In the book, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson, my lifelong frustration was answered. Thompson set out to write the book I would have wanted to read— how the navigators of the Pacific accomplished their voyages; the technology, the skills, the knowledge. But in the process, she discovered that the history of Oceania—the big questions— are unknowable, lost to history, and that the partial puzzle we’ve constructed of the Oceanic past are due to these diverse players, even if sometimes they were wrong or racist or drunk with desire for personal glory or fame. You cannot separate the history of Oceania from James Cook, because therein lies the slim source material of its documented past.

You can’t separate the history of Oceania from Thor Heyerdahl and the others who proposed the drift theories, because even if their ideas were wrong, the popularity of their ideas were counterbalanced by a surge of new challenges to them—particularly as the people of Polynesia sought pride and understanding of their own history. Today, even if the big questions will never be answered, the fragments have been stitched together.

Today, for the first time in my life, I can reasonably imagine the settlement of Oceania without thinking about a British naval coat.

Seventy-thousand years ago, southeast Asia was a very different place. Sea levels were lower, making land masses larger. A variety of human species, not just modern homo sapiens, had already begun to populate this part of the world. 

Many lived inland, hunters and gatherers and proto-farmers, but yet others were coastal, and these were the people who relied more on the ocean for their sustenance.

And it wasn’t just modern humans who were colonizing the islands. Tiny ancestors of homo sapiens, the three-and-a-half foot tall Homo floresiensis, were tool-users who crossed oceans to populate the islands of Indonesia and beyond.

How our ancestors and their cousins began to populate that region of the world will never be known. It’s possible that these initial crossings were the accidental voyages of castaways in small canoes set adrift in a storm, or refuges forced off a mainland, fleeing an enemy or a famine. We will never even know what their rafts or vessels looked like. But I can’t help but to imagine those Homo floresiensis hobbits with paddles and small dugout canoes, paddling in the open sea.

There was great diversity even among the modern humans moving out into Oceania. Australia was populated by one of the very first waves of people to exit Africa, but other islands were being populated by the ancestors of southeast Asian people. Through linguistics, rather than through archeology, we have a rough sense of the dispersal of people from the Southeast Asian islands, like Borneo, Sumatra and Java and Taiwan, into the Indian Ocean, and into the archipelagos of Melanesia, and then onward, to the small dots of Micronesia, and then into the vastness of the South Pacific—Polynesia, and Hawaii and Rapa Nui and New Zealand.

Polynesia’s mountainous Society Islands - Tahiti, Bora Bora and Moorea for example, were populated by 1,000 A.D., and, as part of an era of swift Oceanic discovery, the Tuamotus were likely populated shortly after.

We have fragments of evidence that point to the types of vessels that first landed on these islands—actually, the animated Disney film, Moana, does a fantastic job of presenting many of the possible Polynesian vessels. Moana spends much of the film in a small single-hulled outrigger, and later in a larger double-hulled outrigger known as a wa’a kaulua. Towards the end of the film, we see several dozen larger trans-Oceanic vessels, which are based on different presumed and possible vessel types.

In Moana, we see a Polynesian navigator spot a small white bird—that small white bird is a White Tern, and every day, it goes out to sea to catch fish in the ocean near the islands where it roosts. And each evening, the White Tern heads back home.

Moana's navigator spots the tern in the evening headed in a particular direction. He knows immediately that he is within close range of land, knowing that this bird never wanders too far from land, and always returns home in the evening. Actually, birds, which are distributed throughout the South Pacific, can give navigators loads of information about their whereabouts.

When we set out in the pelagic birding boat in Oregon, everybody knows which birds you will see first, based on how many miles out to see the boat has traveled. Some birds don't appear you've hit the abyss - sixty miles out.

We couldn’t really speculate about the importance of birds in Polynesian navigation until the first crew of the experimental Hawaiian voyaging canoe, Hōkūleʻa, sought to prove that ancient Polynesians indeed could navigate the Pacific. The problem was, back then in the 1970’s, there was apparently nobody left in the world, and certainly nobody in Hawaii, who understood traditional Pacific navigation.

Their answer came in the form of a man from the Caroline Islands, Mau Piailug, a master Pacific wayfinder, who through oral tradition had learned the closely held secrets of ancient Micronesian navigation. Mau became the master wayfinder of the Hōkūleʻa, teaching the crew, and the world. The Hōkūleʻa consistently showed the world that navigating from one island chain to the next was consistently achievable. Eventually, Hōkūleʻa circumnavigated the globe using only Micronesian techniques, proving that intentional voyaging in the Pacific was more than just possible.

