The Wayfinders by Wade Davis Read Free Book Online

Islands.
    Thus began a debate that spun over the waters for
almost two centuries. Who really were these people? Where had they come
from? And how had they reached across an ocean to settle these impossibly
remote and isolated lands? In 1832 the French explorer Dumont d’Urville
classified the peoples of the Pacific into three categories. Micronesians
inhabited the small atolls of the western Pacific north of the equator.
Melanesians dwelt in the “dark islands” of New Guinea, the Solomons,
Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji. Polynesia encompassed what remained, the
“many islands” of the eastern Pacific. Micronesia, named for the size of the
islands, and Melanesia, named for the colour of its inhabitants’ skin, were
both arbitrary designations. They linger to this day despite having no
historical or ethnographic justification. But in distinguishing the people
of Polynesia, Dumont d’Urville recognized what every captain’s log had
recorded: There was effectively a single cultural realm of closely related
languages and shared historical vision spread across an entire ocean, with
the most extreme points separated one from one another by a distance equal
to twice the width of Canada. That the Polynesians had occupied these
islands was self-evident. Explanations for how they had done so exemplified
what the poet Walt Whitman meant when he wrote that history is the swindle
of the schoolmasters.
    As early as 1803, citing the impossibility of
sailing east into the prevailing winds, Joaquín Martinez de Zuniga, a
Spanish priest stationed in the Philippines, identified South America as the
place of Polynesian origins. A little while later, John Lang, an influential
clergyman in the early days of the Australian colony of New South Wales,
first suggested the notion of “accidental drift,” accepting that Polynesians
had settled the islands from the west, but only by chance, hapless sailors
blown off course, fishermen who went out for food only to stumble upon new
lands. This notion of serendipitous diffusion defied logic — after all, what
fisherman takes to sea his entire domestic tool kit, chickens, pigs, dogs,
taro, bananas, yams, not to mention his family — but as an explanation it
had the convenience of acknowledging historical facts while denying
Polynesian people what we now know to have been their greatest achievement.
Accidental drift, championed in particular by a New Zealand civil servant,
Andrew Sharp, was not laid to rest until the early 1970s, when a series of
sophisticated computer simulations, based on naval hydrographic records of
wind and currents, concluded that out of 16,000 simulated drift voyages from
various points in eastern Polynesia, not one had managed to reach Hawaii.
    The waters were further muddied, if you will, by
two men, both of whom saw the world not as it was but as they would have
liked it to be. Sir Peter Buck was born Te Rangi Hiroa, son of a Maori
mother and an Irish father. One of the most prominent Polynesian scholars of
the mid-twentieth century, he headed for many years the Bishop Museum in
Honolulu, and by association held an influential professorship at Yale.
Acutely sensitive to his mixed heritage, and keen in the era of Jim Crow to
distinguish Polynesians from the “Negroid” races, he elaborated a theory
that the Pacific had been settled from Asia in a wave of deliberate
migrations that swept through the islands, but completely bypassed
Melanesia. Though this ran contrary to geography and ignored the fact that
nearly all Polynesian crop plants were of Melanesian origin, it did allow
Buck to claim that: “the master mariners of the Pacific must be Europoid for
they are not characterized by the wooly hair, black skins, and thin lower
legs of the Negroids nor by the flat face, short stature, and drooping inner
eyefold of the Mongoloids.”
    If Peter Buck’s racial uncertainties distorted
his lens on history, a young Norwegian zoologist, Thor Heyerdahl, inverted
history itself