Origins
On the 20th of May 1768, the HMS Dolphin anchored off the Downs, just south of the mouth of the Thames estuary. The Dolphin, under her captain, Samuel Wallis, had just completed a voyage of circumnavigation of the globe. Wallis’ report of his journey contained two astounding discoveries, one of which was to remain a secret with the British admiralty. The first discovery, in the words of J.C. Beaglehole: “was an amazing piece of good luck.....which would mark out his voyage forever, and was of the utmost significance, not for that voyage alone, nor for the great voyages that succeeded it, but for the whole history of the western mind.”
Wallis had discovered Tahiti, an island destined to be synonymous with paradise. Beautifully described in the prose poem of Tahiti by J.C. Beaglehole:
“ Green stood up that island in the sea, not with the pale intense green of the shallows above a reef, spirit beguiled and traitorous magic amid the soft depths of blue: but with the green of groves that root in the soil, of a spontaneous growth that flung abroad the perfume of earth and fruit and flower.
This was an island lived on; as the Dolphin coasted the northern shore the ship-board eyes saw a multitude of houses; as she dropped anchor the bay was alive with canoes; a multitude of brown and naked skins seemed to laud an apical sun. It was a balmy season, the Polynesian June; the thunder of the reef, the huge pedal-point of the ordered polyphony of island life, sank to a quiet pulsation; under the bright day the air was soft and caressing as the water; and after the day came the quick dark, flooding over the heights, the somber tree filled valleys, the cascades, the sand still warm under the coconut boles, while above the islands of all that sea floated the thousand archipelagos of the stars.
Sailors, aching with scurvy, turning from hard salt beef, weevily biscuit and water that stank, might well be forgiven for thinking themselves imparadised…Wallis had not merely come to a convenient port of call. He had stumbled upon a foundation stone of the Romantic Movement.
Not as a continent, not as vast distances, was the ocean henceforth in common thought to be known. The unreal was to mingle with the real, the too dramatic with the undramatic; the shining light was to become a haze in which every island was to become one island, and the one island a Tahitian dream.”
Cook, Journals I, xciv-xcv; J.C. Beaglehole ed
Paradise Regained
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The second discovery of the Dolphin was to remain secrete. While cruising the coast of Tahiti, members of the Dolphin's crew sighted a cloud bank over land some leagues to the south of their position. Could this be the famed Terra Australis Incognita? European powers were in a race to find this mythical continent, and if possible claim it for their own. Those who controlled the southern continent controlled the trade of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
In less than a year of Wallis’ discovery of Tahiti, another ship, the HMS Endeavor would drop anchor in the same Matavai Bay, Tahiti. Her captain was Lt. James Cook, who together with her crew and a group of scientists and illustrators, were commissioned by the Royal Society to explore this new found world. They were also to use Tahiti as a base to measure the transit of Venus predicted to occur in that year of 1769, but more importantly, they were under secret orders by the British Admiralty to find the Terra Australis Incognita, if it existed.
During Cook’s sojourn in Tahiti, he became aquatinted with a high priest on that island, Tupaia, who was currently in exile from his home in Radiate. Warriors from Bora Bora had overrun his kingdom. He was, at the time, counselor to the queen Oboraea of Tahiti. During Cook's five months exploration of the Society Islands, Tupaia became an invaluable interpreter of the language and customs of the Polynesians for Cook and his group of scientists. While Cook was preparing to leave Tahiti to resume his search for the Southern Continent, Tupaia asked to accompany Cook on the rest of his voyage.
Cook was to discover some curious things about Tupaia. Apart from being a priest, what the Tahitians called the Arii, Tupai was a master navigator. He could draw out 130 of the surrounding islands and name 74 of them. He would navigate by the sun and stars without the aid of compass or sextant and had tales of great expeditions taken by his ancestors in days of old.
“The people excell much in predicting the weather, a circumstance of great use to them in their short voyages from Island to Island. They have many various ways of doing this but one only that I know of which I never heard of being practisd by Europaeans, that is foretelling the quarter of the heavens from whence the wind shall blow by observing the Milky Way, which is generaly bent in an arch either one way or the other: this arch they conceive as already acted upon by the wind, which is the cause of its curving, and say that if the same curve continues a whole night the wind predicted by it seldom fails to come some time in the next day; and in this as well as their other predictions we found them indeed not infallible but far more clever than Europaeans.
In their longer Voyages they steer in the day by the Sun and in the night by the Stars. Of these they know a very large part by their Names and the clever ones among them will tell in what part of the heavens they are to be seen in any month when they are above their horizon; they know also the time of their annual appearing and disapearing to a great nicety, far greater than would be easily beleivd by an Europaean astronomer.”
