a Some may question whether the use of “maritime,” from the Latin word for “sea,” is appropriate to freshwater shipping. It is worth noting that the Association for Great Lakes Maritime History has seventy-five institutional members in the United States and Canada. The names of ten include “maritime,” another thirteen use “marine,” and Suttons Bay, Michigan, is home to the Inland Seas Education Association.
Chapter 1
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Taking to the Water
Reindeer are powerful swimmers, but water is not their natural environment and they are at their most vulnerable when crossing rivers, lakes, or estuaries. People recognized this at an early date, and while humans are no more at home on the water than reindeer, we have an insuperable technological advantage: the arts of boatbuilding and navigation. Hunting quadrupeds is not an activity most people associate with watercraft, but people have myriad reasons for pushing off from land. This much is illustrated in six-thousand-year-old Norwegian rock carvings depicting reindeer hunters in boats. These are the oldest known pictorial representations of watercraft, but the distribution of human communities around the world proves that our ancestors launched themselves on the water tens of thousands of years before that.
It is impossible to know who first set themselves adrift in saltwater or fresh and for what reason, but once launched our ancestors never looked back. The advantages of watercraft for hunting, fishing, or simple transport were too great to be ignored. Travel by water was often faster, smoother, more efficient, and in many circumstances safer and more convenient than overland travel, which presents obstacles and threats from animals, people, terrain, and even the conventions and institutions of shoreside society. This is not to minimize the dangers of life afloat. Even a subtle shift in wind or current can make it impossible to return to one’s point of origin and force one ashore among implacable hosts. Still worse, one might be swept away from land altogether. Such misadventures are an inevitable part of seafaring, and developing the means to overcome them is a necessary prerequisite to long-distance voyaging. Part of the solution lies in building maneuverable watercraft, but much depends on gaining an appreciation for how the sea works—its currents, tides, and winds, of course, but also its look and feel, the interplay of land and sea, and the way birds, mammals, and fish relate to the marine environment. Only by imagining this complex of interrelationships can we begin to appreciate the magnitude of the earliest seafarers’ accomplishments fifty thousand years ago, or about forty thousand years before our ancestors began domesticating dogs or planting crops.
A Bronze Age rock carving from Kvalsund in northern Norway showing two reindeer hunters in a boat (left) and their prey. This is one of thousands of such rock carvings found in the Finnmark region, the oldest of which date to 4200 BCE. Many depict boats of various kinds, most of them longer vessels with many paddlers quite unlike the boxier form shown here, which might represent a skin boat. Courtesy of the Deutsches Schiffahrtsmuseum, Bremen.
This history begins with Oceania and the Americas, whose inhabitants had completely distinct relationships to the sea and maritime enterprise but whose approaches to inland, coastal, and deep-sea undertakings are echoed in myriad other cultures. The Pacific offers unrivaled examples of long-distance voyaging alongside unexplained instances of withdrawal from the sea. Similarly, while most people in the Americas experienced or were influenced by only freshwater navigation on rivers, lakes, and inland seas, there were voyagers not only on the Pacific, Atlantic, and Caribbean coasts, but also in the unimaginably harsh environment of the Arctic. No two peoples’ approaches to navigation are alike, even if their environmental circumstances have more in common than those of northern Canada and Tahiti. But starting with an overview of the different approaches to seafaring in Oceania and the Americas allows us to imagine the maritime prehistory of Eurasians whose vessels ultimately attained far greater size and complexity than those found elsewhere, and who are the primary subject of this book.
