Tupaia’s Voyage on the Endeavour
- Amanda Riddell
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- Sep 24
- 29 min read
Updated: Sep 26
Historical Fiction from the Priest-Navigator’s Point of View
The Blue Pacific Civilisation
Before Cook, before the Union Jack, before missionaries recast Polynesian memory in the language of the Bible, Oceania was already a civilisation in full. It was not an empire, with capitals and armies, but something subtler and more enduring: a Blue Continent, its highways made of ocean swells, its archives stored in chants and constellations.
From Hawai‘i in the north to Rapa Nui in the east, from Aotearoa in the south to Samoa and Tonga in the west, Polynesia shared a common language of voyaging, genealogy, and ritual. Knowledge was curated not by kings but by tohunga and priest-navigators who “kept the flames alive,” preserving cosmological charts that bound distant peoples into one world. A voyage from island to island was also a voyage across history, each landfall reaffirming ties of kinship, story, and mana.
Oceania was fully aware of its neighbours. To the east, voyages had carried Polynesians to the coasts of the Americas, bringing back the sweet potato that reshaped Pacific agriculture. To the west, the lands of Pulotu and Kahiki — remembered in chants as “distant horizons” — pointed to Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, and beyond. Through these gateways Polynesians brushed against Melanesian exchange networks, and through them caught echoes of the Muslim spice ports and Indic kingdoms further west.
The Austronesian cousins of the Polynesians had long since reached Madagascar and the Indian Ocean, leaving linguistic and cultural traces that tied Africa to the Pacific. Polynesians did not need continuous migrations to know they were part of a greater oceanic whole; stories, fragments of goods, and remembered chants kept that awareness alive.
Within Oceania itself the seas were busy. Ritual voyaging bound communities back to Ra'iātea and the sacred marae of Taputapuātea, the spiritual capital of the Polynesian world. Red feathers, adzes, shell ornaments, and fine mats passed from hand to hand, binding genealogies across the ocean. Navigators taught apprentices with star compasses, naming every rise and set point of the stars, every curve of swell and flight of birds, encoding them in ritual chants and tattoos. In this way, Oceania was not a scatter of “isolated islands,” as European maps suggested, but a federated sea of knowledge and kinship — as alive and cosmopolitan as any silk road or spice route.
By the time British ships intruded into this ocean, Oceania had already known Iberian sails for centuries. Magellan’s fleet, Mendaña’s landfalls, Quirós’ and Torres’ passage had left fragments of encounter and rumour. Yet even these Europeans were but one more set of strangers at the edge of the horizon. The Polynesian world was never empty. It was a civilisation among many, confident in its own sciences and stories, and keenly aware that there were other worlds beyond the sea.
Music and spirituality
In pre-contact Polynesia, percussion was not limited to rhythm alone but played a melodic role. Slit drums, pahu, and ipu were used in contrasting registers, their low–high strokes creating a rudimentary melodic contour. While not tuned to a diatonic scale, these instruments were sufficient to establish a tonal center. As Daniélou observed in India, percussion alone can determine the tonic: the deep resonance of a pahu or ipu heke anchored chants in a fundamental pitch space, while higher strokes gave contour and accent. Thus, percussion and voice worked in concert — the chant carried melodic lines, while drums reinforced the fundamental, ensuring that tonality was always perceptible even without scale-based instruments.
In the night-long vigils of Polynesia, the chant was the canoe and the drum its keel. Each deep stroke of the pahu called the ocean floor into the body, fixing the tonic like a root stone in the marae. Against it, the higher crack of the pātē leapt like spray on the prow, marking ascent, contrast, and return. Together they did not weave scales, but they traced a melodic horizon: low anchoring the world, high outlining its shimmer. The voice rose and fell like a sail, and the percussion answered, grounding the song in earth’s heartbeat. In this way, rhythm became melody, and the fundamental was never absent — it was the pulse that made the chant a cosmos.
Tupaia’s Entry
Tupaia's final voyage wasn't the beginning of his story: the British sailors said that he was a middle-aged man on the way towards old. Tupaia of Ra'iātea was born into a world where ritual and voyaging bound islands together. He rose to prominence as a priest of ‘Oro, but his true social and religious milieu was the ‘Arioi society — one of the most distinctive and misunderstood institutions of Polynesia.
The ‘Arioi were not a “tribe” or a “sect,” but a travelling order of ritual specialists, artists, and performers, dedicated to ‘Oro, the god of war, fertility, and political legitimacy. They moved from island to island in the Society group — Ra'iātea, Huahine, Tahiti, Moorea, Bora Bora — staging elaborate performances that blended chant, dance, theatre, and satire. They were loved and feared in equal measure: loved for their artistry and spectacle, feared for their ritual power and the tapu they carried. Anthropological accounts also describe the society as a “nursery of warriors”, suggesting specialised martial arts training.
Membership required initiation into sacred knowledge and strict vows. ‘Arioi were prohibited from raising children; infants born to them were often ritually killed, a practice that horrified later missionaries but was bound up in ideas of sacrifice and devotion to ‘Oro. They embodied both sacred fertility and deliberate barrenness, living paradoxes that blurred social categories. In that paradox lay their mana.
