It is the first long story that I have attempted to write, the first novel, and I picked a story that takes place in a historical setting. So far it has been rewarding but also a slow and challenging project that is difficult to fit within the contours of my life.
One of the characters is a navigator and needs to be able to speak authoritatively on the subject so I had to learn more about navigation. One of the books that I read was “Early Man and the Ocean” by Thor Heyerdahl, a series of essays where Heyerdahl lays out his theories of navigation and ocean-going activities in the ancient world. Heyerdahl was a Norwegian zoologist best known for the Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947, when he and a group of hearty fellow-travelers constructed a balsa raft and drifted with the ocean currents to land in the Tuamotu Islands in Polynesia, a journey of 4,300 miles that took over 100 days.
In the book Heyerdahl makes an argument for early contact between Africa and the Americas, showing that ships woven out of reeds used by the Egyptians and the Phoenicians in the pre-Christian era could possibly sail across the Atlantic. He mentions the Sea-People, a mysterious group of maritime traders described by ancient Egyptian and Greek sources; speculating that they sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar to trade along the West African coast, crossed the Atlantic by following the Westward current that begins off of the Canary Islands, and engaged in commerce with the peoples of the Americas. Heyerdahl expands on his theory of the American origins of ancient Polynesia, mustering the supporting data and theories that he can within the small format of the book. There was something about a central image that he used that I found hugely resonant: the idea of a small group of people, impelled by the boundless human capacity for exploration and adaptation to undertake a perilous voyage across thousands of miles of open ocean, living off of the sea, reading the stars and the ocean currents for signs, with no clear sense of destination or purpose.
It reminded me of an old science fiction story and caused me to reflect on human beings and our propensity to spread, in layers of varying thickness, in cultures of infinite variety, to every part of the planet. To me it is a positive image, it speaks of a certain curiosity and vigor which I think contrasts with the imperialism and domination of the modern era. It echoes a primordial passage in human history, before the planet was fully populated by Homo Sapiens, when peoples crossed vast spaces carried by a deep and intrinsic connection with the world around them. To me it is an image that speaks of endless possibilities.
Around the same time I came across an article about a project of the appropriately named Planetary Society[1], a private society founded by the late Carl Sagan with the mission of promoting space travel, that is seeking to launch an experimental space ship that will use solar sails to propel itself through space. Solar sails use the momentum of light to propel a vessel through space, and while it does not solve the problem of speed, it does solve the problem of energy posed to interstellar travel. In my head the vision of a people drifting through the open space of the Pacific to unknown destination combined with the promise of the solar sail and I could not help but imagine a future for humans in space, drifting through untold generations to faraway stars.
I decided to learn a little more about Heyerdahl and his theories of the Polynesians, described in his massive 1952 tome “American Indians in the Pacific.”[2] In reading the book I was struck by some of Heyerdahl’s racial theorizing, to the point I couldn’t actually continue reading it. At points Heyerdahl supports his claims around the origins of the Polynesians by contrasting the “light-skinned” Polynesians with the “dark-skinned” Melanesians. The natural migration route for an ancient island-hopping sea-faring people would most predictably be through Melanesia, touching the large islands of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands en route from the Indonesian archipelago, a route which earlier waves of peoples had travelled, including the forbears of the Australian Aboriginals, said to have reached Australia as much as 40,000 years ago. In looking at the racial aspect Heyerdahl uses observations of physical characteristics like “aquiline noses” or saying that “the structure and color of hair has…been a favored criterion of race.”[3] I found this racialism to be depressing and anachronistic, even for the time that he is writing, with echoes of 19th C scientific literature in its bald assertions of fact that center on superficial racial characteristics. The racial thrust of Heyerdahl’s argument reveals a fundamental discomfort with the darker-skinned Melanesians, as well as a latent romanticization of Polynesian society that has its roots in the very first observations recorded by Captain Cook in his logs and diaries from the series of expeditions that he led in the South Seas between 1768 and 1779, who was killed in Hawaii after he tried to kidnap the king of Hawaii, Kalani-opu, but granted full funerary rites, his organs removed, his body baked, and his bones carefully preserved, and finds full flower in the sensual and “primitive” paintings of Paul Gauguin, who depicted an impressionist Eden from his idyll in Tahiti.
While the bulk of Heyerdahl’s assertions center on the claim that Polynesia was primarily populated through expeditions from South America, he also suggests but does not fully explore an idea around early contacts between European whites and pre-Columbian American societies. Heyerdahl cites Incan myths and stories that speak of “white” gods or culture heroes, similar to the Aztec myth of Quetzalcoatl, an important deity who was white-skinned and disappeared in to the East promising to return, prompting confusion when the white conquistador Cortes was reported to be approaching from the east towards Tenochtitlan, the seat of the Aztec empire. Heyerdahl finds similar hints in Polynesian myths and cites stories of “white” cultural ancestors, essentially claiming some link between European whites and all the cultures that he admires.
The gall of it, the hubris, and the deep insecurity; Heyerdahl reveals a need reflected in most post-Enlightenment European thought that looks at non-European cultures: a need to pathologically assert the excellence and dominance of European cultural forms over the cultures of others, and to base those assertions in race. In theories of Polynesian origins it is not exclusive to whiteness or to someone of purely European origins.
