by Brian Fagan
Tupaia carried a mental file of Polynesia with him. He listed islands, the number of days required to sail to them, and their direction, which Cook made up into a rough sketch map. Modern scholars believe that Tupaia could define an area bounded by the Marquesas in the northeast, the Tuamotus to the east, the Australs to the south, and the Cook Islands to the southwest, an area of 1.6 million square miles (2.5 million square kilometers). Even Fiji and Samoa to the west lay within his consciousness.
No later explorers interviewed Tahitian navigators. Many scholars assumed the Pacific Islands had been colonized by canoes blown accidentally far offshore. But in 1965, the English cruising sailor David Lewis encountered aged canoe navigators in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia. He learned how, far from land, they used the zenith passages of key stars, as well as swell direction, waves reflected off distant land, and even the flights of sea and land birds to make landfall on island archipelagoes far from the departure point. These navigators were also able to return to their homes safely, using the same signs of sea and sky. Determined to preserve a rapidly vanishing art, Lewis sailed his European-designed, oceangoing catamaran from Rarotonga in the Cook Islands to New Zealand, using only a star map and a Polynesian navigator to help him. In the 1970s, Lewis apprenticed himself to the pilots of the Caroline Islands, learning how they made passages with the aid of sun, moon, stars, and cloud and swell formations, even passing birds.
In the late 1960s, the anthropologist Ben Finney began long-term experiments with replicas of ancient Polynesian canoes. Finney’s first replica was Nalehia, a 40-foot (12-meter) copy of a Hawaiian royal canoe. Tests in Hawaii’s windy waters showed that the vessel could sail across the wind, so Finney planned a voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti and back, using a replica built from a composite of known canoe designs from throughout the Pacific Islands. Hokule’a, designed by the Hawaiian Herb Kawainui Kane, is 62 feet (19 meters) long, with double hulls and two crab-claw-shaped sails. Finney, the Micronesian navigator Mau Piailug, and a mainly Hawaiian crew sailed Hokule’a from Hawaii to Tahiti and back in 1976. This journey was followed by a two-year voyage around the Pacific using only indigenous pilotage. Thanks to the successful Hokule’a experiments, ancient Polynesian navigational skills have been recorded in writing as well as oral tradition for posterity.
Every voyager took ample food supplies, usually dried root crops, sometimes even chickens and pigs. Dried fish were a staple, as were catches made while under way. Fresh water was carried in gourds and used sparingly, being replenished during heavy rain showers. Most canoes were provisioned to be as self-sufficient as possible, but the crews must have eaten and drunk sparingly to eke out their food and water for as long a time as possible. In reality, few passages lasted more than a couple of weeks, except when sailing far offshore to Hawaii and in eastern Polynesia.
Five years later, on his third voyage, Cook lay at anchor off Easter Island, the most remote speck of land in Polynesia. By now, he had seen more of the Pacific and its indigenous inhabitants than any European explorer. Wherever he sailed, he witnessed remarkable similarities between island societies dispersed over thousands of miles. Cook marveled at their navigational abilities: “It is extraordinary that the same Nation should have spread themselves over all these isles in this vast Ocean from New Zealand to this island which is almost a fourth part of the circumference of the globe.”9 Having talked to Tupaia and other local pilots, he was in no doubt that the origins of the Polynesians lay in Southeast Asia and that their ancestors had sailed from island to island, from west to east. It is only in recent years that experiments with replica canoes and indigenous navigational methods have reconstructed ancient voyaging strategies.
HOW, THEN, DID Pacific settlement unfold and how did climate changes affect it? Thanks to an explosion of archaeological research over the past half century, we now know that colonization of the offshore Pacific began in the waters of the Bismarck Strait and the Solomon Islands in the far southwest, where a strong maritime tradition flourished as early as 1500 B.C. These “Lapita” people traded fine obsidian and other commodities over enormous distances, between islands hundreds of miles apart.10 They were farmers, but above all sailors, who developed outrigger canoes with sails and used navigational techniques that allowed them to voyage far from land, something very different from the simple line-of-sight pilotage that had brought much earlier canoes to the Solomon Islands from New Guinea and Southeast Asia before thirty thousand years ago.
