebrained theories have been proposed: that the islands of Polynesia are the peaks of a drowned continent and the inhabitants the survivors of a great deluge; that Polynesians are Aryans or American Indians or the descendants of a tribe of wandering Jews; that the islands were settled by castaways or fishermen blown thither by capricious winds. But the truth, if you stop to think about it, can hardly be less astonishing; as the New Zealand ethnologist Elsdon Best once put it, “Could the story of the Polynesian voyagers be written in full, then would it be the wonder-story of the world.”
The problem, of course, is that we are talking about prehistory. It is hard enough to know what happened in the past when there exists a documentary record, but there is no written record of these events. Here, the evidence is all partial, ambiguous, open to widely differing interpretations, and in some cases so technical that it is difficult for a layperson to judge. When I first set out to write this book, I imagined I would be recounting the tale of the voyagers themselves, those daring men and women who crossed such stupendous tracts of sea and whose exploits constitute one of the greatest adventures in human history. But, almost immediately, it dawned on me that one could tell such a story only by pretending to know more than can actually be known. This realization quickly led me to another: that the story of the Polynesian settlement of the Pacific is not so much a story about what happened as a story about how we know.
The evidence for what happened in the Pacific has taken different forms in different eras. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, it consisted of the eyewitness reports of European explorers, who left sketchy but fascinating accounts of Polynesian cultures before they had begun to change under the influence of the outside world. From the nineteenth century we have a different type of source material: Polynesian oral traditions, or what the islanders had to say about themselves. Then, starting in the early twentieth century, science began to deliver up whole new bodies of information based on biometrics, radiocarbon dating, and computer simulations. And, finally, in the 1970s, an experimental voyaging movement emerged, which added a completely different dimension to the story.
Because this evidence is complex—not to mention partial, fragmentary, and perennially open to reinterpretation—the story of what happened in Polynesia has not followed a single bearing to certainty from doubt. In fact, if you were to map it, it would look a lot like the track of a ship under sail, zigzagging and backtracking, haring off in one direction, only to turn and work its way back to an earlier course. There are difficulties with every kind of data—linguistic, archaeological, biological, folkloric—and aspects of the story that have nothing to do with the Pacific at all, for many of the arguments made about Polynesia have been driven by preoccupations originating in Oxford or Berlin.
But these, too, are part of the story, for the history of the Pacific is not just a tale of men and women (and dogs and pigs and chickens) in boats. It is also the story of all those who have wondered who Polynesians were, where they came from, and how they managed to find all those tiny islands scattered like stars in the emptiness of space. Thus, the book you have before you: a tale not just of the ancient mariners of the Pacific but of the many people who have puzzled over their history—the sailors, linguists, archaeologists, historians, ethnographers, folklorists, biologists, and geographers who have each, as it were, put in their oar.
Part I (#ulink_2c9199d2-a064-5e12-ac13-6d83996cca2e)
The Eyewitnesses (#ulink_2c9199d2-a064-5e12-ac13-6d83996cca2e)
(1521–1722) (#ulink_2c9199d2-a064-5e12-ac13-6d83996cca2e)
In which we follow the trail of the earliest European explorers as they attempt to cross the Pacific for the first time, encountering a wide variety of islands and meeting some of the people who live there. (#ulink_2c9199d2-a064-5e12-ac13-6d83996cca2e)
A Very Great Sea (#ulink_ac34452a-ac8e-59c5-b2cf-a3487f201dba)
The Discovery of Oceania (#ulink_ac34452a-ac8e-59c5-b2cf-a3487f201dba)
Globe showing the Pacific Ocean.
C. SCOTT WALKER, HARVARD MAP COLLECTION, HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
IF YOU WERE to look at the Pacific Ocean from space, you might notice that you would not be able to see both sides of it at the same time. This is because at its widest, the Pacific is nearly 180 degrees across—more than twelve thousand miles, or almost half the circumference of the earth. North to south, from the Aleutian Islands to the Antarctic, it stretches another ten thousand miles. Taken as a whole, it is so big that you could fit all the landmasses of earth inside it and there would still be room for another continent as large as North and South America combined. It is not simply the largest body of water on the planet—it is the largest single feature.
For most of human history, no one could have known any of this. They could not have known how far the ocean extended or what bodies of land it might or might not contain. They could not have known that the distances between islands, comparatively small at the ocean’s western edge, would stretch and stretch until they were thousands of miles wide. They could not have known that parts of the great ocean were completely empty, containing no land at all, or that the winds and weather in one region might be quite different from—even the reverse of—what was to be met with in another part of the sea. For tens of thousands of years, long after humans had colonized its edges, the middle of the Pacific Ocean remained beyond the reach of man.
The first people to reach any of the Pacific’s islands did so during the last ice age, when sea levels were as much as three hundred feet lower than they are today and the islands of Southeast Asia were a continent known as Sundaland. This meant that people could walk across most of what is now Indonesia, though only as far as Borneo and Bali; east of that, they had to paddle or swim. No one really knows how the first migrants did it—or, for that matter, who they were—but by at least forty thousand years ago they had reached the large islands of Australia and New Guinea, which were then joined together in a separate continent called Sahul.
