Just a few weeks ago, Chris and his family visited the Big Island of Hawaii. While there, he was completely enthralled with learning more about how the first inhabitants got to such a remote place and surrounding areas. For more than a thousand years, Polynesians have called some of the most distant islands in the Pacific Ocean home. Where did they come from, how did they get there and how did a group of people conquer the largest ocean in the world a thousand years ago? It’s one of the greatest mysteries ever. Our guest this week, who has familial roots to the area, set out to understand more. Christina Thompson is editor of Harvard Review and author of “Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia.” She joins WITHpod to discuss what drew her to this story, what makes this mystery so complex, the impact of the arrival of European explorers, the limits of our understanding and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Christina Thompson: One of the things that inhibits European understanding of the sort of amazingness of this diaspora is that for a very long time, they think there’s a continent there somewhere. So for hundreds of years, Europeans traveling in the Pacific are looking for this unknown continent in the Southern Hemisphere, in the Southern Pacific basin basically. And that sort of explains to them where these people are going to come from. I mean, for some of them anyway.
Another thing they think, there are other theories about where the people might have come from, but basically they’re just starting to recognize what the geography of the ocean is, and then the fact that these little tiny islands are all inhabited is a big, you know, eye-opener.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. You know, one of the great perks of my job and of my life, a thing that I’m forever eternally grateful for, is that I get to learn a lot of stuff. And when I get interested in something, I can just like find an expert in it and talk to them on this very program and pursue my interests. So today is one of those episodes. And the story of this begins just a few weeks ago when my family and I went over holiday break to the big island of Hawaii. And we were there.
I had been once to Oahu, to Honolulu, in Waikiki Beach in the spring. It was my first time in Hawaii. But I was there for under sort of strange circumstances. I ended up getting sick and I was actually working on a book. So it was kind of a writing retreat. I was there because Kate had a gig at the University of Hawaii Law School for her podcast, “Strict Scrutiny.” I went out early to get some writing done and then Trump got indicted that week by Alvin Bragg. So I ended up having to do the show.
So, I didn’t really get to like experience Hawaii as Hawaii, even though I was totally blown away by the little that I got to see. So we went back to the big island and we rented a house in the water and it was one of the most perfect and beautiful places I’ve ever been in my life. And you know, this is not a novel observation by yours truly, but when you go there, you sort of look around, you look at the water and there’s a few things you think. One is this is pretty close to paradise. Like this is a place that has perfect weather, that has no bugs, it’s not malarial, right? And it’s not like oppressively hot like some tropical places might be.
It has bounty everywhere you look. There’s fish in the water. You know, if you were sort of building a society there, there’s coconuts falling from the trees, there’s fruit. You can grow things in the sort of volcanic soil here after it sort of had a little time to develop. I mean, what an amazing place. Like, you know, it’s a cliché to say like paradise, but it feels like that. So that’s the first thought is like, wow, this is really special.
And then the other thought when you’re sitting there at, you know, this place that you’ve rented and you’re looking at on the map and then you’re looking at big island and you’re on the big island and then you’re on Google Maps or Google Earth and you’re zooming out and out and out. It’s like, wow, really in the middle of like literal nowhere. Like this is in the middle of the ocean. And then you think to yourself, huh, how did people get here? You start moving around on Google Earth and you’re like, it is a long way from anywhere else to here.
And, you know, the people that came here when they first came here, how did they find it? Like how would they know? Like, what would it be like to set sail on your outrigger from, you know, the Marquesas Islands, which is, we think, is probably the launch point for the people that first arrived in Hawaii. And obviously, no GPS, none of the navigational technologies that even, you know, we associate with the 18th or 19th century European sailors, but in some ways, better technologies that had been developed for centuries by people navigating these waterways to manage to find an island like this and then to settle it and to have a society grow up there.
And that’s not just true of Hawaii. I mean, Hawaii is the most, in some ways, the most middle of nowhere, but it’s true of everywhere from the Marquesas Islands to Tahiti to New Zealand, which is, you know, in the sort of southwestern part of the Pacific all the way to the Easter Islands, which is a part of the nation of Chile.
All of these islands, and when you look at it, you just think to yourself, how on earth did people settle this part of the planet? How? I literally don’t understand. So I became obsessed with this question and I was just, you know, posting about it on Bluesky. And someone said, oh, there’s this great book. People recommend a few books. One of them is called “Sea People” by an author named Christina Thompson. You should check it out. “Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia.” So I downloaded the book and I read the book while I was on vacation and it blew my mind.
I spent my entire vacation talking to my family members about everything I was reading, just spilling out knowledge about the settlement of Polynesia. It’s one of the greatest accomplishments of human beings in the history of human civilization, bar none. I mean, it’s anything you want to name, like the pyramid, the Roman Empire, like it is up there as like one of the most astounding people, like top five accomplishments of human beings in human history, the settlement of Polynesia.
And the story of how we figured out how it might’ve happened, which we still don’t definitively know, makes up the spine of this incredibly gripping narrative by Christina Thompson. The book is called “Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia.” Christina’s editor of Harvard Review and it’s my great pleasure to have her on the podcast today.
Christina Thompson: Thanks for inviting me. I’m thrilled to be here.
Chris Hayes: Can I talk about your way into this area of interest? I know that you mentioned in the book that your husband is Maori —
Christina Thompson: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — from New Zealand. And how did you sort of get interested in this question?
Christina Thompson: Well, I read another book earlier, which was kind of about the contact between Europeans and New Zealanders, Maori, in the 19th century mostly, some in the 18th century. And in that book, I touch on this subject of the Polynesian diaspora, the settlement of Remote Oceania, but I didn’t really know very much about it. I didn’t really know what it entailed. But the reason I started thinking about it was there was this kind of funny moment for me when we were young. I was a post-doc at the East West Center in Honolulu and we had only just one child then. He was a baby.
And so we’re living in Honolulu and my husband’s father died and that was in New Zealand. So my husband went home to New Zealand, taking the baby with him and I stayed back in Honolulu. And I had this time where I would sit and kind of look out, as you did, on the vast Pacific from Hawaii, a vantage point in Hawaii, and think how incredibly far away they were. They were so far away. And knowing, as I did, about the Polynesian Triangle, the fact that there were the same group of people that had colonized effectively, this huge, you know, 10 million square miles, this huge region in the middle of the Pacific.
