The fluid boundaries discussed in the previous chapter did not come into existence, if indeed they can be said to exist beyond community imagination, by accident, and they are equally not the product of natural creation. These fluid boundaries became imagined in myriad different ways once people settled the islands in the region. All of the islands of this place called Micronesia, in the broadest sense of its imagined boundaries, were islands when people first set their eyes on them. That is, unlike some of the islands of the world in the present day, they were not connected to a continent by ‘land bridges’ at any time in the human past. In this the boundaries were always fluid ones; it was at all times in the past a requirement that the sea be crossed in order to travel to these islands, whether by boat or, beginning in the last century, by aircraft.

Debates surrounding the origins of the islanders of Oceania have been long and, on occasions, heated. The colonization of the islands of Oceania is generally accepted to be the most recent colonization of previously vacant (from a human perspective) land that provides the present distribution of the permanent settlement of our species on earth. (It might be argued that the camps in Antarctica have led to its permanent settlement since the last century.)