“most preposterously”: John Dunmore Lang, View of the Origins and Migrations of the Polynesian Nation (London: Cochrane and M’Crone, 1834), 79–82.
“the chains”: Thor Heyerdahl, Fatu Hiva (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976), 11.
“It’s queer”: Thor Heyerdahl, The Kon-Tiki Expedition (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1963), 12.
“accompanied by the muffled roar”: Ibid., 13.
“a figure or design”: Handy, Native Culture, 244–45; Handy, Polynesian Religion, 121.
“The decisive factor”: Kon-Tiki, directed by Thor Heyerdahl (Sweden: Artfilm, 1950).
“Whether it was 1947”: Heyerdahl, Kon-Tiki, 130, 89.
“waves and fish and sun”: Ibid., 121, 130.
“curious stationary cloud”: Ibid., 165, 169.
“the viciousness of the red reef”: Ibid., 174.
“a question of saving our lives”: Ibid., 183, 186, 196.
It was described: Arnold Jacoby, Señor Kon-Tiki (n.p.: Rand McNally, 1967), 267–68, 278–79.
“A nice adventure”: Quoted in ibid., 288.
“chronologically, archaeologically”: Lowell D. Holmes, “An Appraisal of the Kon Tiki Theory,” Oceania 29, no. 2 (1958): 128.
“The author’s unquenchable”: Ralph Linton, review of American Indians in the Pacific: The Theory behind the Kon-Tiki Expedition, by Thor Heyerdahl, American Anthropologist, New Series 56, no. 1 (1954): 123.
“every straw is seized”: Edward Norbeck, review of American Indians in the Pacific: The Theory behind the Kon-Tiki Expedition, by Thor Heyerdahl, American Antiquity 19, no. 1 (1953): 93.
“to avoid reading racism”: Ibid., 93.
“the poorest natives”: Quoted in D. E. Yen, The Sweet Potato in Oceania (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1974), 311.
“absolute botanical proof”: Ibid., 9.
Botanists have long argued: There is still a great deal of debate about this, with new evidence emerging and being disputed all the time. For a summary of the issues, see Terry L. Jones, Alice A. Storey, Elizabeth A. Matisoo-Smith, and José Miguel Ramírez-Aliaga, eds., Polynesians in America: Pre-Colombian Contacts with the New World (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2011).
Very recently arguments have even been made: See Pablo Muñoz-Rodríguez et al., “Reconciling Conflicting Phylogenies in the Origin of Sweet Potato and Dispersal to Polynesia,” Current Biology 28, no. 8 (April 23, 2018): 1246–56.e12, https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)30321-X.
“that America was discovered”: Heyerdahl, Kon-Tiki, 151; Robert Suggs, The Island Civilizations of Polynesia (New York: Mentor/New American Library, 1960), 224.
“If an opinion poll”: Howe, Quest for Origins, 122.
“the old Polynesians”: Heyerdahl, Kon-Tiki, 150–51.
“systematically underrated”: Linton, review of American Indians in the Pacific, 124.
Drifting Not Sailing: Andrew Sharp
“one of the most provocative”: K. R. Howe, “The Sharp-Lewis Debate,” Texts and Contexts, ed. Doug Munro and Brij V. Lal (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 66.
“no deliberate colonization”: Andrew Sharp, Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific (Wellington: Polynesian Society, 1956), 2.
“Stars do not shine”: Sharp, Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific, 22–23, 34.
“This circumstance”: Cook, Journals, 3.1:87.
“From all the accounts”: Ibid., 1:154.
“a man tired”: Beaglehole, introduction to Journals of Captain James Cook, 3.1:cliv.
Drawing from the accounts: Sharp, Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific, 4, 63, 125, 93, 42, 45.
He related in detail: Ibid., 43–44.
“re-set their courses”: Ibid., 15, 49, 115.
“No Polynesian”: Ibid., 115, 90, 140.
“to ancient prejudices”: Parsonson, “Settlement of Oceania,” 24.
“My first reaction”: Pei Te Hurinui Jones, “A Maori Comment on Andrew Sharp’s ‘Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific,’” Journal of the Polynesian Society 66, no. 1 (1957): 131.
“I stand before you”: Howe, Quest for Origins, 99.
“upwards of a hundred”: Andrew Sharp, Ancient Voyagers in Polynesia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1963), preface.
“Polynesians,” he argued: Sharp, Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific, 85, 84; Orbell, Hawaiki, 29–30.
“echoed the doubts”: L. M. Groube, review of Ancient Voyagers in Polynesia, by Andrew Sharp, Journal of the Polynesian Society 75, no. 1 (1966): 143.
