the Pacific, Captain Cook proposed: “ these islanders had been able to employ their primitive canoes and rudimentary ways of navigating to sail to the Marquesas from a continent lying not far to the south, or from a chain of closely-spaced islands located there, which stretched all the way to Asia and had provided the stepping-stones that enabled these primitive seafarers to expand so far into the Pacific”. “Cook saw only one obstacle to accepting the linguistic evidence…the route would have taken canoes eastward in the face of trade winds that blow from east-southeast. He evidently had doubts about the ability of the islanders’ canoes to sail directly into the trade winds. A Tahitian explained, during the Months of November, December and January Westerly Winds with rain prevail and as the inhabitants of the Islands know very well how to make proper use of the winds there will no difficulty arise in Trading or sailing from Island to Island even though they lay in an East and West direction”.Then there was another argument made by Thor Heyerdahl, which made the Hokule’a voyage seem pointless. He purposed that the Polynesians cam from the west, South America, due to the trade winds and the similarity of the linguistics and culture between the American Indians and the Polynesians. Heyerdahl stated that “ permanent trade winds and forceful companion currents of the enormous Southern Hemisphere would have prevented canoe voyages from settling Polynesia directly from the west, while promoting colonization from the Americas by voyages pushed westward by wind and current”. But this theory soon died out, due to the “ Relationships evident in language and culture traits that pointed to a Polynesian derivation from the west, were not matched by island-to island archaeological excavations demonstrating that the ancestors of the Polynesians had in fact migrated eastward into the mid-Pacifi...
