Hidden Hazards: Reconstructing Tupaia’s Chart

Abstract

I agree with Anja Schwarz and Lars Eckstein that ‘Tupaia’s Map is among the most important artefacts to have come from late 18th-century European–Indigenous encounters in the South Pacific region’ (p. 1). Its sepia and white, two-dimensional scatter of islands hides as much as it reveals – the product of oblique, partial exchanges between navigators who used very different ways of traversing very different seas. Like James Cook, Tupaia was a gifted, highly trained mariner, inheritor of a voyaging tradition that drew upon millennia of experiments in building and equipping robust, durable vessels; finding new lands and recording the routes between them; and learning to survive during long, often dangerous voyages. In each case, the aim of the navigator was to predict weather and storms, to avoid the perils of rocks, reefs and coastlines, to find sheltered anchorages and to make a safe landfall. In familiar seas, they drew on their knowledge of winds, stars, currents and coastlines, and information recorded by those who had sailed before them to avoid capsize or shipwreck. All the same, the differences between the seas that Tupaia and Cook traversed were profound. In 18th-century Tahiti the ocean was a marae, frequented by powerful ancestors, including the winds and the stars. The creator ancestor Ta‘aroa made the first voyaging canoe out of his own body, and islands were once fish that swam through the ocean, hauled up out of the sea by the first ancestral explorers. In their schools of learning, navigators mastered chants that summoned or calmed winds, and at night they followed star ancestors in their sky journeys, guided by the star pillars that marked the locations of particular marae. As Mimi George has described for Taumako navigators, at sea they became their voyaging ancestors (Lata, in this case), impelled by their power. It is no surprise, then, that star navigators were also priests, trained at the great voyaging marae.