At the time of European contact there were few long-range saltwater trading regimes anywhere in the Americas, and only two or three intermediate networks in what is now Latin America—one on the Pacific between Ecuador and Guatemala and Mexico, and the others on the Caribbean. Researchers began investigating the former after noting similarities in a variety of cultural traits found in the two regions—more than eighteen hundred nautical miles apart—but nowhere in between, thus ruling out an overland route. Affinities in burial practices, ceramic styles, metallurgy, and decorative motifs, among other things, indicate that this maritime exchange could have begun as early as the mid-second millennium BCE. More certain, intermittent trade began in the late first millennium BCE and continued until the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. The exploitation of marine resources would have prepared fishermen for long-distance trade and might have inspired it in the first place: the opening of the sea route to Mesoamerica may have been related to the need to get shells for trade to the Andes when native stocks declined due to El Niño events or overfishing. In addition to being an exclusive source of a valued commodity and having direct access to inland trading partners, Ecuador has other advantages that favor its being a birthplace of long-distance sea trade in the Americas. Its equatorial location puts it at the meeting point of wind and current systems in the northern and southern hemispheres, and it has an abundance of wood and other materials for constructing oceangoing log rafts called balsas.
Sixteenth-century Spanish observers identified a variety of South American craft that differed in size and function as well as in materials, construction techniques, and means of propulsion. Floats made of bundled reeds were found in all countries bordering the Pacific, both along the coast and in the mountain lakes—including Lake Titicaca, at an elevation of 3,800 meters, the highest lake in the world—as well as in western Argentina and Bolivia. Logboat canoes were found as far south as northern Ecuador. Natives of the desert coast of Chile had boats made from the inflated hides of seals and sea lions. The only vessels of complex construction were the dalca, a sewn-plank boat found in Chile between the Gulf of Coronado and Taitao Peninsula, and the sewn-bark canoes found from the Taitao Peninsula to the tip of the continent.
The vessels of greatest interest to conquistadors and modern historians alike are the balsas, rafts fashioned from an odd number of balsa wood logs—seven, nine, or eleven—tied together and arranged so that the shortest were on the sides and the longest in the middle. According to a sixteenth-century Spanish official, “They are level with the water, which sometimes washes over them, so that passengers of importance cause planks to be installed over crosspieces, and thus they stay dry. At times they also have stakes and crossbeams set up like the sides of a cart, to keep children from falling overboard.… To keep the sun off they make a little hut of straw.” Balsas were propelled by paddles and one or two triangular fore-and-aft or, more rarely, square sails. By far the most novel detail noted by the Spanish was the steering mechanism, which was unlike anything ever devised in Eurasian waters. Balsas were steered not with an oar or rudder but by raising and lowering a series of dagger boards called guares set between the logs at intervals from stern to bow so that “By sinking some in the water, and raising others somewhat, they succeed in hauling the wind, falling off, and tacking, either coming about or jibing, and lying to, with appropriate maneuvers [of the guares] for these purposes.” The simplicity of this “centerboard steering” so impressed the author of this description, a Spanish naval officer, that he recommended that guares be incorporated into life rafts carried aboard European ships, though without success.
Climatic factors favor a northbound voyage from Ecuador to Mexico or Guatemala over the return trip. Computer models indicate that the fastest northbound passages (mostly in sight of the coast) would have taken forty-six days, compared with ninety-three days southbound. Although the seasonal difference between the longest and shortest voyages from Ecuador was negligible, the best time of year to sail was around April. The best time to start the southward trip was between February and April, but contrary currents and winds required two lengthy offshore passages. Off Guatemala, the balsa would sail 200 nautical miles due south before turning east for the coast of El Salvador. The second offshore leg was from the northern end of the Gulf of Panama to the coast of Ecuador, a distance of about 400 miles.
