Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific

by Nicholas Thomas

An award-winning scholar explores the sixty-thousand-year history of the Pacific islands in this dazzling, deeply researched account. One of the Best Books of 2021 —  Wall Street Journal
The islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia stretch across a huge expanse of ocean and encompass a multitude of different peoples. Starting with Captain James Cook, the earliest European explorers to visit the Pacific were astounded and perplexed to find populations thriving thousands of miles from continents. Who were these people? From where did they come? And how were they able to reach islands dispersed over such vast tracts of ocean?

 
In Voyagers , the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas charts the course of the seaborne migrations that populated the islands between Asia and the Americas from late prehistory onward. Drawing on the latest research, including insights gained from genetics, linguistics, and archaeology, Thomas provides a dazzling account of these long-distance migrations, the seagoing technologies that enabled them, and the societies they left in their wake.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Travel, Anthropology, Science, Audiobook, Asia

224 pages, Hardcover

Published June 15, 2021

Reviews

[Peter Tillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good book, but not as good as I was hoping, and definitely not up to the WSJ review that led me to read it. Episodic layout, more like a series of magazine articles. And in fact, the book could easily have been condensed into one long or 2-3 short magazine features, saving the reader both time and money. Still, I learned some things, and didn't mind the review of things I already knew. Cautiously recommended, and especially to those interested in the book topic, and don't mind skipping the filler. Not even close to a "best of the year" for me!

I read the book after seeing this enthusiastic review:
WSJ review, https://www.wsj.com/articles/voyagers...
(Paywalled. As always, I'm happy to email a copy to non-subscribers)
Excerpt:
‘The Pacific occupies a third of the earth’s surface,” Nicholas Thomas, director of the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, reminds his readers. In that enormous ocean, the South Pacific is unique: “an island world.” It was also the last part of the globe to be occupied by human beings. Who were these settlers? Where did they come from? How, when and why? ...

European explorers—expert seamen and navigators—were particularly impressed by local seamanship. James Morrison, the Bounty Mutineer, spent two years hiding out in Tahiti before being captured in 1791. He testified: “It may seem strange to European Navigators how these people find their Way to such a distance without the Help or knowledge of letters Figures or Instruments of any kind but their Judgement and their knowledge of the Motion of Heavenly bodys.” Their seagoing vessels were also praised. “I do believe, they sail the best of any Boats in the World,” reported William Dampier, an English adventurer who visited Oceania a generation before Cook. A Dutch sea captain agreed. The ships “run so well under sail, that there are very few ships in Holland which could beat them.”

A topic I have always been interested in, since I read "Kon-Tiki" as a boy.

[Jim French · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strong on historical views of the Austronesian voyager by Cook and many others. Strong on boat construction. No attempt was made to portray in a general way, with a map, the chronological dispersal of the Austronesian people; that would have been very useful. The tone of the book becomes more and more fussy, and perhaps appropriately so, about what can be said about the dispersal. An inordinate amount of space is devoted to now-disproved ideas about the ability of the voyagers to sail long distance. The author loves non-essential phrases of great length, set off by dashes. It's a slight book but is based on many years of extensive reading and field experience.

[Dan McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicholas Thomas’s “Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific” is a thorough introduction to the modern understanding of one of the most impressive human feats: the settlement of Polynesia. I can’t help but compare it to Christina Thompson’s “The Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia” which I read last year and really enjoyed. While that book is longer and more in-depth, “Voyagers” goes into depth about recent understandings and reinterpretations of what was considered ‘fact’ about the settlement of Oceania. Two were very interesting to me.

The first explored the earliest settlements into what is now Oceania across Sunda (old continental Southeast Asia) to Sahul (now Australia and New Guinea) over 40,000 years ago. These very early homo sapiens, as well as homo floresiensis (the ‘hobbit’)and homo luzonensis likely crossed straits of water between these regions purposefully. Thomas discusses what we currently know “there is hard data about the movement of people from Sunda into Sahul, but it primarily relates to when, not how, and still less why.” This will certainly be an area we may see new discoveries and deeper understandings of in the future.

The second was the move away from the Melanesia-Polynesia division that has been a characteristic of Oceanic scholarship for centuries. The division was “grounded in physical difference, above all skin color; it was explicitly hierarchical, indeed, essentially racist. To propose that the Melanesians and Polynesians were ancestrally of one dispersed community was to turn deep-seated classification and stereotypes on their heads.” While the split is only distinguished by physical differences, language studies and material-cultural assemblages show a much more cohesive Austronesian people beneath the superficial physical differences.

Thomas comes to three main conclusions:

First, investigation into the history of Polynesia was cross-cultural from its very beginnings. Early sailors learned native languages and guides like Tupaia synthesized native understanding of navigation with European perceptions to create his maps. Later historians like Abraham Fornander and Te Rangihiroa combined field knowledge with concepts and methods of early twentieth-century museum ethnology. Even now, academic anthropology is undergoing a “decolonization” and indigenous understanding and knowledge is becoming recognized as essential.

