So I've been working on a new world building project, this time in the South Pacific. I was partially inspired by a brief idea by Fetcher on the Discord server as he contemplated placing his island nation in the South Pacific instead of the mid-Atlantic. If you know anything about me, you'd know that my fictional island country of Torland is near and dear to my heart and has been a labor of love for many years with numerous fully developed sports leagues and a fairly detailed modern history. Torland isn't going anywhere but I've had an itch for a long time for a different flavor of fictional country.

With Torland I essentially worked backward, starting first with a fully developed modern nation and began figuring out how history might've fit as I went along. This caused a lot of retconning and forcing things to make it work and I was never super happy with the historical aspect of Torland. One of the itches for a different flavor of fictional country would be to start from the very beginning, rough in a few modern elements to work toward, but largely write history as it would develop naturally and see how that goes. I've shared some of it on Discord but the write ups often get lost in the shuffle so I've decided to use a thread here to keep all of the ongoing pieces as the history develops and be a place for ideation and collaboration and research.

Two initial pieces of research sparked the idea of this South Pacific island. The first was researching Eastern Polynesian cultures, beginning with how they even got there, and more specifically, who may have settled in this fictional island. The second was looking at early European patterns of discovery in surrounding areas and determining which historical facts could be altered slightly to suit the new project. Stories, claims, and facts that have unresolved endings or unproven theories would really fit the bill to flesh out what I was imagining without having to literally change too much world history.

While looking at lots of maps, I settled on a location approximately around 37”S x 122”W, which is just about halfway between New Zealand and Chile. I also started on an island shape and began working on a map of the eventual island. I liked how the shape turned out.



As I continued to research, a few things jumped out at me. One, it appears that Eastern Polynesians likely settled Easter Island around 1000-1200, (though some still claim around 800) coming from Mangareva and the current Gambier Islands of French Polynesia. This would place a starting point for the new island around 1200. Most of the current Polynesian islands had clearly defined cultures and subcultures by this point as well, with either some clans dominating others and pushing them out, or other locations being too small and lacking to accommodate growing populations, likely leading to searches for larger and more fertile lands. (essentially how the Maori ended up in modern New Zealand) A culture that jumped out at me was all of the Tahitian clans and how none of them could really rise to power due to not enough space on their home island and so many clans fighting for dominance. This brought the Rapa Nui of Easter Island and the Tahitian clans into play. They both are similar, especially linguistically, but still distinct cultures.



Two, there is anecdotal but compelling evidence that Eastern Polynesian explorers may have eventually reached the outer coast of Chile and South America. This was exactly the type of alternate history I was looking for, so that brings the native tribes of that region into play. More specifically, the Mapuche and their sub-clans like the Huilliche and Picunche. The Incan Empire would have been growing during a later period of this time (1438-1572) but on brief research it didn't seem like they were very marine-oriented, preferring the mountainous mines and cities. I'm still looking into that though. There isn't a ton of evidence of maritime exploration by the Mapuche, however, all of the clans around the Chiloe Archipelago could navigate water very well, so it didn't feel like too much of a stretch. The Incan invasion, however, plus the feuding between clans could have sparked a desire to look for new lands.

I didn't want to get too far ahead of myself but as I was developing the map I began workshopping potential names for the new island. There were quite a few that I liked but were either used by real world or fictional world places. I eventually landed on the word Pagoa. It just kinda felt like a Pacific Island-sounding name to me. Then I learned that Pagoa was in the Basque lexicon with a literal meaning of "The Beech Tree." I love Basque history and culture so that excited me and I decided to roll with it and figure out how it fit later.

Meanwhile, back to the map. I fleshed out the topographic map. And then I added it to some global maps to see how it might look in real life. These are not to scale but I'm aiming for a size somewhere between NZ and Japan.



So with that, I had an island map with a tentative name, and research on initial Polynesian and South American cultures that could have inhabited it. Then I started working on fleshing details for those initial settlers.