The population of the great Polynesian archipelago presents many highly interesting and suggestive features, bearing closely on the question of oceanic migration. The area of Polynesia proper extends from the small islands westward of the Pelews to Easter Island, and from the Mariannes and the Sandwich Islands to New Zealand on the south. In Tongatabu and Easter Island, as well as in the Micronesian Rota, Tinian, Ualan, and throughout the Caroline group, remains of massive stone buildings, the origin or use of which is wholly unknown to the natives, reveal traces of an extinct civilisation, and afford some possible clew to the strange ethnological phenomena of the Oceanic archipelago. Professor Dana, who, as geologist to the United States Exploring Expedition, had abundant opportunities for observation, came to the conclusion that an immense area in the Pacific has for ages been gradually subsiding; and that the numerous Lagoon Islands mark the spots where what were once the highest peaks of mountains have finally been submerged. Mr. Hale, the philologist of the same expedition, gathered sufficient data from a European who had been resident for a time on the island of Bonabe, in the Caroline archipelago, and from his own observations, to satisfy him that the remarkable stone structures, both Ualan and Bonabe, were erected when the sites on which they stand were at a different level from what they now occupy. “At present they are actually in the water; what were once paths, are now passages for canoes, and when the walls are broken down the water enters the enclosure.”
Such an idea seems like a glimpse of far-reaching truths relative to the unwritten history of that recently explored Southern Ocean. When Columbus discovered the islands of the New World he found them lying in thickly clustered groups, and ere long he reached the mainland of a great continent, which lay in close vicinity to its island satellites. But it was altogether different with the Columbus of the Southern Ocean. A strange Antarctic, as well as an Australian continent lay there also, awaiting new discoverers; but far beyond their coasts the Pacific and Southern groups dotted the wide expanse of ocean like the stars that lose themselves in the abysses of night. We read with wonder, as strange as that which rewarded the revelations of the Western Ocean in the closing years of the fifteenth century, of the voyages and discoveries of Byron, Wallis, Carteret, and of Cook and later explorers of the South Pacific Ocean. When Captain Cook reached the Cape on his return from his second expedition, in 1774, he had sailed no less than twenty thousand leagues, through unknown seas, since he left the same point twenty months before. His grand quest was in search of the Terra Australis Incognita, a continent which it was assumed must exist in the Southern Ocean, as a counterpoise to the land occupying so large a portion of the northern hemisphere; but instead of this, the voyagers sailed for days and weeks through vast seas, arriving by chance, now and again, at some little island, cut off from all the world besides, yet tenanted by human beings. And, as later voyagers have noted, on sailing once more into the limitless horizon, after another long interval, in which many hundreds of miles have been passed, another island-speck appears; and not only is it inhabited, but affinities of speech, mythology, and the primitive ingenuity of native arts, all concur in proving a community of origin. The idea suggested to the sagacious naturalist is now very familiar to the scientific mind. The Pacific Ocean is pre-eminently an area of subsidence, where already not only implements of shell and stone, but probably carvings, sculptures, and even architectural structures, lie buried under the coral breccia of a modern cretacean formation, destined it may be, to puzzle the intelligent research of a remote future, when the northern hemisphere shall once more become the area of subsidence; and the islands of the Pacific will constitute the summits of mountain-chains in the Terra Australis of that coming time.
We must not be misled here, any more than in our estimate of possible Atlantic voyagers, by the undue contempt with which the European is apt to gauge the capacity of primitive island mariners. At Vanikoro, the native canoe is a mere rudely-fashioned trunk of a tree, sufficiently grooved to afford foot-hold; yet to this the islander attaches an outrigger, spreads a mat for his sail, and boldly launches forth into the ocean, though few Europeans would be induced to venture in such a craft on the stillest pool. Dr. Pickering, when illustrating the ideas of ocean migration which he was led to form from intimate observations of widely-scattered and very diverse branches of the human family, remarks: “Of the aboriginal vessels of the Pacific, two kinds only are adapted for long sea-voyages: those of Japan, and the large double canoes of the Society and Tonga groups. In times anterior to the impulse given to civilised Europe through the noble enterprise of Columbus, Polynesians were accustomed to undertake sea-voyages nearly as long, exposed to equal dangers, and in vessels of far inferior construction. However incredible this may appear to many, there is sufficient evidence of the fact. The Tonga people are known to hold intercourse with Vavao, Samoa, the Fiji Islands, Rotuma, and the New Hebrides. But there is a document, published before those seas were frequented by whalers and trading-vessels, which shows a more extensive aboriginal acquaintance with the islands of the Pacific. I allude to the map obtained by Forster and Cook from a native of the Society Islands, and which has been shown to contain not only the Marquesas, and the islands south and east of Tahiti, but the Samoan, Fiji, and even more distant groups. Again, in regard to the principles of navigation, the Polynesians appear to possess a better knowledge of the subject than is commonly supposed, as is shown from recent discoveries at the Hawaiian Islands. One of the Hawaiian headlands has been found to bear the name of The starting-place for Tahiti: the canoes, according to the account of the natives, derived through the missionaries, leaving in former times at a certain season of the year, and directing their course by a particular star.”
