Polynesia

• 1. A Sea of Islands

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  Polynesia is a subregion of Oceania made up of more than 1,000 islands, scattered across the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The dry land is small, yet the ocean around it is enormous. The triangle that holds these islands has sides of four thousand miles. The indigenous people who live there are called Polynesians, and they share related languages, cultural practices and traditional beliefs. Their ancestors settled this vast emptiness by canoe. Where did the first voyagers come from? What did their navigators know that let them find specks of land in open water? Did anyone sail on to the Americas? And what became of Polynesian kingdoms once European ships appeared on the horizon?

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• 2. Names and a Triangle

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  In 1756 the French writer Charles de Brosses used the word Polynésie, and he applied it to every island in the Pacific. In 1831 Jules Dumont d'Urville proposed a narrower meaning in a lecture at the Société de Géographie of Paris. Older custom lumped the southern Pacific islands together as the South Sea Islands, and their people as South Sea Islanders. That label strained when it reached Hawaii, which was often counted among them even though it lies in the North Pacific.

  The Polynesian Triangle solves the puzzle. It is drawn by joining Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island, which puts Hawaii at the northern vertex. Inside it sit Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Niue, Wallis and Futuna, and French Polynesia. Some islands settled by Polynesians fall outside the lines. Rotuma, north of Fiji, shows many Polynesian traits, yet its people speak a non-Polynesian language. Some of the Lau Islands, southeast of Fiji, have strong historic ties to Tonga. Small Polynesian communities also exist in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Caroline Islands and Vanuatu. In essence, Polynesia is a cultural term, one of three parts of Oceania beside Melanesia and Micronesia.

  The Line Islands and Phoenix Islands, mostly part of Kiribati, had no permanent settlements until European colonization. They are still often placed within the triangle. Polynesians once lived on the Auckland Islands, the Kermadec Islands and Norfolk Island, but all three stood empty by the time European explorers came. The Auckland Islands hold the most southerly known evidence of Polynesian settlement.

  Some islands far to the east of Easter Island, such as Clipperton Island, the Galápagos Islands and the Juan Fernández Islands, were rarely counted as Polynesian in the past. No evidence has turned up of prehistoric contact between Polynesians and the indigenous peoples of the Americas on those islands.

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• 3. Fire and Sunken Land

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  Roughly 117,000 to 118,000 square miles is all the dry land that Polynesia has, spread across a huge part of the mid and southern Pacific. More than 103,000 square miles of it lie within New Zealand. The Hawaiian archipelago makes up about half of what remains.

  Most Polynesian islands and archipelagos, including Hawaii and Samoa, are volcanic islands built by hotspots. New Zealand, Norfolk Island and Ouvéa follow a different story. Ouvéa is a Polynesian outlier near New Caledonia. All three are the unsubmerged portions of the largely sunken continent of Zealandia.

  Zealandia is believed to have sunk mostly below sea level 23 million years ago. It later partly resurfaced when the Pacific Plate changed its motion relative to the Indo-Australian Plate. Before that change, the Pacific plate had been pushed under the Australian Plate. When the movement shifted, the land that is now New Zealand was lifted. The continental shelf of Zealandia covers approximately 1,400,000 square miles.

  North of New Zealand's North Island runs a convergent plate boundary called the Kermadec-Tonga subduction zone. Its volcanism gave rise to the Kermadec and Tongan islands. On the South Island, a transform fault called the Alpine Fault cuts across the land.

  The oldest rocks in Polynesia lie in New Zealand and are believed to be about 510 million years old. Outside Zealandia, the oldest are in the Hawaiian Emperor Seamount Chain, at 80 million years.

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• 4. Out of Taiwan

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  Between about 3000 and 1000 BC, speakers of Austronesian languages spread from Taiwan into Maritime Southeast Asia. Linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence all treat Polynesians as a branch of these sea-migrating people. Tracing Polynesian languages backward leads through Island Melanesia and Maritime Southeast Asia, and finally to Taiwan.

