Sea People

by Christina Thompson

  But it seems likely: See Salmond, “Their Body Is Different,” 171.

  “opened a pathway to Te Po”: Anne Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 54.

  “drew all our people”: Robertson, Discovery of Tahiti, 154.

  “all our Decks was full”: Ibid., 154. See also Joan Druett, Tupaia: Captain Cook’s Tahitian Navigator (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), 17.

  “terror and amazement”: Gunson, “Cover’s Notes,” 220.

  At this, the Tahitian armada: See Robertson, Discovery of Tahiti, 156; John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty: For Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773), 1:225.

  “The mildness of the climate”: Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, The Pacific Journal of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, 1767–1768, trans. and ed. John Dunmore (London: Hakluyt Society, 2002), 63.

  “I was transported”: Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, A Voyage Round the World: Performed by the Order of His Most Christian Majesty, in the Years 1766, 1767, 1768, and 1769, trans. John Reinhold Forster (London: J. Nourse, 1772), 228–29, 244, 269, 239.

  A Man of Knowledge: Cook Meets Tupaia

  “soft and comfortable”: Joseph Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771, ed. J. C. Beaglehole, 2 vols. (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1962), 1:235.

  “All the birds we saw”: Richard Pickersgill quoted in Cook, Journals, 1:65, n. 2.

  “March’d along the shore”: Ibid., 1:70.

  “any thing that is made”: Ibid., 1:76

  “groves of Cocoa nut”: Banks, Journal, 1:252.

  “a most proper man”: Ibid., 1:312.

  “an extraordinary genius”: Quoted in Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 36, 175.

  “Man of Knowledge”: Banks, Journal, 1:381.

  The Tahitian word is tahu‘a: See E. S. Craighill Handy, Polynesian Religion (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1927), 149.

  “the names and ranks”: Banks, Journal, 1:381.

  an “indigenous intellectual”: Nicholas Thomas, Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain Cook (New York: Walker and Co., 2003), 21.

  “a S[outh]-Sea dog”: Banks, Journal, 1:343, 335, 348.

  “if we may credit the reports”: Ibid., 1:366.

  The name Fenua Ura: Beaglehole, Life of Cook, 174, n. 1; Cook, Journals, 1:291–94. See also Anne Salmond, “Voyaging Exchanges: Tahitian Pilots and European Navigators,” in Canoes of the Grand Ocean, ed. Anne Di Piazza and Erik Pearthree (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008), 38–46.

  They might be islands: See Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 203–4; Paul Geraghty, “Pulotu, Polynesian Homeland,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 102, no. 4 (1993): 362.

  Some of the names begin: See H. A. H. Driessen, “Outriggerless Canoes,” Journal of Pacific History 19, no. 4 (1984): 27.

  “nothing he ever did”: Beaglehole, Life of Cook, 69.

  “vague and uncertain”: Cook, Journals, 1:138, 117.

  “Tupia the Indian”: Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 175; Druett, Tupaia, xi.

  “cosmopolites by natural feeling”: Horatio Hale, Ethnography and Philology, vol. 6 of United States Exploring Expedition during the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842 (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1846), 14.

  “Thank heaven”: Banks, Journal, 1:312–13.

  “the likeliest person to answer”: Cook, Journals, 1:117.

  “Launchd out into the Ocean”: Banks, Journal, 1:329.

  Tupaia’s Chart: Two Ways of Seeing

  “etopa”: Banks, Journal, 1:329, n. 2.

  “we cannot find”: Cook, Journals, 1:157.

  “All these kind of birds”: Ibid., 1:159.

  “not the least visible sign”: Ibid., 1:161.

  “Now do I wish”: Banks, Journal, 1:396.

  “caused to be engraved”: Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations Made during a Voyage round the World, eds. Nicholas Thomas, Harriet Guest, and Michael Dettelbach (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996), 310–11.

  Even before they left: Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 204–5.

  “opaque with trans-cultural confusion”: Gordon R. Lewthwaite, “The Puzzle of Tupaia’s Map,” New Zealand Geographer 26 (1970): 1.

  “though not accurately”: Hale, Ethnography and Philology, 122.

  The key terms here: Ross, Pawley, and Osmond, Lexicon of Proto Oceanic, 2:136–37.