But leaving such glimpses of oceanic migration, there is another aspect in which the ingenuity of the primitive boat-builder of the New World is exhibited, which is highly characteristic in itself; and also worthy of notice from some of its elements of comparison with the primeval ingenuity of the ancient world. Throughout the islands of the American archipelago, and among the southern tribes, where large and freely navigable rivers abound, the native canoe was made of various sizes, but invariably of the trunk of a tree hollowed out, and reduced to the required shape. Such appears to be the normal type of the primitive mariner’s craft; but where obstacles interfere with its accomplishment, the rudest races devise means to obviate the difficulty. The Californian canoe is a mere float made of rushes, in the form of a lashed-up hammock; while those of the Navigator Islands, in the Pacific,—so called by La Perouse, their first discoverer, owing to the graceful shape and superior workmanship of their canoes,—are formed of pieces of wood sewed together by means of a raised margin. In this the skilful carpenter is guided rather by utility or taste, than by necessity, for the Navigator Islands are fertile and populous, and clothed to the summits of their lofty hills with luxuriant forests and richly laden fruit-trees.
But across the wide area of the northern continent of America, which stretches from the Gulf of the St. Lawrence to the Pacific, a different combination of circumstances has given bent to the development of native ingenuity in the art of boat-building. In the St. Lawrence itself, and throughout all its principal tributaries, navigation is constantly impeded by waterfalls or rapids, which constitute an insurmountable barrier to ordinary navigation. In like manner the country along the northern and southern shores of Lake Ontario, the valley of the Ottawa, reaching towards the Georgian Bay and Lake Superior, and much of the route between that and the Rocky Mountains, is a chain of lakes or interrupted river navigation. Hence all the principal routes of travel consist of lines of lake and river united by “portages,” or carrying-places, over which the canoe and all its contents have to be borne by the native boatmen, or voyageurs, as the French Canadians and Half-breeds of the traders and Hudson’s Bay Company are called. For such mode of transport the wooden canoe would be all but impracticable; and accordingly, probably ages before voyageurs of European descent had learned to handle such canoes, the native Indian devised for himself his light and graceful bark-boat, made from the rind of the Betula papyracea, or canoe-birch, which grows in great abundance, and where the soil is good often acquires a height of seventy feet.
Portable boats were not unknown to the ancient tribes of the British Isles. In Mr. Shirley’s Account of the Dominion of Farney in Ulster, a curious example of a portable boat is described, formed of the trunk of an oak tree, measuring twelve feet in length by three feet in breadth, hollowed out, and furnished with handles at both ends, evidently for facility of transport from one loch to another. The district is one abounding with small lakes, such as the ancient Irish chiefs frequently selected as chosen retreats in which to construct their crannoges, or other insulated strongholds, beyond the reach of hostile surprise. But a closer analogy may be traced between the Indian birch-bark canoe and the coracle of the ancient Briton described by Julius Cæsar as a frame of wicker-work covered with skins. The same kind of canoe is in use at the present day on the lakes in the interior of Newfoundland, where the Montagnars from the Labrador coast frequently spend the summer. Their birch canoes are carefully secured for the return voyage to the mainland; and a deer-skin stretched over a wicker frame supplies all the requisites for inland navigation. But the true counterpart to the British coracle is the Esquimaux kaiak, which consists of a light frame covered with skin; and as this is brought over the top, and made to wrap round the body of its occupant, it enables the amphibious navigator, both of the North Pacific and the Greenland seas, to brave a stormy ocean in which no open boat could live.