Second, that in the deepest possible sense, human histories exhibit many strands and trajectories and exemplify diversity. Notions of a through-line of progress in human history is often oversimplified and assumed, and the nautical expansion into Oceania thousands of years before Europeans had mastered the seas in such a way proved to be difficult to understand for Western-centric historians for centuries. “Islanders’ maritime achievements were judged by those who were well equipped to do so as astonishing. Despite lacking metal tools ther were the makers of the ‘best of any boats in the world’. Oceania was not only a distinctive civilization, but an inhabited realm that speaks to the plurality and diversity of human culture.”

Finally the deep and more recent histories of the Pacific are powerfully suggestive, with respect to the questions of identity. Western thought views an island as cut-off by definition and isolated, however the settlers of the Pacific were never isolated and their networks of kinship, ceremony, and exchange were always inter-Island. “The most profound and important achievement of Oceanic Civilization was the principle that what matters most in life is not separate identity, but our capacity to connect.”

I enjoyed this book, but it does not stand alone as a be-all-end-all text into the settlement of the Pacific - and I’m sure Thomas did not intend for it to be with a page count of only 174. It is useful in providing context to other larger books like “Sea People” or “Tears of Rangi” and points readers at new areas on growing understanding for further research.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was inspired to learn about the settlement of the Pacific Ocean after viewing a display at the War Museum in Auckland. This book makes it all crystal clear and it is eminently readable. The author covers early misconceptions, prejudices , and myths, and describes the current scholarship on how the Pacific was settled. It is absolutely fascinating and blew me away. Anyone interested in how the vast stretches of the Islands in the Pacific all the way to Easter Island and Madagascar were settled needs to read this book.

[Andy Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting, fast read about the pacific Voyagers. A little too "history of academics" for me, but overall it was what I was looking for.

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short but solid history of one of history’s most fascinating episodes of migration.

[Graham · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just finished:

New York: Basic Books, 2021.

In some ways this book was what I expected and in other ways it wasn't.

The author points out that the people of Oceania were the first explorers and deserve their reputation as seafaring people.

As controversial as European explorers are to the region, Captain Cook and his missions concluded that the peoples they came up on started out from the same peoples and had similar cultural ancestry.

What I didn't like about the book was the physical anthropology. I knew there would be some but I feel like some explanation are farfetched and not "educated guesses."

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicholas Thomas is one of the big names and voices in Pacific Islands scholarship whose work ranges across disciplines, unpacking at times detail and minutiae and at others broad sweeps across the region, conceptualising and reconceptualising Pacific pasts and presents. His Colonialism’s Culture remains one of the more important analyses of empire and imperial practices and outlooks. With the exception of some exhibition catalogues however, most of his work is written for other scholars and academic audiences.

That makes this short piece all the more welcome. Not only does he engage with the well-trod and ever shifting discussions around where Pasifika peoples came from, he does it in a way that ranges across the region, disciplines and potential audiences. Ever since the first meetings between Pasifika peoples and European-sourced sailors, most of whom in the first couple of hundred years had little or no idea where they were, those visitors seem to have wondered about the origins of the people they met and how they came to occupy such small pieces of land scattered across 1/3 of the planet. When I first seriously studied Pacific history in the late 1970s, there were still fairly current academic and practitioner debates about origins, and through wider organisational networks I found myself tangentially linked into some of the early work being done by those voyagers who set out using Indigenous navigational techniques. This scholarship is current and developing quickly.

Thomas’ core argument is clear and straight forward: settlement was planned, not accidental. He lays out in a clear, straightforward and accessible way, the evidence that shows clearly that in respect of the settlement of the Pacific, we know how it happened and we know when it happened. To his credit, he does more than most whose discussions focus on the Polynesian triangle by taking in not only the whole Pacific basin, but also settlement patterns across what is now South East Asia. He is also clear that the evidence so far means that we cannot explain either why that settlement occurred or its pattern, in that it was not a consistent expansion, the archaeological evidence for instance suggests that there were long periods of settlement followed by bursts of expansion. So there was a long period of occupation of islands in and around New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Solomons and so forth by the culture group we call Lapita, then what seems to be a fairly quick move across the horizon to unseen places in the west Pacific only to wait for 1000 years or so before a rapid spread from the Fiji-Samoa-Tonga triangle into east Polynesia & and to Aotearoa/New Zealand in only a couple of hundred years. This is not a settlement pattern that is likely to be explained by environmental or demographic pressures – so one of the good things about Thomas’ 40 years of study and work in the region is that he can conjecture and muse on options on an informed manner, even when evidence is scant.

In making this case he draws out three powerful and important points. First, knowledge production in the region was cross-cultural from the outset with Indigenous knowledge showing great understanding of the region as a whole. But, and this is vital, he also notes that once Pasifika peoples started travelling with the European arrivals, initial meetings with new peoples were between Pasifika peoples and only latter were those newcomers drawn into things. Second, this longer term settlement pattern going back into East and South East Asia provides further evidence of there being multiple strands and trajectories of human history, challenging the singular evolutionary path from Africa to west Asia to Europe. That is to say, Pasifika peoples ‘developed’ independently of the developments in Africa and west Asia. Third, and here he links to a significant strand in Pasifika scholarship since the 1970s, disrupting the Eurocentric views, he makes clear that Pasifika peoples are not isolated islanders but are part of an extensive network of shared experiences and links. This leads him to conclude that they are not islanders but “inter-Islanders or archipelago dwellers” (p172). It’s a compelling case.

