But there was another aspect of Heyerdahl’s theories that did not attract quite so much attention but was, in its way, even more important. This was his insistence that the first settlers of the Pacific were at the mercy of the elements and that no matter where they had originally come from—Asia, Peru, British Columbia—they could only ever run before the wind. Although Heyerdahl sometimes asserted that “the old Polynesians were great navigators,” he did not actually credit them with much ability. As one writer put it, Heyerdahl “systematically underrated” both the Polynesians’ skill as sailors and “the excellence of their sea-going craft.” But he was not alone. Following nearly two centuries in which Polynesian navigational ability had been largely taken for granted, the mid-twentieth century saw a lurch in the direction of doubt about their capacities as the question of whether Polynesians were really navigators at all—whether they had ever been sailing, as opposed to drifting—suddenly took center stage.
Drifting Not Sailing
Andrew Sharp
Tupaia’s map with island screens, in The Settlement of Polynesia: A Computer Simulation by Michael Levison, R. Gerard Ward, and John W. Webb (Minneapolis, 1973).
THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS.
IN 1956, AN iconoclastic New Zealand historian by the name of Andrew Sharp published what would come to be seen as “one of the most provocative studies ever in Pacific history.” His book, inoffensively titled Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific, argued that the longest intentional journey ever made by any Polynesian voyager was no more than three hundred miles; that no sea gap larger than this had ever been crossed on purpose; and that there had thus been “no deliberate colonization” of Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, the Tuamotus, the Marquesas, New Zealand, Hawai‘i, or Easter Island.
Inside certain island clusters, like the Fiji–Tonga–Samoa region and the Tahiti–Tuamotu archipelagoes, Sharp conceded that Polynesians had been able to travel backward and forward, to set out for islands, find them, and safely return. But beyond the three-hundred-mile limit, he argued, any kind of intentional navigation was impossible. The problem, in Sharp’s view, was the absence of instruments; without sextants, compasses, and something to keep time, it was simply not possible to keep track of where one was on the open ocean. There were invisible currents, fluctuating winds, and no fixed reference points apart from the celestial bodies, which were useful only up to a point. “Stars do not shine during the day, daytime is much longer than the night, and the sun is a poor navigation guide.” Fogs, cloud cover, and storms were a perpetual hazard, and a clear, continuous view of the heavens was a “miraculous event.” Even European navigators with instruments were often metaphorically at sea. While Polynesian sailors deserved their reputation as “outstanding voyagers” within the defined three-hundred-mile limit, “the myth of deliberate long off-shore voyages in the days before navigation instruments” was not, Sharp insisted, “supported by any evidence.”
The issue was evidence—specifically, which kinds of evidence Sharp considered admissible. He begins—as does almost everyone who tells this story—with the testimony of the ur-eyewitness, Captain Cook. But the passage that interests Sharp comes not from Cook’s first voyage and his encounter with Tupaia, but from his third and final voyage, and it involves a different Tahitian, known as Mai. Mai had been brought to England in 1774 by the captain of one of Cook’s companion vessels and, against all odds, had survived the experience. (Banks had arranged for him to be inoculated against smallpox, which certainly helped.) A year later, when Cook set out on his last voyage to the Pacific, one of his tasks was to return Mai to Tahiti.
On the way, Cook passed through what are now known as the Cook Islands, a scattered archipelago of islands lying to the south and west of Tahiti. On the island of Atiu, Mai discovered four of his countrymen—four Tahitians—who told him that about ten years earlier they had set out on a journey from Tahiti to Ra‘iatea, a comparatively short passage of 130 miles. They had somehow missed their target, and after a long period at sea, they sighted Atiu. By this time they were nearly five hundred miles southwest of where they wanted to be; just five of the original twenty were still alive, and these were clinging to the hull of their overturned vessel. The people of Atiu rescued them and absorbed them so completely into their own society that the castaways no longer had any desire to return home. “This circumstance,” wrote Cook in his journal, “very well accounts for the manner the inhabited islands in this Sea have been at first peopled; especially those which lay remote from any Continent and from each other.” Here, in other words, was a method by which the remote islands of Polynesia might have been settled—by voyagers who’d become lost at sea.
This was quite a different conclusion from the one Cook had reached on his first voyage to the Pacific, when, in conversation with Tupaia, he first turned these ideas over in his mind. Then he had written: “From all the accounts we can learn, these people sail in those seas from Island to Island for several hundred Leagues [about a thousand miles], the Sun serving them for a compass by day and the Moon and Stars by night. When this comes to be prov’d we Shall be no longer at a loss to know how the Islands lying in those Seas came to be people’d.”
Cook is certainly the most knowledgeable and trustworthy eyewitness of the period, but even his testimony can be tricky. In between these two voyages there had been another, a long, arduous expedition with two island sweeps and a frigid circumnavigation of the South Pole. Thus, by 1777 he had been at sea almost continuously for a decade, thousands of miles from home in unknown waters, often in dangerous circumstances, responsible for the lives and health of hundreds of men. The man who emerges from the journal of the third voyage is not the same as the one who first took such a keen interest in Tupaia’s lists and charts. He is, as his biographer puts it, “a man tired, not physically in any observable way, but with that almost imperceptible blunting of the brain . . . His apprehensions as a discoverer . . . not so constantly fine as they had been; his understanding of other minds . . . not so ready or sympathetic.” The Cook of the third voyage is harder, crankier, less given to wonder, and less inclined to give Polynesians—or anyone else, for that matter—the benefit of the doubt.