  Three theories describe how people crossed the Pacific, as laid out by Kayser and colleagues in 2000. The Express Train model imagines a fast expansion out of Taiwan, through the Philippines and eastern Indonesia, reaching Island Melanesia by roughly 1400 BC and western Polynesia around 900 BC. Most current genetic, linguistic and archaeological data support it. The Entangled Bank model stresses a long history of mixing with Island Southeast Asians and Melanesians along the way. The Slow Boat model resembles the Express Train but adds a longer stay in Melanesia. Y-chromosome data from Kayser's team favors it, since all three Polynesian Y haplotypes trace back to Melanesia.

  By roughly 1400 BC, a people called the Lapita, named for their pottery tradition, appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago of northwest Melanesia. They had given up rice, which needs paddy fields unsuited to small islands. They kept ancestral crops such as yams and taro, and they added new ones such as breadfruit.

  Excavations at the Teouma site on Efate Island in Vanuatu and the Talasiu site near Nuku'alofa in Tonga were published in 2016. They back the Express Train model with a twist. The first settlers there appear to have come directly from Taiwan or the northern Philippines. They did not mix with the Australo-Papuans of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Early analysis of skulls found no Australian or Papuan affinities, but links to mainland Asian populations instead. A 2017 DNA study of modern Polynesians shows mixed Austronesian-Papuan ancestry, which these sites suggest arose by intermarriage after the first voyages to Vanuatu and Tonga.

  A 2021 study by Pugach and colleagues compared genome-wide DNA from early settlers of the Mariana Islands and early Lapita individuals from Vanuatu and Tonga. Both groups came from the same ancient source population in the Philippines, with no Papuan admixture. The authors raised the possibility that the early Lapita descended directly from Marianas colonists, who arrived about 150 years earlier. Pottery evidence supports the idea.

  At Mulifanua on Upolu, the easternmost Lapita site recovered so far, researchers have studied 4,288 pottery shards. Radiocarbon dating gives it a true age of around 1000 BC, making it the oldest site yet found in Polynesia. A 2010 study also placed the start of human archaeology in Tonga at 900 BC. In just three or four centuries, between 1300 and 900 BC, Lapita culture spread 6,000 km east of the Bismarck Archipelago, as far as Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. Fiji to the west then began to diverge from the distinctive Polynesian language and culture forming on Tonga and Samoa. Most shared features of Fijian and Polynesian speech are now seen as later borrowing, mediated especially through the Tovata confederacy of Fiji.

  Then came what archaeologists call the long pause, a gap of roughly 1,000 years between the settling of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa and the settling of everything beyond. Its cause is contentious. Proposed explanations include climate shifts, the need to develop new voyaging techniques, and cultural shifts.

  When the pause ended, the island groups at the geographic center, including the Cook Islands, Society Islands and Marquesas Islands, were settled between 1000 and 1150 AD. The far-flung groups of Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island followed between 1200 and 1300 AD. Professor Matisoo-Smith of the Otago study judged that the founding Māori population of New Zealand must have numbered in the hundreds, much larger than once thought. Even so, small founding groups left a mark. Polynesians went through a founder effect and genetic drift, which can make a new population differ from its parent population and lose genetic variation.

  Atholl Anderson wrote that mitochondrial DNA, passed down the female line, and Y chromosomes, passed down the male line, told different stories. About 96 percent, or by another count 93.8 percent, of Polynesian mitochondrial DNA has an Asian origin. So do one-third of Polynesian Y chromosomes, while the other two-thirds come from New Guinea and nearby islands. That pattern fits matrilocal residence. Genetically, Polynesians belong almost entirely to mitochondrial Haplogroup B, a marker of Austronesian expansions. It descends from a few Austronesian women who mixed with Papuan men.

  A genomic model published in 2021 traces the direction and timing of the eastward spread from Samoa. It leads to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, then to the Society Islands, known as Tōtaiete mā, in the 11th century AD. The western Austral Islands and the Tuāmotu Archipelago came in the 12th century AD. From there the route branched north to the Marquesas, south to Raivavae, and east to Easter Island, called Rapa Nui, settled in approximately 1200 AD via Mangareva.

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• 5. Reading the Ocean

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  Tupaia, a navigator from Ra'iatea, drew a chart by hand for Cook on Cook's first Pacific voyage. It covered islands within a 2,000-mile radius of his home, to the north and west. Tupaia knew of 130 islands and named 74 of them on the chart. He had sailed short voyages to 13. He had never visited western Polynesia, because voyaging by Raiateans had shrunk to the eastern islands since his grandfather's time. His grandfather and father had still passed on where the major western islands lay, and how to reach Samoa, Tonga and Fiji. Cook's Admiralty orders told him to search for the "Great Southern Continent", so he ignored both the chart and the navigator.

