Tupaia’s map of the Pacific Islands: Students provide new insights

Crusing the southern Pacific Ocean in 1769, two of historical past’s biggest navigators drafted a outstanding map. One was the British explorer Captain James Prepare dinner. The opposite was Tupaia, an aristocratic excessive priest from the island of Ra’iātea, who had joined Prepare dinner’s expedition in Tahiti. Tupaia was a grasp navigator who had lengthy voyaged via areas nonetheless clean on Prepare dinner’s charts.

Tupaia had allied himself with the British, partly to defeat his enemies and produce residence weapons from England. The British, for his or her half, have been eager to get recommendation from an area skilled, and so Tupaia turned Prepare dinner’s information and negotiator.

Throughout the roughly 17 months he traveled with the British, Tupaia impressed the crew as a person of deep studying. He amazed the sailors by accurately pointing within the route of Tahiti, even after they’d sailed round New Zealand and up the east coast of Australia to Indonesia. Prepare dinner was significantly intrigued by Tupaia’s declare to know how to some 130 islands. If Prepare dinner might seize the priest’s data on a chart, the British would acquire an enormous benefit of their Pacific voyages.

Sooner or later throughout the voyage, the British arrange a chart on which Tupaia drew greater than 70 islands scattered throughout the ocean and dictated their names. Though the unique has been misplaced, three copies survive in European archives, exhibiting an ocean crowded with islands that don’t match fashionable charts. Embellished with drawings of ships and enigmatic fragments of Tahitian language, Tupaia’s map has change into an object of fascination for generations of students and sailors.

Just lately, a vigorous debate has centered on an evaluation printed in 2019 by Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz, literary and cultural research students on the College of Potsdam in Germany. They recommend that Tupaia had invented a singular mapping conference that was an ingenious try and convey his personal geographic data in a type the British would perceive. “It’s a translation gadget that he invented,” says Schwarz. 

“You need to neglect something that you realize about maps,” says Eckstein. For Prepare dinner, a chart was a hen’s-eye view of the curved world stretched onto a two-dimensional aircraft. Tupaia as an alternative took a canoe’s-eye view, a perspective that shifts relying on the place you begin from. And whereas Europeans normally fastened north on the prime of the web page, Tupaia could have positioned north within the middle.

The brand new interpretation overthrows antiquated assumptions concerning the supposed inferiority of Indigenous data, says David Turnbull, a science research scholar at Deakin College in Australia. The work of Eckstein and Schwarz is essential and illuminating, he says, though their conclusions could change into onerous to show.

Polynesian wayfinding

Tupaia was inheritor to a maritime custom that allowed his ancestors to settle lots of of islands sprinkled throughout tens of millions of sq. miles of ocean, from Hawai‘i to the north, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to the east and Aotearoa (New Zealand) to the south. Europeans known as this area Polynesia.

Polynesian sailors carved boats with stone instruments, wove sails from leaves and navigated with out devices. The dimensions of their achievement is so giant that it has generally been doubted. Within the Fifties, for instance, historian Andrew Sharp stimulated a fierce debate by arguing that the final phases of this nice migration replicate not deliberate voyaging however one-way journeys undertaken by individuals who have been misplaced or in exile.

“This concept of some form of random drift is simply sort of nonsense,” says Patrick Kirch, an archaeologist on the College of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Islands have been settled by purposeful voyaging enabled by subtle wayfinding talents, Kirch wrote in an article on the settlement of the Pacific within the 2010  Annual Assessment of Anthropology.

These expertise have been observed by Prepare dinner, who was one of many first Europeans to chart the Pacific and meet Polynesians. “These individuals sail in these Seas from Island to Island for a number of hundred Leagues, the Solar serving them for a Compass by day, and the Moon and Stars by night time,” he wrote. 

When Prepare dinner first met him, Tupaia was chief adviser and lover to Purea, a strong girl identified to the Brits because the “Queen” of Tahiti. Tupaia’s legs have been closely tattooed with the marks of his excessive standing inside the ‘arioi spiritual order, whose members included elite navigators. He was identified in Tahiti for his mind. “He was considered a little bit of a genius,” says Anne Salmond, an anthropologist on the College of Auckland in New Zealand.

He was additionally a warrior with a grudge. He had been exiled to Tahiti from his residence island of Ra’iātea by invaders from Bora Bora, and he nonetheless bore the battle scars from being impaled by a spear tipped with a stingray barb. When the British arrived in Tahiti, Tupaia rapidly included the guests into his plans. He tried (in useless, it could end up) to get Prepare dinner to assist him drive the Bora Bora warriors out of Ra’iātea.

Tupaia engaged in lots of mental exchanges with the scientists on the Endeavour (Prepare dinner’s ship) and their chief Joseph Banks. Tupaia discovered to color in watercolors alongside the ship’s botanical artists and had many lengthy conversations with Banks and others about historical past, faith and — most essential to the colonizers — geography.

The map is probably the most well-known final result of those exchanges, surviving solely as copies within the archives of Banks and two German scientists who traveled with Prepare dinner in later years, Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg.

With Ra’iātea within the middle, the map depicts Tahiti and a handful of different islands the British knew in roughly the anticipated positions for a European map, alongside garbled English transcriptions of their Tahitian names. Surrounding these identified landmarks are dozens of unknown islands with mysterious labels.

Prepare dinner’s crew consulted a replica of the map on a later voyage, however islands didn’t seem the place the map indicated they need to. Unable to make sense of the chart, Georg Forster speculated that Tupaia had invented the islands simply to look extra clever than he actually was (regardless of calling Tupaia an “extraordinary genius” in the identical account).