  “they concluded naturally”: Hale, Ethnography and Philology, 122.

  a mosaic: Anne Di Piazza and Erik Pearthree, “A New Reading of Tupaia’s Chart,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 116, no. 3 (2007): 321, 324. See also Geraghty, “Pulotu, Polynesian Homeland,” 354–55.

  “segmenting the circle”: C. Frake, quoted in Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 99.

  Using a model of this kind: Di Piazza and Pearthree, “A New Reading,” 327.

  An Aha Moment: A Tahitian in New Zealand

  “some in heaps”: Banks, Journal, 1:395–97.

  “many great smoaks”: Ibid., 1:400.

  “About an hundred”: Cook, Journals, 1:169, n. 2.

  “prodigious advantage”: Ibid., 1:291.

  “their antiquity and Legends”: Banks, Journal, 1: 454, 462–63.

  “There remains,” he wrote: Ibid., 2:37.

  “It is extraordinary”: Cook, Journals, 2:354.

  “the same language”: Ibid., 2:373, 275.

  “affinity”: William T. Jones, quoted in Benjamin W. Fortson IV, Indo-European Language and Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 8.

  The Greek stem: See Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 4; Fortson, Indo-European Language, 1.

  “very soft and tuneable”: Banks, Journal, 1:370.

  The number two: See Fortson, Indo-European Language, 131.

  Banks’s chart: See Banks, Journal, 1:371.

  Today Tongan is spoken: See Robert Blust, The Austronesian Languages (Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 2009), 44.

  Here the linguistic picture: See John Lynch, Pacific Languages (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998), map 9.

  “That the people who inhabit”: Banks, Journal, 1:371.

  more than a thousand languages: See Lynch, Pacific Languages, 45.

  “longer Voyages”: Joseph Banks, quoted in Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 212.

  Drowned Continents and Other Theories: The Nineteenth-Century Pacific

  The major stops: See I. C. Campbell, Worlds Apart: A History of the Pacific Islands (Christchurch, NZ: Canterbury University Press, 2003), 73–74.

  Poets like Keats: See Richard D. Fulton, “The South Seas in Mid-Victorian Children’s Imagination,” in Oceania and the Victorian Imagination, eds. Richard D. Fulton and Peter H. Hoffenberg (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013).

  “if the inhabitants”: Cook, Journals, 1:288, 154.

  “easier to populate”: Quoted in K. R. Howe, The Quest for Origins (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003), 123.

  As early as 1775: See Forster, Observations, 190.

  Other observers, coming along a bit later: See J. A. Moerenhout, Travels to the Islands of the Pacific Ocean, trans. Arthur R. Borden Jr. (1837; repr., Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 411. See also Alan Howard, “Origins and Migrations,” Polynesian Culture History: Essays in Honor of Kenneth P. Emory, eds. Genevieve A. Highland et al. (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1967), 49.

  An English missionary by the name of William Ellis: See William Ellis, Polynesian Researches during a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, 2 vols. (1829; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2:49.

  “abode of fire”: Julien Marie Crozet, Crozet’s Voyage to Tasmania, New Zealand, the Ladrone Islands, and the Philippines in the Years 1771–1772, trans. H. Ling Roth (London: Trus
love & Shirley, 1891), 70–71.

  “supposing a remnant”: William Wyatt Gill, Life in the Southern Isles (London: Religious Tract Society, 1876), 21.

  there has never been any scientific evidence: Even now there are reports from time to time of evidence of a lost continent in the Pacific, including the recent discovery of the underwater continent known as Zealandia. This is a fragment of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, which has now been found to extend farther underneath the ocean than was previously believed. This continent has nothing to do with the volcanic islands of the mid-Pacific, however, and predates the human settlement of the Pacific by tens of millions of years. See, for example, “Scientists Claim Existence of Drowned Pacific Ocean Continent,” Reuters, February 18, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-new-zealand-continent/scientists-claim-existence-of-drowned-pacific-ocean-continent-idUSKBN15X044.

  “merchant adventurer”: Borden, preface to Travels to the Islands, xi.

  “suddenly destroyed by the waters”: Moerenhout, Travels to the Islands, 390.

  “Mr. Moerenhout come now!”: Ibid., 189–90.

  “In the state of mind”: Ibid., 191.

