The Golden Shore: California's Love Affair with the Sea - Hardcover
A Denver Post Bestseller
A Booklist Top Literary Travel Book of the Year
From the first human settlements to the latest marine explorations, The Golden Shore tells the tale of the history, culture, and changing nature of California's coasts and ocean. Author David Helvarg takes the reader on both a geographic and literary journey along the 1,100-mile Pacific coastline, from the Oregon border to the San Diego/Tijuana international border fence and out into its whale-, seal-, and shark-rich offshore seamounts, rock isles, and kelp forests.
Part history, part travelogue, part love letter, The Golden Shore tells the story of California's majestic coastline and ocean. Helvarg captures the spirit of the Californian coast, its mythic place in American culture, and its role in a state whose ongoing natural disasters and unremitting sense of renewal are intimately linked to its deep connection with an ever-changing sea.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
David Helvarg is founder and Executive Director of the Blue Frontier Campaign, a Washington, D.C.–based organization working for ocean and coastal conservation. An award-winning journalist, he has written for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Smithsonian, National Geographic, Popular Science, Sierra, and Parade, and has produced more than forty documentaries for PBS, the Discovery Channel, and others. His previous books include Rescue Warriors and Saved by the Sea. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
One
NATIVE TIDES
Before the people there was only water.
—MIWOK CREATION TALE
The Miwoks had it right. Before California there was the miles-deep ocean. The geological assembling of California would take uncounted millennia of tectonic plates surfing the liquid magma of the planet’s heart and riding up on one another. These collisions, marked by tens of thousands of massive earthquakes, moved rocks and minerals around the planetary orb like sand grains in a breaking wave.
Of course the very concept of plate tectonics, the idea that coastal California, with its diversity of steep mountains, terraced marine bluffs, and wide, flat, sandy beaches, is a product of millions of years of collision and grinding between the North American and Pacific plates, was considered scientific heresy until relatively recent times. In the 1950s and ’60s, work on Atlantic seafloor spreading, and the mapping of midoceanic ridges and magnetic fields by Walter Pittman, Bruce Heezen, cartographer Marie Tharp, and others, confirmed the theory of plate tectonics or continental drift. This theory made sense and also explained what most curious schoolchildren had already figured out: That Africa, South America, and the other continents seemed to fit together like so many jigsaw pieces because they did. Over millions of years, they’d all drifted apart from a single supercontinent, Pangaea.
The Atlantic’s volcanic ridges and ranges and the Pacific’s still highly active volcanic ring of fire, along with earthquakes, climate and temperature variations, ice ages and carbon-linked warmings, have also had huge impacts on the rise and fall of sea levels in different ocean basins, particularly in recent millennia.
Some twelve thousand years ago during the early Holocene, a Paleo-Indian hunting party might have set off through a grassy river valley passing between a pair of high bluffs topped by live oak, Pacific madrone, and bay laurel. Those bluffs marked an opening between the wide valley and an otherwise contiguous range of low green mountains adorned with majestic pines and three hundred-foot-tall arrow-straight redwood trees. They’d hike another twenty-seven miles across golden meadows of rye grass, and white, yellow, and pink trillium, tree tobacco and fireweed, and through pine, sycamore, and cypress groves past grazing herds of mule deer and big elk too skittish to approach and then, near a coastal swale, give wide berth to a wary grizzly and her two young cubs feeding on the carcass of a dead fur seal. Overhead in cerulean blue skies California condors with ten-foot wingspans circled, waiting for their chance to feed.
Soon the hunting party reached a rocky headland with several craggy granite peaks where thousands of cormorants, puffins, and gulls roosted, whitening the rocky pinnacles with their guano. A few miles beyond, on a wide beach, they cautiously snuck up on a mob of Steller sea lions and elephant seals much larger than themselves. Then, in a quick rush of adrenaline and bravado, they targeted a single large animal, administering a lethal clubbing to the beast, marine mammals being one of their key sources of protein. Next, using sharp stones and obsidian blades they would have begun the slow process of butchering their kill.
