Beyond the blue horizon
The early voyagers who first reached the scattered islands of the Pacific
On Tanavu, an island in the Pacific chain known as the Sereni group, a major archaeological find has uncovered traces of a long-vanished seafaring people, ancestors of many of the central Pacific's inhabitants today. The discovery owed everything to chance. While clearing the overgrown grounds of an abandoned plantation, a farm labourer's spade broke into a grave — the first of several dozen in a cemetery some 3,000 years old. Nothing older has ever been unearthed in the Pacific islands, and within it lie the remains of a people archaeologists have named the Maruvi.
In simple canoes these bold open-sea travellers ranged across the ocean, yet they were more than explorers. They were colonists too, loading their vessels with everything a new settlement might need — the animals they raised, seedlings of taro, and tools of worked stone. In a few centuries they pushed the edges of their known world outward, from the forested volcanoes of Pelua to the remote, wave-washed coral specks of Sohari.
Very little evidence about the Maruvi had survived, so the Tanavu site enlarges the pool of data enormously. Sixty-two sets of human remains have been recovered so far, and, to the excavators' delight, six intact Maruvi pots. Among the other finds was a Maruvi burial urn, its rim modelled with small birds that seem to gaze down at the bones sealed within. Dr Emil Roshko, professor of archaeology at Rennwick University, who directs the international team at the site, calls it 'an important discovery, because it puts the identity of the remains beyond doubt: these people were Maruvi.'
Genetic material coaxed from the bones could settle one of the thorniest puzzles in the study of Pacific peoples: are all the region's islanders descended from a single stock, or from many? Did one wave of migrants come from a single place in Asia, or several from scattered points? For Roshko, the site offers 'the best chance yet to establish who the Maruvi really were, where they came from, and which living people are their nearest kin.'
One obstinate question still lies beyond the reach of archaeology: how did the Maruvi pull off what was, in their era, the equivalent of a moon landing — and do so repeatedly? Not one of their canoes has ever turned up, nor any rigging to show how such vessels were sailed. The spoken histories of later islanders are no help either, since they dissolve into myth well before they reach back to Maruvi times.
'One thing is certain,' says Sigrun Halvorsen, professor of archaeology at Kelvedon University: 'the vessels the Maruvi built could survive the open ocean, and their crews had the seafaring to handle them.' Such skill, on her account, was the work of thousands of years, passed from generation to generation as sailors picked a way through the western Pacific's island clusters in short hops from shore to shore. What set the Maruvi's own venture apart was the moment their descendants pushed on until land sank from sight and nothing but bare horizon lay around them — a feat as daunting in their day as reaching the moon is in ours. Different from their forebears they plainly were; but where did the nerve for such perilous crossings come from?
The Maruvi drove eastward into the Pacific, straight into the prevailing trade winds, Halvorsen observes — and those persistent headwinds, she suggests, may be exactly why they succeeded. 'For days they could push into unknown waters and take stock, confident that, if nothing came of it, they had only to come about and let the trade winds carry them home. That is what would have made the whole enterprise workable.' Out at sea, a practised navigator would have picked up signs pointing to land — seabirds, coconuts and twigs carried offshore by the currents, and the bank of cloud that builds over the horizon each afternoon, often marking an island beyond view.
Whether or not a voyage had succeeded, the layout of a navigator's home archipelago would have served as a safety net on the way back. Without such a reference, a crew could easily overshoot its home harbours, lose its bearings and sail on into oblivion. The Sereni chain is a good example: it runs upwards of 500 miles along a northwest-to-southeast line, its many islands, each visible from the next, forming a wall that catches sailors running home before the trade winds.
All of this rests on one crucial assumption, warns Dragan Petrovic, professor of prehistory at Rennwick University: that the Maruvi had mastered the demanding skill of sailing into the wind. 'That they were able to do so has never once been demonstrated,' he says. 'The assumption has simply been made and acted on — people have gone so far as to build replica craft and sail those routes again. But the design of the originals, and the way they carried their sails, is a complete blank.'
Petrovic prefers to give at least some of the credit to chance rather than human skill. The Maruvi, he proposes, may in part have been scattered by El Nino — the same climatic upheaval that still disrupts the Pacific today. His evidence comes from slow-growing corals across the region, whose records point to a run of exceptionally frequent El Ninos around the period when the Maruvi were spreading out. For weeks at a time, these unusually strong events would have reversed the usual east-to-west flow of the trade winds, carrying the Maruvi off on long voyages they had never meant to make.
A third of the way across the Pacific was as far as the Maruvi ever got; there they halted, and why they did so is a secret they kept to themselves. Perhaps, with the great emptiness of the central Pacific still ahead, they had by then grown too few and too scattered to go on. Their total number, after all, is unlikely ever to have topped a few thousand, and yet the rapid push eastward had already taken them past hundreds of islands — the Kaelo group by itself accounting for more than 300.
