What does the title "Speedboat to Polynesia" imply in Guns, Germs, and Steel?

"Speedboat to Polynesia" is the
title of chapter 17 in 's , a Pulitzer Prize-winning non- book which
examines the causes and consequences of significant historical migrations and thereby explains
the emergence of Europe as a modern, global, cultural, and economic hegemony.

In chapter 17, Diamond describes and explains the period of Austronesian expansion from
the Chinese mainland and to the Pacific, or Polynesian Islands. This expansion began
approximately six thousand years ago and endured for thousands of years thereafter. The
"speedboat" in the chapter's title refers specifically to the sailing canoes without
which this migration would not have been possible.

These canoes were, at the
time, particularly remarkable because, owing to the use of outriggers (logs attached to the boat
to act as floats), they were much more stable than ordinary canoes. These new canoes could,
therefore, sail for longer distances and more quickly than the ordinary, conventional canoes
previously used. The migration would not have been possible, or at least would have taken much
longer, without these new, improved canoes.

The title of the chapter is also
somewhat ironic. These new canoes were obviously not "speedboats" by today's
standards, and the expansion they helped to facilitate in fact took thousands of years, which
ostensibly does not appear to be particularly speedy. Nonetheless, the initial period of
southward expansion was, by contemporary standards, rather rapid.

The
Austronesian expansion also facilitated a rapid spread of technology (stone tools, pottery, food
production, writing) and culture (diet, language). Diamond points specifically to "around
1600 BC" as a time when the Austronesian expansion, specifically as regards culture,
"assumed a speedboat pace." From this moment on, he says, the "bearers of the
cultural package raced eastward into the previously uninhabited Pacific Ocean beyond the Solomon
Archipelago."

Therefore, the title of chapter 17, "Speedboat to
Polynesia," implies firstly the significance of the aforementioned double-outrigger sailing
canoe, without which the Austronesian expansion would not have been possible, at least not at
that time. And, secondly the title also implies the relative speed of the migration (of people,
culture, goods, and technologies) that those canoes were largely responsible
for.