The Cape Horn Road: Part III: Mediterranean Origins by Peter Stanford
Where did the Cape Horn road begin? After thousands of years of deep water sailing and exploration of our water planet, this storm-beaten track ultimately took voyagers right around the world. Itthus played a unique and deeply important role in the development of mankind, as the path by which the different races of mankind finally connected up with each other. It provided the means by which mankind can be said to have finally met itself, in its infinite and challenging variety. Casting back along this trail to its discernible point of origin might tell us things that really matter about ourselves and perhaps even the destiny ofa newly self-aware humanity on this globe. I trace the Cape Horn road back to the Mediterranean Sea, though it's true Norsemen who coursed the bitter northern seas, Iberians who faced out on the Dark Ocean that lashed their rocky shores (interspersed with the occasio nal delight of sandy beaches, as at Vigo Bay), and Arabs who learned their seafaring in the vast Indi an Ocean each brought vita l contributions to the tabl e at which we all sit today- the table of a world united by the ocean voyaging which made its criti cal breakthrough in small ships battling their way round Cape Horn just over 500 years ago. "The reality is better than the dream," said Joseph Conrad . Conrad , the "Sea Dreamer" as hi s French biographer JeanAubry call ed him, sought out hi s ow n reality in service under the Red Duster, sai ling in the British merchant marine of the last century. He went on to forge what he' d experienced into matchless prose in novels and essays in w hich li fe 's eni gmas lead always to fresh cha!lenge. He had one of hi s characters say, once, in a confused didactic way (as Shakespeare had hi s fools speak wisdom), that you mu st " make the deep, deep sea keep yo u up, . . ." and so Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeni owski, exiled from a Poland that did not even ex ist on the map of Europe in hi s day , mapped out for himself a new ho meland in the rugged glori es, the squall s, and banked clouds and sudden clearings of the English language. I offer Conrad ' s counsel, which he SEA HISTORY 72, WINTER 1994-95
puts in the mouth of Lord Jim ' s advisor, the morally ambi guou s Stein, because it so precisely ex presses how I feel we must come at hi story. To leap for quick conc lusions is sure destruction. The only way to make one ' s way is to immerse oneself in the experience, so that it will bear you up. We sha ll be coming back to Conrad in thi s ta le, at certain turningpoints, and thi s is the first one: Let' s not grab at quick, g lib, easy an swers that sound right, in ex ploring this experience of man. Let us go, then, as Conrad went, through the heait of the experience (as near as we can) and see what happened on this long sea road. Let' s look fo r the groundswells that tell of distant, long-past developments over the curve of time' s horizon--or augur, sometimes, things to come. And let's refuse easy answers! It' s easy to say, for example, that going to sea at first upon a log, which he soon learned to ho llow out, man soon fashioned paddles that sped him on his way better than bare hands-and soon after that undoubtedl y learned to hoist some kind of sail. Easy, but dead wrong. That last "soon after," the develop,,, ~
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"'u. ~-------------~ The earliest picture we ha ve of vessel under sail, above,froman Egyptian wall drawing of ca. 3100 BC. Below, a Mesopotamian model of a vessel fitted for mast and shrouds, possibly a skin boat, ca. 3400 Be.
ment of sail , apparentl y took so mething over 5,000 years.
Learning to Sail The earliest evidence we have of sea passages is the di stribution ofobsidian (a hai-d volcanic glass that takes a sharp edge) from the Greek island of Melos through mainland communities, dating back some 12,000 years-before there was any extensive agriculture, or cities, or much real social organization. It'sgottotell us something abo ut the vital ro le of seafai·i ng in human development, to find extensive seaborne trade so earl y in the tale. And it also tells us something of how long it took to develop the idea of harnessing the wind to drive a ship, for the earliest evidence we have of sail is a clay modelperhaps a child 's, perhaps a priest's--of what appears to be a small sailboat, found in Mesopotamia where two great rivers nourished a civilization that began to keep records of its doings as early as 3400 BC. In another few hundred yeai·s, wall paintings and other clay models of boats appeai·ed in Egypt, a little before 3000 BC. So it' s 5000 years from the earli est ev idence of systematic nav igatio n to the earliest ev idence of a sailing vesselabout the span of time from that vessel to the supersonic aircraft of today. A nd when yo u begin to look a.I"O L111d , confirming ev idence flood s in . In all the Americas , when the E uropeans came upon the m 1000 years ago in the Norse voyages, and 500 years ago fo ll owing Columbus's voyage of 1492, there was no sign of a sailing vessel, though there were grand seagoing canoes, and river canoes serving trading systems so we ll developed that the European goods (and, alas, European diseases) had penetrated far inl and long before the Europeans themselves did. When Co lumbus arrived in the Lesser Anti ll es, he encountered thorough ly maritime peoples w ho had never seen a sail , or, ev idently, conceived of such a thing. These peopl es regarded the E uropeans as gods because their ships mo ved on the power of the wind. Later explorers encountered the same reaction wherever they went, up and down the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the A mericas . But by 3000 BC three Middl e Eastern civili zati ons had sailing ships and 13