The Chatham Islands are 500 miles from New Zealand, which isn’t really widely spaced compared to other distances in Polynesia, and it happened in 1835, so not in ancient times, but the Moriori genocide is still one of the saddest stories of inter-island warfare.
Are you saying that the impetus for plain adventure is a uniquely modern motivation? That all pre-modern exploration endeavours had to be material benefit-driven (even in cultures that possibly didn’t even have the same concepts of wealth?)
This is addressed a little in Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything - we know that just doing things purely for the motivation of adventure and curiosity was actually a fairly common thing across a range of cultures. Why not some Polynesians?
I guess it depends on your funding. During the European Age of Sail, the expeditions were financed by the State or later, groups of investors that were to become the new Joint-Stock companies. These institutuions have very specific expectations for their considerable investment in ocean going ship and men.
In antiquity there was trade between the civilisatons around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and there was warfare. Plenty of ship wrecks, found full of cargo.
So what drove the Polynesians to sail across the Pacific? A noble spirit of adventure to parts unknown?
Or maybe younger sones searching for new lands to settle, goods to trade or wives to steal?
If they behaved like the Māori when they invaded the Chatham islands, then it may not have ended well.
I guess you didn’t bother to read two posts up?
Have you ever heard of the tragedy of the Chatham Islands? It’s not a story the Maori would tell you.
Talking about “funding” for a society where people could make their own craft for just sweat equity is just silly.
Adventure and curiosity certainly existed at the time. “Noble spirit” is just unnecessary romanticizing of a natural human drive. Or possibly just sarcasm, I can’t tell. But either way, romantic or cynic, it’s an unhelpful stance to take on people in the past. And not even antiquity - most of Polynesia was being settled when Europe was experiencing the Middle Ages. Some knight setting out to seek adventure would not be out of place then, why would it be strange on the other side of the world?
Is this true?
Probably not:
Might be the runner up though.
Thanks. I’d be curious to know how they got 29,086 measures of barley out that hen scratch! 
See, but that’s the point - Imhotep was a verifiable person, as far as we can be certain of anything. We can’t be sure who or what Kushim is.
The search for new lands to settle would be the obvious choice. We can surmise that, once having done the same to a number of islands so far, expeditions to new islands probably became a celebrated part of the culture - a mission to seek out new islands, to boldly go where no man has gone before…
But trade requires trade goods. the question would be, what did one place have that others did not? I think it was Jared Diamond’s book that discusses (in the context of Easter Island?) how the Pitcairn group failed. Each island was lacking something the others had, but they were too far apart for real trade to be sustained. However, there wasn’t a lot to trade between essentially similar islands in the rest of the area.
Mediterranean trade centered on a number of things that were abundant in different locations; there was a thriving trade in metals, for example since they are found in only a few places - on place had tin, another had copper - bronze was a desirable commodity. Amphoras of wine have been found in shipwrecks - presumably some locales were better suited to growing grapes, others grew wheat, and so on - all conveniently centered on a smallish less wild sea where coastline hugging was the elementary first lesson in navigation.
(I have the transcript from an old CBC Ideas series where one professor suggests the Odyssey was about travel to Ireland then Scandinavia, as one bit describes where Odysseus was shipwrecked frost in summer was a problem, another mentions that the sun is up so long a man could do two days’ work. in a day. Plus, the trade route from Scandinavia through Russia to the black and Mediterranean seas was established even back then. And along with metals, the northerners could trade rich furs…)
I discounted the Chatham episode because my understanding was by the time it happened, the Maori had acquired assorted western technology including guns and shipbuilding supplies; and a need to burn off aggression that they could not do against the English.
But then, the Maori have had a reputation for warlike tendencies, since the land was big enough to support multiple warring factions. I have not heard of the Polynesians natively warring between islands, unless they were very large land masses like New Zealand, or fairly close together.
I suppose an important point to make, too, is that there are random islands scattered all over the Pacific, many the result of volcanic action. Yet somehow, all these acquired plant life that grows on land. Presumably, somehow, once upon a time too - Madagascar managed to acquire a breeding pair of some sort of lemur, but nothing else similar.
It may sometimes seem a stretch to blame Mother Nature for moving plants or animals from point A to point B, but somehow she manages.
When Japan experienced a tsumani, some of the huge amount of debris washed out to sea made it right across the Pacific. I guess it could work in the opposite direction at a lower latitudes.
I suppose it does come down to the question of whether slaves are “persons” but I, for one, am fairly willing to accept the modern legal assumption that En-pap X and Sukkalgir are people. I would also hold that they’re named in a document and that they aren’t nobility. The latter couldn’t be definitively said about Gal-Sal.
Thank you for that link.
Plenty of Polynesians were natively warring with their enemies on the same island. Are you saying they never bothered raiding other islands? Was that taboo?
Heyerdahl had several crackpot theories, including having South American indigenous people traveling to pre-Columbian Polynesia.
If close by, they went at each other like other societies around the world. The Hawaiians were not a peaceful bunch. Long distances, sure friendly. Seafaring groups in small (very small) numbers could not make up an invasion force plus they’d be out/short on supplies when they did land.
True fact - the first proctologists were central American indigenous people - hence the name “Ass-techs”.
Indeed. King Kamehameha the Great united the Hawaiian Islands by violently kicking all the other islands’ asses.