As early as 1643 Abel Tasman had noted the qualities of the fast-sailing Polynesian double-hulled canoes in Tonga, which the Polynesians had reached by 1100 BC. He included a sketch of one of these vessels in his Journal (left). Three canoes of this basic type, launched in September 1997, have kept alive the ancient mode of building this historic type-and also of sailing it! (See pp. 40-42.)
As it was, we must have been a welcome apparition in their unchanging blue skies. Leaving the steamer behind, we soon lost her on the gleaming noontide sea, grinding our way toward Guam, in the Marianas chain on the far side of the ocean, which we reached that evening. We circled in toward the airfield, passing over the ruined harbor with its bombed and burnt-out hulks of sunken and capsized ships attesting to the violence of the conflict just ended. I do remember thinking then, how far men had come across the curve of the globe to get here, to achieve such destruction at the end of the road. The next day we flew northwest in a long day's hop to Shanghai on the mainland of China, a city of stone-faced buildings staring out blankly on the blue-clad, jostling crowds of Chinese who filled the streets. The Western businessmen who had built the European waterfront had been driven out during the wartime occupation of the city by Japanese troops. Out in the river the gaunt shapes of grey warships and transports loomed beyond the jumbled foreground scene of river sampans. These graceful wooden hulls were topped by cabins of straw matting whose sides were rolled up on this sunny afternoon, with children all about and, often, a Ione woman in the stern standing at the yuloh, a long, crooked wooden oar worked with slow, deliberate strokes to drive the slipper-shaped vessel ahead at a respectable speed through the choppy river water. (I was to learn the difficulties of the yuloh later, from Stanley Gerr, who practiced with this oar on the Connecticut River.) But what of the miles of ocean we had crossed? One wondered what kind of people had settled the fabled islands of the South Pacific which we'd read about. Who set up those outposts of humanity amid the sea?
Arcadian life of ease, abundance and freedom from European hang-ups about money, war, work and sexual repression. In fact, the Polynesians resembled the Norse in their warlike ways and the European intruders were frequently welcomed for their cannon and war-making skills, which could assure victory in battles with neighboring tribes. The Polynesians tended to be careless of human life and shocked the Europeans by casually slaughtering captives taken in war and making slaves of the survivors. And their societies did have elaborate class structures, as rigid and even more brutally enforced than the Europeans. But of their charming manners and generosity as hosts there could be no question. Where did these spirited, far-traveled people come from? Cook surmised that they originally came from China and the Indies. This was an inspired hunch. Study of their genetics and language has now established that their remote ancestors settled the islands oflndonesia, north of Australia, during the last Ice Age, around 50,000 BC, when sea levels were much lower than they are today and only rather narrow channels broke the land path to what is today New Guinea and Australia. As the Ice Age waned and the great mile-high icefields that had covered much of globe melted and ran into the seas, about 10,000 BC, the sea level rose. In the warming climate the first civilizations arose that practiced systematic agriculture, built great cities and kept records of their beliefs and doings, first in the Middle East, along the Nile and Euphrates Rivers , before 3000 BC, and then quite independently along the Yellow River in China some 2000 years later, a little before 1000BC. Cut off by deep water from China, the islanders did not share in the progress of Chinese civilization. This was still unknown to them as late as Captain Cook's day. But a defining development was taking place among the people that became the Polynesians. As the Chinese civilization was taking shape around 1000 BC an impulse to move on came over these people. Driven perhaps by new arrivals in New Guinea, they voyaged southeastward, down the Solomons and the Santa Cruz islands to Fiji and then Tonga, which they reached by 1100 BC, and Samoa, which they had settled by I 000 BC. There seems to have been a pause there, roughly from 1000 BC, the time of King Solomon in Israel, to the height of the Roman Empire 1300 years later-a long time!
The First Ocean Voyagers
The Oceanic Breakout-in Canoes
Captain Cook, sailing through the Pacific vastness 200-odd years ago in the later 1700s, noticed early on that the speech used by native people in scattered islands as far apart as New Zealand, Hawaii and lonely Easter Island-a thousand miles distant from any other land-was closely related. His guide from Tahiti spoke easily with the Maori of New Zealand. Over 1500 miles of empty, storm-lashed ocean separated the two peoples, who had never met or heard of each other. What he had encountered was the far-flung settlement of the Polynesian peoples, oceanic voyagers of extraordinary seagoing capability. This tall, bronzed people with their courteous manners and generous ways appealed greatly to European sensibility-and not just to half-starved seamen who hadn ' t seen a woman, often, for over a year, but to the litterateurs and savants of the European enlightenment, who fabricated from sailors' yarns the myth of the No_ble Savage, who didn ' t work or fight for food or domination but lived an
But then these Stone Age sailors achieved an unparalleled oceanic breakout, traveling nearly 2000 miles against the Southern Trades and South Equatorial Current to reach the Marquesas, where evidence of their occupation has been found dating to 300 AD . Even the Vikings, coursing the Atlantic 700 years later, could show nothing to equal this performance. In fact nothing like this feat of sailing was to be seen in the West for over a thousand years, when Dias sailed around Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and Columbus made the 3,000-mile open-water passage to the Americas, just before 1500. Not content with this, these intrepid sailors, carrying their families, plants and livestock with them, reached Easter Island, which stands alone in the boundless ocean, farther east than our city of San Francisco, and then Hawaiifar to the north and New Zealand in the gale-ridden latitudes of the Roaring Forties some 3500 miles to the south.
SEA HISTORY 84, SPRING 1998
11