Tupaia, as an ‘Arioi, was expected not only to master ritual but also to perform. Contemporary accounts suggest that, during his years with Queen Purea, he sometimes appeared as a woman in ceremonial and artistic contexts. This was neither disguise nor shame, but part of the fluidity allowed within the order. In this role, he was akin to the figure of Arjuna in the Mahābhārata, who, while in exile, lived for a time as Brihannala, a eunuch dance teacher. Like Arjuna, Tupaia was a warrior-priest, yet also one who could shift into femininity, embodying multiple powers at once.In Tahiti, Tupaia was seen as māhū, suggesting a gendered spiritual essence perceived as separate from male and female, but containing elements of both. His knowledge, however, came from the sacred marae of Polynesian navigating life (Taputapuātea).
By the time the Endeavour arrived in 1769, he was a man in exile. Purea had been overthrown, and with her went his influence at court. Without patronage, his mana was diminished. Yet his training as priest and ‘Arioi gave him command of the cosmological charts of Taputapuātea, and of the genealogies that bound Polynesia to its ancestral horizons. He was not a legendary wayfinder like Kupe or Māui, but he was something equally significant: a keeper of knowledge, capable of linking fragments of memory across the Blue Pacific Civilisation.
When Cook and Banks invited him aboard, he seized the chance. He would ride this foreign canoe westward, following remembered chants of Kahiki, Pulotu, and Hawaiki-pāmamao. For Tupaia, the voyage was not about aiding the British; it was about restoring his mana by rediscovering the ancestral horizon his people had half-forgotten.
Defiance Against the Ari‘i
When Purea’s star fell and her rivals seized Tahiti, Tupaia’s fortunes collapsed with hers. As an ‘Arioi, his mana had once rested on sacred paradox — on living without children, consecrating himself to performance, ritual, and fertility without lineage. But with Purea deposed and the Ari‘i (high chiefs) turning against him, Tupaia made a decision that shocked his peers. He resolved to have children*.
In the world of the ‘Arioi, this was a deliberate affront — a breaking of tapu, a rejection of their vows. It was more than personal rebellion: it was Tupaia’s way of striking back at the chiefs who had humiliated him. By choosing lineage, he defied their authority and reclaimed a different form of mana, one rooted in ancestry rather than court ritual.
This act of rebellion cast him further into exile. Among Tahiti’s elite he was branded fallen, broken, even cursed. Yet for Tupaia, it was also liberation. In stepping outside the rules of the ‘Arioi, he opened himself to the idea that other rules, other pathways, might also be broken or remade. His voyage on the Endeavour — his decision to ride a foreign canoe into ancestral seas — came from the same spirit of defiance. If his own people would deny him mana, he would find it elsewhere, in the lands beyond the horizon that the chants promised. Footnotes
*“Archaeological studies show that the ʻOro war cult and its elaborate temple styles emerged only in late prehistory, linked to elite socio‑political consolidation in the Society Islands (Kahn 2010). Ethnohistoric accounts similarly note that the cult of ʻOro—with its distinctive red‑feather girdle and priest‑performer institution of the Arioi—functioned as a political‑ritual innovation rather than an ancestral continuum (ʻOro‑maro‑ʻura; childlessness norms imposed on the Arioi). Together with Henry’s observation of an invented origin myth, these sources corroborate the view that Tupaia, grounded in older cosmology, might have consciously rejected the relatively recent ʻOro prohibitions in favor of lineage.Henry also records that the ʻArioi “disbanded and went to their own homes, until new organizations were required” (Henry 1928:241). Ellis likewise notes that they “assembled in companies for a time, and afterwards dispersed, resuming private life until the festivals called them forth again” (Polynesian Researches, vol. II, 1829:181). Oliver reinforces this in his synthesis, describing the ʻArioi as “seasonal traveling troupes” rather than a permanent caste, bound by ritual obligation only while in cycle (Ancient Tahitian Society, vol. II, 1974:1009). This cyclical membership helps reconcile the practice of infanticide with the fact that members could leave or lapse, resuming ordinary lineage and family life once detached from active ʻArioi vows.”Henry also stated: “Offspring of the lowest orders was not permitted to live, in consequence of which infanticide was a common practice among them. If any saved their babes they were dismissed in disgrace from the society. But children born in the highest ranks were regarded as descendants of gods, and were spared to inherit their parents’ titles.” (1928:235)
The Meeting on the Beach
When Cook first met Tupaia, he expected a priest wrapped in mystery, a keeper of taboos who spoke in riddles. What he encountered was stranger.
Tupaia had mediated between ships and his people before as Purea's adviser, picking up some English and some French. Captain Cook spoke French, so those were the likely languages that the conversation took place in.
They met on the sand, the sea rolling behind them. Cook brought Banks and a few sailors; Tupaia came with attendants of the ‘Arioi. The British attempted a few words in broken Tahitian — aroha, manu, tapu — but their accents twisted the sounds. Tupaia answered not in plain speech, but in chant.
