The Polynesians

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A navigator lies in the hull of a sailing canoe in the dark, and he is not looking at the stars so much as feeling the sea. The swells run under him in long sets out of three or four directions at once, each born of a wind blowing somewhere over the curve of the world, and he holds their angle against his body the way a less practiced man holds a compass needle. When cloud closes the sky he steers by the swells alone. He carries no instrument and no chart. He carries, instead, a horizon divided in his memory into named points where particular stars rise and set, and a knowledge of birds and currents and the color of the water over a reef, and somewhere ahead of him, days off, an island a few miles wide that he intends to find. That this could be done deliberately, and done as a round trip, was for two centuries the thing about the Polynesians that the wider world found hardest to believe.

The people of the great ocean triangle made the longest planned voyages the ancient world ever knew, and reached the last large places on the surface of the earth that human beings had not yet touched.

The road of the winds

The Polynesians belong to the Austronesian family, the great seafaring lineage whose ancestors moved out of island Southeast Asia and eastward through the western Pacific over several thousand years. The archaeological signature of the crucial leg is a distinctive ceramic: the dentate-stamped pottery of the Lapita cultural complex, decorated by pressing a toothed tool into the wet clay, which appears across the islands of Near Oceania and out into the open Pacific from roughly 1000 BCE. The makers of this pottery carried domesticated plants and animals, the outrigger and double canoe, and a settled village life out past the limit of intervisible islands into archipelagoes that had never held people. It is from this Lapita horizon, in the scholarly reconstruction, that an ancestral Polynesian society crystallized (Te Ara; Kirch, On the Road of the Winds).

It crystallized in one place, and then it stayed there. The eastward movement reached the islands of Tonga and Samoa and halted, and for something close to a thousand years it did not go on. Archaeologists call this the long pause. Within it the language, the genealogical grammar, and the social forms that would be recognizably Polynesian took their shape, so that when the canoes finally moved again they carried a fully formed culture eastward into empty sea. Why the pause held so long, and why it broke when it did, is among the puzzles of Pacific prehistory that scholars still debate; the upwind difficulty of the next leg, against the prevailing trades, is part of the answer most often given.

When the movement resumed it came as a burst. The best current chronology, built on refined radiocarbon dating, compresses the settlement of central and then marginal eastern Polynesia into a few centuries, with the far corners reached in a remarkable thirteenth-century surge: the Society Islands and the Marquesas first, then Rapa Nui (Easter Island) around 1200, Hawai’i by the middle of the century, and Aotearoa (New Zealand) by about 1280 — the last large landmass on the planet that people settled (Te Ara: the direction and timing of settlement). These three corners frame the Polynesian triangle, a span of ocean wider than any historical empire, with Tahiti, the Cook Islands, the Australs, Mangareva, and the rest of the central archipelagoes scattered within. The voyagers raised pigs and taro and breadfruit where the climate allowed, adapted where it did not — the Maori of cold Aotearoa turning to the kumara and the forest and the sea — and across the whole triangle they kept a shared inheritance of gods, of chiefly genealogy, and of the sacred vocabulary.

That vocabulary is the deep structure beneath every local pantheon. Across the dispersed islands a cognate cosmology can be reconstructed: a Sky-Father and an Earth-Mother prised apart to make the lit world — Rangi and Papa in Aotearoa, Wakea and Papahanaumoku in Hawai’i — and a family of high gods whose names shift by island but answer to one another. The sea and the deep belong to a god the Maori call Tangaroa and the Hawaiians Kanaloa; the forests and the light to one the Maori call Tane and the Hawaiians Kane; and the most widely diffused story in the whole Polynesian repertoire is the cycle of the demigod Maui, who snared the sun to slow it, fished up islands on his hook, and died at last in the attempt to win immortality for humankind. In the volcanic north the living fire of the islands is the goddess Pele, who dwells in the crater of Kilauea and remakes the land with her own body.

The science in the body and the grammar of the sacred

The achievement that filled the triangle was not luck, and it was not a single invention. It was a science — a navigation carried entirely in the trained memory and the trained body, with no instrument and no written record, learned by years of apprenticeship and held by a class of experts whom Hawaiians call po’e ho’okele wa’a, the canoe-steerers.

Its first frame is the sky. The horizon is divided into a fixed set of points — in the reconstructed Hawaiian system, thirty-two “houses,” each a bearing where a known star rises or sets — so that the navigator holds a star compass not on a card but in his mind, a circle of named directions tied to the rising and setting of stars. As one star climbs too high to steer by, the next in its house takes its place, and over a night a long succession of stars walks across the same bearing. A trained navigator carries the rising and setting points of hundreds of them. By day, with the stars gone, he reads the sun’s arc, and in the hours between he reads the sea.