During this last major ice age, with the sea level more than three hundred feet lower than it is today, it was possible for hunters to travel by foot through what is now not a river valley but the waters of San Francisco Bay and on through the naturally formed Golden Gate bluffs across what is today open Pacific waters to California’s own Galapagos, the craggy Farallon Islands twenty-seven miles off San Francisco. These islands are famous not only for their still abundant bird life but also for the visiting white sharks that cross a nearby marine abyss to feed on young elephant seals and other marine mammals that continue to congregate there.
Farther south, the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara were at the time one large near-shore island called Santarosae, which was settled by California’s earliest native people using tule canoes constructed of bundled tule reeds common along the marshy coast. Even farther south, the grass and brush-covered islands of Cortes off San Diego would later sink beneath the waves to become the Cortes Bank submarine mountaintops.
Archaeological digs on what are now the Channel Islands of Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel have found ancient Indian artifacts and food middens that indicate they feasted well off marine mammals, waterfowl, urchins, mussels, and abalone, later using the abalone’s mollusk shell for fishhooks that made shiny lures. The ability to fish expanded their diet to include finfish, lobster, shark, and moray eel. At night and during foggy days they could warm themselves with mesquite, cypress, and pine fires and wrap themselves for comfort in thick otter fur robes.
The Chumash tribe’s origin tale may reflect an original settlement on the island of Santarosae that became less tenable as the sea channel to the mainland expanded with glacial meltwater toward the end of the ice age. With sea levels rising at more than a meter a century, foraging trips to the mainland would have become more difficult over time.
In the Chumash story the island population became too crowded and so the creator gave the people a rainbow bridge to cross to the mainland but warned them not to look down. Those who did fell from the rainbow into the ocean, but taking pity on the drowning people, the creator turned them into dolphins. Anytime I sail through the Santa Barbara Channel or head out to Catalina from Long Beach, spotting hundreds of white-sided and common dolphins leaping in great schools through the sea, I can’t help wondering who they are.
It was the late glaciated ice age some fifteen thousand years ago that brought the first small bands of humans to California’s shores from Siberia across the Bering land bridge and adjacent rocky ice fields but also, according to newer research, along the Aleutian Islands and West Coast in skin boats and other small watercraft.
They initially settled in the warmer south until, over several thousand years, from about 10,000 to 6,000 B.C., temperatures rose, and sea levels with them, creating more coastal estuaries, wetlands, lagoons, and tidal pools in Northern California that proved excellent habitat for hunting and foraging. Bands and clans of people migrated back north from Baja and Malibu to Elkhorn Slough by the Salinas River, to Half Moon, San Francisco, Bodega and Humboldt bays, as well as to the banks of the Carmel, Russian, Noyo, Mattole, Klamath, and Smith rivers just south of Oregon, where people are still somewhat hostile to bands of Californians moving north.
By 9,000 B.C. sea level rise had severed the Bering land bridge, separating Russia from Alaska and effectively stranding the native populations of California and the Americas. The Californians might have numbered in the high hundreds by then. By the time European explorers first caught sight of California around A.D. 1500, the natural wealth of the region had seen the native population expand to some three hundred thousand people living in culturally distinct tribal societies including the Tongva, Chumash, Esselen, Miwok, Pomo, Sinkyone, Yurok, Tolowa, and Shasta.
Native peoples’ lives and livelihoods depended on California’s bountiful shore and coastal range, as well as on the acorn flour–, duck-, salmon-, and venison-rich territories that extended inland to the great estuarine wetlands of the delta and central valley. Tribes also settled the region’s northern temperate rainforest, southern high desert, and even the foothills of the Sierra with its stark granite mountains’ range of light.
The biological abundance of the coast, however, allowed for cultural diversity unseen in the interior regions to the east and south. More than sixty languages based on twenty distinct linguistic groupings were spoken in California. Villages and towns of upward of one thousand people appeared in coastal regions rich in salmon, shellfish, acorns, rabbit, deer, and marine mammals, including seals and dolphins that could be trapped on or near the shore.
