An accidental or intentional settlement?

purposive voyaging

The first Europeans to have discovered Polynesia had no doubt, as they had seen their large canoes and sailing masters,* to the fact that the Polynesians had settled these islands on purposive voyaging because they witnessed large canoes and knew their captains.

But during the beginning of the XIXth century the ancestral knowledge of canoe construction dissolved, leaving in its wake the quasi disappearance of traditional navigation.

winds and currents

In the mid XXth century, researchers put forth the assumption that the Polynesian sailed and settled on island randomly discovered, pushed by the dominant winds and currents. The debates concerning the settlement of Polynesia concentrated on the possibility, even the capacity, of the Polynesians to navigate—and then to return—on long maritime distances.

As impact of Thor Heyerdahl’s exploits on the Kon-Tiki raft (drifting from South America to Tahiti) was resounding, much (and perhaps all the more) of its theory found few echoes in erudite circles.

In 1956, Andrew Sharp’s theory of accidental settlement was largely and quickly accepted by anthropologists, archaeologists and historians alike, who welcomed what they believed to be an overrated image of Polynesians as long-distance travelers and colonizers. Instead of accepting or trying to recreate these navigations which seemed to require qualities of superhuman navigation and endurance, the Sharp model made it possible to all the disciplines to simply suppose that the Polynesians were unable of long distance navigation against prevailing winds and currents, that they had just enough maritime capacities to be endangered and go through by the whims of the wind and the current. The settlement of the Pacific was then a long succession of drifts and chances, randomly sailing and settling across islands, only traveling with the winds and currents.

This theory prevailed for 20 years, to be destroyed in 1973 by Michael R. Levison.

purposive voyaging

To refute this idea of accidental voyaging, he used an important matrix comprising the force of the winds and currents coming from the US naval naval hydrographic documents available of specific points from the Pacific. On the 101,016 tests, if it was possible to drift from west to east, it was virtually impossible to move in the opposite direction (from east to west) without an intentional displacement. Also, on the 16,000 simulated tests, not one course starting from central or Eastern Polynesia could join Hawai’i!