Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific

published in 2009 by the University of Hawai’i Press, 269 pages

When I was growing up in Europe, I became absorbed by tales of Atlantis, of lost lands where ancient forgotten civilizations once dwelled before they were destroyed in some improbable cataclysm.  So imagine my astonishment when, having become sufficiently immersed in Pacific cultures (after a couple of decades of residence), I realized that there were comparable stories here.  Stories that told about islands abruptly disappearing, about civilizations being overwhelmed by catastrophe, stories unencumbered by agendas like those of Plato and the regiments of witless pseudoscientists who followed him.  So I decided to write down these stories, many of which are based on research by my students and myself.

Take the island of Teonimanu that vanished from the geography of Solomon Islands, an island nation in the southwest Pacific Ocean, several hundred years ago.  The people of Teonimanu (sometimes called Teonimenu) had a memorable material culture.  Among their distinctive artefacts were wooden bowls with frigate birds carved on their sides, similar to that photographed in 1906 on neighbouring Ulawa Island shown below.

Teonimanu is said to have sunk rapidly, only a few survivors making it into canoes and reaching other islands.  Many stories recall the large waves that washed over this high volcanic island, giving the appearance of washing it away. 

But the truth is that Teonimanu was affected by a large seafloor earthquake that caused that part of the underwater ridge from which the island rose to become unstable, a massive landslide carrying it quickly into deeper water.  This abrupt movement of the ocean floor caused a series of tsunami waves that washed over the sinking island.

We would probably not know about Teonimanu were it not for the stories of people living on other islands in the area who have kept memories of this vanished island alive for generations.  And their stories might easily be mistaken for legends, for fictions, but like many such ancient stories there remain cores of truth – genuine observations – that over time have become encased in layers of narrative embellishment.

The stories about the disappearance of Teonimanu are remarkable.  Many recall the incident began when a capricious beauty named Sauwete’au from the island married one Roraimenu from nearby Ali’te Island.  One day, tiring of her husband, Sauwete’au eloped with another man and returned to Teonimanu.  Uninterested in compromise, Roraimenu sailed his canoe, grim-faced, to another island where he purchased a wave curse that he then surreptitiously planted on Teonimanu.  People throughout this part of Solomon Islands recall Roraimenu’s return journey with the wave curse for, as he passed their islands, their ancestors called out nervously “Hanua i hei oto a nai warea?” – “Which island are you going to destroy?”.  Roraimenu never replied.

After he had planted the wave curse on Teonimanu, Roraimenu returned home to Ali’ite where the next morning, he climbed a high hill to watch the destruction of his wife’s island.  Smoke rose from the haze-misted water, rumblings marked the sound of the island sinking, eight huge waves washed over the island in succession until nothing more could be seen of it.

We know today where Teonimanu was – Lark Shoal marks the spot.  But as shown on the map below, there is a number of ‘vanished islands’ (shaded red) in this seismically active part of Solomon Islands, stories about most of which have not yet been collected.

Within the last 150 years, pseudoscientists with generally specious agendas have claimed any number of ‘sunken continents’ exist in the Pacific.  Well they don’t, nothing anyway at the enormous scale of places like Lemuria, Mu, and Rutas, some of which were once asserted to have extended from Japan to Easter Island.  Yet we want to believe such places exist, not just to spite the smug scientists like me who insist otherwise, but also because, more profoundly, mystery speaks to the heart of what it means to be human.  We have a natural tendency to embrace mystery, to be sympathetic to it.

With that in mind, I once travelled to Yonaguni Island in Japan where the underwater Yonaguni Monument is claimed by a gaggle of excitable pseudoscientists (and a lone geophysicist, who is mistaken) to be not merely made by humans but also one of the pulsating nodes of a vast civilization that once occupied the continent of Mu that spanned the Pacific (it didn’t) before being submerged in a cataclysmic event.  I had a good poke around Yonaguni, looking especially at the rocks forming the cliffs bordering the underwater ‘Monument’ (picture below).  Erosion along bedding planes in these rocks creates flat smooth surfaces and sharp ‘risers’; they are natural, as is the ‘Monument’ of course.

One other interesting aspect of Pacific Island people’s stories about sunken lands is that at the core of the 2015 Disney movie entitled Moana that featured the demigod Maui, an authentic character in many islander traditions.  Maui was the mischief-maker, a muscly larrikin fellow who is frequently recalled as possessing a magical fishhook which he used to fish up entire islands.  He did this in so many parts of the Pacific that we are clearly looking at stories which spread as particular groups of people spread from island to island, the Maui fishing-up-island stories perhaps a metaphor for their initial discovery.

But in my view, at the root of stories about Maui fishing up islands from the seafloor lies Pacific people’s periodic observations of the eruptions of shallow undersea volcanoes.  Look at the picture below, showing the 1886 eruption of the underwater volcano named Fonuafo’ou in Tonga (South Pacific).

Does it not resemble a large fish?  Especially if you were a person accustomed to catching and eating fish regularly, could you not imagine this as a giant fish being hauled to the surface – and forming an island – by a giant, even a demigod named Maui?  I think this is a compelling explanation for the origin of the Maui stories, many of which emphasize the similarity in the behaviour of the island being hauled to the surface with that of a large fish.  The island is often said to be squirming or thrashing, being hauled up amidst gurgling foam and bubbles.

*****

This book is available for $30 from the University of Hawaii Press website.  It is also available as an audio book. The list of chapters is here.

More reviews of Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific can be found here.