History of Oceania

• 1. Introduction

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  The history of Oceania spans some of the widest distances ever crossed by people in canoes, and one of the longest stretches of human time anywhere on Earth. The region was settled across a staggering range, from around 70,000 years ago in Near Oceania to roughly 3,000 years ago in Remote Oceania. It takes in Australia, Easter Island, Fiji, Hawaii, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Western New Guinea, and the scattered island nations of the Pacific.

  Mungo Man, the earliest definite human remains found so far in Australia, has been dated at about 40,000 years old. Yet some researchers push the arrival of Indigenous Australians' ancestors back as far as 125,000 years ago. How did people reach lands separated by thousands of kilometres of open water? Who built a stone city in the sea, and why did Europeans take so long to find these islands? And what happened when sailing ships, missionaries, and nuclear bombs finally arrived?

• 2. The First Voyagers

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  Indigenous Australians migrated from Africa to Asia around 70,000 years ago and arrived in Australia around 50,000 years ago. They are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent and nearby islands. The Torres Strait Islanders are indigenous to the Torres Strait Islands, at the northernmost tip of Queensland near Papua New Guinea. The term Aboriginal traditionally applies only to the indigenous people of mainland Australia, Tasmania, and some adjacent islands, while Indigenous Australians covers both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

  The first settlers of Australia, New Guinea, and the large islands just to the east arrived between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago, when Neanderthals still roamed Europe. The original inhabitants of Melanesia were likely the ancestors of present-day Papuan-speaking people. Migrating from Southeast Asia, they reached as far east as the main islands of the Solomon Islands, including Makira and possibly smaller islands beyond.

  The Austronesian peoples migrated into the area somewhat more than 3,000 years ago. Along the north coast of New Guinea and the islands to its north and east, they came into contact with the pre-existing Papuan-speaking populations. Kayser and colleagues proposed that, from this area, a very small group speaking an Austronesian language departed east to become the forebears of the Polynesians.

  The diversity that developed among Melanesians is striking. Melanesians of some islands are one of the few non-European peoples, and the only dark-skinned group outside Australia, known to have blond hair.

• 3. Ghosts In The Genome

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  A genetic study published by Temple University in 2008 overturned an assumption. Based on genome scans and more than 800 genetic markers across a wide variety of Pacific peoples, it found that neither Polynesians nor Micronesians have much genetic relation to Melanesians. Both groups are instead strongly related to East Asians, particularly Taiwanese aborigines. The Polynesian ancestors, having developed their sailing outrigger canoes, appear to have moved through the Melanesian area quickly and kept going east, leaving little genetic evidence behind them.

  The same study found a high rate of genetic differentiation among groups within the Melanesian islands, distinguished by island, language, topography, and geography. That diversity built up over tens of thousands of years of settlement, long before the Polynesian ancestors ever arrived. Populations in coastal areas developed differently from those in isolated mountainous valleys.

  Svante Paabo's work on the Denisova hominin, an ancient human species discovered in 2010, took the research somewhere stranger still. He found that people of New Guinea share 4 to 6 percent of their genome with the Denisovans, evidence that ancient ancestors of the Melanesians interbred with these humans in Asia. The Denisovans are considered cousins to the Neanderthals. Both groups migrated out of Africa, with the Neanderthals going into Europe and the Denisovans heading east about 400,000 years ago, a conclusion drawn from a fossil found in Siberia.

• 4. The Venice Of The Pacific

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  Micronesia began to be settled several millennia ago, though theories about its first arrivals compete. The earliest archaeological traces have been found on the island of Saipan, dated to 1500 BCE or slightly before. The ancestors of the Micronesians settled there over 4,000 years ago. A decentralized chieftain-based system eventually gave way to a more centralized culture centred on Yap and Pohnpei.

  Pohnpei's pre-colonial history is divided into three eras: the Period of Building or Peopling before about 1100; the Period of the Lord of Deleur, from about 1100 to about 1628; and the Period of the Nahnmwarki, from about 1628 to about 1885. Pohnpeian legend recounts that the Saudeleur rulers, the first to bring government to Pohnpei, were of foreign origin. Their rule grew increasingly oppressive over several generations. The Saudeleur Dynasty ended with the invasion of Isokelekel, another semi-mythical foreigner, regarded today as the creator of the modern Pohnpeian nahnmwarki social system and the father of the Pohnpeian people.

