The bark canoe was a vehicle of primary importance after the arrival of Europeans in North America, especially the canots de maître or maîtres canots built for French voyageurs and their Indian partners in the fur trade of central Canada. As one historian has written, these “must be looked upon as the national watercraft type, historically, of Canada and far more representative of the great years of national expansion than the wagon, truck, locomotive or steamship.” Canoes and kayaks are rarely built in the traditional manner today, but fiberglass, canvas, and aluminum versions modeled on Native American originals are among the most popular recreational craft in the world, and canoeing and kayaking are Olympic sports, ample testimony to the inherent simplicity of their form and function and to the skill required to master their use.
Planked Boats
Sophisticated though the process of making birchbark canoes is, there is a limit to the size they can achieve, and they do not lend themselves readily to other than manual propulsion. The same is true of the kayak and other skin boats. Larger vessels require more rigid construction such as is found in planked boats; the logboat builders of the Pacific Northwest and Newnan’s Lake did not take this step. Apart from the dalca of southern Chile, the only pre-Columbian planked boat in the Americas is the tomol, built by the Chumash Indians, who lived in the Channel Islands and along the coast between Los Angeles and Point Conception, west of Santa Barbara. Southern California is not rich in native maritime tradition, and the Channel Islands seem an unlikely place for such a sophisticated approach to hull construction to have arisen. The first people to reach the islands around 11000 BCE probably did so in reed rafts rather than logboats. The wood and other materials needed for building tomols had to be scavenged or acquired through trade: planks were cut from driftwood, the most prized being redwood logs borne south on the California current from the central coast 250 miles away; the cordage used to sew the planks together was made from red milkwood imported from the mainland, as was the tar used to caulk and preserve the hull. Not surprisingly, such boats represented an enormous investment in resources, time, and skill. According to a Chumash who was the source for much of what is known about the tomol, “The board canoe was the house of the sea. It was more valuable than a land house and was worth more money.” The complexity of the vessel’s construction and the high status of the people associated with them have led some to trace the tomol’s origins to the mid-first millennium ce, a period when there is evidence of the first stratification of Chumash society.
While plank boats proved a major stepping-stone in the development of deepwater vessels across Eurasia, the Californian tomol and the Chilean dalca proved technological dead ends. Why the tradition of composite joinery for hull construction did not spread, why sails were not used (or at least not widely), and why long-distance maritime networks did not develop more fully in the Americas are difficult questions to answer. It is tempting to cite environmental constraints, such as the fact that the waters of the Americas lack the enclosed seas that fostered sophisticated developments around the Mediterranean or Baltic, the predictable monsoon systems of the Indian Ocean, or the scattered archipelagoes of Southeast Asia that fostered island hopping. Yet the Great Lakes comprise an enclosed sea, while the islands of the Caribbean create an almost unbroken chain of intervisible islands from Venezuela to Florida and the Yucatán. Nor was the availability of natural resources a problem; from the sixteenth century onward, Europeans eagerly exploited the New World for its nearly endless variety and supply of timber and naval stores.
The same questions can be asked of maritime communities in Eurasia, where despite the existence of dense networks of cross-cultural contact and exchange, relatively sophisticated construction techniques and means of propulsion developed in some places but not in others. The people of the Baltic did not use sails until the 600s, although they used boats for hunting, fishing, and transportation, and interacted with people in the Mediterranean, where the sail was known by at least the third millennium BCE. Cultural or sociopolitical explanations are likewise inadequate. Mesoamerica produced an unbroken succession of refined states from the Olmecs to the Aztecs, none of which exploited its proximity to the sea to any significant degree. As the example of Oceania shows, populous, centralized states endowed with abundant resources for shipbuilding and trade are not prerequisites for putting to sea. Pacific islanders were never as numerous as their contemporaries in Eurasia or the Americas, yet they ranged farther across the sea than anyone else. But maritime history is seldom susceptible to overarching theories. No less puzzling is the fact that the most comprehensive body of archaeological, written, and artistic evidence for the development of maritime enterprise in the ancient world comes from Egypt, a land associated more with sand than seafaring.
a The suffix -nesia comes from the Greek word for island, neisos. Melanesia means black islands (for the relative color of the inhabitants’ skin); Micronesia, small islands; and Polynesia, many islands.
b Austronesian (literally, “southern islands”) is a language family whose speakers are found across the islands of, and parts of mainland, Southeast Asia, in Oceania, and, to the west, on the island of Madagascar.
c The Greater Antilles include the large islands of Jamaica, Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico. The southward arc of the Lesser Antilles is divided into the northerly Leeward Islands, from the Virgin Islands to Dominica, and the southerly Windward Islands, from Martinique to Grenada.
d A wherry is a light rowing boat for carrying passengers and freight.