There’s a fairly large body of work exploring these issues and this is less celebratory that quite a bit of that. Thomas is paradoxically more cautious in his assessment of the evidence and its conclusions (there writes the academic) but possible on the basis of confidence after 40 years in the field willing to conjecture more than some of those more popular writers. He also, as noted takes an extensive view exploring Oceania, not just Polynesia, and reminds us also that many of those early European visitors celebrated Pasifika maritime skills. This discussion, in contrast to the other recent book covering some of the same territory, Christina Thompson’s Sea People , focuses less on how European scholars interpreted the evidence from the mid-19th century onwards, dealing more with what that evidence tells us – meaning these to texts are productive complimentary, and worth reading alongside each other.

[Your Common House Bat · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad book, very informative and I came out of it feeling like I learned something about a topic I otherwise wouldn't have known anything about. I liked learning about how early canoes were built and how early travel was done. The information presented was organized and concise and Voyagers shed some light/covered a period of history that, imo, doesn't really get much attention.

[Justin Goldman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Professor Thomas brings several decades of research experience focused on Oceania, starting with his 1984 doctoral thesis on culture and change in the Marquesas Islands. An Australian based at Cambridge University, since the mid-2000s he has been a Professor of Historical Anthropology as well as the Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In addition to ethnographic research, he brings archaeology and linguistics into this short volume, but it remains accessible to a broad audience. He covers the early contacts between Europeans and Pacific Islanders such as Captain James Cook, the subject of his 2003 book "Discoveries: the Voyages of Captain James Cook." He does speak about the work of scholars from Oceania, including Tongan anthropologist Epeli Hau‛ofa who lived in Fiji and taught at the University of the South Pacific. It was interesting to read about how people from western Polynesia ventured over a period from 500 AD for several hundred years and to settle in the Cook Islands, the Society Islands, the Marquesas, Rapa Nui, and later Hawai‘i. Professor Thomas works to describe the navigation and vessels the enables voyagers to traverse the vast Pacific to reach locations well east of the International Date Line.

[Harooon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Pacific Ocean covers a third of the earth’s surface. It was the last major area to be settled by humans, an epic journey spanning nearly 6,000 kilometres across. To give a sense of that distance:

Los Angeles ↔ New York is 4,000km

London ↔ New York is 5,500km

Lisbon ↔ Moscow is 3,900km

Berlin ↔ New Delhi is 5,800km

It’s a difficult task to reconstruct that journey. With the possible exception of Rapa Nui, the pre-colonial Pacific had no writing. Historians rely on a mix of evidence including the carbon dating of material artefacts, the spread of cultural practices, the similarities of words and concepts across languages, the sequencing of genetics, and the survival of oral history and traditional knowledge. Nicholas Thomas’ book Voyagers summarises this evidence. He presents the story of how the first people moved into and across the Pacific, as well as that story’s historiographical evolution.

When Europeans first rocked up on the scene they were amazed at how many of the Pacific’s far-flung islands were inhabited. One of the crew members on James Cook’s first voyage, a priest called Tupaia—originally from Raʻiātea (near Tahiti)—drew a map for him depicting numerous islands. Retrospective analyses of the map indicate that it contains places as far away as Tonga and Hawai’i. Tupaia had been to many, but not all of these places; some had not been visited since his grandfather’s time. The map blended cultural memory with navigational knowledge.

Cook became convinced that the Pacific “… was not an empty ocean, but a richly inhabited insular sea, a realm intimately known by able and accomplished navigators.” (44) When his expedition made landfall in Aotearoa, he and his crew-members noted the many similarities between Māori and Tahitians. Both had similar styles of tā moko, with similar curvilinear patterns and the same method of application in which ink was deposited beneath the skin using a bone chisel that left distinct scarring. Despite centuries of isolation between the two cultures, Tupaia was able to communicate with Māori. Cook even recorded a lexicon of related words in the two languages. At the end of March 1770, upon leaving Aotearoa, he surmised that the two peoples must have had a common origin:

They have the same notions of the Creation of the World Mankind etc. as the people of the South Sea Islands have, indeed many of there Notions and Customs are the very same, but nothing is so great a proff of they all having one Source as their Language which differs in but a very few words the one from the other. (quoted on p. 45)

Later observers, such as the French explorer Jules Durmont d’Urville, made a distinction between Melanesians and Polynesians. This was a racial classification on the basis of the dark skin and “woolly hair” of Melanesians, as well as their supposedly primitive and “fragmentary” social structures. Because the nature of a race determined the characteristics of its societies and the level of development they are able to obtain (so went the assumptions of 19th century racial anthropology) a distinction between two different races of Islanders implied that they must have had separate origins.