The double-hulled voyaging canoe Hokule’a arriving in Honolulu in 1976 after its non-instrument passage to Tahiti and back. Photograph by Phil Uhl, 26 August 1976. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The reading of the sea is the subtler art. The open Pacific carries long, regular swells generated by distant and persistent winds, and these run truer than the wind of the moment; a navigator learns to feel their separate trains through the motion of the hull and to hold his heading against them, by body more than by eye, through nights when no star shows. Closer to land, other signs gather. Certain birds — the white tern, the noddy — feed at sea by day and fly home to land at dusk, and their evening flight is a bearing on an island still below the horizon. The underside of a distant cloud may hold the green stain of a lagoon’s reflected light. Drifting wood and leaves, a shift in the swell where it bends around unseen land, a change in the water’s color — all of it is data. The combined effect is to widen a small target: a navigator does not aim for a dot but for the broad screen of signs that a high island throws up around itself, and corrects inward once he has caught its edge. By such means a canoe could sail two thousand miles and more to a destination a few miles across, and find its way home again.

Over the whole of it lies the sacred grammar that the islands share. Two paired words carry it. Mana is the sacred potency, the realized efficacy or power that flows from a divine source — it gathers in high-born chiefs through their genealogy, in the gods, in skilled work correctly done, in a canoe properly consecrated, in a weapon, in a place. It is not a metaphor for influence; within the frame it is the actual power by which things have effect in the world, and it can be increased or diminished, won in war or drained by pollution. Tapu (the Hawaiian kapu, the wider Pacific tabu from which the English word descends) is its necessary complement: the sacred restriction that fences mana off, marking certain persons, times, places, foods, and acts as set apart and dangerous to cross. The high chief is so charged with mana that contact with his shadow or his leavings may be forbidden; the temple precinct is tapu; the navigator’s craft and the canoe-builder’s forest work are ringed with tapu obligation. The unrestricted, ordinary, free-to-handle state is noa. To live within this world is to move constantly between the charged and the common, and the experts who managed the boundary — the Hawaiian kahuna, the Maori tohunga, the Tahitian tahu’a — were the men whose training made mana effective and tapu safe.

The temples where this power was concentrated took different architectural forms across the triangle: the open stone-paved courts the eastern islanders call marae, the walled and terraced platforms the Hawaiians call heiau. Their rites ran from quiet offerings for a good harvest to the gravest institution the tradition acknowledged of itself. At certain great marae and at the Hawaiian war-temples, the luakini, the highest gods — the Tahitian war-god ‘Oro, the Hawaiian war-god Ku — were served at times with human sacrifice, an act reserved to the ruling chiefs and bound in the most stringent tapu. The greatest of the eastern marae, Taputapuatea on Raiatea, sacred to ‘Oro, was the ceremonial heart of a voyaging network that drew chiefs and priests across hundreds of miles of ocean to gather at one stone court — the meeting point, in the tradition’s own terms, of the world of the living and the world of the gods and ancestors. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2017 (UNESCO).

Carved ancestor figures (moai) at the Rano Raraku quarry on Rapa Nui. Photograph by Aurbina, released to the public domain. Wikimedia Commons.

The afterlife, too, was woven into the geography. Beyond the islands lay Hawaiki, the ancestral homeland from which the canoes had come and to which the spirits of the dead returned — a real place in the genealogies, a named cape and a leaping-off point in the local landscapes, and the far horizon toward which the soul set out. The same name, softened by sound-change, became Hawai’i in the north and survives as Savai’i in Samoa; whether any single island was the historical Hawaiki, and where it lay, is itself a long-running question. The homeland and the road back to it were one direction on the navigator’s compass and one direction in the cosmology, and a people who steered by memory across open water did not draw a hard line between the two.

The long disbelief and the canoe that answered it

When Europeans reached this world — the Dutch at Rapa Nui in 1722, then most consequentially Captain James Cook through the Society Islands, Aotearoa, and eventually Hawai’i from 1769 — they recorded a paradox they could not at first resolve. Cook saw at Tahiti a society of skilled sailors and noted, with the help of the Raiatean priest-navigator Tupaia, that one language and one stock of gods ran across an impossible spread of ocean. Yet the canoes the Europeans saw could be explained, the islands could be counted, and the question of how a people without writing or instruments could have settled a third of the Pacific on purpose hardened, over the following two centuries, into a settled denial.

The fullest statement of the denial came in 1956, when the historian Andrew Sharp published Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific and argued that long deliberate two-way navigation had been beyond Polynesian means. The islands, on his account, had been peopled by accident — by canoes blown off course, by one-way drift voyages that fetched up on chance landfalls, because no one, he held, could navigate so far to so small a target and return. The thesis was austere and widely taught, and it had the effect of making the islanders passengers of the wind in their own history. It also, by its sheer provocation, set scholars to testing the navigation it dismissed: through the 1960s and 1970s, computer simulations of drift showed that the corners of the triangle — Hawai’i, Aotearoa, Rapa Nui — were precisely the places that random drift could not reach, while ethnographers in the western Pacific found living navigators who still steered by star and swell.