So knowing that, it just came home to me in a way that it hadn’t before, even though I had flown across the Pacific multiple times and, you know, I sort of knew how big it was. But it was just the incredible distance. So it’s a distance story, you know? Like as you say, it’s a distance story. So that was kind of how I got started. And then when I was done with that book and I started thinking about what to do next. I realized this is a really good story.
Chris Hayes: There’s a great moment in the book that you talk about that stuck with me, where you talk about your husband and you’re sort of making the point about the Polynesian diaspora, right? These places are thousands of miles from each other, New Zealand, Tahiti, the Marquesas, right? Hawaii. But there’s a unified culture of people and in terms of the myths, language, you know, all sorts of aspects of ritual and culture, right?
And you tell this story, I forget where you guys were, but you were at some like tourist location, I think it was in Hawaii about like renting a surfboard, something like that, right? And it’s mobbed and your husband approaches this guy who’s like, you know, it’s 30 bucks, but it’s 15 for you, brother. And you said, you know, your husband, because he’s like, you know, we’re Islanders basically, even though he’s not from Hawaii, right? And your point being that like you could have that experience between Polynesian peoples over a span of 10 million square miles where people would recognize each other as essentially of the same culture, of the same ancestry, of the same kin.
Christina Thompson: Totally. It was a great moment. It was like sort of cuzzy bro, you know. And when I’m in Polynesia, I don’t go to Polynesia without my husband, and I basically stand behind him.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: And I let him do everything because even though he doesn’t speak French, so that’s a problem when we’re in Tahiti, but he is recognized everywhere as a local, even though he is totally not a local. He doesn’t speak French in Tahiti. He doesn’t speak Spanish in Easter Island. He doesn’t know anything about these places and yet there he is and they know and he knows. It’s cool.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And that exactly, that he is a local, even though it’s thousands of miles away, embodies the majesty and mystery of the settlement of Polynesia, right, which is that you have one culture and one people, right, in sort of quotation marks, that managed to make their way across the water. So let’s talk about how this happened. So there’s two ways we can do this and I’m sort of curious which way you think is better.
We can do it with what we know now, or we can do a little bit of the historiography that makes up the kind of narrative thrust of your book, which is how we’ve learned at different moments what we know. So maybe we start with like the first European encounters and the kind of what they report about what they see, what they encounter.
Christina Thompson: Right. I mean, this actually, the way you just put that, that sort of mirrors what happened to me when I started trying to write about it because I was going about it like, what do we know about it? And then the question was, wait a minute, how do we know any of that? So, you know, stepping it back to sort of each piece of the puzzle. And the beginning is the European explorers in the, well, this little bit in the 16th, mainly the 17th and 18th centuries
And what happens is it takes a long time for Europeans to sort of decode the Pacific. It’s very, very, very big. It’s very, very challenging to cross. It’s not particularly Pacific. It’s not quiet. It’s full of other, you know, big swells and dangerous reefs and long stretches with no water. You know, it’s dangerous and difficult to cross and lots of people died. So the Europeans are sort of bumbling around through the Pacific for a long time and they keep running into islands.
And so gradually what happens is over a period of a hundred, 200 years, they start to accumulate, and this is also different nations by the way. So it’s the Dutch and then it’s the, you know, French and the British or the Spaniards before that. And they’re not all communicating with each other all that well. So little by little, the information starts to sort of percolate out and kind of get aggregated so that people begin to understand that there’s an island here and there’s an island there.
And of course, they don’t have a chronometer yet. So like where those islands are is not really very clear. So they find them and lose them. Then they find them again. And so, you know, all of that happens. That goes on for a long time.
Chris Hayes: Well, let me just say this. If you are listening to this right now on a smartphone, seriously, just do this. Pull up right now Google Earth or Google Maps, and just put in, say, put in Oahu. And then just pinch your fingers out just to get a sense of what we’re talking about, because it is needle in a haystack. I mean, it’s utterly improbable, right? Like there’s just like so much water for every little bit of land in this vastness that is the Pacific Ocean.
Christina Thompson: Yeah, that is really something you need to understand to understand this story, is that it’s really a lot of water. And there are huge stretches between the island groups where there is nothing at all. So you don’t get to stop, you don’t get to refresh, you don’t get to get more water, you don’t get to get anything. You just have to keep going.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And even if let’s say you’re sailing around the African Cape of Good Hope, right? Even if you’re doing that, which is a very long and can be dangerous journey, you can do it in such a way that you’re never that far from shore, right? You can basically hug the coastline of Africa as you go down. You can stop if need be, right? If you do a transatlantic mission, that’s different, right? You leave, you know, you might see the Azores on your way over, but again, that’s dangerous and scary. But that’s smaller and easier than the Pacific. Like, there’s nothing quite like the vastness of ocean that is this part of the earth.
Christina Thompson: That’s right. So, they start to find islands and they start to try to ask questions about the islands. But one of the things that inhibits European understanding of the sort of amazingness of this diaspora is that for a very long time they think there’s a continent there somewhere. So for hundreds of years, Europeans traveling in the Pacific are looking for this unknown continent in the Southern Hemisphere, in the Southern Pacific basin basically. And that sort of explains to them where these people are going to come from. I mean, for some of them anyway.
Another thing they think, there are other theories about where the people might have come from, but basically they’re just starting to recognize what the geography of the ocean is, and then the fact that these little tiny islands are all inhabited is a big, you know, eye opener. That’s —
Chris Hayes: Yes. This exact problem starts to dawn on them pretty quickly. In fact, my favorite is there’s one early theory that like maybe they just developed, you know, it was like Adam and Eve or something. They evolved there like just utterly indigenous to the island.
Christina Thompson: Right. God made them there.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly.
Christina Thompson: And so God made them there that’s why they’re there. Yeah. So there’s lots of this starts to be some thinking like that. And it’s really Cook who is the first guy to put it together. And he over the course of three voyages in the sort of in the 1760s and 70s, mainly 1770s, really does enough work, enough navigational work and enough just plain old traveling to figure it out.
Chris Hayes: And I want to be clear here and Europeans say this in the book, but I just want to be clear here about the sort of the reason that we’re reliant on these accounts from European sailors is because Polynesian culture is not a written culture. So we don’t have written artifacts.
