Sea People

by Christina Thompson

  “the isolation and oblivion”: Fornander, Account, 1:ix.

  “a chip of the same block”: Ibid., 1:iv.

  “peculiarly Cushite outgrowth”: Ibid., 1:iv, 43.

  “the manner or the occasion”: Ibid., 2:3–4.

  “Polynesian folklore”: Ibid., 2:6.

  “migratory wave swept”: Ibid., 1:198.

  “almost impenetrable jungle”: Ibid., 2:v.

  There are cyclical calendars: See Ross, Pawley, and Osmond, Lexicon of Proto Oceanic, 2:287.

  Even the much more common: The length of time that orally transmitted information can be accurately passed on is thought to be about two hundred years. This is often referred to as “three-generation reachback.” See, for example, Elizabeth Vandiver, Herodotus: The Father of History, The Great Courses, The Teaching Company Limited, 2000, compact disc.

  “to the rocks, trees”: Beckwith, Kumulipo, 7.

  “undertaken purposely”: Fornander, Account, 2:19–20, 8–9.

  “the Icelandic folklore”: Ibid., 2:20.

  Voyaging Stories: History and Myth

  At the same time: Teuira Henry and Others, Voyaging Chiefs of Havai‘i, ed. Dennis Kawaharada (Honolulu: Kalamaku Press, 1995), 54–56.

  “first procure choice food”: Henry, Ancient Tahiti, 481, 492, 493; Smith, Hawaiki, 216.

  “The Canoe Song of Ru”: Henry, Ancient Tahiti, 459–65. In an early version, it is only the islands of the Society group that are discovered; according to a later tradition, collected in 1854 and thus potentially influenced by new information, Ru and Hina discover all the island groups of Polynesia.

  A similar sequence: Martha Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology (1940; repr., Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1970), 169.

  Stories of Rata: Henry, Ancient Tahiti, 502–3; Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology, 263–75.

  But the human cost: The place name is cognate with Rarotonga, a name made up of the words raro, meaning “down” or “under” (i.e., “downwind”), and tonga, meaning “south.”

  “We have come”: Karl von den Steinen, Von den Steinen’s Marquesan Myths, trans. Marta Langridge, ed. Jennifer Terrell (Canberra: Target Oceania and the Journal of Pacific History, 1988), 13.

  “We are Pepeu”: Von den Steinen, Marquesan Myths, 18–19, 14. The different star names in this account are not easy to identify, but one—Taku‘ua—is a term applied to many bright guiding stars, as in Takurua-i-te-ahiahi, the Evening Star (Venus), and Takurua-to-vae-nga-rangi, “star in the middle of the heavens” (Pollux). See Maud Worcester Makemson, The Morning Star Rises: An Account of Polynesian Astronomy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1941), 254–55, 259–60.

  “Twenty died”: Von den Steinen, Marquesan Myths, 15.

  Like Tregear: See M. P. K. Sorrenson, “A Short History of the Polynesian Society,” The Polynesian Society, http://www.thepolynesiansociety.org/history.html.

  “all tradition is based”: Smith, Hawaiki, dedication, 13.

  In cosmogonies from: Henry, Ancient Tahiti, 344; Antony Alpers, Legends of the South Seas (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970), 100, 139; Orbell, Hawaiki, 14; von den Steinen, Marquesan Myths, 17, 73.

  “key-word”: Hale, Ethnography and Philology, 120–21.

  Hale believed: In the westerly islands of Samoa and Tonga, this cluster of ideas—otherworldliness, a land of plenty, the destination of the dead—goes by the name of Pulotu rather than Hawaiki. In stories from Tonga, men go to Pulotu in search of children or to procure the wood of a certain tree or to get red feathers or yams or houses made of human bones. It is as though, when you reach Samoa and Tonga, the trail of Hawaikis goes cold, but it is possible to pick up a trail of Pulotus leading still farther west. See Edward Winslow Gifford, Tongan Myths and Tales (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1924), 153–80; Geraghty, “Pulotu, Polynesian Homeland,” 343–84.

  Smith’s story: See S. Percy Smith, The Lore of the Whare-wananga, 2 vols. (1915; repr., New York: AMS, 1978), 2:57–59; H. W. Williams, “The Maruiwi Myth,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 46, no. 3 (1937): 110–11; Henry, Ancient Tahiti, 123.

  “of the marvelous”: Smith, Hawaiki, 216.

  Thus the rhetorical question: Orbell, Hawaiki, 28.

  “the most famous event”: Te Rangi Hiroa, The Coming of the Maori (Wellington: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1949), 36.

  “The tapu sea”: Orbell, Hawaiki, 17.

