Polynesia is the largest and most recently settled inhabited region on Earth. At nearly one million square miles, which is three times larger than the continental United States, it comprises a vast triangle sketched by lines connecting Hawaii, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Aotearoa (New Zealand). The exploration and settlement of this enormous ocean world was certainly the greatest feat of navigation and cultural expansion in human history. And it was a very recent event, one that began only five thousand years ago and was completed after the Vikings were in Newfoundland.
This is the true face of our planet. This world is Ocean, not Earth. All the world’s seas are united into a single World Ocean, which connects to itself through many seas and straits and passages, and divides the continents from one another. On this great salt water highway one can travel from the Arctic to the Antarctic and circle the globe, while on the land there is always land’s end. This was the view of the Polynesian navigators, the heroic voyagers who set out with a perfect technology and clear intention on their journeys from one tiny speck of land to another: the sea is the highway, it connects the islands into a whole that can be travelled and known. Their understanding of this wide ocean world and their presence throughout it suggests an entirely new concept of the term “at sea.” We are not between places, we are in Polynesia.
Our days in the Southern Line Islands have made this clear to us. Although we focused our attention on the reefs and lagoons of the atolls, the sea surrounded us. It was an inescapable fact of every moment of the day that we had arrived at a beautiful anomaly, a fleck of green in an endless blue, an island we could walk across in a few moments caught in the midst of an ocean too large to contain even in our imaginations. Now we seem to be alone, an even smaller fleck of steel and comfort, held in the vast embrace of the Pacific. But we are not alone at all – life surrounds us in the sky and in the sea, and the islands surround us as well; we are adding another thread to the web that unites them.
