The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (7 page)

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 sea
birds, 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 twenty-five 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 low-lying 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.

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.