They crossed water again between New Guinea and the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, reaching as far east as the Solomon Islands, where their progress appears to have been arrested. Perhaps they were stopped by rising sea levels or by the growing gaps of water between bodies of land or by the increasing poverty of plant and animal species as they moved farther out into the sea. Or perhaps they just petered out, like the Norse who tried to settle the island of Greenland and died there or gave up and retreated. In any case, this is how things stood for something like twenty to thirty thousand years. They had pushed out, as it were, to the edge of the shelf, but the vast expanse of the world’s largest ocean remained an insurmountable barrier.
Then, about four thousand years ago, a new group of migrants appeared in the western Pacific. A true seagoing people, they were the first to leave behind the chains of intervisible islands and sail out into the open ocean. They were perhaps the closest thing to a sea people the world has known, making their homes on the shores of small islands, always preferring beaches, peninsulas, even sandspits to valleys, highlands, and hills. They inhabited one of the richest marine environments in the world, with warm, clear tropical waters and mazes of coral in which hundreds of edible species lived. Most of their food came from the ocean: not just fish and shellfish, but eels, porpoises, turtles, octopuses, and crustaceans. They fished the quiet lagoon waters for reef species and trolled the open ocean for pelagic fish like tunas. They gathered sea snails and bivalves, Turbo, Tridacna, and Spondylus oysters, harvested slug-like sea cucumbers from the ocean floor, and pried spiny sea urchins from crevices in the rocks.
All their most ingenious technology—their lures, nets, weirs, and especially canoes—were designed for life at the water’s edge. They made hand nets and casting nets, weighted seine nets with sinkers and buoyed them with pumice floats. They shaped hooks and lures from turtle shell and the pearly conical shell of the Trochus snail. We refer to the vessels they built as “canoes,” but this barely begins to capture their character, something of which is reflected in the language they used. They had words for lash, plank, bow, sail, strake, keel, paddle, boom, bailer, thwart, anchor, mast, and prop. They had words for cargo, for punting and tacking, for embarking, sailing to windward, and steering a course. They had words for decking, for figureheads, and rollers; they even had a term, katae, for the free side of a canoe—the one opposite the outrigger—a concept for which we have no convenient expression.
They lived on the margin between land and sea, and their language was, not surprisingly, rich in terms for describing the littoral. Two of their key distinctions were between the lee side and the weather side of an island and between the inside and the outside of the reef. The principal axis of the directional system they used on land was toward and away from the ocean, and they had another system based on winds for when they were out at sea. They had countless words for water under the action of waves—foam, froth, billow, breaker, swell—and a metaphor in which open water was “alive” and sheltered water “dead.” They had a word for the kind of submerged or hidden coral that was attractive to fish but dangerous for boats, and another for smooth or rounded coral that translated literally as “blossom of stone.” They had words for pools, passages, and channels, and one for islets that was derived from the verb “to break off.” They had a word for the gap between two points of land (as in a passage through the reef), which evolved into a word for the distance between any two points (as in the distance between islands) and which, as these distances expanded, eventually came to mean the far, deep ocean, and even space itself.
The one thing they do not seem to have had is a name for the ocean as a whole, nothing that would correspond to our “Pacific Ocean.” They probably had names for parts of it, like their descendants the Tahitians, who referred to a region west of their islands as Te Moana Urifa, meaning “the Sea of Rank Odor,” and a region to the east as Te Moana o Marama, meaning “the Sea of the Moon.” But they seem not to have conceptualized the ocean in its entirety. Indeed, they could hardly be expected to have conceived of it as a discrete and bounded entity when, for them, it was not so much a thing apart as the medium in which they lived. It was tasik, meaning “tide” or “sea” or “salt water”; or it was masawa, meaning “deep or distant ocean” or “open sea.”
EUROPEAN UNDERSTANDING OF the Pacific has been quite different, in part, because it has a recorded starting point. It begins on the 25th (or possibly the 27th) of September 1513, when the Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa climbed over the Isthmus of Panama and caught sight of what he called the Mar del Sur. He referred to it as la otra mar, meaning “the other sea,” and for Europeans, who were already acquainted with both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, this is precisely what the Pacific was. It was another ocean, defined by its relationship to already known bodies of water and land. If the Atlantic, also known as the Mar del Norte, was the ocean between Europe and the Americas, then the Mar del Sur was the ocean between the New World and the East. This was an essentially geographical perspective, and from the very beginning the principal questions for Europeans were: How big was this ocean, where were its boundaries, and how difficult might it be to cross?
