Sea People Read online

  Dedication

  For Tauwhitu

  Epigraph

  For we are dear to the immortal gods,

  Living here, in the sea that rolls forever,

  Distant from other lands and other men.

  —Homer, the Odyssey

  (translated by Robert Fitzgerald)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Plates

  Prologue: Kealakekua Bay

  Part I: The Eyewitnesses (1521–1722)

  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.

  A Very Great Sea: The Discovery of Oceania

  First Contact: Mendaña in the Marquesas

  Barely an Island at All: Atolls of the Tuamotus

  Outer Limits: New Zealand and Easter Island

  Part II: Connecting the Dots (1764–1778)

  In which we travel with Captain Cook to the heart of Polynesia, meet the Tahitian priest and navigator Tupaia, and sail with the two of them to New Zealand, where Tupaia makes an important discovery.

  Tahiti: The Heart of Polynesia

  A Man of Knowledge: Cook Meets Tupaia

  Tupaia’s Chart: Two Ways of Seeing

  An Aha Moment: A Tahitian in New Zealand

  Part III: Why Not Just Ask Them? (1778–1920)

  In which we look at some of the stories that Polynesians told about themselves and consider the difficulty nineteenth-century Europeans had trying to make sense of them.

  Drowned Continents and Other Theories: The Nineteenth-Century Pacific

  A World Without Writing: Polynesian Oral Traditions

  The Aryan Māori: An Unlikely Idea

  A Viking in Hawai‘i: Abraham Fornander

  Voyaging Stories: History and Myth

  Part IV: The Rise of Science (1920–1959)

  In which anthropologists pick up the trail of the ancient Polynesians, bringing a new, quantitative approach to the questions of who, where, and when.

  Somatology: The Measure of Man

  A Māori Anthropologist: Te Rangi Hiroa

  The Moa Hunters: Stone and Bones

  Radiocarbon Dating: The Question of When

  The Lapita People: A Key Piece of the Puzzle

  Part V: Setting Sail (1947–1980)

  In which we set off on an entirely new tack, taking to the sea with a crew of experimental voyagers as they attempt to reenact the voyages of the ancient Polynesians.

  Kon-Tiki: Thor Heyerdahl’s Raft

  Drifting Not Sailing: Andrew Sharp

  The Non-Armchair Approach: David Lewis Experiments

  Hōkūle‘a: Sailing to Tahiti

  Reinventing Navigation: Nainoa Thompson

  Part VI: What We Know Now (1990–2018)

  In which we review some of the latest scientific findings and think about what it takes to answer big questions about the deep past.

  The Latest Science: DNA and Dates

  Coda: Two Ways of Knowing

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Also by Christina Thompson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  List of Plates

  “Map of the World, showing Terra Australis Incognita,” from Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas, by Abraham Ortelius, 1570. Wikimedia Commons.

  Tattooed Marquesan, “Back View of a younger inhabitant of Nukahiwa [Nuku Hiva], not yet completely tattooed,” in G. H. von Langsdorff, Voyage and Travels in Various Parts of the World (London, 1813). Courtesy Carol Ivy.

  Easter Island moai, “A View of the Monuments of Easter Island,” by William Hodges, ca. 1776. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Wikimedia Commons.

  Nukutavake canoe, acquired in the Tuamotus in 1767 by Captain Samuel Wallis of H.M.S. Dolphin. British Museum.

  Nukutavake canoe detail showing repair.

  Portrait of Captain James Cook by William Hodges, 1775–76. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

  Drawing by Tupaia of a Māori trading crayfish with Joseph Banks, 1769. British Library.

  Peter Henry Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) in academic robes, ca. 1904. Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand.

  Felix von Luschan’s Hautfarbentafel (skin color panel). Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.

  Richard Owen standing beside Dinornis novaezealandiae (large species of moa) while holding the bone fragment he was given in 1839. From Richard Owen, Memoirs on the extinct wingless birds of New Zealand (London, 1879). Wikimedia Commons.

  Moa egg found by Jim Eyles at Wairau Bar in 1939. Photograph by Norman Heke, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

  Necklace of moa bone reels and stone “whale tooth” pendant, discovered at Wairau Bar. Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand.

  “The Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand” by Louis John Steele and Charles F. Goldie (1898), Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of the late George and Helen Boyd, 1899. Based on Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), this painting depicts a vision of Polynesian voyaging not unlike that implied by drift voyaging theories.

  Reconstructed three-thousand-year-old Lapita pot from Teouma, Efate Island, Vanuatu. Photograph by Philippe Metois, courtesy Stuart Bedford and Matthew Spriggs.