The decisive answer was not an argument but a voyage. In 1973 the Polynesian Voyaging Society was founded in Hawai’i, and it built Hokule’a, a double-hulled canoe on the old lines, launched in 1975. To navigate it the society had to look beyond Hawai’i, where the art had lapsed, to Mau Piailug, a master navigator of the tiny island of Satawal in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia, where non-instrument wayfinding had never died. Piailug agreed to steer by the traditional means alone — no compass, no chart, no radio fix — and in 1976 Hokule’a sailed from Hawai’i to Tahiti, making landfall after thirty-one days and reaching Papeete to a crowd of many thousands (Polynesian Voyaging Society). The thing the modern world had declared impossible had been done in front of witnesses. Piailug’s willingness to teach outside his own lineage broke the chain of loss: his Hawaiian student Nainoa Thompson rebuilt the Hawaiian star compass as a teachable system and carried the canoe on far longer passages, and the voyaging arts spread back across the triangle and eventually around the globe, the rebuilt canoes sailing waters their ancestors had crossed a thousand years before.

The war canoes of Tahiti assembled in 1774, painted by William Hodges, official artist on Cook’s second voyage. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The recovery of the canoe ran alongside a wider reckoning, for the Polynesians are living peoples, and the centuries after contact bore on them hard. The written record of their religion is overwhelmingly an outsiders’ record — explorer journals and, above all, the ethnography of Christian missionaries, the London Missionary Society in the east from 1797 and the American Calvinists in Hawai’i from 1820 — and much of it was set down by men who came to convert and who glossed the tradition through categories of sin and idolatry that were not its own. The religion itself was oral: the genealogical chants the Maori call whakapapa, the prayers and the navigators’ star-knowledge, none of it written until the contact era, and the colonial gloss should never be mistaken for a neutral account.

The political history was harder still. In Hawai’i the kapu system was abolished by the Hawaiians themselves in 1819, in the act called ‘ai noa — the free eating, when the young king Liholiho sat to a feast with the chiefly women and the old prohibitions fell — and the missionaries arrived the following year into the opening that had already been made; the Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown by settler interests in 1893 and annexed by the United States in 1898. In Aotearoa the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840 set the Crown’s relation to the Maori in two texts that did not agree: the English version ceded sovereignty, while the Maori version spoke of kawanatanga, a lesser word for governance, and reserved to the chiefs their rangatiratanga, their full chieftainship — a discrepancy over what had actually been signed away that has driven Maori claims for almost two centuries (Treaty of Waitangi). On Rapa Nui the catastrophe came from outside the island’s own choices: Peruvian slave-raids in 1862 and 1863 carried off roughly half the population, and the few survivors brought smallpox home, so that an island of some thousands fell to about a hundred and eleven people by 1877 (Easter Island).

That last collapse bears directly on the most famous and most contested story told about the Polynesians. The popular account of Rapa Nui — that its people felled their last tree to move their giant ancestor-statues, the moai, and so wrecked their own world in an ecological suicide — has been sharply challenged. Recent archaeology, led by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, attributes much of the island’s deforestation to the Polynesian rat that ate the palm seeds, finds no evidence of a population crash before European contact, and shows that the moai were most likely “walked” upright by rope rather than rolled on felled logs. On this reading the islanders endured until outsiders broke them, and the lurid self-destruction narrative misreads a society that adapted to a hard place. The debate remains genuinely unsettled; what is not in dispute is that the moai are deified ancestors, that the later birdman rite at Orongo crowned a yearly contest in honor of the creator Make-make, and that Rapa Nui National Park was inscribed by UNESCO in 1995.

The twentieth century closed, across the triangle, on revival rather than ending. The Hawaiian Renaissance that Hokule’a helped to ignite restored language, hula, and chant — the Kumulipo, the great creation-genealogy of two thousand lines, is again performed in full. The Maori renaissance rebuilt te reo, the language, and pressed the long unfinished business of the Treaty. The dispute over the telescope on Mauna Kea, the firstborn mountain, set Hawaiian sacred geography against modern astronomy on the same summit. These are not the relics of a vanished people but the living arguments of a continuing one, conducted by the descendants of the navigators who, steering by stars they had memorized and swells they could feel in the dark, found every island worth finding in the largest empty quarter of the world.

→ Related: The Maori · The Hawaiians · Tangaroa · Tane · Tumatauenga · Maui · Pele Goddess · Taputapuatea · Orongo · Mauna Kea · Tongariro · Divination · The Yamato People · The Ainu · The Norse · The Vikings · The Icelanders · Reincarnation · Soul · Immortality