Not that these extraordinary voyages were all smooth sailing. Oral traditions suggest that at least half of those who set out across the ocean neither returned nor found safe passage to a new home.
The early navigators weren’t exactly travelling blind, however. With all the wisdom accumulated by generations of sailors and transmitted through staunch oral traditions, the pioneers who set off from Melanesia and headed east knew what they were looking for and how to find it. It’s thought many of the earliest relocations may have followed the seasonal migration paths of the birds that periodically crisscross the Pacific. The long-tailed cuckoo, for example, breeds and nests in New Zealand over summer before very wisely retreating to Tahiti at the approach of the icy fingers of the Kiwi winter. As the first Tahitians observed the life cycle of these birds, which took to the air en masse and headed south-west for a few months before returning to the tropics, they would have been fairly certain that a habitable land was within reach of the Polynesian ocean-going vessels.
However they did it, it worked. Within eighty generations, the Polynesians called almost all the Pacific’s archipelagos home. They had dispersed their culture over twenty-five million square kilometres of the planet’s surface.
SAM NEILL
When you look at the Pacific, there are just tiny little dots on this vast blue ocean. To be able to find those places just blows my mind. Easter Island – or Rapa Nui – it’s so remote from anything at all. Yet the Polynesians settled it hundreds of years ago. How did they find it? The pinpoint accuracy of getting around the Pacific in a canoe – finding a tiny atoll, the highest point of which is a palm tree – now that is a miracle of technology and knowledge.
In contrast, Europe was very late to the Pacific party. It wasn’t until a Spaniard, Vasco Núñes de Balboa, crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and became the first European to glimpse the western Pacific that Europeans even realised the ocean existed. When Balboa waded into the waters of San Miguel Gulf and raised a standard sacred to the Holy Virgin in one hand and a sword in the other, he was staking a claim to the Pacific in the name of the Spanish Crown without having the slightest idea of the scale of this new watery territory.
At the time, the general consensus amongst European geographers was that there was just one great ocean encircling the globe. That’s how Christopher Columbus got it wrong when he took off from Spain in search of a route to the Indies other than the protracted and perilous easterly approach via the Cape of Good Hope. When he landed in the Bahamas in 1492, he thought he was in Asia and was dead sure he had managed to find a westerly passage to the Indies. Hence: the ‘West Indies’. He was blissfully unaware that he was sixteen thousand odd kilometres off the mark. There were other opportunities for Europe to make the Pacific’s acquaintance – it’s likely that Marco Polo had glimpsed its waters during his time in China in the thirteenth century, but he would not have recognised it for what it was. Ditto the Portuguese expeditions of 1512 and 1513 that approached the Pacific from the west in search of the Spice Islands.
It wasn’t until 1520, when Ferdinand Magellan passed through the strait that still bears his name and entered the Pacific, that Europe began to have an inkling of what lay beyond the American continent. The Portuguese navigator, who was confusingly working for the Spanish Crown, named the vast expanse of water Mar Pacifico (‘Peaceful Sea’) if only because its relative calm was a pleasant change of pace after the washing machine–scale turbulence he had experienced in the passage through Tierra del Fuego. Thanks to some unwittingly clever political manoeuvring, the vast majority of Magellan’s placid waters were already under Spanish control. They just didn’t know what that meant yet. As for the ancient and well-established societies that lived there already, they had no idea about the storm clouds that were gathering beyond the horizon.
The shift in the Pacific’s destiny came about, as such things so often did back then, as the result of a papal edict. On 7 June 1494, whether the world wanted it or not, it found itself chopped in two. The Spanish-born Pope Alexander VI bisected the globe along a demarcation line running from pole to pole, assigning one hemisphere to the Spanish and the other to the Portuguese. The Portuguese cried foul and accused the Pope of unfair bias; after some minor squabbling, the line was shifted slightly and ratified in 1506 by a pontiff deemed more impartial, the Italian-born Pope Julius II who also, incidentally, commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel. Ultimately, the Treaty of Tordesillas resulted in a line that ran around the globe from a point roughly 370 leagues – 1900 kilometres or so – west of the Cape Verde Islands. At the time no thought was given to what this meant for the Pacific, because no European knew it existed. All the Spanish and Portuguese cared about was control of the New World. The line placed Brazil in the Portuguese realm and the rest of the Americas went to Spain. Which is why, in case you’ve ever wondered, Brazilians speak Portuguese while the rest of South America uses Spanish.
It’s also why the westernmost borders of the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria run along the same line of longitude as the border between Papua New Guinea and West Papua. The Dutch named the western, or nominally Portuguese, portion of the Australian continent ‘New Holland’. When Cook took possession of the eastern coastline and it was subsequently named ‘New South Wales’, the lands corresponded to what would have been the Spanish Australian territories – which the Spaniards had never tried to claim.
And when Indonesia seized Netherlands New Guinea in 1962, they justified it by invoking the Treaty of Tordesillas that ran through the island – the same line that formed the border of New South Wales, which for the first half of the nineteenth century included the future state of Victoria.