(A trace of these ideas still exists in the dwindling but extant theory—unanimously discredited—that a Melanesian race predated the Māori settlement of Aotearoa.)

Such speculation had far-ranging influence, even among Islanders themselves. In Vikings of the Sunrise (1927), Te Rangi Hiroa credited the peopling of the Pacific to the Polynesian race, which he sharply distinguished from the Melanesian race. His work was based on decades of work across the various Pacific Islands, including empirical observations—physical measurements—that he made. Having proven themselves to be a race of master mariners, the Polynesian stood nearer to the Caucasian in the racial hierarchy. Now was the time for him to be inspired by his awesome origins and rise up to face the challenges of the modern world. Addressing collectively his scattered Polynesian kinsmen, Hiroa wrote:

We have new problems before us, but we have a glorious heritage, for we come of the blood that conquered the Pacific with stone-age vessels that sailed ever towards the sunrise. (72)

Later scholars had a sour reaction to this kind of overt romanticism including historian Andrew Sharp who argued in Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific (1956) that the settlement of the Pacific was almost certainly an accident. Polynesians had none of the technological innovations that Europeans had needed to cross such large bodies of water. By the time Europeans arrived, most islands were not in contact with one another, excepting those in each other’s immediate vicinity. It was more likely, Sharp concluded, that the settlement of new lands was unintentional, proceeding in a haphazard manner whenever fishermen were blown off-course.

While his sober tone and historical rigour were welcome correctives to the bombast of earlier ethno-nationalists, Sharp’s arguments were blunted by a number of archaeological and linguistic discoveries, as well as anthropological fieldwork and nautical experiments. In some cases the knowledge used to cross the ocean had indeed dwindled or been lost by the time Europeans arrived. This was partly due to Pacific settlers adapting their societies to the circumstances of new islands, and partly due to spread of European diseases. Sudden population loss had enormous ramifications for these societies, disrupting the traditional transmission of specialist knowledge, including the ability to navigate by the stars.

Yet there were (and still are) some peoples in the isolated corners of the Pacific who used or remembered the old navigational methods. The Polynesian Voyaging Society was founded in 1976 to document and preserve them. It made two voyages between Hawai’i and Tahiti—a distance of approximately 2,700 kilometres—using traditional methods of boat construction and navigation, proving that it could be done.

The basic design of the boats involved resembles a modern catamaran. It looks like two canoes parallel to each other, one bigger than the other, both joined together by wooden beams fastened with coir (coconut fibre). The smaller canoe is called the outrigger. It imparts stability to the larger canoe, making it less likely to roll over when hit by a wave, and allowing the navigator to quickly turn the boat. They can be paddled or sailed. Sails were made of woven pandanus and could be adjusted or moved around, enabling fine control over the direction and speed of the vessel. You can sail a catamaran against the wind by “tacking”, basically moving in a zig-zag fashion by repeatedly turning left and then right.

Determining where you were and where you should be going was based on the positions of stars. Because the stars are so far away from earth they appear not to move at all. For practical purposes they always rise and set at the same positions on the horizon, although the time of day that they rise and set depends on the time of year. By following a rising (or setting) star you are moving in a specific direction. Navigators would start at dawn and follow a particular star. They would carry on during the day, correcting any potential drifting error by noting the boat’s direction of travel relative to the sun’s path, or a distinct swell, or some other oceanic cue. When it became night the stars would once more be visible, and the sailors could check their position to see if they were on course.

Certain stars are known to reach their zenith (their highest position in the sky) above certain islands. For example, Maui’s Hook (also known as Scorpius) can be seen at its zenith above Aotearoa in winter. Te Pae Mahutonga (also known as the Southern Cross) can be seen at its zenith above the Cook Islands. To get to Aotearoa from the Cook Islands you follow Maui’s Hook until it reaches its highest position in the sky, at which point you are nearby. This is somewhat imprecise, but Aotearoa is thankfully a very big piece of land. The rest of the Pacific helpfully consists of island chains: “An archipelago [was] a broad target; once a canoe reached any part of it, the course could be adjusted towards the particular island and the particular landing point sought out.” (182)

Once you were in the rough vicinity of your destination, you can start looking around for land. This could be done in a variety of ways. Some kinds of birds are known to come and go from land, or to migrate north or south in summer or winter. If you suspect you are near land, you can release one of these birds and see what direction it flies in. Other signals include the presence (or absence) of ocean swells or the shapes and colours of clouds which are subtly affected by the reflections of pools of fresh-water or the presence of land or mountains. None of these methods are entirely precise or infallible. A skilled navigator, utilising his experience and intuition, would have to make a best judgement based on a combination of signals.

The techniques and traditions of ocean voyaging varied from island to island. To take but one example, some kinds of Micronesian baurua had asymmetrical hulls optimised for sailing against the wind. Within an island group there could be multiple designs, ranging from smaller fishing boats not intended to be taken out on the ocean to more seaworthy vessels, the largest of which could have carried hundreds of men. We have some surviving examples of historical boats. There are written accounts by European mariners describing traditional boats and how they worked, as well as 19th century photographs of Fijian drua. All of this has allowed us to reconstruct, with a fair degree of accuracy, the methods of traditional navigation as they may have been in the last 500 years or so.