  Oral narratives: See Agathe Thornton, Maori Oral Literature, As Seen by a Classicist (Otago, NZ: University of Otago, 1987), 69, charts 2 and 4.

  “terse, cryptic”: McRae, “Maori Oral Tradition,” 7.

  In a close textual study: D. R. Simmons, The Great New Zealand Myth (Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1976), 3, 59, 58, 108, 316.

  “facts” over “rumors”: Hiroa, Coming of the Maori, 41.

  Somatology: The Measure of Man

  “fundamentally a field problem”: Herbert E. Gregory, “Progress in Polynesian Research,” Science, New Series 56, no. 1454 (1922): 529.

  “the first comprehensive attack”: “Polynesian Origins: Results of the Bayard Dominick Expedition,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 32, no. 4 (1923): 250.

  “as repositories of information”: Willowdean C. Handy, Forever the Land of Men (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1965), 5.

  “a great liar”: Ibid., 70–71.

  “covered every feature”: Ibid., 55.

  Willowdean was often flummoxed: Ibid., 56.

  Johann Blumenbach’s classic: See Alfred C. Haddon, History of Anthropology (London: Watts & Co., 1934), 17–18.

  including a census: Haddon, History, 28.

  In biology and anthropology: Yasuko I. Takezawa, “Race,” Encyclopedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human.

  Genetic research: A somewhat more nuanced view is that “there are nontrivial average genetic differences across populations in multiple traits” but that “the race vocabulary is too ill-defined and too loaded with historical baggage to be helpful.” See David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (New York: Pantheon, 2018), 253.

  “combined to make”: Gregory, “Progress in Polynesian Research,” 527.

  “a hybrid people”: Louis R. Sullivan, Marquesan Somatology with Comparative Notes on Samoa and Tonga (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1923), 212–15.

  “European racial affinities”: Louis R. Sullivan, A Contribution to Samoan Somatology (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1921), 18, 20.

  When it came to the Tongans: Louis R. Sullivan, A Contribution to Tongan Somatology (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1922), 3.

  All of Sullivan’s calculations: Patrick Kirch, personal communication.

  “no doubt that at least two”: Sullivan, Marquesan Somatology, 19.

  “There is only one way”: Peter H. Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa), Vikings of the Sunrise (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1938), 13.

  A Māori Anthropologist: Te Rangi Hiroa

  His father was: J. B. Condliffe, Te Rangi Hiroa: The Life of Sir Peter Buck (Christchurch: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1971), 51, 55.

  “an internal struggle”: Quoted in ibid., 54.

  “the inside angle”: Ibid., 151; Na to Hoa Aroha, From Your Dear Friend: The Correspondence Between Sir Apirana Ngata and Sir Peter Buck, 1925–50, 3 vols., ed. M. P. K. Sorrenson (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1986–1988), 1:48.

  “the taboo precincts”: Buck, Vikings, 14. The author of this notice was almost certainly the anatomy professor J. H. Scott, who in 1893 had written a paper on the osteology of the Māori, which was published, somewhat bizarrely, in the “Zoology” section of the Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute.

  Borrowing a Flower’s craniometer: Hiroa, “Maori Somatology: Racial Averages,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 31, no. 1 (1922): 37–38.

  “With all my love”: Hiroa, Coming of the Maori, 36, 48, 38, 43; Buck, Vikings, 25.

  He believed that theorizing: Condliffe, Te Rangi Hiroa, 209.

  “objects which people”
: Te Rangi Hiroa, Coming of the Maori, 2.

  “but the fingers”: Buck to Ngata, Nov. 20, 1928, Na to Hoa, 1:146.

  “the atrocities that could”: Condliffe, Te Rangi Hiroa, 178, 182–83.

  “the best way to describe”: Ibid., 189, 109.

  “packed store-houses of facts”: Ngata quoted in ibid., 190; see also 205.

  “atoll-studded route”: Buck, Vikings, 307, 49.

  “a parsimonious explanation”: Patrick Vinton Kirch, On the Road of the Winds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 26.

  “the one more fair”: Forster, Observations, 153.

  “la race cuivrée”: Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville, “Sur les Isles du Grand Océan,” Bulletin de la Societé de Géographie 17 (1832): 5–6. D’Urville also included Australia in this region, but subsequent writers have tended to separate Australia from Melanesia as a separate cultural region.

  “as the wolf”: Hale, Ethnography and Philology, 50. See also Nicholas Thomas, “The Force of Ethnology: Origins and Significance of the Melanesia/Polynesian Divide,” Current Anthropology 30, no. 1 (1989): 31.