Chapter 2
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The River and Seas of Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt emerged as a regional power of enormous vigor five thousand years ago. Written, artistic, and archaeological finds make it clear that waterborne transportation was its people’s lifeline, and their intimate association with boats and ships permeated every aspect of their lives, from their conception of the afterlife and the voyage of the sun across the sky, to the ways they organized themselves for work and how they envisioned the state. The region’s arid climate should not blind us to the Egyptians’ profound reliance on river and sea trade for political stability, domestic tranquility, and intercourse with distant people via the Mediterranean and the Red Seas. The last thousand kilometers of the Nile between Aswan and the Mediterranean were a cradle of maritime enterprise on which innumerable vessels moved people and goods, including thousand-ton stone blocks shipped hundreds of kilometers from quarries to the sites of pyramids and other monuments. By 2600 BCE, mariners routinely sailed to the Levant for bulk cargoes of cedar and other goods, and Egyptians also took to the Red Sea in search of incense, precious metals, exotic animals, and other marvels from the land of Punt. In the twelfth century BCE, the sea-lanes of the Mediterranean proved for the first time a double-edged sword as stateless raiders swept across the ancient Near East and precipitated the end of the New Kingdom. In the meantime, the Egyptians’ embrace of sea trade had brought them into sustained communication with the leading powers of Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, and helped initiate sustained long-distance voyaging in the eastern Mediterranean.
A Ship in the Desert, 2500 BCE
In the spring of 1954, employees of the Egyptian Antiquities Service were removing debris from around the base of the Great Pyramid at Giza. The effort was a routine bit of housekeeping and there was little expectation of uncovering anything of significance in a place that had been worked over by tomb robbers, treasure seekers, and archaeologists for forty-five hundred years. As they cleared the rubble, workers came across the remains of the southern boundary wall. This was hardly extraordinary; boundary walls had been identified on the north and west sides of the pyramid as well. What was unusual was that this one was closer to the pyramid than the others. Because the archaeological record had long since revealed the Egyptians’ fastidious attention to precise measurements and symmetries, archaeologist Kamal el-Mallakh suspected that the wall covered a pit holding a boat connected with the funeral rites of
the pharaoh Khufu—or Cheops, as he was known to ancient Greek writers living about midway between his time and ours. Archaeologists had found such pits around various pyramid complexes, including that of Khufu, although all were empty at the time of their modern discovery. Further excavation revealed a row of forty-one limestone blocks with mortared seams. El-Mallakh chiseled a test hole in one of the stones and peered into the impenetrable darkness of a rectangular pit hewn from the bedrock. As he could not see, he closed his eyes. “And then with my eyes closed, I smelt incense, a very holy, holy, holy smell. I smelt time … I smelt centuries.… I smelt history. And then I was sure that the boat was there.” Such was the discovery of the royal ship of Khufu.
The forty-four-meter-long disassembled vessel had been superbly preserved in its airtight tomb for approximately four and a half thousand years. According to one investigator, the boat’s timbers “looked as hard and as new as if they had been placed there but a year ago.” The boat was almost certainly built for Khufu, the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty. The Great Pyramid was his tomb, and the cartouche of his son, Khafre, was found on several of the blocks sealing the pit. More than twelve hundred pieces of wood were recovered, ranging in size from pegs a few centimeters long to timbers of more than twenty meters. About 95 percent of the material was cedar, imported by sea from Lebanon; the remainder included domestic acacia, sidder, and sycamore. After the pieces had been documented and conserved, the complex work of reconstruction began. The pieces had been arranged logically in the pit: prow at the west end, stern to the east, starboard timbers on the north side, port timbers on the south, hull pieces at the bottom and sides of the pit, and superstructure elements on top of the pile. Carpenters’ marks in the form of symbols in the ancient hieratic Egyptian script gave additional clues about how the pieces fit together. Even so, it took thirteen years before the reconstruction was complete; and it was not until 1982, almost three decades after its discovery, that the Khufu ship was opened to the public in a specially built museum alongside the pyramid.
By any measure, the Khufu ship was an astonishing discovery. The largest and best-preserved ship from antiquity or any other period for the next four thousand years, it reveals the technological sophistication of the ancient Egyptians on a far more intimate and accessible scale than do the pyramids or the more arcane arts of embalming and mummification. Like these practices, the burial of the Khufu ship was clearly linked to death rituals in some way, and there is no clearer indication of the central place of boats and ships in Egypt of the third millennium BCE than their honored place in the sacraments of the afterlife. Together with the other twenty-one Egyptian vessels thus far discovered by archaeologists, to say nothing of the hundreds of models, tomb paintings, and written descriptions of ships and boats, as well as records of river and sea transport, the Khufu ship forcefully highlights the importance of watercraft to a civilization that flourished along a fertile ribbon drawn through an African desert.