“the inner thought”: Te Rangi Hiroa, “The Value of Tradition in Polynesian Research,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 35 (1926): 187.
“precision and definiteness”: Robert W. Williamson, “Origins of Polynesian Culture,” in Essays in Polynesian Ethnology, by Robert W. Williamson, ed. Ralph Piddington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 286.
“an unqualified yes or no”: Michael Levison, R. Gerard Ward, and John W. Webb, The Settlement of Polynesia: A Computer Simulation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973), 11.
“All sorts of people”: Michael Levison, personal communication; Michael Levison, “Computing in the Humanities: The Early Days,” unpublished manuscript, 2016.
“risk probability table”: Levison, Ward, and Webb, Settlement of Polynesia, 20–21. See pp. 13–27 for a full description of the model.
“mammoth task”: Ibid., vi.
“Once a week”: Michael Levison, personal communication.
Out of more than 120,000: Levison, Ward, and Webb, Settlement of Polynesia, 50, 42.
Then there were the islands: Ibid., 53.
Nor would a drifting canoe: Ibid., 55, n. 52.
As for Easter Island: Ibid., 54, 46–48.
“good chances of successfully crossing”: Ibid., 8, 60, 62.
The Non-Armchair Approach: David Lewis Experiments
“stultified by shortage”: David Lewis, We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific, 2nd ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994), 12.
“Most scholars are landlubbers”: Ben Finney, Hokule‘a: The Way to Tahiti (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1979), 12.
“trailing my toes luxuriously”: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 18.
“hampered by too theoretical”: Ibid., 18, 19.
“star and sun steering”: Ibid., 21, 23.
“a most unusual fellowship”: Finney, Hokule‘a, 59.
“an old and wrinkled man”: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 31, 30.
“a mosaic of fragments”: Ibid., 24.
“the sinking Pollux”: Ibid., 90.
Navigators could steer: Ibid., 123, n. 3.
“with a slow, swelling”: Ibid., 126.
passed “through each other”: Ibid., 127–28.
Lewis reported: Ibid., 133.
“some large and some small”: William Wyatt Gill, Myths and Songs from the South Pacific (London: Henry S. King, 1876), 319–20.
“Picture yourself”: Thomas Gladwin, East Is a Big Bird (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 182.
In some stories: See Bacil F. Kirtley, A Motif-Index of Traditional Polynesian Narratives (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1971), 319; Martha Warren Beckwith, ed., Kepelino’s Traditions of Hawaii (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1932), 189; Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology, 71–72.
“expanding the target”: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 252, 205, 207.
“downright affectionate”: Gladwin, East Is a Big Bird, 197.
“as if stuck”: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 216–20.
“a pale, shimmering column”: Ibid., 222; on underwater lightning, see John Huth, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 422–27.
Islanders also speak: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 291.
As one anthropologist: Quoted in Ben Finney, “Nautical Cartography and Traditional Navigation in Oceania,” in Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australia, and Pacific Societies, ed. David Woo
dward and G. Malcolm Lewis, vol. 2, book 3 of The History of Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 485.
“Europeans had no corresponding”: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 248.
“that if one landfall”: Levison, Ward, and Webb, Settlement of Polynesia, 63–64. They note that this idea was first suggested to them by the anthropologist Roger Green.
“a unity”: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 48.
“When a Puluwatan”: Gladwin, East Is a Big Bird, 34, 33.
“All over Oceania”: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 298; Gladwin, East Is a Big Bird, 37.
“sweet burial”: Raymond Firth, We, the Tikopia, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 32.
“simply paddled out”: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 356.
Hōkūle‘a: Sailing to Tahiti
“All this seemed absurd”: Finney, Hokule‘a, 13.
“for the graceful way”: Ibid., 15.
“skidding sideways”: Ibid.
“an exercise in ‘experimental archaeology’”: Quoted in Sam Low, Hawaiki Rising (Waipahu, HI: Island Heritage Publishing, 2013), 31.
“The canoe was the center”: Quoted in ibid., 61, 66.
“No one could foresee”: Dave Lyman, quoted in ibid., 78.
“a professor who seemed to embody”: Ibid., 82.
“There was something about Mau”: Shorty Bertelmann, quoted in ibid., 57.
“I made that trip”: Mau Piailug in “The Navigators: Pathfinders of the Pacific,” directed by Sam Low (Educational Resources, 1983), YouTube, uploaded by maupiailugsociety, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxgUjyqN7FU; Ben Finney, “Hawai‘i to Tahiti and Back,” Voyaging Traditions, Polynesian Voyaging Society, http://archive.hokulea.com/holokai/1976/ben_finney.html.
