Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the Secrets of the Oceans

287 Pages·2012·4.82 MB·English

by  Brian Fagan

Beyond the Blue Horizon
How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked
the Secrets of the Oceans
Brian Fagan
Contents
Preface
1. “The Sands and Flats Are Discovered”
Across the Pacific
2. Sunda and Sahul
3. “Butterfly Wings Scattered Over the Water”
4. A Pattern of Islands
Poseidon’s Waters
5. A World of Ceaseless Movement
6. Timber and Mekku-Stones
The Monsoon World
7. The Erythraean Sea
8. “A Place of Great Traffic”
9. “We Spread Our Cloudlike Sails Aloft”
Turbulent Waters in the North
10. Seascapes of Ancestors
11. “Storms Fell on the Stern in Icy Feathers”
The Pacific to the West
12. The Aleutians: “The Sea Becomes Very High”
13. Raven Releases the Fish
14. The Fiery Pool and the Spiny Oyster
Epilogue: Of Fish and Portolans
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Notes
A Note on the Author
Also by Brian Fagan
To
Peter and Pete
With gratitude for friendship and perceptive diagnosis
They seek only a view of the sea, what Jefferson called
the water prospect without termination. Somehow that
openness, at least to people usually “pent up in lath and
plaster,” opens something else, certainly reverie,
possibly looming as seamen know it, a glimpse over the
horizon.
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Under the insistence of steam, and the Hydrographic
Office, old concepts of sea, seafaring, and seascape
must change.
The Century Magazine, September 1899
Preface
I learned to sail on the English Channel when I was eight years old, pushing
seven decades ago. We sailed not in a gleaming fiberglass yacht or a high-tech
racing dinghy, but in a heavy fishing boat with faded tan sails. When the wind
dropped, we rowed, standing to our oars, for we were too small to sit and row
from the thwarts. No engine, no electronic instruments, but we shipped out with
a skipper who knew his home waters backwards. He measured the state of the
tide by looking at exposed rocks, gauged the wind by feeling it on his weathered
cheek, and knew almost as much about the local seabed as he did about the
Dorset coastline where he fished. To sail with the first of my seafaring mentors
was to step back into a working boat from Victorian times, when men like him
lived off the sea by oar and sail, as his father and grandfather had done.
My childhood friends and I learned the basics of rowing and sailing the hard
way—nothing sophisticated, but enough to hoist and trim a sail, to pull an oar
correctly, and to steer a course on a familiar landmark. But what we learned
above all else was a feel for the sea and its moods, a way of looking at the ocean
with a mixture of caution and respect that has remained with me for a lifetime of
sailing.
A Dorset fishing boat was one thread in my sailing life. Another was literary
—the works of Arthur Ransome, an English journalist turned children’s book
author who wrote classic sailing tales between the 1930s and 1950s that are still
devoured by generations of British young. They tell of the Swallows and the
Amazons, two families of children who had believable sailing adventures in
England’s Lake District, among the mudflats and shallows of Suffolk, and on the
North Sea. Adventures on dinghies and small cruising boats—the stories were so
believable that I yearned to emulate them, and I’m glad to say that I have.
Teenage adventures in traditional converted fishing boats, dinghies, rented
yachts, and then in boats of my own: my seafaring life has been a kaleidoscope
of truly memorable experiences. And some very nasty ones: lying hove to in a
North Sea gale and being becalmed for two days in the middle of the
Mediterranean in a bumpy sea cannot be described as anything but indelibly
unpleasant experiences.
Beyond the Blue Horizon had its birth in my sailing life, with all its varied
adventures and mishaps, in decades of striving to complete voyages happily and
safely. Most of the time, I’ve succeeded, but there have been many times when
I’ve contemplated my mortality in the face of the seemingly inexorable forces of
the ocean. Wherever I’ve sailed, the past has lurked in the background—an
anchorage off the shrines at Delos, in the heart of the Aegean Sea; burial mounds
on the skyline in Denmark; the gray soils of shell middens on Southern
California’s Channel Islands. Such lurkings bring out the archaeological side of
me, the ghosts of long-vanished seafarers going about their business far from the
spotlight of history. Inevitably, sailing fast in rough seas, I’ve wondered how our
forebears plucked up the courage to sail across open water to unexplored
coastlines or to take passage beyond the horizon toward land that may not exist
at all, with seemingly effortless panache. Making my way on a compass course
across a seemingly featureless seascape, I’ve thought of our ancestors paddling,
rowing, and sailing across the same waters without any of the blandishments of
modern technology or a reliable diesel engine belowdecks, let alone a compass.
Then I start wondering: How do you cross oceans without charts, a compass, a
sextant, or satellite navigation? How do you decipher the inconspicuous clues of
impending foul weather or discern with certainty that land lies over the horizon?
Then there’s the question of questions: Why did our forebears go to sea at all?
What compelling forces sent them into deepwater paddling or rowing on rafts, in
dugouts and planked open boats, and, eventually under sail in much more
sophisticated watercraft?
In my professional life, I’m an archaeologist. My colleagues and I study
ancient human societies as they change and develop over immensely long
periods of time. The harsh realities of preservation mean that we reconstruct
ancient cultures from durable, usually unspectacular clues such as stone tools,
pottery fragments, and house foundations. Only rarely can we look beyond the
artifacts at the intangibles of human existence—our cosmology, ritual beliefs,
and social relationships. Perhaps hardest of all, how do we gain an understanding
of how ancient people perceived the land-and seascapes around them—and how
did they decipher them?
Beyond the Blue Horizon is not a narrative of shipwrecks and watercraft,
