Polynesian Navigators and Migration
Captain James Cook learned a lot from the seafaring Polynesians on his three voyages of discovery to the Pacific Ocean. He was one of the first to recognize the scale of the Polynesian migrations. He wondered how they were spread out over such a huge area of the Pacific Ocean, from New Zealand in the south to the Sandwich Islands in the north and to Easter Island in the South-east. He concluded that they had the most extensive nation upon the earth. Modern day Polynesians have learned a lot from the journals and drawings from Cook's voyages.
When Captain Cook came to Tahiti, he met a navigator, Tupaia, who guided him around the islands. Tupaia guided Cook across thousands of miles of ocean without any navigational instruments. He drew a map for Cook that detailed the location of more than seventy islands spread out over two thousand miles of the Pacific Ocean. Captain Cook sailed to New Zealand where Tupaia communicated effortlessly with the Maoris they encountered.
On his second voyage to the Pacific, Captain Cook sailed to Easter Island. An ancient Polynesian navigator had discovered Easter Island more than a thousand years earlier. The natives of Easter Island had exhausted all their resources on building the megalithic statues and there was no wood left for sailing vessels to take them away. On his third voyage to the Pacific, Cook found the Hawaiian Islands north of the Equator. There was a thriving and healthy population and more than a thousand canoes turned out to greet him. Cook realised that the Hawaiian people were related to the southern Tahitians and Maoris, as well as the eastern natives of Easter Island.
But Captain Cook did not know where they came from. He suspected that they might have come from Asia, but could not work out how they could sail against the prevailing south-east trade winds. Hundreds of years later, Thor Heyerdahl hypothesised wrongly that the Polynesians had come from South America. But scholars and scientists have done much research to suggest that the Polynesians came from the aboriginal Taiwanese, via a long stint of island hopping.
Polynesian navigators used prevailing easterly or westerly trade winds to sail back and forth across the Pacific and not fight against any head winds. Early voyages would be for exploration but later voyages would carry the plants, animals and people needed to colonise the newly found islands. When archaeologists searched for artifacts to trace the roots of Polynesian migration, they found a unique type of pottery, Lapita ware. These pottery fragments traced the migration of the Polynesian people from Asia, Micronesia, Melanesia, to Polynesia.
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