He intoned a genealogy of islands, each name bound to the rising and setting of stars. To the sailors, it was gibberish; to Cook, it seemed theatre, some kind of ritualised performance. But as the rhythm went on, Cook felt something uncanny: the chant had structure, like a map sung aloud. Frustrated, Banks drew a crude sketch of an island on a chart and pushed it toward him. Tupaia studied it, then smoothed the sand with his hand. With a stick he began to draw lines — not coastlines but perspectives, radiating out from the centre. Each line matched a bearing sung in his chant: where the sun set, where Canopus rose, where the Southern Cross turned.
At first Cook thought it was pantomime. Then he shifted his position on the sand, lined himself with the angle of the drawn lines, and suddenly he saw it: an island network laid out as a spatial chart, each radiating line marking the relationship of one island to another, like spokes in a wheel.
It was not the kind of map Europeans drew, but it was recognisably cartography.
Cook’s skepticism turned to something else — a dawning sense that this priest knew more of the Pacific than he himself did. If the bearings in chant and sand were true, then the course to the great southern continent might be hidden here, encoded in Tupaia’s ritual. From that moment, Cook understood that this Polynesian priest was not merely translator or entertainer. He was the pilot of an entire civilisation’s knowledge.
A Historical Supposition: Polynesians, Cultural Memory, and the Long Reach of the Silk Roads
It is not unreasonable to suppose that, in the centuries before European expansion, a handful of Polynesian navigators pressed further west than the canonical Hawaiki of Ra'iātea or Samoa. Carried by prevailing winds and guided by ancestral wayfinding, they might have reached the edge of Island Southeast Asia, just as their Austronesian cousins had long before settled Madagascar and linked the Indian Ocean world.
If such Polynesian crews touched at Java, Malacca, or the Moluccas in the 13th to 15th centuries, they would have stepped into the very heart of the Islamic maritime network. There they might have encountered the same things that dazzled Venetian merchants or Arab geographers:
spices (clove, nutmeg, mace) whose fragrance was so intense it was equated with mana or tapu;
cloths of silk and cotton dyed in brilliant batik patterns, unlike barkcloth tapa;
iron and steel tools, heavier and sharper than stone adzes;
glass beads and porcelain that glittered in sunlight, as if made from petrified seawater.
Even if the visit was fleeting, the impression would have been lasting. Polynesians did not carry writing, but they carried whakapapa — genealogical memory woven into chants, origin stories, and place names. In time, the remembered western lands became mythicized: Hawaiki for Māori, Pulotu in Samoa, Kahiki in Hawai‘i. These names preserve not cartography but cultural memory: recollections of abundance, mana, and powerful strangers.
Centuries later, the very same goods that Polynesian voyagers may have glimpsed in Malacca would flood into Renaissance Europe. Venetian merchants trafficked in cloves from Maluku, textiles from Java, and porcelain from China, all funnelled through Islamic ports. European courts adopted the luxury of these items as markers of refinement and divine favor. The confluence is striking: products that once awed a Polynesian canoe crew on the edge of the Indian Ocean were, by the 15th and 16th centuries, redefining taste and consumption in Florence, Venice, and Lisbon.
Thus the Polynesian memory of a western homeland rich in wealth and gods can be read as the other side of the same global process. The Islamic maritime world acted as the intermediary between distant producers and distant consumers, binding together Austronesian voyagers, Polynesian cultural memory, and European Renaissance appetite. In this light, oral traditions of Hawaiki, Pulotu, or Kahiki need not be dismissed as “pure myth.” They may well encode the echoes of brief but transformative encounters at the fringes of the Silk Roads — encounters whose products were destined, a few centuries later, to reappear in Europe as the luxuries that spurred the age of exploration.
Cook’s Hidden Orders, Tupaia’s Charts
The official reason for the Endeavour’s voyage was astronomical: to observe the Transit of Venus in Tahiti. But Cook carried secret Admiralty orders as well — once the transit was observed, he was to search for the great southern continent, the Terra Australis Incognita, which Europeans believed must exist to balance the globe.
In this sense, Cook and Tupaia were bound by parallel quests. Cook sought the continent of European imagination; Tupaia sought the remembered lands of Polynesian chant. The irony was that Cook’s maps recorded the coasts, but it was Tupaia who gave the directions. His oral charts, drawn from Taputapuātea and the memories of voyagers before him, pointed the way south and west — to Aotearoa, to the Great South Land, and eventually to Batavia.
So while history remembers Cook as the captain, in truth the course was Tupaia’s. Cook was chasing a European dream of balance, but Tupaia was following ancestral cosmologies. Both men thought they were testing myth; both men found it real.Tupaia had noticed one other thing on the beach: Cook’s muskets. In uncertain territory, he knew that their weapons were far in advance of those that his people were using, and this influenced his decision to leave.
