Today's post is a short interlude from my writing about the Africa tour.
This CBC article caught my attention for a few reasons. Before flight school and my career as a pilot, I studied archaeology at Simon Fraser University. And before that, at the age of twenty, I had ridden my motorcycle to Mexico, and then two years later I spent nearly half a year travelling though Mexico and Central America in my 1984 Toyota pickup. So I've had an abiding interest in the archaeology of the region for a long time, with a particular interest in the first human migrations to the Americas; when, how and who were the first people to explore the North and South American continents.
I am also a sailor, and hope someday to make the passage to the South Pacific. The notion of crossing thousands of miles of the world's largest ocean to find terraqueous tropical paradises, isolated in the midst of a world of sea and sky, captures my imagination like nothing else.
So when I saw this article, I thought that it epitomized the ethos of this blog. If the researchers are correct, people from either Polynesia or South America made a nautical journey of 6800 km (3700 nautical miles!) about eight hundred years ago. In an era when many Europeans still thought that sea monsters awaited sailors at the edge of the world and when Columbus had not yet made his first crossing of the Atlantic - a journey of 3500 nautical miles, in three massive square-rigged galleons - people in outrigger canoes were crossing the pacific ocean and cultures that had existed in isolation were meeting and trading.
So when I saw this article, I thought that it epitomized the ethos of this blog. If the researchers are correct, people from either Polynesia or South America made a nautical journey of 6800 km (3700 nautical miles!) about eight hundred years ago. In an era when many Europeans still thought that sea monsters awaited sailors at the edge of the world and when Columbus had not yet made his first crossing of the Atlantic - a journey of 3500 nautical miles, in three massive square-rigged galleons - people in outrigger canoes were crossing the pacific ocean and cultures that had existed in isolation were meeting and trading.
What seems most incredible to me, is that it was most likely the Polynesians who made the journey. Which means that the presence of South American staple foods like the sweet potato in the Polynesian diet implies that they also made the crossing from the Americas back to the tiny islands of Polynesia. To me, this seems almost as extraordinary as if the first astronauts to land on the moon had done so without the aid of mission control back on the ground in Houston, Texas, and the computers and complex math that calculated orbits and trajectories; as if some intrepid astronauts had looked up at the sky, put a finger to the wind, strapped themselves to a rocket, and headed for the stars on a wing and a prayer.
By comparison, one of the first European explorers in the South Pacific was Alvaro de Mendaña, who "discovered" the Solomon Islands. Mendaña stumbled upon the islands eighty days after setting sail from Peru in 1567 (almost four hundred years after Polynesians had made return voyages from the same region) and barely survived the crossing back to the Americas, during which much of his crew was starving and had succumbed to scurvy. In spite of the supposed superiority of European methods of navigation and charting, they still had not discovered a means of determining longitude, so they were essentially lost. The position Mendaña ascribed to the Solomons was so inaccurate that they were not found again for another two hundred years, and many began to doubt their existence.
These sorts of revelations about past cultures make us reevaluate our assumptions about what they were capable of, their knowledge, their profound immersion in this world, and their intimacy with the sprawling cosmic charts in the night sky which must have guided them.
I don't think any equivalent remains in the modern world. Until mankind begins to explore the solar system and what lies beyond, the feats of these brave navigators will stand as one of the most inspiring examples of humanity's spirit of discovery.
Commenti