although these are important components in the story. It’s about events both
afloat and ashore. As the pioneering underwater archaeologist George Bass once
forcibly reminded me, shipwrecks, however important, tell us more about
societies ashore than they do about what survives on the seabed. Excavating
shipwrecks can be glamorous, the stuff of which National Geographic is made,
but the most important questions generated by such discoveries lie on land. This
book looks at the wider context of ancient seafaring, at the human societies that
pioneered voyaging on open water. Why did they take to hitherto unexplored
inshore or offshore waters? What compelled a few members of these societies to
search for new lands? Was it land hunger, factional quarreling at home, a search
for prestige and trading opportunities, or simply a deeply felt restlessness and
curiosity? Of course, we will never know the whole story, but generations of
archaeological and historical research, especially in recent years, allow us to tell
at least an incomplete tale.
This is not a tale of galleons and famed European navigators like Christopher
Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and James Cook. Our story ends before
Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492 or Cook observed the transit of Venus
on Tahiti in 1769 and revealed the seductive delights of Polynesia to an
entranced Europe. These are well-trodden historical events. Ours is an earlier
world of anonymous, mostly nonliterate people who formed part of the backdrop
of history. Kings might rise and fall, empires come to prominence then fade into
obscurity, but the timeless routine of cabotage (coasting) along quiet shorelines,
of canoe voyages between Pacific Islands and trading ventures in monsoon seas
or across the North Sea and farther afield continued—quiet events as predictable
as the passage of the seasons. The humble folks on these voyages were the
people who decoded most of the world’s oceans, not out of any overwhelming
ambition to “serve God and to get rich,” as with the Spanish conquistadores who
conquered Aztec Mexico, but simply as part of their existence in the heart of an
intricate, often spiritually charged cosmos.
Nor do I explore claims of very early seafaring, long before the deliberate
seagoing of more recent history. No question, a few humans may have floated
across open straits to islands like Flores, in Southeast Asia, and from mainland
Greece to Crete hundreds of thousands of years ago. Fascinating as these
assertions may be, they are irrelevant here. We’re concerned not with putative
accidental journeys, with the reality that people can stay afloat on buoyant logs,
but with deliberate journeys on the water. Why did people take to the sea, then
paddle, row, and sail on it as a regular part of daily life?
Many early seafaring societies held powerful supernatural beliefs about the
ocean. This is a story about ventures afloat that may seem amazing through the
magnifying glass of history, but to those who undertook them they were often
merely an extension of lives lived at the edge of the ocean. Beyond the Blue
Horizon is a celebration of human ingenuity and often brilliant adaptation to
ever-changing environments, and of the compelling restlessness that drove so
much of human history. I have this sense of restlessness myself, which is why
I’ve woven some of my own experiences into the story. They say that history
repeats itself. Time and time again, far from land or in narrow waters, in fair
weather and foul, I’ve sensed an ancient skipper from the same waters looking
over my shoulder and been reassured that they must have felt much the same
way as I did. And this is why I wrote this book.
Beyond the Blue Horizon defies neat chronological organization, for it’s a book
with many narratives, one that covers enormous tracts of the world’s oceans and
a bewildering array of human societies. Most history books follow a
chronological gradient, and with good reason, for such a timescale provides a
convenient framework for, say, an account of someone’s life, an unfolding
diplomatic crisis leading to war, or something like the Medieval Warm Period of
a thousand years ago. I always find myself reading such books as stories passing
through time, on the general principle established by the King in Alice in
Wonderland: “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then
stop.” An admirable piece of advice for most books, to be sure, but I’m uncertain
as to whether Blue Horizon is best read that way. With the diffuse narratives in
these pages, you have options.
For this reason, I’ve organized the story in sequences of chapters that describe
early seafaring in different regions of the world. Chapter 1, “‘The Sands and
Flats Are Discovered,’” sets the stage and makes the point that the skills
acquired while skirting coasts are little different from those used offshore. This
book revolves around the close relationships between ancient seafarers and the
ocean. Here I draw on my own experience in small boats of all kinds to discuss
some of the mind-sets that one needs to pilot small vessels close to the shoreline
and far offshore. (There are, of course, some chapters not enhanced by personal
experience: I have not sailed everywhere!) I also introduce another major thread:
the complex relationships our forebears enjoyed with seascapes beset by
uncontrollable forces, waters where powerful beasts and deities, as well as the
ancestors, dwelt. Chapters 2 to 4 describe the earliest deliberate seafaring, which
began off the Southeast Asian mainland more than 50,000 years ago, then trace
the remarkable voyages that led to the colonizing of the Pacific and some of the
remotest islands on earth. From the Pacific, we travel in Chapters 5 and 6 to the
Mediterranean, where seafaring began in the Aegean soon after the Ice Age, by
at least 8000 B.C.E. By 2000 B.C.E., mariners were sailing regularly between
the Persian Gulf and the Indus River in what is now Pakistan. Traveling Indian
Ocean waters depended on the predictable reversals of the monsoon winds over
a wide area between Southeast Asia and Africa, a phenomenon described in
Chapters 7 to 9. It was no accident that the first truly global maritime trade
networks developed in the arms of the monsoon. Chapters 10 and 11 take us