New lines across the Pacific
The Tuia 250 anniversary has put the spotlight on the remarkable achievements of Polynesian sailors. Philip Matthews reports.
It was March 1774 and Captain James Cook was on the second of his three Pacific voyages, sailing the Resolution rather than the Endeavour. Going north from the edge of Antarctica, he reached
Rapa Nui. He was not the first: the Dutch and the Spanish had been before and the former named it Easter Island. But Cook achieved a couple of firsts: his crew were the first Europeans to visually document the mysterious moai, or Easter Island statues. And Cook and naturalist Johann Forster noticed something else at this utterly remote spot in the southeastern Pacific.
The Rapa Nui people were Polynesians, with language, culture and crops that connected them to Ma¯ ori and Tahitians. They had tattoos and tapa cloth. Yet the island was closer to South America than Tahiti. Cook marvelled that, ‘‘It is extraordinary that the same Nation should have spread themselves over all the isles in this Vast Ocean from New Zealand to this Island which is almost a fourth part of the circumference of the Globe’’.
But the great seafarer had arrived too late to witness the golden age of long-distance Pacific voyaging. Islands once linked were isolated.
One of the happy side-effects of the sometimes controversial Tuia 250 commemorations of Cook’s arrival in New Zealand in 1769 is that new attention is being given to the achievements of Polynesian navigators and sailors, who crossed enormous distances centuries earlier – and more quickly. And with astonishing accuracy.
Science writer Andrew Crowe believes these voyaging achievements are still underestimated, and not just by Pa¯ keha¯ but by Ma¯ ori.
‘‘I think what the Polynesians did was more impressive than Cook,’’ Crowe says. ‘‘And we talk about the Vikings finding North America, but finding Easter Island from Mangareva, for example, is an incredibly small target.’’
There is a distance of 7000 kilometres between each of the corners of the Polynesian triangle – Hawaii, Rapa Nui, New Zealand – and most of it was peopled within a stretch of 250 to 500 years.
A cultural arrogance once assumed that such voyages must have been accidental and unrepeatable. You still hear the view that Ma¯ ori just drifted here. But what Crowe set out to show in his book Pathway of the Birds, which recently won a New Zealand Heritage Literary Award, is that these voyages were not accidents and there was a lot of back and forth traffic.
He agrees that it’s hard for us now, hundreds of years later, to visualise their way of life and their level of perception. They had a different relationship to nature, to weather, to the movement of birds.
Crowe says satellite images have made the migratory pathways of birds clearer, showing how they could be used by navigators. Imagine the sight of 20 million sooty shearwaters flying towards New Zealand; who could not see it as an arrow on a map, pointing to land?
The kumara becomes central to these questions. The sweet potato is found across the Pacific, moved from island to island by voyaging humans, but it is also found in South America. Who took it where? The most likely version says that Polynesians went east, towards the south coast of South America, travelled up to presentday Ecuador, picked up the kumara and sailed back to the islands. It probably happened by the year 1000.
There are still some who believe South Americans took it across the Pacific. But as Crowe writes, ‘‘What would motivate Peruvians – with no shortage of land and no deep-sea voyaging traditions of their own – to set out on a downwind voyage into unknown seas entrusted with a wealth of planting materials?’’
The book and Auckland Museum exhibition Vaka Moana covered much of this ground in 2006. Fascinating parallels were put before a largely unaware public. Rawiri Taonui showed how similar stories about Maui were spread across the Pacific. There are Motutapu islands found across the Pacific, to name a sacred island that was a sanctuary before a harbour. New Zealand, Tonga, Tahiti, and Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, all have a Motutapu. As people moved across the Pacific, the name Hawaiki also went with them, to describe a geographic and spiritual homeland where people came from and to which they returned. Rekohu, or the Chatham Islands, was probably the last settled place. Long-distance voyaging finished by about 1500, and there are theories as to why. A cooling climate may have discouraged voyaging. Deforestation would have meant no more canoes could be built, although that wouldn’t have applied in New Zealand. A popular theory connects the end of voyaging to one or possibly two major tsunamis. Crowe gathers the evidence of archaeologist Bruce McFadgen, who found catastrophic waves may have taken away canoes, gardens and coastal communities and may even have caused a significant historical change in Ma¯ ori culture.
‘‘I feel like this book is opening the door and letting a little bit of light in,’’ Crowe says. ‘‘I just wish people would explore it more.’’
As he notes, there is more to be discovered about the histories of Polynesian voyaging. At the same time, as the Tuia 250 commemorations have shown, there is a fresh renaissance in navigation and seafaring traditions that runs parallel to a growing sense of pan-Pacific connection.
The legend of Tupaia
If this renaissance has a symbolic frontman from history, he would be Tupaia. Born in Raiatea in the Society Islands in
1725, Tupaia was a priest, a navigator, an artist and, for Cook on the Endeavour, a translator and useful intermediary. Only Pacific historians were interested in Tupaia when the Cook bicentenary was marked in
1969, but as Tuia 250 approached, Cook moved to the background and Tupaia became increasingly important.