  “it was only by dint”: Ibid., 194.

  “He was (or there was)”: Ibid., 210.

  “extreme elevation”: Ibid., 382–83.

  A World Without Writing: Polynesian Oral Traditions

  The advent of writing: See, for example, Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (New York: Routledge, 2002), chaps. 3, 4.

  “and that at a very advanced age”: S. Percy Smith, Hawaiki: The Original Home of the Maori, 4th ed. (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1921), 16– 17.

  “close to the living human lifeworld”: Ong, Orality, 49.

  “A circle would be called”: Ibid., 50–51.

  “abstractly sequential”: Ibid., 8–9.

  “science-like elements”: John Huth, “Losing Our Way in the World,” New York Times, July 20, 2013, Sunday Review, 6.

  But simply that, by enabling: See Ong, Orality, 45.

  “subjective and objective reactions”: Handy, Polynesian Religion, 6.

  Tregear was an Englishman: See K. R. Howe, “Tregear, Edward Robert,” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1993, Te Ara—The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2t48/tregear-edward-robert.

  “no white man has ever yet seen”: Edward Tregear, “Thoughts on Comparative Mythology,” Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute 30 (1897): 56–57. See also Margaret Orbell, Hawaiki: A New Approach to Maori Tradition (Christchurch, NZ: Canterbury University Press, 1991), 1–2.

  “the enquiry became general”: Niel Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas, 1797–1860 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978), 192–93.

  “I do not know”: Elsdon Best, Maori Religion and Mythology, part 1 (1924; repr., Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2005), 60.

  “At the time that turned”: Martha Warren Beckwith, ed. and trans., The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 7, 44–45.

  “Te Po-nui”: Best, Maori Religion and Mythology, part 1, 59.

  “realm of potential being”: Māori Marsden, quoted in Agathe Thornton, The Birth of the Universe (Auckland: Reed Books, 2004), 226.

  “Ideas of infinity”: Thornton, Birth of the Universe, 225.

  “first generation of growth”: Teuira Henry, Ancient Tahiti (1928; repr., Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprint, 1985), 341, 340. This chant has been reformatted slightly to make it easier to read.

  In Hawai‘i: See Beckwith, Kumulipo, 58.

  “Grove by copulating”: Alfred Métraux, Ethnology of Easter Island (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1940), 321.

  There were mixed motives: D. R. Simmons and B. G. Biggs, “The Sources of ‘The Lore of the Whare-Wananga,’” Journal of the Polynesian Society 79, no. 1 (1970): 24.

  The Aryan Māori: An Unlikely Idea

  According to this popular Māori myth: See, for example, Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race, as Furnished by Their Priests and Chiefs, 2nd ed. (Auckland: H. Brett, 1885; repr., Elibron Classics, Adamant, 2005), 1–3.

  “the layer above them”: Henry, Ancient Tahiti, 411, 347.

  “lift on high”: Homer, Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Classics, 1997), Book I, lines 63–64. In the Vedic tradition, the demiurge Indra is similarly tasked with propping up the sky, and one might even suggest a Norse echo of the concept in the image of Yggdrasil, the World Tree.

  They were also entirely familiar: See E. J. Michael Witzel, World Mythology: The Origins of the World’s Mythologies (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 129.

  “And the earth”: Gen. 1:2 (AKJV).

  “Before the ocean”: Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Brookes More (Boston: Cornhill, 1933), 3.

  Other scholars: Hesiod, “Theogony,” The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (London: William Heinemann, 1920), 87: “Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all . . . From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day.” Rigveda, quoted in Witzel, Origins, 107–9: “There was neither ‘being’ nor ‘nonbeing’ then, nor intermediate space, nor heaven beyond it. What turned around? Where? In whose protection? Was there water?—Only a deep abyss.” Snorre, The Younger Edda, trans. Rasmus B. Anderson (1901), Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18947/18947-h/18947-h.htm, chap. IV: “It was Time’s morning, / When there nothing was; / Nor sand, nor sea, / Nor cooling billows. / Earth there was not, / Nor heaven above. / The Ginungagap was, / But grass nowhere.”

  Another intriguing proposition: Witzel, Origins, 410.

  “great natural turn”: M. P. K. Sorrenson, Maori Origins and Migrations (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1979), 14–15.

