Page 115 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

1892 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

faster through rougher seas. Probably as a result, about Oceans. Inuits, for example, spread around the Arctic
500 CE sailors from Borneo crossed the Indian Ocean shoreline from somewhere in Asia, moving by kayak and
and settled the island of Madagascar off the East African dog sled; and learned to harpoon whales from larger skin
coast for the first time. Before then, other sailors had boats about 800 CE. By that same time, coracles made of
moved into the Pacific, and occupied islands as distant as cattle skins had carried a few Irish monks to Iceland
the Solomons. Such lengthy voyages are attested by lin- across the North Atlantic.
guistic affinities between the so-called Malagasy lan- But just as navigation across really long ocean distances
guage of Madagascar and languages of Borneo in the in the southern seas required outrigger pontoons and
East Indies; and by the array of Austronesian languages larger sails, so the stormy northern seas could only be reg-
that range across islands of the Southwest Pacific. ularly crossed by building larger ships that cut through the
Some centuries later, speakers of Polynesian languages waves rather than riding lightly on top of them. In the
began to cross far greater Pacific distances, reaching North Atlantic,Viking ships of the ninth to eleventh cen-
Hawaii, Easter Island, New Zealand and some tiny atolls turies were a halfway step towards safe navigation.Built of
in-between. Exact dates of their arrival are unsure but it overlapping planks nailed to a heavy rib and keel frame,
seems clear that New Zealand was the last to be settled, and rendered waterproof by careful caulking, they were
perhaps only about 1300 CE. The Polynesian dispersal propelled either by oars or, when the wind was favorable,
clearly did depend on sailing canoes equipped with out- by a square sail.They dodged storms by going ashore or
riggers, and their voyages constitute a surprising accom- taking refuge in harbors along the Atlantic and Mediter-
plishment since finding isolated islands in the immensity ranean coastlines of Europe and rowed up and down the
of the Pacific was hit and miss. As a result, people on rivers of Russia and western Europe as well. Sometimes
most of the Polynesian islands failed to maintain contact they went raiding and destroying, sometimes they traded
with the outside world until European seamen suddenly or set themselves up as rulers, and sometimes they pio-
intruded on them after 1522. neered settlements of almost uninhabited landscape as in
Austronesian and Polyne-
sian sailing across the southern
oceans was matched by
increasingly successful ventures
across the stormy seas of the
north. Light boats made of ani-
mal skins floated buoyantly
even on top of big waves; and
a keen eye to the weather
allowed sailors using such ves-
sels to come and go short dis-
tances more or less safely on
the northern reaches of the
Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic

Hindu pilgrims in India
travel on a two-tier
camel bus in Mathura.