Tupaia and the Star-Paths
The Liminal Craft
Tupaia of Ra‘iātea, priest of ʻOro and master of the fare-ʻai-raʻa-ʻupu, stood at the edge of worlds. When he stepped onto Cook’s ship Endeavour, he carried not only genealogies and chants but the night-sky itself folded into memory. His craft was not learned by chance; it was cultivated through ritual abstinence, fasting, long vigils, and nights where the pulse of drums and breath of chants moved mind and body across thresholds. These were not “trances” in the Western sense, but states of alignment: moments when the self loosened and the stars leaned closer, revealing their secret courses.
The ’Arioi Nights
The ’arioi society, into which Tupaia had been drawn, embodied this liminal power. Tattooed and graded, they became living vessels of performance, their ceremonies binding chiefs, gods, and voyagers. Night-long dances and chants worked as engines of altered perception: the body saturated by rhythm, the mind stretched by recitation, until the ordinary world dissolved and the divine became palpable.
Bundles of Breath and Root: Traded Ritual Drugs
Among the treasures exchanged in Pacific voyages—red feathers, stone adzes, tapa cloth—there also moved more subtle goods: bundles of dried root, nut, or leaf that carried the power to shift thought. From Island Southeast Asia came areca and betel; from Melanesia, kava; from later encounters, tobacco. Some preparations induced relaxation, others dream-like lucidity, still others sharpened the focus of chant. None were sought for visions alone: they were keys to proper ceremony, aligning navigator and priest with the sea, the wind, and the ancestral gods. A handful of root or a twist of leaf was as valuable as obsidian blades—small packages of consciousness-tech carried in voyaging canoes.
The Ecology of Mind
Bateson and Mead would later write of how ritual frames signal “this is play,” how trance becomes patterned, not chaotic. Polynesian masters had long known this: that to cross the limen safely required a container—marae stones, fasting laws, chants that signaled passage from noa to tapu. In those containers, mild preparations of plant or root were not intoxicants but companions, woven with breath and rhythm.
The Stars Awaken
On deck, with Cook’s crew watching, Tupaia recited islands as if naming kin. He traced them onto bark and sand, his hand moving with the memory of swell and horizon. The map that baffled the Europeans was no cartography of latitude but a state-specific vision externalized: the relational sky-ocean he had been trained to perceive in altered states, now fixed as a gift to those outside his tradition.
Genealogy of the Tamatoa Line
Tupaia’s authority was not only spiritual and ritual, but genealogical. He belonged to the Tamatoa line of Ra'iātea, a chiefly house that supplied the ariki who presided over Taputapuātea, the sacred marae that anchored the Polynesian world. The Tamatoa family was famed for its mana, their names carried across chants that bound together Ra'iātea, Huahine, Tahiti, and beyond.
Through these chiefly lines, Tupaia was tied to the Queen of Papara, whom he served as priest and adviser. Purea’s lineage from the Papara chiefs and Tupaia’s from Tamatoa intersected at Taputapuātea, the axis of legitimacy. That connection placed him in the highest stratum of Tahitian society, not as an outsider priest but as a kin-ally empowered to guide strategy, ritual, and diplomacy.
The Tamatoa line’s prestige extended beyond the Society Islands. Through remembered genealogies, they were linked to Hawai‘i, Rarotonga, and the families of high chiefs across Eastern Polynesia. Chants carried these ties like voyaging canoes: recited aloud, they traversed the ocean, reaffirming kinship wherever Polynesian sails reached.
Yet the genealogical chants Tupaia mastered did not stop at the boundaries of Polynesia.
They spoke also of Kahiki and Pulotu — names for western horizons, remembered as lands of cloth, towers, fire, and abundance. In these fragments scholars glimpse the echoes of older Austronesian encounters with Island Southeast Asia, where cousins of the Polynesians had long since sailed into the Muslim seas of Malacca and Java.
Though no direct marriage ties linked the Tamatoa house to those Islamic polities, the memory persisted: in chants of distant horizons, in metaphors of prayer and abundance, in the recognition that the Polynesian genealogical net was cast wide. In this way, Tupaia’s lineage was both a local inheritance of ariki mana and a vessel of global memory, binding Ra'iātea not only to Tahiti and Hawai‘i, but in echo to the farthest edges of the Indian Ocean world.
Departure
When the Endeavour left Tahiti in July 1769, Tupaia stood on the deck as both an exile and a guide. Once a priest of ‘Oro, once the confidant of Queen Purea, now a man without a court, he chose to leave the islands of his youth. His only true companion was a boy — not a servant nor a wife, but more like a nurse, a carer who tended him when illness gripped him and who listened patiently to the chants and charts he recited. The boy was his last student, the final vessel into which he could pour the lore of Taputapuātea.
As the Endeavour raised anchor, a flotilla of Tahitian double-hulled vaka followed her out. These great canoes — sleek, lashed by master carvers, with sails of woven mat catching the morning wind — were living symbols of Polynesian ingenuity. Crewed by dozens, they moved with a grace that startled Cook’s men, who for a moment wondered if the foreigners might sail alongside them into the deep. But the vaka came only as escort, a final weaving of kinship and farewell. They trailed the Endeavour past the reef, their hulls knifing through the surf, before peeling away one by one.