  Navigators in Eastern Polynesia carried their charts in memory. They learned the motion of specific stars and where each would rise on the ocean horizon. They memorized weather patterns, the best times to travel, and the wildlife species that gather in particular places. They knew the direction of ocean swells and how the crew would feel their motion. They read the colors of sea and sky, and how clouds cluster over certain islands. They also knew the angles for approaching harbors. All of it passed by oral tradition from navigator to apprentice.

  Generally each island kept a guild of navigators with very high status. Wayfinding techniques and outrigger canoe construction were guild secrets. In times of famine or hardship, these navigators could trade for aid or evacuate people to neighboring islands.

  Scientists think long-distance voyages followed the seasonal paths of birds. Oral traditions refer to bird flight, and some accounts mention range marks onshore pointing to distant islands along those flyways. One theory holds that voyagers carried a frigatebird. These birds refuse to land on water, because their feathers would become waterlogged. Released near suspected land, the bird would fly toward it or else return to the canoe. Navigators may also have timed their trips between islands in units like canoe-days.

  Sea turtle migrations may have offered another guide. Some research finds that only turtles could have led navigators to new islands. Their routes run at shallow depths and slow speeds, and canoes in large groups could follow them. Far to the northwest, people of the Marshall Islands built stick charts showing the places and directions of swells and wave-breaks. Tiny seashells marked islands along the way. The materials were easy to find on beaches, but using the charts effectively took years and years of study.

  Knowledge of traditional navigation was largely lost after contact with Europeans and colonization. That left a puzzle about how Polynesians reached such isolated places. By the late 19th and early 20th century, a more generous view had come into favor, perhaps creating a romantic picture of their canoes and seamanship.

  In the mid to late 1960s, scholars began testing the methods. David Lewis sailed his catamaran from Tahiti to New Zealand using the stars, with no instruments. Ben Finney built a 12-meter replica of a Hawaiian double canoe, named Nalehia, and tested it in Hawaii. Meanwhile, research in the Caroline Islands found that traditional star navigation was still in everyday use there. Recent re-creations by the Honolulu-based Polynesian Voyaging Society rest largely on Micronesian methods and the teachings of the Micronesian navigator Mau Piailug. On Taumako Island in the Solomon Islands, a Polynesian outlier, the original traditional methods are still taught today.

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• 6. The American Question

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  The sweet potato is called kūmara in Māori and kumar in Quechua. It is native to the Americas, yet it was widespread in Polynesia when Europeans first reached the Pacific. Remains of the plant in the Cook Islands have been radiocarbon-dated to before 1400. The present scholarly consensus is that Polynesians who had traveled to South America and back brought it to central Polynesia around 1300. From there it spread across the region. Some genetic evidence suggests seeds could have arrived at least 100,000 years ago, before humans. That idea cannot explain why the names are so alike.

  Thor Heyerdahl offered a very different story in the mid-20th century. He proposed two waves of migration. One came from Native Americans of the northwest coast of Canada in large whale-hunting dugouts. The other came from South America, led by a high priest and sun-king named "Kon-Tiki", with "bearded white men" who had "reddish to blond hair" and "blue-grey eyes". He claimed these men then "civilized" the dark-skinned natives of Polynesia. To prove it, he sailed the highly publicized Kon-Tiki expedition on a primitive raft with a Scandinavian crew. It captured public attention and made the name Kon-Tiki a household word.

  None of Heyerdahl's proposals has been accepted by the scientific community. The anthropologist Wade Davis, in his book The Wayfinders, said Heyerdahl "ignored the overwhelming body of linguistic, ethnographic, and ethnobotanical evidence, augmented today by genetic and archaeological data, indicating that he was patently wrong." The anthropologist Robert Carl Suggs gave a chapter the title "The Kon-Tiki Myth" in his 1960 book on Polynesia. He concluded that "The Kon-Tiki theory is about as plausible as the tales of Atlantis, Mu, and 'Children of the Sun'." Other authors fault the idea for implicit racism, since it credits "white people" for Polynesian advances. They add that it overlooks the advanced Austronesian maritime technology in favor of a primitive balsa raft.

