The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Read Online Free PDF

the octopus in Cook Strait, Kupe named several islands in the strait for his daughters, visited South Island, and then returned to Hawaiki from a peninsula near modern Auckland calledHokianga nui a Kupe, “Great returning place of Kupe.”
    Kupe reported the islands as uninhabited, but other traditions and archaeological evidence suggest that when the first Polynesians arrived, the islands had already been settled, possibly by Melanesians from Fiji.Although New Zealand is closer to the Solomon Islands than the Society Islands or Hawaii, they were more difficult to reach, and over time both the Melanesian and Polynesian settlers lost touch with their homelands. That the most extensive, visible, and fertile islands in the South Pacific did not attract a constant flow of sailors from a much earlier date can best be explained by the patterns of navigation imposed by the Polynesians’ environment.
Wayfinding and Boatbuilding in Oceania
    Sailing the Pacific with any expectation of being able to return to one’s point of departure or making remote landfalls requires navigational ability of a high order. The combined landmass of the islands east of New Guinea amounts to less than one percent of the area of the Pacific—and this is divided among about twenty-one thousand islands andatolls theaverage size of which is less than sixty square kilometers (about twenty-three square miles), although most are much smaller. Just as the exploration and settlement of Oceania wereunique accomplishments in world history, so were thenavigational practices employed. At the most basic level, the essential elements are shared by navigators everywhere: observation of heavenly bodies (celestial navigation), reading the wind and water, and tracing the behavior of birds, fish, and whales. What distinguishes the Pacific argonauts is the relative importance they attached to these phenomena, and the degree to which they consolidated their observations in a coherent body of knowledge without recourse to writing.
    Between the equator and 15°S to 25°S, depending on the season, the prevailing winds are the southeasttrade winds, so called not because they were used by trading ships—so were all winds—but from an archaic use of “trade” meaning steadily and regularly. Sailors setting out from the Solomon Islands exploited periodic wind shifts to sail downwind fully confident that if they did not find new land, the trade winds would eventually return and enable them to run home to the west. (Europeans employed a comparable strategy in their exploration of the Atlantic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.) Thus exploration was for the most part the product of two-way intentional voyaging; only occasionally were new islands discovered as a result of being lost at sea. The initial expansion from the Solomon Islands toward theSanta Cruz Islands andNew Caledonia, which lie east-southeast, conforms to this model, as does the pattern of settlement for the rest of Polynesia between the equator and about 20°S.
    The settlement of New Zealand is an exception that proves the rule. Although the top of North Island lies at 35°S, about two thousand miles from the Solomons, it is on the far side of a belt of variable winds that is difficult to probe from central Polynesia with any reliable expectation of safe return. Thus it was relatively less accessible than the Marquesas, which lie about twice as far to the east of the Solomons but which were reached several centuries earlier. New Zealand also lies in a higher (and colder) latitude, nine hundred miles farther from the equator than Hawaii, in an area more subject to inclement weather. These conditions are thought to explain why the original settlers eventually abandoned the sea road, or
ara moana,
back to Polynesia. Even so, theMaori did not turn their backs to the sea altogether: around 1500 they reached Chatham Island, 430 miles east of New Zealand and probably the last island settled by Polynesian