It was Mau, probably more than anyone, who showed the world that birds, fish, swells, and especially stars, could be used to navigate precisely through a water world in a wayfinding system completely foreign to those of the old world continents.

But as the Hōkūleʻa continued to teach and train Polynesians these wayfinding techniques, the world of science would make the biggest breakthroughs in the mysteries of Oceania.

In the 2010’s, we started to learn more about the settling of the Pacific as geneticists studied the DNA of the domesticated animals of the Pacific islands. Chickens in particular, which along with pigs, dogs, rats and dozens of Southeast Asian crops, held keys to the story of the Pacific. Chickens were brought to every inhabited island, and they began to tell a story about where islands were colonized from, and when.

But only in the past couple years has the DNA evidence exploded. Now, through the DNA of Polynesians and other people of Oceania, we can trace fairly accurately the story of when and where people came from, like a breadcrumb trail.

And this is where Tikehau and the Tuamotus come in, because DNA evidence of people in the Americas contains traces of Tuamotu DNA—allowing geneticists the ability to see that people from the Tuamotus intermingled with people in South America —4,200 miles away.

Then, even more remarkably, geneticists have found that the DNA of South Americans later showed up in Tuamotuan DNA. The nail on Thor Heyerdahl’s controversial contention, that an ancient race of white people from the Americas drifted to Polynesia, was pounded in place. 

This means, almost beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the people of the Tuamotus made at least one 4,200 mile voyage to the Americas, settled in and made children with South Americans, and then voyaged back to the Tuamotus — almost certainly made in a double-hulled canoe similar to the Hōkūleʻa. A feat of navigation without metal tools or nails, without compasses or sextents, was not only possible but prolific and successful throughout the Pacific, and was practiced again and again. 

Underneath our kayaks are schools of mullets, heads of coral, the occasional sea turtle or blacktip reef shark. Ahead of us are sandy islets and forested motus—mini-self-contained jungles. This multicolored lagoon world is majestically vivid—I could grow old with a paddle in my hand.

Perhaps paddling among remote motus creates a good frame of reference to think about life in the Tuamotus long ago, but the blistering sun has its own demands. Despite our sun hats and long-sleeved sun-shirts and reef-safe sunscreen, this half-day voyage will incapacite us for the next three days. Fifteen minutes of sun exposure is all it takes here.

If you grow up here in the Tuamotus, you have a different frame of reference about land and sea. Here, your life is almost by definition played out largely on the water. So that long arc of exploration that began 70,000 years ago may be remarkable, but there is something about being here, paddling in a kayak, that informs me about why people chose to live here, and thrive here, which is not an easy thing for those of us who grew up in a mainland. 

When I set out to interview Heinere, I was expecting a survival story. But his replies belied the fact that I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that living on a tiny island is not a matter of survival for someone who spent his whole life thriving on a slightly less tiny island.

The people who inhabited the Tuamotus were descended from people who lived on successively tinier and tinier islands and atolls over the course of thousands of years. By then, those people in all their learning and technology and oral traditions, everything they knew was this water world. Perhaps the mountainous, Hawaii-like Society Islands were more foreign to the people—all that land—than these tiny Tuamotuan atolls. If your ancestral history is the Bismarck Islands, the Solomon Islands, the Fijian Islands, Nauru, the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu, then your world and everything you know is a water world. Arriving in these atolls must have been seen as a bounty of life, teaming with aquatic sustenance.

We arrive at the first motu. I pull my kayak up on the beach and head straight for the jungle, expecting Kellan to be following my footsteps into the shade.

I turn around and he’s already plunked himself in the water, kicking about. Why would you want to snorkel here, I thought? Between many of the motus is often a column of azure water—it moves like a river, always in the same direction out into the lagoon. I follow his lead, descending down into this riverine channel. The undersea world here is exquisite, even if it is a shallow and small place. 

We continue this practice as we follow the chain of motus. Each new islet brings a new riverine channel, a new snorkeling heaven with new species of exquisitely colored fish. Tikehau is probably best known for Jacques Cousteau’s depiction of it as the lagoon that contained the greatest sheer numbers and diversity of fish in all of Polynesia.

Many of the larger fish species, the butterflyfishes and angelfishes and parrotfishes of the larger reefs in the lagoon are already familiar to me. But in these shallow pools of water, there are smaller fish I had never seen before. Sometimes, they are only an inch long, but up close you can see their reds and whites and blacks and blues.

Diversity is a hard concept to sell to the world—we use polar bears and frogs and jungles to depict its importance. We use rare birds, on the verge of extinction, to plea with the world the value of it. 

