The Polynesian Triangle, the vast stretch of the central and southern Pacific bounded by Hawaii in the north, Aotearoa New Zealand in the southwest and Rapa Nui, Easter Island, in the southeast, was settled by a single closely related population of Austronesian-speaking voyagers whose ancestors had already crossed enormous distances across the Pacific before reaching the Polynesian islands specifically. Archaeological and linguistic evidence generally places the settlement of the more remote eastern Polynesian islands, including Hawaii, the Society Islands and Rapa Nui, within roughly the last two thousand years, a comparatively late chapter in a much longer history of Pacific voyaging.
What makes this migration remarkable to historians is not just its geographic scale but the method behind it: Polynesian navigators crossed open ocean between islands sometimes thousands of miles apart using wayfinding, a navigation system built on reading wave patterns, star positions, wind and cloud formations, and the behavior of birds and marine life, without magnetic compasses, written charts or any of the instruments that later European navigators considered indispensable. The double-hulled voyaging canoe, capable of carrying settlers, livestock and crop plants across these distances, and the navigational knowledge required to sail it accurately, represent one of the most sophisticated pre-industrial maritime technologies documented anywhere, and modern voyaging societies in Hawaii and elsewhere have worked since the 1970s to revive and demonstrate these techniques using replica vessels sailed without modern instruments.