they had leapt across this vastness so fast that islanders spoke languages that could still be understood by distant kin thousands of miles away. The world’s greatest seafarers still shared common myths, common tools, common customs, practices, and beliefs. A clan had spread across a third of the globe a thousand years and more before the West’s most advanced ships managed a single crossing. They formed the farthest-flung cultural group on the planet. And all the anthropology and genetics and historical science available to Evelyne’s own scientific tribe could not say how the feat was done.
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.
