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A review by checkers09
Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific by Nicholas Thomas
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
1.5
Voyagers consists of six chapters providing a brief overview of the settlement of the pacific islands, looking at ethnography, the logistical feats of the islanders and the motivating factors behind their exploration across the islands.
for me this book embraces some of the worst aspects prevalent in post-modern historical writing mixing fact with fiction or optimistic guessing at the very least to conceal an advocacy book into an objective study of the voyagers of the Polynesian people. Thomas comes with the typical view that all observations and studies by colonial forces should be discredited in favour of modern narratives from the local people of the Pacific islands. To a certain extent this is not a bad thing, of course the local people would have a deep understanding of the history of their people and the techniques used in their travels, however the initial stance of dismissal towards deeply intricate and even-handed accounts from adventurers like Captain Cook and Joseph Banks is counterproductive towards the ideal goal of every historian to create a non-biased and informative piece of work.
I felt the actual migrations of people across the pacific islands could have been explained better considering this is the main purpose of the book, for example pictures showing the movements of people to various islands at the times they took place would have been useful instead most of the pictures (of which there are a lot) were of pretty but somewhat extraneous photos of some of the islands nature.
for me this book embraces some of the worst aspects prevalent in post-modern historical writing mixing fact with fiction or optimistic guessing at the very least to conceal an advocacy book into an objective study of the voyagers of the Polynesian people. Thomas comes with the typical view that all observations and studies by colonial forces should be discredited in favour of modern narratives from the local people of the Pacific islands. To a certain extent this is not a bad thing, of course the local people would have a deep understanding of the history of their people and the techniques used in their travels, however the initial stance of dismissal towards deeply intricate and even-handed accounts from adventurers like Captain Cook and Joseph Banks is counterproductive towards the ideal goal of every historian to create a non-biased and informative piece of work.
I felt the actual migrations of people across the pacific islands could have been explained better considering this is the main purpose of the book, for example pictures showing the movements of people to various islands at the times they took place would have been useful instead most of the pictures (of which there are a lot) were of pretty but somewhat extraneous photos of some of the islands nature.