In the northern spruce and redwood forest between what’s now Humboldt Bay and the Oregon border, the Tolowa, Yurok, Chilula, Bear River, Wiyot, Mattole and other tribes occupied coastal lagoons, bays, and riverbanks. Here they built wooden plank houses with round doors and sweat lodges for spiritual purposes and to help take the chill off. They built with redwood and cedar, including dugout canoes made from redwood logs worked with fire, adze, and elk horn wedges till they were as smooth, symmetrical, and polished as any Royal British launch. Some were two-person transports; some were seagoing trade and hunting craft more than forty feet long by eight feet wide that could hold crews of a dozen or more men. While runs of chinook and coho salmon, steelhead trout, smelt, and other fish were abundant almost year-round on the Klamath and other rivers, the big redwood dugouts were essential for launching the big-game sea lion hunts of late summer.
Before dawn on the day of a hunt, one of the canoe skippers would go down to the beach and listen to the sound of the waves to determine the size of the groundswell and conditions offshore. If he was satisfied and got the headman’s agreement, his crew would then launch through the surf, paddling with all their strength. Once outside the break, they might travel twenty miles or more to the islands, promontories, and rock outcrops where Steller sea lion colonies had their rookeries. There they would drop off two-man hunter-killer teams.
With the close approach of these two-legged predators, a fifteen-hundred-pound male might rise up on its front flippers and draw back its head just before lunging at its attacker. Before it could, the point man would suddenly thrust a sharpened stick into its mouth to keep its head back and the second man would come up behind the animal and club it to death, trying to crack its skull with the first blow.
Having had similar-sized elephant seals rear up at me, I can imagine the desperate hunger that would compel a man to keep advancing in this situation. On slippery rocks and sea-flushed mats of giant kelp or pickleweed, amid mobs of large panicked, barking animals stampeding for the refuge of the sea, I’m sure more than just the pinnipeds met death and injury in these encounters.
Even after a successful kill, it was still a huge challenge to drag the animal’s body into the surf and then tip the big canoe over into the water until the carcass could be rolled or pushed inside it. Then the crews, often with two or more dead animals aboard their vessels, certainly cold and wet to their skins, with the salty smell of blood and sea foam in their nostrils, perhaps seasick or carrying injured or dead hunters, would have to paddle hours back to the mainland through sea states that even today can make mariners nervous whenever they venture onto the North Pacific off of California.
About eight hundred miles to the south a different kind of maritime culture was evolving among California’s first settlers, including the Chumash and dolphin-hunting Tongva (or Gabrielino), peoples living near or on the Channel Islands (San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, San Nicolas, Santa Catalina, and San Clemente). Along the Southern California coast these people lived in conical homes made of tule grass, sometimes with whalebone rafters scavenged from beached whales.
With rising sea levels forcing them to navigate more open waters, the Chumash and their neighbors developed a new kind of boat, replacing or supplementing tule reed boats with more elegant, rugged, and seaworthy plank timber canoes known as tomols or in the case of the Tongvas, te’aat (tiat). These were ten to thirty feet in length and three to four feet wide. The Chumash called the tomol the “House of the Sea,” for its reliability, and their crews used double-bladed kayaklike paddles to propel these lightweight seagoing canoes through the ocean.
California archaeologist Brian Fagan suggests the first plank boats might have appeared thousands of years ago on Catalina Island, where the Tongva quarried soapstone that could be worked into cooking pots, slabs, and other tools for trade with other tribes. This would have given them commercial incentive to build faster, more seaworthy boats that could haul hundreds and later thousands of pounds of cargo between the islands and the mainland and along the coast. He calls whoever developed these earliest plank boats that didn’t get waterlogged like tule or tip over like redwood “the rocket scientists of their time.”
By around A.D. 650 the tomol had become the centerpiece of Chumash culture, similar to the role the automobile now plays in Southern California. A secretive guild known as the Brotherhood of the Canoe was responsible for the construction of each new tomol, its boat-building knowledge handed down through the generations from senior craftsman to apprentice.
