Polynesia Trivia
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48 free Polynesia trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Polynesia trivia quiz covers the whole Polynesian Triangle, from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. It begins with the geography and geology: the sunken continent of Zealandia, the hotspot volcanoes, the 1,000-plus islands. Then it follows the people, from Taiwan and the Lapita potters through the long pause to the settlement of the far corners, the sweet potato that hints at contact with South America and the Kon-Tiki theory that got it wrong. From there it visits the island nations one by one: the Tuʻi Tonga Empire and the Pacific's only indigenous monarchy, Tuvalu's eight islands and its .tv domain, Samoa's Tui Manuʻa, the Cook Islands, the Treaty of Waitangi, the moai of Rapa Nui, French Polynesia's nuclear tests, solar-powered Tokelau and the voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa. The first questions suit any traveller; the last reward readers who know the Proto-Polynesian word for the homeland. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which of these English words was borrowed from a Polynesian language?
Tattoo
Tattoo. It first appears in English in James Cook's writing of 1769, picked up in Tahiti, where the art is called tatau; 'taboo' followed from Tonga eight years later.
Q 02Which three points define the corners of the Polynesian Triangle?
Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island
Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island. The triangle is only a rule of thumb: a scattering of Polynesian communities, the 'outliers', live well outside it, on small islands far to the west.
Q 03The name Polynesia, coined by a French writer in 1756, comes from Greek words meaning what?
Many islands
Many islands. Charles de Brosses coined it in a 1756 book on southern voyages, and the names Micronesia, 'small islands', and Melanesia, 'black islands', were later modelled on it.
Q 04Which giant flightless birds of New Zealand were hunted to extinction after Polynesian settlers arrived?
Moa
Moa. The largest stood taller than an ostrich; settlers arriving around 1300 hunted them hard for a century or so, leaving butchery sites heaped with bones that can cover many hectares.
Q 05Norfolk Island and New Caledonia are dry-land tips of which mostly sunken continent?
Zealandia
Zealandia. About 94% of it lies under the Pacific: its crust was stretched thin as it broke away from Gondwana, and it sank; in 2017 a team of geologists made the formal case for calling it a continent.
Q 06What built most Polynesian islands, including the long Hawaiian chain?
Volcanic hotspots
Volcanic hotspots. A column of heat rising from deep in the mantle stays put while the Pacific seabed creeps across it, so each new volcano is carried off to the north-west and another rises behind it over the same spot.
Q 07Linguistic and genetic evidence traces Polynesian origins ultimately to which island?
Taiwan
Taiwan. Seafarers whose ancestors set out from there carried their languages and crops across half the globe, as far as Madagascar in the west and Easter Island in the east.
Q 08The ancestors of the Polynesians are known archaeologically by what pottery culture?
Lapita
Lapita. Its potters pressed toothed stamps into the wet clay to build up bands of pattern, and the trail of their broken pots runs from near New Guinea out to the western edge of Polynesia.
Q 09Tapa, the traditional cloth of Polynesia, is made by beating out which material?
Tree bark
Tree bark. Strips of inner bark from the paper mulberry, a tree the first voyagers brought with them from Asia, are soaked and then beaten with wooden mallets into wide, thin sheets.
Q 10William Bligh's ship Bounty sailed to Tahiti in 1787 to collect which food plant for Britain's Caribbean colonies?
Breadfruit
Breadfruit. Planters wanted it as cheap food for enslaved workers; the mutiny wrecked the first attempt, so Bligh sailed back to Tahiti in 1791 and delivered the trees to Jamaica on a second voyage.
Q 11What do archaeologists call the gap between the settling of western and eastern Polynesia?
The long pause
The long pause. It was no dead time: in those centuries the settlers' culture and language became recognisably Polynesian; one idea is that they also needed new voyaging techniques for the longer crossings ahead.
Q 12Which French painter spent most of his last twelve years in Tahiti and the Marquesas, painting Polynesian life?
Paul Gauguin
Paul Gauguin. He went to Tahiti seeking a refuge from Western civilisation and found a French colony; he died on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas in 1903, ill and short of money.
Q 13What crop native to the Americas was widespread in Polynesia before Europeans arrived?
Sweet potato
Q 21Which calming, non-alcoholic drink, made from the root of a pepper plant, is shared at ceremonies across Polynesia?
Kava
Kava. The bitter, yellow-green brew is made and drunk by strict ritual, to mark occasions such as the visit of a neighbouring chief or the installation of a new one.
