Decent article, though a little thin on details. For example, alludes to but doesn't mention Polynesian wayfinding techniques, which are quite fascinating. The Polynesians developed some really clever nautical wayfinding techniques without instruments, or with rudimentary, imprecise, non-machined ones, that enabled them to reliably traverse the islands of the South Pacific, even to remote ones like Tahiti. Lots of articles on "Polynesian wayfinding" across the web, and a great exhibition on it at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu in case you happen to be in the vicinity.
Probably the best observation in the article, is the way theories can potentially become distorted the further away in time they are from their subject of study:
>GAZETTE: The book deals also with the flip side of that wondrousness, the Western skepticism that an “unsophisticated,” “primitive” people could manage this feat. What underlies Western skepticism? Was it also wonder at the distances involved? Or was it rooted in racism, in ignorance? Why not just take folks at their word when they say they did it?
THOMPSON: There was a lot of skepticism, and I think that was basically rooted in a sense of Western superiority and classic colonialism and that set of attitudes. But one of the things that I think is misunderstood is that this was not a uniform view. There are periods, at the end of the 18th century and in the 19th century, when Europeans who were interested in this subject were actually not that skeptical at all of Polynesian voyaging capacity.
Some of the 19th-century figures I write about took for granted — completely — that Polynesians had been the greatest navigators ever. They were convinced that they had sailed these distances and they had gone back and forth repeatedly.
What I saw that sort of surprised me, because it ran contrary to the conventional wisdom, was a rise in skepticism in the 20th century. My interpretation is that this is because we’re actually moving away from understanding the people. We’re moving away in time from real contact with the islanders and a real understanding of what they were doing.
The earlier theorists of the 19th century had many bad ideas, but they did believe in Polynesian voyaging. And they were quite close to the people. They spoke the languages. They often married into these cultures. They were intimate with them. And they lived in a period before there was so much lost knowledge. So that was an interesting aspect of the story that I didn’t foresee.
The Polynesian Voyaging Society has been using reconstructed navigation techniques to make trips across the pacific since the 1980s. Fascinating stuff!
Even longer ago (late 1940s), there were arguments if a polynesian style vessel could even make the trip, let alone navigate using traditional techniques.
The point is that 20th century anthropologists & historians had access to significantly less information and first hand experience than those in the 19th century.
In 1800 there were between 50,000 - 100,000 Marquesans. By 1902 there were 3,963.
That is indeed evidence they got there by boat, although before DNA comparison it wasn't clear where they came from. (DNA sequencing has revolutionized determining where people came from and who various groups are related to.) It is not sufficient evidence of repeatable navigational skills. Setting out in a boat and luckily happening upon an island is very different from reliably navigating back and forth.
There are modern examples of people in lifeboats drifting incredible distances in the Pacific, with zero navigation.
People didn't accept that the Wrights had flown, either, until the evidence was indisputable. And rightly so, as it was an extraordinary accomplishment.
I happened to read "Sea People" this past fall, and it's one that I'd recommend to anyone interested in more or less any of the areas it touches on. The author took an approach of not just explaining what information was learned, but the how it was learned, and did so in a way that I felt made things really accessible, though not at the expense of making things hand-wavy in her explanation (imho, anyway).
Polynesian exploration and the logistics involved (both from a Polynesian and European point of view), interaction between dissimilar cultures trying to understand each other, historical re-creation, and more, plus some of what I think is simply good writing. It's not a topic I'd looked into much beforehand, but found it a really interesting and enjoyable read. If anyone finds that the interview in the article sparks an interest, I think you could definitely do worse.
I've wondered if the geography of Polynesia didn't help in this regard. The area is a series of small islands out in a big ocean. People who wanted to move between the islands would gain a lot of experience in sea navigation in whatever their ships of the day were. Enough experience plus the human desire to explore means longer trips could mostly be a factor in how much food and fresh water you can pack with you.
By comparison their contemporaries had the luxury of being on the same landmass so they could stick to coastal waters and inland seas for the entire journey. They were not forced to learn the harsh lessens of the open oceans until much later so they have this mindset that open ocean sailing is a monumental feat that requires advanced technology.
