The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Read Online Free Page A

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.

Oceania
    The islands of Oceania form the locus of the oldest, most sustained, and perhaps most enigmatic effort of maritimeexploration andmigration 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 theSolomon Islands just east of New Guinea toEaster 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 explorerJules 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 ofMelanesia, which lie within a broad band more or less south of the equator between New Guinea andFiji. To the east isPolynesia, 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, andMariana 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 fromEcuador to thePhilippines—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 atthe inhabitants of the Tuamotus in 1768, an officer sailing in the expedition of French explorerLouis 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 CaptainJames Cook suggested that ancestors of the people he encountered in theSociety Islands (Tahiti) originated in the western Pacific and that it should be possible to trace their progress all the wayfrom theEast 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 leftAfrica by either walking overland across theSinai Peninsula, which separates the Mediterranean from theRed Sea, or crossing theBab al-Mandeb, the thirteen-mile-wide strait at the mouth of the Red Sea betweenEritrea 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