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been responsible for the civilization
so indelibly etched onto the land. He noted how the local women swarmed
around the Spanish ships like fish because they were forbidden by tapu from
using canoes. How could a culture that had no means of transporting its
women settle a string of islands three months distant from the nearest
outpost of the Spanish realm? How could men without benefit of a magnetic
compass, which he noted they lacked, have sailed to these islands?
Conflating myth with geography, he concluded that the Marquesas were in fact
an outpost of a great southern continent, and that the people had been
transported to the islands by an ancient civilization still waiting to be
discovered. Thus, within a month of making landfall, the Spaniards sailed on
into the Pacific, searching for this legendary land, a futile quest that
would consume the rest of Fernández de Queirós’s life.

    QUEIRÓS WAS NOT the last sailor to be misled and confounded by
the enigma of Polynesia. At a time when European transports, lacking
navigational instruments to measure longitude, hugged the coastlines of
continents for fear of the open ocean, accounts trickled back to Paris and
Amsterdam of fleets of curious vessels plying the open waters of the
Pacific. In 1616 a Dutch naval ship sailing between Tonga and Samoa came
upon a flotilla of massive seagoing trading canoes. In 1714, when a mansion
in London could be fully furnished for hundred pounds, the British
government through an act of Parliament offered a prize of 20,000 British
pounds to anyone who could solve the problem of determining longitude. Until
the invention of the chronometer, navigators relied on dead reckoning, which
made it hazardous for an ordinary ship to sail beyond sight of land. Yet in
the Pacific something exceptional was going on.
    Captain James Cook, arguably the finest navigator
in the history of the Royal Navy, was the first to pay serious notice. When
he landed in Hawaii, his flagship was met by a flotilla of 3,000 native
canoes. At Tonga, he observed that local catamarans could cover three
leagues in the time it took his ship to achieve two. He encountered men from
the Marquesas who could understand the language of Tahitians, though nearly
1,600 kilometres separated these islands. On his very first voyage in 1769
he met in Tahiti a navigator and priest, Tupaia, who drew a map from memory
of every major island group in Polynesia, save Hawaii and Aotearoa. More
than 120 stones were placed in the sand, each a symbol of an island across a
span of more than 4,000 kilometres from the Marquesas in the east to Fiji in
the west, a distance equal to the width of the continental United States.
Tupaia later sailed with Cook from Tahiti to New Zealand, a circuitous
journey of nearly 13,000 kilometres that ranged between 48 degrees south
latitude and 4 degrees north. To his astonishment, Cook reported, the
Polynesian navigator was able to indicate, at every moment of the voyage,
the precise direction back to Tahiti, though he had neither benefit of
sextant nor knowledge of charts.
    Cook and his naturalist, Joseph Banks, who both
learned Tahitian, recognized the obvious cultural connections between the
distant islands. Linguistic evidence suggested to Banks that the people of
the Pacific had originated in the East Indies. Cook, too, was convinced that
the settling of Polynesia had occurred from the west. From Tupaia he had
learned certain secrets of the winds, how to follow the sun by day and the
stars by night, and he was enormously impressed when the navigator described
in detail sailing directions from Tahiti to Samoa and Fiji, south to
Australia, and east all the way to the Marquesas. But he never could quite
convince himself that these journeys had been purposeful. He knew the fury
of the Pacific, and had encountered a group of Tahitians who, helpless in
the face of a headwind, had drifted hundreds of kilometres off course, only
to be marooned for months in the Cook