Tupaia watched them vanish astern and understood the choice he had made. The chants of his ancestors spoke of horizons so distant that only a super‑canoe could reach them now. The great double‑hulled vessels of his youth could cross oceans, but they no longer bore the scale or the stores needed for months upon months at sea. The Endeavour, awkward though she seemed, was such a super‑canoe: a floating fortress of timber and iron that could carry him back into the remembered past of Hawaiki pāmamao. By stepping aboard, he was not surrendering to the foreigners, but seizing their canoe to ride the ancient paths of the stars once more. For the Tahitians, it was ritual: a last binding of mana before the foreign canoe disappeared toward the horizon.
Tupaia knew the Endeavour’s voyage was no English discovery. These foreigners thought themselves the first to pierce the Pacific, but Tupaia knew better: the chants of his ancestors spoke of hundreds of islands, some far to the west, some stretching beyond the burning horizon of Pulotu. If the British wanted him as a translator and intermediary, he would use them in turn — to ride their ship along the ancient cosmological paths.
The Journey Southward
The Endeavour did not leap straight from Tahiti to New Zealand. Tupaia charted their course through a chain of islands, each one a fragment of lore.
The Society Islands
When the Endeavour sailed from Tahiti, the farewell was cordial. Tupaia’s ties to the Maohi chiefs ensured that Cook and Banks departed on terms of respect, with provisions and goodwill exchanged. Yet the next stage of their passage — through the rest of the Society Islands — proved less harmonious.
At Huahine and Ra'iātea, Tupaia was not merely remembered; he was judged. Old rivalries lingered, and whispers spread that he bore responsibility for the turbulence that had unsettled the chiefly balance of the archipelago. His alliance with Queen Purea, his defiance of the ʻarioi vows, and his departure alongside the foreigners cast him as both betrayer and exile in the eyes of many.
Onshore encounters grew tense. Chiefs who had once welcomed him with chant and kava now met him with silence or thinly veiled scorn, while the British sailors mistook some of the ‘arioi for prostitutes. At Bora Bora, the resentment boiled over: an argument in the marae escalated into blows, and British marines had to intervene when stones were hurled at the shore party. What might have been a ritualised contest of mana spiralled into a violent clash.
The Endeavour hastened its departure. Cook, alarmed at the hostility, pressed on without further ceremony. Tupaia stood at the rail, silent, knowing that the islands he had once traversed as priest and navigator now closed their doors to him. For the British, the Society Islands were a place of uncertain welcome. For Tupaia, they were a reminder that exile was not only from Tahiti, but from the wider world of his youth.
From there they turned southwest, passing lonely atolls and skirting the currents toward high latitudes. The air grew colder; new stars rose and set on the horizon.
Finally, after weeks of sailing into seas few Polynesians had seen, the outline of Te Ika-a-Māui (the North Island of New Zealand) rose from the ocean. Soon after they would trace the coasts of Te Waipounamu (the South Island) and even sight Rakiura (Stewart Island), the far southern reach of the Polynesian world.
For Cook, this was new territory to map. For Tupaia, it was a confirmation: the chants of Hawaiki nui, Hawaiki roa, Hawaiki pāmamao were not lies. The land was here, real, peopled with kin who spoke a tongue close enough to his own that he could converse with them.
First Encounter at Tūranganui-a-Kiwa
The waka came in silence, paddles rising and falling with the weight of discipline. Cook’s men thought they were rowing to parley; in truth they were being dragged into a chosen zone, where Ngāti Porou warriors waited. Spears and taiaha gleamed in the sun, not as props of ritual but as weapons held ready. Silence was the first blow, a theatre of mana more fearsome than shouted words.
When the Endeavour’s marines stepped ashore, the warriors surged. In the first rush, British muskets cracked but were too slow; several marines went down in the surf, cut down before they could reload. Cook’s log would never admit it, but the first blood spilt that day was British, not Māori.
The response was ruthless. Muskets fired in volleys, the smoke acrid over the tide. Cook ordered that Māori be seized from the canoes as restitution, dragged aboard to balance the deaths of the marines. To the British it was utu in their own idiom—human lives taken to cover their own losses.
In the chaos stood Tupaia. His tattoos proclaimed the god of war, and in that moment he could not be only a priest. As the line broke and muskets flashed, he lifted a spear and struck, killing Māori himself. Each blow tore at his soul, kin killing kin, but it was demanded by circumstance. If Cook’s men saw him as a mere translator before, they saw him now as a warrior-priest who could meet death with blood of his own. To the Ngāti Porou tohunga, his violence proved his mana—he had rebalanced what had been tipped by British cowardice and premature fire.
When the smoke cleared, bodies lay on both sides. The British would write only of Māori deaths, excusing their gunfire as tragic misunderstanding. But in the memory of the shore, silence had been the first challenge, marines had fallen first, and captives had been taken as payment. Tupaia alone bore both faces of the encounter: priest of Taputapuātea and killer of his own kin, cursed and bound in equal measure. His chant that night was not one of navigation but of lament, a weaving of death into the genealogy of the ocean.
