Island group by island group, watch seafarers from Taiwan and Southeast Asia settle the Pacific without instruments, from Tonga and Samoa to Hawai'i, Rapa Nui, Aotearoa and the edge of the sub-Antarctic.
Stop 01 · c. 3000–1500 BCE
Out of Taiwan
The story of the Polynesians begins far to the west, with the Austronesians, farming peoples who had crossed from mainland China to Taiwan by about 4000 BCE. Between about 3000 and 1500 BCE they spread out by sea, reaching the Batanes Islands, in the far north of the Philippines, by around 2200 BCE, then moving south through the Philippines and into Indonesia. Outrigger canoes and the crab-claw sail were the hallmarks of their seafaring. Before the colonial era, their language family was the most widespread in the world, running from Madagascar to Rapa Nui. Polynesians descend mainly from these voyagers, and they are the branch that would sail furthest east.
The story of the Polynesians begins far to the west, with the Austronesians, farming peoples who had crossed from mainland China to Taiwan by about 4000 BCE. Between about 3000 and 1500 BCE they spread out by sea, reaching the Batanes Islands, in the far north of the Philippines, by around 2200 BCE, then moving south through the Philippines and into Indonesia. Outrigger canoes and the crab-claw sail were the hallmarks of their seafaring. Before the colonial era, their language family was the most widespread in the world, running from Madagascar to Rapa Nui. Polynesians descend mainly from these voyagers, and they are the branch that would sail furthest east.
Around 3,500 years ago a new culture appears, fully formed, in the Bismarck Archipelago off New Guinea. Archaeologists call it Lapita, and they know it by its pottery, stamped with fine toothed patterns. Its people raised pigs, dogs and chickens, grew taro, yams and bananas, and traded obsidian over long distances. After about 1200 BCE they sailed on into Vanuatu and New Caledonia, and by around 1000 BCE they had reached Fiji. At Teouma in Vanuatu, the oldest known cemetery in the Pacific Islands held 36 people, buried about 3,000 years ago. A coral file from Nukuleka on Tongatapu dates the founding of Tonga to about 888 BCE, and Samoa was settled at around the same time.
Then the voyaging stopped. For well over a thousand years the settlers of Tonga and Samoa went no further east, and here, in what is now West Polynesia, they became Polynesians. Their speech grew into Proto-Polynesian, the parent of the languages from Tonga to Hawai'i, and they gave up making pottery, for reasons nobody knows. Genetic studies suggest about a fifth of their ancestry came from Papuan-related peoples of Melanesia. Why the pause ended is still debated. The trade winds blew against sailing east, but one study finds that wind patterns shifted after about 800 CE, another points to a long drought in the west, and a third to new atolls rising as sea levels fell.
While the Polynesians stayed put, their distant Austronesian cousins were crossing a different ocean. This was not a Polynesian voyage, but it shows how far the same seafaring tradition could reach. The language of Madagascar, Malagasy, is closest to Ma'anyan, spoken along the Barito River in southern Borneo. The earliest clear evidence of people living on the island without a break, at Andavakoera, dates to about 490 CE, though cut-marked bones may hint at much older visits. Malagasy people descend from both Southeast Asian and East African ancestors, and Bantu speakers may have begun arriving by the 6th or 7th century. How the Austronesians came is unknown. They may have sailed by way of the Maldives.
To settle an empty island, you had to bring a way of life with you. The great voyaging canoes had two equal hulls lashed side by side, and scholars think family groups of 30 to 200 people crossed the ocean to found each new colony. Their cargo was a working landscape. Cuttings and tubers, wrapped in moss and cloth, hung beneath the deck shelter, out of the salt spray. Pigs, dogs and chickens travelled as breeding stock, to be eaten only in an emergency. Crews lived on dried and fermented food, and carried water in gourds and lengths of bamboo. To Hawai'i alone, settlers brought about two dozen kinds of plants. Stowaway rats came too, reaching almost every island people did.