Oceania
The islands of Oceania form the locus of the oldest, most sustained, and perhaps most enigmatic effort of maritime exploration and migration in the history of the world. They are sprinkled across some thirty-nine million square kilometers of the Pacific—an area larger than the continent of Africa—from the Solomon Islands just east of New Guinea to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) five thousand nautical miles to the east, and from Hawaii in the north to New Zealand in the south. In the 1820s the French explorer Jules S. Dumont d’Urville divided the islands into three main groups according to geographic and ethnographic characteristics. Farthest to the west, and the first settled, are the islands of Melanesia, which lie within a broad band more or less south of the equator between New Guinea and Fiji. To the east is Polynesia, a huge triangle whose sides are described by a line drawn between Easter Island, New Zealand, and Hawaii. Micronesia lies north of Melanesia and spans the Pacific from Palau to Kiribati and encompasses the Marshall, Caroline, and Mariana island groups.a Although many specifics remain unknown and alternative scenarios have been proposed, it is generally accepted that the distant ancestors of the Pacific islanders first encountered by Europeans originated in the Solomons, that the pattern of settlement across Melanesia and Polynesia was generally from west to east, and that the process began about 1500 BCE.
When European sailors crossed the Pacific in the sixteenth century, they were astonished not only at its extent—nearly ten thousand miles from Ecuador to the Philippines—but by the number of small islands, and the fact that the vast majority of these were inhabited. The ability of Pacific sailors to conquer enormous distances and to maintain contact between such small and remote islands has remained a subject of fascination ever since. Marveling at the inhabitants of the Tuamotus in 1768, an officer sailing in the expedition of French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville wondered “Who the devil went and placed them on a small sandbank like this one and as far from the continent as they are.” A couple of years later, Britain’s Captain James Cook suggested that ancestors of the people he encountered in the Society Islands (Tahiti) originated in the western Pacific and that it should be possible to trace their progress all the way from the East Indies. This straightforward conception of Pacific voyaging, articulated by experienced navigators with an appreciation for their fellow sailors, was superseded in the nineteenth century when it was believed that such voyages by non-Europeans could only have been the result of “accidental drift” rather than intentional navigation. One theory held that sailors originating in South America populated the islands of the South Pacific as far west as New Zealand. And yet archaeological, linguistic, and navigational research of the past century demonstrates that the settlement of Oceania occurred as a result of intentional voyaging, and that thirty-five hundred years ago Pacific navigators were the most advanced in the world. Both their vessels and the techniques they devised for crossing thousands of miles of open ocean were unique to them.
The peopling of Oceania represents one of the last stages of mankind’s spread across the globe. About ninety thousand years ago, our ancestors left Africa by either walking overland across the Sinai Peninsula, which separates the Mediterranean from the Red Sea, or crossing the Bab al-Mandeb, the thirteen-mile-wide strait at the mouth of the Red Sea between Eritrea and Yemen. From Southwest Asia some followed the coast of the Indian Ocean and by about 25,000 years ago people had reached the southern coast of China. During the last great ice age, which lasted from about 100,000 to 9,500 years ago, so much water was locked up in ice and glaciers that sea levels in Southeast Asia were about 120 meters lower than today and vast expanses of today’s relatively shallow seabed were dry land. The islands of the western Indonesian archipelago were part of a continental extension of Southeast Asia known as Sundaland, while Australia, New Guinea, and the island of Tasmania formed a single landmass called Sahul, or Greater Australia. Between them lay stretches of open water and the islands of a biogeographical region known as Wallacea. Rising sea levels only crea
ted the configuration of islands and archipelagoes that we know today starting about 5000 BCE.
Archaeological finds show that people had crossed from Sundaland to Sahul by about fifty thousand years ago. The oldest stone tools of the sort necessary for making dugout logboats are only twenty thousand years old, so these trips would have to have been made on rafts of lashed logs. The oldest evidence for sails anywhere in the world is no more than seven thousand years old and comes from Mesopotamia, and Pleistocene seafarers almost certainly propelled their rafts with poles and paddles. Although they crossed considerable distances of open water, they did not necessarily have to sail out of sight of land. The strategy that the earliest long-distance mariners seem to have devised was to go between islands that were visible from one another. A chain of intervisible islands ran between Sunda and Sahul, and east of New Guinea through the Bismarck Archipelago. Then twenty-nine thousand years ago sailors crossed from New Ireland in the Bismarcks to Buka, the westernmost of the Solomon Islands. This introduced a new degree of difficulty. New Ireland and Buka are not visible from each other, but there is an area between the two islands from which it is possible to see both at the same time. More daring still was the occupation of Manus, in the Admiralty Islands north of New Guinea, which could only be reached by sailing completely out of sight of land for at least thirty miles. This occurred no later than thirteen thousand years ago.
