Pacific Ocean

The Pacific holds the longest deliberate maritime expansion in human history, and the religious dimension of it is not incidental.

Over roughly two thousand years, Austronesian-speaking voyagers settled island groups across a third of the earth's surface, sailing against prevailing winds in double-hulled canoes, without instruments, navigating by star paths, swell patterns, cloud formations and the behaviour of birds. Patrick Kirch's synthesis of the archaeology sets out the sequence and the pauses in it, and makes clear how much of the movement was purposeful settlement rather than accident.

The knowledge that made it possible was held as sacred property. Navigators were trained in schools, initiated, and bound by restrictions; the knowledge belonged to particular lineages and was not general. Canoes were built under ritual constraint and launched with ceremony, and the founding of a new settlement typically involved carrying a stone from an established ceremonial ground to establish a new one, which made expansion a religious act as well as a demographic one.

What travelled with the canoes is visible in the shared inheritance across the region: related names for the same gods, genealogy as the form in which sacred claims are made, and the paired concepts of mana and tapu. By the time Europeans arrived, related religious systems were in use across thousands of miles of open ocean, which was itself taken as evidence of a common origin long before archaeology could demonstrate one.

From the late eighteenth century the Pacific became the most intensively missionised region on earth relative to its population, and the pattern of conversion followed the shape of the societies concerned.

Where authority was concentrated in chiefs, conversion tended to be rapid and collective, because religion and rank were the same structure and a ruler's decision carried the population. Where it was dispersed, as in much of Melanesia, missions worked village by village over generations. Both London Missionary Society Protestants and Catholic orders operated across the ocean, sometimes in direct competition, and Pacific Islanders themselves became the majority of the mission workforce, travelling from Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga and Fiji to islands further west.

The twentieth century brought two further disruptions of religious consequence. The Pacific War turned dozens of islands into battlefields and brought enormous quantities of foreign goods and personnel, which is part of the background to the movements outsiders labelled cargo cults, a term the atlas records as contested and unhelpfully broad. Nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia from 1946 displaced communities from atolls understood as ancestral ground and contaminated others, and churches were among the principal organisers of the protest.

The ocean's societies today are overwhelmingly Christian and among the most religiously observant anywhere, while older categories remain in active use in land tenure, funerary practice and the treatment of particular places.