Redwood logs that drifted down the coast and washed ashore made the best construction material since old-growth redwood swells when it gets wet, making better seals. Uprooted pine trees that washed down area rivers during winter storms were also widely used. After splitting the logs with whalebone or antler wedges workers selected only straight-grained planks without any knots to guarantee no cracking or leaks over time. Planks were then trimmed and finished using various adzes including pismo clamshell. The brotherhood then sanded the hull boards with sharkskin before fitting them together. Small holes were bored in the planks with stone or bone awls, and the planks were laid edge to edge and fastened with milkweed fiber cords passed through the drill holes. Tule plant was then stuffed into the cracks as caulking. Additional caulking was done with yop, a mix of natural asphalt from local tar pits and pine pitch melted and boiled together in stone bowls, which was then poured along the edges of the planks and into the drill holes. A crossplank at midship both reinforced the boat and acted as a seat. Another coat of yop was used to waterproof the boat, which was then painted with red ochre, a fourth and final coat of sealant before the finished tomol was decorated with geometric shell designs.
Only male members of leading families were allowed to own tomols. Grizzly or black bearskin capes identified the owners and masters of these boats that, carefully maintained, could last for decades to be passed down from one generation to the next.
Tomols allowed for a widespread trading network among various tribes who lived on Point Conception, Santa Monica Bay, and the Channel Islands. There were designated shipping routes, and signal fires on the islands were used as early aides to navigation. Interestingly, all this maritime trade took place within a day’s paddle of what are now America’s two largest trading ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach.
When Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo explored the California coast in 1542 he saw so many tomols hauled up at one obviously wealthy village he named it Pueblo de las Canoas, or “town of canoes.” It was later renamed Malibu. Another explorer spotted the brotherhood doing their boat carpentry in another village and gave it a name that’s stuck, Carpinteria. Today you can see the Helek, a replica tomol built by modern-day Chumash, at the Museum of Natural History located on a scenic hillside above the old mission town of Santa Barbara.
Partially intact tomols have also been found in ancient Channel Island middens along with dolphin bones; seal and fish bones;...
NATIVE TIDES
Before the people there was only water.
—MIWOK CREATION TALE
The Miwoks had it right. Before California there was the miles-deep ocean. The geological assembling of California would take uncounted millennia of tectonic plates surfing the liquid magma of the planet’s heart and riding up on one another. These collisions, marked by tens of thousands of massive earthquakes, moved rocks and minerals around the planetary orb like sand grains in a breaking wave.
Of course the very concept of plate tectonics, the idea that coastal California, with its diversity of steep mountains, terraced marine bluffs, and wide, flat, sandy beaches, is a product of millions of years of collision and grinding between the North American and Pacific plates, was considered scientific heresy until relatively recent times. In the 1950s and ’60s, work on Atlantic seafloor spreading, and the mapping of midoceanic ridges and magnetic fields by Walter Pittman, Bruce Heezen, cartographer Marie Tharp, and others, confirmed the theory of plate tectonics or continental drift. This theory made sense and also explained what most curious schoolchildren had already figured out: That Africa, South America, and the other continents seemed to fit together like so many jigsaw pieces because they did. Over millions of years, they’d all drifted apart from a single supercontinent, Pangaea.
The Atlantic’s volcanic ridges and ranges and the Pacific’s still highly active volcanic ring of fire, along with earthquakes, climate and temperature variations, ice ages and carbon-linked warmings, have also had huge impacts on the rise and fall of sea levels in different ocean basins, particularly in recent millennia.
Some twelve thousand years ago during the early Holocene, a Paleo-Indian hunting party might have set off through a grassy river valley passing between a pair of high bluffs topped by live oak, Pacific madrone, and bay laurel. Those bluffs marked an opening between the wide valley and an otherwise contiguous range of low green mountains adorned with majestic pines and three hundred-foot-tall arrow-straight redwood trees. They’d hike another twenty-seven miles across golden meadows of rye grass, and white, yellow, and pink trillium, tree tobacco and fireweed, and through pine, sycamore, and cypress groves past grazing herds of mule deer and big elk too skittish to approach and then, near a coastal swale, give wide berth to a wary grizzly and her two young cubs feeding on the carcass of a dead fur seal. Overhead in cerulean blue skies California condors with ten-foot wingspans circled, waiting for their chance to feed.
Soon the hunting party reached a rocky headland with several craggy granite peaks where thousands of cormorants, puffins, and gulls roosted, whitening the rocky pinnacles with their guano. A few miles beyond, on a wide beach, they cautiously snuck up on a mob of Steller sea lions and elephant seals much larger than themselves. Then, in a quick rush of adrenaline and bravado, they targeted a single large animal, administering a lethal clubbing to the beast, marine mammals being one of their key sources of protein. Next, using sharp stones and obsidian blades they would have begun the slow process of butchering their kill.