Tupaia and the Bitter Feast
After the clash on the sands, when blood had already soaked the surf, the Ngāti Porou warriors returned with the bodies of their enemies. Fires were kindled, flesh was roasted. The Endeavour’s crew recoiled, but none more than Tupaia.
In Tahiti the practice had long since withered, remembered more in chant than in act. The ‘arioi invoked atua with sacrifice, but not the flesh of men. To Tupaia, who carried the genealogies of Taputapuātea, the sight of kin eating kin was a desecration. He turned away, spitting in disgust, muttering that such acts stripped Polynesians of their dignity. Banks recorded that he pleaded with the chiefs to stop, declaring that the gods of Ra'iātea abhorred such deeds.
Yet the tohunga of Ngāti Porou answered him calmly. Around the fire they spoke: kai tangata was not hunger, they said, but utu — the settling of debts in the oldest way. To eat the flesh of an enemy was to bind his mana to the victors, to ensure that his descendants would not rise again in vengeance. It was an act of ritual, no more barbaric to them than the taking of red feathers or obsidian blades had been in older voyages.
The elders explained that such feasting was rare, reserved for great battles or grievous insults. It was not the common food of the people, but a bitter feast that carried tapu. Some chanted that their ancestors had eaten the hearts of warriors to gain strength; others reminded Tupaia that just as the gods devoured offerings, so men too might consume what was sacred.
Tupaia wept. To him it was a breaking of kinship, a breach in the great web of Polynesia. To the tohunga it was an affirmation, a weaving of the dead into the living. They saw no contradiction; he saw only fracture. In that moment the priest of Ra'iātea understood that Polynesia was not one ocean but many currents — and that even within the Blue Continent, customs diverged like branches of a river.
After the Feast
At night by the fire, after the blood-guilt had been bound by ritual, the tohunga of Ngāti Porou began to chant. Their voices reached far back, beyond Kupe, beyond Toi, into voyages half-remembered, into horizons where land and sea blurred into story.
They spoke of Rēkohu, the misted islands to the east, where kin lived without war and seabirds darkened the sky. They spoke of Pulotu, the western abundance, and of Kahiki, from which ancestors came bearing iron, cloth, and fire. And they spoke of the people: the tangata pango, dark-skinned and strong, warriors of the islands where the sun set; and the urukehu, reddish-haired, lighter of skin, remembered as rare yet still born from time to time among their own kin.
The tohunga did not describe the urukehu as strangers or as foreigners. They were Māori, Polynesian — but set apart, marked by tapu. Some whispered that their difference tied them to the patu-paiarehe, those otherworldly beings of the forests and mist, whose appearance could signal hidden connections between the human world and the unseen. Others said it was simply the way of whakapapa, the endless variety carried within descent. Either way, the urukehu were proof that the body itself could carry memory, showing how the ancestors lived within their descendants in many forms.
Tupaia listened as the tohunga wove these genealogies. His own chants of Ra'iātea spoke of Hawaiki, Pulotu, Kahiki — but here those horizons were peopled with flesh and hair, towers and cloth, mists and fire. What had been fragments in his lore became full images in theirs. He realised then that he held only one half of the map. The tohunga of Te-Riu-A-Māui held the other, completing the arc toward the west.
By the glow of the fire, Tupaia saw it: his route was no longer a set of chants without anchor. It was a living path, marked by bodies, places, and genealogies that bound the Pacific to the worlds beyond.
In the days that followed, the tohunga bound him into the tribe with ritual. A woman of Tongan descent was chosen to bear his mana forward. Through sacred rites she conceived his child, even as the tohunga laid a mākutu on him — a curse for the blood he had spilled. Thus he was bound and burdened in one stroke: kin by descent, shadowed by death-magic
To balance the fertility spell, and to sanctify the mākutu, Tupaia’s apprentice was castrated, and his blood was used to bind Tupaia with a mark of shame. Castration in those days was done with a kotiate club. The scrotum was gripped in the two lobed openings of the kotiate and tension/compression on the spermatic cord led to eventual atrophy—i.e., sterilisation by lesion.
This tohunga ritual had a dual spiritual function, one that suited Tupaia's interests: by cutting off heredity via cultural transmission in order to secure his heredity via blood, Tupaia made his definitive break with the 'Arioi and, to some extent, the faith system that he had been raised by.
The inquisitive, almost atheistic, enlightenment of the British scientists had made an impression on him, although he thought them naive and crude in their knowledge of the spirit worlds, blindly intruding upon - and distorting - the subtle relations of the cosmos with their metallurgic weapons and their measurement tools.
Prelude: Toward the Austronesian and Islamic Seas
Before the Endeavour raised anchor, Tupaia knew that the chants of his ancestors did not end at the edge of Polynesia. Ra'iātea’s lore spoke of western horizons where kin had sailed long ago, and where wealth beyond flax and feather was found. Through Samoa and Tonga the genealogies reached out into Island Southeast Asia, into the chain of Austronesian cousins whose ancestors had spread across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar.
