The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  The Hawai’ian islands cannot have been discovered by accident; the winds simply do not permit an accidental arrival from, say, Samoa.4 People had gone in search of new islands, and they now ranged far from those with which they were already familiar. This must have tested their navigational abilities to the limit. They no longer had sight of such night-time star guides as the Southern Cross. Once they were in the northern hemisphere they had entered what was for them a new world. Oral traditions told of discoveries and of journeys back to the starting point to carry the news that there was new land to settle. These oral traditions are full of fascinating information about navigation and even some remembered history, but how well that history was remembered, amid many miraculous accretions, including giant octopuses, is a moot point.

  A distinction began to emerge between two basic types of society in Polynesia, the so-called open societies, in which a variety of different groups, including warriors and priests, competed for power and land, and what are called stratified societies, of which early Tahiti and Hawai’i are good examples, where there was much less fluidity and a clearly defined elite emerged, with power concentrated in the hands of hereditary chieftains. On Tahiti and its close neighbours in the Society Islands the chieftains expected tribute payments of food and bark-cloth; they expressed their power through their intimate ties to the war god Oro, a relationship they sealed by acts of human sacrifice.5 Around AD 1200, the Tahitians began to build terraces and to lay out orchards where they cultivated breadfruit. They built storage pits for the breadfruit. They also constructed stone temples with platforms, or marae, that stood right by the ocean and sometimes jutted out into it. War canoes would set out from the marae, and a new chieftain would arrive by boat for his installation. These were societies wedded to the sea. Chieftains from some of the less well-endowed islands to the east preyed on the richer central islands, and managed to extract tribute from them. Leadership in war, celebrated in the cult of Oro, consolidated the hold of chieftains from the lesser isles over neighbouring territories. Little maritime empires came into being, and chieftaincies were by no means confined to a single island or part of one. Tension between chieftains, and in particular between their sons, would explain the urge to go and seek new lands, without quite explaining why the new burst of colonization occurred when it did. Arriving in already populated islands could, however, be dangerous: in some places it was apparently the custom to kill newcomers the moment they were found.6

  II

  The deep interest understandably shown by American archaeologists in the ancient history of the fiftieth state in the Union is matched by a profusion of evidence from the archipelago. There is the archaeological evidence; but there is also the evidence, hard though it is to assess, of elaborate oral traditions recorded in the nineteenth century, at a time when reading and writing had become a passion among the Hawai’ians – this was the result of energetic Christian missionary activity, and for a time resulted in higher literacy than in the United States.7 Moreover, the islands have attracted attention because organized hierarchical states came into existence without parallel in the Polynesian world.8 The Polynesian settlers found a paradise: whereas each of the atolls and reefs of the island chains of the south Pacific had an individual character, marked by limitations on what could be produced in often unpromising soils, Hawai’i was a veritable garden, well endowed with volcanic soil, though with some variety between the islands. Evidence from O’ahu shows that settlement was under way along the shoreline by 800, though the first arrivals may have occurred several centuries earlier, suggesting that this was not a one-off settlement that then grew prodigiously. Particularly eloquent, if that is the right word, are the rat bones from O’ahu and elsewhere. Pacific rats could only have arrived in such remote places by travelling as stowaways, or possibly as a live food reserve, on Polynesian canoes. Many rat bones have been found in sinkholes dated to somewhere between AD 900 and 1200.9

  It is generally agreed that these settlers came from the Marquesas Islands, because of similarities between the tools used in both places, notably adzes and fish hooks, though contacts were probably flowing both ways, so it is hard to be sure who influenced whom, and a new style of fish hook adopted around 1200 indicates links with the area around Tahiti. It will be seen that oral tradition spoke of close links to Tahiti and the Society Islands, at least in the fourteenth century. So we can think of settlers converging from two main directions, whether or not one group had heard of the discovery of the islands by the other group. Among the tales about early voyages that were still being related in nineteenth-century Hawai’i, two stand out, even though the assumed date of the events is some point in the fourteenth century AD. These dates depend on calculations of generations that are, to put it mildly, approximate. Hawai’ian narrators were not interested in exact dates. They measured time by the names of the rulers, and inevitably some reigns were longer than others. The tales told of voyages across vast swathes of the Pacific, reflecting an era before Hawai’i became closed off from the rest of Oceania.