Sharp, however, saw the matter differently. In the passage from Cook’s third journal he read a necessary and corrective shift away from conjecture and speculation and toward concrete and objective evidence. Sharp argued that in what he called the “authentic record”—meaning the written record of the Pacific in the post-European period—there was not a single instance of deliberate long-distance voyaging. There were, however, innumerable examples of drift or accidental voyages. Drawing from the accounts of missionaries, whalers, naval captains, and other early European observers, Sharp recounted a number of stories about Polynesian castaways: a group of Tahitians blown more than thirteen hundred miles to an island just east of Samoa; a family from the Tokelaus swept more than twelve hundred miles southeast to Mangaia; a canoe from Aitutaki that finished up a thousand miles west in the Tongan archipelago after nearly five months at sea.
He related in detail a story about three canoes from an island in the Tuamotus that set out for Tahiti (240 miles west) with 150 people on board. They had almost reached Mehetia (the first signpost, at 170 miles) when a westerly gale sprang up. The canoes were battered by ferocious winds and swamped by enormous seas; the three lost sight of one another, and two were never seen again. The third, with its complement of forty-eight men, women, and children, survived the storm and bravely set sail again, only to be becalmed. Then the food and water ran out and half the people died. A second storm came, bringing “life-giving” rain but also driving them still farther back in the direction from which they’d come. By the time they finally cast up on an uninhabited atoll, they had traveled more than 400 miles in the wrong direction and were now 650 miles from where they wanted to be.
This, then, was Sharp’s model for how the islands of Polynesia had been settled: accidentally, through voyages arising fro
m exiles and storms. Many of Sharp’s critics later referred to these journeys as “drift voyages,” though Sharp himself was adamant that there was an important distinction between “drifting” and “accidental voyaging.” Polynesians, he insisted, were able seamen who knew very well how to control their canoes. It was just that, over long distances or in bad weather, they could not keep track of where they were. They could not “re-set their courses when blown away . . . or when committed to unfamiliar waters.” They could “exercise a choice” about the direction in which they sailed, but since they soon became lost “in the trackless wastes of the vast Pacific Ocean,” they could not know where to go.
This distinction between sailors who had lost their way and hapless drifters was not so clear to some, however, and there were implications of Sharp’s argument that he seemed unwilling to acknowledge. “No Polynesian,” he wrote complacently, “need be in the slightest degree disturbed about the impact” of this accidental voyaging theory “on his genealogy or his tribal history. Obviously the Polynesians had ancestors, and obviously they came in canoes. The only thing that needs to be revised is the manner of their arrival.” They could not take credit for deliberately exploring the Pacific or discovering their islands, but they should take pride in the fact that their ancestors had survived “such a long succession” of unintentional voyages. New Zealand Māori, as the inhabitants of the last islands to be settled, were the inheritors of a particularly impressive record of survival and adaptation. They might not have been deliberate navigators, Sharp argued, but they were “healthy, hardy and optimistic, taking life as it came, as their forebears who were borne to distant islands had done many times before.”
There is something quite tone-deaf about this, even for 1956. The argument, wrote one of Sharp’s critics, owed more “to ancient prejudices which seem now to be deep-rooted in the European psyche” than “to any genuine understanding of Oceanic life and culture.” The Māori scholar Pei Te Hurinui Jones was more direct: “My first reaction to the theme of the book,” he wrote, “was decidedly hostile. I felt that Andrew Sharp had set out with the purpose of discrediting the achievements of our Polynesian ancestors.” Like many, Jones considered the term “accidental,” when applied to Polynesian voyaging, to be “unfortunate” and suggested that the voyages that had led to the discovery of islands “were as deliberate as the first voyage of Christopher Columbus.” A better term for such journeys, he suggested, might be “voyages of exploration.”
THERE CAN BE little doubt that Sharp enjoyed setting the cat among the pigeons. The historian K. R. Howe tells a funny story from his own undergraduate days at the University of Auckland in the mid-1960s. Sharp, who had been invited to give a history lecture, introduced himself to the students with a wave of his hand, declaring, “I stand before you as a heretic!” “None of us had heard of him before,” writes Howe, “and because we had done Luther in the previous lecture, we thought we were about to get a talk on the Reformation.” But while undergraduate history majors might not have realized it, Sharp’s book had generated so much heat among professional anthropologists and historians that a special volume of responses was even then being prepared, one that would run to three editions. In response to this, Sharp rewrote and reissued his own book, noting in the preface to the new volume that the first edition had received “upwards of a hundred published notices” and that he had engaged in “a dozen protracted and interesting exchanges of letters” and “2,191 oral discussions” of his ideas. None of these had caused him to change his view on any of the essential points. “I have yet to hear of a fact or read an argument,” he wrote, “which impugns the basic contentions of the former book.”