As we will see, and as I think honestly, the Europeans recognized almost immediately to me in a fascinating way, it is an incredibly developed and sophisticated culture and civilization, but it does not have writing. So we cannot rely upon, you know, in the case of Sumer or in Hammurabi’s Cope. Like there’s other civilizations that we can look at texts and we can try to translate them. We don’t have that here to try to reconstruct the story.
Christina Thompson: Right. We don’t have written texts to cover this time period. And there are also other problems. There are things that are complicated like Tropical Polynesia is not a very good environment for archeological remains.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: Things kind of decay and disappear.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: So there’s not a ton of evidence. So the evidence tends to come from a whole bunch of different sort of areas like, you know, linguistics, for example, or from obviously archeology. But also the reason that we start, and people did wonder, why did you start with the Europeans if it’s a story of the Polynesian people. Why did you start with Europeans? Because they’re like a data point from very early in the story. From as early as the 17th century, we have eyewitness observation of like, what’s going on? What kinds of boats do these people have? And the observations aren’t very good, but they’re there. There’s something. So that’s important.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. So maybe let’s talk about Cook because Cook is the pivotal figure and Cook is fascinating. And I didn’t realize how fascinating Cook was or how pivotal he was until I read your book. Who is Captain Cook?
Christina Thompson: So Captain Cook is, I mean, I think he’s the greatest European navigator of the 18th century and probably of more centuries than that. He was a man of humble origins. He was in the Royal Navy. He had military service. He was in Newfoundland for a while. He gets assigned a job in the late 1760s, which is to go to the middle of the Pacific, to Tahiti, and observe the transit of Venus, which is the passage of the planet Venus across the face of the sun, which is like this astronomical phenomenon that 18th century astronomers were very interested in.
And so they send him out there to this place that has only just been sort of, quote, “discovered,” right? Like it’s only just been located from the point of view of Europeans. And he goes to Tahiti and sets up his observatory. And the thing that’s incredible about him for the period is that he stays there for four months, which is way longer than, you know, than any of the kinds of encounters that other European explorers have.
Chris Hayes: And he’s the second European to land in Tahiti, right? There had been a French explorer first or?
Christina Thompson: The Spaniards were there, the French were there, and earlier your Englishman was there, Wallace was there. So, it’s not the first guy there. It’s more that he spends enough time there so that he really learns some things. And the other thing about him is that Cook was a surveyor. He was really obsessed with figuring out where things were, you know, laying down the actual locations of islands and also drawing the coastlines and mapping.
And so he is the guy who’s responsible for having basically, because he passed back and forth and back and forth and up and down through the Pacific over the course of some basically close to a decade. Over the course of those three voyages, he just found everything.
Chris Hayes: Right.
More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Now, one of the most fascinating things about this, when he comes to Tahiti and has a good relationship with the Tahitians, indigenous Polynesians. There’s a queen, I believe, of the island at the time who has a kind of counselor wise man who is a figure I had never heard of until your book and has to be one of the most literally fascinating figures in all of history. His name is Tupaia. Is that how it’s pronounced?
Christina Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Tupaia. And Tupaia seems from the accounts that we have like a world historical genius basically, who basically like teaches himself English and becomes a sort of translator and sort of cross-cultural interlocutor and is like hanging out with Cook’s men and kind of becomes the first real sort of transmission point of indigenous Polynesian culture to Europeans.
Christina Thompson: Yes. He is one of these sort of go between figures. And he is a man of significant knowledge and authority, which I think is important because sometimes there are other situations in which islanders went with Europeans, but they weren’t always people of such prestige. So it was quite important that Tupaia was a man of real knowledge. So the crazy thing that happens is that Tupaia is an informant for him. And then after Cook has been there for several months and it’s time for him to go, Tupaia says, I’d like to go with you. To me, I mean, I’m always kind of blown away by that because it’s like so dangerous and so wild and he just decides he’s going to go, and Cook says, okay.
Chris Hayes: And there’s an important part of this too, which is that there’s a question, right? Which is it could be the case, given the vastness and the kind of physical distance between these islands, it could be the case that each little settlement is sort of in its own world and doesn’t realize that there’s a bunch of folks around, right? Or it could be the case that they understand themselves as part of a kind of archipelago, right? That because they’re such a seafaring people that they know that there’s other islands out there and that they have experience maybe going back and forth to trade.
And one of the key insights that Cook gets from Tupaia is that it’s clearly the latter, right? Because he knows there are other islands out there. He talks about it. I think his father going. And so when he’s going like, I want to go with you, it’s also like these are adventurous seafaring people who go to other islands and kind of aren’t scared of that and also he has some personal knowledge, at least from his dad, that there are other islands out there.
Christina Thompson: Yes, he definitely knows about other islands. And in fact, you know, I think one of the best ways of thinking about this is that even within the historic period, the historical period, there are areas where people were still traveling fairly long distances, hundreds and hundreds of miles in voyaging canoes. So Tahiti to the Marquesas maybe, but certainly Tahiti to the Tuamotu archipelago, which is a very long archipelago to the east, certainly within the Tonga-Samoa-Fiji triangle, there’s a lot of activity. You know, there are places where people are moving around. But what the thing is that by the time Europeans arrive in the Pacific, the islanders, the inhabitants of these islands are not making the really long voyages anymore that they must have made in order to populate the islands in the first place. Cook does not find in Tahiti that people are going to Hawaii, for example.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: He does not find that they are going to New Zealand. He basically finds that they’re going to the Toa Motu and so forth. And when he talks to Tupaia, Tupaia, you know, he ultimately draws this amazing map for Cook in which he shows what he knows of the region and it’s very extensive, but it doesn’t stretch as many people do claim, which I think is wrong. It does not stretch all the way to the far points of the triangle.
Chris Hayes: Right. And it also is, you write about this in the book, it’s sort of this weird conceptual hybrid, right? There’s a sort of fascinating, deep, almost sort of epistemological question about what space is and how we know the world, right? And how you talk about, I love the metaphor you use, which is you talk about how our map is the God’s eye view, right? And that that’s not actually the way that we think of spaces like we live in.
