Book Review: Sea People

In Sea People, author Mrs. Thompson sets out to explain the journey that the Western world took to understand how the Polynesian Triangle was populated. It is a magisterial look at the anthropological, scientific, and cultural attempts over the past three hundred years by the Western mind to conceive of how specks of islands separated thousands of miles apart in an empty ocean basin could have been located, identified, and settled systematically by Polynesians. It is clear that Mrs. Thompson has a personal agenda: she is White, but married to a Polynesian. The book, thus, seems like an attempt by her to identify and come to terms with a separate world that has become intimately close to her. Beginning from the early, abortive attempts by the Spanish conquistadors and ending with the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s all-Native Hawaiian crew, Sea People is a celebration of the ingenuity of the Polynesian navigators and the various communities they founded along the way. It tracks across numerous correct and incorrect attempts by Spanish, Dutch, British, and American mariners to figure out how the islands were populated, discussing a medley of sometimes whimsical and outlandish theories. Throughout, Mrs. Thompson maintains a detached perspective of a writer, but goes out of her way to criticize the eurocentricism of early attempts.

We are led on a journey - as if sitting on a sampan - across numerous islands. We meet almost mythical characters such as Tapuia, Captain James Cook’s ingenious navigator from Tahiti, and modern-day seafaring savants like Mau from Satawai. We are fed oral stories about the mythical birdman and the various cosmogonies of Polynesian origin. Because the Polynesian mind is so separated and distant from the European one, its perspective and traditions are so strange and exotic to any reader who happens to be non-Polynesian. In some parts, however, Mrs. Thompson is sympathetic to colonizers. She quips that Captain James Cook, far from being a harbinger of Western imperialism and colonialism, was simply a “man of the Enlightenment” who was very interested in marine science. In doing so, she seems to gloss over some more atrocious behavior of Western imperialism. She fails, for example, to mention the use of nuclear testing sites on numerous Pacific atolls or the savagery of slave trading, although she does recognize that the forces of colonialism had decimated native populations within decades of their arrival.

Despite certain glaring spots in the book, Sea People was a good read. We are led through extremely technical sailing terminology (beyond leeward and windward) and given to understand the Polynesian method of wayfinding in simple and understandable terms. The book also rightly explains a lot of the cultural similarities and consistencies across numerous Pacific nations, and we particularly enjoyed the tangential discussion into the linguistics of Polynesia. The book, beginning with the ominous landing of a white man in tropical paradise, ends well with the factual renaissance of Polynesian culture. Looking back at history, more than a thousand years later, the Polynesian voyages can only spark much wonder and interest. The book’s pace also makes it a good read, and it never felt like we were ploughing through the tome despite its size.