But that was yet to come. In the eighteenth century when Cook embarked on his first voyage, the enormous body of water that lapped the shores of three continents was largely unknown to Europeans. The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English explorers who had dipped toes into its briny depths prior to Cook had done so in a tentative manner, using its waters as little more than a passageway to get from A to B. Even the Spanish, whose galleon trade route operated in the Pacific between 1565 and 1815, just used its prevailing winds as the maritime equivalent of a super highway, rarely if ever wandering off the well-travelled track they established on the fortieth latitude. At least one Spanish vessel a year passed across the Pacific between Manila and Acapulco, carrying ivory, silk, spices and porcelain from Asia to the Spanish territories in America. From there they were transported overland and then across the Atlantic to a European populace hungry for ‘exotic’ knick-knacks. Heading back in the other direction was silver, sourced from American mines and highly sought after in Asia.
There was a fundamental difference between the original inhabitants of the Pacific and the early European explorers. For the Polynesians, the ocean was home.
MATAHI TUTAVAI
We are ocean people. That’s what defines us and our culture. That’s what our ancestors were made of . . . salt water.
It was here that they had established a complex network of trade routes and a shared culture. But for Europeans, the Pacific was a daunting, expansive and barren space that was the antithesis of their definition of ‘civilisation’. To them, ‘civilisation’ meant a kingdom of sovereign nations that shared, and frequently tussled over, terrestrial borders. In the Western psyche, to be lost at sea was an existential nightmare.
And get lost they did. In the eighteenth century more Europeans died at sea than in naval warfare because, more often than not, ship captains had no idea where they were, which made avoiding sandbanks and reefs rather challenging. Regardless of a chart’s accuracy, it’s next to useless if you can’t pinpoint your location. The missing factor in this equation was an accurate way to measure longitude. Latitude was easy – all a ship’s captain had to do was calculate the angle of the sun above the horizon relative to the ship’s position and work out its relative proximity to the equator. But longitude was a great deal tric
kier. This meant European navigators were forced to hug coastlines – in itself a rather dangerous pastime – in order to identify a point at which they could break out into open water travelling east or west along what they hoped would be the correct line of latitude to reach their intended destination. It sounds a great deal easier than it was.
Intent on solving the problem, in 1714 the British government offered an eye-wateringly generous prize to crack the longitude code: £20,000, or 3.5 million of today’s pound sterling. Astronomer Edmond Halley, he of the comet fame, had proposed that by measuring the passage of the planet Venus as it passed between earth and the face of the sun from various viewpoints on the earth’s surface, it would be possible to calculate the earth’s distance from the sun. This was key to calculating longitude. Not that he’d have the chance to test his theory in person. Unfortunately for Halley, who died in 1742, the Passage of Venus is such an infrequent event that he was long gone before it recurred; it occurs in pairs eight years apart with a century between events. The next passage was scheduled for 1761 and 1769.
But Halley’s peers in the Royal Society weren’t going to let all his good work go to waste. After lobbying King George III, the president of the Society, the Earl of Morton, secured royal assent and financial backing to send a voyage to the South Seas in order to observe and record the Passage of Venus. The earl’s case was based on the argument that a great deal more than scientific curiosity was at stake – it was a matter of national pride.
JAMES DOUGLAS, THE EARL OF MORTON (1702–1768), Scottish Scientist and President of the Royal Society 1764–1768
The British Nation have been justly celebrated in the learned world, for their knowledge of astronomy, in which they are inferior to no nation upon Earth, ancient or modern; and it would cast dishonour upon them should they neglect to have correct observations made of this important phenomenon.
This was why James Cook headed off into the big blue. He did so with the most cutting-edge navigational technology of the time. But judged by today’s standards, once he left Old Blighty, Cook was on his own with the maritime equivalent of a couple of sticks to spark up a fire. Astronaut Neil Armstrong put it this way when he compared his own journey to the moon with Cook’s circuit of the Pacific: ‘at least we were in touch with mission control’.
SAM NEILL
The sheer guts of the man – to go, blind, into a place that was virtually unknown in Europe. That takes remarkable bravery. That’s why I admire Cook so much.
Yes, Cook’s navigational achievements were remarkable. But when he arrived on Tahiti, he encountered a race of people who had mastered open ocean navigation many centuries before he did. If it was so difficult for Cook and his peers, he must have wondered how on earth the Polynesians had done it.
And so we meet the theory of ‘accidental drift’. Championed by the nineteenth-century Australian clergyman John Dunmore Lang as a way to explain Polynesian settlement of the Pacific, it requires us to accept that entire families – who happened to be accompanied by their dogs, pigs and conveniently transplanted paper mulberry trees and banana palms – were set adrift and off course on the high seas, then carried by benevolent winds to welcoming, uninhabited islands. In short, the theory removed Polynesians’ agency from the equation and cast them in the role of passive subjects tossed about the Pacific at nature’s whim. There are two reasons this theory may have gained such traction and survived well into the 1970s. Possibly it was fuelled by a Western inability to accept that something the European navigators found so challenging had been mastered by another race thousands of years beforehand. But a less generous interpretation is that it’s easier to justify dispossessing a group of people who just happened to stumble on a place through dumb luck than it is to take a land that was chosen by another society as its home.