  One story begins on the outer island of O’ahu, where the ruler Muli’eleali tried to divide his section of the island among his three sons, in the same way that he had inherited one third of O’ahu from his own father. But the obvious problem was that generation by generation there was less land on which to subsist. His two youngest sons therefore rebelled and were sent into exile, moving to the larger island of Hawai’i itself. They introduced new methods of irrigation that had been developed on O’ahu in order to cultivate staple root vegetables (notably taro), but a combination of hurricanes and floods wrecked their work, and they decided that they had had enough of the Hawai’ian islands; they would return to the land of their ancestors, a place called Kahiki. If there is any truth in the story, they sailed their double canoe to what is now south-western Tahiti, an area with striking cultural similarities to Hawai’i: the Taputapuatea temple in this part of Tahiti bears an identical name to the Kapukapuakea temple in northern O’ahu, allowing for a sound shift that converted t to k in the Hawai’ian dialects (so Kahiki is a Hawai’ian version of Tahiti). One of the brothers then decided he was homesick and returned north, where he made a very successful marriage to a chieftain’s daughter and found himself appointed a paramount chief of Kaua’i, an outlying island beyond O’ahu. But his father-in-law had left behind a son from another marriage he had made in Kahiki/Tahiti, and the story tells of journeys back and forth to Kahiki. Another rather gory tale recounts the experiences of Pa’ao around the same time. He originated in the Society Islands. When his son was accused by Pa’ao’s brother of stealing breadfruit, Pa’ao cut his son open to show that his stomach was empty, and then rolled his canoe out to sea over the body of his nephew, the child of the brother who had made the accusation. That meant that two lines of succession were obliterated in the feud. He set out for Hawai’i, building temples and generating a new line of descendants, who became an important dynasty of hereditary priests in the Hawai’ian islands. Reduced to essentials, these tales indicate an ease of movement between Hawai’i and Tahiti or the islands around Tonga that persisted into the fourteenth century.

  One of the tales preserves a song that is as clear about the memory of at least partly Tahitian origins as one could wish:

  Eia Hawai’i, he moku, he kanaka,

  He kanaka Hawai’i – e,

  He kanaka Hawai’i,

  He kama na Kahiki …

  Here is Hawai’i, an island, a man,

  Here is Hawai’i – indeed,

  Hawai’i is a man,

  A child of Tahiti … 10

  Proof that these stories are not total fantasies has been provided by DNA evidence that links the modern native Hawai’ian population to the population of the Marquesas, in eastern Polynesia, and to the Society Islands a little further west.11 Archaeological finds have been more reticent about contacts between Hawai’i and the Society Islands. An adze made of stone from Hawai’i fashioned in Tahitian style and found 2,5
00 miles away on a coral island in the Tuamoto archipelago provides minute but precious evidence of contact. This ‘hawaiite’ rock could only be traced back to Hawai’i. Around Tuamoto, adzes were produced from stone carried from a wide range of islands around south-eastern Polynesia; to have identified a Hawai’ian example, even just one, indicates lengthy (though not necessarily direct) links far beyond obvious trading neighbours. Alas, it is impossible to date this type of material securely.12