So you talk about how, if you ask a person to describe their apartment, they don’t walk you through the floor plan, right? They say like, well, first you come in through the entrance and then you have the living rooms there and you go up the stairs, there’s a bedroom. And that that’s kind of more spatially the way that Tupaia and Polynesian folks are thinking of this space, right? Because there’s no God’s eye, there’s no bird’s eye view. There’s the sailing experience of you go this way and that way and that’s where things are.
Christina Thompson: Yeah. That’s what we think. It’s sort of a little bit speculative, but it does seem to be that that’s the way that it works. I mean, certainly even European cartographers did coastal profiles, which is from the deck of the ship.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: So there are times when they are seeing, they are thinking about what it looks like to be on the ship, to look at the land, you know, where it is relative to them. It’s basically where it is relative to you —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Christina Thompson: — you know, as a human on the surface of the earth. But it definitely does seem as though the kind of knowledge that would be useful to Tupaia or to other navigators or way finders that like him would be instructions. It’s like, how do you get there from here is the important piece of information.
Chris Hayes: Exactly. So Tupaia, he talks about these other islands. They sort of collaborate on this map. There’s also just before we get to where he goes, because I think there’s a moment in that that’s like just a jaw-dropping moment that I’m excited to talk about. There’s also just that we should say that Cook has the same experience that every other European sailor has, which is immediate appreciation that these people’s boats are really good, and they are really good on the water, and there is a high degree of technical acumen and sophistication in their ability to sail.
Christina Thompson: Yes, and this is reported by many people. There is kind of amazement at the vessels themselves. Although they go out, they disappear fairly quickly because European boats start to replace them. But there is like some pretty good documentation of what the vessels themselves actually look like. And then there’s just this awareness that these people are incredible on the water. They’re just great sailors and they’re really comfortable there. So, you know, it’s obvious.
Chris Hayes: And in many cases, faster, there’s some saying, you know, they can go three lengths to our two. Will you describe these outrigger boats, like what the sort of traditional Polynesian boat is?
Christina Thompson: Right. So, the key innovation that really enables all of this is the development of the outrigger. And that’s something that happens thousands of years ago in the island Southeast Asia. And that’s just this piece of wood basically that runs parallel to the hull that is attached to the hull of a canoe by two long arms basically, and it’s a stabilizer. And so it enables a narrow craft to go on the open ocean. So that’s fundamental. So that evolves into what’s basically a catamaran.
So the voyaging canoes are two hulls, parallel hulls with a platform over them, which is effectively a catamaran. And then they have a sail or two sails sometimes, and they have storage compartments and they can carry, you know, 40, 50 people and they can sometimes go in either direction. There’s all kinds of cool stuff about them, but that’s basically what they are.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And this sort of, right, the outrigger part is this sort of innovation that, like you said, they can go fast, they’re quite agile on the water and they’re also stable. All right, so Cook’s there for four months. There’s this sort of really interesting cultural exchange. Tupaia is like, I want to go with you guys. And again, he’s this just completely compelling and fascinating figure who’s, you know, this sort of single-handedly, this kind of, you know, site of cultural exchange. So he goes with them and they go to New Zealand, right?
Christina Thompson: Right.
Chris Hayes: And I’ll let you tell this about when he gets off. So, New Zealand’s very far from Tahiti.
Christina Thompson: Yes. It’s a couple of thousand miles.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Christina Thompson: I mean, they go south, and it’s longer than that for them because they go due south. Cook is looking for the unknown continent, okay? He’s looking for the great Southland. So he sets —
Chris Hayes: Oh, right, they think there’s one down there, right?
Christina Thompson: Right. So, they sail south from Tahiti, goes into the Australs various other. Anyway, eventually they turn west and they head for New Zealand. Now Cook knows that New Zealand is there because Abel Tasman was there in 1642. Abel Tasman was chased away by the Maori who killed some of his guys. So they know about New Zealand and Cook even thinks he knows where it is. So they head for it and they sail and they sail and they sail and they sail and they sail. And during this time when they’re sailing is when Cook and Tupaia together developed this map, which is so cool.
But anyway, so they finally reach New Zealand and they get to New Zealand and Cook does the thing that he normally does, which is that he, you know, takes a little party of men in a couple of little boats and they go on shore. And then it goes wrong as it so often does, often in New Zealand especially, but many places. There’s an altercation. The Maori come out of the bush. The boys in the boat think they’re going to try and steal the boat. One of the Marines shoots one of the Maori. He dies. It’s all bad. Okay.
Cook retreats with his people and he decides the next day he’s going to do it again. So the next day he makes a change to his strategy. He brings a lot more Marines. That’s the first thing he does, but he also brings Tupaia. And what happens is that as they approach the shore, Tupaia steps up effectively and speaks to the people on shore, in fluent Tahitian, and they understand him.
Chris Hayes: I mean, like, they’re more than 2000 miles. The guy’s never been there, of course. Tupaia —
Christina Thompson: He doesn’t even know. Tupaia definitely doesn’t know what this land is, but he gets up and he speaks to them. Probably he says something about who he is and where he’s come from and who they are maybe or what he intends or something. And they understand him. And, you know, that’s a real jaw dropper.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And Cook and his men are like, holy crap.
Christina Thompson: Right.
Chris Hayes: How is this possible?
Christina Thompson: This is like the first real confirmation, even though there have been a lot of word lists that have been collected in various different parts of the Pacific. And there’s a suggestion that there is a great similarity between some of these languages, a surprising similarity between some of these languages. But in this case, this is just total confirmation that these people are speaking cognate languages, languages that are related to one another.
Chris Hayes: And it’s one of the pieces of evidence, and there’s lots of others. There’s the migration of the domestic animals that they’ve brought with them throughout the islands that are not indigenous to the island. So we can sort of trace that was brought by human settlement. There’s shared cultural myths. There’s, of course, cultural practices, tattooing, things like that, that are also shared across them. But that moment of like, I’m just going to talk to you guys. And it would be like, you know, if like, yeah, like if the aliens showed up and like they just spoke English is like —
Christina Thompson: Yeah. Exactly.
Chris Hayes: How did that happen, like?
Christina Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So I think it’s also probably worth talking about because you talk about this sort of, you know, the altercation because we’re going to get to Hawaii where, you know, this chapter ends for Cook. The nature of these exchanges, I mean, obviously, and one of the things I found about your book and one of the things I found about Hawaii was that it was actually quite radicalizing, like politically. Like these places had, you know, indigenous civilizations that were just totally taken from them, like straight up.