Q 22Which city is often called the largest Polynesian city in the world?
Auckland
Auckland. It has New Zealand's greatest concentration of Māori, and decades of migration from the smaller islands had by the 1990s given it more Polynesian residents than any other city.
Q 23Tonga is the only Pacific island nation that still has which form of government?
Indigenous monarchy
Sweet potato. The usual explanation is that voyagers carried it across from South America centuries before Columbus sailed, most likely Polynesian sailors who made the journey there and back.
Q 14Which explorer's raft expedition tried to prove Polynesians came from the Americas?
Thor Heyerdahl
Thor Heyerdahl. In 1947 he and five companions rode the balsa raft Kon-Tiki from South America until it hit a reef in the Tuamotus, which showed the crossing could be done; anthropologists still did not accept that it had been.
Q 15Descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian companions still live on which remote island, settled in 1790?
Pitcairn
Pitcairn. The mutineers burned the ship soon after landing, and the little colony went unnoticed by the outside world for eighteen years, until an American ship happened on it in 1808.
Q 16What does Tuvalu's name mean in Tuvaluan?
Eight standing together
Eight standing together. Tuvalu has nine islands, but the smallest and southernmost, Niulakita, had no settled population when the name arose, so only eight were counted.
Q 17Which internet domain has Tuvalu marketed for income?
.tv
.tv. Because the two letters also stand for television, broadcasters and video sites around the world pay for addresses ending in it, and the fees go to one of the world's smallest countries.
Q 18Which trickster hero of Polynesian legend is said to have fished up islands and snared the Sun to slow it down?
Māui
Māui. In stories told from Hawaii to New Zealand he also steals the secret of fire for humankind; Disney's 2016 film Moana turned him into a boastful demigod with a magic fish hook.
Q 19Only three countries are smaller than Tuvalu: Vatican City, Monaco and which island nation in the Pacific?
Nauru
Nauru. Its 21 square kilometres are mostly a plateau of phosphate leached from ancient bird droppings, and a century of mining it has stripped the island's interior bare.
Q 20Which sacred royal line, founded by the 10th century, is credited with a sea empire?
Tuʻi Tonga
Tuʻi Tonga. In time the sacred kings handed everyday rule to deputies and became ceremonial figures, and it was a holder of the last deputy title, not a Tuʻi Tonga, who united the islands in 1845.
Indigenous monarchy. The kingdom dates from 1845, when one chief united the islands, and it kept its own monarch even while it was a British protected state, from 1900 to 1970.
Q 24Which French Polynesian island, a peak ringed by a lagoon, was a United States supply base in the Second World War?
Bora Bora
Bora Bora. The Americans came to store fuel for ships crossing the Pacific, and the airstrip they laid on a reef islet is still the island's airport, now bringing in tourists instead of supplies.
Q 25Which Scottish novelist settled near the Pacific port of Apia and was buried on a mountain above his home there in 1894?
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson. He had asked to lie on top of Mount Vaea, so islanders cleared a path to the summit overnight and carried him up; lines from his own poem 'Requiem' are cut on the tomb.
Q 26In 1962, which country became the first Pacific island nation to win independence from colonial rule?
Samoa
Samoa. New Zealand troops had taken the islands from Germany at the start of the First World War and stayed for nearly fifty years; independence took effect on New Year's Day.
Q 27Which island holds Avarua, the capital of the Cook Islands, and most of the country's people?
Rarotonga
Rarotonga. Nearly everyone lives on its narrow coastal ring, because the interior is a tangle of steep peaks, the stumps of extinct volcanoes rising to about 650 metres.
Q 28What name is given to the undeciphered glyphs that Easter Islanders carved on wooden tablets?
Rongorongo
Rongorongo. Only about two dozen inscribed objects survive, none still on the island, and the wood of one dates to the 1400s, a hint that islanders invented writing before any outsider arrived.
Q 29What did a group of Māori chiefs issue on 28 October 1835?
A declaration of independence
A declaration of independence. Thirty-four northern chiefs signed it at Waitangi at the urging of the British Resident, James Busby, who had heard that a Frenchman meant to proclaim a kingdom of his own nearby.
Q 30Polynesians who settled the Chatham Islands became known as which people?
Moriori
Moriori. In 1835 a Māori invasion party killed or enslaved most of them, and they were long written off as extinct; their descendants have since won recognition as a living people.