South Sea Islands

THE SOUTH SEA ISLANDS are rich with history, lore, and fantastical beauty, and are a tropical adventure paradise.

One famous visitor to these remote islands was Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraim’s Daughter Longstocking, otherwise known as Pippi, the spunky fictional heroine of the Pippi Longstocking books. In one adventure, red-haired Pippi’s pirate father, the swashbuckling Efraim Longstocking, capsizes his boat, The Hoptoad, on a South Sea Isle (the fictional Kurrekurredutt). The locals pronounce him their leader, calling him Fat White Chief. And when Pippi comes to visit with her friends from Sweden, they call her Princess Pippilotta.

Well, that was the 1940s. It has gone out of fashion to barge onto native islands like that, expecting to become the princess and chief, in fiction or in reality. Today, were you to land on a South Sea Island (whether because your own pirate ship takes water in the Pacific, or because the tunnel you were digging from your backyard to China went slightly askew), here are some contemporary and historical details you’ll want to know.

FASCINATING FACTS

The South Sea Islands are part of the geographical area called Oceania. This includes more then 10,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean. Some are mere specks of rock in the ocean. Others, like Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand, are large and well known. The islands are divided into four groups: Australasia, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia.

Many of the islands are coral reefs—with villages built on the delicate skeletons of live coral. Some formed from the once-hot lava of underwater volcanoes, which eventually rose to the water’s surface.

Additional islands are atolls—that’s a narrow circle of land surrounded by ocean, with a lagoon in the middle. Atolls are the result of coral that has grown on top of a volcanic island that over the years and, with changing water levels, has sunk back into the sea. Still others are archipelagos, long chains of islands scattered over an expanse of water.

A good number of the islands are actually territories of far-away nations like the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. A few, like Fiji, the Marshall Islands, Pelau, and Vanuatu, are independent.

CAPTAIN COOK’S VOYAGES TO THE SOUTH SEAS

The famous English explorer Captain James Cook made three voyages through the Pacific islands between 1768 and 1779. Cook was the first European to see Tahiti, to sail around New Zealand, and to set foot in Australia.

A Tahitian man named Omai guided Cook through the islands during his first voyage. Cook brought Omai back to England with him and, on his third and final voyage to the islands, he returned Omai to his home.

Cook left from Tahiti, heading north and then east to the Americas, where he mapped the west coast and tried, unsuccessfully, to find passage back to England through the Bering Strait. He died in Hawaii in 1779.

PAUL GAUGUIN AND THE SOUTH PACIFIC

Perhaps you have seen French artist Paul Gauguin’s vivid paintings of village scenes, huts, and the spiritual life of South Sea Island people, in his trademark oranges and lush greens. Gauguin (1848-1903) embraced these islands. On his last legs as a failed businessman, he left his Danish wife Mette and their five children (forcing them to live with Mette’s family to make ends meet) and boarded a ship for the South Pacific. There, he dreamt, he could escape the conventions of European life and the Impressionist school of art, which he found confining.

In Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, where Gauguin lived the rest of his days, he painted his now renowned images of island life. Gauguin found himself at odds with the European governments established on the islands; it turns out he couldn’t really escape Europe after all. The colonial government sentenced him to prison, but he died of illness at the young age of 54, before he could serve his time. Gauguin is buried on the Marquesas Islands, and his work earned fame and fortune only after his death.

WAR BATTLE ON THE SOLOMON ISLANDS

During World War II, the key battle of Guadalcanal took place in the Solomon Islands. The Japanese were using several of the Solomon Islands as bases, hoping to intercept ships between the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. The Allies (the United States and its partners) wanted these islands for their own bases, and to stop Japan’s growing control in the South Pacific.

From August 1942 to February 1943, United States marines and allied forces fought Japanese troops in and near the Solomon Islands. The Allies’ victory at Guadalcanal was a major turning point in the war against Japan.

EASTER ISLAND AND THE MOAI STATUES

Deep in the Pacific Ocean sits Rapa Nui, two thousand miles from its nearest neighbors, Tahiti and Chile. Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is famed for its haunting—and huge—human-like stone carvings, the Moai, who stood guard around the whole circle of the island’s coast for a thousand years.

The first European to discover Easter Island was the Dutch explorer Admiral Roggeveen, who landed with his caravan of three ships, the Eagle, the Thienhoven, and the African Galley on Easter Day in 1722 (hence the island’s English name). They were neither the first nor the last explorers to reach this outpost, as the Polynesians had been there since 400 AD and other Europeans such as Captain Cook were on their way.

Cook visited Rapa Nui/Easter Island in 1774, on the second of his three voyages to the South Sea. He brought along the artist William Hodges, who was transfixed by the Moai statues and made oil paintings of them. A century later, several hundred villagers helped roll two of the Moai statues onto the British ship HMS Topaze. The statues were brought back to England and presented to Queen Victoria. The queen made a place for them in the British Museum, where, in Room 24, you can see them today.

In 1888, Chile claimed Easter Island, and transformed it into a giant sheep ranch. The Chilean colonists crowded the native islanders into the small village of Hanga Roa and confined them with a stone wall, even taking some islanders as slaves. Life went from bad to worse. Some natives tried to escape the island in raft-like fishing boats, facing near-certain death on the high seas.

And the remaining statues? In the 1950s Norwegian archaeologists docked at Easter Island, fascinated by reports and pictures of the mysterious Moai. (Once again the history of the South Sea Islands intersects with far-off Scandinavia!) They found the Maoi in sad disrepair. Invaders had taken some, and the rest had been pushed to the ground when missionaries converted the island to Christianity in the 1890s.

Over time, the archaeologists restored nearly 250 of the Maoi statues—some weighing several tons and standing thirty feet tall—hoisting them back onto their ancient stone platforms, each one-half mile from the next, where they circle the mysterious, stark, now treeless island once again, and look out to sea.

EXOTIC NAMES FOR ADVENTUROUS PLACES

The South Sea Islands have amazing native names that paint mental pictures of this faraway world of ethereal beauty: Giao, Hatuti, Rapa Nui, Bora Bora, Makatea, and Tongal; Fanafutti, Olosega, Fatu Hiva, Mangareva, and many more.