Sea People

by Christina Thompson

  IT WAS AGAINST this backdrop of population collapse—of “death coming in like a tide,” as Stevenson put it—that Fornander began his great oeuvre: An Account of the Polynesian Race: Its Origins and Migrations and the Ancient History of the Hawaiian People to the Times of Kamehameha I. He dedicated it to his surviving daughter, Catherine, “as a reminder of her mother’s ancestors and as a token of her father’s love.” Fornander had by then been living in Hawai‘i for decades, working first as a plantation manager, then as a journalist and public servant, and finally as a judge. For years, in his capacity as inspector general of schools, he had made an annual round of the archipelago, traveling to the remotest corners of the islands, accompanied by two or three Hawaiians. Everywhere they went, they collected stories, chants, prayers, and genealogies—anything, as Fornander put it, with a “bearing upon the ancient history, culte, and customs of the people.” These he assembled and translated, conferring with Hawaiian scholars like Samuel Kamakau, Kepelino, and King Kalakaua. It was all part of the great work of his life: “to unravel the snarled threads” of Polynesian history.

  Hawaiians, Fornander observed, were often reluctant to share what they knew, especially when it came to the more esoteric traditions. The old people, he wrote, “maintain the greatest reserve on such subjects, even to their own countrymen; and to a foreigner, unless most intimately and favourably known, any such revelation is almost impossible.” This was also true in other parts of Polynesia. In New Zealand, it was said that some kinds of knowledge were considered too tapu—too sacred and dangerous—to be shared with outsiders. One Māori tohunga who was persuaded to share a creation myth with a European collector agreed to do so only under the cover of darkness and with the understanding that his family was never to know. Another, who provided a European collector with details of priestly ceremonies and the sacred purposes of certain shrubs, was charged by his grandfather with having given secrets “to a ‘common man.’” When both this informant and his son died a short time later, their deaths were widely attributed to this betrayal.

  Clans and tribes had always jealously guarded their more powerful and secret kinds of lore, but the prospect of handing it over to Europeans raised a whole new set of concerns. Why, exactly, were Europeans recording these traditions? With whom would they share them? What would it do to the potency of the knowledge to write it down, to print it, to make it public? There was fear that the process would lead to sacrilege. As one Māori elder put it, “in olden times the house was closed by karakia [prayers or incantations] to men outside and to those who desecrate the house; now, because the talks were to be written, the house was open forever.”

  At the same time, it was clear that the threats to Polynesia’s traditional knowledge base were multiplying: the flood of foreigners and their imported ideas; the disruption of local political structures and the ensuing wars, feuds, and annexations; widespread conversion to Christianity and the overturning of every settled idea; above all, the recurrent plagues of sickness and the rising tide of death. Faced with the possible extinction of a whole body of thought—one European collector wrote of the need to “embalm” native traditions before it was too late—both Europeans and Polynesians felt the urgent need to “rescue” Polynesian knowledge from what Fornander described as “the isolation and oblivion which were fast closing over it.”

  NO EUROPEAN HAD ever attempted anything like Fornander’s history of the Polynesian people, which spans more than two thousand years and was based on an analysis of genealogies, customs, legends, place names, numerals, and mythological traditions from Hawai‘i, the Society Islands, the Marquesas, Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, and New Zealand. Fornander was committed to the Aryan thesis, and he dedicated a great deal of energy to proving that the ancestors of the Polynesians were “a chip of the same block from which the Hindu, the Iranian, and the Indo-European families were fashioned.” He trotted out evidence of ancient Zabaism (sun worship) in Polynesian legends and found links to Latin, Welsh, and Old Babylonian deities in the names of Polynesian gods. He saw elements of serpent worship (a “peculiarly Cushite outgrowth of religious ideas”) in stories about lizards and identified signs of a Shiva cult in the ritual use of stones. But this was only part of the larger project: a sweeping history of the Hawaiian people from their most ancient roots to the unification of the Hawaiian Islands under Kamehameha I, in 1795.