  The oral traditions about later happenings on Hawai’i have nothing to say about sea journeys after the time of Pa’ao and the men from O’ahu. All the archaeological evidence too indicates a caesura: Hawai’i, for whatever reason, became secluded from the rest of the Polynesian world. Around 1400 a long pause in voyaging out of Hawai’i began, despite the continuing circulation of oral traditions about the inhabitants’ arrival across the sea.13 Yet this did not reflect contraction at home in Hawai’i. The population grew rapidly, reaching about a quarter of a million by the time Captain Cook arrived in the late eighteenth century. Whatever tension this created as the land became ever more densely populated was resolved partly by war and partly by the assertion of strong central authority by the chieftains – a process, in some interpretations, of ‘state formation’. As in Tahiti, the war god, here named Kuy, was propitiated by human sacrifice; the stone temple platforms became increasingly elaborate; and in time the chieftains claimed divine descent, thereby marking themselves out clearly from the common people. These ordinary islanders worked on the land controlled by lesser chieftains, offering their labour services and regular tribute. All this was a source of great enrichment to the greater and lesser chieftains, for the growth in population was also addressed: it was reflected in ever greater intensification of agriculture, with organized field systems, fish farms where mullet were encouraged to breed, and irrigation projects, under the patronage of the god of flowing water, Kane. By the sixteenth century something like an organized state had emerged in Hawai’i, a stratified society that might very loosely be described as ‘feudal’.14 The fertility of the land and the efficiency of Hawai’ian agriculture had reduced dependence on the sea, except for local fishing. The islands had never depended on the rest of Polynesia for vital goods – they were too far away. They became little continents, turned away from the sea that had borne their first settlers to their safe havens.

  III

  Before turning eastwards to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and southwards to New Zealand, the last part of Oceania to be settled, a question about contacts right across the Pacific needs to be addressed. Since Polynesian navigators reached as far east as Rapa Nui, isolated in vast tracts of open ocean, is it conceivable that some reached further still and arrived in South America? The search to identify the first people to reach America is based on any number of false premises, beginning with the assumption that people would recognize what they discovered as part of two massive continents (something that Columbus, for one, failed to do); they would then deserve to be hailed as the ‘true discoverers’ of the New World. But the question of links between Polynesia and South America was posed in the reverse form – South Americans reaching and indeed colonizing Polynesia – by the Norwegian explorer and self-publicist Thor Heyerdahl. He became obsessed by the idea that the Polynesians were of American descent, and that they took advantage of the easterly winds to sail their boats deep into the Pacific. He insisted that he could see Native American influence on innumerable Polynesian artefacts. The raft he constructed, Kon-Tiki, bore no resemblance to the type of vessel used by Polynesian navigators all the way across Oceania; it was copied from Peruvian sailing rafts deployed after the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.15 Nonetheless, in 1947 he sailed his raft across the open ocean, miraculously survived the experience, and assumed that just because it was possible to land (in his case, crash-land) in Polynesia such voyages must have happened in the past. Evidence from DNA and from the spread of the Austronesian languages unequivocally demonstrates that the Polynesians migrated from west to east and not from east to west; and even if Crick and Watson had yet to identify the structure of DNA when Heyerdahl set sail, the linguistic evidence had long been clear. This did not prevent Heyerdahl being voted the most famous Norwegian of all time (rather than Amundsen or Nansen, just to mention Norwegian explorers), nor did it prevent the construction of a much-visited museum in Oslo where his strange ocean-going craft is displayed.

  The diplomatic view of modern Norwegian scholars is that Heyerdahl opened up some important questions. And the question about links between Oceania and South America is a real one. There is evidence for contact in the era of Polynesian navigation, though it is not easy to decipher. Most of the supposed similarities between objects produced in Oceania and along the American coastline have functional explanations; it is not beyond the capacity of human beings to invent the same simple item at different times and in different places. This applies for instance to harpoons, fish hooks manufactured out of shell, and plank-constructed boats of the sort favoured by the Chumash Indians off Santa Barbara, California, and in much of Polynesia.16 The Chumash Indians are often cited as the sort of people who might have ventured across the sea, since they were busy boat-builders, specializing in journeys between the mainland and the Channel Islands opposite Santa Barbara; they were also one of the most economically sophisticated peoples along that coastline, with a monetary system based on a currency made out of pierced shells (periodically destroyed to prevent rampant inflation). But their boats were hard-pressed to cross the Santa Barbara Channel in rough weather and were far too small and simple to venture out into the open ocean; besides, fish supplies were plentiful in inland waters.17 As one goes down the American shoreline the impression of societies interested in the sea solely for coastal fishing strengthens: the Kumiai Indians of Baja California loved sardines, sole, tuna (including bonito) and shellfish, but were not navigators; they used small reed boats, often capable of carrying just a couple of people.18 Nor do these peoples show any sign of receiving goods from distant Polynesia.

