![]() ![]() What the heck? Who had done this and how? ![]() But things started to coalesce with the 1721 voyage of a Dutch navigator, Jacob Roggeveen, who stumbled upon what became Easter Island, totally deforested, with its great stone statues, or moai. Someone would find an island, but didn’t know exactly how he’d gotten there, and, besides, the natives weren’t nice, so nobody would go back for another 500 years. Those early voyages were haphazard at best, and fraught with peril. But their discoveries were largely accidental. The world didn’t know much about Polynesia – a huge triangle of sea sprinkled with thousands of islands, with the points of the triangle at Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand – until Captain James Cook set out for Tahiti from England in August, 1768. In other words, a host of disparate ideas. Ask any third-grade class how humans arrived on the far-flung islands of Polynesia and you’ll probably get some of the same answers that grown-ups offered until fairly recently: God put them there they walked there before the continents rearranged themselves they were already there and the oceans rose around them. ![]()
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