15 The Pacific’s first navigators
European explorers, working at the limits of their technology and pushing beyond the edges of their known world, were regularly startled to find Polynesians already inhabiting the islands they had only just been able to reach. The term ‘Polynesia’ is a European one, and it reflects the experience of the European explorers who recognised that the people they encountered in this watery section of the planet shared elements of culture and language. Startled that other people could navigate the region earlier and more thoroughly than they had yet managed themselves, Europeans speculated on how the Polynesians had arrived. Interest in that story of human discovery continues and the story of the original exploration of the Pacific is continually being refined by archaeologists.
Early European explorers were perplexed by the presence of Polynesians on widely scattered islands and sought to explain it. In 1722, Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen raised the possibility that the inhabitants of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) had been created there or otherwise directly placed there by God. Europeans, struggling to reliably reach previously visited Pacific Islands, also tended to discount the navigational abilities of Islanders, leading to the enduring idea that the Pacific Islands had been discovered and settled by survivors of vessels blown off course and out to sea. In the nineteenth century there was also some enthusiasm for the idea that the islands of Polynesia were the remnants of a sunken continent which had left only its mountaintops above sea level, holding survivors of a lost civilisation. Some early observers put forward the idea that Polynesians had migrated from Asia, an idea familiar in the present. During the nineteenth century, migration theories proliferated and variously suggested Aryan, European, and Semitic origins for Polynesians, as well as raising the prospect of waves of migration by different peoples across the Pacific at different times. The possibility of a South American origin for Pacific migration was also put forward, supported by biological evidence (in the form of sweet potatoes) of pre-European contact between Oceania and the Americas.
The development of the discipline of archaeology has changed the way in which the question of Polynesian origins is addressed, as have improved understandings of the ways in which the world itself has changed over time (the prospect of a sunken continent has been destroyed). When human beings first set out into the Pacific the region was physically different from the way it is now. Lower sea levels made the region more accessible from the west, and large amounts of evidence has led archaeologists to believe that the ancestors of Pacific Islanders came from southeast Asia. Approximately 30,000 years ago, when sea levels were at their lowest, people settled the Bismarck Archipelago and the northern Solomon Islands. Low sea levels had made those regions more accessible, a