48 Fun Facts About Polynesia

Which of these English words was borrowed from a Polynesian language?

Tattoo. It first appears in English in James Cook's writing of 1769, picked up in Tahiti, where the art is called tatau; 'taboo' followed from Tonga eight years later.

Which three points define the corners of the Polynesian Triangle?

Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island. The triangle is only a rule of thumb: a scattering of Polynesian communities, the 'outliers', live well outside it, on small islands far to the west.

The name Polynesia, coined by a French writer in 1756, comes from Greek words meaning what?

Many islands. Charles de Brosses coined it in a 1756 book on southern voyages, and the names Micronesia, 'small islands', and Melanesia, 'black islands', were later modelled on it.

Which giant flightless birds of New Zealand were hunted to extinction after Polynesian settlers arrived?

Moa. The largest stood taller than an ostrich; settlers arriving around 1300 hunted them hard for a century or so, leaving butchery sites heaped with bones that can cover many hectares.

Norfolk Island and New Caledonia are dry-land tips of which mostly sunken continent?

Zealandia. About 94% of it lies under the Pacific: its crust was stretched thin as it broke away from Gondwana, and it sank; in 2017 a team of geologists made the formal case for calling it a continent.

What built most Polynesian islands, including the long Hawaiian chain?

Volcanic hotspots. A column of heat rising from deep in the mantle stays put while the Pacific seabed creeps across it, so each new volcano is carried off to the north-west and another rises behind it over the same spot.

Linguistic and genetic evidence traces Polynesian origins ultimately to which island?

Taiwan. Seafarers whose ancestors set out from there carried their languages and crops across half the globe, as far as Madagascar in the west and Easter Island in the east.

The ancestors of the Polynesians are known archaeologically by what pottery culture?

Lapita. Its potters pressed toothed stamps into the wet clay to build up bands of pattern, and the trail of their broken pots runs from near New Guinea out to the western edge of Polynesia.

Tapa, the traditional cloth of Polynesia, is made by beating out which material?

Tree bark. Strips of inner bark from the paper mulberry, a tree the first voyagers brought with them from Asia, are soaked and then beaten with wooden mallets into wide, thin sheets.

William Bligh's ship Bounty sailed to Tahiti in 1787 to collect which food plant for Britain's Caribbean colonies?

Breadfruit. Planters wanted it as cheap food for enslaved workers; the mutiny wrecked the first attempt, so Bligh sailed back to Tahiti in 1791 and delivered the trees to Jamaica on a second voyage.

What do archaeologists call the gap between the settling of western and eastern Polynesia?

The long pause. It was no dead time: in those centuries the settlers' culture and language became recognisably Polynesian; one idea is that they also needed new voyaging techniques for the longer crossings ahead.

Which French painter spent most of his last twelve years in Tahiti and the Marquesas, painting Polynesian life?

Paul Gauguin. He went to Tahiti seeking a refuge from Western civilisation and found a French colony; he died on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas in 1903, ill and short of money.

What crop native to the Americas was widespread in Polynesia before Europeans arrived?

Sweet potato. The usual explanation is that voyagers carried it across from South America centuries before Columbus sailed, most likely Polynesian sailors who made the journey there and back.

Which explorer's raft expedition tried to prove Polynesians came from the Americas?

Thor Heyerdahl. In 1947 he and five companions rode the balsa raft Kon-Tiki from South America until it hit a reef in the Tuamotus, which showed the crossing could be done; anthropologists still did not accept that it had been.

Descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian companions still live on which remote island, settled in 1790?

Pitcairn. The mutineers burned the ship soon after landing, and the little colony went unnoticed by the outside world for eighteen years, until an American ship happened on it in 1808.

What does Tuvalu's name mean in Tuvaluan?

Eight standing together. Tuvalu has nine islands, but the smallest and southernmost, Niulakita, had no settled population when the name arose, so only eight were counted.

Which internet domain has Tuvalu marketed for income?

.tv. Because the two letters also stand for television, broadcasters and video sites around the world pay for addresses ending in it, and the fees go to one of the world's smallest countries.

Which trickster hero of Polynesian legend is said to have fished up islands and snared the Sun to slow it down?

Māui. In stories told from Hawaii to New Zealand he also steals the secret of fire for humankind; Disney's 2016 film Moana turned him into a boastful demigod with a magic fish hook.

Only three countries are smaller than Tuvalu: Vatican City, Monaco and which island nation in the Pacific?

Nauru. Its 21 square kilometres are mostly a plateau of phosphate leached from ancient bird droppings, and a century of mining it has stripped the island's interior bare.

Which sacred royal line, founded by the 10th century, is credited with a sea empire?

Tuʻi Tonga. In time the sacred kings handed everyday rule to deputies and became ceremonial figures, and it was a holder of the last deputy title, not a Tuʻi Tonga, who united the islands in 1845.

Which calming, non-alcoholic drink, made from the root of a pepper plant, is shared at ceremonies across Polynesia?

Kava. The bitter, yellow-green brew is made and drunk by strict ritual, to mark occasions such as the visit of a neighbouring chief or the installation of a new one.

Which city is often called the largest Polynesian city in the world?

Auckland. It has New Zealand's greatest concentration of Māori, and decades of migration from the smaller islands had by the 1990s given it more Polynesian residents than any other city.

Tonga is the only Pacific island nation that still has which form of government?

Indigenous monarchy. The kingdom dates from 1845, when one chief united the islands, and it kept its own monarch even while it was a British protected state, from 1900 to 1970.

Which French Polynesian island, a peak ringed by a lagoon, was a United States supply base in the Second World War?

