That people were able to make so many minute landfalls again and again was due to their outstanding familiarity with the ocean environment and their ability to “expand” the size of their intended landfalls by relying on phenomena other than direct visual contact with their destination. This esoteric knowledge was transmitted orally to a select few from one generation to the next. Some of these techniques are common to other maritime traditions—following birds that feed at sea but nest on land, noting where different species of fish or sea mammals are found, looking for smoke generated by natural fires, or discerning changes in water color over reefs. In the Pacific, sailors developed the ability to read the patterns of ocean swells and how these change as they are deflected when passing islands. Clouds can announce the presence of islands lying below the horizon by shifts in color, speed, and shape. Finally, there is the “loom” of an island, a faint but telltale column of light above islands, especially atolls with lagoons. Taken together, these phenomena widen the range at which sailors can sense the presence of land by as much as thirty miles, which increases dramatically the likelihood of finding even the smallest speck in the sea.
But locating land at a distance is not the same as purposefully navigating from one island to another, which the sailors of Oceania accomplished by observation of both the environment and the heavens. Their approach to celestial navigation requires memorizing “the direction of every known island from every other one.” An island’s bearing relative to another is determined by the rising or setting star under which the island lies relative to the observer. When sailing between two islands, a third is chosen as the etak, or reference island. The navigator knows the stars under which the etak lies in relation to the islands of departure and destination, as well as the stars under which the etak lies at various stages of the passage between them. Thus a passage is broken into a series of etak stages. Using etak depends on knowing how all known islands are related to one another with respect to different stars, so a navigator sailing between, for example, the Caroline Islands of Woleai and Olimarao (117 miles apart) would use Faraulep (70 miles to the north) as the etak; but when sailing from Olimarao to Faraulep, Woleai would be the etak.
Sailors in different areas of the Pacific tended to apply different methods of traditional navigation. Among the few remaining practitioners today, Marshall Islanders pay most attention to ocean swells, while sailors in the Federated States of Micronesia rely more on the rising and setting of stars. Starting in the 1970s, researchers began interviewing and sailing with the last adepts of traditional navigation to learn their secrets and determine whether these were reliable enough for the sorts of voyages necessary to maintain contact between islands separated by many hundreds of miles of open water. In 1976, the Polynesian Voyaging Society built the Hokule’a, a double canoe rigged with claw sails, which sailed from Hawaii via the Tuamotus to Tahiti, about twenty-four hundred miles. Mau Piailug, a wayfinder from Satawal (an island of about four square kilometers) in the Carolines, navigated the Hokule’a across the northeast trade winds, the equator, and then into the southeast trades before they made Tahiti, thirty-four days out from Maui. In 1985, a Hawaiian student of Piailug’s named Nainoa Thompson navigated the Hokule’a on an expedition that covered many of the old routes within Polynesia—sixteen thousand miles’ worth—between the Cook Islands, New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, and the Tuamotus. In 1999, the Polynesian triangle was closed with a voyage from Hawaii to Easter Island via the Marquesas. The successful completion of these voyages, among others, proved that early sailors relying on an orally transmitted body of navigational knowledge were able to explore the far-flung islands of the Pacific methodically and deliberately, and that given vessels of adequate size and speed they could easily transport the people and goods necessary to populate these islands and maintain communications between them.
By the time of her passage to Easter Island in 1999, the Hokule’a was the oldest of a fleet of at least six traditional deepwater craft that had been built in Hawaii, the Cook Islands, and New Zealand. Archaeological remains of ancient vessels in the Pacific are few and the people of Oceania had no written language, so our understanding of ancient boatbuilding practice depends on interpreting written descriptions and illustrations by European voyagers of the sixteenth century and later, in light of surviving practices. Vessels tended to be built of planks lashed together to achieve the desired hull shape after which frames or ribs were inserted to strengthen the hull, a process called shell-first construction. Single-hull vessels were used for fishing in Tonga, Tuamotu, and the Society Islands, and in New Zealand to carry warriors into battle, but these were not stable enough for ocean passages. Shipwrights compensated for this either by adding outriggers or by yoking two hulls with transverse beams on which they could erect a sheltered platform. Outriggers consist of two or more poles laid between the hull and a small piece of wood called a float on the outboard end, and they are found not only in Oceania but throughout Southeast Asia—where they were probably developed—as well as in the Indian Ocean.
