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

“that the peculiar shape of the Tongan kalia, or double canoe, and the arrangement of its large and single [wishbone] sail, are conducive to the attainment of great speed in ordinary weather.” (Quoted in Paul Johnstone, The Sea-Craft of Prehistory, 205.) Courtesy of the British Museum, London.

Maritime Trade in South America and the Caribbean
    When Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, he landed in theBahamas archipelago southeast ofFlorida. On the advice of Taíno Indians he kidnapped there, he sailed 130 miles across the Bahama Bank to Cuba. FromArawaks he later met onHispaniola (the island of the Dominican Republic andHaiti) he learned of other people to the south, whom the Spanish called theCariba or Caniba, from which we get the words “Caribbean” and “cannibal.” The usual focus on Columbus tends to leave basic questions unasked: Who were the Taíno, Arawak, and Carib people? Where did they come from, and when? How did they travel? Columbus and his contemporaries had their own answers, some steeped in theological and even mystical belief about the nature of the origin of man. Thanks to the dearth of written histories by indigenous Americans, the first European visitors’ preoccupation with ensuring their own prosperity, and the catastrophic loss of population to Eurasian disease throughout the Americas—and with it the oral traditions that might have shed light on these questions—the work of tracing the origins andmigration patterns of humans in the Americas has fallen to specialists in disciplines from paleontology and archaeology to linguistics and genetics.
    Particularly difficult to tease out is the role played by seafaring and inland navigation in the initial settlement and subsequent dispersal of people and cultures fromAlaska and northernCanada, east toGreenland and south toTierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. Four scenarios for the peopling of the Americas have been posited, none of which can be proven conclusively. Three argue for an arrival by sea—two via the Pacific and one via the Atlantic; the fourth depends on an overland migration from Northeast Asia to Canada. Looked at another way, three favor a Southeast or East Asian origin, while one believes that people arrived from Europe. Of the two maritime Asian routes, one posits a transpacific migration, which was surely impossible more than fifteen thousand years ago, and the other favors acoastal migration fromSiberia to Alaska and western Canada. This last theory has achieved wide currency but is not necessarily the last word on the subject.
    During the lastice age—whenAustralia, New Guinea, andTasmania comprised the landmass ofSahul—theBering Strait was also dry land and with contiguous areas of Siberia and Alaska formed an Asian-American land bridgeknown asBeringia. According to thePacific Rim or coastal route theory of migration, people from Asia reached the Americas in boats by hugging the coast of Beringia. Despite the widespread presence of ice, the warm waters of the eastward-flowing North Pacific current would have ameliorated the conditions on the coasts—just as theGulf Stream moderates theclimate ofIceland and northwest Europe today—and created intermittent ice-free peninsulas and islands where people could replenish their water and food. These coastal migrants would have skirted Beringia as far as the QueenCharlotte Islands offBritish Columbia, near the southern limit of the ice sheet, before they had the opportunity to turn inland. About eleven thousand years ago, rising sea levels began flooding the land that lies beneath the Bering Strait, which is now forty-five nautical miles wide.
    The southerlyCalifornia current would have hastened migrants’ progress as far as Baja California, but the west coast of the United States is notorious for itsdearth of harbors, islands, or major rivers south of theColumbia River, on the border between Washington andOregon. No people on the coast between Oregon and