Marquesan tattooing was among the most spectacular practices of the art form in Polynesia. In many Polynesian islands, tattooing was restricted to certain parts of the body—the legs and buttocks, the back, sometimes the face. But in the Marquesas, the entire body was often tattooed—even the eyelids, the tongue, and the palms of the hands. … Read more
While Westerners have tended to see Cook as an Enlightenment hero, Hawaiians and other Polynesians are not crazy about the man, whom they view as a usurper and the leading edge of a wave of cataclysmic change. Indeed, those who live in the Cook Islands have recently been talking about renaming their archipelago in protest. Over … Read more
Breadfruit, which was a staple of many Polynesian diets, entered European legend in the late eighteenth century as the cargo carried by Captain Bligh of the Bounty when his crew mutinied off the island of Tofua. Bligh was carrying the breadfruit seedlings to the West Indies where, it was envisioned, they would provide an economical … Read more
Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, the story of his amazing 1947 attempt to drift from South America to Polynesia on a balsa-wood raft, was published in Norway in 1948 and translated into English two years later. It sold millions of copies and was eventually translated into more than sixty languages, including Mongolian and Esperanto. Described by the … Read more
This beautiful thing is a page from the ship’s log of the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman—imagine if all our journals looked like this! Tasman is here describing the island of Tongatapu, in the southern reaches of the Tongan archipelago. He was not the first European to reach what is now the Kingdom of Tonga; the … Read more
Between 1852 and 1872, the Reverend William Wyatt Gill worked as a missionary on the island of Mangaia, the most southerly of the Cook Islands. Gill was an energetic collector of traditional Polynesian lore and a great admirer of what he called the “natural poetry” of “the Polynesian conception of things.” Here is a sample of his translations … Read more
Many of the Polynesian flood stories collected in the 19th c. have overtly Christian overtones—only one man and one woman survive, they take their animals with them to higher ground, sometimes they are explicitly being punished. But a few flood stories were recorded that exhibit a different logic. In one, recited by a Tahitian tahua (priest) to an … Read more
In 1869, a man named Paiore from the island of Anaa drew this diagram, illustrating the creation of the world. Polynesians did not have a tradition of this kind of illustration and it seems likely that he drew it at the behest of some European who was trying to understand the principles of Tuamotuan cosmogony. … Read more
When the Dutch explorers Schouten and LeMaire crossed the Pacific in 1616, they happened upon a number of small islands which they named according to what they found: Vliegen Island, where the landing party returned covered from head to foot with flies; Waterlandt, where they found fresh water in a pit; Sondergrondt, where the sea was … Read more
I love this map because of the way it so confidently depicts a chain of islands that never existed. The Portuguese navigator Quiros believed that islands—or maybe the edge of Terra Australis Incognita—lay just to the south of the routes he had taken across the Pacific in 1595 and 1605, and many later maps show bits … Read more