BIRTH OF OCEANIA 3/4: Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific; Nicholas Thomas, author, @MAACambridge.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2023
⏱️ 15 minutes
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BIRTH OF OCEANIA 3/4: Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific; Nicholas Thomas, author, @MAACambridge.
https://www.amazon.com/Voyagers-Settlement-Pacific-Nicholas-Thomas/dp/1541619838
An award-winning scholar explores the sixty-thousand-year history of the Pacific islands in this dazzling, deeply researched account.
The islands of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia stretch across a huge expanse of ocean and encompass a multitude of different peoples. Starting with Captain James Cook, the earliest European explorers to visit the Pacific were astounded and perplexed to find populations thriving thousands of miles from continents. Who were these people? From where did they come? And how were they able to reach islands dispersed over such vast tracts of ocean?
In Voyagers, the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas charts the course of the seaborne migrations that populated the islands between Asia and the Americas from late prehistory onward. Drawing on the latest research, including insights gained from genetics, linguistics, and archaeology, Thomas provides a dazzling account of these long-distance migrations, the seagoing technologies that enabled them, and the societies they left in their wake
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| 0:40.0 | This is CBS, I'm the world. I'm John Batch, so visiting with Professor Nicholas Thomas. |
| 0:44.0 | His new book is Voyagers, the settlement of the Pacific. |
| 0:48.0 | He's a professor of historical anthropology at the University of Cambridge and that's what we're doing here, history. |
| 0:53.0 | But near history, the mystery of Oceania begins with Captain Cook's first, second and third voyage. |
| 1:03.0 | Present mysteries to be solved. Professor, who was Captain Cook? |
| 1:08.0 | Why was he in the Society Island in 1768? What was his mission? |
| 1:16.0 | So Cook was a naval man, but he was above all an exceptionally accomplished surveyor. |
| 1:24.0 | And that's why the Royal Society and the Admiralty selected him in the 1760s to lead an expedition. |
| 1:36.0 | The ship was the Endeavour. They went to Tahiti and the core purpose, certainly the ostensible purpose was the observation of the transit of Venus. |
| 1:48.0 | And that observation, that astronomical observation was scientifically important. |
| 1:54.0 | It was part of a coordinated set of observations and the Royal Society and colleagues internationally hoped to be able to measure the distance between the Earth and the Earth. |
| 2:06.0 | But Cook was also exploring the South Pacific because the British among other European nations were very interested to try and establish whether there was a great Southern continent. |
| 2:19.0 | They thought that a great Southern continent might be a previously unknown land like China or India, that could be a key trading partner, a huge source of wealth. |
| 2:34.0 | So the expeditions were about knowledge and geographic discovery, but they were certainly also about empire and the scope for trade and colonization. |
| 2:47.0 | On board was Joseph Banks, who was he and what does he leave us to know about this first voyage? |
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