Although there was a fair amount of inland navigation within Mesoamerica, Ecuadorian navigators excited no imitation on the part of the Olmecs (1200–300 BCE), Mayas (300–1000 CE), or Aztecs (1200–1519), none of whom seem to have engaged in anything more than short-range coastal navigation or to have used sails. The only instance of long-range maritime trade known from the east coast of Mesoamerica was maintained by the Putun Maya between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. This was well after the height of the Classic Maya period (ca. 430–830), but their diverse trade, which included salt, obsidian, jade and copper, quetzal feathers, cacao beans, cotton, slaves, and pottery, linked coastal trading centers from north of the Yucatán Peninsula to Honduras. Ferdinand Columbus described an encounter that his father had off the latter on his fourth voyage in 1502 when
by good fortune there arrived at that time a canoe long as a galley and eight feet wide, made of a single tree trunk like the other Indian canoes; it was freighted with merchandise from the western regions around New Spain [Mexico]. Amidships it had a palm-leaf awning like that which Venetian gondolas carry; this gave complete protection against the rain and waves. Underneath this awning were the children and women and all the baggage and merchandise. There were twentyfive paddlers aboard.
Putun Mayan mariners may have raided coastal settlements in Guatemala and Honduras; but neither they nor anyone else from Mexico or Central America seem to have sailed east to the Greater and Lesser Antilles of the Caribbean.c
Although these were settled from South America, the earliest archaeological sites in the Caribbean islands, from the mid-fourth millennium BCE, are found not in the southern part of the chain, as one might expect, but on the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba. Apart from a few archaeological finds in the highlands of Martinique, there is no evidence of human occupation in the Windward Islands until the late 1000s BCE, when a large-scale migration from around the Orinoco delta of Venezuela swept through the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico, and subsequently onto Hispaniola and Cuba, where the new arrivals introduced pottery making. While population pressures may account for this emigration from South America, environmental factors seem to have been responsible for the later seventh-or eighth-century colonization of the Bahamas, which was a valuable source of salt. The end of the first millennium also saw the rise of the Taíno culture, which yielded to the native chiefdoms that dominated the Greater Antilles when the Spanish arrived at the end of the fifteenth century. These were among the first Native Americans wiped out by disease and warfare as the islands were overrun by European settlers and African slaves. Their history was quickly lost and most evidence for the patterns and tools of migration in the pre-Columbian Caribbean has been lost permanently.
North America
Curiously, there is little indication of contact between the North American mainland and either the Antilles, ninety miles south of Florida, or the Bahamas, fifty miles to the east. Yet five thousand years ago the people of the Archaic period in Florida had a robust nautical tradition, and among the oldest log canoes found anywhere is a veritable fleet of more than a hundred discovered at Newnan’s Lake, near Gainesville, in 2000. More than forty of these date from between 3000 and 1000 BCE, and of the twenty-two whose length can be estimated with any confidence, twenty are between six and nine meters long. Often referred to as dugouts, the oldest log canoes generally antedate the development of metal tools, and they were actually hollowed out by the application of fire and stone scrapers used to remove the charred interior. When the hull was finished, frames could be inserted to keep the sides from deforming, while continuous lines of planks called strakes could
be attached to the sides to raise the freeboard, for which reason logboats are often seen as forerunners of planked boats. The Newnan’s Lake vessels were clearly intended for sheltered waters, and many of them appear to have been poled rather than paddled. Despite signs of early promise, sailors of the Florida peninsula did not make the transition to open-water navigation.
Logboats of the Pacific Northwest
One of the few places in the Americas where logboats were used extensively for saltwater navigation was on the Pacific coast between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and southeastern Alaska. Coastal people traded diverse goods including furs and hides, candlefish oil, slaves, and dentalium shells harvested off the coast of British Columbia and widely used as a form of currency. By the time of European contact, boat ownership in some places on the coast was all but universal, and when in 1805 the Lewis and Clark expedition descended the Columbia River to the Pacific, William Clark remarked on a village of “about 200 Men of the Skilloot nation[.] I counted 52 canoes on the bank in front of this village manney of them very large and raised in bow.” The Nootka (Nuu-chah-nulth) of Vancouver Island, and the Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands to the north were especially celebrated for the quality of their logboats, which they traded to neighboring tribes.
