Special thanks are due to those who have been of such enormous help during my travels across the oceans, beginning with a word of praise for the British diplomatic service in several countries. I was seated by chance next to Steven Fisher, formerly British ambassador to the Dominican Republic, at a dinner in Cambridge, and he urged me to visit Santo Domingo, with the largest, oldest and best-preserved colonial quarter anywhere in the Americas; he made contact for me with Chris Campbell, his successor, who introduced me to Thelma de la Rosa García, a counsellor at the embassy, and she provided outstanding support in the Dominican Republic, especially in arranging museum visits and a very valuable meeting with Juan Rodríguez Acosta, director of the Museo del Hombre Dominicano. Steven Fisher also arranged for me to meet His Excellency Bernardo Vega, president of the Academia Dominicana de História, where it was my privilege to lecture; and he introduced me to Estebán Priete Vicioso, architect in charge of the cathedral and other ancient buildings in Santo Domingo, who very kindly took me around all the major sites. To all of these, as well as the delightful staff of the magnificent Nicolás de Ovando hotel in Santo Domingo, based in Ovando’s palace dating back to 1502, my immeasurable thanks for their exceptional hospitality. Joe Moshenska in Cambridge provided valuable information on the eve of my visit to Santo Domingo. I also received very generous help during my visit to the Cape Verde Islands, thanks to the enthusiastic support of Marie-Louise Sørensen and Chris Evans, the leaders of the archaeological team from Cambridge that has been excavating the earliest European church in the Tropics at Cidade Velha. José Silva Lima and Jaylson Monteiro, from the Ministry of Culture, very kindly showed me the World Heritage Site at Cidade Velha and the museums in Praia.
On the other side of the world, A. T. H. (Tony) Smith welcomed me to Wellington, New Zealand, and James Kane showed me places I needed to see in Sydney, NSW. Judge William Waung was a delightful host in Hong Kong, showing me the splendid new maritime museum with which he has been closely involved; my warm thanks too to Arun and Christine Nigam, Anthony Phillips, Paul Serfaty and the Royal Geographical Society (Hong Kong). In Singapore, Antony Phillipson, British High Commissioner, directed me to the Fort Cannon excavations; John Miksic enlightened me about his exciting discoveries; Patricia Welch was very hospitable during my two visits to the city-state; Andrea Nanetti was my kind host at Nanyang Technological University. My wife and I benefited from the limitless hospitality of Hiroshi Takayama and his colleagues and students in Tokyo, Kamakura, Kyoto and Nara, including Minoru Ozawa, Keizo Asaji and Noriko Yamabe – it is difficult to express sufficient thanks when the hospitality is so generous and gracious. The same applies to my hosts in Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanjing: Michelle Garnaut and the staff of the Shanghai Literary Festival; Lu Dapeng from the Social Sciences Academic Press; Dr Jia Min from Fudan University; Prof. Zhu Feng and Dr Chang Na from Nanjing University; and many others.
I am particularly grateful to the Joukowsky Institute, under Peter van Dommelen, and John Carter Brown Library, under Neil Safier, for their welcome to Brown University in Rhode Island during November–December 2017 – for listening to my presentations and also for allowing me to spend an all-too-brief period as a Fellow at the JCB using its superb collection of material from the earliest days of European exploration onwards. I owe my invitation to Brown to two very delightful hosts, Miguel-Ángel Cau Ontiveros and Catalina Mas Florit. David González Cruz of the University of Huelva very amiably guided me and others around the sites connected to Columbus, including Palos and the convent of La Rábida, during a lively conference to mark the 525th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. Yasir Suleiman and Paul Anderson at the Centre for Islamic Studies in Cambridge arranged a number of visits by a team from Cambridge to universities in the Islamic world; particular thanks go to my fellow travellers Alice Wilson, now at the University of Sussex, in Morocco and the UAE, and Yonatan Mendel, then at the Centre for Jewish–Arab Relations at the Van Leer Institute in Israel and now at the University of the Negev, in the UAE and Qatar. The Lines from Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf are quoted by permission of Faber and Faber.
