The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays

by Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

As human culture developed northward from the equator toward the 40th parallel of latitude, civilization began to bud out in Egypt, India, and China, and a great highway of nations was established by means of ships along the southern margin of the land, from China to the Red Sea.

Along this ocean highway may be traced many connexions in ship forms which have survived from the earliest times. The oculus, which, on the sacred boats of the Egyptians, represented the eye of Osiris guiding the mummy of the departed across the sacred lake, is still seen eastward—in India and China—converted into an ornamental device, whilst westward it lived through the period of the Roman and Grecian biremes and triremes, and has survived to this day on the Maltese rowing-boats and the xebecque of Calabria, or has been converted into a hawser-hole in modern European craft. The function of the rudder—which in the primitive vessels of the southern world is still performed by the paddlers, whilst paddling with their faces to the prow—was confided, as sails began to be introduced, to the rearmost oars. In some of the Egyptian sculptures the three hindermost rowers on each side are seen steering the vessel with their oars. Ultimately one greatly developed oar on each side of the stern performed this duty; the loom of which was attached to an upright beam on the deck, as is still the case in some parts of India. In some of the larger Malay prahaus there are openings or windows in the stern, considerably below the deck, by which the steersmen have access to two large rudders, one on each side; each rudder being the vestige of a side oar.

Throughout the Polynesian Islands the steering is performed with either one or two greatly developed paddles. Both in the rudder of the Egyptian sculptures and in the gubernaculum of the Roman vessels, we see the transition from the large double oar, one on each side, to the single oar at the stern. The ship of Ptolemaeus Philopator had four rudders, each thirty cubits in length (Smith’s Dict., s. v. ‘Navis’). The Chinese and Japanese rudder is but a modification of the oar, worked through large holes in the stern of the vessel; which large holes, in the case of the Japanese, owe their preservation to the orders of the Tycoon, who caused them to be retained in all his vessels, in order to prevent his subjects from venturing far to sea. The buccina, or shell trumpet, which is used especially on board all canoes in the Pacific, from the coast of Peru to Ceylon, is represented, together with the gubernaculum, in the hands of Tritons in Roman sculptures (Smith’s Dict., s. v. ‘Navis’), and the shell form of it was preserved in its metallic representatives.

The sail, in its simplest form, consists of a triangular mat, with bamboos lashed to the two longer sides. In New Guinea and some of the other islands, this sail, which is here seen in its simplest form, is simply put up on deck, with the apex downwards and the broad end up, and kept up by stays fore and aft. When a separate mast was introduced, this sail was hauled up by a halyard attached to one of the bamboos, at the distance of about one-fifth of its length from the broad end, the apex of the bamboo-edged mat being fastened forward by means of a tack. By taking away the lower bamboo the sail became the lateen sail of the Malay pirate proa, the singular resemblance of which to that of the Maltese galley of the eighteenth century (a resemblance shared by all other parts of the two vessels) may be seen by two models placed side by side in the Royal United Service Institution. Professor Wilson observes that the use of the sail appears to be almost unknown on either continent of America, and the surprise of the Spaniards on first seeing one used on board a Peruvian balza arose from this known peculiarity of early American navigation (p. [218]). Lahontan, however, in 1684, says that the Canadian bark canoes, though usually propelled by paddles, sometimes carried a small sail. He does not, however, say whether the knowledge of these has been derived from Europeans. Mr. Lloyd also mentions small sails used with bark canoes in Newfoundland.

The crow’s-nest, which in the Egyptian vessels served to contain a slinger or an archer at the top of the mast, and which is also represented in the Assyrian sculptures, was still used for the same purpose in Europe in the fifteenth century, was modified in the sixteenth century, and became the mast-head so well known to midshipmen in our own time. The two raised platforms, which in the Egyptian vessels served to contain the man with the fathoming pole in the fore part, and the steersman behind, became the prora and the puppis of the Romans, and the forecastle and poop of modern European vessels. The aplustre, which, in the form of a lotus, ornamented the stern of the Egyptian war-craft, gave the form to the aplustre of the Greeks and Romans, and may still be seen on the stern of the Burmese war-boats at the present time.

All these numerous examples serve to show that where civilization has advanced the forms have been gradually changed; where, on the other hand, it has not advanced, they have remained unchanged. Sir Gardner Wilkinson and others have pointed out the striking resemblance between the boats of the ancient Egyptians and those of modern India. ‘The form of the stern, the principle and construction of the rudder, the cabins, the square sail, the copper eye on each side of the head, the line of small squares at the side, like false windows, and the shape of the oars of boats used on the Ganges, forcibly call to mind,’ he says, ‘those of the Nile, represented in the paintings of the Theban tombs.’ We have also seen (p. [214]) that the inflated sheep-skin still serves to transport the Mesopotamian peasant across the Euphrates, as it did when Nimroud was a thriving city. The skin and wicker tub-shaped vessels still float down the Euphrates with their cargoes to Baghdad, are broken up, and the skins carried up the river again on mules, as they were in the time of Herodotus, upwards of 2,000 years ago. What is there to prevent our believing that the primitive vessels which we have been describing in the southern hemisphere, the representatives of some of which have been discovered in river deposits of the stone age in Europe, may have been in use in the countries in which they are now found, as long, and longer—far longer?

What reason is there to doubt that the rude bark-float of the Australian, the Tasmanian, and the Ethiopian; the catamaran of the Papuan; the dug-out of the New Zealander; the built-up canoe of the Samoan; and the improved ribbed vessel of the Ke islander, are survivals representing successive stages in the development of the art of ship-building, not lapses to ruder methods of construction as the result of degradation; that each stage supplies us with examples of what was at one time the perfection of the art, inconceivable ages ago? Some, as we have seen, especially the more primitive kinds, spread nearly all over the world, whilst others had a more limited area of distribution. Taken together, they enable us to trace back the history of ship-building from the time of the earliest Egyptian sculptures to the commencement of the art.

Nor does the interest of this inquiry confine itself to the development of ship-building. As affecting the means of locomotion, it throws light on the development of other branches of culture in early times. For even if we set aside exceptional instances in which individual canoes have been driven away to great distances—such as the case in which an Esquimaux in his kayak was picked up off the coast of Aberdeen, or that of a Chinese junk having been wrecked on the north-west coast of America, which might or might not have produced permanent results—and confine ourselves to those cases in which the distribution of like forms of vessels proves that there must probably have been frequent communication between shore and shore; and if we further assume, as I propose to do, that the existing means of communication in the Pacific in a great measure represents the amount of intercourse that took place across the sea in prehistoric times, that is to say, in times prior to the earliest Egyptian sculptures, we find no difficulty in accounting, by this means, for the striking similarity observable in the arts and ideas of savages in distant lands; for not only have these vessels been the means of conveying from place to place the material form of implements, such as celts, stone knives, and so forth, which, being imperishable, have been handed down to us unchanged, and the forms of which we know to have spread over large geographic areas; but also each voyage has conveyed a boat-load of ideas, of which no material record remains, in the shape of myths, religions, and superstitions, which have been emptied out upon the seashore, to seek affinity with other chatter that was indigenous to the place.

Thus, by means of intercommunication, no less than by spontaneous development, have been formed those numerous combinations which so greatly puzzle the student of culture at the present time.