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Visitors to Vaka Moana will learn how the Pacific began to be explored 3-4000 years ago by the world’s first truly maritime people — the ancestors of today’s Pacific peoples. How they developed vessels and a means of navigating — their descendents prefer to call it ‘way-finding’ — based on observations of the sea and the sky. And how, as a result, they were able to range across the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean thousands of years before the Vikings, Portuguese, Spaniards and other seafaring cultures undertook their first trans-Oceanic forays.
Vaka Moana also tells how the extremities of Polynesia were the last regions on earth to be settled by humans, and it places the epic achievements of the voyagers in the context of the gradual exploration of the entire habitable world.
 Ancestor Figures The exhibition reveals the types of craft used, the nature of the essential skill of ‘way-finding’, and the evidence modern investigators have pieced together to retell the story. It examines the response of early Spanish, British and French expeditions to the widely scattered Polynesian peoples and presents their recorded impressions of the technology they encountered.
Early ideas about the origins of the Pacific peoples are supported by recent scientific research. Noting the resemblance of people and language on distant islands, British explorer Captain James Cook surmised that they had a common origin in Southeast Asia. Later scholars disagreed and championed now discredited notions, including the sailing of a great fleet and ‘accidental’ voyaging. This exhibition is an acknowledgement of the achievements of the ancient voyagers, and the modern renaissance of Pacific voyaging.
‘The human settlement of the Pacific Islands is not just a Pacific story’, says Professor Kerry Howe of Massey University’s School of Social and Cultural Studies, who edited the exhibition’s companion book. ‘It is also the final chapter in the story of human exploration and settlement of our planet. With the settlement of the Pacific islands, we reached the end of our habitable world’.
‘It was the first great migration to require technology’, says the Director of Auckland Museum, Rodney Wilson. ‘That is one reason the exhibition is so successful. Here we are as a people in the 21st century, having occupied all of the earth and looking to islands in space. It is analogous to where humans were 40,000 years ago’.
‘Scholars have drawn a parallel with the exploration of the Pacific Ocean and space’, agrees archaeologist Geoff Irwin, of the University of Auckland’s Department of Anthropology. ‘The proof is there that small numbers of people travelling fast are viable; that just a canoe-load or a plane-load of them can take a portable economy — the ancestors of the Polynesians took a whole suite of plants and domestic animals — and can reproduce culturally and biologically’.
Pacific People ‘It is no coincidence that the islands of the Pacific were settled after humans had developed agricultural practices — that is, within the past 10,000 years’, says Kerry Howe. ‘Actually, they were the first places on earth to be settled by humans who were agriculturalists. Every other part of the globe had been initially settled by humans long before the agricultural revolution’.
The means of finding a way to the new lands and back again was also something new, and so different from the instrument-based navigation of later European explorers that scholars at first dismissed the possibility that it had been done at all.
‘What the exhibition tries to say is that successful voyaging depended on the traditional knowledge of expert navigators’, says Auckland Museum’s Curator of Ethnology, Roger Neich. ‘Even learning tools like the Marshall Islands’ stick chart, which visitors to the exhibition can see, were not taken on the voyaging canoes. Everything took place in people’s minds’.
In recent years a clearer picture has emerged about how Pacific culture spread from island to island, thanks in part to computer modelling of likely exploration strategies.
‘Since World War Two it has been a developing story based on accumulating evidence from archaeology, DNA mapping, linguistics and so on. We looked at that evidence and the considered theories about what went on to produce it’, says archaeologist Geoff Irwin, himself a blue water sailor.
Through computer simulation, Irwin and his colleagues tested a range of voyaging strategies and found that the best explanation was that the early explorers were able to accurately navigate and that their method of exploration was rational and cautious.
‘Clearly settlement was intentional and motivated, but it was also underpinned by a concern for safety’, says Irwin. ‘There was a policy of searching, then returning home. The safest way was to go against the prevailing winds, so that the winds would take them home again. Their own islands then became a safety net to fall back on’.
It is now thought that the Austronesian voyagers most likely waited for the brief annual reversal of the tropical Pacific’s prevailing south-easterly winds to take them east, rather than attempting to sail against them.
‘What the story tells us is that humans expanded when they had the capacity and, in this case the technology, to do so’, says Irwin. ‘We increasingly know how it was done, when and by whom. What we still don’t know is why’.
Tikopian Vaka Pacific People ‘It is fitting that Auckland Museum should curate Vaka Moana’, says Director Rodney Wilson. ‘We are the oldest museum in the country, with the strongest Maori and Pacific collections in the country. We have had priceless artefacts coming into the collection from early times. And we are in the foremost Pacific Island city in the world. No city has a bigger Pacific Island population or a stronger Pacific identity’. |