While logboats can be made from many kinds of straight timber, the cedar of the Pacific Northwest is one of the few species that produces logs wide enough to make the stable and deep hull forms necessary for sea travel. Large dugouts used for long-distance trade, hunting whales, and warfare were about twelve meters long and two meters across and could carry twenty to thirty people and their cargoes or gear. Others reached eighteen meters, and one of twentyfive meters was recorded in the nineteenth century; Meriwether Lewis marveled at canoes with a capacity he estimated at three to four tons. Somewhat smaller “family canoes” carried ten to fifteen people. More common still were the four-meter boats designed for one or two people. Typically they were “ornimented with Images carved in wood the figures of a Bear in front & a man in Stern, Painted & fixed very netely on the canoes, rising to near the hight of a man.” Remarking on the construction techniques employed at the start of the nineteenth century, well after European traders had introduced metal tools to the region, Lewis noted that “the only tool usually imployed in felling the trees or forming the canoe &c is a chisel formed of an old file about an Inch and a half broad … a person would suppose that the forming of a large canoe with an instrument was the work of several years; but these people make them in a few weeks. They prize their canoes very highly.”
Kayaks, Umiaks, and Baidarkas
Renowned though the Nootka and Haida are for their logboats, the two indigenous North American vessels par excellence are the birchbark canoe and the skin boat. Unlike the dugout, which was shaped by removing material from a tree to reveal a boat, both skin boats and birchbark canoes are composite craft. Each is the product of a particular environment, the temperate forest zone of North America in the case of the canoe, and the Arctic zone for the skin boat, three distinct types of which are found from northeastern Siberia across the top of North America to Greenland. In addition to the kayak, designed to carry one person, there were the umiak, a large open boat between five and eighteen meters in length and used for carrying passengers and cargo and for hunting walrus and sea lions; and the baidarka, similar to a kayak but with two and sometimes three cockpits. Kayaks and baidarkas were used chiefly for hunting.
All three types are built around a flexible wooden frame generally constructed from driftwood. Seal, walrus, or polar bear skin attached to the frame by sinew, whalebone, or hide lacing had an elasticity and toughness that made the hulls resilient to shocks from hitting the ice. The light construction and a generally flat bottom allowed umiaks to carry large loads while making it easy to drag them across the ice when necessary. Kayaks and baidarkas were constructed in a similar fashion, but the skin covered the deck apart from the cockpit or manhole in which the paddler sat with his legs outstretched. Despite their broadly similar appearance, there was great variety in kayak design according to the conditions that prevailed in different places.
Umiak on Whale Patrol off the coast of northwest Alaska in May 1905(?). The umiak is made by stretching a depilated animal skin over a wooden frame. This vessel seems typical of the type, about ten meters by three meters and with places for five or six paddlers per side and a steersman in the stern at left. Courtesy of the Archives, University of Alaska Fairbanks, S. R. Bernardi Collection, UAF–1959–875–13.
The inhabitants of Arctic and subarctic North America had a marine orientation as early as 6000 BCE, the date of the earliest archaeological finds in the Aleutians. The later history of the maritime Arctic is characterized by the emergence of cultural traditions in Alaska followed by their eastward spread as far as Greenland. The people of the so-called Arctic Small Tool Tradition hunted marine animals like seals and polar bears from about 2500 BCE, but they depended on the wood of the subarctic forests for heat and light. A defining invention of the Dorset culture that emerged around 500 BCE was the stone lamp fueled by walrus or seal oil, which increased the importance of hunting from kayaks. Weapons included darts and harpoons, frequently thrown with atlatls or throwing sticks, and leather bladders were attached to the harpoon line to keep it afloat and tire the prey. Given the size of the animals hunted, expeditions involved many kayaks, and in rough weather kayakers often lashed their boats together in pairs to increase stability.