The first European to cross the Pacific was the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, who set sail from Spain in 1519 in search of a western route to the Spice Islands. Magellan had an idea that there might be a passage through South America, and after crossing the Atlantic, he picked up the South American coastline near what is now Rio de Janeiro and followed it south. He was at 52 degrees south latitude, nearly to the tip of the continent, before he found it: the winding, tortuous strait that now bears his name. To the north lay Patagonia, or the Land of Giants; to the south, Tierra del Fuego, or the Land of Fire. After thirty-eight difficult days, he emerged into an ocean that, thanks to a rare spell of good weather, was surprisingly calm. It was Magellan who gave the Pacific the name by which it is still known (though many storm-tossed travelers have since disputed its fitness).
But this was only the beginning of Magellan’s journey. Like other navigators of his era, he labored under a misapprehension about the size of the earth and the relationships of its landmasses to one another. He believed that once he reached the Mar del Sur it would be but a short distance to the Indies. In fact, it was a very great distance indeed. For over three months they sailed without sight of land, excepting a glimpse of two little atolls, that he named Los Desventurados, or the Unfortunate Isles. They had been short of provisions when they began their crossing; before it was over, the crew was reduced to eating rats, sawdust, and the leather on the ships’ yards. The voyage was marked by every possible calamity—mutiny, shipwreck, scurvy, starvation, not to mention the death of its commander, in a melee on an island in the Philippines. When, three years later, the expedition finally returned, it was with just one of the five original ships and eighteen of the original 188 men. They had, however, crossed the Pacific and discovered just how big it really was. They had also established that it was possible to reach the Indies by traveling west from Europe, though to do so, one would have to traverse “a sea so vast that the human mind can scarcely grasp it.”
And not only so vast, but so empty. Maps of the Pacific can give the impression that parts of the great ocean are filled with bits of land. But what looks like a V-shaped scattering of islands concentrated in the west and stretching across the tropics—as if some giant standing on the Asian mainland had taken a handful of earth and tossed it out in the direction of Peru—is really a kind of cartographic illusion. While there are a great many islands in the Pacific—some twenty to twenty-five thousand, depending on what you count—the vast majority are so minuscule that on most maps, if they were represented to scale, they would be too small to see. Indeed, the space taken up by the names of these islands is often many times greater than the land area they represent, and there are enormous stretches of ocean to the north, south, and east where there are no islands at all. So, while much is often made of the fact that Magellan managed to “miss everything” between the coast of Chile and the Philippines (and it is true that he succeeded in threading a number of archipelagoes without spotting any of the islands they contain), when you truly grasp how very little land there is and how much water, it’s almost more surprising that anyone ever found anything at all.
One of the few survivors of Magellan’s voyage, Antonio Pigafetta, wrote an account of his experience; it is from him that we know about the rats—traded, he tells us, at half an écu apiece—and the weevily biscuit powder, and the rank, revolting water they had to drink. His description of this part of the voyage is economical, as though perhaps it had been more horrible than he cared to recall, and he ends his chapter on the crossing of the Pacific with the following remark: “If our Lord and the Virgin Mother had not aided us . . . we had died in this very great sea. And I believe that nevermore will any man undertake to make such a voyage.” In this, however, he was mistaken. Magellan was followed into the Pacific by a series of navigators from several European nations. Drawn both by the known wealth of the Indies and by the tantalizing prospect of the unknown, they embarked on an ocean about which they knew almost nothing. But each one who returned brought back new information, and little by little, over the course of the next few centuries, a picture of the Pacific began to emerge.
THE PACIFIC WAS so large, and its exploration so difficult, that it took Europeans nearly three hundred years to complete it, and during this period the contact between islanders and outsiders was random and sporadic. Nevertheless, the accounts of these early explorers—our first eyewitnesses—have a unique value. Privileged observers, they see Polynesia at the moment of contact with the outside world, and they can tell us things that are hard to discover in any other way.
Take, for example, the size of Polynesian populations. This has been an enduringly difficult number to pin down, in part because one of the things outsiders brought to the Pacific was disease. Epidemics—of smallpox, influenza, measles, scarlet fever, dysentery—affected virtually every island group and dramatically increased Polynesian mortality. So, even before any kind of official census could be taken, many island populations were already in decline. But we can look to the early eyewitnesses for a sense of how densely populated the islands were before any of this had happened. Their estimates are hardly scientific, and scholars continue to debate their validity, but they are a key piece of evidence nonetheless.
We can see other things, too, through the eyes of the early explorers. It is helpful, for example, to learn what animals they found on different islands. Polynesians brought four main animals with them into the remote Pacific: the pig, the dog, the chicken, and the rat. These animals, sometimes referred to as “commensals” because they exist in a symbiotic relationship with people, are an interesting proxy for human movement in the Pacific. Since they were unable to travel from island to island on their own, their presence tells you something about where the people who must have transported them went.
Not all of these animals made it to all of the islands. There were only rats and chickens on Easter Island when Europeans arrived (no pigs or dogs), and only rats and dogs (no pigs or chickens) in New Zealand. In the Marquesas, they had pigs, chickens, and rats, but there is no early record of dogs. And then there are the islands on which Europeans puzzlingly found dogs but no people. On some islands, the animals may have died out (this appears to have been the case with the Marquesan dog, which turns up in archaeological digs); in other cases, they may never have arrived. Either way, their absence suggests something about the difficulty of successfully transporting animals about the Pacific. It may also tell us something about the frequency of prehistoric voyaging, because if you were missing both chickens and pigs and you had the chance to get them from another island, wouldn’t you do it?