As for why it was lost. The article speculates that it was climate change, but I think the lack of a system of writing is probably even more to blame. Some disaster kills off the school of deep ocean navigation and the skills are lost as the old sailors die off.
>As for why it was lost. The article speculates that it was climate change, but I think the lack of a system of writing is probably even more to blame. Some disaster kills off the school of deep ocean navigation and the skills are lost as the old sailors die off.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. When James Cook came through Polynesia, he brought syphilis which ravaged the populations of Tahiti, Hawaii, and others - weakening oral tradition of passing down information. Also, when europeans first came, they were overall very un-interested in preserving any oral history, and mostly just colonised and fucked over the local populations - playing out the classic tropes of colonisation.
Polynesia also has helpful ocean currents all over the place, which probably made propulsion easier & trip time faster, with the bonus of allowing smaller simpler craft.
My layman's understanding of European sailing history is full of oars, tacking, doldrums, rations, and complex multi-sail designs. All things you'd never have to contend with if there was always a powerful current headed to your destination.
One lingering question I have for all migrations in antiquity is why (given very low pop density)?
I’m sure some were for the sake of exploration (maybe wanderlust). But in the vast Pacific if you wanted tropical abundance you had the Indonesian archipelago. Why bother to search for low density land like Micronesia, etc?
Did people just overhunt and overfish so they had to move on before agriculture took hold?
Polynesian culture didn't develop in Indonesia though. And as evidenced by the history of Indonesia, the various cultures there aren't overly good at living and let live.
Polynesians had agriculture, but they also had limited natural resources on account of, well, living on islands, and limited arable land. They developed extensive trade networks to overcome these resource limitations[0], but their migrations tended to occur when overpopulation led to warfare.
On the agriculture - fun fact, the staple crop of the Polynesians who settled New Zealand was kumara - a sweet potato. Sweet potatoes being native to South America.
> One lingering question I have for all migrations in antiquity is why (given very low pop density)?
It's likely was that people clustered in dense settlements around natural assets like good hunting and fishing areas, or sheltered areas. Control of those would have almost certainly generated competition and conflict.
Our romanticization
of the idea of living in very low density situations is a modern thing facilitated by industrial technology, just like camping became a socially acceptable pastime once people didn't have to do it to survive.
> Did people just overhunt and overfish so they had to move on before agriculture took hold?
Perhaps. The Polynesians of Rapa Nui seem to have done themselves in that way. But more likely they were forced into migration by their own relatives when they started running out of room.
As an addition to the above - New Zealand was the last major place in the world to be settled by humans, in around 900AD, by Polynesians who had left Taiwan (according to recent DNA evidence), traveled across the Northern Pacific, likely reached the Americas (there's some archaeological evidence though controversial) and back across the Southern Pacific to NZ - they had maps and could repeat their journeys
From my reading on this subject, the sweet potato is what enabled the settling of New Zealand. It came from South America, and one of the stable trade routes in eastern Polynesia did run along South America.
"Pathway of the Birds" is the best reference available today on all this.
900 AD is the date that was taught in NZ schools for most of the 20th century, but these days it's considered much too early. Studies from various sources - archaeology, genetics, and careful analysis of Maori oral tradition - are largely in agreement now that the first Polynesian settlers arrived around 1250 AD, give or take a few decades.
> So the idea of going out and back, out and back, out and back, in a radial pattern — or something like that — is not so improbable. And if you were a person who expects there to be an island, who knows that islands are in chains and believes that you will find another island and that there will be another island beyond that, then the question is basically, “How long is it going to take to find the next one?”
That's the fascinating bit for me. Being an exceptional navigator is one thing, but finding some of those tiny specks of land in a massive ocean in the first place is really something incredible.
If you read into traditional Polynesian navigation techniques, they were very good at inferring the existence and direction of far off land based on birds, wave patterns etc.
