Silk Roads Peoples, Cultures, Landscapes

Cambridge, director of the Cambridge Museum of Anthropology and Archeology, and the author of several books, including Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (2011), his credentials are excellent. In the first chapter, Thomas discusses the first quarter millennium of contact between the Europeans and the peoples of the “South Sea” and what the Europeans reliably came to know about them, which he believes was very little. He sees this as the period during which the initial “theories and myths of Pacific settlement” were formed, and that none of them were valid. Yet, eventually, when centering on the Pacific voyages of Dampier and Cook in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Thomas almost grudgingly gives credence to some of the observations recorded by the leaders of these expeditions. The rest of the volume provides an uncomplicated introduction to the history of a “community of related peoples,” originating largely from Islands of Southeast Asia and Taiwan, who discovered, explored, and settled the isles of the Pacific in the centuries before the pre-contact era. In the process, several of the important technologies associated with these voyages—coconut fiber cordage (“coir”), large double hulled canoes, star and ocean/Islands mental maps, and actual ones (i.e. “stick charts”) as well—are touched upon. Given the established presence of the sweet potato, a New World commodity, in the Islands prior to European contact, the author also points to the strong possibility of an exchange between the Islanders and people of the Americas. This book is admittedly, by the author, a short and basic account, but it nevertheless offers quite a good introduction to a complicated and little-known chronicle of events. To start with, even before the Introduction, there are 12 pages of very useful maps to help the reader to locate the various landmasses of the Pacific and their positioning in relation to each other. The physical and linguistic evidence cited is rather more than convincing, and, perhaps sadly, there is a general lack of reliance on indigenous myth-historical stories (e.g. the great white shark Lono leading people on the long journey from the Marquesas to the Hawaiian Islands). The text is peppered with personal photographs from Thomas’ and other research sites and other illustrations from across the Pacific, though they are not always relevant where placed and/or explained (e.g. stick chart, p. 146). Overall, this work seems to be thoroughly researched, including in Asian and other non-European sources, but there is no real bibliography and only Notes and a three-page Further Reading section. What might be slightly off-putting to some readers and detrimental to the case Thomas is making are his occasional but overt nods toward political correctness, especially in the Introduction and Chapter 1 (e.g. Balboa, p. 17). Voyagers is a clearly and concisely written volume that reads well. It should appeal to anyone interested in the history of discovery and exploration and Oceanic history as well, and it will lead some readers to delve further into these captivating subjects.