Of course, there were lots of things the early explorers did not see, and many of their accounts are maddeningly superficial. Early visitors to the Marquesas saw none of the monumental architecture and sculpture that links that archipelago to both Tahiti and Easter Island. Early visitors to Easter Island reported the presence of “stone giants” but were confusing on the question of how easy it was to grow food. And the first European visitors to New Zealand saw nothing, being too scared of the Māori to go ashore.
Much has been made in histories of the Pacific about the problem of observer bias. Early European explorers saw the world through lenses that affected how they interpreted what they found. The Catholic Spanish and Portuguese of the sixteenth century were deeply concerned with the islanders’ heathenism; the mercantile Dutch, in the seventeenth century, were preoccupied by what they had to trade; the French, coming along in the eighteenth century, were most interested in their social relations and the idea of what constituted a “state of nature.” Still, the project on which these explorers were embarked was, very broadly speaking, an empirical one; their primary task was to discover what was out there and report back about what they had seen. Naturally, there were other agendas: territorial expansion, political advantage, conquest, commerce. But on a quite fundamental level, the project was one of observation and reportage, and, for the most part, they got better at it as the centuries wore on.
There was, however, one really big mistake that all the early European explorers in the Pacific made, one that blinded them to the true character of the region for ages. It was essentially a geographical error, and the best way to understand it is by looking at early European maps.
THE FIRST EUROPEAN maps of the world, the so-called Ptolemaic maps of the fifteenth century, do not even include Oceania, or what Cook would later call “the fourth part” of the globe. Their focus is on the known, inhabited regions of the world, which means, at this stage of history, that there is nothing west of Europe, east of Asia, or south of the Tropic of Capricorn. This all changed with the discovery of the Americas, and maps of the sixteenth century show a world that is already quite recognizable. The outlines of Europe, Asia, and Africa all look surprisingly correct, and even the New World, though distorted, bears a better-than-passing resemblance to North and South America as we know them today.
The Pacific in this period is still something of a cipher. Virtually all the major archipelagoes are missing, California is sometimes depicted as an island, and the continent of Australia is often drawn as though it were a peninsula of something else. The large island of New Guinea is frequently represented at twice its real size, and the Solomon Islands, discovered in 1568 and then lost for almost exactly two hundred years, are not only grossly exaggerated but seemingly untethered. On some maps they are located in the western Pacific, where they belong, but on others they have floated right out into the middle of the ocean, a clear reflection of the fact that for centuries no one had the foggiest idea where they actually were.
But the most remarkable feature of maps from this period is the presence of an enormous landmass, greater than all North America, Europe, and Asia combined, wrapped around the southern pole. This continent, known as Terra Australis Incognita, or “the Unknown Southland,” occupies nearly a quarter of the globe. It is as if Antarctica included both Tierra del Fuego and Australia, stretched almost to the Cape of Good Hope, and reached so far into the Indian and Pacific Oceans that it entered the Tropic of Capricorn.
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.” This idea of global symmetry was inherently appealing, but it 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.
Like many imaginary places, Terra Australis Incognita—or, as it was sometimes more optimistically known, Terra Australis Nondum Cognita, “the Southland NotYet Known”—represented not just what Europeans thought ought to exist in the Pacific but what they wanted to find. It was conflated with a whole range of utopian fantasies: lands of milk and honey, El Dorados, terrestrial paradises. Almost from the beginning, it was linked with the land of Ophir, the source of the biblical King Solomon’s wealth, which explains why there are Solomon Islands in the neighborhood of New Guinea. Other rumors connected it with the mythical lands of Beach, Lucach, and Maletur, said to have been discovered by Marco Polo, and with the fabled islands of the Tupac Inca Yupanqui, from which he was said to have brought back slaves, gold, silver, and a copper throne.
For nearly three hundred years, the idea of Terra Australis Incognita drove European exploration in the Pacific, shaping the itineraries and experiences of voyagers, who were convinced that if they just kept looking, they would find a continent somewhere in the southern Pacific Ocean. Of course, there is a continent there—Antarctica—but it is not the kind of continent that Europeans had in mind. They were hoping for something bigger and more temperate, greener and more lush, richer and more hospitable, inhabited by people with fine goods for trade. They were dreaming of another Indies, or, failing that, another New World. But despite the “green drift” reported at 51 degrees south by the Dutch explorer Jacob Le Maire, and the birds he claimed to have seen in the roaring forties, and the mountainous country resembling Norway reported at 64 degrees south by Theodore Gerrards, despite the buccaneer Edward Davis’s rumors, and Pedro Fernández de Quirós’s claim of a country “as great as all Europe & Asia,” no continent resembling Terra Australis Incognita ever appeared.
