Sea People

by Christina Thompson

  IN THE YEARS that followed, Lapita sites would be discovered on the Mussau Islands off Papua New Guinea, the Reef and Santa Cruz Islands, Tikopia Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Futuna, and Samoa—in other words, virtually everywhere between the Bismarck Archipelago and the western edge of Polynesia. Dates from these sites confirmed the age of the culture represented by these ceramics, but they also revealed an unexpected pattern: Lapita settlements across a 2,500-mile swath of the western Pacific—from roughly the Solomon Islands to Samoa—seem to have appeared almost simultaneously around 1000 B.C. Furthermore, east of the Solomons, they appeared to represent a cultural horizon: no one predated them in these islands, archaeologically speaking; no cultural artifacts underlay theirs. Whoever they were, the so-called Lapita people appeared to be the first people on the scene in these places, and this, in turn, meant that not only were they the true pioneers of the remote Pacific—the first people to sail over the horizon to islands that were too far away to see—but they were also the first people to reach the Polynesian Triangle. And this meant that they were the immediate precursors and ancestors of the Polynesians.

  All of a sudden it was possible to track the Polynesian migrations backward some two thousand years with near perfect certainty. The Lapita people were, you might say, Polynesians in an earlier incarnation. So what can we say of them, beyond the fact of their taste for fine decoration? We know they were colonists, movers, migrants, settlers, explorers, pioneers. We know they had a technology that enabled them to travel and a culture neat and transportable enough to take with them wherever they went. We know they were denizens of the coast, occupants of a narrow band of shoreline between the forest and the sea. Almost all the Lapita settlements that have been discovered are located on beaches or beach terraces, or in places that were beaches two thousand years ago. We know they liked spots at the edge of a lagoon, in proximity to fresh water and arable land, often opposite an opening in the reef that gave access to the open ocean. We know they trolled the deep sea, cast nets in the lagoon, and fished at night by torchlight on the reef. We know they had a few domesticated animals—pigs, chickens, and dogs—that would have fossicked and foraged along the shoreline, while their owners divided their time between gathering seafood and tending their yam beds and taro plantations.

  Although it is pottery that has come to define them, the crowning technological achievement of the Lapita people must have been their canoes. Almost all the islands in the one-thousand-mile chain that begins in the Bismarcks and ends in the Solomons are intervisible, with water gaps generally smaller than forty miles. But from there to the next group of islands, the distance is 250 miles, and it’s 500 miles from there to the group after that. No one has ever uncovered even a scrap of a Lapita canoe—it has been too long, the materials are too perishable, the atmosphere too damp—but words for sail, outrigger, boom, washstrake, rib, caulking, paddle, bailing, and cargo can all be reconstructed in Proto-Oceanic, a hypothetical language (like Proto-Indo-European) that is associated with the Lapita expansion.

  Proto-Oceanic is the theoretical mother tongue of the Oceanic peoples and the language from which all the Oceanic languages are thought to descend. It is a huge family, encompassing more than 450 languages, including those spoken on all the islands of Polynesia, most of the smaller islands of Melanesia, and all the islands of Micronesia except two. It is itself a branch of the larger Austronesian language family, a truly stupendous grouping of more than a thousand languages, which includes, in addition to all the Oceanic languages, those of the Philippines, Borneo, Indonesia, Timor, the Moluccas, and Madagascar. The very oldest Austronesian languages—and thus, in a sense, their geographic root—are a group of languages known as Formosan, a few of which are still spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of Ilha Formosa (Beautiful Island), an old Portuguese name for the island of Taiwan. Thus, at least from a linguistic point of view, the path back from Polynesia to the ultimate homeland proceeds through the Melanesian and Southeast Asian archipelagoes to an island off the coast of China, where the trail goes cold around 5000 or 6000 B.C.

