CHAPTER VI.

THE CANOE.

THE USE OF TOOLS—TOOL-USING INSTINCT—RUDIMENTARY STAGE OF ART— PRIMITIVE RIVER-CRAFT—THE GUANAHANÈ CANOE—OCEAN NAVIGATION— AFRICAN CANOE-MAKING—OREGON CEDAR CANOES—NATIVE WHALERS OF THE PACIFIC—PREHISTORIC BOAT BUILDERS—MAWAI’S CANOES—THE POLYNESIAN ARCHIPELAGO—THE TERRA AUSTRALIS INCOGNITA— CANOE-FLEETS OF THE PACIFIC—PRIMITIVE NAVIGATION—PORTABLE BOATS—THE CORACLE AND KAIAK—THE PERUVIAN BALSA—OCEAN NAVIGATORS.

The discovery of fire, and its application even to such simple purposes of art as the hardening of the wooden spear, or the hollowing of the monoxylous canoe, suffice to illustrate the characteristics of man, not merely as a reasoning, but also as a tool-using, or, as Franklin defined him, a tool-making animal. Whilst, however, an innate instinct seems to prompt him to supplement his helplessness by such means, mechanical science, the industrial and the fine arts, are all progressive developments which his intellect superinduces on that tool-using instinct. And through all the countless ages revealed to the geologist, with ever new orders of successive life; with beast, bird, crustacean, insect, and zoophyte, endowed with wonderful constructive instincts, and perpetuating memorials of architecture and sculpture, of which the microscope is alone adequate to reveal the exquisite beauty and infinite variety of design: yet so thoroughly is the use of tools the exclusive attribute of man, that the discovery of a single artificially shaped flint in the drift or cave-breccia, is deemed proof enough that man has been there. The flint implement or weapon lies beside bones revealing species kindred to the sagacious elephant, or to those of carnivora allied to the dog, with its wonderful instincts bordering on reason and the forethought of experience; yet no theorist dreams of the hypothesis that some wiser _Elephas primigenius_, in advance of his age, devised the flint-spear wherewith to oppose more effectually the aggressions of the gigantic carnivora, whose remains abound in the ossiferous caverns.

But if man was created with a tool-using instinct, and with faculties capable of developing it into all the mechanical triumphs which command such wonder and admiration in our day, he was also created with a necessity for such. “The heritage of nakedness, which no animal envies us, is not more the memorial of the innocence that once was ours, than it is the omen of the labours which it compels us to undergo. With the intellect of angels, and the bodies of earth-worms, we have the power to conquer, and the need to do it. Half of the industrial arts are the result of our being born without clothes; the other half of our being born without tools.”[66]

With the growing wants of men as they gathered into communities, novel arts were developed; and the demands of each new-felt want called into being means for its supply. Artificers in brass and iron multiplied, and the sites of the first cities of the earth were adorned with temples, palaces, sculptured marbles, and cunningly-wrought shrines. But whenever communities were broken up and scattered, the elements of an acquired civilisation were inevitably left behind. All but the most indispensable arts disappear during the process of migration; and although the wanderers might at length find a home in “a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass,” no arts are so speedily lost among migratory tribes as those of metallurgy. The hold of the accumulated wisdom and experience of successive generations must be partial and uncertain among an unlettered people, dependent on tradition for all knowledge excepting such as is practically transmitted in the operations of daily experience. Few indeed of all the wanderers from the old centres of European civilisation to the wilds of the New World bring with them the slightest knowledge either of the science or the practice of metallurgy. Every chemical analyst knows what it is to receive pyrites for silver, and ochres for iron or gold. Even now the skill of the American miner has to be imported, and the copper-miners of Lake Superior are chiefly derived from Cornwall, Norway, or the mining districts of Germany.

With all our many artificial wants so promptly supplied, even in the remotest colony, we are slow to perceive how much we owe to the wondrous appliances of modern civilisation, and its division of labour. The Dutchman exported his very bricks across the Atlantic, wherewith to found his New Amsterdam on the banks of the Hudson; and the English colonist, with enterprise enough to mine the copper and iron of Lake Superior, still seeks a market for the ores in England, and imports from thence both the engineers and the iron wherewith to bridge his St. Lawrence. With such facts before us in relation even to the systematic colonisation of a highly civilised and enterprising commercial nation, it is easy to understand what must have been the condition of the earth’s primeval wanderers. Their industrial arts were all to begin anew; and thus we see that the non-metallurgic condition of primitive social life which is designated its Stone Period, is not necessarily the earliest human period, but only the rudimentary state to which man had returned, and may return again, in the inevitable deterioration of a migratory era.

