All of England celebrated James Cook’s return - with a stirring reception befitting a man who had made the greatest ocean voyage in history.

Cook retired honorably from the Royal Navy with the rank of post captain, and as an added honor, was appointed captain of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich. The Royal Society elected him a fellow and eventually awarded him the Copley Gold Medal, its highest honor. His portrait was painted by acclaimed English painter Nathaniel Dance, who portrayed Cook as a man of great natural dignity.

Other members of the Cook expedition received attention, but perhaps none more than Omai, the Society Islander who had been brought to England aboard the Adventure. London society and people of every rank were charmed by the native. And Omai was delighted by everyone he met - including King George III, of whom he said, “King Tosh, very good man.”

Cook was surprised somewhat by the public’s excitement over Omai, who had been in London a full year before the captain saw him again. When they were at Omai’s home island of Huahine, Cook wrote, he had judged that Omai “was not a proper sample of the inhabitants of these happy lands, not having any advantage of birth or acquired rank; nor being eminent in shape, figure, or complexion.” But Omai had proved him wrong, Cook wrote: “For . . . I much doubt whether any other of the natives would have given more general satisfaction by his behavior among us. Omai has most certainly a very good understanding, quick parts, and honest principles; he has a natural good behavior, which rendered him acceptable to the best company, and a proper degree of pride, which taught him to avoid the society of persons of inferior rank. He has passions of the same kind as other young men, but has judgment enough not to indulge them in an improper excess.”

Omai was transformed considerably during his stay in England. He developed an urbane manner and wore fine clothes made especially for him. In contrast to the nobleman’s façade was the Polynesian’s brown skin, long hair, and blazing dark eyes. James Burney, who had been promoted to second lieutenant aboard the Adventure, served as Omai’s interpreter, and the naturalist Joseph Banks, despite his exclusion from the expedition that brought back the native, paraded him in front of London’s scientific community.

Londoners thought the native an amusing oddity, and enjoyed his wit and disarming naïveté. Many artists - including Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder and first president of London’s Royal Academy of Arts - sketched and painted portraits of Omai, both formal and casual. Most of these renderings emphasized exotic features, such as hand tattoos, robes, and turbans.

Others taught Omai to play backgammon and chess, and in exchange, were regaled by his stories of life in the Pacific. Omai told them that when he was about ten years old, his island - Raiatea, the second largest of the Society Islands - had been invaded by a rival tribe from Borabora. His father had been killed, and Omai had fled with his family to Tahiti. Later, these stories would become the subject of a theatrical production, written and directed by John O’Keefe, performed at London’s Theatre Royal.

Moreover, the British marveled at how much Omai seemed to know about the history of his island home, the islands nearby, and the whole South Sea Island civilization as well.

Cook knew that Omai was not uniquely well informed in this respect. On his first visit to the Society Islands, the explorer had noted that “these people have an extensive knowledge of the islands situated in these seas.” And on his third voyage, recognizing that Hawaiians were of the same race as Tahitians, Cook would write: “How shall we account for this nation spreading itself so far over this vast ocean? We find them from New Zealand to the south, to [Hawaii] to the north, and from Easter Island to the Hebrides. . . . How much farther is not known, but we may safely conclude that they extend to the west beyond the Hebrides.”

Generations of explorers who followed Cook were similarly puzzled by the native migration. We now know that, long before Spain’s Vasco Núñez de Balboa first saw the mighty Pacific, native adventurers in canoes crafted from gouged-out tree trunks were sailing the ocean’s breadth and colonizing its myriad islands.

These primitive people took hundreds of years to populate as many islands as James Cook visited on one three-year voyage. They guided their canoes by the sun and the stars, the wind, and their awareness of the shifting ocean currents - and have come to be recognized as perhaps the most skilled navigators, and most courageous sailors, of the ancient world.

Many anthropologists have agreed that the first Pacific voyagers came from various parts of Asia. These Stone Age peoples may have been pushed from their mainland homes by the arrival of other, stronger races - or perhaps were compelled by famine to seek new homelands. They migrated east and later south, along the Malay Peninsula. From there, it was a relatively short distance to Indonesia - the island group that includes Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and the Moluccas.

Living close to the sea, these former landsmen had to change their way of life. Over the course of many generations, they learned to fish, build boats, and sail. When they emigrated again, they ranged even farther - to New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania. The distances seemed great, but the bays and straits were so dotted with islands that land was seldom far out of sight.

The islands in the western Pacific were settled sometime during the last few centuries before Christianity. But several hundred years passed before the uninhabited islands of the central Pacific were colonized. This region came to be called Polynesia (a word of Greek origin, meaning “many islands”). Shaped like the head of a spear pointing east, Polynesia extends from New Zealand in the south to Hawaii in the north, and to the apex of the triangle, Easter Island.

Many believe the settlement of Polynesia began in the fifth century, though the method by which the first inhabitants arrived is debatable. The most likely route of migration passed through an island chain called Micronesia (“little islands”), which includes the Caroline, Marshall, and Gilbert islands. But the precise path the natives followed may never be known.