  The splitting off of the Oceanic branch of this language family is thought to have taken place in the neighborhood of the Bismarcks around the time of the first Lapita settlement, and it is strongly linked with the rapid colonization of the islands between there and Samoa between 1500 and 1000 B.C. Thus, the reconstruction of Proto-Oceanic opens a window onto the otherwise fairly mysterious Lapita world. Little survives in archaeological contexts in the tropics—none of the baskets or cordage or wooden housewares, no foodstuffs or clothing, no buildings apart from stone foundations and the dark impressions left by long-decayed posts. But something of the texture of these people’s lives can be extracted from their reconstructed vocabulary, working back through the ages via whatever was essential enough to pass on.

  It seems, for example, that they had terms for two particular times of day: the period from dawn to midmorning and that from midafternoon to dusk—both good times for getting things done in the tropics. They had a word for a water container made from a calabash or coconut shell and a word for the bung or stopper used to seal it. They had words for wooden bowls and coconut cups and for tongs that could be used to lift food out of an earth oven. They had a word for a conch- or triton-shell trumpet and another for a coconut-leaf torch. They had words for clearing and hoeing and weeding and for the fences they built around gardens, perhaps to keep out the pigs. They had a large number of words for types of wind, including strong wind, storm wind, light wind, dry wind, winds from various directions, and wind bringing rain. They had a constellation known as Big Bird, which overlaps our constellations Orion and Canis Major, and they gave the same name to the planet Venus that we give it: Morning Star.

  Not all these concepts are attested in every Oceanic language, but enough traces exist to enable linguists to follow the trail. Some concepts that one might have expected to find have proven surprisingly difficult to reconstruct: there is no obvious Proto-Oceanic term for tidal wave or volcano, although words can be reconstructed for both earthquake and flood. It has also been difficult for linguists to identify specialized navigational terminology. Two possible reasons for this might be that, like politics, all navigation is local, and that what is true in one geographical region is not necessarily true in another. The night sky in New Zealand is not the same as the night sky in Papua New Guinea, which is not the same as the night sky in Hawai‘i. The winds and currents in the Solomons are not the same as those around Rapa Nui or in the Marquesas. A second consideration might be that in many Oceanic societies, navigational knowledge is believed to have been privileged and known to only a few, which may mean that it was especially easy to lose once it was no longer central to a society’s survival.

  There are some very important notions, however, that can be traced back almost to the dawn of Oceanic time: the word for land, as in “not sea” but also “inhabited territory”; the word for canoe, meaning a large sailing vessel for going on the open sea; the word for star, along with terms for rising and descending; and a word for sky or heavens that, once you get out into the remote islands of Polynesia, doubles as the name of a primordial god.

  THE KEY TO the migrations of the Lapita people (or, more properly, peoples) was their ability to replicate their lives—their houses, gardens, customs, modes of travel, their whole way of interacting with the world—on island after island, beach after beach. Although they actively sought out a particular kind of setting—coastal plains, tidal rivers, lagoons—they were always adapting to new environments, responding to both the opportunities and the disadvantages presented by new lands. One salient feature of the Pacific region is the steady diminishment in the number of species as you move eastward away from the continental edge. The point is often illustrated with reference to bird species, which, on the large, ecologically opulent island of New Guinea, number some 520. Just a few hundred miles east in the Solomon Islands, the number of bird species drops to 127; then 54 in Fiji, 33 in Samoa,
20 in Tonga, 17 in the Society Islands, 11 in the Marquesas, and at the extreme southeast end of the Polynesian Triangle, on remote Henderson Island, just 4. What is true for birds is also true for corals, plants, reptiles, insects, echinoderms, and vertebrates, with the consequence—at least for human colonists—that the farther they went, the less there was to work with and the more resourceful they had to be.

  The Lapita colonists and their descendants solved this problem by transporting everything they needed to reestablish the life they had left behind: breeding pairs of animals, root stocks, seedlings. They also carried a whole host of other life forms: weeds, mollusks, insects, microbes—the entire “portmanteau biota,” to use Alfred Crosby’s charming formulation, that colonists take with them wherever they go, intentionally or not. Crosby coined the phrase in an account of the impact of European expansion on, among other places, the Pacific, but it applies equally well to these earlier colonists. The portmanteau biota of the Lapita peoples included not just their valued dogs, pigs, chickens, taro, breadfruit, sugarcane, and banana, but a little brown stowaway known as Rattus exulans (the Pacific rat) and an assortment of geckos, skinks, and snails.