Navigators carried no instruments. What we know of their methods comes from later masters and from today's revival, in which the horizon is split into 32 houses, each a bearing where stars rise or set. This star compass exists only in the mind. A navigator set a heading by a star low on the horizon, then moved to the next as the first climbed too high. Under cloud, the long ocean swells held the course, and the master navigator Mau Piailug could feel their pattern lying inside the hull. Speed, direction and time all had to be tracked in the head. Near land, clouds over an atoll and the flight of seabirds pointed the final way.
The first step east is where scholars disagree most. A genetic study of 2021 traced the path from Samoa to Rarotonga around 830. Rarotonga is the tallest and largest of the Cook Islands, and the clouds on its peak would have shown from far out at sea. Mud from a lake on Atiu points to people around 900, during the region's driest spell in 2,000 years. Yet the radiocarbon survey led by Janet Wilmshurst, which accepted only the most reliable samples, placed the southern Cooks in the mid-1200s, and other estimates fall in between. Other models begin the eastern settlement in the Society Islands instead. No one has settled the question, so treat these dates as a range.
From the Cooks, settlers fanned out north-east to the islands around Tahiti. Here the evidence agrees: the genetic study says about 1050, and Wilmshurst's survey between 1025 and 1120, the earliest firm dates it found in East Polynesia. On Ra'iātea, at Opoa, rose Taputapuatea, a marae, or sacred stone courtyard, that may go back to around 1000 and was rebuilt in later centuries. It became a religious and political centre for much of East Polynesia, and tradition remembers chiefs from distant islands meeting there in alliance. Stones from it, tradition says, were carried away to found new marae elsewhere. UNESCO listed Taputapuatea as a World Heritage Site in 2017.
East of Tahiti lie the Tuamotus, a great scatter of low coral atolls. The genetic study reaches them by about 1110, and sees them as a hub, noting that some atolls had risen above falling seas only around 900. Others turned south to the Austral Islands. From the Tuamotus, settlers went north to the Marquesas, Te Henua 'Enana, the land of men, high islands some 1,370 kilometres from Tahiti with no sheltering reefs. Dates differ here too: about 1140 from the genes, the late 1100s to mid-1200s from most radiocarbon work, and 850 to 900 from one study. Genealogies recorded on Fatu Hiva count back 29 generations, to about 1005.
Some crews sailed north across the equator, about 4,000 kilometres over open sea, to Hawai'i. When they landed is one more thing scholars argue about. Wilmshurst's survey put the arrival as late as 1219 to 1266. In 2014 a team led by Stephen Athens combined pollen, charcoal and archaeology to reach an earlier answer, 940 to 1130, and most likely between 1000 and 1100. Taken together, the evidence says people arrived somewhere between about 1000 and 1250. Whether the first crews came from the Marquesas or the Society Islands is also unclear. Hawaiian tradition remembers later contact too, such as the priest and navigator Pa'ao, said to have sailed from distant Kahiki.
From the Tuamotus the path ran south-east to Mangareva, in the Gambier Islands, and on to Rapa Nui, about 2,000 kilometres beyond Pitcairn, the nearest inhabited land today. Here the evidence lines up. The genetic study says about 1210, and Wilmshurst's radiocarbon range and lake and soil studies agree, replacing older guesses of 800 or earlier. The languages of Mangareva and Rapa Nui are close as well. Rapa Nui tradition tells of two canoes led by the chief Hotu Matu'a and his captain Tu'u ko Iho. On this far-off island, people raised stone platforms, as Polynesians did elsewhere, and carved the moai, of which nearly a thousand survive.
Did Polynesians sail on to the Americas? The sweet potato is an American plant, yet it has been radiocarbon-dated in the Cook Islands to between 1210 and 1400. Most scholars think Polynesians brought it home from South America, though a 2018 study argued it crossed the ocean on its own. In 2020 a genetic study found Native American ancestry on several East Polynesian islands, closest to indigenous peoples of Colombia, and dated a single contact to about 1200. Its authors think Polynesians landed in South America. A 2024 study of Rapa Nui puts its contact between the 13th and 15th centuries. Thor Heyerdahl's idea that South Americans settled Polynesia, however, has been overwhelmingly rejected.
