Sea People. Christina Thompson
has been described as “the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world.” One argument points to the island’s ecological fragility and its vulnerability to changes brought about by humans. Sediment cores on Easter Island reveal dramatic increases in erosion and charcoal particles around A.D. 1200. This is often taken as a proxy for human activity in the Pacific, where slash-and-burn agriculture was widely practiced, and it has been used to support the argument that Easter Island’s ecological collapse began with the arrival of the first Polynesian settlers.
According to this view, the original colonizers began felling trees and clearing land for gardens and plantations as soon as they arrived. On a different island—one that was wetter, warmer, younger, larger, or closer to other landmasses—such activities might have altered the island’s ecology without destroying it. But Easter Island is a uniquely precarious environment. The slow-growing trees were not quickly replaced, while the loss of the canopy exposed already poor soils to “heating, drying, wind, and rain.” This, in turn, led to erosion, the loss of topsoil, and a general decrease in the island’s fertility. Each step in the degradation of the environment led to the next, and once the damage reached a certain level, there was no going back. Others—partly in response to the disturbing image of some desperate and improvident Easter Islander chopping down the last palm tree—have argued that the island’s deforestation was caused not by the islanders themselves but by their commensals, in particular the Polynesian rat. It was the rat, they argue, with its taste for nuts, seeds, and bark, its lack of predators, its climbing ability, and its fast rate of reproduction, that spelled doom for the virgin forests on Rapa Nui.
But however it came about, the loss of trees must have reached catastrophically into every aspect of the islanders’ lives: no shade, no nuts, no bark for cloth or cordage, no wood for houses or fuel. One of the most disturbing implications is that without wood, the inhabitants of Easter Island would have had no way to make canoes, especially the large, oceangoing kind they would have needed if they ever wanted to leave. For an island off the beaten track, with no near neighbors, this was a potentially ruinous reality. If one consequence of deforestation was that it brought to an end the age of monumental sculpture, an even more poignant implication is that it also spelled isolation from the rest of the world.
FOLLOWING THEIR BRIEF stop at Easter Island, Roggeveen and his men set sail again to the northwest, and May found them wandering among the northern Tuamotus. The hazards of this archipelago were forcefully brought home to them when one of the ships, the Afrikaansche Galei, ran aground on the atoll of Takapoto—the very island that, in one of history’s little jokes, Schouten and Le Maire had named “Bottomless.” Not so bottomless after all, as it turned out. Sailing on, Roggeveen came to the uplifted coral island of Makatea, where he found people who seemed “in all respects similar to those of Paaslant” (a version of the Dutch name for Easter Island), and then to Samoa, at the western edge of the Polynesian Triangle, where he again observed how “like the Paaschlanders in sturdiness and robustness of body, also in painting themselves,” the islanders were.
Thus, by 1722, there was finally enough history between Europe and the peoples of the remote Pacific for someone to begin thinking about the big picture. Europeans were still fixated on Terra Australis Incognita, but another poser had at last occurred to them. “To make an end and conclusion of all the islands which we have discovered and found to be peopled,” wrote Roggeveen, “there remains merely the presenting of the following speculative question, which seems to me must be placed among those questions which exceed the understanding, and therefore are to be heard, but answered with silence.” This question, which is almost completely obscured by Roggeveen’s tortured syntax—a sign perhaps of how difficult it was for him even to think—was, in essence: Who are all these people and how did they end up here?
Roggeveen appears to have been the first European to note the similarity of one group of Polynesians to another, but what interested him most was the question of how they had gotten to the islands. The problem, as Roggeveen saw it, was one of isolation and distance, something he now understood from hard personal experience—having rounded the Horn in mid-January, he did not reach the far side of the Pacific until the following September. On the grounds that the mysteries of navigation had only recently been unraveled, Roggeveen argued that no one could possibly have sailed such distances in the days before the Spanish and Portuguese. To suggest otherwise, he argued, “would resemble mockery rather than serious thought.”
This left only two possibilities. First, that the islanders of the remote Pacific had been brought there by the Spanish and left as colonists, though it was hard to imagine why the Spanish would go to the trouble of setting up “colonies of Indians in these distant regions” when there was nothing obvious to be gained by it. Then, too, the Spanish had always claimed that the islanders were already there when they arrived. That left just one possible solution, in Roggeveen’s view: that “the Indians who inhabit these newly discovered islands,” the people we now know as Polynesians, had not in fact come from anywhere but had been created in situ by God.
It is probably safe to say that the suggestion that Polynesians were autochthonous—that is, that they had first sprung into being on the islands on which they lived—was almost as absurd in 1722 as it seems to us today. But it does suggest how perplexing Europeans found the issue of Polynesian origins. In truth, it was not yet entirely clear how very puzzling a problem this was, since large swaths of Polynesia had yet to be discovered. Although European explorers had been crisscrossing the ocean for more than two centuries, long-standing political rivalries meant that knowledge of the region was still largely piecemeal—the Spanish knew some things, the Dutch knew others, no one was interested in sharing information, and everyone remained dazzled by visions of Terra Australis Incognita. All this, however, was about to change.
“A View taken in the bay of Oaite Peha [Vaitepiha] Otaheite [Tahiti]” by William Hodges, 1776.
NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM, GREENWICH, LONDON. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
BETWEEN MENDAÑA’S VOYAGE of 1595 and the midpoint of the eighteenth century, there were just five European expeditions that intersected in any significant way with the Polynesian world. But beginning in 1764, the number and intensity of these “visitations” increased dramatically, with ships coming thick and fast from England, France, Spain, and Russia—so many that there were sometimes two or three expeditions in the Pacific at one time—and encounters that lasted not days but weeks and months.
The reasons for this were many, but one important factor was the conclusion, in 1763, of the Seven Years’ War, a messy international conflict involving all the great European powers and several colonies, from which Britain emerged as a dominant power with the world’s most formidable navy. No longer tied up fighting its enemies, the British crown quickly set out to secure new territories and new routes, dispatching Commodore John Byron in 1764 on the first of a series of expeditions to the Pacific. Byron sailed in His Majesty’s Ship Dolphin, and when he returned in 1766, the Dolphin was immediately sent out again under the