Sea People

by Christina Thompson

  Coda

  Two Ways of Knowing

  Map of Polynesia, in Vikings of the Sunrise by Peter H. Buck (Christchurch, 1954).

  COURTESY WHITCOULLS CO., AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND.

  SHOULD WE BE surprised that the latest science brings us closer to the oral history of the Polynesians? It has been about a hundred years since these chants and tales were last taken as seriously by Europeans as they were by Polynesians themselves. For most of the twentieth century, they were largely dismissed by scholars, who were inclined to view Polynesian traditions as “mythical fictions composed for just about any purpose other than memorializing actual events.” They were seen as literature or religion or political tracts, as metaphors or symbols or allegories, but never simply as documentary accounts.

  In part, this was the consequence of a general pivot toward science in the twentieth century: a semi-repudiation of the nineteenth century’s romantic tendencies and a gravitation to the provable and quantifiable, toward numbers and calculations. But it also had something to do with the way the traditions—and the world they represented—were receding in time. Nineteenth-century Europeans, for all their foibles, had been close to this material and to the people who created it. But after about the 1930s, one can feel this knowledge, this intimacy, slipping away. The hard turn toward skepticism—regarding both the usefulness of the traditions and the voyaging capacity of the Polynesians themselves—that we see in the 1950s and ’60s is a measure of this drift.

  The prestige of Polynesia’s oral traditions as sources for history was further eroded in the 1970s by studies that showed just how much editing and shaping these narratives had undergone and raised new questions about their authenticity. And the situation was only aggravated by postmodernists who claimed that, since people were always inventing their own histories, there was really no such thing as an authentic tradition anyway—an argument that was deeply resented by many indigenous scholars.

  The success of the experimental voyaging movement, however, provided a powerful counterbalance to these trends. At a practical level, the voyages of Hōkūle‘a and the other canoes validated traditional Polynesian and Micronesian bodies of knowledge and approaches to problem-solving. And, while they did not prove that Kupe or Mo‘ikeha or Hotu Matua or any other legendary figure had actually sailed the sea roads of the Pacific, they strongly supported the idea that, as Finney put it, the traditions “could actually reflect an era when Polynesian mariners did sail back and forth.”

  The past few years have seen a resurgence of interest in Polynesian myths—witness the popularity of Disney’s Moana—which can also be traced pretty much directly to the success of the experimental voyaging movement. But even among scientists the tide has turned, and it is now common for even the most abstruse academic papers on, say, the geochemical sourcing of lithic artifacts by X-ray fluorescence to reference some piece of traditional lore. Whether or not such gestures are always meaningful at a literal level, their symbolism is important, suggesting as it does the possibility of convergence between quite different ways of thinking not just about what but about how we know.

  The problem of Polynesian origins has never been an easy one to solve, and there are questions remaining. For instance, it is unlikely that we will ever know how some of the remotest archipelagoes were initially discovered or how many canoes were lost in the course of this long and arduous colonizing process. To the extent that this history has been disentangled, however, it has been thanks to input of radically different kinds. At one end of the spectrum are the mathematical models: the computer simulations, chemical analyses, statistical inferences—science with all its promise of objectivity and its periodic lapses into error. At the other, the stories and songs passed from memory to memory: the layered, subtle, difficult oral traditions, endlessly open to interpretation but unique in their capacity to speak to us, more or less directly, out of a pre-contact Polynesian past.

  These two angles of inquiry are in many ways opposed, and for much of the past two centuries the debate has oscillated between them, as first one and then the other was held up as the avenue to truth. In fact, both have been crucial to the unfolding of a credible history of the Polynesian migrations, as have the bold experiments in voyaging that bookend this story: the sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century explorers whose accounts give us a glimpse of Polynesia as it was, and the twentieth-century experimental voyagers who set out to rediscover what the very first explorers of the great ocean must have known.

  In short, it has taken all different kinds of people using all different kinds of tools, and even then the way has been rife with misdirection and dead ends. Some of the best ideas were had way back at the beginning (Cook’s early insight about the Asian origin of the Polynesians), while some of the worst looked great at the time (the notion that Polynesians had Indo-European roots). This should remind us how easy it is to get the wrong end of the stick, and how hard it can be, in the moment, to tell the right end from the wrong. But, looking back on three centuries of inquiry, it is interesting to note that many of the most compelling insights have arrived at moments of convergence, when two different ways of looking at a problem—practical and abstract, ancient and modern, humanistic and scientific, European and Polynesian—intertwine.

  I have always loved the image of Tupaia in the great cabin of the Endeavour with Captain Cook (however much they were said to have gotten on each other’s nerves; both haughty men, accustomed to power—how could it have been any other way?). I like to think of them standing there at the table, with the charts and maps spread out before them, trying to find some common navigational ground. Or Abraham Fornander, up late at night in the port of Lahaina, poring over his Hawaiian texts, dreaming up wildly improbable solutions—the key to all mythologies!—while his half-Hawaiian daughter slept nearby. Or the physician-sailor David Lewis, hunkered down on the deck of his yacht, studying the navigator Tevake, trying to see the swells, the birds, the loom of an island through the other man’s eyes. Or, to take what may be the paramount example, Te Rangi Hiroa, who embodied the problem of divergent perspectives and who, while he often spoke about being a “blend” of two cultures, tended to describe his experience not as a fusion or synthesis but as an oscillation between two contrasting, even irreconcilable, points of view. What he had, as he once put it, was the ability to “detach” himself from one side or the other—to be Māori or to be European, but never exactly to be both. When, in truth, both is exactly what he was.