Around 1200 B.C., long-distance voyages took Lapita canoes far beyond the Solomons, which had been the outer limit of human settlement for millennia. By 1100 to 900 B.C., Lapita families had settled in Fiji and in New Caledonia, also on Samoa. Within the brief compass of two to three centuries, a mere fifteen to twenty-five generations, Lapita seafarers had colonized islands over 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) of the offshore Pacific. Quite why they undertook these voyages of exploration and colonization, no one knows. Like the Norse, who suffered from land shortages and overcrowding, many Polynesians may have gone to sea because they had to. They lived in societies where property, house sites, ritual privileges, even esoteric knowledge were passed down to the eldest son. Junior siblings got the short end of the economic stick. Many of them struck out into the ocean in search of new lands to settle, where their families could find ample food.
Beyond Fiji and Tonga, the distances widen out to the Cooks and the Society Islands. There was, apparently, a pause before further voyages took people eastward from western Polynesia at about the time of Christ—the exact date is uncertain—and then on to the remotest islands of the central and southeastern Pacific during the late first millennium. Hawaii was settled by A.D. 800, New Zealand by 1000, perhaps earlier, and Rapa Nui by 1200, during the Medieval Warm Period.
IF THE LATEST radiocarbon dates are correct, the closing chapters of Polynesian voyaging unfolded during the centuries of the Medieval Warm Period. Was there, then, something unusual about passage-making conditions during the late first millennium?
Most of the time, the prevailing northeasterly and southeasterly trade winds blow on either side of the Intertropical Convergence Zone and are fueled by the Walker circulation, the powerful engine for El Niño events. As any small-boat sailor will tell you, sailing downwind in the trades is a paradisal experience. You sail at full speed for days on end, two jibs boomed out before the mast, a small part of the mainsail strapped in tight to dampen your rolling. Day and night, the ship sails herself effortlessly. You sit on watch at midnight in shorts and without shirts, the full moon high in the heavens. This is the ultimate in ocean sailing. But woe betide you if the winds reverse and blow from ahead. You slog miserably against lumpy seas and a nasty westerly, sick to your stomach and eager for the disturbance to pass.
Like modern yachts, Pacific canoes sail well with, and across, the wind. Modern replica canoes can sail at an angle of about 75 degrees to the wind (90 degrees is, of course, perpendicular to the wind).11 Even sailing “full and bye,” at a lesser angle to the wind, progress is slow. When pushed closer, the canoe slows down and slips away from the wind across its intended course. Like skippers everywhere before the days of internal combustion engines, Polynesian navigators waited for the trades to die down and for westerlies that would carry them in a direction that was normally upwind. Captain Cook, an expert seaman if ever there was one, well understood Polynesians’ tactics for sailing to windward, for he himself was used to waiting for favorable winds. Tupaia told him that “during the Months of Novr Decembr & January Westerly Winds with rain prevail & as the inhabitants of the Islands know well how to make proper use of the winds, there will no difficulty arise in trading or sailing from Island to island even tho’ they lie in an East & West direction.”12
Today, we have mountains of data on the Pacific trades, which confirm what Tupaia told Captain Cook. There are periods during the southern summer when the trade winds falter and westerlies prevail. In fact, the winds blow from the southwest or southeast; thi
s is ideal for east-sailing canoes, which perform best with the wind at an angle to the stern. The actual strategies for sailing east must have varied greatly, as many voyages would have begun in favorable westerly conditions, then experienced wind shifts as pressure systems moved across their course. In a remarkable series of experimental voyages, modern-day sailors have shown that eastbound voyages were entirely possible, provided that the sailors had patience and navigational expertise, and that they used indirect courses, always thinking ahead of their actual position.13
Westerly conditions are most prevalent during El Niño events. When the atmospheric pressure gradient over the Pacific reverses, the trades weaken and westerlies can blow for long periods, especially during the summer. These winds are usually strongest in the western and central Pacific, but they can reach as far as Rapa Nui and beyond. During major El Niños, canoes from Tonga could even have sailed direct as far as the Marquesas, where potsherds made of clay with minerals sourced to Fiji have been found.