The last great step ran south-west into cooler seas. Aotearoa New Zealand was the last large habitable land on Earth to be settled, and its date is among the firmest: Wilmshurst's survey gives about 1230 to 1282, rat-gnawed seeds appear from around 1280, and the oldest confidently dated human traces lie above ash from an eruption of about 1314. Some think the main waves came later still, up to about 1350. Māori oral tradition tells of ancestors arriving from Hawaiki in great ocean-going waka, and iwi trace their descent from different canoes. Settlers brought kūmara, taro and yams, though other crops probably failed in the cold. They cleared about 40 per cent of the forest, and hunted the giant flightless moa to extinction.
From Aotearoa, a few crews pushed on into the cold. About 800 kilometres to the east lie the Chatham Islands, known to Moriori as Rēkohu. Moriori are Polynesians, descended from settlers of mainland New Zealand. An old claim that they were a more primitive people who came before Māori has been rejected since the early 1900s. Their arrival date is uncertain: dated remains start around 1500, a waka found there has interim dates of 1440 to 1470, and a New Zealand settlement act says between 1000 and 1400. Moriori came to live by Nunuku's law, which set war aside. They suffered terribly after armed Māori parties from Taranaki arrived in 1835. Far to the south, Polynesians and their dogs lived for a time on Enderby Island.
Not every voyage ran east. Outside the Polynesian triangle, scattered through Melanesia and Micronesia, lie about two dozen small islands whose people are Polynesian, among them Tikopia, Anuta, Rennell, Ontong Java, Kapingamarangi and Nukuoro. An older idea held that these were remnants left behind on the way east. The view that now dominates reverses it: people came back west, sailing or blown from West Polynesia, in a later movement. Language suggests two separate expansions, one west from around 'Uvea and Futuna, and one north-west from Tuvalu. Dates vary widely by island. Tikopia, for one, seems to have been settled between the 10th and the mid-13th centuries.
For centuries the scattered islands stayed in touch. In the south-east, Mangareva sent oyster shell, Pitcairn basalt for adzes and volcanic glass for blades, and Henderson, a raised coral island, perhaps birds and turtles. Then, around the 15th century, this network fell away. One study blames a lack of big trees for canoes on Mangareva; others point to a crisis there, or to a wider fall in voyaging. Henderson was deserted by about 1600, and Pitcairn stood empty when the Bounty mutineers landed in 1790. No single cause fits everywhere, and Tahitians still had double canoes when Europeans came. But the longest voyages ceased, and each island world went its own way.
Europeans puzzled over how one people had spread across so much ocean, and one man could have told them. When James Cook's Endeavour left Tahiti on 13 July 1769, it carried Tupaia, a priest and navigator from Ra'iātea tied to the great marae of Taputapuatea, who came aboard at the urging of the naturalist Joseph Banks. The ship called next at Huahine and at Ra'iātea, his home island. With the crew he drew a chart of 74 islands, which scholars read as voyaging paths from about Samoa to Rapa Nui. In New Zealand, some Māori welcomed him as a tohunga, an expert, and gave him a precious dog-skin cloak. He died at Batavia on 20 December 1770.
By the 20th century much of the old wayfinding had been lost, and the writer Andrew Sharp argued that the islands were settled by luck and drift. To test the question, Ben Finney, Herb Kawainui Kāne and Tommy Holmes founded the Polynesian Voyaging Society in 1973 and built Hōkūleʻa, a double-hulled canoe launched in March 1975. They recruited Mau Piailug of Satawal in the Caroline Islands, a master navigator since the age of eighteen. On 1 May 1976 the canoe left Maui, and he guided it without instruments. On the 31st day he said land was near; white terns appeared, and the crew sighted Mataiva. The Polynesian Voyaging Society calls it the first voyage on that old sea road in about 600 years.