• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1937 0

and Pitcairn Islanders, there would have been still another likely function of the trade with Henderson. The journey from Mangareva to Henderson would take four or five days by Polynesian sailing canoes; from Pitcairn to Henderson, about one day. My own perspective on sea journeys in Pacific native canoes is based on much briefer voyages, which left me constantly terrified of the canoe’s capsizing or breaking up and in one case nearly cost me my life. That makes the thought of a several-day canoe voyage across open ocean intolerable to me, something that only a desperate need to save my life could induce me to undertake. But to modern Pacific seafaring peoples, who sail their canoes five days just to buy cigarettes, the journeys are part of normal life. For the former Polynesian inhabitants of Mangareva or Pitcairn, a visit to Henderson for a week would have been a wonderful picnic, a chance to feast on nesting turtles and their eggs and on Henderson’s millions of nesting seabirds. To Pitcairn Islanders in particular, living on an island without reefs or calm inshore waters or rich shellfish beds, Henderson would also have been attractive for fish, shellfish, and just for the chance to hang out on the beach. For the same reason, the descendants of the Bounty mutineers today, bored with their tiny island prison, jump at the chance of a “vacation” on the beach of a coral atoll a few hundred miles distant.

Mangareva, it turns out, was the geographic hub of a much larger trade network, of which the ocean journey to Pitcairn and Henderson a few hundred miles to the southeast was the shortest spoke. The longer spokes, of about a thousand miles each, connected Mangareva to the Marquesas to the north-northwest, to the Societies to the west-northwest, and possibly to the Australs due west. The dozens of low coral atolls of the Tuamotu Archipelago offered small intermediate stepping-stones for breaking up these journeys. Just as Mangareva’s population of several thousand people dwarfed that of Pitcairn and Henderson, the populations of the Societies and Marquesas (around a hundred thousand people each) dwarfed that of Mangareva.

Hard evidence for this larger trade network emerged in the course of Weisler’s chemical studies of basalt, when he had the good fortune to identify two adzes of basalt originating from a Marquesas quarry and one adze from a Societies quarry among 19 analyzed adzes collected on Mangareva. Other evidence comes from tools whose styles vary from island to island, such as adzes, axes, fishhooks, octopus lures, harpoons, and files. Similarities of styles between islands, and appearances of examples of one island’s type of tool on another island, attest to trade especially between the Marquesas and Mangareva, with an accumulation of Marquesas-style tools on Mangareva around A.D. 1100-1300 suggesting a peak in interisland voyaging then. Still further evidence comes from studies by the linguist Steven Fischer, who concludes that the Mangarevan language as known in recent times is descended from the language originally brought to Mangareva by its first settlers and then heavily modified by subsequent contact with the language of the southeastern Marquesas (the portion of the Marquesas Archipelago closest to Mangareva).

As for the functions of all that trade and contact in the larger network, one was certainly economic, just as in the smaller Mangareva/Pitcairn/ Henderson network, because the networks’ archipelagoes complemented one another in resources. The Marquesas were the “motherland,” with a big land area and human population and one good basalt quarry, but poor marine resources because there were no lagoons or fringing reefs. Mangareva, a “second motherland,” boasted a huge and rich lagoon, offset by a small land area and population and inferior stone. Mangareva’s daughter colonies on Pitcairn and Henderson had the drawbacks of a tiny land area and population but great stone on Pitcairn and great feasting on Henderson. Finally, the Tuamotu Archipelago offered only a small land area and no stone at all, but