Dorset culture was replaced by the bearers of the Thule tradition—the immediate ancestors of the modern Inuit—who appeared in Alaska about a thousand years ago, during the same medieval warm period that facilitated the Norse transatlantic migrations to Iceland, Greenland, and North America. The Thule culture’s eastward expansion was so swift and thorough that the people from northern Alaska to Greenland speak one language, albeit in different dialects, whereas Alaska and neighboring Siberia are home to five distinct languages. Thule kayaks were larger than the Dorset, and the Thule also used umiaks for hunting beluga whales. Well equipped to take advantage of the Little Ice Age that began around 1300, they became more seasonal hunters than their predecessors had been, migrating between summer camps for fishing and hunting caribou and winter camps for hunting seals, but always within Arctic or subarctic regions.
The Birchbark Canoe
Boatbuilders living below the tree line have considerably more materials from which to fashion watercraft than do their Arctic counterparts. Most woodland Indian sites from 1000 BCE to the centuries before the arrival of the Europeans were clustered around major rivers—notably the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, and Tennessee—which were valuable for their fertile bottom grounds and fish resources and as avenues of communication. Tracing the evolution of woodland Indian watercraft over their long history is impossible, but we know that the art of building birchbark canoes was perfected well before the sixteenth century. These were used extensively from the coasts of Newfoundland, the Canadian Maritimes, and New England, westward up the St. Lawrence valley and into central Canada, and across the Appalachian Mountains into the Midwest. Although canoes today are identified almost exclusively with inland waters, the Mi’kmaq are known to have used them to carry copper ingots from Nova Scotia across the Gulf of Maine as far as Cape Cod.
The earliest descriptions of canoes are short on details but uniform in amazement at their capacity, lightness, and speed—factors that evidently impressed their makers, too: the Penobscot word for canoe was agwiden, meaning “floats lightly.” Following his exploration of the coast of Massachusetts in 1603, the English explorer Martin Pring, awestruck by the canoes he encountered, brought one back to England.
[I]t was sowed together with strong and tough Oziers or twigs, and the seames couered ouer with Rozen or Turpentine … it was also open like a Wherrie, and sharpe at both ends, sauing that the beake was a little bending roundly vpward.d And though it carried nine men standing vpright, yet it weighed not at the most
aboue sixtie pounds in weight, a thing almost incredible in regard of the largenesse and capacitie thereof. Their Oares [paddles] were flat at the end … made of Ash or Maple very light and strong, abot two yards long, wherewith they row very swiftly.
The preferred bark for building canoes comes from the paper birch (sometimes called canoe birch) which grows across North America in a wide band, the northern limit of which extends from Labrador to the Yukon River and the coast of Alaska, and the southern boundary of which runs from Long Island to the Pacific coast in northern Washington State. Bark at least one-eighth of an inch thick was peeled from the tree and the sheets sewn together with, preferably, the root of the black spruce, and made watertight with spruce gum, to form the outer shell of the canoe. The variety of such canoes was enormous and depended as much on the use and waters for which they were intended—cargo, passengers, or warfare; lakes, streams, or rapids—as on their makers. Whereas the frame of a kayak was assembled first and the skin wrapped around it, the bark canoe was a “skin first” construction. “The Indian,” writes John McPhee in his classic work The Survival of the Bark Canoe, “began the assembly with bark. He rolled it right out on the building bed, white side up, and built the canoe from there. Lashing the bark to the gunwale frame, he made—in effect—a birchbark bag. Then he lined the bag with planking. Then—one by one—he forced in the ribs. The resulting canoe was lithe, supple, resilient, strong.” To show McPhee just how strong, a canoe builder “cocked his arm and drove his fist into the bottom of one of the canoes with a punch that could have damaged a prizefighter.… The bottom of the canoe was unaffected. He remarked that the bark of the white birch was amazing stuff—strong, resinous, and waterproof.”
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 5