Another mystery that may never be solved concerns the motive behind the push to the central Pacific. Did the Polynesians’ ancestors fill their canoes with livestock and foodstuffs and set out deliberately to find new places to live? Or did their colonizing result from shipwrecks, or from boats being blown off course and running aground on foreign shores? Because of personal experience, Cook believed the latter was true.

When Cook later reached Atiu on his third voyage, he discovered four Tahitians living on the island. Omai, who was still traveling with Cook, was astonished, because Atiu was 600 miles from Tahiti. Omai learned that these four natives were the only survivors of a twenty-man canoeing expedition to Raiatea, about 100 miles west of Tahiti. A violent gale had blown them off course, and rough seas had capsized their boat. Starved and terrified, they had clung to the overturned craft for several days - until some natives on Atiu saw it on the surf and brought it ashore. Omai related the story to Captain Cook, who, fascinated, wrote in his journal: “This circumstance very well accounts for the manner the inhabited islands in the sea have been at first peopled; especially those which lay remote from any continent and from each other.”

Gradually, calamity at sea became less of a factor in the Polynesians’ movement, as they honed their shipbuilding skills. Observing some of the native shipbuilders, Cook was impressed by their proficiency. “When one considers the tools these people have to work with, one cannot help but admire their workmanship,” he wrote. “With these ordinary tools that a European workman would expect to break [on] the first stroke, I have seen them work surprisingly fast.” Their tools included “adzes and small hatchets made of hard stone, chisels or gouges made of human bones” - generally the bones of the forearm, though these were eventually replaced by spike nails from visiting ships. Most of the implements were attached to wooden handles by coconut fibers or sennit braids.

The native shipbuilders worked deftly, shaping the trunks of felled trees into long strips, which when joined became smooth, seaworthy hulls. When their tools became dull from constant use, the natives sharpened them on sandstone blocks. And when friction made the tools hot and brittle, they sank them briefly into the cool, juicy trunks of banana trees.

In many parts of the Pacific, the natives prayed to Tane, the god of the forest, for his consent before striking any tree with a hatchet. They also dedicated the canoe that was made from the tree to Tane, built an altar to him on board, and made daily offerings so that the god’s wrath would not fall on those who sailed it.

The size of a canoe usually corresponded to the type of voyage on which it would be used. Larger boats were generally sixty or eighty feet long, but some are known to have reached 100 feet. These could carry sixty people, along with their pigs and dogs, and a supply of fresh vegetables - or 100 warriors, fully armed.

Slim, tapered, and expertly shaped to glide through the water, the native canoes could often reach twenty knots - a speed that astonished European sailors, whose ships normally traveled much slower. The natives used long paddles as rudders to steer the canoes, and smaller paddles to help propel them. They pieced together sails from cloth made of the dried, sword-like leaves of pandanus trees.

Many canoes were attached to an outrigger, which extended to the side to help balance the narrow boats and prevent them from capsizing. The larger canoes, built to carry supplies and people on long voyages, had a second canoe joined to them in place of the outrigger. On these “double canoes,” some of which had as many as three wooden masts, the Polynesians’ ancestors took their language, customs, culture, and traditions to the farthest Pacific Islands. And the plants and animals that were carried with them provided food for the generations that succeeded them in the new lands.

The pigs, dogs, and fowl found in Polynesia today came from the southeastern portion of the Asian continent. So did breadfruit, bananas, plantains, and coconuts. The sweet potato had a surprisingly different story; its origin has been traced, not to Asia, but South America.

At first, early Spanish explorers were credited with bringing the sweet potato to the Pacific; but later, scientists determined that this root vegetable had arrived in Polynesia even before Christopher Columbus discovered America. One theory holds that a host of South American Indians, set adrift in the Pacific on crudely fashioned rafts, were swept along by the ocean currents and southeasterly trade winds to an island in central Polynesia. (The possibility of such a voyage was confirmed in 1947 by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, who, aboard a raft he called the Kon-Tiki, drifted 4,300 miles from the west coast of Peru to the heart of the South Pacific in 101 days.) But a more widely accepted explanation for the presence of sweet potatoes in the Pacific is that a native expedition (perhaps only one canoe) sailed from Polynesia to Peru, and then returned to its homeland.

This expedition must have embarked some 500 years before Omai left home on the Adventure. The voyage would have been long and hard, bucking the southeasterly trade winds, but with a push from an occasional westerly wind, could have been completed in three weeks. The land they discovered was forbidding, and the natives hostile, so the Polynesians probably did not stay long. When they finally made their way back home, they brought tales of the weary days at sea and of the strange, frightening land they had seen. They also carried tangible, permanent evidence of their transoceanic achievement: the mellow sweet potato.

Although the names of these courageous travelers are unknown, they were the first heroes of exploration in the Pacific. They crossed the mighty ocean and found its eastern limits, and they returned home to tell of it.