  Construction of Nan Madol, a megalithic complex made from basalt lava logs, began as early as 1200 CE. Offshore of Temwen Island near Pohnpei, it is a series of small artificial islands linked by canals, often called the Venice of the Pacific. It was the ceremonial and political seat of the Saudeleur dynasty, which united Pohnpei's estimated 25,000 people. Isokelekel and his descendants initially occupied the stone city, then later abandoned it.

  The first people of the Northern Mariana Islands navigated there between 4000 BCE and 2000 BCE from Southeast Asia. They became known as the Chamorros and left megalithic ruins, including Latte stone. Micronesian colonists gradually settled the Marshall Islands during the 2nd millennium BCE, using traditional stick charts to navigate between islands.

• 5. Out Of Taiwan

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  Linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence places the Polynesians as a subset of the sea-migrating Austronesian peoples, tracing their origins to the Malay Archipelago and ultimately to Taiwan. Between about 3000 and 1000 BCE, speakers of Austronesian languages began spreading from Taiwan into Maritime Southeast Asia. Kayser and colleagues outlined three theories for the spread of humans across the Pacific.

  The Express Train model describes a recent expansion out of Taiwan, via the Philippines and eastern Indonesia, reaching Island Melanesia by roughly 1400 BCE and the western Polynesian islands about 900 BCE. The Entangled Bank model emphasizes long cultural and genetic interaction with Island South-East Asians and Melanesians along the way. The Slow Boat model adds a longer hiatus in Melanesia with admixture, supported by Y-chromosome data showing that all three haplotypes of Polynesian Y chromosomes trace back to Melanesia.

  By roughly 1400 BCE, the Lapita peoples, named after their pottery tradition, appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago of northwest Melanesia. The Lapita had given up rice production after encountering and adapting to breadfruit in the Bird's Head area of New Guinea. The most eastern Lapita site recovered so far is at Mulifanua on Upolu in Samoa, where 4,288 pottery shards have been found, with a true age of about 1000 BCE based on carbon dating. A 2010 study places the human sequence in Tonga at 900 BCE.

  Within a mere three or four centuries, between about 1300 and 900 BCE, the Lapita culture spread 6,000 kilometres eastwards from the Bismarck Archipelago until it reached Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa. That trio became a gateway into the rest of Polynesia. Ancient Tongan mythologies report the islands of Ata and Tongatapu as the first islands hauled to the surface from the deep ocean by Maui.

• 6. Empires And Cannibal Isles

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  The Tongan Empire, or Tu'i Tonga Empire, is a description sometimes given to Tongan expansionism dating back to 950 CE, peaking during the period 1200 to 1500. Empirical evidence of a political empire ruled for any length of time is lacking, yet studies confirm widespread Tongan cultural influence. It ranged through East 'Uvea, Rotuma, Futuna, Samoa, Niue, parts of Micronesia including Kiribati and Pohnpei, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and the Loyalty Islands. Some academics prefer the term maritime chiefdom, while others argue that empire is the most convenient term.

  Pottery art from Fijian towns shows that Fiji was settled before or around 3500 to 1000 BC. The first settlements were started by voyaging traders and settlers from the west about 5000 years ago. Aspects of Fijian culture resemble the Melanesian culture of the western Pacific but have a stronger connection to older Polynesian cultures. Stretching 1000 kilometres from east to west, Fiji has been a nation of many languages, its history one of both settlement and mobility.

  Constant warfare and cannibalism between warring tribes were part of everyday life in Fiji. In later centuries, the reputation of that cannibal lifestyle deterred European sailors from going near Fijian waters. Fiji acquired the name Cannibal Isles and remained unknown to the rest of the world.

