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For returning explorers, successful or not, the geography of their own archipelagoes would have provided a
safety net. Without this to go by, overshooting their home ports, getting lost and sailing off into eternity would
have been all too easy. Vanuatu, for example, stretches more than 500 miles in a northwest-southeast trend, its
scores of inrervisible islands forming a backstop for mariners riding the trade winds home.
(9)
All this presupposes one essential detail, says Atholl Anderson, professor of prehistory at the Australian
National University: the Lapita had mastered the advanced art of sailing against the wind. ‘And there’s no
proof they could do any such thing,’ Anderson says. ‘There has been this assumption they did, and people have
built canoes to re-create those early voyages based on that assumption. But nobody has any idea what their
canoes looked like or how they were rigged.’
(10)
Rather than give all the credit to human skill, Anderson invokes the winds of chance. El Nino, the same
climate disruption that affects the Pacific today, may have helped scatter the Lapita, Anderson suggests. He
points out that climate data obtained from slow-growing corals around the Pacific indicate a series of
unusually frequent El Ninos around the time of the Lapita expansion. By reversing the regular east-to-west
flow of the trade winds for weeks at a time, these super El Ninos might have taken the Lapita on long
unplanned voyages.
(11)
However they did it, the Lapita spread themselves a third of the way across the Pacific, then called it quits for
reasons known only to them. Ahead lay the vast emptiness of the central Pacific and perhaps they were too
thinly stretched to venture farther. They probably never numbered more than a few thousand in total, and in
their rapid migration eastward they encountered hundreds of islands – more than 300 in Fiji alone.