In the fireside chants of Ngāti Porou, he had heard of lands with towers and cloth, of men who bent in prayer five times each day, and of ancestors who had sailed west and never returned. These fragments matched the stories whispered in Tahiti of Kahiki and Pulotu. To Polynesian ears they were horizons of spirit and descent; to Tupaia, now stepping onto a British ship, they were also living routes, pathways that could be followed into the Muslim seas.
For centuries, the Austronesian and Islamic worlds had braided together: Malay and Javanese sailors carried spice and faith across the ocean, Bugis praus pushed into trepang waters, and Indian merchants set their marks upon the ports. Tupaia did not know the names of Mecca or Gujarat, but he knew their echoes in chant: lands of fire, cloth, and ritual. The voyage westward was not discovery — it was return, a reconnection with kin long entangled in the Austronesian diaspora.
Tupaia’s Last Voyage
Aotearoa to the Great South Land
After the encounters with Ngāti Porou, and after the rituals that bound and cursed him in equal measure, Tupaia’s path on the Endeavour carried him further than any Polynesian priest-navigator had gone.
The ship swept south around Te Ika-a-Māui and Te Waipounamu. Each inlet and headland seemed to him like echoes of chants half-remembered — Hawaiki-roa, Hawaiki-pāmamao — lands of distance and cold, where the ocean bit and the mountains rose higher than Ra'iātea’s sky.
He spoke to the Māori they met, and though Cook thought him translator only, Tupaia was comparing genealogies, weighing fragments of story. His mind was turning always to the west, to what lay beyond.
When they crossed the Tasman Sea and made landfall at Botany Bay, Tupaia felt no confirmation of ancestral promise. This land was new, silent of marae, bare of chants. Its people carried no Polynesian tattoos or genealogies. Their tongue was opaque. And yet the stars above remained familiar. He sensed that the way lay further, that this was a threshold, not an ending.
Interlude: The Songlines and the Stars
On the shores of the Great South Land, Tupaia stood apart from Cook and Banks. The British saw silence and resistance in the Aboriginal people, gestures they could not read. But Tupaia’s gaze lifted to the sky.
The strangers sang with their hands, their voices carrying not toward him but across the land itself. They traced ridgelines with their fingers, pointed to rivers with the arc of their arms, then lifted their eyes to the constellations. At first he thought it pantomime. Then he realised: they were chanting the land as he chanted the sea.
The stars above were not foreign. Canopus rose where he expected; the Southern Cross turned in its wheel. The voices of the people bound those stars to rocks and rivers as surely as his own chants bound them to swells and islands. In that moment he saw himself reflected: he was Cook, baffled by chant, staring at a cartography sung instead of drawn. And yet unlike Cook, he recognised it.
For the Polynesian, the heavens were a compass of ocean. For the people of this coast, they were the spine of the earth. Both charted space through memory and rhythm, both tied place to ancestry. Tupaia felt a shiver: the stars themselves were the common speech of the world, binding desert and ocean, canoe and songline, into a single order of knowledge.
And then came something stranger still. Among the gestures, he caught fragments — a word bent in a form close to Austronesian, a borrowed sound that echoed through their chant. The men pointed north when they spoke it, toward seas where fleets of praus gathered, where Muslim sailors prayed beneath towers of wood and cloth. Tupaia leaned forward, hearing in their rhythm an echo of Kahiki and Pulotu.
Cook muttered about failure to communicate. But Tupaia knew better. He had been given a gift. Where Europeans saw only blank land and muteness, he saw a parallel civilisation: navigators of stone and desert, whose chants of place mirrored his chants of sea, and whose words carried the faint trace of Austronesian kin long braided with the Muslim seas.
In their songlines he recognised the stars he already carried within — and for the first time, he felt not exile, but kinship. The map was larger than he had ever imagined: Polynesia, Australia, and the Indies were not separate worlds, but strands of one great net, knotted by stars, chants, and remembered words.
Northward Through Torres Strait
The Endeavour sailed north through reefs and shoals that Cook feared, but which to Tupaia read like genealogies carved in coral. Each change of current, each shift of colour in the sea, reminded him of the lore of Taputapuātea — that reefs themselves are teachers, showing the navigator humility before abundance.
Passing through Torres Strait, he knew he was crossing a liminal zone. The stars still shone above, but the canoes were broader, the people darker, the chants tuned to new rhythms. He had entered the boundary between Melanesia and Indonesia, where Austronesian kin faded into the hum of other civilisations. At dawn one morning, canoes appeared on the horizon—long, swift Torres Strait vessels cutting across the reef waters. Their sails of pandanus caught the light, and the rhythmic rise of paddles showed discipline and intent. The Islanders did not flee at the sight of the foreign ship; they gathered, as if measuring the intruder. Among some, he again heard fragments: loanwords that bent close to Tahitian, gestures that recalled the market cries of the north. These were hints of the trepang trade with Makassar, echoes of Muslim sailors whose daily prayers bound them to towers of fire and cloth. To Cook they were meaningless; to Tupaia they were confirmation. The western horizons of chant — Kahiki, Pulotu — were not myth. They were living territories.