For a long time, scientists assumed that the Medieval Warm Period brought higher temperatures and warmer conditions to the tropical Pacific, part of a global warming trend. Such conditions would have meant a higher incidence of El Niño events, commonly thought to be an accompaniment of warming. Recent studies of the Pacific trades have noted a weakening of the Walker circulation in response to warming. Did, in fact, the Medieval Warm Period bring more favorable voyaging conditions to the Pacific? This is a point of particular interest since the earliest known occupation of Rapa Nui, the remotest of all Polynesian islands, is now dated to A.D. 1200.
SUBTROPICAL RAPA NUI is the remotest inhabited landmass on earth, 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) from Chile to the east and 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometers) from Pitcairn Island to the west. The island covers 66 square miles (171 square kilometers) and is only 1,670 feet (510 meters) above sea level at its highest point, much lower than most Polynesian islands. It seems incredible that the Polynesians located this tiny dot in the Pacific, which is only some 8.5 miles (14 kilometers) across from north to south. The navigation is challenging enough with modern-day sextant and chronometer, even with a GPS. But the ancient canoe skippers located the island long before they actually sighted it, probably from the enormous flocks of nesting seabirds that live there, which could be sighted by an observant navigator as much as 186 miles (300 kilometers) before any land hove over the horizon.
The Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen sighted Rapa Nui on April 5, 1722, after a seventeen-day journey from Chile. He was astounded to be greeted by Polynesian speakers living on an island where the only watercraft were small, leak-prone canoes made of small fragments of wood stitched together with palm twine. Their homeland was treeless and poverty stricken, yet the inhabitants had managed to quarry and raise dozens of huge stone figures (moiae) that gazed silently out to sea. Where had the timber for seagoing canoes and for raising the statues come from? Half a century later, James Cook anchored off Rapa Nui. He described the islanders as “small, lean, timid, and miserable” and was equally puzzled by the lack of timber and of oceangoing canoes.
When did first settlement take place? The archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo have recently excavated the only sand dune on the island, at Anakena. They dug through superbly preserved archaeological layers to a depth of nearly 138 inches (350 centimeters). There they hit sterile clay and a primordial soil that contained artifacts and the distinctive tubular root molds of the giant, extinct Rapa Nui palm. The same layer yielded the bones of numerous dolphins, which could only have been taken in deep water from oceangoing canoes. Eight radiocarbon dates from this level put the earliest settlement of the island at A.D. 1200, the height of the Medieval Warm Period.14 The inhabitants were clearly able to fish from canoes far offshore and lived in a forested environment.
When the first canoes arrived, dense forests of huge Easter Island palms, some with trunk diameters of more than 6.5 feet (2 meters), covered the island. Within three centuries, the palms were extinct. So were twenty other tree species that once flourished on Rapa Nui. Two of the tallest trees, the toi (Alphitonia zizyphoides) and the evergreen (Elaeocarpus rarotongensis), grew to heights of 49 and 98 feet (30 and 15 meters) respectively, and were widely used in Polynesia for canoe hulls. All of these trees became extinct before 1500, as a result of intensive human exploitation of the thick forests for canoe timber, dwellings, levels and rollers for erecting moiae, and firewood, also from the depredations of imported rats. With no trees to build canoes, there was no way for the survivors of the resulting population crash to travel across the open Pacific to distant islands like Pitcairn and Mangareva, where deforestation also had disastrous consequences. The penalty of deforestation was complete isolation, for trade between Pitcairn and Mangareva ended by 1500, when commodities such as adze stone disappeared.