What European navigators found in the Pacific instead was water—vast, unbroken stretches of water extending in every direction as far as the eye could see. For days on end, for weeks, sometimes for months, they sailed on the great circle of the ocean with nothing above them but the vault of the sky and nothing between them and the horizon but “the sea with its labouring waves for ever rising, sinking, and vanishing to rise again.” No distant smudges, no piles of clouds, no sea wrack, sometimes not even any birds. And then, just when they had begun to think they might sail onward to the end of eternity, an island would rise up over the rim of the world.
First Contact (#ulink_a6a20604-a872-5c88-8199-8bb3712574a5)
Mendaña in the Marquesas (#ulink_a6a20604-a872-5c88-8199-8bb3712574a5)
Breadfruit, after a drawing by Sydney Parkinson, in John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages (London, 1773).
DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY.
IF WE SET aside Magellan’s two little atolls, both of which were uninhabited at the time, the first Polynesian island to be sighted by any European was in the Marquesas. This is a group of islands just south of the equator and about four thousand miles west of Peru, a location that puts them at the eastern edge of the Polynesian Triangle, in a comparatively empty region of the sea. To the west and south they have neighbors within a few hundred miles, but you could sail north or east from the Marquesas along a 180-degree arc and not meet with anything at all for thousands of miles.
The islands of Polynesia come in different varieties, and the Marquesas are what are known as “high islands.” What this means to a layperson is that they are mountainous, rising in some cases thousands of feet from the sea; what it means to a geologist is that they are volcanic in origin. Some high islands occur in arcs, in places where one tectonic plate plunges underneath another. But those of the mid-Pacific are thought to be formed by hot spots, plumes of molten rock rising directly from the earth’s mantle. These islands typically occur in chains, grouped along a northwest–southeast axis, with the oldest at the northwest end and the youngest at the southeast, a pattern explained by the northwesterly movement of the Pacific plate. The idea is that over the course of millions of years, islands are formed and carried away as the slab of crust on which they are sitting drifts, while new islands rise out of the ocean behind them. The textbook case is the Hawaiian archipelago: the Big Island of Hawai‘i, with its active volcanoes, lies at the southeastern end of a chain of islands that get progressively older and smaller as they trail away to the northwest, ending in a string of underwater seamounts. Meanwhile, southeast of the Big Island, a new volcano is emerging, which will crest the sea sometime in the next 100,000 years.
The landscape of a high island has a sort of yin and yang about it. Composed almost entirely of basalt, high islands erode in quite spectacular ways, exposing great ribs and ramparts and pinnacles of rock. On their windward sides, where the mountains wring moisture from the passing air, they are lush and verdant, while on their leeward sides, in the rain shadow of these same mountains, they can be perfectly parched. But perhaps the greatest contrast is between the dark, heavy loom of the mountains and the bright, open aspect of the sea. Out from under the shadow of the peaks, the tangle of trees and vines in the uplands gives way to an airier landscape of grasses, coconut palms, and whispering casuarina. The ridges flatten to a coastal plain; the mountain cataracts slow to quiet rivers. At the tide line, the rocks and pools give way, here and there, to bright crescents of sand. The sea stretches out into the distance, broken only by a line of white breakers where the reef divides the bright turquoise of the lagoon from the darker water of the open ocean.
In some respects, the Marquesas are typical high islands, with their towering rock buttresses and fantastic spires, their deeply eroded clefts and fertile valleys. But in others they are quite unlike the Polynesian islands pictured in tourist brochures. Lying in the path of the Humboldt Current, which carries cold water up the South American coast, the Marquesas have never developed a system of coral reefs. They have no lagoons, few sheltered bays, and only a handful of beaches. Their ruggedness extends all the way to the coast, and their shores are largely grim and perpendicular.
The other thing missing in the Marquesas is the coastal plain. This is the part of a high island on which it is easiest and most natural to live. As anyone who has been to the islands of Hawai‘i knows, the standard way of navigating a high island is to travel around the coast. And it is easy to see how important this part of the island’s topography is—how it enables movement and communication, provides room for gardens, plantations, and housing; how even now the land between the ocean and the mountains is where the human population lives. In the Marquesas, however, there is none of this; the only habitable land lies in the valleys that radiate out from the island’s center, enclosed and cut off from one another by the mountains’ great arms.
To many Europeans, the Marquesas have seemed indescribably romantic. With their peaks shrouded in mist, their folds buried in greenery, their flanks rising dramatically from the sea, they have a brooding prehistoric beauty. Visiting in 1888, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson found them at once magnificent and forbidding, with their great dark ridges and their towering crags. “At all hours of the day,” he wrote, “they strike the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the same menacing gloom.”