  A high-density genome-wide DNA analysis reported in July 2020 found something more surprising. Polynesians and the pre-Columbian Zenú people of South America intermingled between 1150 and 1380 AD. It is not yet clear whether indigenous Americans reached eastern Polynesia or Polynesians visited the northern coast of South America.

  Chickens, coconuts and bottle gourds count among other possible signs of pre-Columbian contact, with varying plausibility. Anthropologists remain deeply divided over whether Polynesians reached the Americas and what influence followed. A single chicken bone from the site of El Arenal-1, on the Arauco Peninsula in Chile, once seemed to settle the matter. A 2007 report using radiocarbon dating and ancient DNA suggested Polynesians reached the Americas at least 100 years before Columbus, who arrived in 1492. A later report on the same specimens found no support for a Polynesian introduction of chickens to South America. It also noted that a marine carbon contribution casts further doubt on the claims. Two Easter Island sites did yield sequences from an uncommon haplogroup found in Indonesia, Japan and China, which may be a genetic signature of early Polynesian dispersal.

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• 7. Island Societies

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  On Tahiti, the 35,000 Polynesians living there at the time of European discovery were divided between high-status people with full access to food and resources, and low-status people with limited access. So say Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones. Unlike in western Melanesia, Polynesian leaders were generally chosen by hereditary bloodline. Samoa differed, with a system called Fa'amatai that combines heredity with practical skills.

  The culture of West Polynesia, including Tonga and Samoa, grew up around high populations. It has strong institutions of marriage and well-developed judicial, monetary and trading traditions. Lapita pottery, which gave the earliest Pacific Austronesians their archaeological name, lapsed in Western Polynesia. By 1000 BC, language, social life and material culture there were distinctly Polynesian. Early European observers noticed theocratic elements in traditional government. Eastern Polynesian cultures adapted instead to smaller islands and atolls, among them Niue, the Cook Islands, Tahiti, the Tuamotus, the Marquesas, Hawaii and Rapa Nui. The large islands of New Zealand were first settled by Eastern Polynesians who adjusted their culture to a non-tropical environment.

  Hamlets of four to five houses, usually with gardens, were built on larger volcanic islands, where many zones of food and resources could be divided without overlap. Villages of thirty or more houses went up on the coasts of smaller islands. On atolls a village stood on only one island of the group, so food could be grown on the others. These villages were usually fortified with walls and palisades of stone and wood. New Zealand shows the opposite pattern, with large volcanic islands and fortified villages.

  Periodic droughts and the famines that followed often led to war. On many low-lying islands, salt from the storm surge of a tropical cyclone could poison the gardens. Fishing, the main source of protein, could not replace the lost food energy. Religion, farming, fishing, weather prediction and outrigger canoe building were therefore highly developed, because an entire island depended on them.

  Fish-hooks made for different catches were built to exacting standards and decorated even when decoration served no function. Stone and wooden weapons were believed more powerful the better they were made and adorned. In some island groups, giving woven articles as gifts was an ingrained practice. Across the Pacific, Polynesians shared largely the same account of how earth and sky were created and of the gods who rule aspects of life. People traveled thousands of miles to celebrations that they all owned communally.

  Beginning in the 1820s, large numbers of missionaries worked in the islands and converted many groups to Christianity. Ian Breward argues that Polynesia is now "one of the most strongly Christian regions in the world... Christianity was rapidly and successfully incorporated into Polynesian culture. War and slavery disappeared."

  Polynesian languages fall into five subgroups. Green's categorization of them in 1966 helped confirm that settlement generally ran from west to east. East Polynesian forms a distinct subgroup with many shared innovations. The vowels are generally a, e, i, o and u, pronounced as in Italian, Spanish and German, and consonants are always followed by a vowel. A pidgin based on Tahitian, Māori and Hawaiian served as a common trade language between European voyagers and islanders in the 18th and 19th centuries, before English supplanted it.