Evidence of various kinds still points to a cradle-land for the human family towards the western borders of Central Asia, and remote from its coasts: probably in that range of country stretching between the head-waters of the Indus and the Tigris. The earliest history of man that we possess represents the postdiluvian wanderers journeying eastward, and at length settling on a plain that long afterwards remained one of the chief centres of history. But the arts there developed belonged exclusively to a far inland people; and to this day the rude craft of the Tigris and the Euphrates betrays a total absence of maritime instinct or skill in navigation. The highest effort of their boat-builders is little more than to construct a temporary raft, on which themselves and their simple freight may float in safety down the current of the great river. Similar rafts are still in use by the Egyptians, formed of earthenware jars bound together by withes and cords, and covered with bulrushes. Like the corresponding river-craft of the Euphrates, these are steered down the Nile, never to return; for, on their arrival at Cairo, the rafts are broken up, and the jars sold in the bazaars. Such was the rudimentary condition of navigation in that great Asiatic hive of nations where man chiefly dwelt for centuries remote from the sea. But from thence the wanderers were scattered over the face of the whole earth. The primitive river-craft, therefore, found an early development into sea-craft; and oceanic migration gave a new character to the wanderings of the primeval nomads. Thenceforth, accordingly, those instinctive tendencies began to characterise certain branches of the human family, as leaders of maritime enterprise, which may be traced under very diverse degrees of social development: as in the Phœnicians, the Northmen, the Malays, and the Polynesians; while other tribes and nations, such as the Celts and the Fijians, though living on the coast, are tempted by no longings to voyage on the ocean’s bosom.

The islands of the Central American archipelago were the first to reward the sagacity of Columbus, as he steered his course westward in search of the old East. The arts of their simple natives accordingly attracted his attention; and although he found among them personal ornaments of gold, sufficient to awaken the avaricious longings of the Spaniards for that fatal treasure of the New World, yet practically they were in ignorance of metallurgic arts, and lacked that stimulus to ingenious industry which the requisites of clothing call forth in less genial climes. The natives of Guanahanè, or San Salvador, were friendly and gentle savages, in the simplicity, if not in the innocence, of nakedness. Their only weapons were lances of wood hardened in the fire, pointed with the teeth or bone of a fish, or furnished with a blade made either of the universal flint, or more frequently, with them, from the large tropical shells which abound in the West Indian seas. They had learned to turn the native cotton-plant to economical account; but their chief mechanical ingenuity was expended on the light barks to which they gave the now universal name of _canoe_. These were formed from the trunk of a single tree, hollowed by fire, with the help of their primitive adzes of flint or shell, and were of various sizes, from the tiny bark only capable of holding its solitary owner, to the galley manned by forty or fifty rowers, who propelled it swiftly through the water with their paddles, and baled it with the invaluable native calabash, which supplied every domestic utensil, and rendered them indifferent to the potter’s art.

The canoe has a peculiar interest and value in relation to the archæology of the New World. With our wondrous steamships, wherewith we have bridged the Atlantic, we are apt to lose faith in the capacity of uncivilised man for overcoming such obstacles as the dividing oceans which had so long concealed America from the ancient world. But the bark in which Columbus first crossed the Atlantic was in no degree more capable of braving the ocean’s terrors than the navies of the Mediterranean had been a thousand years before; and the primitive canoes of the American archipelago far more nearly resembled the Pinta, or the Niña with its lateen sails, than the smallest of our modern ocean craft.

Throughout the Polynesian archipelago, fragments of foreign vocabularies are the chief traces of that oceanic migration by which alone the descendants of a common race could people those distant islands of the sea. The recognition of certain Malay and Polynesian words in the language of the remote island of Madagascar is one striking illustration of what such intrusive linguistic elements imply. We can thus trace the primitive voyagers, in their _praus_, or slight Malayan vessels, navigating an ocean of three thousand miles; and perceive how, even by such means, the ocean highway was open to the world’s grey fathers in remotest prehistoric times.

