Travelling eastwards against the prevailing winds and currents, the Polynesians reached the Marquesas by about 200 BC. By about AD 500 they had colonized Hawaii and Easter Island, New Zealand by AD 1200, and eventually almost all of the habitable islands of the central and eastern Pacific. The golden age of occupation of new island groups was recorded in the folk memories and myths that were later written down by the earliest missionaries. Moreover, different schools of navigators in recent times kept open communication by sea within their own island groups by knowing the positions of many islands and the take-off points and shortest sea routes from one group of islands to another (Lewis 1972).