  “We know the Maoris”: John H. Scott, “Contribution to the Osteology of the Aborigines of New Zealand and of the Chatham Islands,” Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute 26 (1893): 5; Louis R. Sullivan, “The Racial Diversity of the Polynesian Peoples,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 32, no. 21 (1923): 83. See also Moira White, “Dixon, Skinner and Te Rangi Hiroa,” Journal of Pacific History 47, no. 3 (2012).

  “I am binomial”: Buck, Vikings, 260; Te Rangi Hiroa quoted in John S. Allen, “Te Rangi Hiroa’s Physical Anthropology,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 103, no. 1 (1994): 20.

  “the Pakeha [European] attitude”: Buck to Ngata, Feb. 11, 1934, Na to Hoa, 3:126.

  “the Polynesian idea of beauty”: Te Rangi Hiroa, “Maori Somatology: Racial Averages, III,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 31, no. 4 (1922): 164; Te Rangi Hiroa, “Maori Somatology,” 39; see also Buck, Vikings, 15.

  “the more antient inhabitants”: Forster, Observations, 187.

  The Moa Hunters: Stone and Bones

  For a long time: See Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 20–23.

  “large fossil ossifications”: Joel S. Polack, quoted in Roger Duff, The Moa-Hunter Period of Maori Culture, 2nd ed. (Wellington: Government Printer, 1956), 291–92.

  “a certain monstrous animal”: Rev. William Colenso, quoted in Duff, Moa-Hunter Period, 293. See also T. Lindsay Buick, The Mystery of the Moa (New Plymouth, NZ: Thomas Avery, 1931), 52.

  “such as is brought to table”: Quoted in Buick, Mystery of the Moa, 65–72.

  “as if a hole”: W. B. D. Mantell, quoted in Duff, Moa-Hunter Period, 251.

  “the huge pachydermata”: Julius von Haast, “Moas and Moa-Hunters. Address to the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury,” Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute 4 (1872): 67.

  Haast believed that these: Haast, “Moas and Moa-Hunters,” 67, 84.

  He argued that: Quoted in Duff, Moa-Hunter Period, 250, 298, 306–7, 331–32.

  “remarkably perfect”: James Hector, “On Recent Moa Remains in New Zealand,” Transactions of the New Zealand Institute 4 (1872): 110–11.

  “the very word”: Duff, Moa-Hunter Period, 298, 333.

  According to Smith’s account: Smith, Lore of the Whare-wananga, 2:71–75.

  “many of the rich collections”: Janet Davidson, The Prehistory of New Zealand (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1984), 6.

  They noted their use: David Teviotdale, “The Material Culture of the Moa-Hunters in Murihuku,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 41, no. 2 (1932): 102–3.

  “type-site of the earliest phase”: Hallie R. Buckley et al., “The People of Wairau Bar: A Re-examination,” Journal of Pacific Archaeology 1, no. 1 (2010): 1.

  “during the ages”: Duff, Moa-Hunter Period, 22–23.

  Eyles’s find generated: Jim R. Eyles, Wairau Bar Moa Hunter (Dunedin, NZ: River Press, 2007), 64.

  About twelve inches below: Duff, Moa-Hunter Period, 33, 35.

  “a chance, isolate find”: Eyles, Wairau Bar, 81.

  These “enigmatical” objects: Duff, Moa-Hunter Period, 2, 6.

  “a single canoe-load”: Davidson, Prehistory of New Zealand, 56–57.

  Radiocarbon Dating: The Question of When

  “a godsend”: Colin Renfrew, Before Civilization: The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 48.

  The rate at which: Ibid., 49–52, 266; see also R. E. Taylor and Ofer Bar-Yosef, Radiocarbon Dating: An Archaeological Perspective, 2nd ed. (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2014), 19–23.

  “closed system”: Renfrew, Before Civilization, 50–51.

  “I shall be very much interested”: Taylor and Bar-Yosef, Radiocarbon Dating, 284.

  “the color of Marguerite’s skin”: Bob Krauss, Keneti (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1988), 170–71.

  “be safe from bombs”: Ibid., 293.

  Not long after America’s entry: Ibid., 295–96.

  Enthusiasm for Emory’s little book: Ibid., 297–98.

  “a whole new vista”: Ibid., 338.

  “poor man’s IBM”: Ibid., 359–60.

  “few opportunities”: Ralph Linton, Archaeology of the Marquesas Islands (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1925), 3.

  “We were seldom out of sight”: Suggs, Hidden Worlds, 3.

  “hibiscus tangle”: Ibid., 81–82.

  “some very peculiar stone adzes”: Ibid., 104–7.

  They suggested that: Harry L. Shapiro and Robert C. Suggs, “New Dates for Polynesian Prehistory,” Man 59 (1959): 12–13.