Cook ordered muskets readied, Banks scribbled furiously, but Tupaia stood at the rail and watched in silence. The canoes wheeled in formation, circling just beyond musket shot. Shell trumpets sounded, echoing over the surf. To the Islanders, this was not theatre: it was a muster of defence, a declaration that these waters were not empty.
As the ship struggled against currents, a few canoes darted closer. Spears glittered in the sun. Stones clattered against the hull, harmless but deliberate, a warning that passage was neither free nor uncontested. Marines raised their muskets, and one shot cracked across the waves. The canoes scattered, but not in retreat—rather, in a calculated withdrawal, regrouping further out, still watching. Tupaia muttered that the ship was being weighed, tested, judged.
For days the pattern repeated: distant sails appearing at dawn, shadowing the Endeavour as she edged through the straits. No boarding came, no battle forced, but the message of their eerie chanting was plain —this was not unclaimed sea. Cook, in his log, wrote only of reefs and shoals, but the Islanders’ vigilance lived on in their musters, remembered in the echoes of paddles slapping the water.
Ritual Meaning of the Far Horizons
In Polynesia, Tupaia’s chants named horizons as places of spirit: Hawaiki as the ancestral womb, Pulotu as the land of abundance, Kahiki as the faraway source of wealth. In Australia, he saw that such names were not illusion but memory: fragments of earlier voyages, encoded in ritual and song.
The Aboriginal songlines were a terrestrial counterpart to his own oceanic chants, fixing the stars to land rather than sea. The fragments of Austronesian words carried by northern trade routes were like ritual glosses, confirming that these horizons lay not beyond comprehension but within a larger ritual order. The rituals of the desert people — songs of place, taboos on certain waters, dances that mimicked constellations — were as systematic as the fasting and chants of Taputapuātea.
Makassar and the Memory of Pulotu
By the time they reached the waters near Makassar, he saw something that jolted the cosmologies he carried: fleets of Muslim sailors in praus, harvesting trepang, trading in markets alive with spices. He had heard whispers of Pulotu as a land of plenty, and now here it was: not a mythical paradise, but a living world of towers, mosques, and endless commerce.
The rhythms of prayer, five times a day, struck him as eerily close to Polynesian chant. The minarets could have been the towers spoken of in Ngāti Porou fireside tales. Tupaia knew then that the fragments of the old cosmological charts had been right — they were pointing here, to the Muslim seas of the Indian Ocean.
Batavia — The Boundary Edge
When the Endeavour limped into Batavia in October 1770, battered by sea and worm, Tupaia felt the air thicken with memory. The canals stank of fever, yet the markets gleamed with porcelain and spice. Mosques rose above tiled roofs, and the rhythm of prayer echoed dawn chants at Taputapuātea. For a moment he thought: Here it is — Pulotu, Kahiki, the remembered abundance.
But as he walked the city’s crowded lanes, doubts gathered. Batavia was a Dutch fortress, not an ancestral homeland. The people were strangers, their prayers fixed to a god foreign even to the Muslim traders who bent toward Mecca. He listened in the markets, hearing Malay, Javanese, Arabic — and then a word, bent and broken, that matched a syllable in his chants of Ra'iātea. It was a fragment, a shard of proof.
The tohunga of Ngāti Porou had told him of lands with towers and cloth, of men who prayed to the setting sun. Here he had found towers and prayer — but not the source.
This was an edge, not an origin. He knew then that the true homeland his chants preserved lay further still: westward across the Indian Ocean, toward the lands from which the Austronesian ancestors had once departed.
Perhaps it was in Madagascar, where Austronesian tongues had long since taken root in African soil. Perhaps it was in the Malay-Indonesian archipelago, where voyagers braided their lives with Muslim traders. Or perhaps, more distantly still, in the coastal lands of India where cinnamon, cotton, and iron were once traded for feather and shell. Each was possible. Each shimmered on the horizon of memory.
In Batavia he had reached the boundary, the place where Polynesian chant touched the Muslim seas but did not cross them. He was too ill to voyage further. Fever clung to him, and his young attendant was already gone. As his strength ebbed, he whispered chants of Hawaiki-roa, Hawaiki-pāmamao — not illusions now, but coordinates he had confirmed. The map was unfinished, the destination glimpsed but unreached.
Cook recorded barely a line at his passing. Banks grieved more, writing that a great man of the Pacific was lost. But within the framework of chant, Tupaia’s death was not failure. He had traced the path as far as he could, up to the liminal edge where memory touched history. The homeland remained hidden, its precise shore unreached — but he had shown that it existed, somewhere beyond Batavia, in the seas where Austronesian and Muslim worlds intertwined.
Thus he died at the boundary, bearing knowledge that would not be carried home: that Polynesian chants did not speak of myth, but of a homeland still waiting in the far west.
As for my newsworthy discovery of whakapapa: well, the interesting thing is that people were comparing me to Tupaia well before any of that was uncovered.
This is the story as I saw it, combined with state-of-the-art facts from modern historians and anthropologists.
Amanda Michelina September 2025