The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (39 page)

While the Chinese had sails by at least the end of the first millennium
BCE
, they were not used extensively on inland waters owing to the prevalence of bridges, at least until the development of a hinged mast (called a tabernacle mast) that could be easily lowered and raised. The earliest sails were square sails, but by the second or third century the balanced lugsail was ubiquitous in river craft. (The balanced lugsail is a quadrilateral fore-and-aft sail set from a boom and yard, with the luff forward of the mast.)
The primary materials for the sail were woven mats of bamboo or reed stiffened by bamboo battens. These keep the sail flat, thus allowing the vessel to sail closer to the wind than otherwise, making it easy to douse or reef the sail, and providing a means for the crew to ascend the mast. Because the junk sail is broken into smaller sections, each of these is exposed to less pressure than an unbattened sail of the same overall area and the sail can therefore be made of weaker material. When the junk sail was first taken to sea is not known, but the ship in the
Dunhuang fresco is shown running before the wind with a single square sail.

In addition to being employed for peacetime trade and transportation, river-craft were also used for warfare. The frontline vessel in both
Shihuangdi’s campaign against the Hundred
Yue and Wudi’s invasion of Jiaozhi a century later was the
louchuan,
or towered ship. Based on interpretations of the images on Dong-Son drums and Chinese bronzes from the fourth century
BCE
, these seem to have been decked vessels of twenty to twenty-five meters in length,
propelled by forward-facing rowers stationed below, and fought by archers and soldiers armed with dagger axes and bows stationed above deck and in the towers. The main antiship weapons were fifteen-meter-long beams mounted on pivots, a design not unlike the Roman
corvus
but intended simply to smash enemy ships to pieces rather than to hold them fast for a boarding action.

The largest of the ships from the Dunhuang cave complex in Gansu Province, central China, about 2,300 kilometers from the nearest saltwater. The Buddhist ship of faith sailing from the shores of illusion to the paradise of Amitabha (Amida) Buddha has the square ends typical of Tang Dynasty ships, but the square sail suggests an Indian or Indian Ocean point of reference. Courtesy of the RMN–Grand Palais, Paris/Art Resource, New York.

It is doubtful that such weapons were used in the campaigns against Jiaozhi or the Korean Peninsula, the fleets for which likely comprised only armed troop transports. Whether they would have encountered vessels specifically designed for combat is difficult to know, for while the kingdom of
Silla established an
office of maritime administration (
Seonbuseo
) responsible for civilian and naval shipping in the sixth century, references to and archaeological finds of individual ships on the Korean Peninsula, as well as in Japan, are few. According to the
Nihongi
(which was compiled in the eighth century and may include anachronisms that reflect the authors’ experience), the gods who introduced
shipbuilding to Japan specified the use of
Japanese
cedar and
camphorwood. The need for water transport was dictated by Japan’s rugged terrain and the availability of coastal routes, but the throne may have had an interest in developing a fleet for trade or warfare early on. Emperor
Sujin Tenno (third or fourth century) reportedly mandated that ships be built in all the coastal provinces of his realm, and the ships accidentally burned by the envoys from Silla in 300
CE
were said to have been given to the throne as tribute from the provinces in exchange for gifts of salt, while another passage refers to a vessel being “enrolled among the number of Imperial vessels.” How big these were or how they were constructed is unknown. One entry in the
Nihongi
mentions a ship built from a large tree, which might suggest a logboat of some sort, but another tells of the construction of a ship of thirty meters, which is indicative of a vessel of more complex design. These are only tantalizing hints of robust maritime cultures whose particulars do not come into sharp relief for several centuries.

The inland origins of the
Chinese state did not predispose its people to maritime pursuits, but the exploitation of rivers and canals facilitated territorial expansion and domestic stability, while accumulated wealth enabled members of the elite to import exotic goods, the most extraordinary of which came from Southeast Asia. The exposure to alien ideas that resulted from these exchanges was anathema to Confucianists, but the rise of Buddhism and the resulting demand for religious texts, statuary, incense, and other religious paraphernalia spurred trade not only with Southeast Asia and India but also Korea and Japan, where Buddhism was introduced from China. Initially the sea route between China, Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean wound through a series of small, loosely defined coastal and island networks, but when fifth-century mariners began crossing the South China Sea from the Strait of Malacca to Vietnam, they inaugurated the longest sailing routes the world would know for the next millennium and ensured the spectacular growth in long-distance trade that flourished in the early centuries of the Islamic caliphates and China’s Tang Dynasty.

Maritime life in the
medieval Mediterranean was shaped by the collapse of the
Western Roman Empire, the rise to power of the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic caliphates, and the emergence of religious ideology in political conflict. Disputes over heresies undermined the cohesion of the Byzantine Empire in the seventh century and the resulting stresses are reflected in diminished activity that led to truncated or abandoned shipping routes, and fewer and smaller ships. In its weakened state, the empire was unable to prevent the expansion of Islam in the Levant, whose seafaring communities helped carry the new faith west. Muslim states’ encouragement of industry, trade, and the arts revitalized existing port cities of
North Africa and gave rise to new ones, and emirates of the eighth and ninth centuries ruled most of the major islands from Cyprus to the Balearics. In the tenth century, rivalries between
Shiites and
Sunnis contributed to the loss of Muslim territories to Christian princes. The outstanding long-term change, however, was the gradual decline of the maritime primacy of
Egypt, the Levant, and the Aegean, which had constituted the fulcrum of the Mediterranean for millennia. In their place arose commercial and naval powers—Muslim giving way to Christian—that emerged from almost complete obscurity in the central and western Mediterranean.