For greater than 200 years students have tried, and failed, to determine how the map’s depiction of islands pertains to the precise geography of the area. Current efforts have as an alternative tried to think about the worldview of Indigenous Pacific navigators, who have been much less involved with absolutely the place of an island than with get there.

Reaching a distant vacation spot concerned island-to-island routes that have been memorized in chants and lists, says Schwarz. She and Eckstein reexamined lists of island names that Tupaia had given the Endeavour’s crew and labeled them in the identical order on the map. “What emerges is one thing like a connect-the-dots drawing” which will characterize historical crusing routes, says Eckstein.

The students additionally observed a largely ignored clue on the middle of the map: the phrase Eavatea.

Banks translated “E avatea” as “the midday.” Schwarz and Eckstein puzzled if Tupaia had supposed this annotation as a reference level for his British collaborators. Though the midday place of the solar was not important for Polynesian navigation, it was essential for the British.

Every day proper earlier than midday, the officers would collect on deck with their devices to measure the peak of the solar above the horizon, marking the precise second of midday with eight strikes of the Endeavour’s bell. This ritual was a part of Prepare dinner’s every day process for figuring out the ship’s latitude and calibrating the clock and compass readings.

For navigators like Tupaia, the solar was simply one among many positional cues, together with the moon and stars, cloud formations, winds, currents and swell patterns. Eckstein and Schwarz recommend that maybe Tupaia, discovering it not possible to condense all this info onto a sheet of paper, devised a shorthand tailor-made to the British obsession with midday.

They suggest that the avatea mark represents north — the standard route of the midday solar within the Southern Hemisphere. As a substitute of orienting his map with north on the prime, as is the conference on fashionable maps, Tupaia put it on the middle. To achieve a selected island in a voyaging path, a navigator begins at an island within the sequence and imagines going through the  avatea/north mark. The navigator can now estimate the compass bearing of the subsequent island drawn on the map.

As every vacation spot is reached, the voyager should mentally or bodily rotate the map and reorient to avatea. As a result of the primary island in a voyaging path can seem anyplace on the map,  avatea bearings can solely be learn in sequence inside a route, not between totally different routes.

Reinterpreting among the island names in gentle of the avatea system, Eckstein and Schwarz have linked the dots right into a patchwork of voyaging paths that stretches west to Rotuma in Fiji, north to the Hawaiian archipelago and east to Rapa Nui. By their calculations, the islands fall inside a mean of 5 p.c of their precise geographic bearings alongside every route.

However not everyone seems to be satisfied.

A competing interpretation, advocated by Anne Di Piazza, an anthropologist at Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, EHESS, CREDO in France, and unbiased scholar Erik Pearthree, holds that Tupaia’s map is known as a mosaic of crusing instructions radiating from essential departure islands. On this interpretation, every departure island (with its cluster of goal islands) has its personal orientation, reasonably than utilizing a single reference level just like the avatea mark.

In a commentary article, Di Piazza and Pearthree level out that in lots of instances Eckstein and Schwarz argue for the real-world id of an island on Tupaia’s map not from unbiased proof, such because the island’s title, however from the doubtless round proven fact that it appears to match an  avatea bearing. Di Piazza and Pearthree additionally notice that the overwhelming majority of  avatea bearings recognized by Eckstein and Schwarz are far sufficient off the true bearings {that a} voyager utilizing them would miss their goal.

Eckstein responds that the avatea system was not what Tupaia himself would have used to make landfall, however reasonably his try and bridge two geographical worldviews. Tupaia was working from reminiscence on a bit of paper across the measurement of a laptop computer display screen. “The diploma of accuracy, given all that, is beautiful,” says Eckstein.

Salmond says that whereas she admires their meticulous work, she thinks Eckstein and Schwarz overstate the knowledge of their conclusions, contemplating the fragmentary nature of the proof and the massive hole between the students’ worldviews and that of Tupaia. She notes that Tupaia’s ocean was a sacred area the place islands have been fish pulled from the ocean and stars have been canoes crusing the sky.

“While you’re piling inference upon inference and drawing deductions — which may get more and more creaky as you go on — should you’re doing that on the idea of a very totally different set of assumptions about how the world works, you may go fairly far astray,” Salmond says.

Moeata Galenon and Titaua Teipoarii, navigators from Tahiti and Ra’ivavae respectively, additionally emphasize that there are radical variations in the best way teachers and Indigenous navigators see the world, including that collaboration with Indigenous specialists is important for deciphering Tupaia’s map.

Eckstein and Schwarz acknowledge that their perspective is that of Western students. Although the pandemic put their plans on maintain, they’re increasing their collaborations with Tupaia’s cultural heirs and those that nonetheless voyage lengthy distances, the individuals greatest positioned to make sense of previous voyaging paths and Tupaia’s worldview.

Though the small print of Tupaia’s data could also be misplaced to historical past, Pacific individuals proceed to voyage in his wake. To mark the 250-year anniversary of Tupaia’s voyage, in 2019 Galenon and Teipoarii navigated the ship  Fa’afaite by the moon and stars from Tahiti to Aotearoa. They’re a part of a Pacific-wide motion of contemporary wayfinders who hope to revive inter-island networks disrupted by colonization and to construct regional unity round shared challenges like local weather change.

Like Tupaia, they exchanged oral traditions with individuals they met alongside the voyage. “Our ancestors would navigate to keep up relationships,” says Galenon. “The canoe was the hyperlink.”