Hamilco, the Carthaginian, according to Festus Avienus, witnessed the ancient Britons “ploughing the ocean in a novel boat; for, strange to tell, they constructed their vessels with skins joined together, and often navigated the sea in a hide of leather.” Upwards of four centuries later, Cæsar found the same stormy sea navigated by the southern Britons in their coracles. When, in the sixth century, in the lives of the Irish Saints, we once more recover some glimpse of maritime arts, it is in the same coracles—sometimes made of a single hide, and in other cases, such as the ocean currach of St. Columba, of several skins sewed together,—that the evangelists of Iona crossed the Irish sea, visited the Orkney and Shetland Islands, and even, as there is reason to believe, preceded the Northmen in the discovery of Iceland. The old Scottish historian Bellenden, writing in the sixteenth century, asks: “How can there be greater ingyne than to make a boat of a bull’s hyde bound with nothing but wands? This boat is called a currock, with which they fish, and sometimes pass over great rivers.” This primitive boat is even now to be met with in the river-estuaries of Wales, and on various parts of the Irish coast: the counterpart of the Esquimaux kaiak, or the baydar with which the Aleutian Islanders navigate the intervening ocean between Asia and America. Dr. Pickering remarks, on encountering the latter to the north of the Strait of De Fuca:—“From its lightness, elegance, and the capacity of being rendered impervious to both air and water, I could not but admire its perfect adaptation to the purposes of navigation; for it seemed almost to enable man to take a place among the proper inhabitants of the deep. Such vessels are obviously fitted to cope with the open sea, and, so far as the absence of sails permits, to traverse a considerable expanse of ocean.”
It is a curious fact, well worthy of notice, that throughout the American continent, seemingly so dependent on maritime colonisation for its settlement by man, the use of sails as a means of propelling vessels through the water appears to have been almost unknown. Prescott, when describing the singular suspension bridges, made of the tough fibres of the maguey, with which the Peruvians spanned the broad gullies of their mountain streams, adds: “The wider and more tranquil waters were crossed on balsas, a kind of raft still much used by the natives, to which sails were attached, furnishing the only instance of this higher kind of navigation among the American Indians.”[[67]] This statement of the historian is too comprehensive; for, although the Peruvians were so essentially an agricultural and unmaritime people, the use of sails in their coasting trade constitutes one of their noticeable points of superiority over other nations of the New World. Attention is specially directed to this by an incident recorded in the second expedition for the discovery of Peru preparatory to its conquest. Bartholomew Ruiz, the pilot of the expedition, after lingering on the coast, near the Bay of St. Matthew, stood out into the ocean, when he was suddenly surprised by the sight of a vessel in that strange, silent sea, seemingly like a caravel of considerable size, with its broad sail spread before the wind. “The old navigator was not a little perplexed by this phenomenon, as he was confident that no European bark could have been before him in these latitudes; and no Indian nation yet discovered, not even the civilised Mexican, was acquainted with the use of sails in navigation.” As he drew near, it proved to be a native balsa, formed of huge timbers of light, porous wood, and with a flooring of reeds raised above them. Two masts sustained the large, square, cotton sail; and a moveable keel and rudder enabled the boatman to steer. On board of it Ruiz found ornaments displaying great skill, wrought in silver and gold, vases and mirrors of burnished silver, curious fabrics, both cotton and woollen, and a pair of balances made to weigh the precious metals. Here were the first undoubted evidences of the existence of that strange seat of a native American civilisation, among the lofty valleys of the Southern Andes, which he was in search of. The balsa’s crew included both men and women, who carried with them provisions for their voyage, and had come from a Peruvian port some degrees to the south. Like older voyagers of the Mediterranean, the Peruvian pilots were wont to creep timidly along the shore; but the Spaniards encountered them in the open Pacific, where no European prow had ever sailed. Caught by a sudden gale their bark might have been borne far off among the islands that stud the Southern Ocean, and here was the germ of a race of islanders, to whom, after a few generations, the memory of their Peruvian ancestry would have survived only as some mythic legend, like the Manco Capac of their own Incas, or the Mawai of the Polynesian archipelago.
| [66] | What is Technology? an Inaugural Lecture. By George Wilson, M.D., Regius Professor of Technology, Edinburgh University. |