But there is nowhere on Earth that summarizes biodiversity better than these Indo-Pacific reefs, where a rainbow of color and a mosaic of shapes literally swirls around you. I could grow old slipping into the water, to be with these little fish, in all their color. 

When we reach our fifth atoll of the morning, Kellan immediately slips into the water. A few minutes later, he pulls off his mask, shouting, “sea urchin!” and later showing off a shell. Seeing him alive in the outdoors reminds me of one of my own memories as a teenager. Our family vacations to the Bahamas had changed when our older brother had gone to become an adult, and was less often able to join us. Without the adventurous guidance of our older brother, my younger brother and I resorted to long hours snorkeling along the edge of the seagrass. There, for hours each day, we would find rocks and sunken logs and swim to a specific location, adding them to a large pile. As the pile would get larger with each day of our vacation, we would find that it would attract more and more new denizens.

The joy of six hours of work was to find, the next morning, that new crabs, anchovies and juvenile coral reef fish had moved in. We were building a castle in the water, but it was a beacon, inviting new citizens.

One day, I looked under a rock of our castle and saw something I had only seen in pictures — a tiny black and white fish, not more than 8 centimeters in length. Its fins were elongated in a way that made it look like an elegant alien creature. I was looking at a juvenile Jack-knifefish. It was the first time that I realized that snorkeling along the shore, rather than diving or snorkeling at larger reefs, held just as many chances for discovery and joy. In fact, unaided snorkeling had no bounds—you have all day, you can go in any direction, and find surprises unknown in the deepwater reefs. 

Watching Kellan kicking his way along the shore makes me want him to be able to know a seven hour snorkeling day. That idea, that gift that my parents gave to me and is so rare and unknowable today—that idea that in the outdoors, seven simple hours of joy under the sun is the magic of life.

The Terrestrial Fauna and Flora of the Tikehau Atoll

I had done my homework.

For the past six months, I had been trying to learn about the terrestrial life of the Tuamotus - the life that exists on the rocks, beaches and particularly the tropical moist forests of the motus. I had studied the small motu where we would stay on Google Earth, and I knew that while the hotel and its operations took up much of the island, the back half was mostly a wooded area, with a few small trails. 

I tried to learn the plants of the island, and the land crabs, and even the insects. I had also brushed up on the birds reported in Tikehau. Like many other places on Earth, Tikehau has a total number of reported bird species, and the species count is very low. You could say that the Tuamotus have some of the fewest bird species of anywhere on Earth.

Actually, you could say that all of French Polynesia, in all its 1,200 mile length and 121 islands, has very few birds. Only 108 bird species have ever been seen in these islands. Most of these are seabirds, many of which are known from other places like Mexico, Peru or Hawaii. 

For comparison, in the birdiest parts of Costa Rica, individual parks or lodges may have bird species counts of over 500. And yet the entire Tikehau atoll has yielded only 25. 

Bear with me for a moment, and let’s forget all the birds that are seabirds and shorebirds and waders, because these birds are ocean-dwellers, and many are migratory or pelagic. In other words, they aren’t terrestrial land-dwellers. Tikehau, then, has only three land-dwelling birds. Atoll Fruit-Dove, Tuamotu Reed-Warbler and Blue Lorikeet. So, if you discount the ocean-dwelling birds, Tikehau has one of the tiniest bird counts on Earth! 

Why does Tikehau, and all the Tuamotus have such a low bird count? They have tropical moist forests, freshwater marshes, endless beaches and rocky coral heads. Similar habitat in Colombia or Panama would be crawling with birds.

I openly wondered whether I could increase Tikehau’s bird count from 25 to 26, maybe by seeing a shorebird that had gone unnoticed. One thing is for certain - if I move the needle on Tikehau’s bird count, it would have to be at sea. The forest is fixed.

As I venture out into the forest of the small motu, I know there will be no terrestrial birds, because all three of the species require a different habitat than what this motu has to offer. Such birds would exist in parts of the atoll with more landmass or freshwater.

How lovely, a place without birds! 

As I step into the forest, I notice that none of the knee-high plants had been trammeled. Nobody has walked here for weeks. This is a pattern I see wherever I go. People tend to stay put. They travel 5,000 miles to the most distant place, and when they get there, they don’t have the curiosity to walk five minutes?

Being without land birds, I can walk through this forest and pay attention to everything else. I am exhausted from travel, and it’s stifling hot, and getting dark, and I am aware I have already left my wife and son for the woods, but I begin to look under leaves and scan the trunks of the trees, and, then, right there in front of me, something enormous glides from one dense set of trees, across the untrammeled path, and into dense cover. It - it was a bird, but that’s impossible. It was large and with a long ornamented tail and dense brown patterns. It felt almost like those large Squirrel Cuckoos of Latin America, or even those Lizard-cuckoos of the Caribbean.