It is tempting to imagine that the first Polynesians might have had similarly mixed impressions when they arrived. The discovery of any high island in the Pacific must have been a triumph: here was land, water, safety, sources of food. But archaeological sites in the Marquesas reveal a surprising variety of types of fishhooks from the very earliest settlement period, suggesting, perhaps, a surge of experiment and innovation prompted by the realization that fishing techniques brought from islands with more coral would not work in the deep, rough waters of the Marquesan coast. Still, the animals that were imported thrived (except for, maybe, the dog), the breadfruit trees grew, and the people prospered—so much so that by the time the first Europeans arrived, the Marquesas were “thickly inhabited” by a population that came out to meet the strangers in droves.
THE MARQUESAS WERE discovered in 1595 by the Spaniard Álvaro de Mendaña, who was en route with a shipload of colonists to the Solomon Islands. We say that Mendaña “discovered” the Marquesas, but of course this is not, strictly speaking, true. Indeed, the claim that any European explorer discovered anything in the Pacific—least of all the islands of Polynesia—is obviously problematic. As the Frenchman who later claimed the Marquesas for King Louis XV observed, it is hard to see how anyone could possess an island that is already possessed by the people who live there. And what is true for possession is even more true for discovery: In what sense can a land that is already inhabited be discovered? But what the word “discovered” means in the context of eighteenth-century Frenchmen or sixteenth-century Spaniards is not “discovered for the first time in human history” but something much more like “made known to people outside the region for the first time.”
This was Mendaña’s second voyage across the Pacific. Nearly thirty years earlier, he had led another expedition in search of Terra Australis Incognita, managing to reach the Solomon Islands before returning, in some disarray, to Peru. Despite the hardships of the journey, cyclones, scurvy, insubordination, shortages of food and water—at one point the daily ration consisted of “half a pint of water, and half of that was crushed cockroaches”—Mendaña was determined to try again. For twenty-six years he pestered the Spanish crown, and in 1595 they finally gave in.
The second expedition was, if possible, even more calamitous than the first. Confused and disorderly from the start, it was plagued by violence and dissension. Mendaña was on a zealot’s mission to bring the benighted heathen to God; his wife, an unlovable virago, caused trouble wherever she went; many of his soldiers were self-interested and cruel. Neither the commander nor any of his subordinates seem to have understood just how far away their destination was, despite—at least in Mendaña’s case—having been there before. In fact, they never did arrive. The colony, established instead on the island of Santa Cruz, was a disaster, with robberies, murders, ambushes, even a couple of beheadings. Mendaña, ill, broken, and “sunk in a religious stupor,” contracted a fever and died like something out of Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The rest of the expedition disbanded and sailed for the Philippines.
We have the story from Mendaña’s pilot, Pedro Fernández de Quirós, who recorded that just five weeks after setting out from the coast of South America, they sighted their first body of land. Believing this to be the island he was seeking, Mendaña ordered his crew to their knees to chant the Te Deum laudamus, giving thanks to God for a voyage so swift and untroubled. This, of course, was ridiculous; the Solomons were still four thousand miles away, at a minimum another five weeks’ sailing. But it does illustrate just how poorly these early European navigators understood the size of the Pacific and how easily misled they could be. Eventually, Mendaña realized his mistake and after some consideration concluded that this was, in fact, an entirely new place.
The island, which was known to its inhabitants as Fatu Hiva, was the southernmost of the Marquesas, and as the Spanish approached, a fleet of about seventy canoes pulled out from shore. Quirós noted that these vessels were fitted with outriggers, a novelty he carefully described as a kind of wooden structure attached to the hull that “pressed” on the water to keep the canoe from capsizing. This was something many Europeans had not seen, but the development of the outrigger, which can be traced back as far as the second millennium B.C. in the islands of Southeast Asia, was the key innovation that made it possible for long, narrow, comparatively shallow vessels (i.e., canoes) to sail safely on the open ocean.
Each of the Marquesan canoes carried between three and ten people, and many more islanders were swimming and hanging on to the sides—altogether, thought Quirós, perhaps four hundred souls. They came, he wrote, “with much speed and fury,” paddling their canoes and pointing to the land and shouting something that sounded like “atalut.” The anthropologist Robert C. Suggs, who did fieldwork in the Marquesas in the 1950s, thinks they were telling Mendaña to bring his ships closer inshore—“a friendly bit of advice,” as he puts it, “from one group of navigators to another.” Or maybe it was a strategy to get them to a place where they could be more effectively contained.
Quirós wrote that the islanders showed few signs of nervousness, paddling right up to the Spanish ships and offering coconuts, plantains, some kind of food rolled up in leaves (probably fermented breadfruit paste), and large joints of bamboo filled with water. “They looked at the ships, the people, and the women who had come out of the galley to see them . . . and laughed at the sight.” One of the men was persuaded to come aboard, and Mendaña dressed him in a shirt and hat, which greatly amused the others, who laughed and called out to their friends. After this, about forty more islanders clambered aboard and began to walk about the ship “with great boldness, taking hold of whatever was near them, and many of them tried the arms of the soldiers, touched them in several parts with their fingers, looked at their beards and faces.” They appeared confused by the Europeans’ clothing until some of the soldiers let down their stockings and tucked up their sleeves to show the color of their skin, after which, Quirós wrote, they “quieted down, and were much pleased.”