  Thor Heyerdahl was anxious to show that the Galápagos Islands, with the rich fishing grounds around them, were the first stepping stone into the Pacific for his supposed Amerindian navigators. This, he hoped, would embarrass the often virulent critics of his Kon-Tiki expedition.19 Since the Galápagos lie 600 miles west of Ecuador, reaching them would have been no mean achievement; they were discovered, or maybe rediscovered, by the Spaniards in 1535, and it is no surprise that a fair amount of Spanish pottery was found when Heyerdahl and his companions went to look for evidence of early visits to the islands a few years after the Kon-Tiki expedition. Although the Norwegians identified dozens of other fragments of pottery as South American, mainly from Ecuador, they had to admit to uncertainty about the dating of much of what they found, which was very simple pottery that could have been made before or after the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. Some more elaborate fragments may simply show that in the sixteenth century native Indian potters perpetuated styles from the Inca era – one would expect nothing less, since the overwhelming majority of the population remained Indian. So we can conclude that South American Indians did venture out on ships at least as far as the Galápagos; the question remains whether these were Spanish galleons or the balsa wood rafts in which Heyerdahl placed his faith, and the most likely explanation is that the pottery arrived aboard galleons. Nonetheless, the Incas did preserve myths about rulers going out to sea on mysterious voyages, and maybe these should not be totally discounted.

  The best evidence for pre-Spanish contact is provided by plants that are very unlikely to have travelled such great distances by natural means, surviving winds and seas without being destroyed: bottle gourds and sweet potatoes spread across the Pacific, but originated in South America; in the other direction, coconuts reached Panama. The word used by the Quechua Indians in South America for the sweet potato, kamote, has been imaginatively compared to Easter Island kumara and Polynesian kuumala.20 Seasonal winds
made journeys to South America possible, but there is no evidence for any attempt to settle there and no evidence for active commerce between South America and any part of Polynesia.21 It might be argued that the sweet potato was diffused by the Spaniards when they gained control over trans-Pacific trade routes in the sixteenth century. However, the places where they were most actively cultivated lay some way from the Spanish trade routes – Hawai’i, New Zealand and Easter Island – and carbonized tubers of sweet potato excavated by archaeologists in New Zealand, Hawai’i and Mangaia can all be dated to the period before the arrival of the Europeans. Mangaia lies in the Cook Islands, part of Remote Oceania situated north-east of New Zealand; its specimens have been carbon-dated to about AD 1000. While it is possible to imagine birds carrying seeds across many thousands of miles, tubers are another story. It is therefore safe to say that Polynesian navigators extended their range right across the Pacific during this extraordinarily ambitious second phase of expansion.

  Even more remarkable than possible contact with the admittedly vast landmass of South America, impossible to miss if you go far enough eastwards, is the settlement of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, in the middle of nowhere. And yet, by contrast with Hawai’i, it at least lies on the plane of Polynesia, and reaching Rapa Nui posed less of a challenge in dealing with the winds. There are probably as many theories about the significance of the island’s enigmatic giant statues as there are statues. The question here is, rather, by what means navigators reached Rapa Nui and what sort of outside contacts the islanders maintained after its discovery and settlement. Heyerdahl, naturally, saw Easter Island as one of the first bases of his pioneering Peruvian sailors; the locals obliged him by offering him pieces of South American pottery, but they were just modern Chilean ceramics (the island is governed by Chile) – they wanted to keep the eccentric Norwegian gentleman happy.