Did a Polynesian Navigator Reach Antarctica 1,300 Years Before Europeans?
UI-Te-Rangiora
Ui-te-Rangiora, a legendary Polynesian navigator from Rarotonga, is sometimes credited with sailing to the Southern Ocean and sighting Antarctica in the early seventh century aboard Te Ivi o Atea. The claim rests on a 19th-century reading by Stephenson Percy Smith of the phrase Tai-uka-a-pia as a frozen sea. Scholars now dispute it: Cook Islands Māori had no pre-European word for ice, the original legend never mentions an Antarctic voyage, and Ngāi Tahu treats the tale as myth.
There is no mention of an Antarctic voyage in the original legend, and it is first mentioned in the story of his descendant Te Aru Tanga Nuku, who wished to "behold all the wonderful things on the ocean" seen by his ancestor.