Worlds Apart A History Of The Pacific Islands 2nd Edition Ian C Campbell by Ian C. Campbell 9781927145029, 1927145023 instant download after payment.

THE PACIFIC ISLANDS were first colonised by people moving out of Southeast and East Asia and eventually occupying every habitable island and archipelago except the Galapagos in the far east of the Pacific Ocean. Considering that the ocean is a vast expanse of water covering one-third of the earth’s surface, and that archipelagos are separated from each other by hundreds of kilometres, this feat was the most extraordinary accomplishment of colonisation performed by the human race in its entire history. A famous New Zealand anthropologist, Sir Peter Buck, called the farthest-flung of these people the ‘Vikings of the Sunrise’. The term is flattering to the Vikings, who never performed maritime feats in any way comparable, nor were their craft as capable. Moreover, the Vikings were an iron-age people, whereas the first explorers of the Pacific did not have any knowledge of metals, a lack that makes their achievements all the more remarkable.
The histories of these scattered peoples before the coming of Europeans are obscured by the lack of written evidence. It is being filled in by archaeological research, though this will never be able to tell the stories of individual endeavour, or of the intellectual aspects of the long story. For the last several hundred years, a shadowy history becomes visible for some islands through myth, legend, genealogies and other forms of oral tradition. The histories of the Pacific peoples do not become known or told in detail until the coming of Europeans, who not only brought the art and habit of literacy to enable history to be written, but also set the history of Pacific islanders into a new trajectory.