Read Online The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World by Lincoln Paine - Free Book Online
Book: The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World by Lincoln Paine
Read Free Book Online
Authors: Lincoln Paine
Ads: Link
type, historically, of Canada and far more representative of the great years of national expansion than the wagon, truck, locomotive or steamship.” Canoes andkayaks 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 tothe inherent simplicity of their form and function and to the skill required to master their use.
Planked Boats
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 thePacific Northwest and Newnan’s Lake did not take this step. Apart from the
dalca
of southern Chile, the onlypre-Columbian planked boat in the Americas is the
tomol,
built by theChumash Indians, who lived in the Channel Islands and along the coast betweenLos Angeles and Point Conception, west of Santa Barbara. SouthernCalifornia 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 thetar 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, whysails 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 predictablemonsoon systems of the Indian Ocean, or the scattered archipelagoes of Southeast Asia that fostered island hopping. Yet theGreat Lakes comprise an enclosed sea, while the islands of the Caribbean create an almost unbroken chain of intervisible islands fromVenezuela toFlorida and theYucatán. 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
Planked Boats
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 thePacific Northwest and Newnan’s Lake did not take this step. Apart from the
dalca
of southern Chile, the onlypre-Columbian planked boat in the Americas is the
tomol,
built by theChumash Indians, who lived in the Channel Islands and along the coast betweenLos Angeles and Point Conception, west of Santa Barbara. SouthernCalifornia 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 thetar 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, whysails 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 predictablemonsoon systems of the Indian Ocean, or the scattered archipelagoes of Southeast Asia that fostered island hopping. Yet theGreat Lakes comprise an enclosed sea, while the islands of the Caribbean create an almost unbroken chain of intervisible islands fromVenezuela toFlorida and theYucatán. 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
Similar Books
