His people had done a thing no modern navigator could match. His ancestors had slid into the immensity of the Pacific in tiny, hand-paddled canoes, without astrolabes or lenses, without compasses, with no maps or charts except those in their heads. Even without writing, they had dispersed through an ocean larger than all the continents combined and settled every inhabitable speck of land in it, specks scattered like stars in a mostly empty universe.
