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Not much is known about Tonga before European contact because of the lack of a writing system during prehistoric times other than the oral history told to the early European explorers. The first time the Tongan people encountered Europeans was in April 1616 when Jacob Le Maire and Willem Schouten made a short visit to the islands to trade with ...
Tongans or Tongan people are a Polynesian ethnic group native to Tonga, a Polynesian archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. Tongans represent more than 98% of the inhabitants of Tonga. The rest are European (the majority are British ), mixed European, and other Pacific Islanders .
The islands most regularly visited by Westerners were Ata, 'Eua, Ha'apai, Tongatapu, and Vava'u. Sometimes, Tongan men were recruited to serve as crewmen on these vessels. The United States Exploring Expedition visited Tonga in 1840. [21] In 1845, an ambitious young Tongan warrior, strategist, and orator named Tāufaʻāhau united Tonga into a ...
Around 2850 BP, the Lapita people reached Tonga, and carbon dating places their landfall first in Tongatapu and then in Haʻapai soon after. [3] The newcomers were already well adapted to the resource-scarce island life and settled in small communities of a few households [3] on beaches just above high tide line that faced open lagoons or reefs.
According to leading Tongan scholar Dr. 'Okusitino Mahina, the Tongan and Samoan oral traditions indicate that the first Tuʻi Tonga was the son of their god Tangaloa. [5] As the ancestral homeland of the Tuʻi Tonga dynasty and the abode of deities such as Tagaloa ʻEitumatupuʻa, Tonga Fusifonua, and Tavatavaimanuka, the Manuʻa islands of ...
William Charles Mariner (10 September 1791 – 20 October 1853) was an Englishman who lived in Tonga from 29 November 1806 to (probably) 8 November 1810. [1] He published a memoir, An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, in the South Pacific Ocean, which is one of the major sources of information about Tonga before it was influenced significantly by European cultures and Christianity.
Any description of Tongan culture that limits itself to what Tongans see as anga fakatonga would give a seriously distorted view of what people actually do, in Tonga, or in diaspora, because accommodations are so often made to anga fakapālangi. The following account tries to give both the idealized and the on-the-ground versions of Tongan culture.
Much of the U.S. Tongan community resides in California. In San Mateo County (0.7% of the county's population) in the San Francisco Bay Area, there are over 5,000 Tongan Americans, mainly concentrated in Daly City, East Palo Alto, San Mateo, and San Bruno. There is a Tongan community in Oakland, of about 1,500 people (0.3% of Oakland's population).