Excerpt From: Sir Joseph Banks. “The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks.” iBooks.
Tupaia's Map
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Cook sailed from Tahiti in August 1769 in search of the Southern Continent. On October 6th, he discovered New Zealand instead, and in circumnavigating the north and south islands, disproved the existence of the famed Terra Australis Incognita. But then, an astounding thing; Tupaia was already familiar with the inhabitants of the country and could understand them perfectly:
“Tupia spoke to them in his own language and it was an [a]greeable surprise to us to find that they perfectly understood him.”
Excerpt From: Captain James Cook & Philip Edwards. “The Journals of Captain Cook.” iBooks.
The language and culture of the native New Zealanders (Maori) and the Tahitians was strikingly similar. These were Polynesians who sailed, explored and settled this land that lay over 2600 miles of open ocean from their homeland. (Oral traditions in Polynesia today speak of a great expedition to settle New Zealand from Faaroa Bay and the Apoomua River, Raiatea. See the page of our visit to this lovely bay and river, Day # 5 of our sail.)
Cook’s crew also found sweet potato grown by the Maori which they had transplanted from their homeland in Raiatea. The sweet potato is endemic to South America. How did it get to the South Pacific? The bottle gourd, or calabash, only grows in America, yet it was in use by Polynesians well before the Europeans arrived. Could Polynesian explorers have found South America?
Subsequent discoveries of Polynesian settlement in Hawaii and Easter Island confirmed Polynesian settlement of nearly the entire Pacific Ocean, one third of the land mass of the earth. Questions concerning Polynesian navigation, exploration and settlement began to mystify early Europeans such as Cook much as they do modern researchers today.
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Where did the Polynesians come from and how could they have explored and settled so vast an area, achieving one of the greatest feats of human exploration in history with stone age technology?
The answers were not forthcoming, for, by Tupaia’s day transoceanic navigation had all but disappeared, and to this day very little archeological evidence of ocean going vessels have been found that could make these journeys. (In the late 1970’s Yoshihiko Sinoto, from the Bishop Museum unearthed several wooden parts of what appeared to be an ocean going Tahitian canoe on the Island of Huahine. Using a drawing of a Tahitian double canoe from Cook’s third Pacific voyage, Sinoto postulated the size of this vessel to be 25 meters, possibly large enough for transoceanic sailing.
Modern day investigators have each taken a hand in explaining Polynesian origins. Thor Heyerdahl thought that he had the answers: the Polynesians, Heyerdahl reasoned, could have sailed easily along the eastern trades from South America to Polynesia. He outfitted a raft, Kon Tiki, and set out from Peru in 1947. 101 days later he crash-landed on a reef in the Tuamotu islands thus proving that South Americans could have sailed in small balsa rafts to Polynesia. Linguistic, archeological and genetic analysis, however, has demonstrated an origin from South East Asia, possibly from Taiwan, not from South America. This is all the more astounding in that the Tupaia’s Polynesian ancestors explored and settled the entire pacific basin sailing against the trades!
Given the origin of the Polynesians from Southeast Asia, how did they colonize the entire Pacific?
The ancient Polynesians needed the right boats and the navigational skills. The boats were probably double-hulled canoes developed in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. These boats were large and fast, traveling over 8 kts. Large platforms were built between the hulls for the people, animals and food stuffs. Around AD 0, these large oceangoing boats, vaca moana in Tahitian, were settling the Society Islands. Hawaii was settled by AD 700, Easter Island by AD 900, and New Zealand by 1500, just before the first Europeans were to begin their own exploration of the Pacific.
Ancient Polynesians probably used the sun by day and the stars by night to navigate. There is evidence that they may have used a 32 point star compass simulating our own 32 point magnetic compasses. Polynesian navigators could line up their course with a known star on the eastern or western horizon. As these stars ascended or descended out of the line of sight, another known star would be followed. Zenith stars, stars which are directly overhead at a given latitude, were used. Arcturus was a Zenith star for Hawaii, Sirius, for Tahiti and Raiatea. One simply steered the boat so the zenith star remained directly overhead as it passed east to west on a nightly basis, and one would stay on the proper latitude. Wave and cloud formations and animal migratory patterns were considered as one approached land.
The art of this ancient form of navigation was largely lost until recently. Led by the pioneering efforts of the great navigator Piailug of Satawal Island and the double canoe voyages such as the Hokele’a’ from Hawaii to Tahiti, the possibility of ancient Polynesian navigation has been given tangible proof.