  Easter Island holds its own uncertainty. Local oral traditions recorded by early European visitors claimed that a chief named Hotu Matu'a arrived in one or two large canoes with his wife and extended family. Published estimates of settlement range widely, from around 300 to 400 CE, to 700 to 800 CE, to as recently as 1200 CE. A large palm unique to the island, Paschalococos disperta, became extinct due to deforestation by the early Polynesian settlers.

• 7. Charting The Unknown Sea

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  Portuguese navigators reached the Moluccas, Timor, the Aru Islands, the Tanimbar Islands, some of the Caroline Islands, and west Papua New Guinea between 1512 and 1526. In 1519, a Castilian expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan sailed down the east coast of South America and, on the 28th of November 1520, entered the ocean he named Pacific. Magellan was killed in the Philippines, but one surviving ship led by Juan Sebastian Elcano completed the first circumnavigation of the world.

  Andres de Urdaneta found a wind system in 1565 that allowed ships to sail eastward from Asia back to the Americas. From then until 1815, the annual Manila galleons crossed the Pacific from Mexico to the Philippines and back, the first transpacific trade route in history. In 1668, the Spaniards founded a colony on Guam as a resting place for west-bound galleons, for a long time the only non-coastal European settlement in the Pacific.

  The Dutch were the first non-natives to undisputedly chart the coastlines of Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, and Easter Island. On the 24th of November 1642, Abel Tasman sighted the west coast of Tasmania and named it Van Diemen's Land after Antonio van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. On the 13th of December his crew became the first Europeans to see New Zealand, which he named Staten Landt.

  Tasman's encounter turned violent. One of his boats was attacked by Maori in a double-hulled waka, and four of his men were killed by mere. He named the place Murderers' Bay, now known as Golden Bay. He came across the Tongan archipelago on the 20th of January 1643 and nearly wrecked his ships on the reefs of Fiji before reaching Batavia on the 15th of June 1643. For over a century afterward, until the era of James Cook, Tasmania and New Zealand were not visited by Europeans.

• 8. Cook And The Reckoning

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  In 1766, the Royal Society engaged James Cook to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun. His expedition sailed from England on the 26th of August 1768 and reached Tahiti on the 13th of April 1769, where the observations were made. Sealed orders then directed him to search the south Pacific for the postulated continent of Terra Australis. With the help of a Tahitian named Tupaia, who had extensive knowledge of Pacific geography, Cook reached New Zealand on the 6th of October 1769 and mapped its complete coastline.

  Cook reached the south-eastern coast of Australia on the 19th of April 1770, the first recorded European encounter with its eastern coastline. On the 29th of April, he and his crew made their first landfall on the mainland at a place now known as the Kurnell Peninsula, making first contact with an Aboriginal tribe known as the Gweagal. On his second voyage, commissioned in 1772, Cook crossed the Antarctic Circle on the 17th of January 1773 and reached 71 degrees 10 minutes south on the 31st of January 1774, putting to rest the myth of Terra Australis.

  On his third voyage, Cook became the first European to visit the Hawaiian Islands in 1778, naming them the Sandwich Islands after the fourth Earl of Sandwich. He charted the majority of the North American north-west coastline for the first time, all the way to the Bering Strait. His arrival back at Kealakekua Bay in 1779 coincided with the Makahiki, a Hawaiian harvest festival of worship for the god Lono, and it has been argued, most extensively by Marshall Sahlins, that some Hawaiians treated Cook as an incarnation of Lono.

  Tensions rose after the Resolution's foremast broke and the ships returned for repairs. On the 14th of February 1779, after Hawaiians took one of his small boats, Cook tried to take King Kalani'opu'u hostage. He was struck on the head and stabbed to death as he fell in the surf. Following their practice for chiefs, the Hawaiians prepared his body with funerary rituals, baking it to remove the flesh and cleaning the bones for preservation. Some of his remains were eventually returned to his crew for a formal burial at sea.

  The Mutiny on the Bounty against William Bligh in 1789 led to several mutineers settling on the Pitcairn Islands, which later became a British colony. Britain established colonies in Australia in 1788, New Zealand in 1840, and Fiji in 1872. Among the last islands colonised was Niue in 1900. Its King Fata-a-iki, who reigned from 1887 to 1896, had offered to cede sovereignty to the British Empire in 1887, fearing annexation by a less benevolent power. The offer was not accepted until 1900.

