Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Tupaia's chart of Polynesia within 3200km of Ra'iatea. 1769, preserved in the British Museum. On his first voyage of Pacific exploration, Captain James Cook had the services of a Polynesian navigator, Tupaia, who drew a chart of the islands within a 2,000 miles (3,200 km) radius (to the north and west) of his home island of Ra'iatea. [40]
Early Polynesian explorers reached nearly all Pacific islands by 1200 CE, followed by Asian navigation in Southeast Asia and the West Pacific.During the Middle Ages, Muslim traders linked the Middle East and East Africa to the Asian Pacific coasts, reaching southern China and much of the Malay Archipelago.
The sweet potato, a food crop native to the Americas, was widespread in Polynesia by the time European explorers first reached the Pacific. Sweet potato has been radiocarbon-dated to 1000 CE in the Cook Islands. Current thinking is that it was brought to central Polynesia c. 700 CE and spread across Polynesia from there. [20]
Hawaiian history is inextricably tied into a larger Polynesian phenomenon. [5] Hawaiʻi is the northernmost vertex of the Polynesian Triangle, a region of the Pacific Ocean anchored by three island groups: Hawaiʻi, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and Aotearoa (New Zealand).
The Kon-Tiki expedition was a 1947 journey by raft across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands, led by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl. The raft was named Kon-Tiki after the Inca god Viracocha, for whom "Kon-Tiki" was said to be an old name.
Although the small islands scattered across the Polynesian Pacific account for only around 0.2% of that part of the Pacific Ocean’s total area, Polynesian mariners were more skilled in finding ...
Tupaia (also spelled Tupaea or Tupia; c. 1725 – 20 December 1770) was a Tahitian Polynesian navigator and arioi (a kind of priest), originally from the island of Ra'iatea in the Pacific Islands group known to Europeans as the Society Islands.
The Marshallese recognized four main ocean swells: the rilib, kaelib, bungdockerik and bundockeing. [2] Navigators focused on effects of islands in blocking swells and generating counterswells to some degree, but they mainly concentrated on refraction of swells as they came in contact with undersea slopes of islands and the bending of swells around islands as they interacted with swells coming ...