Expanding the map

Fifty years ago it was possible for scholars to disagree about whether prehistoric Polynesians had been capable of long sea voyages. The decline of traditional aquatechnology and colonialist assumptions of racial inferiority had both cast doubt on the veracity of oral histories that described the crossing and colonisation of the Pacific.

Today, the Polynesians are rightly celebrated for their feats of seamanship. The reconstruction of traditional sailing craft and the combined efforts of hundreds of researchers have left no doubt about the broad outlines of the history of the settlement of Polynesia.

In the last couple of years, new research has further expanded our appreciation of the achievements of ancient Polynesian mariners. A team based in the Anthropology Department of the University of Auckland made headlines in the New York Times when they found Polynesian chicken bones in a Chilean cave, and thereby showed that the Polynesians had pushed on beyond Rapa Nui/Easter Island all the way to South America.

The discovery in Chile is already opening up new lines of enquiry for research into human prehistory. For instance, scholars are investigating the possibility of a connection between proto-Polynesian and pre-Columban American cultures by looking at the languages and artefacts of some coastal American peoples.

The subantarctic Auckland Islands have been the scene of some less-publicised discoveries in the last few of years. Digging into the frigid soil of the islands, researchers have discovered middens and fragments of artefacts which were left by Polynesians in or before the fifteenth century. It has been known for some time that the ancestors of the Maori not only quickly explored the whole of New Zealand after arriving here around about the twelfth century, but also journeyed from these shores to the Kermadecs, Norfolk Island, and the Chathams before the end of the fifteenth century. It now appears that the early Maori also made the journey south from Te Wai Pounamu to the inhospitable Auckland Islands. I spent yesterday afternoon in Te Papa, and I was pleased to see that the museum's curators have reacted to the discoveries of the last couple of years by updating the map which they use to explain the exploration and settlement of the Pacific and adjoining areas. New arrows record the Polynesian progress to South America and to the Auckland Islands.

Even if the distance between New Zealand and the Aucklands is relatively short, compared to the gulf between Rapa Nui and South America, the Polynesian foray into subantarctic waters seems as impressive as the journey to the coast of present-day Chile. Although the world's climate was going through a relatively warm period in the fourteen and fifteenth centuries, the seas around the Auckland Islands would still have been enormous, capricious, and icy, and the waka that went south would not have been able to rely on a tailwind for long. The apparent ability of ancient Polynesians to survive for some time on the Auckland Islands is perhaps even more impressive. The islands get an average of one sunny day a year, and their never-ending winds and frosts make even subsistence agriculture a very difficult proposition. The British established a settlement in 1846, but even with the advantages of industrial technology they were unable to make the venture a success, and the colony they had named Hardwicke was evacuated after less than three years. A colony set up by the Ngati Mutunga conquerors of the Chathams and their Moriori slaves lasted a little longer, but only because the colonists had to wait for a boat to take them away from their ill-chosen home. Of the four prehistoric 'colonies' set up by the early Maori, only the settlement in the Chathams survived. Over several centuries, the Maori who settled on those cold but relatively large islands developed their own distinctive culture, and came to call themselves Moriori. Norfolk island and the Kermadecs appear to have been abandoned, and we do not know whether the discoverers of the Auckland Islands perished there or returned to the comparative warmth of Te Wai Pounamu.

If the European whalers and explorers who showed up at the Auckland Islands at the end of the eighteenth century had been greeted by descendants of the island's first settlers, what sort of culture would these people have had? It has generally been considered that the things which make Moriori culture unusual in Polynesia - its pacifism, its egalitarianism, its ingenious but simple technology, and its famous dendroglyphs - were all the product of the unusual environment in which the first settlers of the Chathams found themselves. Pacifism is supposed to have been essential on a small island, egalitarianism is thought to be have been an automatic result of a hunter gatherer economy, low-tech but clever devices like the wash-through raft are supposed to be responses to the absence of big trees, and so on.

I'm all for a bit of functionalism, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that there is only one way that humans can react to a given environment, even an environment as distinctive as the one on the Chathams. There are many examples of small islands which nourished warlike rather than pacifist cultures - consider, for instance, Rapa, a little-known northen neighbour of New Zealand which is covered with earthworks that recall the pa sites up and down the North Island. The Chathams may have been cold, but they were actually far richer in food resources and trees than many other Pacific islands - far richer, for example, than the Kiribatis. The I-Kiribati, who live on the equator and never get cold, built huge common houses, despite the fact that their 'desert islands' had few suitable trees; the Moriori, who must have been cold all the time, slept in rough, temporary shelters.

It also seems somewhat demeaning to suggest that a people's choices are dictated wholly by their environment, and not by beliefs and values. How noble is a pacifism which is wholly pragmatic in origin?

If the prehistoric settlement on the Auckland Islands had persisted, then we might have something compelling with which to compare the Moriori experience. As it is, the Moriori are perhaps the only surviving example of an indigenous subantarctic people.