The Wayfinders (5 page)

The waters were further muddied, if you will, by
two men, both of whom saw the world not as it was but as they would have
liked it to be. Sir Peter Buck was born Te Rangi Hiroa, son of a Maori
mother and an Irish father. One of the most prominent Polynesian scholars of
the mid-twentieth century, he headed for many years the Bishop Museum in
Honolulu, and by association held an influential professorship at Yale.
Acutely sensitive to his mixed heritage, and keen in the era of Jim Crow to
distinguish Polynesians from the “Negroid” races, he elaborated a theory
that the Pacific had been settled from Asia in a wave of deliberate
migrations that swept through the islands, but completely bypassed
Melanesia. Though this ran contrary to geography and ignored the fact that
nearly all Polynesian crop plants were of Melanesian origin, it did allow
Buck to claim that: “the master mariners of the Pacific must be Europoid for
they are not characterized by the wooly hair, black skins, and thin lower
legs of the Negroids nor by the flat face, short stature, and drooping inner
eyefold of the Mongoloids.”

If Peter Buck’s racial uncertainties distorted
his lens on history, a young Norwegian zoologist, Thor Heyerdahl, inverted
history itself with the claim, supported by a harrowing journey of some
7,000 kilometres on a balsa raft, that Polynesia had actually been settled
from South America. When the raft, named
Kon-Tiki
, crashed onto a
reef in the Raroia Atoll in the Tuamotus some 800 kilometres northeast of
Tahiti on August 7, 1947, after a 101-day journey from Peru, a
National Geographic
hero was born. Heyerdahl was blond, good-looking,
bronzed by the sun, charismatic, and eminently photogenic: the very
archetype of the modern adventurer. His argument in favour of American
origins for the people of the Pacific, however, was dubious in the extreme.

The argument was based on three strands of
non-evidence. First, Heyerdahl maintained, as had the early Spaniards, that
it would have been impossible for Polynesians to sail east into the
prevailing equatorial winds. This was an old puzzle that had in fact been
solved by Captain Cook in his conversations with the navigator Tupaia. The
answer was an open secret in Polynesia, but perhaps unknown to Heyerdahl, or
at least inconvenient for his hypothesis. There is a time every year when
the trade winds reverse, and sailors are free to sail east, knowing full
well that if they become lost, they need only await the returning easterlies
to carry them home.

Heyerdahl’s second argument focused on monumental
architecture. Comparing the stonework of the Inca with that of Polynesia, he
cited similarities so superficial as to be meaningless to the trained eye of
an archaeologist. Third, and the only interesting possibility, was the
presence in Polynesia of the sweet potato,
Ipomoea batatas
, a plant
undoubtedly of American origin. All this implied, as we now know, was that
Polynesian vessels reached South America and returned home, a fact
corroborated by the recent discovery of chicken bones, a bird of Asian
origin, in pre-Columbian middens at El Arenal, on the south coast of Chile.

In making his sensational claim Thor Heyerdahl
ignored the overwhelming body of linguistic, ethnographic, and
ethnobotanical evidence, augmented today by genetic and archaeological data,
indicating that he was patently wrong. He failed to note that in order to
get
Kon-Tiki
beyond the Humboldt Current at the beginning of
its voyage he had required the aid of the Peruvian navy. Or that there was
no evidence in his time, or today, to suggest that the design of sail rigged
on the raft existed in pre-Columbian South America. Indeed, Heyerdahl was so
loose with his interpretations, and so casual with chronology, that his
theory, as one scholar has suggested, was equivalent to a modern historian
claiming that: “America was discovered in the last days of the Roman Empire
by King Henry VIII, who brought a Ford Thunderbird to the benighted
aborigines.” But none of this mattered. Heyerdahl’s story was a sensation
and his book,
Kon-Tiki
, went on to sell more than 20 million
copies.

FOR POLYNESIANS AND
serious scholars of Polynesia, Heyerdahl’s
theory, which denied the culture its greatest accomplishment, was the
ultimate insult. But it inspired two vitally important initiatives. First,
it forced archaeologists to dig, to seek and find concrete evidence that
would allow them to trace the Polynesian diaspora. Second, it led Hawaiians
to sail. The Polynesian Voyaging Society, established in 1973, launched the
Hokule’a
on March 8, 1975. What began as a visionary
experiment grew over time into a mission to recapture history and reclaim a
stolen legacy.