Double canoes were the largest and most important vessels used in the colonization of the Pacific. In addition to being more stable, the deck spanning the hulls created more space and protection from the elements for crew, passengers, and cargo. Captain Cook observed double canoes carrying between 50 and 120 people and measuring up to twenty-one meters long and nearly four meters across. In settling the Pacific, Polynesians likely sailed double canoes of between fifteen and twenty-seven meters in length and capable of carrying the people, supplies, and material goods necessary for establishing sustainable communities on uninhabited islands after voyages lasting as long as six weeks. These included edible plants for crops (yams, taro, coconut, banana, and nut-bearing trees); domesticated dogs, pigs, and chickens; and tools and ceramics.
The chronology of Oceanian settlement shows that long-distance voyaging and migration expanded and contracted in centuries-long cycles. When Europeans began mapping the Pacific in the eighteenth century, the forces of expansion had been spent for some time, but Polynesians had not abandoned the sea or lost the ability to navigate long distances. During Cook’s first voyage, Joseph Banks recorded that the Tahitian Tupia could locate scores of remote islands and that journeys of twenty days were not uncommon. But communication between the Polynesian heartland of Hawaiki and the extremes of Easter Island, Hawaii, and New Zealand had stopped. At some point people would have taken to their boats again to strike out for far horizons, and in so doing they likely would have initiated a demonstrable and sustained interaction with the continents to their east and introduced the people of the Americas to their innovative forms of seafaring. As it happened, the people of the Americas developed a variety of discrete maritime traditions in isolation from one another, although they never exploited the sea to the same degree that people in many other parts of the world did.
Boats of the Friendly Islands [Tonga] by John Webber, an artist who accompanied Captain James Cook’s third expedition to the Pacific (1776–80). In the foreground is a small sailing canoe with an outrigger and a platform for passengers. Farther off is a larger double canoe for long-distance passages. “There cannot be a doubt,” wrote a nineteenth-century observer, “that the peculiar shape of the Tongan kalia, or double canoe, and the arrangement of its large and single [wishbone] sail, are conducive to the attainment of great speed in ordinary weather.” (Quoted in Paul Johnstone, The Sea-Craft of Prehistory, 205.) Courtesy of the British Museum, London.
Maritime Trade in South America and the Caribbean
When Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, he landed in the Bahamas archipelago southeast of Florida. On the advice of Taíno Indians he kidnapped there, he sailed 130 miles across the Bahama Bank to Cuba. From Arawaks he later met on Hispaniola (the island of the Dominican Republic and Haiti) he learned of other people to the south, whom the Spanish called the Cariba or Caniba, from which we get the words “Caribbean” and “cannibal.” The usual focus
on Columbus tends to leave basic questions unasked: Who were the Taíno, Arawak, and Carib people? Where did they come from, and when? How did they travel? Columbus and his contemporaries had their own answers, some steeped in theological and even mystical belief about the nature of the origin of man. Thanks to the dearth of written histories by indigenous Americans, the first European visitors’ preoccupation with ensuring their own prosperity, and the catastrophic loss of population to Eurasian disease throughout the Americas—and with it the oral traditions that might have shed light on these questions—the work of tracing the origins and migration patterns of humans in the Americas has fallen to specialists in disciplines from paleontology and archaeology to linguistics and genetics.
Particularly difficult to tease out is the role played by seafaring and inland navigation in the initial settlement and subsequent dispersal of people and cultures from Alaska and northern Canada, east to Greenland and south to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. Four scenarios for the peopling of the Americas have been posited, none of which can be proven conclusively. Three argue for an arrival by sea—two via the Pacific and one via the Atlantic; the fourth depends on an overland migration from Northeast Asia to Canada. Looked at another way, three favor a Southeast or East Asian origin, while one believes that people arrived from Europe. Of the two maritime Asian routes, one posits a transpacific migration, which was surely impossible more than fifteen thousand years ago, and the other favors a coastal migration from Siberia to Alaska and western Canada. This last theory has achieved wide currency but is not necessarily the last word on the subject.