The Bismarcks and Solomons remained the limit of eastward expansion for another ten thousand years. Little is known of how society or technology evolved here, though there was clearly interisland exchange in such rarities as obsidian, a sharp volcanic glass frequently traded among ancient people. Still, the region’s hallmark is not homogeneity but diversity. Over these ten millennia the people of New Guinea and the surrounding islands came to speak hundreds of languages divided among a dozen language families, a linguistic stew found in no other region of comparable size. Life in the area was interrupted by the cataclysmic explosion of New Britain’s Mount Witori around 3600 BCE, an event followed by widespread changes in social organization and technological innovation across Melanesia. People began to live in larger settlements, to produce ceramics, to domesticate dogs, pigs, and chickens, and to develop more advanced fishing gear to catch offshore species. This period lasted for about two thousand years before a new wave of seafaring migrants swept through from Southeast Asia.
These newcomers were part of a movement of Austronesian-speaking people whose ancestors are thought to have originated in southern China, from where they moved east to Taiwan, the Philippines, and Borneo, before doubling back to mainland Southeast Asia.b In the east, these people are distinguished by their ceramics, called Lapita ware, found from the Philippines and northeastern Indonesia to the Bismarck Archipelago. Having merged relatively briefly with the people of Melanesia they encountered along the way, the bearers of Lapita culture plunged southeast from the Solomon Islands into Melanesia to reach the Santa Cruz Islands, Vanuatu (New Hebrides), the Loyalty Islands, and New Caledonia in the twelfth century BCE. One offshoot turned east from the Santa Cruz Islands or Vanuatu to Fiji, an open-water distance of about 450 nautical miles. Their descendants pushed on to reach Tonga and Samoa by about 950 BCE, the date of the earliest human habitation in Western Polynesia. Although kinship ties and trade between colonies and home islands may have sustained two-way communication between them following their initial settlement, interisland ties gradually loosened. Nonetheless, Polynesians generally regard Tonga and Samoa as Hawaiki, their ancestral homeland.
After about seven centuries of settlement, there was a resurgence of exploratory seafaring during which Western Polynesians began to venture east and south. A number of sequences have been suggested. A recent theory holds that around 200 BCE Samoans and Tongans reached the Society Islands, while settlers of the Marquesas Islands farther east and north came from Samoa. Five hundred years later, voyagers from the Societies and Marquesas reached Easter Island, which is less than a third the size of Manhattan and the most remote island on earth, more than a thousand miles from its nearest neighbor, Pitcairn, and nearly two thousand miles from South America. Around 400 ce, voyagers from the Societies and Marquesas reached Hawaii. The last major wave of Polynesian settlement spread from the Society Islands southwest to New Zealand around a thousand years ago.
The chronology of Micronesia’s settlement is not as clear, but the small, widely dispersed islands appear to have been reached variously by people from island Southeast Asia, by a northern offshoot of the Lapita people from Polynesia, and by Melanesians from the Bismarck Archipelago. (A less likely scenario involves settlers coming directly from Taiwan.) Guam is the largest and one of the westernmost islands in Micronesia and the earliest material finds of human habitation date from 1500 BCE. The sketchy archaeological record suggests that people began arriving in the Marshall Islands, about a thousand miles east of Guam, by the first century BCE and in the Carolines, which are closer to Guam, shortly thereafter, but further research may reveal a different sequence of events.
What prompted the Lapita people to work their way into the open waters of the Pacific is unknown. Population pressures were probably not a factor, and the distances involved were too great and the volume and value of goods too modest to make trade worthwhile, at least on a scale we can comprehend from this vantage. A more likely possibility depends on the nature of Lapita society, in which birth order and rules of inheritance may have forced or prompted generations of the disinherited to make their way in the world on their own. It may have been mere curiosity, but if the Polynesian voyages were a case of discovery for its own sake, they would have no real parallel—at least on a sustained level—until the polar explorations of the nineteenth century. Whatever their rationale may have been, as in any exploration the crucial underlying factor was the confidence that they could return to their point of origin. By and large, the human settlement of the Pacific was the result of deliberate calculation and not of accident or “splendid recklessness,” a fact borne out in the oral traditions of Oceania.