Christina Thompson: Well, yeah.
Chris Hayes: And that’s not the nature of these initial exchanges. So that I think is actually important to note. Talk about characterizing what these initial exchanges are like in terms of conflict, in terms of perceptions of threat, in terms of violence, et cetera.
Christina Thompson: There’s a lot of conflict. I mean, anybody who says there isn’t is lying.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Christina Thompson: I mean, something that was always interesting to me is that the sort of mythology, like the popular understanding of some of different islands in Polynesia is kind of different. Like Tahiti is always seen as this kind of like soft paradise, you know.
Chris Hayes: Groovy, yeah.
Christina Thompson: Yeah, and sort of feminized in some way.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Christina Thompson: Like beautiful Tahitian women, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes. Gauguin.
Christina Thompson: I mean, Gauguin, et cetera. But the thing is that the early interactions between say, Wallace, who is the Englishman who kind of located Tahiti, and the Tahitians had an armada and they were massed against Wallace and they were totally determined, I think, to take his ship and kill him. And that was often the case that the people’s reaction to the arrival of strangers was to be unsure of them or maybe sometimes to take their stuff or to kill them.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, in a defensive posture. Yeah, right.
Christina Thompson: Whatever.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Christina Thompson: I mean, it varied, right? It varied a lot, but there was definitely that. And then the Europeans were often brutal. In the Marquesas, the early interactions in the Marquesas between the Spanish and the Marquesans were just totally brutal. Cook himself had moments of real brutality, especially in his later voyages. The Hawaii story is, I mean, he was being quite cruel and horrible when he was ultimately killed. So no one gets out of this. I mean, it was hard and dangerous and bad in many cases, but it wasn’t always bad. You know, so it’s complicated.
Chris Hayes: That’s what I found so interesting. Yeah, the complexity of is actually really interesting because it does seem like there’s tension, there’s conflict, sometimes there’s violence, but sometimes there’s violence followed by not fight. Like it’s not particularly straightforward. It’s not like they fight immediately or they’re like, it’s like peaceful and welcome. It’s fraught and complicated and sort of moves in different ways even over a period of a five day visit basically.
Christina Thompson: Right. And also over some decades, you know, it continues, like new people arrive and sometimes they behave, you know, particularly badly and then they get punished.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Christina Thompson: You know, there are some examples in New Zealand of encounters, and this is also true for Cook, encounters where parties of European sailors kind of disappeared and later their body parts were discovered.
Chris Hayes: Right. We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So Cook ends up in New Zealand with Tupaia, right? And then he will ultimately be the first European. He’s not the first in Tahiti, and he’s not the first in New Zealand, but he will be the first in Hawaii.
Christina Thompson: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And so that’s his final voyage as he goes out. At this point, does Tupaia —
Christina Thompson: Tupaia dies.
Chris Hayes: — dies on the ship. Right.
Christina Thompson: He dies actually, you know. Cook had an incredibly successful voyage until they got to Batavia, which is basically Jakarta really. And there they had to refit for the last part of their journey and Tupaia was planning to go back with them to England. And the ship’s crew got hit with a wave of fever and dysentery and Tupaia was one of the people who died, but half the crew died there. It was a bad end to that voyage.
Chris Hayes: But he does set out again.
Christina Thompson: Cook sets out again and he is still looking for the unknown continent and he traverses the Southern Pacific. He goes to all over the place. And as he’s going, he’s putting together this picture of who all these people are and the fact that they’re, you know, really confirming the similarities between the islanders of the Marquesas, the islanders of Tonga, the islanders of Tahiti, the islanders of so on. And then he does go north. And it’s when he goes north that he finds Hawaii.
Chris Hayes: We should talk about, I mean, the story of him, the Hawaii encounter is probably worth telling, which is that he, goes to the big island. He stops in Kauai first, is that right? And then he goes to the big island. He sort of circumnavigates the big island in a counterclockwise fashion. And it turns out he’s arriving propitiously at this time of year when there’s a big celebration festival in which a sort of deity mythic figure comes to the island this one time a year.
I think in the mythos, the deity also circumnavigates counterclockwise. He comes into this like this bay, this inlet that’s like this very special and sort of holy place. It’s reserved for like the highest echelons of the sort of social system there, social hierarchy. And what does he encounter when he comes into this inlet?
Christina Thompson: Well, he gets received in a way that is surprising to him. There are hundreds of thousands of people gathered. He is met by priests who lead him to an altar, who make offerings to him, who drape him in tapa, who do all these things. So he is received in a, to him, slightly surprising way. He’s not expecting this. And, I mean, there’ve been a lot of books written about this. It’s kind of an interesting phenomenon. And there have been arguments about what was actually going on there.
But it’s does seem as though he was, and this is where I think people say, oh, he was mistaken for a God. Well, nobody was mistaking him for God.
Chris Hayes: No. Yeah. Like, yeah.
Christina Thompson: That’s like stupid. But I do think it’s possible to imagine that he was received as the embodiment.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, a divine sign. Yeah.
Christina Thompson: Right. Of this important moment and important supernatural being. So somehow, you know, it was all mixed up. His presence, the celebration.
Chris Hayes: And it’s a freak accident, just to be clear. Like he just happens. You know, it would just be like you show up with candles on the first night of Hanukkah. You know what I mean? Like, it’s like —
Christina Thompson: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: He just happened to be there at that time.
Christina Thompson: Right, exactly. And so, you know, the way that the story goes is that this all unfolds really wonderfully and they get received very well and everything. And then eventually it’s time for them to go and they sail away. Now, the thing that’s important to understand is that whenever Europeans arrive and they are celebrated in this way, which happens occasionally, it’s very taxing for the local community because they have to put on a big party and they have to feed everybody and everything. So it depletes the resources of the community.
So when Cook leaves, like, you know, it’s over, the celebration is over —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, we’re done.
Christina Thompson: He’s supposed to go —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Christina Thompson: And they’re happy to see him go, I think. And then his mast breaks and he turns around and comes back. And this time he enters the bay and they’re like, what are you doing here?
Chris Hayes: The vibes have flipped.
Christina Thompson: The vibes have flipped.
Chris Hayes: Very different vibes.
