Pacific Voyaging

The many tiny islands of the Pacific Ocean had no human population until the ancestors of today’s islanders sailed from Southeast Asia in ocean-going canoes approximately 2,000 years ago. At the present time, the debate continues about exactly how they migrated such vast distances across the ocean without any of the modern technologies we take for granted. Although the romantic vision of some early twentieth-century writers of fleets of heroic navigators simultaneously setting sail had come to be considered by later investigators to be exaggerated, no considered assessment of Pacific voyaging was forthcoming until 1956, when the American historian Andrew Sharp published his research. Sharp challenged the ‘heroic vision’ by asserting that the expertise of the navigators was limited and that the settlement of the islands was not systematic, being more dependent on good fortune and drifting canoes. Sharp’s theory was widely challenged, and deservedly so. If nothing else, however, it did spark renewed interest in the topic and precipitated valuable new research. Since the 1960s, numerous investigations have been conducted, and most of them have been of the ‘non-armchair’ variety. While it would be wrong to denigrate all ‘armchair’ research—that based on an examination of available published materials—it has turned out that so little progress had been made in the area of Pacific voyaging because most writers relied on the same old sources: travelers’ journals or missionary narratives compiled by unskilled observers. After Sharp, this began to change, and researchers conducted…