None of this would have been possible without the support of my editor at Penguin Books, Stuart Proffitt, and my editor at Oxford University Press New York, Tim Bent, nor that of my agent, Bill Hamilton of A. M. Heath. Candida Brazil has done superb work on my text, as have my copy-editor, Mark Handsley, and proofreaders, Stephen Ryan and Chris Shaw, my picture researcher, Cecilia Mackay, and Ben Sinyor at Penguin. I could not be in better hands. Nor could I have written the book without the unrivalled facilities of Cambridge University Library, and of Gonville and Caius College Library, where special thanks are due to Mark Statham. Meanwhile Anna has put up with all the maritime museums and bookshops that somehow intruded into our holidays abroad. My thanks to her and my daughters, Bianca and Rosa, are ‘as boundless as the sea’.
David Abulafia
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
8 May 2019
Note on Transliteration and Dating
The transliteration of the names of people and places is a nightmare in a book that covers such a long period and embraces so many cultures, as well as changes of regime. I have tried to combine authenticity with clarity. With Greek names, I have preferred forms closer to the original Greek sounds than the Latinized forms long in use: Periplous for a book in Greek describing maritime routes, rather than the bastardized form Periplus; Herodotos not Herodotus. Old Norse names have been kept as close as possible to what is in the sources (omitting the final -r of the nominative form); and, now that Icelandic crime stories are widely read, I am confident people can cope with Ɖ and ð (soft ‘th’ as in ‘that’) and Þ and þ (hard ‘th’ as in ‘thin’), valuable letters which are a sad loss from the English alphabet. Turkish ı is a short vowel similar to the ‘i’ in ‘sir’, c is ‘j’ and ç is ‘ch’. I have rendered Polynesian glottal stops with a ’, though I am aware that many transcriptions use ‘, which I have used for Arabic names to represent the guttural sound known as ‘ayin.
Place names are particularly difficult; some have been officially changed only in recent times, even if they have more ancient origins (Essaouira for Mogador; Mumbai for Bombay; Sri Lanka for Ceylon; Gdansk for Danzig), and I have sometimes switched back and forth. Where European and indigenous names are very similar I have preferred the indigenous version, if it is in current use: Melaka rather than Malacca, recognizing that the city originated a hundred years before the Portuguese conquest (but one still talks of the ‘Malacca Strait’); Macau rather than Macao. I have alternated between New Zealand and the lovely Māori name Aotearoa (‘Long White Cloud’). Guangzhou became known to westerners as Canton, a Portuguese corruption of Guangdong (the name of the wider region); but it would be perverse to call ancient Guangzhou ‘Canton’, so I have used ‘Canton’ only when writing about the period of intensive European trade up the Pearl River. Generally, I have done my best to use modern pinyin spelling of Chinese names, so Zheng He instead of Cheng Ho for the famous admiral, and Quanzhou rather than the older transliteration of Ch’üan-chou, even though the ‘q’ sound in pinyin is closer to ‘ch’ or ‘ts’ than to ‘k’. The Korean pirate Chang Pogo is, however, generally known by the old version of his name, which I have preferred.
Nowadays it is quite common to find BCE and CE being used instead of BC and AD, even though the actual date remains exactly the same. Since, for those who do not want to use a Christian dating system, BC could stand for ‘Backward Chronology’ just as well as ‘Before Christ’, and AD could stand for ‘Accepted Date’ instead of Anno Domini, I have retained the traditional forms. BP, on the other hand, signifies ‘Before the Present’, and is used by archaeologists among others, generally calculating backwards from 1950, so not quite the ‘present’.