During this last major ice age, with the sea level more than three hundred feet lower than it is today, it was possible for hunters to travel by foot through what is now not a river valley but the waters of San Francisco Bay and on through the naturally formed Golden Gate bluffs across what is today open Pacific waters to California’s own Galapagos, the craggy Farallon Islands twenty-seven miles off San Francisco. These islands are famous not only for their still abundant bird life but also for the visiting white sharks that cross a nearby marine abyss to feed on young elephant seals and other marine mammals that continue to congregate there.
Farther south, the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara were at the time one large near-shore island called Santarosae, which was settled by California’s earliest native people using tule canoes constructed of bundled tule reeds common along the marshy coast. Even farther south, the grass and brush-covered islands of Cortes off San Diego would later sink beneath the waves to become the Cortes Bank submarine mountaintops.
Archaeological digs on what are now the Channel Islands of Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel have found ancient Indian artifacts and food middens that indicate they feasted well off marine mammals, waterfowl, urchins, mussels, and abalone, later using the abalone’s mollusk shell for fishhooks that made shiny lures. The ability to fish expanded their diet to include finfish, lobster, shark, and moray eel. At night and during foggy days they could warm themselves with mesquite, cypress, and pine fires and wrap themselves for comfort in thick otter fur robes.
The Chumash tribe’s origin tale may reflect an original settlement on the island of Santarosae that became less tenable as the sea channel to the mainland expanded with glacial meltwater toward the end of the ice age. With sea levels rising at more than a meter a century, foraging trips to the mainland would have become more difficult over time.
In the Chumash story the island population became too crowded and so the creator gave the people a rainbow bridge to cross to the mainland but warned them not to look down. Those who did fell from the rainbow into the ocean, but taking pity on the drowning people, the creator turned them into dolphins. Anytime I sail through the Santa Barbara Channel or head out to Catalina from Long Beach, spotting hundreds of white-sided and common dolphins leaping in great schools through the sea, I can’t help wondering who they are.
It was the late glaciated ice age some fifteen thousand years ago that brought the first small bands of humans to California’s shores from Siberia across the Bering land bridge and adjacent rocky ice fields but also, according to newer research, along the Aleutian Islands and West Coast in skin boats and other small watercraft.
They initially settled in the warmer south until, over several thousand years, from about 10,000 to 6,000 B.C., temperatures rose, and sea levels with them, creating more coastal estuaries, wetlands, lagoons, and tidal pools in Northern California that proved excellent habitat for hunting and foraging. Bands and clans of people migrated back north from Baja and Malibu to Elkhorn Slough by the Salinas River, to Half Moon, San Francisco, Bodega and Humboldt bays, as well as to the banks of the Carmel, Russian, Noyo, Mattole, Klamath, and Smith rivers just south of Oregon, where people are still somewhat hostile to bands of Californians moving north.
By 9,000 B.C. sea level rise had severed the Bering land bridge, separating Russia from Alaska and effectively stranding the native populations of California and the Americas. The Californians might have numbered in the high hundreds by then. By the time European explorers first caught sight of California around A.D. 1500, the natural wealth of the region had seen the native population expand to some three hundred thousand people living in culturally distinct tribal societies including the Tongva, Chumash, Esselen, Miwok, Pomo, Sinkyone, Yurok, Tolowa, and Shasta.
Native peoples’ lives and livelihoods depended on California’s bountiful shore and coastal range, as well as on the acorn flour–, duck-, salmon-, and venison-rich territories that extended inland to the great estuarine wetlands of the delta and central valley. Tribes also settled the region’s northern temperate rainforest, southern high desert, and even the foothills of the Sierra with its stark granite mountains’ range of light.
The biological abundance of the coast, however, allowed for cultural diversity unseen in the interior regions to the east and south. More than sixty languages based on twenty distinct linguistic groupings were spoken in California. Villages and towns of upward of one thousand people appeared in coastal regions rich in salmon, shellfish, acorns, rabbit, deer, and marine mammals, including seals and dolphins that could be trapped on or near the shore.
