Sea People

Winner of the 2020 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for nonfiction and the 2019 NSW Premier's History Awards for general history

‘Wonderfully researched and beautifully written’ Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan




‘Succeeds in conjuring a lost world’ Dava Sobel, author of Longitude



For more than a millennium, Polynesians occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, an enormous triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Polynesians today can trace their roots back to a group of epic voyagers who first explored this vast expanse Sailing in large, double-hulled canoes, they were the first and, until the era of European discovery, the only people ever to have reached this part of the globe. Today, they are widely acknowledged as the world’s greatest navigators.


But how did these ancient mariners find all these islands? How did they reach them? Diving deep into the history of the Pacific, Christina Thompson uncovers who these voyagers were, where they came from, and how they managed to colonise every habitable island in Remote Oceania. A thrilling intellectual detective story, Sea People combines the thrill of exploration, the wonder of pursuit, and the drama of a gripping historical puzzle.