ORIGINS OF THE OCEANIA BATTLEFIELD BETWEEN #PRC AND #US: 4/4: Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific, by Nicholas Thomas. @MAACambridge.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2024
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
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.
1837 BOUGAINVILLE
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a new book is |
| 0:05.0 | This is CBS I on the world. I'm John Bachelor and Professor Nicholas Thomas is here. His new book is voyagers. |
| 0:10.0 | Many avenues that we've not had time to explore but now the great big mystery that just sits there and makes you laugh |
| 0:17.3 | It's like the game of Thrones or trying to figure out the world by reading Greek history. |
| 0:23.5 | All right, here we go. |
| 0:25.0 | It's a map, not quite a map, constructed by 2-Paeia. |
| 0:30.0 | I say that incorrectly, Professor, forgive me. what are we looking at because you reproduce |
| 0:35.2 | it in your book on cook's first voyage the ship spent several months off the island of Tahiti and the British |
| 0:48.4 | developed close relationships with a host of islanders. It wasn't one of these passing |
| 0:54.9 | encounters where they exchanged a few things or interacted violently. It was a |
| 1:00.3 | sustained interaction and one of the most extraordinary aspects of this interaction was that |
| 1:06.4 | Tupaya who was a priest, a navigator, a political player in the dynamics of the Tahitian kingdoms at that time. |
| 1:17.1 | He was clearly extremely interested in these people who had appeared from beyond the known universe at that particular time. |
| 1:26.3 | He was interested in why they were there and what they were doing. |
| 1:29.8 | So he spent a great deal of time with Joseph Banks and with Cook and when time came for the ship to depart, |
| 1:38.8 | he wanted to join the voyage. |
| 1:40.9 | He took a young boy, a servant with him, and his interest was in visiting England |
| 1:47.9 | and learning what he could about a society that he knew nothing about before. |
| 1:55.0 | Cook, of course, was very interested in the geography of the Pacific. |
| 2:01.0 | There were clearly islands that had never been visited by Europeans. |
| 2:07.0 | He clearly made inquiries of Tupaya. |
| 2:12.0 | He tried to learn as much as he could from him. A number of the British |
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