But how did canoes colonize Rapa Nui? The modern Hokule’a sailed from Mangareva to Rapa Nui in seventeen days in 1999, but she is a composite of several Polynesian canoe designs, with a relatively large sail area and an ability to work to windward that may have been superior to that of earlier outriggers. We do not know what earlier watercraft looked like, but they were certainly double-hulled and had rigs that were good across- and downwind. Their windward ability compared with the Hokule’a’s was probably limited, although we should remember that Norse knarrs turn out to sail much better to windward than people believed possible. Almost certainly, voyages of colonization were undertaken in periods of unusual westerly winds.
If ancient voyagers could sail in any direction, they would have left at any time. But with prevailing easterlies and canoes that could not sail well upwind, passages would have taken place sporadically. During El Niños, the easterly trade winds die down, and westerlies are common in January or February with an average rate of 3 to 5 knots (5.5 to 9.26 kilometers per hour). Such conditions would allow canoes traveling at a mean speed of 1.5 knots (2.7 kilometers per hour) to sail from western to eastern Polynesia in about twenty-two days at sea, if there were no calms or headwinds. Modern data suggest that the westerlies often did not extend far enough east during even major El Niños, but this does not mean they did not do so in the past. If they failed to discover land, they could always turn round and run before the trades, but we do not know whether the great voyages of discovery were one-way enterprises or made with the intention of returning. Much must have depended on political and social conditions at home, which might have made return impossible.
A double-hulled Tahitian canoe paddled by masked men, sketched by Philip de Bay, c. 1723. This is a small version of the much larger double-hulled canoes that sailed long distances. No pictures of such canoes survive, but this sketch gives a general impression of the type of hulls and sail.
The strongest El Niños occur during periods when they are most frequent, so the archaeologist Atholl Anderson and others believe that downwind voyaging to the east occurred during times of frequent west-erlies. Polynesian navigators had no computer models to assist them, but they must have been familiar with the prolonged westerly conditions and high humidity that descended over the islands at irregular intervals. A voyage of any distance to the east and into the unknown would have required several weeks of westerlies, a far longer period than that required for a short interisland passage. As we have seen, there are signs that El Niños were more prevalent during the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, as the Medieval Warm Period ended and the first settlement of Rapa Nui took place.
EVERYONE AGREES THAT ENSO events played a major role in ancient Pacific climate. The extent to which they affected Pacific voyaging is still intensely debated and we cannot yet be sure whether major El Niños really were significant factors in colonization. But we can be sure that the Polynesian islanders, like other people who base their lives around the sea, relied on an intimate knowledge of both maritime and terrestrial environments. If the Medieval Warm Period brought climatic conditions that were unusually favorable for long-distance navigation, these gifted sailors wer
e ready to capitalize on them.
CHAPTER 11
The Flying Fish Ocean
The heat was intense, the thermometer indicated 108 degrees. A hot, blinding sandstorm filled our eyes and nostrils with microbe laden dust, and the all-pervading stench from putrefying bodies, impregnated clothes, hair and skin.
—Louis Klopsch, The Christian Herald (1900)1
“FAMINE IS INDIA’S SPECIALTY. EVERYWHERE famines are inconsequential incidents; in India they are devastating cataclysms,” wrote a Victorian traveler who witnessed the horrors of the great Indian famine of 1896–99.2 No one knows how many people died of starvation and famine-related diseases. A conservative figure is 1.9 million. The suffering beggared description. The journalist Julian Hawthorne was Cosmopolitan Magazine’s special correspondent in India. He arrived in the heart of the famine by train, shocked to see families of corpses seated under trees by the tracks: “There they squatted, all dead now, their flimsy garments fluttering around them, except when jackals had pulled the skeletons apart, in the hopeless search for marrow.”3 In Jubbulport (Jabalpur) in central India, American missionaries took him to the market, where he was horrified by the contrast between the plump merchants and the “bony remnants of human beings” begging for grain. He visited more famine victims in the poorhouse: “The joints of their knees stood out between the thighs and shinbones as in any other skeleton, so did their elbows; their fleshless jaws and skulls were supported on necks like those of plucked chickens. Their bodies—they had none, only the framework was left.”4 As the historian Mike Davis remarks, Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1887 was “celebrated in carnage.” The gross inadequacy of relief efforts by the British Raj contributed to the disaster.