Sea People

(by Christina Thompson)

This book isn’t just about the settlement of the Polynesian Triangle—it’s also about history and anthropology and archaeology and epistemology: it’s about what non-Polynesian people have known (or not known, or guessed, or tried to figure out) about Polynesia and how (and when) it might have been settled, and how sources of knowledge and attitudes towards them have changed over time.

The book starts with what we know from various eyewitness accounts from the first Europeans to arrive in various parts of Polynesia, moves from there to what Europeans learned of Polynesian history from Polynesian oral traditions and then from anthropological and archaeological study, and finishes with information gleaned from more recent advances in genetics and radiocarbon dating. My favorite part of the book, though, was the section about various “experimental voyagers” who have tried to “reenact the voyages of the ancient Polynesians,” both by building and sailing in boats modeled after the ones that Europeans saw when they first arrived, and by trying to learn/recreate traditional Polynesian techniques for navigating vast stretches of ocean without instruments, thanks to the help of wayfinders like the Micronesian navigator Mau Piailug and other Pacific Islanders.

I don’t know how many fun facts I’m going to actually remember from this book, but there sure were a lot of them. Did you know, for example, that the whole idea of the hypothetical continent of “Terra Australis Incognita” came about not just because Europeans liked the idea of some big undiscovered place full of hypothetical riches to plunder, but also because of the ancient Greek idea “that there must be an equal weight of continental matter in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, or else the world would topple over”? Or did you know that when the Europeans arrived in the Tuamotu Archipelago in the 1700s, the people there used canoes made of multiple small pieces of wood (because their islands didn’t have the bigger trees that could be found elsewhere in Polynesia), and that there’s a surviving example that is made of “no fewer than forty-five irregularly shaped pieces of wood” joined with “braided sennit, a kind of cordage made from the inner husk of a coconut”? Or that we’re still not sure how the sweet potato (which is a plant of the Americas) ended up being widespread in Polynesia by the time that Cook and other Europeans arrived?

A lot of the nonfiction I’ve been reading over the past few years has been for the nonfiction book club I’m in, and this book is another in the list of books I’ve read for that book club that I probably never would have picked up otherwise. This was my first read of 2026 and a good start to the reading year: I found myself totally engaged by Thompson’s writing and by the story of what we know about how Polynesia was settled and how we know it.