  The Lapita peoples did not just arrive and adapt; they also changed each of the new places they discovered. Humans are notorious for altering the environments into which they move, and the Lapita peoples were no exception. Pollen cores on islands in Lapita territory show a dramatic increase in charcoal particles around the time they arrived, which has been interpreted as evidence of widespread burning to clear land for gardens. Layers of mud, clay, and other “erosional debris” also point to forest clearing, but the most dramatic impact was on the wildlife, particularly the birds. One account of the extirpation of land birds in Polynesia describes it as perhaps “the most extreme example of late Quaternary vertebrate extinction.” The evidence shows overwhelmingly that the Lapita peoples and their descendants, the Polynesians (with help, no doubt, from the omnivorous Pacific rat), wiped out innumerable varieties of birds, including rails, pigeons, parrots, fruit doves, and megapodes, either by hunting them to extinction or by destroying their habitat. Humans will eat whatever they find and will do whatever it takes to make their environment more habitable; the biologist Tim Flannery famously describes the species—our species—as “Future Eaters.” It should therefore come as no surprise to learn that the Lapita peoples ate not only the birds but the turtles, lizards, mollusks, fish, and even the large land crocodile of New Caledonia, thereby irrevocably altering every one of the environments they encountered.

  One can look at these facts from one of two points of view. Like all other humans, the Lapita peoples and their descendants were a powerfully transformative force in Oceania, responsible for much alteration of the landscape and the destruction of many life forms. But one can also think about what it took to be so successful, to be able to wreak this kind of havoc in so many places, so far apart. Nothing about this stupendous migration—over thousands of miles of water to islands that no one could have known existed—was either obvious or, seemingly, necessary. And so one of the most tantalizing questions of all must be Why? Why leave the safety of the intervisible lands, where, even if there is water between you and the next shore, you can still see the dark peaks of your destination?

  One reason may have been that when the speakers of these Austronesian languages—the precursors of the Lapita peoples—first arrived in the islands of the western Pacific, many of these were already occupied and had been for tens of thousands of years. Perhaps the newly arriving immigrants showed such a strong preference for coastal niches because that was what was available. Rather than try to colonize already inhabited interiors or compete with established populations, they kept to the edge of the islands and moved on. But this rationale fails once these oceangoing settlers moved beyond the inhabited islands—out past the intervisible islands of the Solomon chain to the uninhabited Reef and Santa Cruz Islands, to Vanuatu and New Caledonia, to Fiji, and on to the islands of Polynesia.

  Some of these islands were large and promising, and one wonders what it was like to discover them. It must have been great—lots of food, plenty of land, good water supplies—so why did they keep going? Given the size of some of these islands, it could not have been population pressure; it would have taken hundreds of years before a scarcity of resources forced them to leave. A more interesting notion is that they were “pulled” into the unknown by a “founder-focused ideology,” meaning that the impetus for movement was embedded in the way they constructed their world. Many Austronesian cultures show a deep reverence for founder figures; this is certainly true in Polynesia, where lineages are named for founders whose names and deeds are the very backbone of the mythology. Founders hold positions of rank and command material advantages, and over time these benefits accrue. As one anthropologist put it, the original settlers of New Zealand, whose journey constitutes the final chapter in this great migration, “would have been heirs to perhaps 3,000 years of successful Austronesian expansion”—three thousand years of founder tales “stacked one upon the other.” Under such circumstances, what “ambitious young man of a junior line” would not seek to become a founder himself by setting off in search of his own island, no matter how far away?

  Part V

  Setting Sail

  (1947–1980)

  In which we set off on an entirely new tack, taking to the sea with a crew of experimental voyagers as they attempt to reenact the voyages of the ancient Polynesians.

