The First Days of Man, as Narrated Quite Simply for Young Readers

by Frederic Arnold Kummer

For a long time after Ka-Ma and his wife came to live beside the sea, his children and his children's children continued to use rafts, made of logs tied together, for floating on the waters of the river. They never ventured on the ocean with these rafts, because of the heavy waves, and surf. Once or twice a raft was swept from the river into the sea, but the waves dashed over it, washing the men upon it into the water, and finally tossed it like a cork through the foaming surf and left it, battered and broken, on the beach. Some of the sea people were drowned in this way, and this made them very careful when they used their rafts upon the river.

There was a young man in the tribe named Ma-Ya, who used to sit for hours on the beach, looking out across the ocean, and wondering what was on the other side. He thought the ocean was a very wide river, too wide for him to see across, but he believed that if he could find some way of reaching the other side, he might find a new country, filled with strange adventures. The early men who lived by the sea always felt this call to cross its wide surface, and find new lands. It was the spirit which drove the early Norsemen, the Vikings, to Iceland, and later on, all the way across the Atlantic to the shores of North America, many centuries before Columbus made his first voyage. It sent these same Norsemen southward, around the shores of Spain to the coast of Africa, and into the Mediterranean Sea until they came to Italy, and even to the shores of Asia. But all this was thousands of years later, when man had learned how to build stout ships out of wooden planks, driven by long rows of oars, and sails.

Ma-Ya, sitting on the beach, made up his mind that some day he would cross the Great Water, and see what was on the other side. He believed there was land there, because he often saw flocks of birds winging their way inland from the sea, and he felt sure that in the place from which they came there must be food for them to eat, and trees for them to nest in, just as there were in his own country. But he knew he could never venture to make such a voyage on a clumsy raft.

One day, while fishing along the banks of the river, he saw, floating in the water, a dry leaf. A caterpillar had spun his cocoon in it, and with his web had drawn together the ends and sides of the leaf in such a way that it took the form of a perfect little canoe. When Ma-Ya saw it, it was gliding rapidly down the stream, dancing over the little waves like a bit of thistledown. In the centre of it lay the single passenger, the caterpillar in his cocoon.

Ma-Ya thought how nice it would be if he had such a boat to ride in. He thought about this a great deal, and finally an idea came into his head. Why could he not make himself a boat shaped like that, large enough to carry him and one of his companions upon the surface of the water? But it was a long time before he found a way to do it.

The sea people had learned a great deal from twisting and weaving rushes and reeds together to form the roofs and framework of their huts. Ma-Ya thought that in this way he might use reeds to make the framework of a boat.

So he got a great pile of reeds and wove them into a large round basket, shaped something like a bowl, and big enough to hold him. Then he covered the basket with the skin of a sea animal he had killed, tying the edges of the skin to the rim or edge of the wicker bowl. When he put his new boat in the water, it floated very nicely, but it had a bad habit of turning round and round, no matter which way he paddled. Still, it was much lighter than a raft, and could be used to cross the river in, or to fish from in quiet pools. But Ma-Ya was not satisfied with it; he wanted a boat which would be longer and narrower, with pointed ends, so that it could be more easily driven through the water. So he kept on thinking and thinking.

These round basket-work boats were called coracles, and sometimes, instead of being covered with skins, they were made by plastering all over the basket-work surface a kind of pitch that the early people found oozing from the ground. They were not very useful boats, however, and that was why Ma-Ya made up his mind to build a better one.

At last, after thinking about the matter for a long time, he found a way. First he took two long, stout poles of seasoned wood, such as the tribe used for making the handles of their spears. These two wooden poles he laid side by side on the ground, and then bound their ends tightly together with leather thongs. When this was done, he pulled the two poles apart in the middle, bending them like two bows until they were about three feet apart. A stick of this length, placed between the two poles in the middle, kept them apart. He now had a strong framework, very much the shape of a long, narrow leaf, pointed at each end, and widest in the middle.

When this was done, Ma-Ya got another pole about three feet longer than the framework, and bent the two ends of it upward at right angles to the main part of the pole. These bent ends, which were about eighteen inches long each, did not bend upward sharply, like the upright leg of the letter "L," but sloped upward on a curve, like the sides of the letter "U." Then he fastened the two uprights to the ends of his framework, with the straight part of the pole eighteen inches below it. This gave him the main framework of his boat. Then he took many strong slender reeds and bent them U-shaped, fastening the middle or bottom of the "U" to the bottom pole, and the two ends to the two upper or side poles. Because these side poles were widest apart in the middle, the U-shaped reeds were wide and flat there, but toward the two ends of the boat, the "U" shapes became narrower and narrower until at the ends they were shaped like a narrow "V." These bent reeds formed the ribs of the boat, and were held in place by wrappings of strong cord.