The most banal yet awesome fact about the pacific is its size. This vast ocean with its scattered pinprick islands has raised questions of scale, proportion and relation whenever it has been contemplated. From an outside perspective the islands of Oceania are almost submerged in the immensity of their surroundings (indeed Pacific islands have come and gone), their sea-locked inhabitants marooned on coral or volcanic tips of land. The Pacific, as opposed to its rim, is conceived as being more or less empty, the hole in the doughnut.

The inside perspective must always have been different. It is unlikely that Pacific peoples ever thought of themselves as inhabiting somewhere small, or that the disproportions of scale so striking to outsiders would have impressed them in the same way. In 1769 Tupaia, a priest from the Tahitian group of islands, drew Cook a map of his world. Taking its centre at Tahiti, the map showed seventy-four islands scattered across a large oceanic area measuring about three thousand miles from east to west and a thousand miles from north to south. The islands were arranged in concentric circles based on sailing times from the map's centre rather than on linear distance.