Cook wasn’t so quick to dismiss the skills of the Polynesian navigators. He knew the Polynesian settlement of the Pacific was far too complicated to attribute to a series of lucky breaks. He may have been disparaging of his own lack of formal education, but he had an intuitive intelligence and remarkable powers of observation and deduction. Cook came from a humble background and in the absence of good family connections forged a naval career through hard work, exemplary skills and the patronage of powerful men who recognised his abilities. He didn’t receive his commission as lieutenant until relatively late in life – he was just shy of forty, which in the eighteenth century was high time to hang up your tricorne hat. The Royal Navy was every bit as hierarchical as you would imagine; most commissioned officers had more than one high-society feather in their cap and came from a bloodline peopled by the landed gentry or, at the very least, (shudder) educated professionals. Cook had none of that and was, most likely, all the better for it.
When he encountered people in the Marquesas Islands who could understand the Polynesian dialect despite the 1600 kilometres that separated them, he reached the rather sensible conclusion that the two groups were related and in regular contact with each other. And this wasn’t the first time it occurred to Cook that these people were related; journal entries from his first voyage show he was thinking about this even then.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
These people sail in those seas from island to island for several hundred leagues, the sun serving them for a compass by day and the moon and stars by night. When this comes to be proved we shall be no longer at a loss to know how the islands lying in those seas came to be peopled, for if the inhabitants of Uleitea have been at islands laying 2 or 300 leagues to the westward of them it cannot be doubted but that the inhabitants of those western islands may have been at others as far westward of them and so we may trace them from island to island quite to the East Indias.
Over 150 years earlier, the Dutch had witnessed the Polynesians embarking on open ocean voyages. Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten were sailing between Tonga and Samoa in 1616 when they crossed paths with a convoy of canoes laden with trade goods. These Polynesian traders were neither lost, nor drifting – accidentally or otherwise.
MOETAI BROTHERSON, Mā’ohi Tribe, French MP
At a time when most European sailors were just following the coasts, our ancestors were crossing the oceans without any compasses. I wish I could go back to a time where it was normal to cross the ocean and Polynesian people were reaching Asia and America. We have evidence of that. It must have been an incredible time.
In order to ensure the British could become masters of the high seas, Cook was tasked with journeying to King George’s Island, as Tahiti was then known to the British, to observe the Passage of Venus across the face of the sun. As the big day approached – 3 June 1769 – Cook was nervous. Or as nervous as a man like Cook could be. This was, literally, a twice-in-a-lifetime event, and he had missed it the first time. It was also one that he had travelled halfway around the world to witness. The one thing that’s rather crucial to the correct observation of the sun is that one can see it. Clouds rather spoil the fun. The day dawned, and he held his breath.
Appearance of Venus. The transit of Venus on 3 June 1769, as sketched by Cook and the astronomer Charles Green. A deceptively simple drawing that had profound consequences for navigation for nearly two centuries.
National Library of Australia, 2564210
He had nothing to worry about. From the island of Tahiti, Cook and astronomer Charles Green observed the tiny black silhouette of Venus cross the blazing disc of the sun from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. To cover all his bases, Cook sent Charles Clerke to the other side of the island to make the same observations, as did Banks on the nearby island of Mo’orea. Cook was concerned about some discrepancies in their reading. Due to what can best be described as a ‘droplet’ effect, which meant the outline of the planet distorted as it passed the outer rim of the sun, Cook and Green couldn’t agree on the exact time the planet entered and exited the sun. But they needn’t have worried. Once the results were combined with all the other results from the many observat
ion points around the world, a figure was calculated that gave a distance between the earth and the sun that we now know was just 3 per cent off the mark.
As they watched what was going on, the Tahitians must have been perplexed. They, too, studied the planet Venus. They knew it as Ta’urua-nui, the beautiful eldest daughter of the mother of all stars, Ātea. Ta’urua-nui was also a Polynesian navigational star. But that’s where the common ground with the British navigators ended.
For a start, while Cook and his men pored over charts and recorded everything in their journals and ledgers, the Tahitians did not write. Everything that was transmitted from generation to generation was communicated orally, most often in the form of a song. This was also true of the secrets of Polynesian navigation. Each island had a guild of navigators whose members enjoyed high social status and protected their trade secrets fiercely – and these were secrets worth protecting. They were the tricks of the trade that allowed the Polynesians to travel long distances across open water, not by measuring, calculating and consulting almanacs, but by observing the world around them.
MATAHI TUTAVAI
Navigators use everything around them. Signs they see in the sky, birds and clouds. They read the weather, but also the stars, and the moon as well as the sun. The navigators grew up doing just that out on the water. You learn your own limits, both physically and mentally. On the canoe, it’s such a small place. Working together on the water can be really powerful. The canoe is an island, and the island is a canoe. Whatever experience you get on the va’a (‘canoe’), it’s your responsibility to bring it back to the land to the community, so all the community can share that experience with you.
The Pacific Page 5