Volta
Explorationc. 1250–1300

Polynesian voyaging and the settlement of New Zealand

Also called: Polynesian navigation, Settlement of New Zealand, Māori arrival

Polynesians voyaging across the Pacific reached Hawaiʻi, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Aotearoa (New Zealand) in the 1200s. Aotearoa was the last large land that people reached.

The voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa, a 1975 revival of the ancient Polynesian double-hulled canoe, under sail off Honolulu, 2009
The voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa, a 1975 revival of the ancient Polynesian double-hulled canoe, under sail off Honolulu, 2009

HongKongHuey · CC BY 2.0 · Source

About 3,000 years ago people from the Taiwan–Philippines region (the Lapita culture) sailed double-hulled canoes through Melanesia to Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. Their descendants, the Polynesians, sailed into the open ocean, finding their way by stars, sun, swells and birds.

A 2010 study re-examining some 1,400 radiocarbon dates found that after reaching the Society Islands in the 1000s they spread to the far corners of East Polynesia in a short burst around 1190–1290 — reaching Hawaiʻi, Rapa Nui and, in the far south-west, Aotearoa (New Zealand) around 1230–1280. The journey begun by the people who left Africa had reached every large habitable land but Antarctica.

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Later
1438 Expansion of the Inca Empire

Themes that include this event

  • The Human Journeyc. 300,000 years ago – 1300

    How modern humans, who appeared in Africa some 300,000 years ago, left Africa, met the Neanderthals, crossed the sea to Australia and the ice-age Bering land bridge to the Americas, and finally reached the remotest islands of the Pacific