I learned in middle school that the Native Hawaiians migrated in canoes from the Marquesas Islands 2000 miles to the Hawaiian islands in the year 400. This has always blown my mind. It's super hard to believe that someone could travel that far in canoes. It makes me wonder if maybe they actually found some way to construct larger boats with sails like the Europeans did. They were intelligent human beings after all. How do we know they traveled that far in just canoes? If they did, how could they store enough food and not have it go bad? How did they deal with weather? What about the need to sleep and their bodily needs? I know this is the accepted story, but is it possible it's wrong and they really built bigger boats?
Hi there, while more can always be said, this section of our FAQ may be of some interest to you, particularly this answer on how "canoe" is conceptualized as a term. (The short version is that the term for the small outrigger "canoes" that explorers such as Cook saw in voyages into the Pacific was stretched to cover even extremely large ships that the Pacific islanders might have used to cover large swathes of ocean.)