Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific (The Landmark Library)

by Nicholas Thomas

These islands weren’t just settled by mistake. These are islands that belong to great navigators in the past, including Guam and the whole entire Pacific. We

Oceania denotes a sea of islands with their inhabitants. The world of our ancestors was a large sea full of

who were these people? From where did they come? How were they able to reach islands dispersed over such vast tracts of ocean? These questions

Voyagers is about a civilization that has seldom been recognized as such – that of Oceania. It addresses

Cook was in no doubt that both peoples ‘have had one Origin or Source’ – an arresting remark given that their islands were over 4,000 kilometres (2,485 miles) apart. He added immediately, ‘but

the extraordinary extent of the islands occupied by speakers of related languages, even as he was confused by an apparent mismatch with physical type. This mix of insight and misrecognition would shape ways of seeing the Pacific for almost two centuries. The observations made during the expedition

Cook’s visit to Rapa Nui was significant in a number of ways. This was the first time the famous moai, statues of deified ancestors, were described in detail, drawn and painted. But, in the context of the cultural and linguistic connections that were

immediately obvious to Cook and his companions: the people they encountered there were closely related to the Society Islanders, Maori, Tongans and other Polynesians. Yet they were separated from those peoples by distances that were vast by any standards. As Cook observed in his voyage journal:

recognized that both the navigational knowledge of Polynesians and the sailing capacities of some of the larger canoes exemplified maritime understanding and technological achievements of a high order.

Small wonder that the Europeans were utterly astonished to encounter people who lacked iron tools, instruments, writing and maps, but who had nevertheless voyaged so far. Yet at Rapa Nui, the canoes that

At some stage, post-settlement, the people had ceased to voyage. At this early stage of European interest in Oceanic history, it was already evident

from the 1790s on, Islanders increasingly frequently joined foreign ships in various capacities, to make their own voyages and to renew connections.

vital point is that the observation that there were ‘two great varieties of people’ in the Pacific would prove foundational for subsequent perceptions of the

Both Fiji and Hawai‘i were established as politically independent constitutional kingdoms, with governments in which white settlers were influential, but in due course both were incorporated into the imperial sphere: Cakobau, the Fijian king, was pushed into a Deed of Cession to the British Crown in 1874; the Hawaiian kingdom was overthrown and annexed by the United States in the 1890s. In the context of these colonial relationships,

the Sunrise. First published in

Having been a student of Pacific archaeology, I had been taught that Oceanic cultures could be traced back to the island known historically as Formosa, today as Taiwan. Yet the links were

Those seeking present and posthumous renown might thus understand a successful voyage of colonization, resulting in the foundation of a community, as the ultimate human achievement. Yet it is hard to understand quite why this culture drove such an extraordinary succession of colonizing ventures at the time that it did. We may also wonder why these took the form of extended

‘Polynesia’ began with Lapita’s furthest movement east.11 Fiji was settled very soon after New Caledonia and the Solomons, between 1100 and 1000 BC; people appear to have moved on to Tonga and Samoa by 900–850

expansion, and that expansion’s pause in western Polynesia, are ultimately mysterious, so too are the factors that prompted Polynesians to adventure and voyage further. For whatever reason, just over a thousand

Further archaeological research will inevitably refine dates for first settlement across the region, but it appears that the Austral Islands, Hawai’i and Rapa Nui were reached by about AD 1100 and New Zealand a century or so later, around AD 1200. These

that enabled, or compelled, Cook and his companions to recognize that a single ‘great nation’ had dispersed itself across the vast ocean. However, at another level, the diversity of local social,

Even so, Voyagers points towards three broader conclusions.

the story of the region is that, in the deepest possible sense, human histories exhibit many strands and trajectories; they exemplify diversity. Many people are sceptical about notions of progress, but

Those advances saw a baton passed from Africa to southwest Asia to the Mediterranean and then to Europe. In the 1970s, the discovery of a locus for early agriculture in the New Guinea Highlands was – together

Despite lacking metal tools, they were the makers of the ‘best of any boats in the world’. Oceania’s was not only a distinctive civilization, but an inhabited

that speaks the plurality and diversity of human culture.

Those we call Islanders could in fact nearly all be better described as inter-Islanders, or archipelago-dwellers.

Pacific peoples formed communities which were almost without exception linked through kinship,

nevertheless the case that right across the Pacific, people interacted extensively within and between archipelagoes. While their voyages often involved trade, Islanders’ traffic was – as Bronisław Malinowski famously recognized in the Trobriand

People undertook voyages to initiate, sustain and extend relationships. Those relationships were the principal form of achievement within the societies concerned; they enabled individuals to obtain renown and fame, within and across Islander milieux. The settlement of the Pacific over thousands of years certainly represents an incredible series of achievements. From another perspective, the most profound and important achievement of Oceanic civilization was not voyaging but this social principle: that what matters most in life is not separate identity,