Tupaia joined Cook’s voyage on Tahiti in 1769. He was skilled at navigating by the stars and would naturally have taken a strong interest in Cook’s observations of Venus. He was worldly and had travelled to other islands; he was already familiar with the English from Samuel Wallis’ arrival in Tahiti two years earlier.
Historian and anthropologist Anne Salmond argues that for many Ma¯ ori in New Zealand in 1769, Tupaia was the key figure, not Cook. Here was a learned priest arriving from their homeland who was able to converse with them. ‘‘You can
imagine that, from the point of view of those on shore, this was an extraordinary arrival.’’
Cook is a mere bit player in a recent feature-length documentary timed for Tuia 250,
Tupaia’s
Endeavour. First screened on Ma¯ ori Television, the film follows anthropologist Paora Tapsell, artist Michel Tuffery and actor Kirk Torrance across the Pacific to England in search of Tupaia’s stories. Salmond joins them, as does her daughter, Amiria Salmond, an anthropologist at the University of Cambridge. There are stories of Tupaia’s mana and knowledge. Cook let him steer the Endeavour through the Society Islands, which showed the regard in which he was held. Ship’s master Richard Molyneux recorded that Tupaia appeared ‘‘infinitely superior in every Respect to any other Indian we have met with’’. As Salmond writes in her Cook history,
The Trial of the Cannibal Dog,
Tupaia’s most remarkable contribution was a map. He reportedly dictated 130 islands from memory, including New Zealand, Tonga and Samoa, but there were language gaps and incomprehension of each other’s world view, and important narratives were not recorded on Cook’s version of the map.
Tupaia stayed on the Endeavour on Cook’s first day in New Zealand, when the English shot the Nga¯ ti Oneone rangatira Te Maro. He came ashore for the second day and Cook’s men found, to their great surprise, that he could converse with a party of Ma¯ ori who gathered on the other side of a river. According to one account, they asked Tupaia who these strange men were. Where had they come from? And why did they kill Te Maro?
It would be nice to think that peace broke out then, but it didn’t. There was a struggle over weapons and a second man, Rongowhakaata rangatira Te Rakau, was shot and killed. Even Tupaia shot two Ma¯ ori men in the legs. But there was a sense that, without Tupaia, things might have been even worse on that first voyage. ‘‘He made a lot of things possible that would have been impossible without him,’’ as Salmond says.
By the time Cook reached Tolaga Bay, he knew to make Tupaia the front man, as Victor Walker of the Te Aitangaa-Hauiti iwi explains in the documentary. ‘‘Through Tupaia, we had an honourable meeting of two cultures.’’
It was said to be a centre of Ma¯ ori spiritual knowledge. In a cave nearby at Opautama, Tupaia met with a tohunga or priest. What did they talk about? Hawaiki, probably. News from the homeland, their diverging religions and traditions. Tupaia was said to be revolted by Ma¯ ori cannibalism. Pictures were drawn on the walls of the cave – images of a ship and possibly a dolphin made by Tupaia stayed on the wall for decades, even centuries. Tuffery and Tapsell uncovered faint outlines nearly 250 years later.
It was also during this visit that Tupaia created a famous painting of botanist Joseph Banks and a Ma¯ ori trading crayfish for a tapa cloth.
This was probably the high point of Tupaia’s trip to New Zealand. He was less useful to Cook in Australia as the indigenous people did not speak a Polynesian language. Hoping to go back to Britain with Banks, he died in 1770 at the Dutch colony of Batavia, in presentday Indonesia, a settlement riddled with malaria. He was mourned by Ma¯ ori, who only heard the sad news during Cook’s second voyage.
This ‘‘brilliant’’ figure, as Salmond calls him, a polymath and adventurer, has become a new hero in New Zealand in 2019. Along with the feature-length documentary, there is a children’s book about Tupaia,
The Adventures of Tupaia , by poet Courtney Sina Meredith and illustrator Mat Tait, and an Auckland Museum show, Voyage
to Aotearoa. Tessa Duder remarks on his ‘‘noble bearing and intellectual curiosity’’ in her new book about Cook, First Map. Botanists even named a mistletoe after him, the Tupeia antarctica.
‘‘He’s almost the example of the good native,’’ says Victoria University of Wellington Pacific Studies lecturer Emalani Case. ‘‘He’s the one who can work between the two [cultures] and create peace.’’
‘‘He is someone who is an acute observer, a translator, a cross-cultural broker,’’ as Otago University historian Tony Ballantyne puts it. ‘‘He really captured people’s imagination.’’
Ballantyne sees Tupaia as offering a new way of thinking about the Pacific. It is not just about the Ma¯ ori and European story any longer. Now that story is triangulated with this ‘‘quite remarkable man from Raiatea as the two cultures’ intermediary’’. Through him, New Zealand is linked back to the Pacific.
‘‘Cook and the Endeavour fade into the background,’’ he says. ‘‘What is to be seen is a reconnection between Pacific peoples, which is interesting.’’
This is the last in a series of five stories on the histories behind Tuia 250. For more information on events, go to https://mch.govt. nz/tuia250.