Voyagers

The Pacific contains thousands of islands, each home to one of many different peoples. When European navigators began arriving in the sixteenth century, they were both amazed and baffled to find communities living so far from any large landmass. Where had these people come from, and how had they managed to cross such enormous stretches of ocean to settle scattered islands?

The anthropologist Nicholas Thomas follows the sea journeys that populated the islands between Asia and the Americas. From the third millennium BC, Austronesian communities from the western edge of the Pacific settled the Philippines, Indonesia, Micronesia and Melanesia. Later Polynesian migrations carried voyagers much farther, to Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Easter Island and eventually New Zealand, with this expansion unfolding up to AD 1250.

Thomas bases his account on recent research from linguistics, archaeology and experimental re-creations of ancient voyages. He examines the seafaring technologies that made these long-distance crossings possible and the societies that took shape on the islands they reached.