But Sharp, in his queer, intransigent way, had crystallized some important problems. One of his most “heretical” assertions was that Polynesian oral traditions were essentially of no use in determining what had happened in the past. It was a fundamental mistake, he argued, to seek answers to historical questions in this quarter. “Polynesians,” he argued, “were making stories and poetry, not writing history.” Their voyaging tales were filled with “mystical and figurative” elements—ancestors who traveled by rainbow or on the backs of birds, or who floated across the sea on a piece of pumice or traveled from island to island by bending a tree. It was neither “scientific” nor “objective” to cherry-pick these accounts, selecting only those bits that seemed to support the theory of long-range voyaging and discarding the rest as so much embellishment, as, he claimed, “traditionalists” like Smith and Fornander had done.
Sharp had staked out an extreme and in many ways unpopular position. And yet, he also seemed to have tapped into a broad concern. For some time, the feeling had been growing among anthropologists and historians that the so-called traditionalists of the late nineteenth century had given too much credence to Polynesian accounts and that the time had come for a reevaluation of the conclusions that had been drawn from this material. Sharp, for all his irritating tendentiousness, wrote one anthropologist, “echoed the doubts of many other scholars who have not had the courage to place their views in print.”
Sharp’s intervention had the effect of opening a floodgate, and a torrent of books and articles followed, questioning the “authenticity” of canonical sources of Polynesian mythology. This was an easy one for European scholars because, of course, it was quite true that Smith, Fornander, and the others had been unsophisticated in their methods and had brought their own ideas and longings to the project. But for Polynesians, the implications of this new angle were complex. On the one hand, it led to a more thoughtful approach to Polynesia’s oral history and a deeper appreciation of the complex process by which Polynesian traditional knowledge had been converted to historical documents—including the role that Polynesians themselves had played. At the same time, some of the stories being “debunked” had come to be understood as cherished history, and the idea that profound and seemingly ancient Polynesian traditions had been “invented” by nineteenth-century Europeans was, quite naturally, felt as a blow.
The nuanced view, as represented by Te Rangi Hiroa, for example, was that the traditions were essentially poetic but that this did not disqualify them as sources for history. It was essentially a matter of interpretation: being too literal put one at risk of losing “the inner thought through the outer garb.” Citing a widespread myth in which the demigod Maui fishes up the islands of Polynesia with a magic hook, he suggested that the idea of an island being pulled from the sea is so obviously untrue that we overlook its real meaning as “the echo of a traditional Polynesian explorer who by discovering a new island literally fished it up out of the depths of the unknown.” But this kind of argument was gradually losing its appeal in a world increasingly preoccupied with “precision and definiteness.” What anthropologists and historians in the mid-twentieth century seemed to want was something almost mathematical, and in 1964 that was exactly what emerged.
SHARP’S ARGUMENT HINGED on the idea that the original settlers of Polynesia had been carried to the islands by currents and blown there by winds. But while vast numbers of claims and counterclaims had been made regarding the influence of meteorology, no one had ever attempted to assess the statistical probability of a canoe being driven from one part of Polynesia to another.
Then, one morning in 1964, two geographers at University College London met over coffee to discuss the value of computer simulations in solving certain kinds of problems. The ideal type of problem would be one involving a system with known dynamics but many variable elements. Its complexity would be such that only by running a huge number of scenarios could the likelihood of any given outcome be determined—a problem, in other words, with too many permutations for the human mind to manage. One of the geographers, John Webb, was visiting from the United States, but the other, Gerard Ward, was a New Zealander, and later, during a relaxing soak in the tub, it occurred to him that the drift hypothesis of Polynesian settlement was a problem of precisely this type. A well-designed sim
ulation, even if it could not provide “an unqualified yes or no,” might give a persuasive answer to the question of whether the islands of Polynesia could have been discovered by drift voyaging alone.
Of course, such a project could not be undertaken without the help of a computer scientist with access to a large computer, and so Michael Levison, of Birkbeck College, came on board. Levison, who worked for many years on computing applications in the humanities—one of his projects concerned the authorship of the Epistles of St. Paul—remembers the period as one in which researchers were just beginning to realize what computers could do. “All sorts of people would show up” with projects, he recalls, some of which were quite interesting, while others were “decidedly odd.” The Polynesian problem fell into the former category, and Levison agreed to begin writing and testing a program while the geographers set about amassing the data required to make such a simulation work.
The data for this model consisted primarily of information about winds and currents over the test area, which is to say, most of the Pacific. It was gathered from more than five thousand tables of meteorological information collected by British naval and merchant vessels since the mid-nineteenth century and tabulated by the Marine Division of the United Kingdom Meteorological Office. For the purpose of the study, a vast rectangle from Australia to South America and from Hawai‘i to New Zealand was divided up into five-degree “Marsden squares,” boxes defined by lines of latitude and longitude. Wind and current probability matrices were devised for every month of the year for every one of the 392 squares. For winds, these included both speed (measured from 0 to 9 on the Beaufort scale) and direction (any one of sixteen compass points, plus “calms and variable winds,” a no-direction category). Currents came in eight different speeds (0–7) and from any one of sixteen compass points.
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