  Kon-Tiki

  Thor Heyerdahl’s Raft

  The Kon-Tiki, 1947.

  THE KON-TIKI MUSEUM, OSLO, NORWAY.

  THE DISCOVERY OF the Lapita peoples yoked Polynesian prehistory firmly to the western Pacific and thus, ultimately, to Asia. But it could not entirely put to rest a competing notion that there was a link between Polynesia and the continent on the other side, namely South America. It had been popular in the nineteenth century to argue that the strength and prevalence of the easterly winds “most preposterously” conflicted with the idea of anyone sailing eastward across the Pacific and that the inhabitants of Polynesia must therefore be “descended from the aborigines of Chili and Peru.” This notion continued to percolate in the early twentieth century, and in the 1930s and ’40s it attracted the attention of the Norwegian adventurer and anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl.

  Heyerdahl had made his first foray into the Pacific in 1936, when, at the age of twenty-two, he went to live on the island of Fatu Hiva, in the Marquesas, with his twenty-year-old bride. The two had decided to abandon civilization and return to nature; leaving behind “the chains” that bound them to the modern world, they would “enter the wilderness empty-handed and barefoot.” It was, Heyerdahl wrote many years later, “a hippy’s dream, a trip deep into an utterly different existence.” And it did not go very well. Ants ate up the bamboo house they tried to live in; the Marquesans mistrusted them; cuts and scrapes they got from going barefoot became infected; and they finally ended up in a cave, ill, afraid, and desperate for a boat to come and rescue them. It was during this period, however, that Heyerdahl first concocted the theory that would bring him immense celebrity and, at the same time, estrange him from the majority of his academic peers.

  About a year into their sojourn on Fatu Hiva, Heyerdahl and his wife, Liv, were sitting on a beach in the moonlight, watching the waves. “It’s queer,” said Liv, “but there are never breakers like this on the other side of the island.” “No,” Heyerdahl replied, “but this is the windward side, there’s always a sea running on this side.” This prompted him to begin thinking about the geography: how the sea was always “rolling in from eastward, eastward, eastward” and how the “eternal east wind” was always pushing it up over the horizon to the islands.

  The first men who reached these islands knew well enough that this was so. . . . And we knew ourselves that far, far below the horizon to eastward, where the clouds came up, lay the open coast of South America. It was 4,300 sea miles away, and th
ere was nothing but sea between.

  An old Marquesan who was sitting with them then offered this tidbit of information: “Tiki,” he said, “was both god and chief. It was Tiki who brought my ancestors to these islands where we live now. Before that we lived in a big country beyond the sea.”

  That night when Heyerdahl went to bed, the stories of Tiki and his ancient homeland swirled in his mind, “accompanied by the muffled roar of the surf in the distance,” sounding, he thought, “like a voice from far-off times which . . . had something it wanted to tell.” Suddenly it struck him that the sculptures he had seen up in the forest, “the huge stone figures of Tiki,” as he called them, were “remarkably like the gigantic monoliths which are relics of extinct civilizations in South America.” And so, he wrote, “the whole thing began.”

  When the pair got back to Europe, Heyerdahl decided that he wanted to study the peoples of Polynesia. “The unsolved mysteries of the South Seas had fascinated me . . . and I had made my objective the identification of the legendary hero Tiki.” According to the ethnologist Edward Handy, Tiki was one of many gods in the Marquesan pantheon. He was a trickster figure who was also known as the first ancestor of men, whom he created through his union with a heap of sand. The word tiki was also used generically in the Marquesas, as it is in other parts of Polynesia, to mean figures carved in human or animal form that depict deified ancestors or family gods. In the past, Handy believed, the word had likely meant “a figure or design representing a procreating human progenitor, referring back always to the ultimate origin of man.” Heyerdahl, however, became convinced that Tiki was a historical figure. With the fresh gusts of the trade winds and the breakers uppermost in his mind, he concluded that Tiki was a founder figure who had come to the Marquesas from the east and that his roots should be sought in South America.