Canoes of the Grand Ocean

This collection of essays examines the canoes of the Pacific islands. The first section reflects the strangeness of the canoes to early European explorers, looking at their accounts, and at exchanges between islanders and Europeans. There is also a fascinating piece about the importance of the canoe in Polynesian conceptions of space and time. The second section looks at the canoes themselves, their design and construction. The third offers detailed research into the long distance travel of the Lapita expansion, using both phyical experiments and digital modelling to throw more light on the remarkable voyages.