  Micronesian stick chart from the Marshall Islands. Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

  Hōkūle‘a passing the Statue of Liberty in 2016 on the Mālama Honua voyage around the world. Photo by Na‘alehu Anthony, courtesy ‘Ōiwi TV and the Polynesian Voyaging Society.

  Prologue

  Kealakekua Bay

  Map of the Sandwich Islands by Giovanni Cassini (Rome, 1798), based on Cook’s chart of Hawai‘i.

  STORY OF HAWAII MUSEUM, KAHULUI, MAUI.

  KEALAKEKUA BAY LIES on the west, or leeward, side of the Big Island of Hawai‘i, in the rain shadow cast by the great volcano Mauna Loa. It is a smallish bay about a mile wide, open to the southwest, with a bit of flat land at either end and a great wall of cliffs along the middle, where in ancient times the bodies of Hawaiian chiefs were hidden in secret caves. The name of the bay, Kealakekua, means in Hawaiian “the Path of the God,” and in the final centuries of Polynesian isolation, before the arrival of Europeans, it was a seat of power and the ancestral home of no less a personage than the first Hawaiian monarch, Kamehameha I.

  To get to Kealakekua Bay, you take the main road south from Kailua, leaving behind the more heavily settled areas of the Kona Coast and passing through a series of small towns. The highway on this part of the island runs along the shoulder of the mountain, and the drive down to sea level is a steep one. Turning off at the Napo‘opo‘o Road, you wind down through an arid landscape of mesquite and lead trees interspersed with ornamental plantings of hibiscus and plumeria. Taking a right at the bottom and following the road to its end, you come at last to a little cul-de-sac under a pair of spreading jacarandas. The beach, with its jumble of boulders, is a stone’s throw away, the high red rampart of the Pali looms on the right, and, squinting into the distance, you can just make out the low, scrubby outline of the farther shore.

  Immediately adjacent rises the wall of the Hikiau Heiau, a large rectangular platform neatly built of close-fitting lava stones. The first time we visited this spot, my husband, Seven, and I were at the end of a long trip across the Pacific with our three sons. We had seen these sorts of structures before, coming upon them half-hidden in the forests of Nuku Hiva and high on a h
eadland on O‘ahu’s North Shore, and once on a beach like this on the island of Ra‘iatea. In many parts of Polynesia they are known as marae, and in the days before Europeans reached the Pacific they were places of great mystery and supernatural power. Presided over by chiefs and priests and dedicated to particular gods, they were sites of sacrifice—including, occasionally, of humans—and propitiation to ensure safe voyaging or good health or plentiful food or success in war. They were decorated with scaffoldings and carved wooden images, and often with skulls, and were governed by the incontestable law of kapu (known elsewhere as tapu and the source of our word “taboo”), the system of rules and prohibitions linking everyday existence to the world of the numinous, which permeated every aspect of ancient Polynesian life.

  We picked our way around the outside of the heiau, trying to get a sense of what was there. What remained of the original structure was a raised dry-stone platform more than a hundred feet long and about half as wide, rising to a height of ten feet at the beach end. It was said to have been nearly twice this size when it was first seen by Europeans, in the late 1700s, and would have been an imposing edifice with a commanding view of the bay. Or so we imagined. The stone stairway up to the top of the platform was roped off, and no fewer than three separate signs reminded us that no trespassing was allowed. Visitors were admonished not to wrap or to remove any of the stones or to climb on the walls or in any other way to disrespect the site. Heiau on the islands of Hawai‘i have more signage than similar structures on other islands, and, given the number of visitors, it’s easy to see why. But encounters with the past are different when they are mediated in this way, and I was glad that our first experience of such places had been deep in a forest in the Marquesas, where we had wandered freely among the ruins, ruminating after our own fashion upon the passage of time.

  Directly in front of the heiau was an obelisk built of the same black lava rock but cemented in a very un-Polynesian way. It was about ten or twelve feet high and was mounted with a bronze commemorative plaque that read:

  In this heiau, January 28, 1779,

  Captain James Cook R. N.

  read the English burial service

  over William Whatman, seaman,

  the first recorded Christian service

  in the Hawaiian Islands.

  Here was a completely different story from the one the heiau had to tell. On the surface, it was the story of poor Whatman, dead of a stroke, whose last wish had been to be buried on shore, and of the almost accidental arrival of Christianity, the rippling effect of which would be felt in these islands for centuries to come. But the much larger story, only obliquely indicated here, was of the coming of Europeans to the Pacific—the most consequential thing to have happened in these islands since the arrival of the Polynesians themselves. And so, while we might have come simply to see the heiau, with its tantalizing glimpse of a remote and cryptic Polynesian past, it was, in fact, the intersection of these two histories that had brought us to Kealakekua Bay.

  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.