Paperback, 384 pages
Published April 5, 2022 by Harper Paperbacks.
THE POLYNESIAN TRIANGLE is an area of ten million square miles, defined by the three points of Hawai‘i, New Zealand, and Easter Island. All the islands inside this triangle were originally settled by a clearly identifiable group of voyagers: a people with a single language and set of customs, a distinctive arsenal of tools and skills, and a collection of plants and animals that they carried with them wherever they went. They had no knowledge of writing or metal tools and yet they succeeded in colonizing the largest ocean on the planet, occupying every habitable rock between New Guinea and the Galapagos, and establishing what was until the modern era the largest single culture area in the world.
Sea People tells the story of these remarkable voyagers and of the many people—explorers, linguists, anthropologists, folkorists, navigators—who have puzzled over their astonishing history for more than three hundred years.
Not just the history of the people but the conflicts in ways of thinking across cultures and the way the book forces you to think about what a map is and who history belongs to. Loved it.
Excellent book, and yes, I did have "We Know the Way" stuck in my head the whole time I was reading this
Fascinating, well-written book about the Polynesians and the history of European voyages and research in the area.
John McWhorter praised this book in his August 19, 2019 podcast of “Lexicon Valley”, on the Austronesian language family, stating that the book read like a novel and was delightful like Pringles at a party.
I.
Hate.
Pringles.
But the endorsement was so complete that I, who have long admired the Polynesian human miracle of setting the Pacific, and loved Michener’s retelling of the first settlement party from Bora Bora to the eponymous “Hawai‘i”, and had read a good bit of Kon-Tiki (the Norwegian dudes who rafted from Peru to the Tuamotus), and even suffered through the film Moana, had to pick up the book.
It is an absolute delight. There are so many topics that I wish I had as superb a teacher as Christina Thompson. She tells you up front that the book is about the sea people, but also about the story of what we know about …
John McWhorter praised this book in his August 19, 2019 podcast of “Lexicon Valley”, on the Austronesian language family, stating that the book read like a novel and was delightful like Pringles at a party.
I.
Hate.
Pringles.
But the endorsement was so complete that I, who have long admired the Polynesian human miracle of setting the Pacific, and loved Michener’s retelling of the first settlement party from Bora Bora to the eponymous “Hawai‘i”, and had read a good bit of Kon-Tiki (the Norwegian dudes who rafted from Peru to the Tuamotus), and even suffered through the film Moana, had to pick up the book.
It is an absolute delight. There are so many topics that I wish I had as superb a teacher as Christina Thompson. She tells you up front that the book is about the sea people, but also about the story of what we know about them—yes, the latest archeology and linguistics and DNA scholarship is a snapshot of the story of what we know.
Starting with first contact eyewitness stories, the story of Captain Cook and Tupaia, through the characters, both European and Polynesian, and threads of intellectual inquiry that wove the rest of this story, the book is a feast, for which Christina Thompson is a sensitive and curious chef. Thank you for this wonderful meal.
…which left me hungry for more!
Wikipedia has a great map by Obsidian Soul showing the islands in question and the latest dates of first settlement. It’s worth researching and pondering the question of why the Lapita people, who settled the western fringes of Polynesia 1000 BCE as far as we can tell (when the Achaeans were busy futzing around the walls of Troy), stopped there for two thousand years, and then exploded into the rest of Polynesia around 1000 CE (when the Vikings were writing family sagas).
There’s also the fascinating notion from Geoffrey Irwin who posits in “The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonization of the Pacific” an obvious scheme for exploring, where canoes loaded with supplies sufficient for an exploratory trek would wait for a rare wind blowing towards the east, sail till half their supplies were exhausted, and then turn around and return if they failed to find land. I have no idea if such a scheme would lead to any results—the islands seem spaced out too far for it to work but it’s conceivable that this, combined with the unfortunate occurrences of sailing parties being blown off course, might be sufficient.
I have picked up Thompson’s earlier book and am devouring it too. But Sea People is a five star recommendation!