  IT HAS BEEN fashionable in recent decades to say that the “problem of Polynesian origins” was always a European quest, “an ongoing vehicle for investigating the European past, present and future,” and that the question was never so much “Where did they come from?” as “What does their existence imply for us?” And there is certainly some truth to this. We can never escape the fact that this inquiry has unfolded within the colonial period, or that it involves questions that could only ever have been asked by people who came to the Pacific from someplace else. Questions about who Polynesians are would never have been asked by Polynesians themselves in the days before outsiders arrived in the Pacific. Queries about origins would have been answered by myths—We are the people from Te PŌ, from Te Tumu, from Ta‘aroa; we come from Hawaiki—and there would have been no point of view from which to ask, What are the geographic limits of Polynesia? or Which people are Polynesians most closely related to? Indeed, there would hardly have been any way to frame such inquiries, there being no term for—or even concept of—what we mean by “Polynesian.”

  The whole project presupposes an outsider perspective. It also arises from an intellectual tradition in which events of the past—the facts of history—are essentially up for grabs. History, in the post-Enlightenment European tradition, is made up of elements that are theoretically available to anyone to do with as they see fit. But this idea conflicts with what one might call a “traditional” Polynesian perspective about things that happened in the past. According to
the Polynesian view, history is not an assortment of data points to be cherry-picked at will but something much closer to a kind of intellectual property. Polynesian histories may be fluid, but not everyone is equally entitled to make use of them. As the Māori scholar Tipene O’Regan puts it: “To inquire into my history or that of my people, you must inquire into my whakapapa [genealogy]. My tupuna [ancestors] may be dead but they are also in me and I am alive. . . . My past is not a dead thing to be examined on the post-mortem bench of science without my consent. . . . I am the primary proprietor of my past.”

  This position presents difficulties for European scholars, effectively denying them “any absolute right” to study the history of the Polynesian peoples. And it is hard not to have some sympathy for the idea that the past “belongs first to those on whom it impinges”—particularly in cases like this, where there has been a good deal of conflict and where one group has suffered at the hands of another. How can Europeans be trusted to tell the story of a people they have subjugated and dispossessed? And even beyond the question of willful distortion or suppression, how can anyone be trusted to tell a story they may not fully understand?

  Writing about these difficulties, the historian Judith Binney concluded that there are contradictions here that simply cannot be resolved. “We cannot translate other histories into our own,” she wrote. “We can merely juxtapose them.” There will always be a sense in which this is a European story and a sense in which it is a Polynesian one as well. The best we can do is to acknowledge this complexity, and, as the anthropologist Kenneth Emory once put it, “keep our minds as sensitive as we can to every little breeze of thought that flows.”

  When I look at this history, what I see is not so much the steady march of knowledge toward some final point of truth, but the complicated process of trying to figure things out—a twisting, braided rope of intersecting narratives, a set of conversations between different people with different bodies of knowledge, different ways of thinking, and different reasons for wanting to know. At some point, it dawned on me that the whole thing was a kind of contact story, a story about people trying to peer, if not always to leap, across a cultural divide. This was certainly true of both Cook and Tupaia; it was true of the priests and chiefs, many nameless, who entrusted Europeans with their most sacred lore, and of the missionaries, travelers, and colonial officials who painstakingly wrote it all down. It was true, almost by definition, of the anthropologists whose very job it is to try to crack the code of someone else’s way of thinking, and true, perhaps most obviously, of the experimental voyagers who, in pursuit of prehistory’s secrets, quite literally put their lives on the line.

  Will Kyselka once said of Nainoa Thompson that he “chose to be puzzled,” and this, it seems to me, is the tonic note. For what, after all, do we see when we look back at Tupaia, who sailed away from his homeland out of—one can only assume—overwhelming curiosity; or Willowdean Handy, with her Marquesan sketchbook; or Gifford and Shutler, with their shovels and pails? Fornander, in particular, seems to me a man who, within the limits of his era, made remarkable efforts to grapple with what he could barely understand. But even poor, ill-fated Sullivan, with his taxonomic muddle, or Tregear, with his mad Aryan cow tales, share this commitment to inquiry, this unshakable enthusiasm for the as yet unknown.

  Virtually everyone who has ever thought about the problem of Polynesian origins has been attracted to the subject by two different things: first, by the sheer wondrousness, the improbability, of these migrations—all those thousands of miles of open ocean, the landfalls so few and far between—and, second, by the intellectual puzzle, the question of how such a story can ever really be known. For them, as for me, the appeal of this history is that it combines the romance of a great human adventure with a cool, cerebral awareness that it is only by sifting through volumes of evidence that we will ever get close to knowing what happened in the dim, unreachable, mesmerizing, endlessly entrancing past.