Christina Thompson: Yeah. They’re not so happy to see him anymore. And it’s a kind of, you know, it’s just kind of an interesting story that way.
Chris Hayes: And it sort of degrades from there. There’s standoff. There’s conflict. They don’t want to fix the ship. He wants to get on land to fix the ship. He at some point says he’s going to meet with the king, right? He wants to meet the king and his plan is basically to kidnap and ransom the king —
Christina Thompson: Yup.
Chris Hayes: — so they fix his ship, right? That’s the plan.
Christina Thompson: Yeah. It’s take him hostage. That’s a technique that they used a lot when they wanted to get something done. They like take some powerful person hostage so that people would have to do it for them.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And it would be subterfuge, right? They’d be like, come on our ship for lunch. And then it’s like, now we have you, you have to give us what we want.
Christina Thompson: Right.
Chris Hayes: So his men try to grab the king at a certain point, a conflict ensues, his guards lunge, Cook’s men fire, they end up chasing Cook, and Cook ends up in this part of the same inlet, right? The same little bay that he had first arrived in, in the water and drowns to death, is that right?
Christina Thompson: Well, he gets hit on the head. I don’t exactly know what happened to him, but he definitely is killed. So, he dies there and they take his body away. I mean, the thing that struck me about it, and I had a little kind of argument about this with somebody from Hawaii, because they see this as a very big important moment, but I see it as something that could have happened to Cook almost anywhere he went. I mean, this could have happened in so many other places.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: And in a way, he was just kind of lucky that he got away with this.
I mean, he went through encounter after encounter after encounter where nobody could speak to anybody else. Nobody knew what anybody’s intentions were. Everyone was armed on both sides and there was no knowing what was going on. They like really did not know what was going on. So the fact that it ultimately happened is kind of, I mean, sort of no surprise to me, I guess is the way I think of it.
Chris Hayes: Right. His luck kind of ran out.
Christina Thompson: I think so.
Chris Hayes: So maybe now is a good time to transition to what we do know about the process of settlement, right? So the big question is we know that these are a link to people. We know that cultural practice, mythology, language, domesticated animals bear similarities. They had to start somewhere and make their way somewhere. What do we know about that?
Christina Thompson: Right. So, the big question for many hundreds of years was where did they come from? I mean, there are two big questions, obviously, where did they come from and how did they do it? And those are kind of separate questions. So where did they come from? There have been a lot of debates about it, but basically it’s pretty clear that they came from Southeast Asia. So the migration pathways, it’s sort of theoretically starts in Taiwan, although obviously doesn’t start in Taiwan. There are people before that.
But for this sort of seagoing people, they come down from the coast of mainland, sort of Asian mainland, down through the Philippines, down into the Indonesian archipelago. A branch of this group of people goes west across the Indian Ocean, around the Indian Ocean, or across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar, which is quite astonishing. And then a branch of them goes east, over the top, over the north of Papua New Guinea and through the islands and then out through a series of island chains, which become increasingly far from each other as you go eastward.
Chris Hayes: I mean, just to be clear, right? Like, it had to have been intentionally expeditionary. Like —
Christina Thompson: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: No one’s doing it. It’s not an accident. And you’re setting out into the open water with the tools needed, right? Like in order to make it work, you’ve got to have a critical mass of people and stuff so that you get there and settle. It’s all done. It’s got to be done intentionally. There is an intentional thing happening where they are going out into the open ocean to find and to settle.
Christina Thompson: Yes. And, you know, when you were talking about the paradise of Hawaii, many of the islands that these people inhabited in the Pacific were not paradises at all.
Chris Hayes: Much more difficult, yes.
Christina Thompson: They were very hard to live on. They had very few sources of water. They had no soil. They had no plants, no edible plants. There were no animals. There are no mammals anywhere. You can’t eat anything except seafood. I mean, you can get a lot of seafood, but there’s not much else. And it’s just hard. It’s a hard environment, even though we all think of it as a kind of beautiful and soft and giving environment.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: It isn’t in many, many cases. So that’s one thing.
But the other thing I think they think about is that these are people. So, one of the things about the island chains as you go from the West towards the center of the Pacific is that at first, these are like island hoppers, you know,. They go from island to island. And in the Western Pacific, you can do this without having to get out of sight of land for a long time.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: So you can go island to island to island to island. And then eventually there’s a point comes where the islands are further apart and then they’re farther and farther and farther apart. So that’s kind of like the kind of amazing thing was that they kept going —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: — once it got harder and harder and harder and harder. But by then, you know, this is the way I see it anyway. I see them as these sea people. I see these people who, this is where they live. They live on the ocean. They live on the coast. They inhabit these particular sort of niche, which is near a stream where they’re for gardens, but ideally with inside a reef, so with a lot of fish. So they have like this life that is a coastal life. And so they take that with them everywhere they go from island to island to island.
Chris Hayes: The big question then becomes, you know, that pattern is the wayfaring, right? How do they manage to find their way in the vast ocean? And this is the thing that people are obsessed with, right? The real kind of miraculous form of human ingenuity, you know, developed over centuries probably, if not millennia honestly, of using, you know, the sun, the stars, the currents to find ways, to find land. Like what do we know about that? And maybe you want to talk a little bit about the post-World War II beginnings of this kind of this renaissance in Polynesian wayfaring in the Pacific.
Christina Thompson: Right. So how did they do it? I don’t know that anybody will ever know how they sort of figured out how to do it. I think it was, you know, just experience and practice or whatever. But we didn’t know. Europeans who came to the Pacific didn’t know how they did it. And one of the really creative approaches to this whole issue is one that took place starting in the 1970s. And that was in Hawaii and also an anthropologist in California and sort of a little cluster of people. I won’t go into all the details about it, but it’s a great story.
So it’s decided that they would try to reenact these voyages. So if you try to reenact them, you have to build a canoe, and then you have to sail the canoe. It was actually a bicentennial project in 1976, which I think is kind of funny, like supported by the Bicentennial Commission or whatever. So they build the canoes, they do some experimental building of canoes, and they get that going, and then they need someone to navigate them.
And there isn’t anyone in Hawaii, for example, where this is all taking place. And there isn’t really anybody in Tahiti, and there isn’t really anybody in New Zealand. And so they turned to this guy, this British sailor, David Lewis, who had been sailing around in the Western Pacific and he had met a couple of people who were practicing non-instrumental navigation in the Santa Cruz Islands and up in Micronesia.