Pacific Islanders certainly had the means to cross the ocean, but where did they come from? Archaeologists began to formulate an answer in the 1950s and 1960s with the discovery of over 230 examples of pottery within a 4,500 kilometre wide girdle of the Pacific. All were made in the same distinctive Lapita style, with corded patterns pricked into the clay using bone or bamboo combs (not unlike the traditional methods of tā moko). They were carbon-dated to within a thousand years of each other. Crucially, the sort of clay needed to make these pots doesn’t exist east of Tonga. The fact that they were found over such a broad range and time period indicates that all of these islands were once in some kind of cultural or economic exchange.

Thanks to anthropological fieldwork and linguistic analyses—as well as living in a more globalised world—we have become more aware of the similarities and differences of the various Pacific cultures. Reconstruction of a hypothetical ancestor language, Proto-Austronesian, is possible due to the numerous cognates for important words and concepts that feature in most (if not all) of the Pacific languages. These includes words relating to fish, houses, chieftainship, tapu, mana, marae, shores, lagoons, waka, and sailing. Note that many of these words are complex cultural phenomena lacking simple translations into English. The fact that all Pacific cultures have them indicates a shared cultural milieu at least, a common origin at most.

This combination of evidence—a shared material, linguistic, and cultural record—soundly refutes the idea that the settlement of the Pacific was a witless accident. The idea that it could have happened by being blown-off course is highly improbable to start with: deep-sea fishing was everywhere an exclusively male activity, and as unlikely as it may seem that a “stone-age” culture could navigate a catamaran across the ocean, it is even less likely that entire families—mum, dad, kids, pigs, chickens, plants, pots, and seedlings all—were routinely blown off-course en route to the neighbour’s house. It’d be like setting off from Wellington to Auckland, only to end up in Sydney instead—which is still not as far as the distance between Tahiti and Hawai’i.

The story may not be entirely clear, but we can trace its broad outline. The Lapita culture likely entered the Bismarck archipelago off the eastern coast of New Guinea from an earlier homeland further north, maybe somewhere in the Philippines. One migratory wave went north-east to Mariana, and from there to the rest of Micronesia. Another spread out across Melanesia, where there was some admixture with the Papuan cultures. A third went east sometime between 700 AD and 900 AD, using the Society Islands as a springboard from which to settle the rest of Polynesia.

There may have been numerous reasons for these migrations, including personal motives like glory or heroism: the thrill of discovering a new land and becoming a person of great stature within it. Other migrations may have been exoduses, spurred on by conflict over dwindling resources or the desire to escape blood-feuds between big personalities. One of Aotearoa’s traditions, that of Kupe, may be illustrative. The most common form of the story—the one recorded by Governor George Grey as it was told him by Te Pirikawau—holds that Kupe had come to Aotearoa from a place called Hawaiiki, having left after coming into conflict with another chief over the love of a woman.

Whatever his motives, Kupe would have found a land unfriendly to the heat-loving Polynesian crop-package, but rich in bird and sea life. Settlers adapted themselves to their new circumstances, in some cases losing or obsoleting the cultural innovations that had made the original ocean voyages possible. Aotearoa, being much larger than any other Pacific island, is the best example of this. It was far easier to eat moa, birds, mussels, and fish than to spend time growing fiddly yams and taro, which only truly flourish in Northland.

Though we may credibly speak of “lost knowledge”, that phrase can be misleading. When a culture forgets, it also remembers. Broadly analogous concepts find new forms of expression. For instance, pou, the carved posts sometimes seen in the forecourts of marae, are built of wood in Aotearoa. But there’s hardly any wood in the Tuamotu atolls, so they use coral instead. Similarly, the principal crop in Aotearoa was kūmara. It was traditionally grown in shallow mounds—the shoots are laid down in a “J” shape to promote sideways growth—which is how similar crops like yams were grown centuries before in the islands. Another important crop, kava, was used to make a sedating drink in Fiji for social occasions. It’s too cold to grow that crop in Aotearoa, but a related plant with similarly heart-shaped leaves, kawakawa, bears the same name.

These journeys were arduous, but they were probably not initially one-way. Settlers may not have arrived with the intention of losing connection with the homeland, but as new social organisations established themselves those old bonds would have diminished—and with them the desire to make the journey back. The fires—ahi kā—went cold. That knowledge, like the knowledge of islands not visited since the time of Tupaia’s grandfather, passed into cultural memory. Only a patient few kept threads of it alive in symbolic, esoteric mannerisms.

Much of that knowledge, until recently, was considered to be little more than garbled fables. Keith Sinclair said as much in the 1960s. We have learned a lot since then. Some of the stories we hear may never be fully clarified to the point of historical or scientific certain. There may be little we can do with them; indeed, by projecting our own modern values onto them, we often damage their integrity. But we should not forget that they are rooted in something that really happened. We should not overlook the skill and intelligence required to fix our earthly position based on the movements of heaven using nothing but the naked eye. That is what happened over a thousand years ago when a distinct, ocean-faring civilisation left the Bismarck Archipelago on a 6,000 kilometre journey across the Pacific.

[Brooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s ok. Nothing I didn’t already know about the settlement of the Pacific. I think Jarred Diamond does a lot better job of explaining things. Still always good to get some new information …

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a great example of what happens when you combine history with post-modernism: You get a lot of facts mixed with a lot of bias and politically correct wishful thinking. The author knew what conclusions he wanted before crafting the narrative and it's becoming painfully obvious that this is how alot of popular history seems to work now.

(For the record, I agree that Pacific Peoples were brilliant, innovative, and haven't gotten their due..but I also believe correcting this view is not the job of historians...which is exactly the apparent goal of this book)

The glorification of the Islanders knowledge, skills and culture is more important to this author than what actually happened, and that's more or less admitted by the book's end. Conversely, we're constantly reminded that Europeans are bad and racist and possibly technically inferior to the Islanders...except for the fact that this view doesn't fully reflect the facts. (any way you slice it, Europeans were technologically and scientifically superior, whether that fits a post-modern narrative or not).

For example, a modern team of Islanders recreated a hypothetical pre-historic journey and it's given as evidence of 'how the islands were probably populated' and yet in a subsequent paragraph the journey of Thor Heyerdahl was mentioned and tossed away without consideration as 'obviously wrong' (even though he also succeeded). I'm not making a judgement on whether the author was technically correct in this respect (he is), I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy and misleading historical impression that the bias creates.

I learned a few things here, but the goals of the author clearly got in the way of the facts I was eager to learn...and that's unfortunate.

[John Traver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyable

Very interesting. Greatly improved my knowledge of how the pacific ocean was colonized. More understanding of what ancient civilization were able to do increases my appreciation of how knowledgeable they were. I think we tend to greatly unnder appreciate how intelligent they were.

[Don Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

There have been a number of books written on the subject of the population of the vast Pacific archepeligo and while this book is likely the most thorough and complete, it was a bit of a strugggle to finish.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Today, atoll nations such as Kiribati and the Marshall Islands are those most vulnerable to sea-level rise. Among the most eloquent voices in debates around climate change are Islander leaders and activists such as Kathy Jetil-Kijiner, a performance poet:

tell them about the water—
how we have seen it rising flooding
across our cemeteries
gushing over the sea walls and
crashing against our homes
Tell them what it’s like to see the entire
ocean__level__with the land”

“What was of decisive importance was that Cook and those who sailed with him visited an unprecedented range of islands across the north and south Pacific. And the seamen, artists, and scientists who accompanied him included individuals with interests and imaginations that were wide-ranging, indeed remarkable—even by the standards of the Enlightenment.”

This was engaging and thought-provoking and new information in many ways, and I spent a lot of time looking at my Ocean Atlas and thinking of this part of the planet. Several years ago, I had a patient from the Chuuk State of Micronesia, and I had studied it then, in awe and ignorance of this part of the world, and this built on that experience. I am so in love with the ocean, this was definitely a beauty read with all the atolls, and waves and lagoons, and I am just talking about how the words reverberate in my mind and I am there, floating, feeling the air and the wind and the water.

The islands that seafaring boats “called at,” another image I love confirming I must have been a seafarer in a past life. Deepwater. Voyaging itself deserves some pause, why not travelling or traveller or journeyer, wanderer, adventurer? Archipelago. Sea passage. Trade winds. The Marquesas: “Sailing a reach before a following sea/She was making for the trades on the outside/And the downhill run to Papeete Bay /Off the wind on this heading lie the Marquesas/We got eighty feet of the waterline, nicely making way…”

“Oceania was not only a distinctive civilization, but an inhabited realm that speaks the plurality and diversity of human culture.” Tahiti, Bora Bora, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Samoas, well known. New islands to me, as if I was discovering them again: Vanuatu, Tokelau, Kiribati, Tuvalu. That Easter Island is Rapa Nui.

Just east of Bali, which formed the far southeastern tip of Asia at its greatest extent, and west of Lombok in the archipelago of the Lesser Sunda Islands, running north to south between Borneo and the Philippines, is Wallace’s Line. This line, discovered by British zoologist and traveler Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), acknowledged that the fauna of Southeast Asia was basically different from that of New Guinea and Australia, reflecting an ancient history of separation between the great regions.

The question of what motivated voyages that were exceptionally arduous and risky is very hard to answer without retrospectively attributing our contemporary sense of human interest and identity to people in the past. Yet, more cautiously, it can be suggested that social values loomed large. Austronesian cultures seem to have privileged the “founders” of particular communities. Those seeking renown might thus understand a successful voyage of colonization, and the foundation of a community, as the ultimate human achievement. Yet it is still hard to understand quite why this culture drove such an extraordinary succession of colonizing ventures at the time that it did. We may also wonder why these took the form of extended sea passages, rather than short-distance, local moves into the abundance of new territory offered across extensive landmasses. New Caledonia’s Grande Terre is bigger than the state of Connecticut and more than three-quarters the size of Wales. The archipelago is made up of more than eighty islands—now forming the modern nation of Vanuatu—many of which offered room enough, one might have thought, for new founders and communities.