During the last ice age—when Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania comprised the landmass of Sahul—the Bering Strait was also dry land and with contiguous areas of Siberia and Alaska formed an Asian-American land bridge known as Beringia. According to the Pacific Rim or coastal route theory of migration, people from Asia reached the Americas in boats by hugging the coast of Beringia. Despite the widespread presence of ice, the warm waters of the eastward-flowing North Pacific current would have ameliorated the conditions on the coasts—just as the Gulf Stream moderates the climate of Iceland and northwest Europe today—and created intermittent ice-free peninsulas and islands where people could replenish their water and food. These coastal migrants would have skirted Beringia as far as the Queen Charlotte Islands off British Columbia, near the southern limit of the ice sheet, before they had the opportunity to turn inland. About eleven thousand years ago, rising sea levels began flooding the land that lies beneath the Bering Strait, which is now forty-five nautical miles wide.
The southerly California current would have hastened migrants’ progress as far as Baja California, but the west coast of the United States is notorious for its dearth of harbors, islands, or major rivers south of the Columbia River, on the border between Washington and Oregon. No people on the coast between Oregon and southern California are known to have developed watercraft for exploiting marine resources to any substantial degree. Nonetheless, by thirteen thousand years ago, people had settled in the Channel Islands, an archipelago of eight islands extending 140 miles between the Santa Barbara Channel and Gulf of Santa Catalina off southern California. Similar dates are ascribed to the settlement of coastal Peru and Chile and the center of South America, where a dense network of eastward-flowing rivers rising in the Andes would have fostered very fast migrations; when the Amazon is in flood, it takes little effort to cover 120 kilometers a day going downstream.
The exact sequence and dating of these events is still a matter of vigorous, sometimes rancorous debate, but the earliest widely accepted archaeological evidence for human settlement throughout the Americas dates from about fifteen thousand years ago. Regardless of how and when people reached the Americas, it was not until about five thousand years ago, roughly contemporary with the rise of literacy in Mesopotamia and Egypt, that the first states emerged there. The climax cultures of pre-Columbian America are those of the Andes and of Mesoamerica, but there were independent flowerings in North America, among the Moundbuilders of the Eastern Woodlands, many of whose sites were located on rivers, and in the desert southwest. Some of these developed autonomously, while others show the imprint of neighboring or ancestral civilizations.
A theory of particular interest to maritime historians is the possibility that Andean civilization emerged from maritime-oriented communities on the coast of Peru and that later Andean culture was carried north by sea to Mesoamerica. This hypothesis maintains that the first people in Peru to coalesce into societies larger than a handful of families were predominantly fishermen living at the mouths of rivers. The arid coast of Peru is home to one of the planet’s driest deserts; there is scant rainfall on the coastal plain and 80 percent of runoff from the Andean highlands flows east toward the Atlantic Ocean—yet one of the world’s most productive fisheries lies just offshore. The west coast of South America is washed by the cold-water Humboldt current, which sweeps north from Antarctica. As warm air from the Pacific passes over the cold coastal waters, it loses its ability to retain water and generate rain, which accounts for Chile’s and Peru’s coastal deserts. At the same time, cold water tends to be richer in nutrients than warm water, and the upwelling of the Humboldt current accounts for the bounty of the adjacent fisheries. A similar climatological process occurs in the Atlantic, where the fish-rich, cold-water Benguela current washes the desert coasts of Angola, Namibia, and South Africa.
