Davis Museum Webinar - Christina Thompson: “How Do We Tell the Story of What Happened?”

Christina Thompson is the author of Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia, which won the 2020 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for nonfiction and the 2019 NSW Premier's General History Prize and was a finalist for the 2020 Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, the 2019 Mountbatten Maritime Award, the 2019 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, and the 2019 Queensland Literary Award. Her first book, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All, was a finalist for the 2009 NSW Premier's Literary Award and the 2010 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA and NEH, including a Public Scholar Award. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, American Scholar, and BBC World Histories. She teaches in the Writing Program at Harvard University Extension and can be found at christinathompson.net.

[@nedaustin5690]

Thank you for writing the book, Sea People, The Puzzle of Polynesian. I read it 2020 and find myself still thinking about it. I hope you don’t mind these musings of a 80 + year old retired sea captain. In 2019 I was on a Road Scholar trip to New Zealand where the subject of Māori discovery and settlement came up and was discussed including the question of Polynesian navigation. At a Māori culture center I asked our college educated Māori tour guide if he could explain Māori sea navigation and he could only answer in a vague way that included using using celestial, oceanographic, meteorological and signs in Nature like bird migration. In the Polynesian section of the Wellington Museum there is a gourd with perforations labeled “artificial horizon” that was donated by Tom Davies, the author of Island Boy, Harvard educated physician, deep ocean sailor and South Seas politician. Clearly Tom was thinking about the navigation question also.
I have been thinking that Polynesian explorers had a systematic way of exploring the Pacific islands and reporting back their discoveries to their “home” islands which later led to repeat voyages of migration and settlement but this would seem to suggest there is some way of communicating the navigation information for repeat voyages e.g. latitude navigation using zenith stars. Your book gets into this but the question regarding navigation information suggests another level of sophistication that should be taught with pride in every Polynesian and Māori school system.