The man who "discovered" all these islands... islands that already had people on them... and then (according to the botanist on his ship Georg Forster) engaged in pedophilia, raping the children they found. They often took girls as young as 9 and 10, rationalising that this was acceptable because "Polynesian girls were sooner ripe".
> We went for eight weeks all over Polynesia
Wow, eight weeks in six or seven nations, and then writing with such authority on the subject. Tourists spend more time in one locality than she did.
And the use of "Polynesia" again. There are three groupings in the Pacific. The greatest sailing vessel of all was the Drua, developed in Fiji by Melanesians, not Polynesians. It could carry over 200 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drua
> and then (according to the botanist on his ship Georg Forster) engaged in pedophilia, raping the children they found
Citation needed for claims Captain Cook raped kids.
> And the use of "Polynesia" again.
Polynesia is a well established area, google Polynesian triangle to learn more. Yeah, there are three main language and genetic groups in the Pacific - Micronesian, Melanesian, Polynesian, but the Polynesians are the focus of this article because they're far more widely dispersed.
> The greatest sailing vessel of all was the Drua, developed in Fiji by Melanesians
No doubt. And it was rapidly adopted by the Tongans, Polynesians that had regular contact with the Fijians. Much how the Polynesians rapidly adopted the sweet potato of South America. The fact that they built a big ocean going canoe does nothing to detract from the navigational exploits of the Polynesians.
IIRC that part is based on the diary of Georg Forster, who was the botanist aboard Cook's 2nd voyage.
Cook and his savages wreaked havok on the islands they came into contact with. Abductions, pedophilia and rape, and the diseases they brought decimated the populations.
Not as far as I know, but that's not a distinction worth making. It's not a stretch to assume a man of as few scruples as he had also indulged his base instincts. And even if he didn't, these men were under his direct command and supervision, and performed these crimes with his foreknowledge.
Hitler (inb4 Poe's law) didn't personally drag people into gas chambers.
> The most logical answer is that they have a tradition of migrating. These are people who have been moving for a couple of thousand years. They have been migrating from island to island and they keep migrating until they run out of places to migrate to.
While their ocean wayfinding skills were doubtless incredible, I have a hard time believing they migrated for the sake of migration.
Most human migrations away from an existing settlement are motivated by the tips of the spears of those who hold power in the settlement, ultimately by population exceeding the resources available.
People still ultimately prefer the relative security of the settlement to the dangers of the wilds, and usually only venture out into the latter when they have no other choice.
Obviously this applies less to nomadic groups, but even in that case the group is really a mobile settlement.
The motivation certainly seems to mainly have been finding new places to live:
> While the early Polynesians were skilled navigators, most evidence indicates that their primary exploratory motivation was to ease the demands of burgeoning populations. Polynesian mythology does not speak of explorers bent on conquest of new territories, but rather of heroic discoverers of new lands for the benefit of those who voyaged with them.
> People still ultimately prefer the relative security of the settlement to the dangers of the wilds, and usually only venture out into the latter when they have no other choice.
From what I've seen, the opposite is true, at least for a subset of people who prefer to travel and explore. These people usually move again after their new land is fully established. They just like the frontier.
> From what I've seen, the opposite is true, at least for a subset of people who prefer to travel and explore. These people usually move again after their new land is fully established. They just like the frontier.
Most of the European migration to the United States was by people who were either refugees (the first Puritan settlers, Jews fleeing persecution), starving (Irish and Southern Europan immigrants), or forcefully evicted from their homes (Scottish peasants after the Highland Clearances [1]).
Even within the US, groups that we think of as pioneering westward, like the Mormons, were fundamentally fleeing persecution. According to the Latter Day Saints' history (as explained to me by the tour guide at the Church's HQ in Salt Lake City's), it was legal in NY state to kill Mormons in the early days of their community - thus triggering their series of migrations west ultimately to what we call Utah today.
Others westward American pioneers were landless and destitute as the arable lands of the eastern seaboard were all held by wealthy estates. Their options were to stay in near-serfdom or move west.
Among them no doubt were a few who migrated just for the sake of adventure. But most people were moving just to survive.