  I BEGAN THIS story in Kealakekua Bay because it was there that I first really grasped the full significance of the Polynesian Triangle and what it meant for my husband and sons, whose deep genealogy I was trying to fathom. It was one of many sites that taught me something important about Polynesia, but of all the places I have visited, the one I go back to in my mind is a bay on the north side of Nuku Hiva known as Anaho.

  Anaho is that rarest of rare things in the Marquesas: a sheltered bay with a long, creamy sickle of sand and a stretch of clear, shallow water. Tucked into the lee of a headland, it is protected from both wind and ocean surge, sheltered on its eastern flank by a long, snaking ridge of barren rock. There is no road in, and the only way to get there is by sea, or by foot along the trail over the ridge from the neighboring village of Hatiheu. The ridge rises some seven hundred feet, and from its crest you can see the bay spread out below you, the long, branching arms of the island reaching out to the sea, and the deep blue clefts of water in between. Farther out, the ocean glints like burnished metal, and away in the distance, where sky and water meet, lies the vast, empty curve of the horizon at the edge of the visible world. From there, the track plunges down again through a dry forest, the leaves crunching underfoot and the light coming, dim and dappled, through the canopy. At the bottom, you come suddenly out into the open and find yourself on a broad, grassy verge planted out in banana and coconut palms, with the beach just a stone’s throw away.

  In 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson dropped anchor in Anaho Bay. He was on a valedictory tour of the South Pacific in a chartered ninety-four-foot schooner called the Casco, and the Marquesas were his first stop. His health, never good, had been in decline, and he believed, as he later wrote, that he “was come to the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and the undertaker to expect.” In fact, he was not far wrong; he would live only another six years. But the South Seas revived him, and he was well enough to take a boundless pleasure in this, his first port of call. “I have watched the morning break in many quarters of the world,” he wrote, “and the dawn that I saw with most emotion shone upon the bay of Anaho.” As the sun came up on that first morning, he watched the glow light up the mountains that overhung the bay. “Not one of these but wore its proper tint of saffron, of sulphur, of the clove, and of the rose. The lustre was like that of satin; on the lighter hues there seemed to float an efflorescence; a solemn bloom appeared on the more dark.”

  Anaho is today almost exactly as Stevenson described it in 1888: a scattering of houses and canoe sheds, some gardens, a little hamlet at the western end. To the east is the spot where he liked to spend his days, standing in the shallows with the warm sea bubbling up to his knees and the shells and pebbles tumbling between his feet. In the perfect stillness of midday, the sun shines hot and bright, the palms lean drunkenly out over the sand. From time to time a bird pipes somewhere in the forest; the sea heaves gently in and out. At such moments, Stevenson wrote, “the face of the world was of a prehistoric emptiness; life appeared to stand stock-still, and the sense of isolation was profound.” It was an illusion, of course; he was not even alone on the beach, never mind the island. But it is easy to feel in Anaho as though one has slipped through a fissure in time, back to when a primeval stillness had reigned over the Marquesas, a time of wind and waves and the harsh, high call of seabirds, a time lasting hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years.

  I sat on the beach in Stevenson’s favorite spot and thought about the perplexing history of Polynesia. Seven had gone for a walk over the ridge to the east, to the bay where Robert Suggs found his five miraculous pieces of pottery. The boys were out in the water, with their snorkels and masks. I thought about all the many bits and pieces of history—the chants, bones, fishhooks, chromosomes, charcoal—and how all we can do is to try to fit them together like the fragments of a smashed and scattered urn. I thought about how the deep history of Polynesia—perhaps like all of human time—lives in that interesting place between knowledge and imagination, how it is a story not just of facts
but of interpretations, which are the imaginative extensions of what can be known. We had chosen the Marquesas as our first stop because they were the first Polynesian islands to be discovered by Europeans and because of Suggs’s interesting discovery of pottery where there ought to have been none. What I had not anticipated, though, was the power of the place itself to cast me back beyond the archaeological digs and the missionary journals, beyond the arrival of the first eyewitnesses, beyond the centuries of settled Polynesian life, back to the very dawn of the story, to a time of rattling palm fronds and the beaching of the first canoes.

  For ages upon ages, the islands of the remote Pacific—tips of volcanoes, rings of coral, remnants of ancient Gondwana—remained secluded, far beyond the reach of man. No one set foot on their sun-bleached shores or penetrated their forests. Wind and rain eroded their mountains; coral grew up and encircled their shores; birds and plants, floating on sea wrack or blown by the wind, arrived and took root, evolving in curious and unexpected ways. The islands were eminently habitable, much more so than many of the places where people had already settled. They were warm and lush, rarely subject to storm, and the seas around them teemed with life. But their location in the middle of the world’s largest ocean kept them isolated, out of reach of human beings for tens of thousands of years. Then, one day, a canoe appeared, emerging out of the haze on the horizon. No one saw it from the beach—there was no one to see it. No one documented its arrival; no one knows who it was. But one moment the sounds of the island were those of wind and sea and the cries of birds, and the next, the air was filled with voices and the thud of feet and the scrape and rumble of hulls being run up the shore.