Spirit of Aloha | Features | January/Febuary 2006

Ancient Maps of the Eternal Ocean
By: TOM CHAPMAN

We take you on a cartographic adventure to the largest geographic feature of the earth, and show how Hawai‘i found its place on the map in the mid-pacific

Imagine thousands of self-sufficient nations, terrestrial microcosms linked not by valleys and rivers, not by deserts or forests, but by seemingly endless, featureless ocean. To the Pacific islanders, this was the world. Around it, they evolved their civilizations and geographic methods. To Europeans, this ocean was the far side of the Earth. An ocean that in maximum breadth spans virtually half the Earth’s circumference, it baffled map makers for four-and-a-half centuries before its surface was laid down with confidence. In its scale, diversity, extremes of climate and lack of points of reference, the challenges it presented the explorer and map maker dwarfed those of any other entity on Earth.

For most of medieval humanity, the world consisted of dry Earth of uncertain extent, bordered by sea. The Earth was defined primarily by its land, and even people of archipelagos could relate their island to a core continent. Many people of the Aegean Islands, for example, may never have set foot on the mainland, but they could understand their island’s position in relation to neighboring isles and, in turn, to Greece or Asia Minor.

But for the people of Oceania, the world was eternal sea; dry Earth was the precious exception. Pacific islanders typically knew that their land was limited in extent, even if they themselves had not seen its frontiers. Just to know that a village fisherman would be away for five nights and circumnavigate the known land, created a wholly different cosmographic perspective from someone who knew that even sailors who had been away for years returned knowing nothing of the dry Earth’s full circuit if, in fact, it had bounds. Amplifying this difference, until the 15th century, European sailors rarely ventured very far from sight of shore

Pacific islanders mapping the world beyond their islands would face two choices: below them lay sea devoid of any landmarks to record their way or gauge distance, while above them lay a sky that was rich in features and landmarks but was ever moving. The collective experience of many generations revealed subtle “cartographic” signs in the sea that European eyes missed and that guided them where maps failed. Generations of eyes peering upward garnered similarly hard-won secrets from the moving stars. Mapping the Pacific was as much a study of the sky as the Earth and was the work of many peoples, approached from different perspectives. Pacific islanders offered pieces of the puzzle—the shape of an individual island, the relative positions of a group of neighboring islands, the nature of an interior region, undersea formations or the location of fishing grounds. Asian pilots were familiar with many islands in the westernmost Pacific. Europeans tied together the sundry pieces to make a coherent whole, supplementing their own data with whatever they could glean from those who lived there.

This sharing of knowledge was not always easy. Islanders’ maps were, with rare exceptions, ephemeral, typically shells or stones set upon the ground. They generally quantified distance by travel time, relating the number of days’ sailing around and between islands. Islanders’ knowledge of the heavens was of little value to European navigational techniques, and the Europeans’ knowledge of map making was of no use to the islanders until they adopted Western navigational equipment and theory. What did it mean to “map” the Pacific? For Europeans, until the 19th century it was primarily determining the ocean’s perimeter and placing its islands in context, and only secondarily the mapping of the islands themselves. Mapping the features beneath the sea was always important when they reached within contact of a ship bottom, but the ocean floor was not seriously tackled until the late 19th century, and not mapped with any precision until the latter part of the 20th century.

By the end of the 17th century, nongeographic and nontopographic Pacific data were also analyzed and set to maps. Latitudes at which specific winds blow and magnetic declination were among the earlier nongeographic data of interest to European map makers. The locations and habits of various Pacific fish and mammal species were laid to charts by the mid-19th century, and the mapping of more esoteric data followed, such as the water temperatures at various depths and the cyclical changes in those temperatures, as well as the presence of exploitable resources on the ocean bottom.

The story of the evolution of cartographic knowledge of the Pacific is thus largely that of Europeans, who aggressively explored the Pacific and were singularly enamored of the mass-production and dissemination of maps. Ideally, the cartography of Pacific islanders would be a starting point, but since these pioneers rarely left any tangible records, much of their story is elusive. Asian and Arab pilots frequented the islands of the westernmost Pacific before Europeans, but much of what is known of their early western Pacific cartography must be gleaned from indirect sources.

Pilot books, trade records, herbal treatises, even literature, have been tapped to construct a better idea of Asian geographic knowledge of the westernmost Pacific than the dearth of surviving early maps has allowed. The European mapping of the Pacific was at times a mapping of the European psyche: Such icons of Christendom as Paradise, the lost tribes of Israel and Purgatory all found their way to the Pacific at the hands of European authors and map makers. Refining the charts of Oceania began only in the latter 18th century, all the efforts of the preceding two-and-a-half centuries yielding little more than a rare, tiny speck placed with little confidence on a nearly empty canvas.

THOMAS SUAREZ is a well-known authority on early maps. His book Early Mapping of Southeast Asia (Periplus Editions, 2000) is considered a standard work in the field. His particular interest in the Pacific began in the early 1970s when he was traveling through Micronesia on a concert tour as a classical violinist. This essay was excerpted and adapted from Suarez’s definitive book, Early Mapping of the Pacific (Periplus Editions, 2004), and is used with permission.

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