It was "legal" to kill Mormons in the sense that a jury might decline to convict the killers. They had a pretty brutal time at Nauvoo, Illinois, as well.
Much the largest part of Scottish emigration to America was from the Lowlands--there were just a lot more people in the Lowlands than in the Highlands. And the German emigration mostly wasn't of refugees or the starving.
> Much the largest part of Scottish emigration to America was from the Lowlands--there were just a lot more people in the Lowlands than in the Highlands.
The Highlands were much more populated before than after the Clearances. They were cleared to make space for industrial scale sheep farming. Many of those evicted Highlanders spent a time in the oversubscribed Lowland cities before moving on to the American colonies.
> And the German emigration mostly wasn't of refugees or the starving.
> And the German emigration mostly wasn't of refugees or the starving.
"German emigration to the USA began at the end of the 17th century when Germany was suffering from the after-effects of the bloody religious conflicts of the Thirty Years’ War, and Christian minorities were being persecuted. Many farmers lived in poverty, their very existence threatened by failed harvests and land shortages, so many decided to leave for a country that appeared to offer both freedom and prosperity. That country was America."
"The situation in Germany worsened when the start of industrialisation caused the population to grow dramatically. In the mid-19th century, around three quarters of farmers did not have enough land to make a living, hence they began migrating in huge numbers from 1816 – the start of official German mass emigration to the USA."
So basically they didn't have many other good options? Stay and be killed, otherwise persecuted, or starve. Flee and worst-case scenario, you just die anyway, but there's a chance of something better.
The title is a little inaccurate (and dismissive), the mystery isn't about how Polynesian navigation worked - the mystery has more to do with the DNA origins of the people of Polynesian.
I really recommend reading the story of Tupia to learn more about how Polynesian Navigation actually worked. He was a priest and navigator who joined James Cook's ship and essentially helped him discover many more islands than they ever would. It also shows how much of a dick James was in the end.
Thank you for the recommendation. There’s also the excellent movie Kon Tiki (2017) about the famous Norwegian team that replicated the “backwards” journey from South America to Polynesia following WWII.
I have just happened to read it. While I find the technical parts of navigation of Nainoa Thompson and Mau Piailug highly interesting, large parts of the book are concerned with Hawaiian or Polynesian identity. Would you have a suggestion for a much more technical oriented book on Polynesian (or Micronesian) navigation? Thanks!
For those who are interested in this subject, the right book to go read is "Pathway of the Birds," which is a summary of the research to date. We know a lot now about this.
https://www.bishopmuseum.org/?s=wayfind
Probably the best observation in the article, is the way theories can potentially become distorted the further away in time they are from their subject of study:
>GAZETTE: The book deals also with the flip side of that wondrousness, the Western skepticism that an “unsophisticated,” “primitive” people could manage this feat. What underlies Western skepticism? Was it also wonder at the distances involved? Or was it rooted in racism, in ignorance? Why not just take folks at their word when they say they did it?
THOMPSON: There was a lot of skepticism, and I think that was basically rooted in a sense of Western superiority and classic colonialism and that set of attitudes. But one of the things that I think is misunderstood is that this was not a uniform view. There are periods, at the end of the 18th century and in the 19th century, when Europeans who were interested in this subject were actually not that skeptical at all of Polynesian voyaging capacity.
Some of the 19th-century figures I write about took for granted — completely — that Polynesians had been the greatest navigators ever. They were convinced that they had sailed these distances and they had gone back and forth repeatedly.
What I saw that sort of surprised me, because it ran contrary to the conventional wisdom, was a rise in skepticism in the 20th century. My interpretation is that this is because we’re actually moving away from understanding the people. We’re moving away in time from real contact with the islanders and a real understanding of what they were doing.
The earlier theorists of the 19th century had many bad ideas, but they did believe in Polynesian voyaging. And they were quite close to the people. They spoke the languages. They often married into these cultures. They were intimate with them. And they lived in a period before there was so much lost knowledge. So that was an interesting aspect of the story that I didn’t foresee.