Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia in Around the World in 80 Books

Apr 20, 2024 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it really liked it

Shelves: author-woman, 4-star, genre-non-fiction, a-reviewed, z-read-gelesen-2024, author-white, landscape-open_ocean, world-australia, format-audiobook, theme-roadtrip-plane-ship

I listened to this as an audio book in the new Spotify Premium plan which includes 15 free book hours per month. The voice of Susan Lyons was rather mesmerising to listen to with her rising and falling, non-dramatic cadences. She sounds British with a slight Australian inflection (and I was delighted to find out that she is, indeed, Australian).

I had to get used to what this book was. I expected a story of the Polynesians and their sea voyages and was a bit taken aback when it starts out with Ca I listened to this as an audio book in the new Spotify Premium plan which includes 15 free book hours per month. The voice of Susan Lyons was rather mesmerising to listen to with her rising and falling, non-dramatic cadences. She sounds British with a slight Australian inflection (and I was delighted to find out that she is, indeed, Australian).

I had to get used to what this book was. I expected a story of the Polynesians and their sea voyages and was a bit taken aback when it starts out with Captain Cook and other explorers. But the book is actually a tale of all the Europeans who over the centuries have tried to figure out who the Polynesians are and how they came to be where they are and when until it gloriously ends in the late 20th century with indigenous Polynesians with a triumphant and very moving chapter on the first exploratory voyage undertaken on a reconstructed canoe by a mix of European, Hawaiian and Carol Islanders.

I liked how this roams across the centuries and above all, how it roams across the Polynesian triangle. Before this book, I hadn't even realised there was such a thing as a Polynesian triangle (or was it rectangle? audiobook information is so ephemeral and annotation-less!). My favourite bits were those about Polynesian (and Melanesian) 'wayfinding': star charts, star paths, navigating by feeling the swells (apparently best done with one's testicles, should one have any), and 'capturing islands'. The most compelling section was the one about 'etak' which evokes a worldview radically different from that of European navigators. In Europe, we tend to think of the sea as static and our boat as moving across it. In the 'etak' worldview, one thinks of one's boat as static, one's world with the everlapping waves moving alongside it and the only constants the stars rising and setting in predictable paths above; islands appear alongside and move away; and the island one wants to 'capture' is thought of as moving towards one. I love this. It is much as the way we think about the sun rising and setting although we know that it is the earth that moves -- a switch in the brain that makes instinctive sense once you conceive of navigation as egocentric (in the words of the author).

I enjoyed listening to this a lot.

Chosen as part of my landscape theme for 2024: the open ocean. ...more

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