“Before we leave”: Quoted in Low, Hawaiki Rising, 89.
“Tommy Holmes”: “Tommy Holmes, a Founder (1945–1993),” Hawaiian Voyaging Traditions, Polynesian Voyaging Society, http://archive.hokulea.com/index/da_crew/tommy_holmes.html; Lewis, We, the Navigators, 333–34; Finney, Hokule‘a, 194.
“Our strategy”: Finney, “Hawai‘i to Tahiti and Back.”
“A medieval Tahitian”: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 317.
“Once this background”: Ibid., 318; see also Finney, Hokule‘a, 127.
“a red giant”: Finney, Hokule‘a, 121, 119.
“you can tell the experienced navigators”: Gladwin, East Is a Big Bird, 2.
“looks the part”: Finney, Hokule‘a, 122.
“smoothed to a vast skin”: Low, Hawaiki Rising, 91, 95.
“calmly confident”: Finney, Hokule‘a, 223.
“they were everywhere”: Ibid., 251–53; Low, Hawaiki Rising, 101–2.
“When we leave from Maui”: Quoted in Finney, Hokule‘a, 260–61; Low, Hawaiki Rising, 104–5.
“I could see what we were doing”: Quoted in Low, Hawaiki Rising, 51.
“to understand my place”: Quoted in ibid., 43.
“The more I learn”: Quoted in ibid., 134.
“We thought we could do without one”: Quoted in ibid., 157.
“It was blowing like shit”: Harry Ho and Ben Finney, quoted in ibid., 159.
“It just happened”: Snake Ah Hee and Nainoa Thompson, quoted in ibid., 163.
“We’re tired”: Stuart Holmes Colman, Eddie Would Go: The Story of Eddie Aikau, Hawaiian Hero and Pioneer of Big Wave Surfing (New York: St. Martin’s, 2001), 222.
“to see Tahiti”: Nainoa quoted in ibid., 211, 246.
Reinventing Navigation: Nainoa Thompson
“if the canoe’s legacy”: Quoted in Low, Hawaiki Rising, 181–82.
Three thousand years ago: See Ross, Pawley, and Osmond, Lexicon of Proto Oceanic, vol. 2, chap. 6, esp. 189–91.
“Knowledge alone”: Will Kyselka, An Ocean in Mind (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1987), 53, 56, 58.
“I will train you”: Nainoa Thompson, “Recollections of the 1980 Voyage to Tahiti,” Polynesian Voyaging Society, http://archive.hokulea.com/holokai/1980/nainoa_to_tahiti.html.
“You need to define”: Quoted in Low, Hawaiki Rising, 182, 193.
“I was in near trauma”: Thompson, “Recollections of the 1980 Voyage.”
“naïve” to think: Finney, Hokule‘a, 37; see also Ben Finney, Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey through Polynesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 93.
The canoe itself: See Ben Finney, Sailing in the Wake of the Ancestors: Reviving Polynesian Voyaging (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 2003), 62–74.
The Carolinian compass: Finney notes that the points on the Carolinian compass are sometimes depicted as evenly spaced and sometimes not, a difference that may “simply reflect the differing approaches of the researchers”; see Finney, “Nautical Cartography and Traditional Navigation in Oceania,” 464.
“to illustrate that Ngatik”: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 184.
“the relation of the problem solver”: Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, 80–81.
“it is easy for us to forget”: Lewis, We, the Navigators, 184
“a rather high order”: Gladwin, East Is a Big Bird, 220.
“real point of view”: Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, 80–81.
There is an intriguing experiment: Experiment by C. Linde and W. Labov, described in Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 119. See also C. Linde, “The Organization of Discourse,“ in Style and Variables in English, ed. Timothy Shopen and Joseph M. Williams, Center for Applied Linguistics (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1981), 104–6.
Tour thinking: See Woodward and Lewis, introduction to Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, 4, n. 9.
“to ‘revisit information’”: Thompson, “Recollections of the 1980 Voyage.”
“manageable inventories”: Saul H. Riesenberg, “The Organisation of Navigational Knowledge on Puluwat,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 81, no. 1 (1972): 19–22.
“I suddenly felt”: Thompson, “Recollections of the 1980 Voyage.”
“immediate organ of sensation”: Elsdon Best, Maori Religion and Mythology, part 2 (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2005), 45.
“the ancient way”: Thompson, “Recollections of the 1980 Voyage”; Kyselka, An Ocean in Mind, 206.