  “until in the lapse”: Rev. Richard Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, or New Zealand and Its Inhabitants (London: Wertheim and Macintosh, 1855), 12, 8.

  “the mother of modern civilization”: Edward Tregear, The Aryan Maori (Wellington: George Didsbury, Government Printer, 1885), 6.

  It could be inferred: Fortson, Indo-European Language, 16–44.

  “To learn”: Tregear, Aryan Maori, 5.

  “remnants of a race”: John Rae, quoted in K. R. Howe, “Some Origins and Migrations of Ideas Leading to the Aryan Polynesian Theories of Abraham Fornander and Edward Tregear,” Pacific Studies 11, no. 2 (1988): 71.

  “Strange as it may sound”: Quoted in Howe, “Some Origins,” 73.

  “of a pastoral people”: Quoted in K. R. Howe, Singer in a Songless Land: A Life of Edward Tregear, 1846–1931 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1991), 40.

  An English example: Tregear, Aryan Maori, 27.

  “Knowing that the Maoris”: Quoted in Howe, Singer, 41.

  Combing the Māori lexicon: Tregear, Aryan Maori, 28.

  “cloak of heaven”: See Tiaki Hikawera Mitira, Takitimu (Wellington: Reed, 1972), 131, http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-MitTaki-t1-body-d2-d10.html.

  “crotchety but highly intelligent”: Howe, Singer, 56–57. See A. S. Atkinson, “The Aryo-Semitic Maori,” Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute 19 (1886): 556–76; Howe, “Some Origins,” 68.

  “cradle in Central Asia”: Sorrenson, Maori Origins, 18; review of An Account of the Polynesian Race, vol. 1, by Abraham Fornander, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 45 (February 9, 1878): 180–81.

  “primitive aliens”: Howe, Quest for Origins, 168.

  “seeking new homes”: Tregear, Aryan Maori, 82.

  A Viking in Hawai‘i: Abraham Fornander

  a rugged and daring tribe: R. J. McLean, A Book of Swedish Verse (London: Athlone Press, 1968), 57.

  “I will say nothing of the hardships”: Eleanor Harmon Davis, Abraham Fornander: A Biography (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1979),
32, 31.

  In 1847, he took: Davis, Abraham Fornander, 49–51.

  “I have a native wife”: Honolulu Times, December 13, 1849, quoted in Helen Geracimos Chapin, Shaping History: The Role of Newspapers in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996), 49.

  “holiest memory”: Quoted in Davis, Abraham Fornander, 123.

  The pandemic: See Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 235, 256.

  As early as the 1830s: See William Ellis, Polynesian Researches during a Residence of Nearly Eight Years in the Society and Sandwich Islands, 4 vols. (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1833), 1:89–93.

  “there not being persons”: Quoted in Robert C. Schmitt and Eleanor C. Nordyke, “Death in Hawai‘i: The Epidemics of 1848–1849,” Hawaiian Journal of History 35 (2001): 1–3.

  From a high: See Stephen J. Kunitz, Disease and Social Diversity: The European Impact on the Health of Non-Europeans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), appendix 3-1. See also Dening, Islands and Beaches, 239.

  Robert Louis Stevenson: Stevenson, In the South Seas, 26–27.

  “death coming in like a tide”: Ibid., 24.

  “as a reminder”: Abraham Fornander, An Account of the Polynesian Race: Its Origins and Migrations, 3 vols. (1877–1884; repr., Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1969), dedication.

  “bearing upon the ancient history”: Ibid., 1:iv.

  “maintain the greatest reserve”: Ibid., 1:v.

  “to a ‘common man’”: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1977), viii; Michael Reilly, “John White, Part Two: Seeking the Elusive Mohio: White and His Maori Informants,” New Zealand Journal of History 24, no. 1 (1990): 47.

  “in olden times”: Quoted in Jane McRae, “Maori Oral Tradition Meets the Book,” in A Book in the Hand: Essays on the History of the Book in New Zealand, eds. Penny Griffith, Peter Hughes, and Alan Loney (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000), 5–6.

  “embalm”: Michael Reilly, “John White: The Making of a Nineteenth-Century Writer and Collector of Maori Tradition,” New Zealand Journal of History 23, no. 2 (1989): 167.