In this view of the case, the canoe of America is the type of a developed instinct pregnant with many suggestive thoughts for us; and the traces of the primeval ship-builder’s art accumulate wonderfully so soon as attention is drawn to it. On the banks of the Clyde, the voyager from the New World looks with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics of those huge steamers, which have made the ocean, that proved so impassable a barrier to the men of the fifteenth century, the easy highway of commerce and pleasure for us. The roar of the iron forge, the clang of the fore-hammer, the intermittent glare of the furnaces, and all the novel appliances of iron ship-building, tell of the modern era of steam; but, meanwhile, underneath these very ship-builders’ yards lie the memorials of ancient Clyde fleets, in which we are borne back, up the stream of human history, far into prehistoric times. The earliest recorded discovery of a Clyde canoe took place in 1780, at a depth of twenty-five feet below the surface, on a site known by the apt designation of St. Enoch’s croft. It was hewn out of a single oak, and within it, near the prow, lay a beautifully finished stone axe or celt, represented here (Fig. 50), doubtless one of the simple implements with which this primitive ship of the Clyde had been fashioned into shape. At least sixteen other canoes have been since brought to light; some of them buried many feet underneath sites occupied by the most ancient structures of the city of Glasgow. It is difficult to apply any satisfactory test whereby to gauge the lapse of centuries since this primitive fleet plied in the far-inland estuary that then occupied the area through which the Clyde has wrought its later channel; but that the changes in geological, no less than in technological, aspects indicate a greatly prolonged interval, cannot admit of doubt. Yet primitive man, alike in Africa and in the New World, is still practising the rude ingenuity of the same boat-builder’s art which the allophylian of the Clyde pursued in that remote dawn.

The vessel in which Captain Speke explored Lake Tanganyika was a long narrow canoe, hollowed out of the trunk of a single tree. “These vessels,” he says, “are mostly built from large timbers, growing in the district of Ugubha, on the western side of the lake. The savages fell them, lop off the branches and ends to the length required, and then, after covering the upper surface with wet mud as the tree lies upon the ground, they set fire to, and smoulder out its interior, until nothing but a case remains, which they finish by paring out with roughly constructed hatchets.”

The islanders of the Southern Ocean, the natives of many parts of the African continent, and the canoe-builders of the New World, all employ the agency of fire to supplement their imperfect tools. The stone axe of the St. Enoch’s croft canoe is formed of highly polished dark greenstone. It measures five and a half inches in length by three and a half in breadth; and an unpolished band round the centre indicates where it had been bound to its haft, leaving both ends disengaged, as is frequently the case with the stone hatchets of the American Indians and the Polynesians. But the accompanying woodcut (Fig. 51) drawn from one brought by Mr. Paul Kane from the Strait of De Fuca, shows a more ingenious mode of hafting the stone adze. Such implements are in use by the Clalam Indians for constructing out of the trunks of cedar trees, large and highly ornamented canoes, in which they fearlessly face the dangers of the Pacific Ocean. Some of their canoes, made out of a single tree, measure upwards of fifty feet long, and are capable of carrying thirty as a crew. They have thwarts from side to side, about three inches thick, and their gunwales curve outwards so as to throw off the waves. The bow and stern rise in a graceful sweep, sometimes to a height of five feet, and are decorated with grotesque figures of men and animals. The Indian crew kneel two and two along the bottom, and propel the canoe rapidly with paddles from four to five feet long, while a bowman and steersman sit, each with his paddle, at either end, and thus equipped these savages venture in their light bark upon the most tempestuous seas. One of their most coveted prizes is the whale, the blubber of which is eaten along with dried fish, and esteemed no less highly by them than by the Esquimaux. Since the encroachments of European settlements on their territories their game has greatly diminished, and few whales approach the coast; but, when an opportunity offers, the Indians are enthusiastic in the chase, and the process by which their prize is secured furnishes an interesting illustration of native ingenuity and daring. When a whale is seen blowing in the offing, they rush to their canoes and push off, furnished with a number of large sealskin bags filled with air, each attached by a cord to a barbed spear-head, in the socket of which is fitted a handle five or six feet long. Upon coming up with the whale, the barbed heads are driven into it, and the handles withdrawn; until the whale, no longer able to sink from the buoyancy of the air-bags, is despatched and towed ashore. By just such a process may the whale have been stranded at the base of Dunmyat, in times when an ancient ocean washed the foot of the Ochil hills, and the old Scottish whaler revelled in spoils such as now reward the enterprise of the savages of the North Pacific coast.

