The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Read Online Free
Author: Lincoln Paine
Tags: History, Oceania, Military, Transportation, Naval, Ships & Shipbuilding
freshwater shipping. It is worth noting that the Association forGreat Lakes Maritime History has seventy-five institutional members in the United States andCanada. The names of ten include “maritime,” another thirteen use “marine,” and Suttons Bay, Michigan, is home to the Inland Seas Education Association.
Chapter 1
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Taking to the Water
Reindeer are powerful swimmers, but water is not their natural environment and they are at their most vulnerable when crossingrivers, 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-oldNorwegian 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 withOceania 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 theunimaginably harsh environment of theArctic. No two peoples’ approaches to navigation are alike, even if their environmental circumstances have more in common than those of northern Canada andTahiti. But starting with an overview of the different approaches to seafaring in
Chapter 1
----
Taking to the Water
Reindeer are powerful swimmers, but water is not their natural environment and they are at their most vulnerable when crossingrivers, 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-oldNorwegian 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 withOceania 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 theunimaginably harsh environment of theArctic. No two peoples’ approaches to navigation are alike, even if their environmental circumstances have more in common than those of northern Canada andTahiti. But starting with an overview of the different approaches to seafaring in
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