The challenge for archaeologists had always been
the dearth of physical remains upon which to establish a chronology.
Polynesians, technically sophisticated in so many ways, at the time of
European contact did not use pottery. A first breakthrough came in 1952 on
New Caledonia in the Coral Sea. There, at a remote site near a beach called
Lapita, archaeologists did find pottery, highly distinctive stamped ceramics
identical to shards that had been found thirty years before on Tonga, an
island 2,400 kilometres to the east. Subsequent discoveries in New Guinea
and Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands left no doubt of the existence of
a lost civilization, an ancient cultural sphere that, beginning around 1500
bc, had spread from Melanesia east into the Pacific. In one of the great
sagas of prehistory, a people known to us as Lapita, named for the original
site in New Caledonia, had left their original home in the forests of New
Guinea and set out to settle a world. Within five centuries, perhaps twenty
generations, and sailing against the prevailing winds, they crossed 3,200
kilometres of water to reach not only Fiji but beyond, to Samoa and Tonga.
And they made this journey ten centuries before the birth of Christ.

Then, for reasons that remain unknown, the
movement rested for nearly a thousand years. The ceramic tradition was lost,
but not syntax and grammar, the meaning of carved stone or the decorated
body, the power of the ancestors and the divine origins of the wind.
Beginning around 200 bc, a new wave of exploration began, inspired by the
direct ancestors of modern Polynesians. From Samoa and Tonga they sailed
east, reaching the Cook Islands, Tahiti, and the Marquesas, a distance of
some 4,000 kilometres. Then, after another hiatus of centuries, new
discoveries were made, first Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, and then Hawaii,
which was settled by ad 400. The final great phase of the Polynesian
diaspora unfolded roughly around the time of the First Crusade, as
navigators probed to the south and west, making landfall in Aotearoa, later
New Zealand, around ad 1000. Five centuries before Columbus, the Polynesians
had over the course of only eighty generations settled virtually every
island group of the Pacific, establishing a single sphere of cultural life
encompassing some 25 million square kilometres of the earth’s surface.

Imagine for a moment what these journeys
entailed. The sailors travelled in open catamarans, all built with tools
made from coral, stone, and human bone. Their sails were woven from
pandanus, the planking sewn together with cordage spun from coconut fibre;
cracks were sealed with breadfruit sap and resins. Exposed to the elements,
the sun by day, the cold wind by night, with hunger and thirst as constant
companions, these people crossed thousands of kilometres of ocean,
discovering hundreds of new lands, some the size of small continents, others
mere island atolls less than a kilometre in diameter with no landmarks
higher than a coconut tree.

While no doubt there were instances of fishermen
blown out to sea or stranded by the wind as they sailed offshore in pursuit
of schools of pelagic fish, the overwhelming evidence suggests that these
voyages were deliberate and purposeful journeys of discovery. But why did
they go? Why would anyone risk his or her life to leave a place like Tahiti
or Rarotonga to head into a void? Prestige, curiosity, a spirit of adventure
certainly played a role. To sail off into the rising sun, quite possibly
never to be seen again, was an act of considerable courage that brought
enormous honour to a clan. Oral traditions suggest that as many as half of
these expeditions may have ended in disaster. But as failure implied death,
those left behind had a vested interest in imagining success, and in their
dreams they envisioned new lands rising out of the sea to greet their
departed relatives, men and women who acquired by their very acts the status
of gods.

As in any culture, there were more mundane
motivations. Inheritance in Polynesia was based on primogeniture, and the
social structure was fiercely hierarchical. The only way for a second or
third son, or the scion of a lowly family or clan, to achieve wealth and
status was to find a new world. Ecological imperatives and crises, both
natural and man-made, also drove discovery. The pollen record on Rapa Nui,
or Easter Island, suggests that until the arrival of Polynesians the island
was densely covered in subtropical forest. By the time of European contact
the landscape had been completely modified, with many local species driven
to extinction, and much of the wealth of the soil exhausted. The flightless
birds of New Zealand disappeared within a generation of settlement.
Polynesians were fully capable of overexploiting the natural world, and when
their populations exceeded the carrying capacity of the land, they had no
choice but to move on. This implied heading out to sea.