Recent discoveries from the Leang Bulu’ Sipong cave site in southern Sulawesi have revealed what appears to be the earliest narrative scene in cave art from any part of the world. In particular, a fifteen-foot panel constitutes a scene in which human-animal hybrids—with human bodies but indeterminate, animal heads—are engaged in hunting pigs and a bovid, such as a wild ox of some kind. No specific belief, nor a spiritual practice such as shamanism, can be identified from this scene other than speculatively. However, it has generally been assumed that similar representations from later periods were not just images of hunting, but were part of some magical or ritual effort to enhance the success of hunters, who may have danced or chanted in the presence of the painting.

Were people driven, rather, by a spirit of adventure? As Matthew Spriggs, a distinguished archaeologist of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, has reflected, “These kinds of ultimate-cause questions always disturb me, as the glib answers that people often give always reveal more about the self-image or concerns of our age than they do about any past reality.” Hence, wanderlust, for example, suggests absurdly that people in the Pleistocene needed to get away from the ancient equivalent of office drudgery.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good academic look at the people, customs and navigational abilities of the Polynesians. Looks in detail at the origins of Polynesian peoples.

[Danielle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too scholarly for my needs.

[Boy Blue · Rating 3 out of 5]

A truly beautiful little book. There was no expense spared in its creation. Stunning photos and excellent quality paper.

As for the written content this is a tidy and succinct account of the settlement of the islands of the Pacific. Thomas does a good job not just of recounting the prevailing theories but also reflecting on what has been at stake in the creation and debate of those theories across the centuries.

Having colour images really gave you a sense of what living in the Pacific is like. However, my biggest gripe (this lost it an entire star) is in the selection of those images. If you're going to the effort of printing a beautiful book like this with so many pictures, you can surely choose a better selection. Too many generic shots of wilderness. Use the space to provide more crucial imagery, particularly relating to your cited sources. There were a few pages after Tupaia's map was mentioned that I thought we weren't going to see it and that alone would have lost it another star.

Now for the necessary comparison to Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia. Voyagers feels like a distilled version of Sea People. Despite being less than half the length, there's the same major points. Sea People does discuss commensal animals in more depth which is pretty fascinating but Thomas addresses the potential of Polynesians making return trips to South America which is equally interesting. The validity behind the South America sojourn by the way is that there just doesn't seem to be any other way they could have got their hands on that sweet, sweet, sweet potato. It's odd because Thomas is the academic's academic when it comes to this area, a Director of Cambridge's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, a Fellow at Trinity, and a Professor of Historical Anthropology. Yet he's somehow managed to make his work seem more vital and interesting than Thompson, who's self-professed expertise in the field is that she married a Maori man. Admittedly she's an accomplished academic as well who was also the editor of the Harvard Review and has a PhD in Pacific literature.

Maybe I preferred Voyagers because I've already read Sea People but I think by reducing Sea People's 100 or so pages of dead end investigations, to just a few pages, Voyagers becomes a far more compelling work. If you don't know anything about Polynesia or its people, this is a great primer. If you do know plenty about Polynesia and its people, this is a great refresher.

[Bertie Brady · Rating 1 out of 5]

Voyagers consists of six chapters providing a brief overview of the settlement of the pacific islands, looking at ethnography, the logistical feats of the islanders and the motivating factors behind their exploration across the islands.

For me this book embraces some of the worst aspects prevalent in post-modern historical writing, mixing fact with fiction or optimistic guessing at the very least to conceal an advocacy book into an objective study of the voyages of the Polynesian people. Thomas comes with the typical view that all observations and studies by colonial forces should be discredited in favour of modern narratives from the local people of the Pacific islands. To a certain extent, this is not a bad thing, of course, the local people would have a deep understanding of the history of their people and the techniques used in their travels, however, the initial stance of dismissal towards deeply intricate and even-handed accounts from adventurers like Captain Cook and Joseph Banks is counterproductive towards the ideal goal of every historian to create a non-biased and informative piece of work.

I felt the actual migrations of people across the Pacific islands could have been explained better considering this is the main purpose of the book. Pictures showing the movements of people to various islands at the times they took place would have been useful instead most of the pictures (of which there are a lot) were of pretty but somewhat extraneous photos of some of the island's nature.

1.5 stars

[Jake May · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative on the basic theme, but major quibbles on several points, such as
1/ that radio-metric dating is factual in the 'hundreds of millions of years' scenarios. Even a cursory study will disclose that RM is deeply flawed. Examples: Hawaiian lava flows recorded as being 200 years old were RM dated as hundreds of millions of years old; live seals dated at 3,000 years old. These facts are easy to find. Researchers know them, but they go along with the consensus to obtain grants. Anyone not on the RM bandwagon is deemed a non-scientist. A good book on these shenanigans (that's a dated term!) : Slaughter of the Dissidents.
2/ 'Hominid half-human species/ancestors of homo sapiens' are deemed as factual here. This is a major flaw. Every so-called partial human/ape ancestor has always been later found to be fully human. First, the 'discovery' is touted in the media; second, the 'discovery' is proven to be false, and three, the poor science is not covered by the media. Four, the public is left with the impression that another 'human ancestor' has been discovered.

[CJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very good though the audiobook narrator could have been better.

Firstly one would expect that taking on a historical work on Oceania he would have known how to pronounce Kiribati…

Additionally, it sounded like it was recorded in somebody’s bathroom.

That aside, I felt that this included a great deal of sound scholarship from which I learned much. Inevitably, certain aspects were speculative but I always felt that the author was honest about what cannot be established with any degree of certainty.

On balance this was an interesting blend of historical observation, and linguistic and archaeological discoveries. It is very accessible to a general readership and showcases the navigational experience and expertise that led to the settlement of the island societies of the Pacific.

[Jeff Greason · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is well written and engaging, though the tone is somewhat odd -- part popular account, part history of academic discussion, part advocacy, part critique. I still found it useful because the author does a good job citing footnotes and giving references, so it is something of a roadmap to more recent literature (and also, helpful in assessing modern opinion on older sources, some of which were pretty clearly biased products of their time, some of which have held up).

I'm glad to have read it, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it to someone who isn't going to go do the deeper reading.

[Paul Norwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the mentions of studies in their historical context. In fact, I almost would have rather had little sections highlighting research, a bit like a topical collection of essays. Many of the photos were not very helpful. Some were great, or even necessary to the text. I would have liked to see fewer photos, more illustrations like the maps and reproductions of documents or charts. A surprisingly short book. I grabbed it to read on my vacation in Hawaii and it only lasted me two days. Some of that is due to fluent, clear writing.

[William Collen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great non-technical, popular introduction to a fascinating topic. The author investigates the probable routes of the first settlers, their seafaring skills and navigational techniques, and the history of how Europeans came into contact with the Pacific peoples. Unfortunately, there is not very much evidence to go on in this study; the region does not favor preservation of archaeological material, and there is no written record of the interisland voyages. Still, Thomas does what he can with the available evidence, and the result is a fascinating read.

[AJ Payne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick and easy read on the history of the settlement of the Pacific, or at least what the current science says. It discusses most of the previously held beliefs about settlement - like that the people came from the Americas, or that they ended up on the various islands by mistake - that have been debunked by archaeology and the like. It was an interesting read, especially for a lay person into the history of the Pacific islands. Definitely not deep and all encompassing by any means, so a scholar I'm sure could find many faults, but it's a great beginning point.

[Per Kraulis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice description of the controversies and investigations of the settlement of the Pacific Ocean islands by several different waves of people. It's a wonderful and fascinating story. In particular, the skills involved in navigating the deep sea using the stars and reading the signs of the ocean are humbling. The traditions and techniques developed by these expert seafarers were amazing, and happily there are now efforts to remember and revive the old ways.

The author Nicholas Thomas convincingly argues that the expansion of humans into Oceania could not have been primarily a random affair of shore-bound craft being blown off-course, or people being swept out on rafts by tsunamis. One important point is that the expansion took place in distinct pushes, historically brief, with long periods of little change in between.

The narrative focuses perhaps a little too much on the historical ideas and prejudices in the development of the sciences involved, but given the strong influence of racist ideas in interpreting the facts, it is understandable. The book is amply illustrated with many historical renderings, and though the maps are very useful, I do miss a schematic map showing the approximate geographical and temporal paths of the expansion. But it is nevertheless a book very well worth reading.

[Mitchell Friedman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This didn't add much, though it had bits of a review of what I already knew. It had kind of a random feel to it, it felt almost like an accidental book. And it had typos which always feel disturbing. It is hard to compare an academic book to a popularized book. But this felt like an academic trying to write a popularized book and failing. Not bad, but not great and not one I'd come back to. Having my kindle crash and become unreadable on a middle footnote of the last chapter was a bonus (luckily I still had access to the book and a different kindle)

[Anna C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this to be, appropriately, my audiobook for a trans-Pacific flight. Most of the time I was listening to it, the in-flight monitor map just showed the tiny plane icon surrounded by an interminable expanse of blue, all water to the edge of the screen, without any land in sight. Eventually the Midway Islands popped up on the monitor, but the Pacific still just seemed to unfold endlessly.

(Oh yeah, and the book itself- lower rating because it was insubstantial and more a history of the evolution of Western ideas about the Pacific than what I wanted.)

[Verity · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot of people did not get what they expected from this book, and myself also; it could have easily been condensed into a couple of articles and maybe that would have given Thomas more focus. The structure of this book was all out of whack, making it very difficult to read and understand.

I'm sure it would have been more interesting to those with a more complex understanding of the topic, but as an introduction, I am left without much to go on. Thomas' understanding of Cook's voyages and contributions was strong, as well as his use of visual sources which I liked, but that's about it.