Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

What this book does best is convey how incredible an achievement the settlement of Polynesia was. Untangling the timeline and methods was an intellectual puzzle that Thompson relates with the taut pacing of a mystery novel. With each unexplained piece of evidence, the instinct of many investigators seems to have been to doubt or diminish the skill of the Polynesian navigators; at times, they appear to have been looking for any other explanation, regardless of plausibility. Thompson shows how misguided this instinct was, and instills the appropriate respect for those navigators.

The Pacific is very big, as everyone who has had anything to do with it will tell you, and the islands in it are for the most part very small and a long way apart. Yet when the first European sailors reached Polynesia in the 16th century, they found people living on just about all of those tiny specks of land. What's more, those people all seemed to speak closely-related languages and share many of the same domestic animals, food-plants and cultural traditions, and in many cases they had obviously been settled where they were for a long time.

Thus, Western science was confronted with the famous "puzzle of Polynesia" — how did "primitive" people, without access to metal tools, nails, compasses, sextants and Admiralty charts, manage to show more migrate effectively across such vast areas of ocean? And where did they start?

Thompson's approach in this book is not so much to resolve that puzzle but rather to tease out the history of the interaction between Polynesian peoples and western scientists, looking at it as far as possible from both sides, and focussing as much on the long tradition of false preconceptions and intercultural misunderstandings as on the occasional isolated outbreaks of serious research and willingness to listen to each other that eventually made it possible for the two cultures to gain some kind of mutual understanding. I was particularly struck by her observation that a major stumbling-block for western scientists was the blind assumption that Polynesian cultures, being "primitive", were necessarily static: in many cases a famous "mystery" stopped being mysterious as soon as you allowed for the possibility that the way of life of a community had changed over the centuries to adapt to changes in its environment.

Obviously, it's not really possible to present a completely balanced view when one of the two parties in the discussion has all the written records, but Thompson does what she can with the handful of Polynesian thinkers who did leave some trace, like the Tahitian navigator Tupaia who sailed with Cook and Banks, and the early 20th century Maori ethnologist Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter H Buck).

The book is pitched at general readers, and whilst making us look critically at some of the things we remember from our schoolbooks (and all of the things we remember from Thor Heyerdahl) it also seems to give a useful broad overview of the main topics involved and how they fit together in time and space, without going into very much detail about any particular place or particular technical or cultural aspect of Polynesian life. show less

Fantastic book. It's a history of the "puzzle of Polynesia" - how did the islands of the Pacific, so far from each other and so remote from any continent, come to be populated by a common people, making Polynesians "both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world"?

Christina Thompson doesn't attempt to provide a definitive answer to that question, because a definitive answer is likely impossible to find. Rather, she takes us through the history of the question itself, and how answers to it have grown and evolved since Europeans first came to Polynesia.

It's a story that's part history, part anthropology, part archeology, part genetic research, and part cultural renaissance, and she makes all of it show more interesting. There are a number of personalities highlighted in this book. I was especially taken with the story of Nainoa Thompson, the young Hawaiian who was instrumental in returning Polynesian voyaging as a skillset and a way of living to Hawaii and Polynesia at large.

The book is capped off with Thompson's well thought out and beautifully written Coda, where she talks about the "two ways of knowing", one arising from the Polynesian culture, one from the European.

I rate Christina Thompson's Sea People 5 Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ - it is a fantastic book. If you have any interest in the history of Polynesia, or of European exploration, or of cultural "contact", do yourself a favor and pick this up. show less

The author, having met, married, and had a family with a Maori man she met while conducting academic research in New Zealand, continues and expands her own exploration of Polynesian origins and culture in her second book. There's no geographical entity on the planet larger than the Pacific Ocean, nor any firm origin stories as to the background of its people and how they managed to navigate to and to populate so many distant, tiny islands even before European explorers appeared. Her writing style is simultaneously compelling and comfortable, a rare combination in a book of history and adventure - and still unsolved mysteries. She details modern attempts to recreate ancient voyages using techniques passed down via oral legends. If Thor show more Hyerdahl's Kon-Tiki was dry stuff, this is the fascinatingly juicy version. show less

Truly excellent. Not a history of Polynesia, but an narrative of the way the prehistory of the Polynesians has been thought about from the West's first interactions in the eighteenth century through to the present.

Starting with endpapers that are the relevant maps for easy consultation - to quirky and informative title headings, the book is an absolute delight.

The interaction between Tupaia, a Tahitian navigator and Captain Cook could serve as a paradigm for the entire book: the intertwining of traditional knowledge (legend, language and navigational techniques) have interacted with scientific knowledge (from linguistics, somatology to DNA and radio-carbon dating) is developed in a clear and accessible way for the lay reader.

Simply superb. A history of efforts to discover where the Polynesians came from and how they colonized the remote Pacific. It considers cultural, scientific, and practical methods; mistakes, prejudices, and revelations along the way; Polynesian and Western perspectives. A model of writing and of how to blend the hardness of evidence with a sensitivity to diverse ways of seeing the world.

From the blurb, I was expecting a lot more about the Polynesians' own ideas about their origins rather than the Europeans' changing ideas on the subject. Having said that, it was a fascinating account and, if nothing else, has fixed in my mind the difference between Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, although I could have done with larger maps.