And so he tipped them to this guy, very famous now named Mau Piailug, who ended up being the navigator for the first reenactment, the sort of first experimental voyage of a Polynesian canoe, double-hauled voyaging canoe from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1976.
Chris Hayes: And this navigator uses his incredibly, you know, sophisticated forms of Polynesian navigation, a lot of which has to do with the stars, right? You can navigate by the stars because if you know them well enough and you know the sky, the star chart, they sort of tell you where you are because depending on where you are at a given moment, the sky looks differently and you can navigate by sort of maintaining your line with a certain part of the sky, right?
Christina Thompson: Sort of. What you do is you have a path which is rising or setting, but let’s call it rising stars. So you know you’re going to go in this particular direction. And in this little part of the horizon, a star is going to rise and then another star is going to rise and another star is going to rise. They’re all going to rise on the same line. And so you’re going to keep those rising stars. This is a pathway. Star A, star B, star C, star D is your pathway that you’re going to follow.
So there’s things like that. And then there’s other stuff like, I had a conversation with a guy from Rarotonga who was a trained navigator who has done a lot of this stuff with the Polynesian Voyaging Society, which is the organization that did this reenactment. And I asked him at some point if he knew how to use this ATAK system, which is a system of position finding, which is, you know, incredibly like hard to understand. And he goes, I don’t know how to do that. But Mau did things that nobody else knew how to do. And part of it was, I think, just that he had been on the water, trained to do this since he was 5-years-old.
And he had voyaged, he had traveled in his own archipelago for all his entire life. And he had been trained to do this. So there were people who were still being trained. There wasn’t anybody doing this in, you know, Tahiti, Hawaii, the Marquesas, there wasn’t anybody there, but in some places in the remoter parts of the Pacific, there were people who still knew how to do this. So, you know, when you think about this business of the knowledge, one of the things about Mau’s voyage, taking the Hokulea, which is the name of the reenactment ship, when they took it from Hawaii to Tahiti, they took Mau into the planetarium to show him the night sky for this voyage because the night sky for this voyage, he’s crossing many lines of latitude. I mean, it’s very, very different from the night sky that he himself was used to in his hometown, you know, in his home islands.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: So the crazy thing is when you think about the first voyages like this, how they did that because they couldn’t have a star path to Hawaii on the first time they did it, you know.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: But what they did have to do was recognize what the star path was that they had used. I mean, they had to pay attention basically. It’s an amazing beggars belief basically that they ever found Hawaii.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And I mean, the other thing is that probably a lot of people died doing. I mean, that’s the other part of this, right? At some point it was successful, but we don’t know how many expeditions went out into the ocean month after month, year after year, century after century, honestly. Like, you know, it’s improbable and it may have been the result of a lot of, you know, a lot of expeditions. There’s a really interesting question that you talk about in the book about the sort of cultural drivers of that kind of exploration, right? What’s the incentive, right?
Christina Thompson: Right.
Chris Hayes: Like, okay, maybe you’re running out of food, but like to do something that vast to go that long, like there’s something driving folks to do it.
Christina Thompson: Yeah. I think it’s really complicated actually that it’s probably a bunch of different things. I mean, there are situations where islands become uninhabitable, like from storms, where all the trees are dead, you know.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: Or there are situations where people would have to leave.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: I mean, the mythology, the stories definitely have a kind of a storyline where a younger male member of a group does something bad, like he steals his brother’s wife or he does something else and he kind of has to go, has to leave.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: So he sets off like that. So there’s a social piece to this where, you know, and it may not be just because he did something bad. It may be because he was establishing his own lineage because he was sort of a hero.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: Because some of them are just heroes. So there are all kinds of interesting kind of motives that are encoded in these stories, and I don’t know, I think it’s probably all of the above.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, there’s also like a deep set of cultural stories about the sort of tension between staying and exploring, right? Like the sort of the times when we went out and the times that we’re staying here. I mean, the sort of Disneyfication version of that is the Moana tale, which is about exactly this tension, right? That the fathers, we have to stay, the grandmothers, like we were once sort of the seafaring adventurous people and reconnect to your sort of exploratory ancestry. But that, as Disneyfied as that is, embodies something real that shows up in a lot of Polynesian myth.
Christina Thompson: Yeah, I’m sure there were always people who didn’t want to go.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: Who were afraid and didn’t want their sons to go.
Chris Hayes: Right. Yeah.
Christina Thompson: Like you don’t want your children to go because they may never come back.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Scary. Yeah.
Christina Thompson: And I mean, one of the things I was sort of curious about was if I could find stories in the mythology that, you know, what’s recorded. There’s a lot recorded, not everything, but there’s quite a bit, about people who left and never came back. And there’s not a lot of that. There is some discussion of that in some places, but mostly it’s about people who went out and successfully prosecuted a voyage and returned with whatever it is they went for.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: Food, feathers, women, whatever it is they wanted.
Chris Hayes: In addition to the sort of rising stars and this ATAK system, which is very difficult to sort of communicate and also get your head around sort of. It’s sort of a set of mnemonic devices that one uses to keep in your head to kind of order sort of spatial phases of a journey, if that is a rough approximation.
Christina Thompson: Yeah, it’s position fixing. It’s like, where am I relative to where I was before and how do I know?
Chris Hayes: Right. In addition to that, there’s like all sorts of other stuff around like currents and also understanding when you’re near land and the indicators of land, right? There’s birds. There’s other sort of sea creatures you might see. Like there’s stuff that lets you know that you’re near land.
Christina Thompson: Yeah. I mean, the e land finding piece of this is one of the most interesting to me, I mean, just because it’s just so amazing. Yeah, there are things that happen when you’re near an island, but most of us would never be able to identify them. But if you have a lot of experience, there are cloud formations over land bodies that you can see from a distance. There are changes in the wave, in the swells as the waves bounce off the island and then return. And then there are birds that do behave in certain ways. And if you know the birds and you know what they’re doing, then you have a sense of which way they’re going.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, in fact, if you get it right, you can kind of almost follow them back to land, right? Because there are certain birds that will come out a certain radius at certain times a day and then head back to the island at another time of day.
Christina Thompson: Right. You just have to know which birds those are.