Te Rangi Hiroa, born in 1877 of an Irish father and Maori mother, was a pre-eminent scholar of Polynesian societies of the mid-20th C. While proud of his Maori ancestry Hiroa could not help but internalize the dominant view of non-whites as inferior, as some anthropologists went so far as to classify Polynesians as a “badly mixed race” with both “Negroid” and “Mongoloid” elements.[4] I find it strange to even write words like “negroid” and “mongoloid” not because of some implicit offensiveness or implied judgment contained in those words, more because I experience them as referring to another world, another era when the unwavering and steady White eye looked upon the world just so, creating what it saw as it looked; silent, hovering and god-like. To be able to see the world from within that orb must be profoundly settling, and to be excluded from that perspective, to be constantly engaged in calculations of triangulation in relation to the orb and the object being observed, must produce immeasurable stress. In a heroic attempt to explain away considerable evidence of a passage through the island of Melanesia along the migration route of ancestral Polynesians, Te Rangi Hiroa elaborated a theory of a Micronesian stop along the route of the ancient Polynesians, an unlikely and strained detour that defies geography. Hiroa surmised Polynesian racial origins that were, sadly, “Europoid” as contemporary Polynesians were not characterized by “the wooly hair, black skins, and thin lower legs of the Negroids nor by the flat face, short stature, and drooping inner eyefold of the Mongoloids.”[5] Hiroa called his book “Vikings of the Sunrise”[6]
It turns out that the origins of the Polynesians are complex, and differ substantially from the theories of Hiroa and Heyerdahl, although they evidence cultural resilience, intelligence, and adaptability, as well as amazing feats of seafaring and navigation on the part of the ancestors of the Polynesians. Recent archeological evidence, linguistic analysis and other scholarship have converged on identifying the Lapita peoples as being the forbears of the Polynesians. The roots of the Lapita peoples are on the island of Taiwan, where the Austronesian language complex originated, later spreading through waves of migration that began around 3000BC. The first expansion was to the Philippines, then through the Philippines to the long Indonesian archipelago, along New Guinea to the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands, all of this in their ingenious outrigger canoes in which they carried pottery, children, pigs, dogs, and chickens, along with seeds, cuttings of crops like banana, coconut and breadfruit, and most importantly a flexible and expansive culture. Along their route some of the Lapita established fixed settlements and important cultural centers, while others continued their purposeful drift through the vast oceans, hopping from island to island.
Around 1200 BC descendants of the Lapita broke through the barrier of Near Oceania, the Southeast end of the Solomon Islands chain, sailing out of sight of land and breaking the barrier of human existence in the Pacific that had hemmed people in for 30,000 years of human occupation in the region. From the Eastern end of the Solomon Islands the Lapita reached Samoa and Tonga, from there making landfall on the Marquesas, New Caledonia, and New Zealand, where they established the rich and varied societies of the Maori. Along the way the Lapita became Polynesians and continued their journeying, reaching further into the West to Easter Island, where they expended tremendous resources carving and installing their enigmatic heads, and to Hawa’ii, where they developed complex chiefdoms and elaborate cultural expression. In his book “The Wayfinders” Wade Davis talks to modern Polynesians who are working to preserve the practices of their ancestors, who were able to find their way on the open oceans without any modern navigational tools, lacking sextant or backstaff, radio or GPS. The ancient navigators underwent extensive training to become corporeally attuned to the ocean environment, sensing changes in the water currents by the way the waves slapped on the hull, observing the behavior of marine creatures, and reading the portent of every gust of wind. At one stage of their training the male navigators would tie a thin thread around their testicles and attach it to the hull of the boat, sensitizing them to every subtle movement.[7]
In contrast to Heyerdahl and Hiroa’s narratives of Polynesian origins, Polynesian forebears actually did travel through the islands and archipelagoes of Melanesia, encountering a myriad of other peoples along the way, improving their navigation and sea-faring skills, sharing technologies and establishing abundant and culturally complex societies, probing and exploring until they sailed out into the watery wastes of the South Pacific, where they wandered guided by stars and currents and a world-sense which I can only speculate at.
When I return to the image of the drift of human societies: adventurous, turbulent and expansive, and think about the distant prospect that we may one day expand the field of our restless curiosity outside the atmosphere of this planet, pushed perhaps by the invisible force of photons on a shimmering solar sail, I hold a hope and an optimism that when human beings gather the momentum to propel ourselves beyond our planetary bounds and take on the vast expanses of space, that we do it with the spirit of the Polynesians: patiently, with the full and complex richness of our societies and experience, with great skill and a feel for the currents that move us.
[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/space/10solar.html?scp=1&sq=solar%20sail&st=cse
[2] Early Man and the Ocean: A search for the beginnings of navigation and seaborne civilizations, Thor Heyerdahl, Doubleday, New York, 1979
[3]American Indians in the Pacific: The theory behind the Kon-Tiki expedition, Thor Heyerdahl, Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1952
[4] On the Road of the Winds: An archeological history of the Pacific Islands before European Contact, Patrick Vinton Kirch, U of C Press, Berkeley, 2000
[5] Ibid
[6]Vikings of the sunrise, Peter H. Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa), New York, Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1938.
[7] The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, Wade Davis, House of Anasi Press, 2009
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