  “According to the most trustworthy”: Robert Carl Suggs, The Archaeology of Nuku Hiva, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1961), 174.

  “a few fragmentary”: Suggs, Hidden Worlds, 87–89.

  “the complexion of Polynesian”: Suggs, Archaeology of Nuku Hiva, 95–96.

  “The big question now”: Suggs, Hidden Worlds, 88.

  The Lapita People: A Key Piece of the Puzzle

  “I, poor hermit”: Quoted in Kirch, The Lapita Peoples, 6.

  Cook’s naturalists: Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World, 2 vols. (London: B. White, 1777), 1:471. See also Cook, Journals, 2:451.

  “highly porous, lightly fired”: W. C. McKern, The Archaeology of Tonga (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1929), 116–17.

  An amateur ornithologist: Patrick V. Kirch, “E. W. Gifford and Pacific Prehistory: An Appreciation,” in L’Expédition Archéologique d’Edward W. Gifford et Richard Shutler Jr. en Nouvelle-Calédonie au Cours de l’Année 1952, by Christophe Sand and Patrick V. Kirch (Nouméa, New Caledonia: Service des Musées et du Patrimoine de Nouvelle-Calédonie, 2002), 25; Wilhelm G. Solheim II, “Edward Winslow Gifford,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 68, no. 3 (1959): 177.

  “succession of cultures”: E. W. Gifford, Archaeological Excavations in Fiji (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 189, 225.

  Like New Zealand: Flannery, Future Eaters, 43–48.

  “coastal kitchen middens”: E. W. Gifford and Dick Shutler Jr., Archaeological Excavations in New Caledonia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 1.

  “I am afraid”: Christophe Sand, “Petites et Grandes Histoires Autour de l’Expédition Archaéologique de 1952 en Nouvelle Calédonie,” in Sand and Kirch, L’Expédition Archéologique, 174–75, n. 1.3.

  “peaceful uses”: “The Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project,” University of Michigan Energy Institute, http://energy.umich.edu/about-us/phoenix-project.

  “of considerable significance”: E. W. Gifford, “A Carbon-14 Date from Fiji,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 61 (1952): 327.

  “vastly superior”: Gifford and Shutler, Archaeological Excavations in New Caledonia, 75.

  Richly and completely decorated: See Maurice Piroutet, Études Strat
igraphique sur la Nouvelle Calédonie (Mâcon, France: Imprimérie Protat, 1917), 260; M. H. Lenormand, “Découvert d’un Gisement de Poteries a l’Ile des Pins,” Bulletin Periodique de la Société d’Études Mélanésiennes 3 (1948): 57.

  “Lapita was name”: Sand, “Petites et Grandes Histoires,” 146.

  In his final report: Gifford and Shutler, Archaeological Excavations in New Caledonia, 94. For the complex history of who realized what when, see also Lenormand, “Decouvert d’un Gisement de Poteries,” and Jacques Avias, quoted in Gifford and Shutler, Archaeological Excavations in New Caledonia, 94.

  Dates from these sites: Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 93–97.

  No one has ever uncovered: Kirch, Lapita Peoples, 98–99.

  The splitting off: Ross, Pawley, and Osmond, Lexicon of Proto Oceanic, 1:2. See also Blust, Austronesian Languages, 23–28.

  they had terms: Ross, Pawley, and Osmond, Lexicon of Proto Oceanic, 2:310–14, 126–31, 166–70; see also vol. 1.

  Not all these concepts: Ibid., 2:89, 189; Arthur Grimble, quoted in ibid., 2:191.

  One salient feature: R. C. Green, “Near and Remote Oceania—Disestablishing ‘Melanesia’ in Culture History,” in Man and a Half: Essays in Pacific Anthropology and Ethnobiology in Honour of Ralph Bulmer, ed. A. Pawley (Auckland: Polynesian Society, 1991), 499.

  “portmanteau biota”: Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 89; Kirch, Lapita Peoples, 218–19.

  “the most extreme example”: David W. Steadman, “Extinction of Birds in Eastern Polynesia: A Review of the Record, and Comparisons with Other Pacific Island Groups,” Journal of Archaeological Science 16 (1989): 201; Kirch, Lapita Peoples, 222–25.

  “pulled” into the unknown: Kirch, On the Road of the Winds, 97; Peter Bellwood, “Hierarchy, Founder Ideology and Austronesian Expansion,” in Origins, Ancestry and Alliance: Exploration in Austronesian Ethnography, eds. James J. Fox and Clifford Sather (Canberra: ANU E Press, 1996), 29.

  “would have been heirs”: Bellwood, “Hierarchy,” 30–31.

  Kon-Tiki: Thor Heyerdahl’s Raft