Part One
* * *
THE OLDEST OCEAN: THE PACIFIC,
176,000 BC–AD 1350
1
The Oldest
Ocean
I
The Pacific Ocean is far and away the largest ocean, covering a third of the Earth’s surface, and the distance from Sumatra to the Ecuadorian shore at the Equator is around 18,000 kilometres. Even if Polynesian sailors may, very occasionally, have landed on the shores of South America, regular contact between the opposing shores was non-existent before the Spaniards launched their Manila galleons linking the Philippines to Mexico in the sixteenth century. In the midst of the sea there lie the hundreds of islands in the dozens of archipelagoes that make up Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, three broadly defined zones whose ethnic distinctiveness from one another was much exaggerated by nineteenth-century anthropologists. Some strings of islands, such as the Solomon Islands, are closely enough packed for the inhabitants to be able to see or in some other way detect the presence of close neighbours. Others, notably Easter Island (Rapa Nui), the Hawai’i islands and New Zealand (Aotearoa) are well out of sight of the nearest landfall, and in the last two cases some way removed from the main lines of Polynesian navigation.
Within this vast space, however, there are extraordinary signs of unity. Captain Cook and the natural historian Joseph Banks explored immense tracts of the Pacific in the years around 1770, and they were intrigued to find that the languages spoken in Hawai’i, Tahiti and New Zealand were mutually comprehensible and that what are now called ‘Oceanic’ languages were spoken across the whole north–south span of Polynesia. ‘It is extraordinary,’ Cook stated, ‘that the same Nation each having adopted some peculiar custom or habit etcetera never the less a carefull observer will soon see the Affinity each has to the other.’1 Indeed, later research showed that these languages were related to the language now spoken in Malaysia and Indonesia, and even to the Malagasy language of Madagascar, all forming a large ‘Austronesian’ group of languages. Polynesian vaka or waka, the term for a canoe, matches Malay wangka. Reconstruction of the ancestral Austronesian language, based on a remarkably rich common vocabulary concerned with ships and navigation, reveals that the distant ancestors of the Polynesians were maritime folk, who spoke of canoes commanded by captains with outriggers, platforms, masts, sails or paddles, and even carved prows and sterns.2 That said, the eerily beautiful languages of the Pacific had broken away from those of south-east Asia many millennia ago, suggesting a common linguistic origin among the early settlers in the Pacific. It is important to use the phrase ‘linguistic origin’, because language and ethnic origins may be at odds with one another.3
The Pacific was both the first area far from land to be settled by humans, tens of thousands of years ago, and the last. That statement needs to be qualified: a few small, uninhabited islands in the Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean were settled from the fifteenth century onwards, places such as Madeira, St Helena, Mauritius, that will be seen to have played a role out of all proportion to their size in the maritime networks that came into existence as the Portuguese, the Dutch and other rivals claimed dominion over the sea routes across the world; and Antarctica, with no permanent population, can be left out of account. But the last substantial territory to be colonized by humans was New Zealand, whose settlement is variously dated somewhere between AD 950 and 1350. Even though many of its original inhabitants, who were at first concentrated on the warmer North Island, lived in the interior away from the sea, stories about the arrival of the first canoes abounded; the Māoris and the Hawai’ians had no doubt that they were migrants. Once settled, the Māoris lost interest in large ocean-going seacraft and confined their navigation to boats better suited to coastal waters. They could say little about the place from which they had come, other than that it bore the all-too-common name Hawaiki, a name that conveyed a sense of ‘the place where our ancestors lived long ago’. Further north, among the chains of islands, movement across the sea generally remained the norm. These were people who treated the sea with the familiarity that Tuaregs might show to the Sahara desert or Incas to the mountains of the Andes: these were all obstacles that could be overcome, with precise knowledge, determination and confidence.
Over several millennia an extraordinary maritime culture had come into being, out in the middle of the ocean, lacking long shorelines, great ports and access to long rivers bringing produce down from the inner parts of massive continents. Instead, it was a largely interconnected world consisting of atolls, coral reefs and volcanic islands: a very diverse world, offering very different opportunities to those who settled, and thereby providing a great stimulus to local and even long-distance exchange.4 These Polynesians lacked the elaborate tools available to navigators, most importantly the art of writing. Their knowledge was passed down orally, and yet it was extremely detailed, very accurate and in many respects superior to the instruments of the western navigators, such as Magellan and Cook, for whom the Pacific was a sea of constant surprises and uncertainty. There is a simple point that sums up the mastery over the seas accomplished by the Polynesian navigators: apart from a northern route across the Atlantic, managed for several centuries by the Vikings and their descendants, western European sailors did not venture deep into their neighbourhood ocean until the end of the Middle Ages.