Obviously, such a bird does not exist in the South Pacific! Obviously, I am tired and delirious, and false sightings are common in birding. In a brief sighting, the mind invents details - hopefulness convinces you that something common is its rare cousin.

But did my mind invent such a specific and exotic thing—something completely incongruous to this environment? I am awake, I haven’t had a drink - this is not some dream. 

I find Jane and Kellan at the bar. It was enormous, I tell them! It was like something from a deep jungle! I explain.

I find a small bird book near the bar (bird books of the Pacific are slender volumes), and I thumb through it to behold an extravagant, large bird - it’s a Long-tailed Koel, a type of Cuckoo related to the Lizard-cuckoos of the Caribbean. It breeds in New Zealand, where it lays its eggs in other bird nests, and tricks the mother to its raise its young. Then it disperses widely into the most remote islands of the South Pacific. To get to Tikehau from the South Island of New Zealand, this individual flew at least 3,300 miles.

I had never come across this cuckoo because it’s just not expected here, and so I increased the total Tikehau land dweller bird count from 3 to 4!

Over the next several days, I will spend time on the back half of the motu, finding all the plants, land crabs, beetles, katydids, spiders and dragonflies I can find. 

Like with the birds, there is a very distinct lack of diversity. Two spider species! One beetle! Four or five trees! Two skinks! One native gecko! No butterflies!

So why is this? Why is there so little diversity on this little motu? It turns out there is a neat way to sum that question up. The Theory of Island Biogreography, proposed by ecologist Robert MacArthur and renowned entomologist Edward O Wilson in the 1960s, and popularized in the natural history travelogue The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen, the theory holds that the farther away an island is from a mainland, and the smaller its size, the smaller its diversity.

More technically, the theory states that there is a equilibrium which exists between species that immigrate to an island, and species that go extinct on that island. But that equilibrium trends down the farther you are from a mainland, and the smaller the island.

Quammen describes the likely fate of any species that happens to drift to a small, distant island: "Its evolutionary adaptability is largely gone. Ecologically, it has become moribund. Sheer chance, among other factors, is working against it. The toilet of its destiny has been flushed."

Tikehau, and all of the Tuamotus, with their very small land areas and their extensive island, are a great place to see the theory up close: you can more or less find all the observable animals and plants of the island in a few short walks.

My sighting of the cuckoo on my first day in Tikehau was such a run of luck, that I almost instantly gave up on my quest to find a Blue Lorikeet, which I had already more or less confirmed no longer exist in Tikehau.

Blue Lorikeets, a deep blue and white parrot-like bird whose rarity and beauty make them an iconic symbol of French Polynesia, are known to exist on only 8 French Polynesian islands, including Tikehau. The last official sighting of the bird on Tikehau was in 1984.

Before our visit, I had decided to try to contact locals in Tikehau to see if I could confirm whether they persisted here. I also worked through any ornithologists, birders, and even naturalist guides in Tahiti, to see if they could connect me with someone who might have seen a Blue Lorikeet on Tikehau. I surmised that their most likely location would be the main island of Tuhererara, with its bounty of palm forests.

The one small shop on our motu sells pearls and souvenirs, and is adorned with paintings of Blue Lorikeets. I enter the shop and try to feel the owner out for her reasons for her Blue Lorikeet paintings.

“Here on Tikehau? No, there are no Blue Lorikeets here,” she says in a French accent.

“But there used to be, in the 1980s,” I explain.

She doesn’t seem to believe me, although her love for the birds is abundant.

“I reached out to a lot of people in Tikehau,” I explained. “One man even offered to enquire around the village for me. He told me he had lived in the village most of his life, but had never seen or heard of the bird.”

“They would not live on the main island,” she explains, “because there are too many people there. I would think that if there were any left, they would be out on one of the uninhabited motus.” She gestured to the northeast, the area in Tikehau’s ring that contains miles of uninhabited land.

“I’ve given up trying to find them anyway,” I explain.

Days later, we are at the airport, preparing to leave the island. While my family waits inside the open-air airport, I roam around the outside, overjoyed to finally find a butterfly - a Pea Blue - flittering along the road. 

I hear airplane noise in the distance, and turn around to confirm that our airplane is about to land. But instead, I see a forest of palms beyond the runway, and in the upper canopy are eight medium-sized, blue-colored birds.

Blue Lorikeets, flocking through the canopy.