Whatever the ultimate motivation, the ancient
Polynesians sailed. And though many of the voyages were indeed exploratory,
and certain remote islands such as Rapa Nui, once settled, may have become
over time isolated, these were not all one-way journeys of desperation. To
the contrary, all evidence suggests that regular long-distance trade along
established routes criss-crossed the ocean.

But how did the Polynesians do it? They left no
written records. Theirs were oral traditions, with all knowledge stored in
memory, transmitted generation to generation. One of the tragedies of
history was the failure of early Europeans, with notable exceptions such as
Captain Cook, to make any effort to study and record, let alone celebrate,
this extraordinary repository of seafaring knowledge. The prestige and
authority of the traditional navigators should have been evident to any
unbiased observer; they were the cultural pivots of every community.
Navigation fundamentally defined the Polynesian identity. That these masters
were ignored was no mere oversight, but an inevitable consequence of the
clash of cultures that came with conquest.

Contact brought chaos and devastation. The two
pillars of Polynesian society, aside from the navigators, were the chief and
the priest. The authority of the chief was based on his capacity to control
and distribute surplus food. The power of the priest lay in a spiritual
capacity to enforce tapu, the sacred rules of the culture. When European
diseases swept through the islands, killing up to 85 percent of the people
on the Marquesas in less than a month, the demographic collapse destroyed
the traditional economy, even as it compromised the priests, who had no
capacity to sanction foreigners who violated tapu with impunity and by some
miracle were immune to pestilence. Missionaries, who in considerable numbers
crossed the beaches in the wake of sustained contact, blamed the people
themselves for their misfortunes, even as they dismissed their religious
beliefs as crude idolatry. In such an atmosphere, it would have been
difficult indeed for Europeans to acknowledge that Polynesians possessed
navigational skills that rivalled and even surpassed those of their own
sailors, especially given that seamanship, particularly in Britain, was the
pride of the nation. But they most assuredly did.

TO UNDERSTAND THE GENIUS
of the ancient Polynesians, Nainoa Thompson told
me on the deck of the
Hokule’a
as we left Kauai in a fierce rain to round Oahu
before heading north from Molokai by night to the open sea, you must begin
with the fundamental elements of the Polynesian world: wind, waves, clouds,
stars, sun, moon, birds, fish, and the water itself. Bring to these the raw
power of empirical observation, of universal human inquiry. The skills of
the traditional navigator are not unlike those of the scientist; one learns
through direct experience and the testing of hypotheses, with information
drawn from all branches of the natural sciences, astronomy, animal
behaviour, meteorology, and oceanography. Temper this with a lifelong
training of impossibly intense commitment and discipline, all to be rewarded
with the highest level of prestige in a culture where status counted for
everything. All the intellectual brilliance of humanity, in other words,
together with the full potential of human desire and ambitions, was applied
to the challenge of the sea.

Nainoa’s teacher for more than thirty years was
Mau Piailug, a master navigator from Satawal in the Caroline Islands of
Micronesia. Mau grew up on a coral islet less than 1.5 square kilometres, a
third the size of Central Park in New York. His universe was the ocean. His
grandfather was a navigator, and his father before him. At the age of one
Mau was selected to inherit the ancestral teachings. As part of that
training he was placed as an infant in tidal pools for hours at a time that
he might feel and absorb the rhythms of the sea. When, at eight, on his
first deep ocean voyage, he became sick from the swells, his teacher’s
solution was to tie him to a rope and drag him behind the canoe until the
nausea passed. As a young man of fourteen he tied his testicles to the
rigging of the vessel to more carefully sense the movement of the canoe
through the water. Mau learned not only to sail, but also to understand the
secrets of the Big Water, both the physics and metaphysics of waves. It was
said he could conjure islands out of the sea just by holding a vision of
them in his imagination.