The Wayfinders by Wade Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

kilometres to the east. Subsequent discoveries in New Guinea
and Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands left no doubt of the existence of
a lost civilization, an ancient cultural sphere that, beginning around 1500
bc, had spread from Melanesia east into the Pacific. In one of the great
sagas of prehistory, a people known to us as Lapita, named for the original
site in New Caledonia, had left their original home in the forests of New
Guinea and set out to settle a world. Within five centuries, perhaps twenty
generations, and sailing against the prevailing winds, they crossed 3,200
kilometres of water to reach not only Fiji but beyond, to Samoa and Tonga.
And they made this journey ten centuries before the birth of Christ.
    Then, for reasons that remain unknown, the
movement rested for nearly a thousand years. The ceramic tradition was lost,
but not syntax and grammar, the meaning of carved stone or the decorated
body, the power of the ancestors and the divine origins of the wind.
Beginning around 200 bc, a new wave of exploration began, inspired by the
direct ancestors of modern Polynesians. From Samoa and Tonga they sailed
east, reaching the Cook Islands, Tahiti, and the Marquesas, a distance of
some 4,000 kilometres. Then, after another hiatus of centuries, new
discoveries were made, first Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, and then Hawaii,
which was settled by ad 400. The final great phase of the Polynesian
diaspora unfolded roughly around the time of the First Crusade, as
navigators probed to the south and west, making landfall in Aotearoa, later
New Zealand, around ad 1000. Five centuries before Columbus, the Polynesians
had over the course of only eighty generations settled virtually every
island group of the Pacific, establishing a single sphere of cultural life
encompassing some 25 million square kilometres of the earth’s surface.
    Imagine for a moment what these journeys
entailed. The sailors travelled in open catamarans, all built with tools
made from coral, stone, and human bone. Their sails were woven from
pandanus, the planking sewn together with cordage spun from coconut fibre;
cracks were sealed with breadfruit sap and resins. Exposed to the elements,
the sun by day, the cold wind by night, with hunger and thirst as constant
companions, these people crossed thousands of kilometres of ocean,
discovering hundreds of new lands, some the size of small continents, others
mere island atolls less than a kilometre in diameter with no landmarks
higher than a coconut tree.
    While no doubt there were instances of fishermen
blown out to sea or stranded by the wind as they sailed offshore in pursuit
of schools of pelagic fish, the overwhelming evidence suggests that these
voyages were deliberate and purposeful journeys of discovery. But why did
they go? Why would anyone risk his or her life to leave a place like Tahiti
or Rarotonga to head into a void? Prestige, curiosity, a spirit of adventure
certainly played a role. To sail off into the rising sun, quite possibly
never to be seen again, was an act of considerable courage that brought
enormous honour to a clan. Oral traditions suggest that as many as half of
these expeditions may have ended in disaster. But as failure implied death,
those left behind had a vested interest in imagining success, and in their
dreams they envisioned new lands rising out of the sea to greet their
departed relatives, men and women who acquired by their very acts the status
of gods.
    As in any culture, there were more mundane
motivations. Inheritance in Polynesia was based on primogeniture, and the
social structure was fiercely hierarchical. The only way for a second or
third son, or the scion of a lowly family or clan, to achieve wealth and
status was to find a new world. Ecological imperatives and crises, both
natural and man-made, also drove discovery. The pollen record on Rapa Nui,
or Easter Island, suggests that until the arrival of Polynesians the island
was densely covered in subtropical forest.