Chris Hayes: Right, yeah. Right, exactly. And what time of day, right, exactly.
Christina Thompson: Right.
Chris Hayes: So in the end, you know, one of the kind of culminating moments of your book is that this reconstruction voyage in 1976 with this navigator from Micronesia. They’re on the water for 30 days or something, right?
Christina Thompson: I think so. I can’t remember exactly how many days. It’s about a month.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Christina Thompson: It’s about a month.
Chris Hayes: So on the water for about a month. And again, like he’s using the methods that he’s used his whole life. And I think like one day wakes up and it’s like, it should be tomorrow on the right, basically. Right?
Christina Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And it’s true.
Christina Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like literally the next day it’s on the right —
Christina Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — like 30 days in the ocean with no navigation gear. It gets him to Tahiti. It’s mind blowing.
Christina Thompson: Right. I mean, one of the things that is really incredible if you think about it is that his ability to tell how far he had gone, you know, where he was in relationship to where he had been, that’s incredible.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: Also, I mean, directions, maybe not so hard, but where you are and also, which way has the current pushed you?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: You have to be able to tell where you’ve been pushed. And I don’t even know how, I mean, you know, because it can depend on the strength of the current, it can depend on the —
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean —
Christina Thompson: You know, it’s amazing.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Yeah, like just to give a small version, like if you’ve ever played in strong surf in a beach and you’re jumping in the waves and you’re riding the waves and you’ve been in the water for five minutes, there’ll be a moment where you come out and you’ll look at the shore and be like, oh, wait, where am I? I mean, that’s five minutes in strong surf by the shore, right?
Christina Thompson: Right.
Chris Hayes: Like magnify that over 2,000 miles. Think about like —
Christina Thompson: Right.
Chris Hayes: — how difficult it would be just to keep your place.
Christina Thompson: Right. Well, I mean, you know, when you look at the line that they intend to take, it’s a curve, right? Because the current is going to push them all the way, all during the voyage. It’s always going to be beating against them and pushing them, pushing them, pushing them sideways, you know? So yeah, that’s something they had to take into consideration.
Chris Hayes: I mentioned before the sort of radicalizing effect of being in Hawaii and partly was reading about actual Hawaiian history in which like the means by which the United States government just steals Hawaii, and there’s no better word for it, from the Hawaiians, is just like a total immoral abomination. In fact, again, like many moral abominations that later in history were like, well, they didn’t realize at the time, know any better, like is recognized at the time as a moral abomination.
Like literally, it comes up in the State of the Union speech by the American president after one of the American business people’s backed coups on the island in which he says like, yeah, that was pretty gnarly, like that American president saying this. So, the means by which it is essentially stolen from indigenous people and taken possession of by the U.S. is replete with all kinds of like gaslighting and deceit and bullying and all sorts of stuff. But it’s also just the case that like the colonial encounter and then the legacy of colonization up until today is still such a defining access of life in Polynesia.
Even the encounter that you talk about with your husband and in Hawaii, right, with the guy offering him the discount, it’s like, that’s a moment of like cultural fellowship, kinship, but it’s also a moment of like, the context of the colonized people and the universe in which like, there are these non-Indigenous tourists who were there. I think, you know, often those relationships can be fraught, sometimes predatory, obviously they bring a lot of business and jobs to these parts of the world, but it’s all really complicated and fraught and is the legacy we have today from the initial encounter you talk about in your book.
Christina Thompson: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard. The whole thing is hard. I mean, it’s, like I said, you know, one of the reasons that I like when I travel in Polynesia, I travel with my husband and I stand behind him because, you know, I am trying to sort of recede a little bit and let him come forward because, you know, it’s his place. One of the things about the history of this region that I think a lot of people, they sort of maybe know but they don’t really understand.
So there is this, you know, exploratory period and then there are the arrival of missionaries and then there is the arrival of settlers and it is uneven across the Polynesian Triangle. Some places, Hawaii, New Zealand, Tahiti, especially Hawaii and New Zealand though, the people who were there are very outnumbered by the people who came.
Chris Hayes: By the settlers, yeah.
Christina Thompson: Right. So that really is very influential. There are lots of places in the islands where people speak their own language. They don’t speak a colonial language. They don’t speak French. They don’t speak English. They may know French or English, but they speak their own language —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Christina Thompson: — and where the numbers of foreigners are small.
Chris Hayes: Right. That’s a great point. Right.
Christina Thompson: Tonga, for example, you know, is a good example. They’re not very many strangers. They’re maybe outsiders in Tonga. So there are really big differences from place to place.
Chris Hayes: That’s a great point. Yeah.
Christina Thompson: But the other thing in terms of the history that I think about a lot is that especially in the places that were colonized quite early, where there was a lot of interaction in the early 19th century, especially partly through whaling and also some trading, is that the impact of disease on these island populations was really significant —
Chris Hayes: Catastrophic.
Christina Thompson: — in some places. Catastrophic in some places, not everywhere.
Chris Hayes: No.
Christina Thompson: Again, not everywhere. But the Marquesas, for example, the population went from an estimated maybe 50,000 people at pre-contact to 2,000 at the beginning of the 20th century. So, you know, there are places where the colonial impact has been multi-layered. It’s been terrible in many different ways. And there are places where it hasn’t been as bad, you know.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Christina Thompson: So it is quite a nuanced sort of subject, I guess.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and also very different statuses, institutions, forms of government, forms of relationships with, you know, non-Polynesian nations, depending on where you are, right? And depending on what the nature of the, you know, American Samoa is different and New Zealand is different from the state of Hawaii —
Christina Thompson: Right.
Chris Hayes: — is different from Easter Island. The book is called “Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia.” Christina Thompson is the author. She’s editor of Harvard Review. I really recommend the book to anyone that found this conversation interesting. And Christina, thank you so much for sharing all your expertise.
Christina Thompson: Well, thank you for loving my book.
Chris Hayes: It was great. My pleasure.
Once again, great thanks to Christina Thompson. The book is called “Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia.” You can e-mail us with your thoughts on today’s conversation at withpod@gmail.com. You can get in touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod. You can also follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. I’ve got some TikTok’s up now and I’m going to be doing more of those. You can follow me on Threads or Bluesky. In both places I’m @chrislhayes.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. And you can see more of our work including links to things we mention in here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?