  Fornander’s history is worth summarizing because it represents the first really systematic attempt to lay out the migrations of the Polynesian people from beginning to end. It starts in India centuries before the birth of Christ. How long the ancestors of the Polynesians resided in the foothills of the Hindu Kush, or what “the manner or the occasion of their leaving,” Fornander was unable to say. But at some point they began their migrations eastward toward the Asiatic archipelago, ultimately settling in the islands of what we now know as Indonesia and the Philippines. Then, around the first or second century A.D., they began a second migration out into the Pacific, reaching as far as the islands of Fiji, where again they paused. “After several generations of séjour,” they continued onward, settling the increasingly distant islands of Tonga, Samoa, the Society Islands, and the Marquesas and reaching remote Hawai‘i around the fifth or sixth century A.D.

  For some hundreds of years after this, according to Fornander, Polynesian traditions were strangely silent. But suddenly, around A.D. 1000, there is an efflorescence in the lore. “Polynesian folklore in all the principal groups becomes replete with the legends and songs of a number of remarkable men, of bold expeditions, stirring adventures, and voyages undertaken to far-off lands. An era of national unrest and of tribal commotion seems to have set in, from causes not now known, nor mentioned in the legends.” For the next three or four hundred years (roughly A.D. 1000 to 1400), Fornander argued, a great “migratory wave swept the island world of the Pacific.” This was a period not just of out-migration but of repeated return voyaging among the archipelagoes. Fornander believed that the Hawaiian Islands, for example, had been “visited by expeditions from the Samoan, Society, and Marquesas groups, and that Hawaiian expeditions visited them in return.”

  The reasons for this explosion of activity, Fornander thought, were probably overpopulation and natural disasters, including volcanic eruptions and the subsidence of coasts. (One of Fornander’s pet theories was that there used to be more islands in the Pacific than there are now, a kind of echo of the drowned-continent theory.) But this great era of unrest and exploration lasted only a few centuries, coming to an end in the 1300s or 1400s, when the last great wave of Polynesian settlers reached New Zealand. From this point onward, Fornander argued, the major Polynesian archipelagoes were isolated from one another until they were once again reconnected by the arrival of European ships.

  It was a remarkably seamless story, and one that would ultimately prove both spectacularly right in some places and spectacularly wrong in others. A big part of the problem lay in the inherent difficulty of translation—not just from one language to another or one culture to another, but from one way of thinking to another. There is a huge difference—in style, tone, logic, everything, really—between the type of sequential historical narration that Fornander was aiming for and the “almost impenetrable jungle of traditions, legends, genealogies, and chants” from which he tried to extract it. History, as Fornander understood it, required “sequence, precision, and clarity,” none of which was particularly characteristic of Polynesian oral traditions, which were densely poetic, elliptical, evocative, and occasionally obscure even to those who could recite them. Translating the one into the other involved a good deal of interpretation, and one of the first difficulties confronting Fornander was the absence of a clear chronology.

  Fornander’s history demanded dates, but there are no dates in Polynesian traditions. There is no absolute system of time beginning at some specified moment and proceeding at regular intervals. There are cyclical calendars tied to the seasons and the phases of the moon, but there is
nothing like the term “1850” or any kind of conceptual system that might generate such a term. But Fornander had an ingenious solution for this, which was to count generations in the long and detailed genealogies that were such an important part of Polynesian lore. He was not the first person to think of this, but his use of genealogies to establish a timeline for Polynesian events attempted to reach much further back into the past.

  Later, in the mid-twentieth century, when a scientific method for dating using radiocarbon isotopes was developed, this method of genealogical dating would come to be seen as irredeemably quaint. But Polynesians cared enormously about their lineages and scrupulously maintained information about who was descended from whom, making their genealogies extremely valuable as historical sources. The only problem was that, as they went back in time, Polynesian genealogies moved seamlessly from what we might consider the “historical” through the “legendary” to the “mythological.” Some of the genealogies Fornander used ran to as many as ninety-nine generations, which meant a span of nearly three thousand years. Even the much more common twenty- or thirty-generation genealogies that were routinely used to date Polynesian events span periods of six hundred to nine hundred years—three or four times the conventionally accepted time frame for accurate transmission of oral information.