The Nile: Cradle of Navigation
The dynastic period of ancient Egypt began around 3000 BCE. The Old Kingdom (Third through Sixth Dynasties), during which the pyramids of Giza were built, lasted from about 2700 to 2200 BCE. The Twelfth and Thirteenth Dynasties of the Middle Kingdom lasted about two centuries, ending in about 1700 BCE. The New Kingdom, the period of pharaonic Egypt’s greatest prosperity and most active foreign relations, began about 1550 BCE and lasted five hundred years. Thereafter the land came under increasing domination by foreigners from the south and east. In the meantime, Egyptian culture attained a degree of sophistication unmatched anywhere in the world. The Egyptians were literate masters of engineering, the visual arts, medicine, and religious, political, and social organization whose work is characterized by an almost obsessive attention to detail. Their culture thrived for more than two thousand years, their peace and prosperity interrupted only occasionally, and in the great scheme of things briefly. The pyramids at Giza and elsewhere date from relatively early in the history of unified Egypt, but the society that produced these monuments neither appeared nor ended abruptly. Although the conquest of Alexander the Great brought the dynastic age to a close in the fourth century BCE, Egypt has throughout its history been a center of commercial and cultural exchange thanks to its position astride the Nile, the longest river in Africa, and at the intersection of the land crossings between Africa and Asia, and between the Mediterranean and Red Sea and Indian Ocean.
The Nile rises in the mountains of east-central Africa and flows northward into Sudan. In the sixteen hundred kilometers below Khartoum, the river’s course is broken by six major cataracts, or sets of rapids. In antiquity the northernmost of these, the First Cataract at Aswan, represented a natural barrier between Egypt and Nubia (northern Sudan), and the early pharaohs’ fortification of the island of Elephantine made it a gateway to the south. This was by no means an absolute boundary, and New Kingdom pharaohs pushed as far south as Napata in Kush, between the Third and Fourth Cataracts. North of Aswan, the Nile valley widens slightly for its last thousand kilometers, hemmed in on either side by the Sahara. Egyptian civilization arose within this slip of land, no more than twenty kilometers wide in Upper Egypt but annually inundated by the sediment-rich floodwaters of the Nile until the construction of the Aswan Dams in the twentieth century.
To the west are a few remote oases linked to one another and the Nile by desert tracks, but these were not large enough to support populations capable of threatening the stability of the valley and they offered little to attract any but the most hardened traders. The landscape to the east is bleak but the mountains are rich in deposits of quartzite, alabaster, and gold, which have been mined since predynastic times. Beyond the mountains lies the Red Sea, which was reached via arid, narrow valleys cut by seasonal streams, called wadis. The most important Egyptian towns were generally located near where these wadis reached the Nile, strategic sites that afforded their inhabitants an easy command of north–south and the more limited east–west trade. In the early period these included Elephantine, Hierakonpolis (Kom el-Ahmar), Naqada, Coptos (Deir el-Bahri), and the important royal burial site at Abydos. The majority of these towns were located on the west bank of the river, although Coptos was near Wadi Hammamat and the point on the Nile closest to the Red Sea. At the head of the delta near modern Cairo, Memphis straddled the boundary between the rich agricultural lands of the delta and the traditional centers of power to the south. Memphis was also the city through which Mediterranean commerce funneled into or out of Egypt via the many branches of the Nile and the delta ports, of which Buto was probably the most important from predynastic times. The capital was also near the terminus of the major overland trade routes to Sinai (a major source of copper and turquoise), Canaan (Palestine), and beyond. Thebes (Luxor) later emerged as an important capital near Coptos, with a corresponding mortuary site on the west bank of the Nile.
Upper and Lower Egypt constituted distinct cultural regions and of the towns noted above all but Memphis and Buto were located in the former. By about 3000 BCE, Upper Egypt appears to have been technologically superior, and the ruling elites at Hierakonpolis, Naqada, and Abydos showed the traits of divine kingship and centralized control that would characterize pharaonic rule in a united Egypt. Administrative authority was necessary to guarantee the stability of a society dependent entirely on the Nile for its existence. Although the river’s annual inundations followed predictable patterns and in normal times nourished farmers’ croplands, the flood was sometimes insufficient and stockpiling grain in times of plenty was a hedge against years of drought and famine. Communication within Egypt depended mostly on the river, too, in part because lands adjacent to the river were either underwater or otherwise impassable for several months each year. Likewise, crossing the innumerable irrigation canals radiating out from the Nile would have entailed the use of endless ferries or bridges. Not until the period of Roman rule in the first century BCE were substantial road-building projects undertaken.
Be
low Elephantine the Nile is an almost ideal cradle of navigation. On its predictable, northward-flowing current, paddling or rowing toward the Mediterranean is easy. Although the gradient of the river between the First Cataract and the sea is only about 1:13,000—that is, it drops only one meter in every thirteen kilometers—paddling or rowing against the current was challenging, especially when the river was in flood between June and September. However, the prevailing wind is northerly, blowing from the Mediterranean against the current, so that voyagers returning upstream could do so with a following wind. This advantage was amplified after the invention of the sail, and it is hardly surprising that the Egyptian word “to sail” also means “to sail southwards, go upstream.” When it first occurred to Nile boatmen to harness the wind cannot be determined, but the oldest known picture of a sail anywhere in the world is found on a vase of the Late Gerzean Culture at Naqada, dated to about 3300–3100 BCE.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 6
