Sea People - In Search of the Ancient Navigators of the Pacific

Informationen zum Autor Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review and the author of Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story , which was shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. A dual citizen of the US and Australia, she lives outside of Boston with her family. Zusammenfassung Winner of the 2020 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for nonfiction and the 2019 NSW Premier's History Awards for general history ‘Wonderfully researched and beautifully written’ Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan ‘Succeeds in conjuring a lost world’ Dava Sobel, author of  Longitude For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, a vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Until the arrival of European explorers they were the only people to have ever lived there. Both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world before the era of mass migration, Polynesians can trace their roots to a group of epic voyagers who ventured out into the unknown in one of the greatest adventures in human history. How did the earliest Polynesians find and colonise these far-flung islands? How did a people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? This conundrum, which came to be known as the Problem of Polynesian Origins, emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the great geographical mysteries of mankind. For Christina Thompson, this mystery is personal: her Maori husband and their sons descend directly from these ancient navigators. In Sea People , Thompson explores the fascinating story of these ancestors, as well as those of the many sailors, linguists, archaeologists, folklorists, biologists and geographers who have puzzled over this history for three hundred years. A masterful mix of history, geography, anthropology, and the science of navigation, Sea People is a vivid tour of one of the most captivating regions in the world. ...

Product details

• Authors: Christina Thompson, Thompson Christina
• Publisher: William Collins
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 05.03.2020
• EAN: 9780008339050
• ISBN: 978-0-00-833905-0
• No. of pages: 384
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 197 mm x 30 mm
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Geosciences > Geography; Non-fiction book; Anthropology, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Adventurers & Explorers, TRANSPORTATION / Navigation, HISTORY / Australia & New Zealand, HISTORY / Oceania, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Aviation & Nautical, Geographical discovery & exploration, maritime history, Polynesia, Indigenous Peoples, Islands, Australasian & Pacific history, Australasian and Pacific history, Pacific Ocean, Biography: adventurers and explorers, Oceanography (seas & oceans), History of other geographical groupings and regions