How did people reach every habitable island across ten million square miles of Pacific, upwind, centuries before Europeans could cross an ocean at all? Thompson takes the whole history of that question: Cook and his crews puzzling over it, missionaries, the drift theories, Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki, then the linguists and archaeologists, then the moment in 1976 when the Hōkūleʻa sailed Hawaii to Tahiti with no instruments, navigated by Mau Piailug from Micronesia, one of the last men alive who knew how. She’s married into a Māori family and writes the scholarship and the seamanship with equal care.
Sea People