These developments were accompanied by a major transition in naval architecture as Mediterranean shipwrights abandoned shell-first for frame-first hull construction, a process more economical in material, labor, skill, and time and that ultimately gave rise to the ships that launched European mariners into the Atlantic and beyond. Interfaith conflict posed real obstacles to trade and led to the most intense period of Mediterranean naval warfare since the end of republican Rome. Even so, merchants’ efforts to reconcile different
religious and legal principles among Jews, Christians, and Muslims fostered the creation of novel forms of financing commerce, the spread of legal practices designed to protect merchant shippers and their investments, and the forging of compromise solutions to which all could subscribe, regardless of faith. Eventually, this nascent international law fostered further commercial expansion within and beyond the Mediterranean.

In 1973, archaeologists discovered the remains of an eleventh-century merchant ship in the Turkish harbor of Serçe Limani about twelve miles north of
Rhodes. The ballast of the “glass wreck” included about three tons of cullet—broken and raw glass—along with a striking array of other goods, ship’s gear, tools, weapons, and personal possessions.
What prompted archaeologists to focus on the Serçe Limani site before turning to other known shipwrecks was the ship’s date and the possibility that it might show whether shipwrights had begun to construct ships frame-first rather than in the ancient shell-first sequence, that is, by fastening hull planking to a preerected skeleton of keel and ribs, the method most familiar in western shipbuilding for the past five hundred years. As it happens, the find at Serçe Limani is the latest of three shipwrecks clustered in southwest Turkey through which we can trace the transition from shell-first to frame-first shipbuilding. The two other ships were located off the island of Yassi Ada, about sixty-five miles by sea to the southeast. The older
Yassi Ada B wreck dates from the second half of the fourth century. With a length of almost nineteen meters and a beam of less than seven, the ship was of typical shell-first construction, with edge-joined planks fastened to one another by mortise-and-tenon joints and reinforced with frames inserted after the hull was formed. While there is nothing novel in the hull’s construction, Yassi Ada B is thus far the oldest known Mediterranean ship likely to have been rigged with a
fore-and-aft sail.

From the south side of the island, the seventh-century
Yassi Ada A ship (so-called because it was found before the older Yassi Ada B site) belongs to a transitional shipbuilding phase. In the lower part of the hull the shipwrights edge-joined the planks in the shell-first manner, but the mortise-and-tenon joints were unpegged and widely spaced, a less elaborate joinery than that found in older vessels. Above the waterline, they simply nailed the strakes to existing frames, some of which they fastened to the keel with iron bolts before
fitting the planks.
Quarter rudders were mounted between two beams that ran the width of the hull aft, and the helmsman probably steered from a raised helm-deck. Archaeologists also identified hatches forward and amidships. The hull is surprisingly slender for a cargo vessel, 21 meters long by 5.2 meters. Some believe that this reflects a renewed interest in speed to outrun pirates, although there could have been an economic rationale for faster ships. Nothing of the rig survives, but given the hull shape and the probable placement of the mainmast and quarter rudders the ship would have sailed best with a two-masted, lateen rig rather than a square sail.

The Serçe Limani ship probably measured 16 by 5 meters, with a depth in hold of nearly 2.5 meters—tall enough to stand up in—and a loaded draft of about 1.4 meters. There is no clue as to where the ship originated, but the keel is of elm and the planking of
pine. One of the more curious aspects of the ship’s overall construction is that the shipwrights shaped the timbers with
saws rather than axes and adzes, the shipbuilder’s tools of choice worldwide. There were about forty framing stations in the ship, with frames or half frames fastened to the keel with iron nails, and the planks were fastened to the frames with nails and wooden treenails; there is no evidence for any edge-joining of planks. The boxy, thirty-five-ton hull was designed for maximum capacity and the ship apparently carried a two-masted, lateen rig.

When, where, and why shipwrights realized that one could erect a hull’s frame around a centerline keel and then attach planks to the frames are questions not answered in any contemporary sources. Most modern discussion attributes this technological change to the wrenching economic transformations that roiled the
Mediterranean between the third and eleventh centuries: the barbarian invasions and division of the
Roman Empire; decades of plague in the sixth century; the conflict between the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim caliphates; and sectarian violence within Christianity and Islam. This was not an era of uninterrupted decline, and there were periods of dazzling brilliance and prosperity across the Mediterranean. Yet Rome’s
Pax Mediterraneana
—an historically anomalous period in which there was almost no conflict at sea—was a thing of the past. With less state support of maritime commerce, the inherent uncertainties of sea trade discouraged investment in large, expensive ships, and it behooved merchant-owners of relatively modest means to run ships that were small and easy to build. These comparatively inexpensive frame-first hulls also gave smaller polities such as the Italian city-states the opportunity to develop niche trades in which they could compete against more established maritime powers.