It is difficult to reconstruct the process of settlement. Did it occur from west to east across the islands of the Pacific, or should we think instead of a series of spirals that gradually encompassed the islands, creating several distinct networks of settlement? When did the pioneers arrive? If we cannot even date their arrival in the last territory, New Zealand, with confidence, it is all the more difficult to do so on small islands where archaeological research has been spasmodic, based as much on serendipity as carefully constructed programmes of excavation. What sort of boats did the first navigators employ? Across the Pacific there developed different types of boat, with different shapes of sail (lateen, square, claw and the upside-down triangles known as sprit sails). But the most challenging problem of all is why the navigators went looking for more islands. The question is rendered more difficult by the fact that there were phases of expansion and phases when expansion ceased. It is also complicated by the often fiery disputes between the experts, some of whom have tried to prove their point by getting on board and sailing the seas in reconstructed Polynesian ships.
In this account of the settlement of the Pacific islands some substantial territories are largely missing: Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, the islands of Indonesia. They maintained a close relationship to the Asian mainland and formed the outer edges of what might be described as little Mediterraneans, the Japan Sea and Yellow Sea in the north, and the South China Sea (which has often been compared to the Mediterranean) in the south. Another territory, the Australian continent, was inhabited by people some of whom used the sea as a source of food, and who greatly respected the sea, but made no known attempts to venture across the waves once they had settled in their arid continent. The main concern here is with the open ocean, with communities scattered over Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia who inhabited small islands, New Zealand apart, and whose remoteness was generally no barrier to lively interaction across hundreds and even thousands of miles.
II
The antiquity of navigation across the Pacific is demonstrated by the arrival of humans in Australia. The distances involved were smaller than nowadays, because sea levels were much lower between 140,000 and 18,000 years ago, while much water was locked in northern ice floes and glaciers. At one extreme, the sea level stood 100 metres lower than present levels, but within that time frame it rose and fell, so at some points it was only about twenty metres lower than nowadays.5 During this era, the Pleistocene, the Australian continent encompassed the whole of New Guinea and Tasmania; but it remained isolated from continental Asia (which included Java) by stretches of open sea dotted with islands that have been given the name Wallacea, after Darwin’s illustrious contemporary. This separation, which took place 40,000,000 years ago, ensured that animal species unique to Australia continued to flourish there, especially marsupial mammals. There w
as a sort of island bridge linking south-east Asia (named Sunda by the geologists) to Sahul (Australia and New Guinea), and it included the small island of Flores. Here we encounter the first great enigma. In 2003 archaeologists excavating a cave shelter on Flores discovered the remains of several early humans, dating very roughly to the second half of the low-water period and possibly several centuries later; more recent discoveries suggest that other early hominids reached as far as the Philippines.6 These people were very small, a little over a metre in height, and their brain capacity was no greater than that of a chimpanzee. However, other physical features make it clear that they were an early form of human. Their small size was most probably the result of adaptation to the restricted diet of the island, similar to the dwarfism found in other species across the world that have lived in challenging environments. If that is so (and that is only one if) they probably descended from earlier, taller hominids who had managed to reach Flores before about 100,000 BC; but since then, and ever after, the island has been isolated from ‘Sunda’ and the Asian mainland by a stretch of sea. Setting aside the speculations of nineteenth-century theorists that the inhabitants of the Pacific were a separate creation of mankind by God, we are left with evidence that early humans crossed the sea, by whatever means we can only guess. It has also been suggested that the Flores humans (unkindly nicknamed ‘hobbits’ by the press) co-existed with modern humans on the island around 12,000 BC, and that memories of these little people survive in folk tales; but such folk tales are so widespread in every human society that it is hard to believe they are credible. The evidence is further complicated by the contemporary survival on Flores and in parts of the Philippines of stegodons (animals related to elephants) which seem to have reached these places by swimming across the sea. Flores remains a mystery.
The Boundless Sea Page 3