Bora Bora. The Americans came to store fuel for ships crossing the Pacific, and the airstrip they laid on a reef islet is still the island's airport, now bringing in tourists instead of supplies.

Which Scottish novelist settled near the Pacific port of Apia and was buried on a mountain above his home there in 1894?

Robert Louis Stevenson. He had asked to lie on top of Mount Vaea, so islanders cleared a path to the summit overnight and carried him up; lines from his own poem 'Requiem' are cut on the tomb.

In 1962, which country became the first Pacific island nation to win independence from colonial rule?

Samoa. New Zealand troops had taken the islands from Germany at the start of the First World War and stayed for nearly fifty years; independence took effect on New Year's Day.

Which island holds Avarua, the capital of the Cook Islands, and most of the country's people?

Rarotonga. Nearly everyone lives on its narrow coastal ring, because the interior is a tangle of steep peaks, the stumps of extinct volcanoes rising to about 650 metres.

What name is given to the undeciphered glyphs that Easter Islanders carved on wooden tablets?

Rongorongo. Only about two dozen inscribed objects survive, none still on the island, and the wood of one dates to the 1400s, a hint that islanders invented writing before any outsider arrived.

What did a group of Māori chiefs issue on 28 October 1835?

A declaration of independence. Thirty-four northern chiefs signed it at Waitangi at the urging of the British Resident, James Busby, who had heard that a Frenchman meant to proclaim a kingdom of his own nearby.

Polynesians who settled the Chatham Islands became known as which people?

Moriori. In 1835 a Māori invasion party killed or enslaved most of them, and they were long written off as extinct; their descendants have since won recognition as a living people.

Which Royal Navy officer signed the Treaty of Waitangi with Māori chiefs in 1840?

William Hobson. A veteran who had twice been captured by pirates in the Caribbean, he greeted each chief who signed with the Māori words 'He iwi tahi tātou': we are now one people.

Which word, borrowed from Māori in the 1840s, names the spiritual power a Polynesian chief or sacred place is held to possess?

Mana. It can cling to places and objects as well as people and can be won or lost by what a person does; Western scholars once built whole theories of religion on the idea.

In Māori tradition, what is the name of the ancestral homeland from which the first voyaging canoes set out?

Hawaiki. It is also where the spirits of the dead are said to return, and the same old word survives on the map today as Hawaiʻi in the north and Savaiʻi in the west.

In written Hawaiian, what is the name of the ʻ mark that stands for a glottal stop, as in Hawaiʻi?

ʻOkina. It counts as a full letter of the alphabet, so it changes meanings: the letters p-a-u can spell finished, a smudge, moist or a skirt, depending on where the ʻokina and the long-vowel bar fall.

Which Dutch explorer gave Easter Island its name in 1722?

Jacob Roggeveen. He was hunting for a rumoured southern continent when he sighted the island on Easter Sunday; he stayed a single day and sailed on.

What name is given to the giant stone figures of Easter Island?

Moai. Almost all were cut from the soft volcanic stone of a single crater, where hundreds still lie unfinished, among them a giant 21 metres long that never left the quarry wall.

Which country annexed Easter Island in 1888?

It is the only territory in Polynesia where Spanish is an official language.

Slave raiders from which country struck Easter Island in the 1860s?

Peru. The raiders carried off a large part of the island's people; a few were sent home after an international outcry, but smallpox followed, and by 1877 only about 110 islanders were left.

What double-hulled canoe reached Tahiti in 1976 using only traditional navigation?

Hōkūleʻa. It was built to settle an argument: sceptics held that Polynesians had merely drifted to their islands by accident, and the voyage showed that a canoe could be steered there on purpose.

Which master navigator from Micronesia guided the 1976 canoe voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti without instruments?

Mau Piailug. No Polynesian still knew the old art, so he was brought from the tiny island of Satawal; afterwards he taught it to Hawaiians and other Polynesians, founding a new generation of navigators.

Who was the last monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii, overthrown in 1893?

Liliʻuokalani. After a failed rising in her name she was held under house arrest in her own palace and signed away the throne to win pardons for her supporters; she was also the composer of 'Aloha ʻOe'.

Polynesian navigators traditionally passed knowledge from master to apprentice how?

In song. A navigator carried whole voyage routes in memorised chants, along with the rising and setting points of the stars he steered by.

Which city is the capital of French Polynesia?

Papeete. It stands on Tahiti, the territory's largest island, and grew up around an excellent harbour, which by the 1830s was drawing traders and whalers.

Which British navigator became the first European to reach Tahiti, two years before James Cook arrived there?

Samuel Wallis. Sailing HMS Dolphin in 1767, he named the place King George the Third's Island; Cook came in 1769 to time the planet Venus crossing the Sun from its shore.

France carried out most of its Pacific nuclear tests between the 1960s and 1996 at which atoll in French Polynesia?

Moruroa. When France resumed testing there in 1995 after a three-year pause, riots broke out across the territory; the very last blast, months later, was set off under the neighbouring atoll of Fangataufa.

Which nickname does Niue, one of the world's largest coral islands, go by?

The Rock. Niue is one great slab of old coral reef lifted out of the sea in two steps: a central plateau some 60 metres high, ringed by a lower terrace that ends in cliffs.

In 2012 Tokelau became the first territory in the world to meet all its electricity needs from what?

Solar energy. Until then its three atolls had depended entirely on diesel brought in by ship; New Zealand, which administers them, paid for a solar grid on each one.

Which warrior chief united the Hawaiian Islands into a single kingdom by 1810?

Kamehameha I. He had taken every island but two by force of arms by 1795; the last pair came over without a battle fifteen years later, when their ruler agreed to serve under him.