The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World by Lincoln Paine Read Free Book Online Page B

for these purposes.” The simplicity of this “centerboard steering” so impressed the author of this description, a Spanish naval officer, that he recommended that
guares
be incorporated into life rafts carried aboard European ships, though without success.
    Climatic factors favor a northbound voyage from Ecuador to Mexico or Guatemala over the return trip. Computer models indicate that thefastest northbound passages (mostly in sight of the coast) would have taken forty-six days, compared with ninety-three days southbound. Although the seasonal difference between the longest and shortest voyages from Ecuador was negligible, the best time of year to sail was around April. The best time to start the southward trip was between February and April, but contrary currents and winds required two lengthy offshore passages. Off Guatemala, the
balsa
would sail 200 nautical miles due south before turning east for the coast of El Salvador. The second offshore leg was from the northern end of theGulf of Panama to the coast of Ecuador, a distance of about 400 miles.
    Although there was a fair amount of inland navigation within Mesoamerica, Ecuadorian navigatorsexcited no imitation on the part of theOlmecs (1200–300 BCE ),Mayas (300–1000 CE ), or Aztecs (1200–1519),none of whom seem to have engaged in anything more than short-range coastal navigation or to have used sails. The only instance of long-range maritime trade known from the east coast of Mesoamerica was maintained by thePutun Maya between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. This was well after the height of the Classic Maya period (ca. 430–830), but their diverse trade, which included salt, obsidian, jade and copper, quetzal feathers, cacao beans, cotton, slaves, andpottery, linked coastal trading centers from north of theYucatán Peninsula toHonduras.Ferdinand Columbus described an encounter that his father had off the latter on his fourth voyage in 1502 when
    by good fortune there arrived at that time a canoe long as agalley and eight feet wide, made of a single tree trunk like the other Indian canoes; it was freighted with merchandise from the western regions aroundNew Spain [Mexico]. Amidships it had a palm-leaf awning like that which Venetiangondolas carry; this gave complete protection against the rain and waves. Underneath this awning were the children and women and all the baggage and merchandise. There were twenty-five paddlers aboard.
    Putun Mayan mariners may have raided coastal settlements in Guatemala and Honduras; but neither they nor anyone else from Mexico orCentral America seem to have sailed east to the Greater and Lesser Antilles of the Caribbean. c
    Although these were settled from South America, the earliest archaeological sites in the Caribbean islands, from the mid-fourth millennium BCE , are found not in the southern part of the chain, as one might expect, but on the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba. Apart from a few archaeological finds in the highlands of Martinique, there is no evidence of human occupation in the Windward Islands until the late 1000s BCE , when a large-scalemigration from around the Orinoco delta ofVenezuela swept through the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico, and subsequently onto Hispaniola and Cuba, where the new arrivals introduced pottery making. While population pressures may account for this emigration from South America, environmental factors seem to have been responsible for the later seventh- or eighth-century colonization of theBahamas, which was a valuable source of salt. The end of the first millennium also saw the rise of theTaíno culture, which yielded to the native chiefdoms that dominated the Greater Antilles when the Spanish arrived at the end of the fifteenth century. These were among the firstNative Americans wiped out by disease and warfare as the islands were overrun by European settlers and African slaves. Their history was quickly lost and most evidence for the patterns and tools of migration in