  While they undoubtedly served to mark the passage of time, Polynesian genealogies were never designed to establish accurate chronologies. Their purpose was social, political, even metaphysical, connecting an individual back through his ancestors “to the rocks, trees, streams, even the stars in the sky.” An important genealogy might start with the story of the creation of the world and continue on down through the ages, with the pairing of gods, the emergence of men, the division of lands, and so on, culminating finally in the immediate descent line of the individual in question. Thus, while the modern end of a genealogy might be highly accurate, the beginning “in deep darkness” was by definition mythic, and the question for Europeans was where the boundary between the two lay.

  Fornander was not unaware of this problem. But he was simultaneously wedded to a Polynesian view of the traditions’ absolute veracity and to a European conception of historical fact. The result was a strangely tortured theory, in which we find him asserting, for example, that a chief named Wakea (an ancient Polynesian name for the primordial Sky Father) and Papa, his wife (the Earth Mother), were living on the island of Gilolo, in the Moluccas, in the first century A.D. But while this extreme literalness introduced certain absurdities into Fornander’s history, it also reflects an important dimension of his view.

  For reasons that were both personal and intellectual—having to do with his Hawaiian wife and daughter as well as the Romantic antiquarianism of his youth—Fornander was strongly pro-Polynesian. Unlike many Europeans both before and after him, he took it entirely for granted that the ancestors of the Polynesians had explored and colonized the entire Pacific, that they had made voyages over the open ocean of hundreds, if not thousands, of miles, and that, for at least three or four hundred years, they had traveled back and forth among the archipelagoes on voyages “undertaken purposely and accomplished safely both in going and returning.” He believed they had possessed everything they needed to accomplish these great journeys: vessels “sewn or stitched together,” with holds “sufficient to contain men, animals, and stores”; knowledge of the stars, “their rising and setting at all times of the year, both in the Southern and Northern Hemisphere”; the strength to endure long voyages; the ability to recognize “the approach of land, by flight of birds and other signs”; above all, the requisite personal traits, “courage, hardihood, and perseverance that never failed them at critical moments.”

  For Fornander, there was no doubt about any of this; it was a matter of record. If “the Icelandic folklore which tells of exploits and voyages to far distant lands” was to be believed, he asked, why not “the Polynesian folklore which tells of voyages between the different groups?” It was a perfectly straightforward question, and the answer, he thought, was equally clear. To know the story of the Polynesian peoples’ origin and migrations, one had only to look at their sagas. But as the efforts of both Fornander and his successors revealed, translating the stories of Polynesia’s voyaging heroes into chronological historical accounts was a matter less of science than of art.

  Voyaging Stories

  History and Myth

  “Departure of the Six Canoes from Rarotonga for New Zealand” by Kennett Watkins, 1906.

  AUCKLAND ART GALLERY, NEW ZEALAND.

  EVERY BRANCH OF Polynesian mythology has voyaging stories—tales of heroes and heroines who set out on journeys to discover new lands or revisit old homelands, or to seek adventure or procure valuable goods—and in the wake of Fornander’s great oeuvre, these moved to the center of the debate about the history of the Polynesian migrations. These tales, the sea stories of a sea people, run the gamut from the obviously fabulous to the plausibly historical. At one end of the spectrum are cosmogonic navigator-gods; at the other, discoverers, settlers, and founders of lineages that are still claimed by people today. Virtually all have what might be described as both a “texture of history” and a “texture of myth.”

  The characters in these stories are often described as making use of magic objects to aid them in their travels: magic boats, bones, paddles, fishhooks, nets, baskets, gourds. They might hold the winds in a magic bag and or be guided by meteors or talking stars. Sometimes they are assisted by uncanny creatures—sailfish who swim to windward to protect them from waves, or sharks who rescue castaways or drag overturned canoes to land. Or they may be beset by monsters from the deep: enormous octopuses, murderous billfish, giant tridacnas. The ocean itself is a place of supernatural hazards, in the form of whirlpools, waterspouts, fogs, storms, waves, and hidden reefs. Even the islands themselves are occasionally mysterious, wandering off or floating away or vanishing into thin air.

