A Long-Standing Debate

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37

If, then, voyages to the New World were made . . . the sweet

potato seems to make this a certainty. Originating in America,

it could only have reached Polynesia with human aid. Since

we have no evidence that at any time the Indians of the Pacific

coast of South America where the sweet potato was grown had

either craft or skill for making long sea journeys, we are forced to

conclude that the transference was made by Polynesians.

—ROLAND DIXON (1934:173–174)

W

hile it may come as a surprise to many scholars of the 21st century, arguments for Polynesian contact with the Americas were advanced regularly during the 19th and early 20th centu-ries. This began with the posthumous publication of Captain Cook’s jour-nals (1784), which spawned a great deal of interest in the remote islands of the Pacific, particularly in the extent of Polynesian voyages and the point of their origin. Much of this writing was hopelessly ill-informed and some of it was decidedly racist—one of the reasons why it was never carried for-ward or embraced by later scientists. By far, most attention was focused on the question of Polynesian origins with three basic alternatives considered: an Asiatic origin, an American origin, or an autochthonous origin. These theories had at their basis the same rudiments of diffusionary thinking that would continue with later writing in the 20th century; scholars weighed the relative similarity of different cultural elements across these three re-gions and made cases for connections between one region or another. The