The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (5 page)

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.

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 created 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.