  At the same time, even the most marvelous of these stories contain oddly specific details: what tools to use for building a suitable vessel; what kinds of provisions to take and how to store them; what to do to prevent a canoe from sinking; how to make a cooking place from sand on the deck. They are filled with practical advice about how voyages should be conducted: “first procure choice food” for the canoe builders; select the “bravest and most experienced warriors who would of their own accord volunteer”; “let the course be to the right of the setting sun, or moon, or Venus in the month of February.” They also contain rationales and motives—something that is hard for historians to see. Voyages are made to fetch valuable objects—birds’ eggs, feathers, tortoiseshell or pearl shell, special kinds of rock—or to seek lost family members or procure desirable brides. Sometimes they are explicit about the need for new territory: often a younger male figure sets out after quarreling with an older relative or committing some kind of transgression, like stealing someone else’s wife. Occasionally there is famine or some other kind of trouble, but usually it is a matter of chiefly ambition or pride. All of this rings true—or, at least, plausible—and so, while they are in no sense documentary, it is impossible to avoid the impression that there is lived experience behind these tales.

  Even cosmogonic myths are interwoven with knowledge that can only have come from actual voyages. Take the story of Ru, a Tahitian deity, who, with his sister, Hina, sets out in a canoe named The Hull to discover and name all the islands of the world. “The Canoe Song of Ru” is an origin story and also, plainly, a lesson in geography. Before they depart, Ru looks about him and names the directions: “The east he called Te-hitia-o-te-ra (The-rising-of-the-sun), the west Te-tooa-o-te-ra (The-setting-of-the-sun), the south he named Apato‘a, and the north Apatoerau”—terms we have encountered before, in the margins of Tupaia’s chart. Then, sailing from the west toward the Society Islands, Ru and Hina draw their canoe to each of the islands in turn, naming them in their proper geographic order: first Maupiti, then Bora Bora, then Taha‘a, then Ra‘ia
tea. A similar sequence occurs in the well-known Hawaiian story of the volcano goddess Pele, who sets out from her home in Kahiki in a canoe belonging to her brother Whirlwind, with Tide and Current as paddlers. Approaching the Hawaiian Islands from the northwest, she reaches first Ni‘ihau, then Kaua‘i, then O‘ahu, then each of the others in turn—following the correct geographic sequence—until, finally, she settles in a crater on the island of Hawai‘i.

  Stories of Rata, one of the greatest wayfinders in the Polynesian pantheon and a hero whose name is known throughout the triangle, catalog the right rituals for building and launching a voyaging canoe, as well as some of the hazards that might be encountered on a long journey. Embarking on a voyage to avenge his father’s death, Rata faces a series of oceanic dangers, each of which—in an interesting detail—he at first mistakes for land: a giant school of fish that threatens to swamp his canoe; a swordfish that tries to pierce the hull; a powerful, predatory giant cavalla; a monstrous clam that tries to suck the canoe in through its terrible valves. In other versions, Rata’s challenges include whales, tidal waves, and unexpected reefs.

  Most of these voyaging stories detail successful journeys (though some are undertaken to search for someone else who has been lost). But the human cost of voyaging is memorialized in an interesting tale from the Marquesas, in which the hero, Aka, decides to sail to Aotona to get valuable red feathers (known throughout much of Polynesia as kula). Aka does not know how to get to Aotona, so he sends his sons-in-law to ask their father. “We have come for the story of the kula,” they say, only to be told, “You two cannot reach it. Much food is necessary; a great quantity of cooked ma [fermented breadfruit], raw ma, coconuts, raw taro, cooked taro, raw kape [another kind of taro], and cooked kape. You have to go far out in the sea, there is no more food and it is a long time before land is found.” Still, they decide to try. They build two boats, which they tie together, collect sail mats and food, and look for “seven times twenty” men to join the crew.