The first builders of South American monumental architecture lived along the more than fifty parallel river valleys that inscribe the coast of Peru. Excavations at Aspero, on the Supe River north of Lima, show that people derived most of their sustenance from the sea in the form of seabirds, shellfish, pelagic fish, and sea mammals. To the extent that they relied on the land, it was for freshwater and the cultivation of reeds, cotton, and gourds, which could be used for fishing line, nets and floats, and food crops. In the third millennium BCE, the people of Aspero began to erect pyramids—eighteen have been identified—the largest of which covered 1,500 square meters. Farther up the Supe valley, and farther removed from the marine resources that sustained Aspero, is the later site of Caral, with an area more than three times that of Aspero and pyramids as tall as twentyfive meters. A third site known as El Paraíso and begun about 2000 BCE lies to the south, about two kilometers from the sea. Andean sites contemporary with these and of comparable sophistication in terms of architecture were clearly linked to the coast and all have yielded seashells and fish bones.
The coastal polities declined at the start of the first millennium BCE. The reasons are obscure, but one suggestion is that the region was devastated by a severe El Niño event in which warm surface waters prevented the normal upwelling of cold waters on the coast. This would have resulted in a depletion of fish stocks and caused torrential rains and flooding that drove people inland. Whatever the explanation, between 900 and 200 BCE the highlands prospered, especially at the site in west-central Peru known as Chavín de Huantar, which gives its name to a pan-Andean culture that was a forerunner of the Incas. Chavín culture had little immediate connection with the ocean or inland waters per se, but it is of interest to maritime historians. Not only does it seem to have evolved from or been significantly influenced by the marine-oriented society of the Peruvian coast, but Chavín also linked disparate regions that relied to a considerable degree on water transport and associated technologies from Ecuador to Amazonia, a massive region of rain forest and savanna bounded by the Andes, the Guiana Highlands, and the Brazilian Highlands. One of Chavín’s earliest long-distance trades was with the southern coast of Ecuador, a source of shells from the thorny oyster, a major prestige gift of the time, and conch. These were being traded south by sea perhaps as early as the third millennium BCE. At their source, oyster and conch shells were used for tools and ornaments, but in Andean and coastal Peru they had a symbolic importance in rituals and were fashioned into beads, pendants, and figurines. Initially they may have been traded
for perishable goods that have not survived in the archaeological record, but by the first millennium CE they were probably being exchanged for copper and obsidian.
Research over the past few decades has overturned long-held views that Amazonia was inhabited by primitive forest tribes content to subsist on the jungle’s lowlying fruit. The people who lived along the major river systems of tropical South America, notably the Amazon, Orinoco, and their tributaries, are now seen as masters of their environment who planted tropical orchards, built curbed roads up to fifty meters wide as well as causeways, bridges, dikes, reservoirs, and raised agricultural fields. These structures have been found across a vast swath of the continent from eastern Bolivia to Manaus, where the Río Negro meets the Amazon, along the upper Xingu River in Mato Grosso state, and the huge equatorial island of Marajó at the mouth of the Amazon near Belém. While many of these finds date from the first millennium ce, Marajó is home to the oldest known pottery in the Americas, dating from 6000 BCE.
The earliest written account of a journey down the Amazon, by Gaspar de Carvajal, offers vivid descriptions of a number of extensive and highly developed riverside societies. Carvajal was one of fifty-seven men under Francisco de Orellana who in 1542 spent eight months on the Napo, Maraño, and Amazon Rivers. According to Carvajal, the people of “the great dominion of Machiparo” above Manaus had fifty thousand men at arms and occupied territories that “extended for more than eighty leagues” (about 470 kilometers). The Spaniard marveled at the size and quality of the pottery, including jars with a capacity of nearly four hundred liters and smaller pieces the equal of any he had seen in Spain. He wrote of running battles with tribes led by women—the Amazons—while farther east the Spanish encountered “two hundred pirogues, [so large] that each one carries twenty or thirty Indians and some forty,” the warriors accompanied by musicians who “came on with so much noise and shouting and in such good order that we were astonished.” The people of the Amazon were obliterated by diseases introduced from Europe and Africa, and the survivors were so reduced in numbers that they could not maintain the quality of life of their forebears. As a result, subsequent interpretations of pre-Columbian South America were based on observations of a culture in crisis rather than on interaction with vibrant communities linked by extensive river-based networks of trade and transportation.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 4