It is thus seen to how large an extent the primitive canoe may have sufficed for remote ocean expeditions. The old navigators of the Clyde were probably not a whit less fearless than the native whalers of the Oregon coast; and they had to face dangers fully equal to any of those to which voyagers of the Pacific are exposed, whenever they navigated the lochs and island channels towards its mouth, or ventured beyond it, to face the gales and currents of the Irish Sea. The Clyde has supplied an unusually rich store of illustrations of primitive ship-carpentry; but the disclosures of another Scottish locality also merit notice here. The carse of Falkirk is intimately associated with some very memorable events of Scottish history. It is traversed by the vallum and chain of forts reared by Lollius Urbicus the Roman proprætor of Antoninus Pius in the early part of the second century, and is rich in memorials of many later incidents. But underneath lie far older records. In the year 1726, a sudden rise of the river Carron undermined a portion of its banks, and exposed to view a canoe of unusually large dimensions, fashioned with care from a single oak tree, and lying at a depth of fifteen feet beneath successive strata of clay, shells, moss, sand, and gravel. The Statistical Accounts record the discovery, in the vicinity of Falkirk, of another ancient boat buried thirty feet below the surface, in the same carse from which the remains of a mammoth were exhumed in excavating the Union Canal in 1821. Those traces of primitive human art have already been referred to in the _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, but a further discovery in the same locality confers a fresh interest upon them. Soon after the publication of that work, when on a visit to Falkirk, I was shown by Dr. G. Hamilton a human skull, which at once attracted my attention from its marked correspondence to the brachycephalic crania of ancient British graves. It is figured here, Fig. 52, from a careful drawing executed at a later date. The facial bones and the whole of the base are wanting, but enough remains to show that it is well developed, according to a type of crania of the early Scottish tumuli. But what confers a special interest on it is, that it was found in the same alluvial carse-land as the ancient canoes and the fossil bones of the _Elephas primigenius_, twenty feet below the surface, in a bed of shell and gravel, when digging the area of the large Grangemouth lock of the Union Canal, on the 29th of June 1843. Buried at such a depth in the detritus of the river-valley, it may be regarded as a record of the men of the period when the valleys of the Forth and Carron were navigable arms of the sea; and may even belong to the epoch when their shores were peopled by a race of fishermen contemporaneous with the whalers of Dunmyat and Blair-Drummond Moss, and with the monoxylous boatmen of the Clyde.

Among many of the islands of the Southern Ocean the boats are simple wooden canoes, pointed at either end, and propelled through the water with the paddle; but the barks of the true Polynesians are more elaborate and ingenious. They frequently are double, with a raised platform or quarter-deck; and are invariably provided with an outrigger, an article seemingly of Malay origin. So essential, indeed, is the latter deemed for safe navigation, that the most remarkable characteristic recognised by the Tahitians, when Captain Cook’s vessels first revealed to them the wonders of European civilisation, was the want of the indispensable outrigger. Throughout the mythology of oceanic Polynesia, Mawai, the upholder of the earth, and the revealer of the secrets of the future, plays a prominent part. In one of his prophecies, Mawai foretold that a ship such as had never been seen before, a canoe without outriggers, should in process of time come out of the ocean. But to the mind of a Tahitian, an ocean canoe without an outrigger was so impossible a thing that they laughed their prophet to scorn: whereupon Mawai launched his wooden dish on the waters, which swam without outrigger, and the Tahitians thenceforward looked for the strange marvel of the outriggerless canoe. Cook’s ship was regarded as the fulfilment of Mawai’s prediction, and still English vessels are frequently called Mawai’s canoes. The mythic prophecy seems in reality one of those vague traditions of ancestral intercourse with other members of the human family, such as, among the Aztecs, led to the belief that the ships of Cortes had returned from the source of the rising sun with Quetzalcoatl, the divine instructor of their forefathers in the arts of civilisation.

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.

[67] _Conquest of Peru_, vol. i. B. I. ch. ii.