“more rewarding”: Finney, Voyage of Rediscovery, 309.
“You have not closed”: Finney, Sailing in the Wake, 147.
“demoted”: Ibid., 8.
The Latest Science: DNA and Dates
“express train to Polynesia”: Jared M. Diamond, “Express Train to Polynesia,” Nature 336, no. 24 (1988): 307–8. Diamond credits Peter Bellwood with the essential idea, but the catchphrase appears to be his.
“entangled bank”: John Terrell, “History as a Family Tree, History as an Entangled Bank: Constructing Images and Interpretations of Prehistory in the South Pacific,” Antiquity 62 (1988): 642–57.
An earlier study: David Addison and Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith, “Rethinking Polynesian Origins: A West-Polynesia Triple-I Model,” Archaeology in Oceania 45 (2010): 3.
“leaving behind their genes”: Manfred Kayser et al., “Melanesian Origin of Polynesian Y chromosome,” Current Biology 10 (2000): 1237.
genetic bottlenecks: See Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith and K. Ann Horsburgh, DNA for Archaeologists (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012), 133.
The site, known as Teouma: Stuart Bedford, Matthew Spriggs, and Ralph Regenvanu, “The Teouma Lapita Site and the Early Human Settlement of the Pacific Islands,” Antiquity 80 (2006): 822; Stuart Bedford and Matthew Spriggs, “Birds on the Rim: A Unique Lapita Carinated Vessel in Its Wider Context,” Archaeology in Oceania 42 (2007): 12–21.
The first ancient DNA: See Pontus Skogland et al., “Genomic Insights into the Peopling of the Southwest Pacific,” Nature 538 (October 27, 2016): 510–13; Mark Lipson et al., “Population Turnover in Remote Oceania Shortly after Initial Settlement,” Current Biology 28, no. 7 (
April 2, 2018): 1157–65, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.02.051.
Where and when and how: Frédérique Valentin et al., “Early Lapita Skeletons from Vanuatu Show Polynesian Craniofacial Shape: Implications for Remote Oceanic Settlement and Lapita Origins,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 2 (January 12, 2016): 292–97.
One finding: Elena McPhee, “Marlborough Rangitane o Wairau Iwi Related to Wairau Bar Ancestors,” Marlborough Express, December 5, 2016, https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/87142104/marlborough-rangitane-o-wairau-iwi-related-to-wairau-bar-ancestors.
But another interesting revelation: Thomas Higham, Atholl Anderson, and Chris Jacomb, “Dating the First New Zealanders: The Chronology of Wairau Bar,” Antiquity 73 (1999): 425–26; Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith, “The Human Landscape: Population Origins, Settlement and Impact of Human Arrival in Aotearoa/New Zealand,” in Atlantis Advances in Quaternary Science: Landscape and Quaternary Environmental Change in New Zealand, ed. J. Shulmeister (Paris: Atlantis Press, 2017), 305.
Rattus exulans: See Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith, “The Commensal Model for Human Settlement of the Pacific 10 Years On—What Can We Say and Where to Now?,” Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 4 (2009): 151–63.
Studies of rat DNA: Matisoo-Smith, “Human Landscape,” 296.
On Easter Island: S. S. Barnes, E. Matisoo-Smith, and T. L. Hunt, “Ancient DNA of the Pacific rat (Rattus exulans) from Rapa Nui (Easter Island),” Journal of Archaeological Science 33, no. 11 (2006): 1536–40; Matisoo-Smith, “Human Landscape,” 305; Higham, Anderson, and Jacomb, “Dating the First New Zealanders,” 425–26.
“It’s like turning on an electric light”: Stephanie Dutchen, “Coming Into Focus,” interview with David Reich, Harvard Medical School, February 21, 2018, https://hms.harvard.edu/news/coming-focus.
These included: Patrick V. Kirch, “When Did the Polynesians Settle Hawai‘i? A Review of 150 Years of Scholarly Inquiry and a Tentative Answer,” Hawaiian Archaeology 12 (2011): 9–11.
“to weed out”: Matthew Spriggs, “The Dating of the Island Southeast Asian Neolithic: An Attempt at Chronometric Hygiene and Linguistic Correlation,” Antiquity 63 (1989): 590.
“chronometric hygiene”: Spriggs claims to have lifted the term from Wilfred Shawcross, who, he says, “ad-libbed” it; see Matthew Spriggs, “Archaeology and That Austronesian Expansion: Where Are We Now?,” Antiquity 85 (2011): 510.
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