Fishing is a major leitmotif in Polynesian mythology, one that accounts for the very existence of the islands and for humans’ discovery of places from Hawaii to New Zealand. According to one tradition, the first expedition to New Zealand was led by a fisherman named Kupe from Hawaiki, which in this instance probably refers to the Society Islands. The story relates that the fishermen of Hawaiki kept losing their bait to a school of octopi until their leader, Kupe, decided to give chase—all the way to New Zealand. Kupe evidently anticipated a long voyage and his canoe, Matahorua, carried sixty-seven people, including his wife and their five children. After killing the octopus in Cook Strait, Kupe named several islands in the strait for his daughters, visited South Island, and then returned to Hawaiki from a peninsula near modern Auckland called Hokianga nui a Kupe, “Great returning place of Kupe.”
Kupe reported the islands as uninhabited, but other traditions and archaeological evidence suggest that when the first Polynesians arrived, the islands had already been settled, possibly by Melanesians from Fiji. Although New Zealand is closer to the Solomon Islands than the Society Islands or Hawaii, they were more difficult to reach, and over time both the Melanesian and Polynesian settlers lost touch with their homelands. That the most extensive, visible, and fertile islands in the South Pacific did not attract a constant flow of sailors from a much earlier date can best be explained by the patterns of navigation imposed by the Polynesians’ environment.
Wayfinding and Boatbuilding in Oceania
Sailing the Pacific with any expectation of being able to return to one’s point of departure or making remote landfalls requires navigational ability of a high order. The combined landmass of the islands east of New Guinea amounts to less than one percent of the area of the Pacific—and this is divided among about twenty-one thousand islands and atolls the average size of which is less than sixty square kilometers (about twenty-three square miles), although most are much smaller. J
ust as the exploration and settlement of Oceania were unique accomplishments in world history, so were the navigational practices employed. At the most basic level, the essential elements are shared by navigators everywhere: observation of heavenly bodies (celestial navigation), reading the wind and water, and tracing the behavior of birds, fish, and whales. What distinguishes the Pacific argonauts is the relative importance they attached to these phenomena, and the degree to which they consolidated their observations in a coherent body of knowledge without recourse to writing.
Between the equator and 15°S to 25°S, depending on the season, the prevailing winds are the southeast trade winds, so called not because they were used by trading ships—so were all winds—but from an archaic use of “trade” meaning steadily and regularly. Sailors setting out from the Solomon Islands exploited periodic wind shifts to sail downwind fully confident that if they did not find new land, the trade winds would eventually return and enable them to run home to the west. (Europeans employed a comparable strategy in their exploration of the Atlantic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.) Thus exploration was for the most part the product of two-way intentional voyaging; only occasionally were new islands discovered as a result of being lost at sea. The initial expansion from the Solomon Islands toward the Santa Cruz Islands and New Caledonia, which lie east-southeast, conforms to this model, as does the pattern of settlement for the rest of Polynesia between the equator and about 20°S.
The settlement of New Zealand is an exception that proves the rule. Although the top of North Island lies at 35°S, about two thousand miles from the Solomons, it is on the far side of a belt of variable winds that is difficult to probe from central Polynesia with any reliable expectation of safe return. Thus it was relatively less accessible than the Marquesas, which lie about twice as far to the east of the Solomons but which were reached several centuries earlier. New Zealand also lies in a higher (and colder) latitude, nine hundred miles farther from the equator than Hawaii, in an area more subject to inclement weather. These conditions are thought to explain why the original settlers eventually abandoned the sea road, or ara moana, back to Polynesia. Even so, the Maori did not turn their backs to the sea altogether: around 1500 they reached Chatham Island, 430 miles east of New Zealand and probably the last island settled by Polynesian sailors.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 3