Mendaña and some of his officers handed out shirts and hats and trinkets, which the Marquesans took and slung round their necks. They continued to sing and call out, and as their confidence increased, so did their boisterousness. This, in turn, annoyed the Spanish, who began gesturing for them to leave, but the islanders had no intention of leaving. Instead they grew bolder, picking up whatever they saw on deck, even using their bamboo knives to cut slices from a slab of the crew’s bacon. Finally, Mendaña ordered a gun to be fired, at which the islanders all leapt into the sea—all except one, a young man who remained clinging to the gunwale, refusing, either out of obstinance or terror, to let go until one of the Spaniards cut him with a sword.
At this, the tenor of the encounter changed. An old man with a long beard stood up in his canoe and cried out, casting fierce glances in the direction of the ships. Others sounded their shell trumpets and beat with their paddles on the sides of their canoes. Some picked up their spears and shook them at the Spaniards, or fitted their slings with stones and began hurling them at the ship. The Spaniards aimed their arquebuses at the islanders, but the powder was damp and would not light. “It was a sight to behold,” wrote Quirós, “how the natives came on with noise and shouts.” At last, the Spanish soldiers managed to fire their guns, hitting a dozen or so of the islanders, including the old man, who was shot through the forehead and killed. When they saw this, the islanders immediately turned and fled back to shore. A little while later, a single canoe carrying three men returned to the ships. One man held out a green branch and addressed the Spaniards at some length; to Quirós he seemed to be seeking peace. The Spanish made no response, and after a little while the islanders departed, leaving some coconuts behind.
THE ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN the Marquesans and Mendaña’s people were filled with confusion, and many “evil things,” wrote Quirós, happened that “might have been avoided if there had been someone to make us understand each other.” In this, it was like many early encounters between Europeans and Polynesians: everything that happened made sense to someone, but much of it was baffling, offensive, or even deadly to those on the other side.
In one incident, four “very daring” Marquesans made off with one of the ships’ dogs; in another, a Spanish soldier fired into a crowd of canoes, aiming at and killing a man with a small child. On shore, Mendaña ordered a Catholic mass to be held, at which the islanders knelt in imitation of the strangers. Two Marquesans were taught to make the sign of the cross and to say “Jesus, Maria”; maize was sown in the hope that it might take. Mendaña’s wife, Doña Isabel, tried to cut a few locks from the head of a woman with especially beautiful hair but was forced to desist when the woman objected—the head, being tapu, should not have been touched, as hair was known to be useful for sorcery.
Three islanders were shot and their bodies hung up so that the Marquesans “might know what the Spaniards could do.” Mendaña envisioned establishing a colony, leaving behind thirty men along with some of their wives. But the soldiers adamantly refused this mission. Perhaps they understood, no doubt correctly, that it would have been more than their lives were worth, 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.
Quirós was distressed by the cruel and wanton behavior of Mendaña’s men. In the islanders, on the other hand, he found much to admire. Indeed, it is through Quirós’s eyes that we get our first glimpse of a people who would come to epitomize for many Europeans the pinnacle of human beauty. One later visitor described the Marquesans as “exquisite beyond description” and the “most beautiful people” he had ever seen. Even Cook, a man never given to exaggeration, called them “as fine a race of people as any in this Sea or perhaps any whatever.”
The islanders, wrote Quirós, were graceful and well formed, with good legs, long fingers, and beautiful eyes and teeth. Their skin was clear and “almost white,” and they wore their hair long and loose “like that of women.” Many were naked when he first saw them—they were swimming at the time—and their faces and bodies were decorated with what Quirós at first took to be a kind of blue paint. This, of course, was tattooing, a practice common across Polynesia—the English word “tattoo” is derived from the Polynesian tatau—but carried to the peak of perfection in the Marquesas, where every inch of the body, including the eyelids, tongue, palms of the hands, even the insides of the nostrils, might be inscribed. Quirós found the Marquesan women, with their fine eyes, small waists, and beautiful hands, even more lovely “than the ladies of Lima, who are famed for their beauty,” and characterized the men as tall, handsome, and strong. Some were so large that they made the Spaniards look diminutive by comparison, and one made a great impression on the visitors by lifting a calf up by the ear.
Ethnographically speaking—remembering that this is the earliest recorded description of any Polynesian society that we have—Quirós’s account is slim but interesting. The Marquesans, he wrote, had pigs and chickens (“fowls of Castille”), as well as plantains, coconuts, calabashes, nuts, and something the Europeans had never seen, which they described as a green fruit about the size of a boy’s head. This was breadfruit, a plant that would enter Pacific legend two centuries later as the cargo carried by Captain William Bligh of the Bounty when his crew mutinied off the island of Tahiti. (Bligh was carrying the breadfruit seedlings to the West Indies, where, it was envisioned, they would provide an economical means of feeding African slaves.) They lived in large communal houses with platforms and terraces of neatly fitted stone and worshipped what the Spanish referred to as an “oracle,” an enclosure containing carved wooden figures to whom they made offerings of food. Their tools were made of stone and shell; their primary weapons were spears and slings. Their most significant manufactures were canoes, which they made in a variety of sizes: small ones with outriggers for three to ten paddlers, and large ones, “very long and well-made,” with room for thirty or more. Of the latter wrote Quirós, “They gave us to understand, when they were asked, that they went in these large canoes to other lands.”