  Sound changes across the islands show up in one old word, the name of the ancestral homeland, which comes from Proto-Nuclear Polynesian sawaiki. In the Society Islands it became Havaiʻi, and in New Zealand it is Hawaiki. The Cook Islands say ʻAvaiki. In the Hawaiian islands the largest island is Hawaiʻi, and in Samoa the largest island is Savaiʻi.

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• 8. Thrones and Treaties

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  In the 9th century, according to Samoan and Manu'an oral tradition, the Tui Manu'a controlled a vast maritime confederacy. Oral history places Fiji, Tonga, Uvea, Futuna, Tokelau and Tuvalu within its reach. The title is one of the oldest in Samoa. Trade is thought to have fueled its rise, in goods such as finely woven ceremonial mats, whale ivory called tabua, obsidian and basalt tools, red feathers for chiefs, and polished nautilus and egg cowry shells reserved for royalty.

  The Tuʻi Tonga Empire was established in Tonga in the 10th century, and most of the Western Pacific came within its sphere of influence, up to parts of the Solomon Islands. Its reach carried Polynesian customs and language across much of the region. It began to decline in the 13th century. After a bloody civil war, power passed to the Tuʻi Kanokupolu dynasty in the 16th century. In 1845 a young warrior, strategist and orator named Tāufaʻāhau united Tonga into a more Western-style kingdom. He had been baptised Jiaoji, meaning George, in 1831. In 1875, helped by the missionary Shirley Waldemar Baker, he declared Tonga a constitutional monarchy. He freed the serfs, set down a code of law and land tenure, enshrined freedom of the press, and limited the chiefs' power. On the 18th of May 1900, Tonga became a British protectorate under a Treaty of Friendship, after settlers and rival chiefs tried to oust the second king. The monarchy continued without interruption, and on the 4th of June 1970 Tonga became independent.

  In Samoa, the western isles of Savaiʻi and Upolu rose to prominence after the Tongan occupation, under a system of titled rulers called the tafaʻifa. Colonial intervention broke it apart in the early 1900s. The Tripartite Convention of 1899 divided Samoa east and west, and the German Empire and the United States annexed their shares. New Zealand occupied the German-controlled west in World War I and administered it under a League of Nations mandate. The Western Samoa Act of the 24th of November 1961 granted independence, effective the 1st of January 1962. The Malietoa titleholder stayed influential until Malietoa Tanumafili II, the head of state, died on the 11th of May 2007.

  In New Zealand, Polynesians began arriving in waves in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Those who settled the mainland became the Māori, while those on the Chatham Islands became the Moriori. On the 28th of October 1835, a group of Māori chiefs issued a declaration of independence as the United Tribes of New Zealand. A Scottish businessman, James Busby, drafted it, and the British Crown recognized the new state in 1836. In 1840 the Royal Navy officer William Hobson and several Māori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi, which made New Zealand a British colony. Disputes over land led to the New Zealand Wars of 1845-1872, land confiscations, and epidemics that devastated Māori communities. In the 2013 census, roughly 600,000 people in New Zealand identified as Māori. In Fiji, the chief Cakobau, whose country was heavily in debt to foreign creditors, ceded it to the United Kingdom in 1873. It became independent on the 10th of October 1970 and a republic on the 28th of September 1987.

  Tuvalu means "eight standing together", for eight of its nine islands were inhabited. Its founding ancestors are said to have come from Samoa on Niutao, Funafuti and Vaitupu, but from Tonga on Nanumea. Oral history on Niutao recalls Tongan warriors defeated on the reef in the 15th century, then repelled again later that century and twice more in the late 16th century. The Spanish navigator Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira first sighted Tuvalu in January 1568, passing the island of Nui and charting it as Isla de Jesús.

  In the 1930s, Imperial Japan floated the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a bloc originally planned to reach as far east as Hawaii and Easter Island. It collapsed with Japan's defeat in World War II. In November 2011, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu and five self-governing but non-sovereign territories launched the Polynesian Leaders Group, to cooperate on culture, language, education, climate change, trade and investment. It is not a political or monetary union. Aside from New Zealand, most independent Polynesian islands rely heavily on foreign aid and remittances. Hawaii welcomes more than ten million visitors annually, excluding 2020. Some islands found stranger income. The Cook Islands relied on postage stamp sales, and Tuvalu marketed its ".tv" internet domain name.

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