Sea of Glory

the squadron had arrived at Upolu’s beautiful Apia Bay. The next day Reynolds and Lieutenant George Emmons set out on an overland expedition to survey a harbor on the opposite side of the island. After a week’s confinement, Reynolds had difficulty containing his enthusiasm. “I was enraptured with the loveliness around me, & I strode on with a light step, care banished from my mind . . . ; when I behold a glorious prospect, my heart would burst, did I not give way & exult & rejoice aloud!”
    They stopped at a village for the night, and before dinner they went to a freshwater pool for a bath. Nearly the entire village followed them, and as Reynolds took off his clothes, one of the natives drew attention to the contrast between his white body and his tanned face, neck, and hands. “Those parts of me, he said were ‘Samoa,’ the rest ‘Papalangi [Polynesian for white person],’ and he proceeded to assure his hearers with an air of triumphant satisfaction, ‘that . . . a short time would make us Samoa all over. ’”
    Accompanying Reynolds and Emmons on this journey was the Expedition’s philologist, or linguist, Horatio Hale. As the officers faded off to sleep, Hale, Reynolds reported, “sat up late learning the language from pretty lips, both in song & story.” Just twenty-three years old, Hale was the son of Sarah Josepha Hale, who as editor of the Godey’s Lady’s Book was one of the most influential women in the United States (not to mention the author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”). As a student at Harvard, Horatio Hale had visited a group of Native Americans from Maine who had taken up residence near the college grounds. Soon after, he published a vocabulary of the Indians’ language that, along with some lobbying on the part of his powerful mother, won him a post on the Ex. Ex.
    Unlike his colleague Charles Pickering, who was more interested in what differentiated the various peoples they had so far visited (especially when it came to race), Hale was in search of what these peoples had in common. As it so happened, the vocabularies and oral traditions that he had so far collected from the Tuamotus, Tahiti, and now Samoa pointed to a remarkable similarity among the inhabitants of Polynesia—a fact first observed by James Cook.
    In his voyages across the Pacific, Cook had noticed that as far east as Easter Island and as far west as New Zealand and as far north as Hawaii, the people not only looked similar, they spoke only slight variations of the same language. But if they shared a common origin, Cook was hard-pressed to explain how these people managed to scatter themselves across such an immense space. He had seen the natives’ oceangoing outrigger canoes. They were capable of incredible speeds and had, on several occasions, literally sailed circles around his pudgy ships. But if the canoes were fast, they could only sail effectively with the wind, and the trade winds blew from the southeast. Since the Polynesians looked nothing like Native Americans, he reasoned that they must have come from the west. But how did they sail against the trade winds? And exactly where did they originally come from?
    Not until recently have archeologists and ethnographers been able to determine the location of the Polynesian homeland, what is referred to as Hawaiki in legends and myths. Between 4000 and 2000 B.C. people began to venture out from the islands of Southeast Asia. The gradual development of the outrigger canoe enabled them to sail farther and farther to the east and south, but it was not until the first millennium B.C. that the distinctive culture of Polynesia first emerged in Samoa and Tonga.
    In its pristine state, a Polynesian island was not a particularly good place for humans to live—edible vegetables, especially those containing starch, were nowhere to be found; there were no large animals. The Polynesians’ oceangoing canoes became their arks, transporting dogs, pigs, breadfruit seedlings, taro, and, inevitably, rats to islands that had never before seen the like. Once on a new island, the Polynesians set to work re-creating an agricultural society similar to the one they had left behind, a process that led to the extinction of countless indigenous species of animals and plants.
    Once a small pioneering outpost was established, there was intense pressure to increase the size of the population. Archeological evidence has suggested that in some instances the population density reached