What lands these might have been remained a mystery, however. In one curious incident, the Marquesans, seeing a black man on one of the Spanish ships, gestured toward the south, making signs “to say that in that direction there were men like him, and that they went there to fight, and that the others had arrows.” This is a baffling remark, and quite typical of the sort of misdirection that is rampant in these early accounts. While it might describe any number of people in the islands far to the west, the bow was never used as a weapon in Polynesia. The only places south of the Marquesas are the Tuamotu Archipelago, and, even farther away, Easter Island—all of whose inhabitants are culturally and physically quite similar to Marquesans. They might well have been perceived as enemies, but they were not archers and they were not black.
But while we have no idea which islands Quirós was referring to, we do know that there were “other islands” in the Marquesans’ conceptual universe. Later visitors heard tell of “islands which are supposed by the natives to exist, and which are entirely unknown to us.” It was also reported that in times of drought, “canoes went out in search of other islands,” which may help explain why, when Cook reached the Marquesas in 1775, the islanders wondered whether he had come from “some country where provisions had failed.”
MENDAÑA REMAINED IN the Marquesas for about two weeks, in the course of which he identified and named the four southernmost islands in the archipelago. (A second cluster of islands lay undiscovered to the north.) He called them, after his own fashion, Santa Magdalena, San Pedro, La Dominica, and Santa Cristina, names that have all long been replaced by the original Polynesian names: Fatu Hiva, Motane, Hiva Oa, and Tahuata. The archipelago as a whole he named in honor of his patron, Don García Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Cañete and viceroy of Peru, and in all the years since 1595 the Marquesas have never been known as anything else. Except, of course, among the islanders themselves, who know their islands collectively as Te Fenua, meaning “the Land,” and themselves, the inhabitants of Te Fenua, as Te Enata, meaning simply “the People.”
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. Privately, if the Spanish concluded anything, it was that the Marquesas, with their large, vigorous population of beautiful people, their pigs, their chickens, and their great canoes, proved the existence of a southern continent. Lacking “instruments of navigation and vessels of burthen,” Quirós concluded, the inhabitants of these islands could not possibly have made long-distance ocean crossings. This meant that somewhere in the vicinity there must be “other islands which lye in a chain, or a continent running along,” since there was no other place “whereby they who inhabit those islands could have entered them, unless by a miracle.” Thus the irony of first contact between Polynesia and Europe: that it served to reinforce a hallucinatory belief in the existence of an imaginary continent while obscuring the much more intriguing reality of the Marquesans themselves.
Barely an Island at All (#ulink_f2208721-df3e-5dc1-a7fa-5df55b656098)
Atolls of the Tuamotus (#ulink_f2208721-df3e-5dc1-a7fa-5df55b656098)
Winds in the Pacific, based on “Map of the prevailing winds on earth,” in Het handboek voor de zeiler by H. C. Herreshoff, adapted by Rachel Ahearn.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
MENDAÑA DISCOVERED THE Marquesas because he sailed west in roughly the right latitude from the port of Paita, in the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru. But those who came after set sail from different ports and followed different routes and, thus, discovered different sets of islands. This was not so much a matter of intention: European explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries did not have the freedom to go wherever they wished. On the contrary, for some centuries virtually all their discoveries were determined by the distinctive pattern of the winds and currents in the Pacific Ocean and by the limited points of entry into the region from other parts of the world.
The weather in the Pacific is dominated by two great circles of wind, or gyres, one of which turns clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, while the other turns counterclockwise in the Southern. Across wide bands from roughly 30 to 60 degrees in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the winds are predominantly westerly, that is, they blow from west to east. In the north, these winds sweep across the continents of Europe, Asia, and North America. But in the Southern Hemisphere, where there are few landmasses to impede them, they can reach fantastic speeds—hence the popular names for the far southern latitudes: the “roaring forties,” “furious fifties,” and “screaming sixties.”
From the equator to about 30 degrees north and south—roughly across the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer—the winds predominantly blow the opposite way. These are known as the trade winds, a reliable pattern of strong, steady easterlies with a northeasterly slant in the Northern Hemisphere and a southeasterly slant in the Southern. In between, in the vicinity of the equator itself, is an area known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone, or ITCZ, a region of light and variable winds and frequent thunderstorms more commonly known as the Doldrums and greatly feared by early European navigators for its deadly combination of stultifying heat and protracted calms. Anyone who has flown across the equator in the Pacific—say, from Los Angeles to Sydney—may remember a bumpy patch about halfway through the flight; that was the ITCZ.
