Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

by Christina Thompson
Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

by Christina Thompson

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Overview

“Who hasn’t stayed up late reading South Sea tales? Christina Thompson’s Sea People is a South Sea tale to top them all.”Richard Rhodes, author of Energy: A Human History and the Pulitzer Prize winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb

“Magnificent. . . .  A grand, symphonic, beautifully written book. . . . Sea People is an archive-researched historical account that has the page-turning qualities of an all-absorbing mystery.”—Boston Globe

A blend of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester’s Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know.

For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in human history.

How did the earliest Polynesians find and colonize these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins, emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind.

For Christina Thompson, this mystery is personal: her Maori husband and their sons descend directly from these ancient navigators. In Sea People, Thompson explores the fascinating story of these ancestors, as well as those of the many sailors, linguists, archaeologists, folklorists, biologists, and geographers who have puzzled over this history for three hundred years. A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People combines the thrill of exploration with the drama of discovery in a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world.

Sea People includes an 8-page photo insert, illustrations throughout, and 2 endpaper maps.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780062060884
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 04/05/2022
Pages: 384
Sales rank: 53,818
Product dimensions: 7.80(w) x 5.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review and the author of Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story, which was shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her essays and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including Vogue, the American Scholar, the Journal of Pacific History, and three editions of Best Australian Essays. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Writer's Grant from the Australia Council, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. A dual citizen of the US and Australia, she lives outside of Boston with her family.

Table of Contents

List of Plates xiii

Prologue Kealakekua Bay 1

Part I The Eyewitnesses (1521-1722)

In which we follow the trail of the earliest European explorers as they attempt to cross the Pacific for the first time, encountering a wide variety of islands and meeting some of the people who live there.

A Very Great Sea

The Discovery of Oceania 17

First Contact

Mendaña in the Marquesas 28

Barely an Island at All

Atolls of the Tuamotus 39

Outer Limits

New Zealand and Easter Island 51

Part II Connecting the Dots (1764-1779)

In which we travel with Captain Cook to the heart of Polynesia, meet the Tahitian priest and navigator Tupaia, and sail with the two of them to New Zealand, where Tupaia makes an important discovery.

Tahiti

The Heart of Polynesia 67

A Man of Knowledge

Cook Meets Tupaia 77

Tupaia's Chart

Two Ways of Seeing 88

An Aha Moment

A Tahitian in New Zealand 99

Part III Why Not Just Ask Them? (1779-1920)

In which we look at some of the stories that Polynesians told about themselves and consider the difficulty nineteenth-century Europeans had trying to make sense of them.

Drowned Continents and Other Theories

The Nineteenth-Century Pacific 115

A World without Writing

Polynesian Oral Traditions 126

The Aryan Maori

An Unlikely Idea 139

A Viking in Hawai'i

Abraham Fornander 150

Voyaging Stories

History and Myth 161

Part IV The Rise of Science (1920-1959)

In which anthropologists pick up the trail of the ancient Polynesians, bringing a new, quantitative approach to the questions of who, where, and when.

Somatology

The Measure of Man 175

A Maori Anthropologist

Te Rangi Hiroa 188

The Moa Hunters

Stone and Bones 199

Radiocarbon Dating

The Question of When 210

The Lapita People

A Key Piece of the Puzzle 221

Part V Setting Sail (1947-1980)

In which we set off on an entirely new tack, taking to the sea with a crew of experimental voyagers as they attempt to reenact the voyages of the ancient Polynesians.

Kon-Tiki

Thor Heyerdahl's Raft 237

Drifting Not Sailing

Andrew Sharp 250

The Non-Armchair Approach

David Lewis Experiments 262

Hokule'a

Sailing to Tahiti 274

Reinventing Navigation

Nainoa Thompson 286

Part VI What We Know Now (1990-2018)

In which we review some of the latest scientific findings and think about what it takes to answer big questions about the deep past.

The Latest Science

DNA and Dates 299

Coda

Two Ways of Knowing 311

Acknowledgments 321

Notes 325

Index 349

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