The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (9 page)

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.

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 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.

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 deep-water 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.

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.

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.