ABSTRACT
‘DARKNESS FROM THE SEA’ is a phrase denoting seafaring strangers common to both Island Southeast Asia and parts of the Island Pacific. It is one more indication how people from the Archipelago to the China Sea may be jocularly seen as descended from stay-at-home proto-Pacific Islanders. Naval architecture shows something of the Archipelago’s influence from outriggers on windward gunwales keeping narrow hulls upright under sail to sprits spreading mat sails. Languages and physiognomy reveal the close relationships. Enzymes in red blood cells indicate correlation between Bali and Papua New Guinea. Austronesian languages seem traceable along a protracted and in practice essentially irrelevant chain to Taiwan. By AD 1000 Austronesian peoples from South-east Asia had sailed immensely far. Pacific-related people had colonised oceanic islands scattered across more than half the globe, from Madagascar by some 2,000 years ago to Easter Island by about AD 500 or 600 and possibly to New Zealand a little later – though perhaps not until AD 1200 if carbon dates have been misread. By about 1500 B.C. at latest their vessels had carried them eastward to a rallying and redistribution point in or around Fiji. Remains of a seafaring, trading, horticultural society appear in coastal sites in this, the largest of south-central Pacific Island groups, ‘Viti’ to its people.