  France moved through missionaries and gunboats. French Catholic missionaries arrived on Tahiti in 1834, and their expulsion in 1836 led France to declare a protectorate over Tahiti and Tahuata in 1842. On the 24th of September 1853, under orders from Napoleon III, Admiral Febvrier Despointes took formal possession of New Caledonia, which became a penal colony. From the 1860s until 1897, about 22,000 criminals and political prisoners were sent there, among them many Communards including Henri de Rochefort and Louise Michel.

  Germany established colonies in New Guinea in 1884 and Samoa in 1900. Following papal mediation and German compensation of 4.5 million dollars, Spain recognized a German claim in 1885. The United States expanded into the Pacific beginning with Baker Island and Howland Island in 1857, and Hawaii became a U.S. territory in 1898. Territorial disputes between the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom over Samoa led to the Tripartite Convention of 1899.

  The Samoan Crisis of 1887 to 1889 brought three American and three German warships to a standoff in Apia harbor over several months. It ended on 15 and the 16th of March when a cyclone wrecked all six warships, witnessed by Robert Louis Stevenson, who later wrote about what he saw.

  The Occupation of German Samoa in August 1914 by New Zealand forces was one of the first land offensives in the Pacific theatre of World War I. Over 1,000 New Zealanders landed and the campaign ended without bloodshed. In September 1914, 500 Australians encountered 300 Germans and native policemen at the Battle of Bita Paka in German New Guinea, won the day, and forced the Germans to retreat to Toma.

  The attack on Pearl Harbor, a surprise strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy on the United States naval base in Hawaii on the morning of the 7th of December 1941, brought the United States into World War II. The Japanese then invaded New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and other Pacific islands, before being turned back at the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Kokoda Track campaign and finally defeated in 1945.

  The Allied operation against the Japanese in the Solomons launched on the 7th of August 1942 with landings on the Florida Islands at Tulagi and Red Beach on Guadalcanal. Of more than 36,000 Japanese on Guadalcanal, about 26,000 were killed or missing, 9,000 died of disease, and 1,000 were captured. The Slot was the name for New Georgia Sound when the Tokyo Express used it to supply the Japanese garrison.

  The Kokoda Track campaign, fought between July and November 1942 in the Australian territory of Papua, saw Japanese forces try to advance overland through the Owen Stanley Range to seize Port Moresby and isolate Australia from the United States. The Australians recaptured Kokoda on the 2nd of November, and the Battle of Buna-Gona followed as Australian and United States forces assaulted the Japanese beachheads.

  From 1946 to 1958, the Marshall Islands served as the Pacific Proving Grounds for the United States, the site of 67 nuclear tests on various atolls. The world's first hydrogen bomb, codenamed Mike, was tested at Enewetak atoll on the 1st of November 1952. Due to its low population, Oceania was a popular location for atmospheric and underground tests by the United Kingdom, the United States, and France, often with devastating consequences for the inhabitants.

  Fallout from the American Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test in 1954 forced the inhabitants of Rongelap Atoll to abandon their island. Allowed to return three years later, they suffered abnormally high levels of cancer, were evacuated again in 1985, and in 1996 were given 45 million dollars in compensation. British tests in the 1950s at Maralinga in South Australia forced the removal of the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples from their ancestral homelands.

  Moruroa atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago became notorious as a French testing site, chosen after Algeria became independent in 1962. In 1985, French agents caused the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland to prevent it reaching the test site. France resumed testing in 1995 after a three-year moratorium, conducted its last test on the 27th of January 1996, and announced the next day that it would accede to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

  Fiji has suffered several coups, military in 1987 and 2006 and civilian in 2000, all ultimately due to ethnic tension between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians, who first came as indentured labor. The 1987 coup, led by Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, was denounced by the United Nations and saw Fiji expelled from the Commonwealth of Nations. Samoa became the first Pacific nation to gain independence in 1962, followed by Nauru in 1968, and Fiji and Tonga in 1970.