ABSTRACT
Reflecting on the discovery of the Marquesas Islands in AD 1595, the Portuguese navigator Pedro de Quiros first set down the ‘problem of the Polynesians’: ‘the embarkations of the natives are adapted for short voyages. For which reason it is to be sought, what could be believed to be the manner how they could go to distant parts’ (quoted in Parsonson 1963: 12). During the subsequent 400 years, the ‘manner’ has been pondered abundantly in research of formidable diversity. Yet some additional insight may be available in considering it as a problem of learning about an unfamiliar landscape, in exploring the ways in which predictability of landscape qualities may have underwritten processes of initial colonization. The possibilities are broad, and I shall confine attention here to some propositions about how pioneering settlers accommodated two levels of Pacific landscape. One consisted of the ocean and its pattern of islands, a two-dimensional landscape to be mapped on the sea, and mirrored in the night sky; the other, the resource landscapes of Oceanic islands, which were the targets of dispersal. Successful settlement depended on effective means to cross the former and behavioural flexibility in relation to the constraints of the latter.