In the northern spruce and redwood forest between what’s now Humboldt Bay and the Oregon border, the Tolowa, Yurok, Chilula, Bear River, Wiyot, Mattole and other tribes occupied coastal lagoons, bays, and riverbanks. Here they built wooden plank houses with round doors and sweat lodges for spiritual purposes and to help take the chill off. They built with redwood and cedar, including dugout canoes made from redwood logs worked with fire, adze, and elk horn wedges till they were as smooth, symmetrical, and polished as any Royal British launch. Some were two-person transports; some were seagoing trade and hunting craft more than forty feet long by eight feet wide that could hold crews of a dozen or more men. While runs of chinook and coho salmon, steelhead trout, smelt, and other fish were abundant almost year-round on the Klamath and other rivers, the big redwood dugouts were essential for launching the big-game sea lion hunts of late summer.
Before dawn on the day of a hunt, one of the canoe skippers would go down to the beach and listen to the sound of the waves to determine the size of the groundswell and conditions offshore. If he was satisfied and got the headman’s agreement, his crew would then launch through the surf, paddling with all their strength. Once outside the break, they might travel twenty miles or more to the islands, promontories, and rock outcrops where Steller sea lion colonies had their rookeries. There they would drop off two-man hunter-killer teams.
With the close approach of these two-legged predators, a fifteen-hundred-pound male might rise up on its front flippers and draw back its head just before lunging at its attacker. Before it could, the point man would suddenly thrust a sharpened stick into its mouth to keep its head back and the second man would come up behind the animal and club it to death, trying to crack its skull with the first blow.
Having had similar-sized elephant seals rear up at me, I can imagine the desperate hunger that would compel a man to keep advancing in this situation. On slippery rocks and sea-flushed mats of giant kelp or pickleweed, amid mobs of large panicked, barking animals stampeding for the refuge of the sea, I’m sure more than just the pinnipeds met death and injury in these encounters.
Even after a successful kill, it was still a huge challenge to drag the animal’s body into the surf and then tip the big canoe over into the water until the carcass could be rolled or pushed inside it. Then the crews, often with two or more dead animals aboard their vessels, certainly cold and wet to their skins, with the salty smell of blood and sea foam in their nostrils, perhaps seasick or carrying injured or dead hunters, would have to paddle hours back to the mainland through sea states that even today can make mariners nervous whenever they venture onto the North Pacific off of California.
About eight hundred miles to the south a different kind of maritime culture was evolving among California’s first settlers, including the Chumash and dolphin-hunting Tongva (or Gabrielino), peoples living near or on the Channel Islands (San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, San Nicolas, Santa Catalina, and San Clemente). Along the Southern California coast these people lived in conical homes made of tule grass, sometimes with whalebone rafters scavenged from beached whales.
With rising sea levels forcing them to navigate more open waters, the Chumash and their neighbors developed a new kind of boat, replacing or supplementing tule reed boats with more elegant, rugged, and seaworthy plank timber canoes known as tomols or in the case of the Tongvas, te’aat (tiat). These were ten to thirty feet in length and three to four feet wide. The Chumash called the tomol the “House of the Sea,” for its reliability, and their crews used double-bladed kayaklike paddles to propel these lightweight seagoing canoes through the ocean.
California archaeologist Brian Fagan suggests the first plank boats might have appeared thousands of years ago on Catalina Island, where the Tongva quarried soapstone that could be worked into cooking pots, slabs, and other tools for trade with other tribes. This would have given them commercial incentive to build faster, more seaworthy boats that could haul hundreds and later thousands of pounds of cargo between the islands and the mainland and along the coast. He calls whoever developed these earliest plank boats that didn’t get waterlogged like tule or tip over like redwood “the rocket scientists of their time.”
By around A.D. 650 the tomol had become the centerpiece of Chumash culture, similar to the role the automobile now plays in Southern California. A secretive guild known as the Brotherhood of the Canoe was responsible for the construction of each new tomol, its boat-building knowledge handed down through the generations from senior craftsman to apprentice.
Redwood logs that drifted down the coast and washed ashore made the best construction material since old-growth redwood swells when it gets wet, making better seals. Uprooted pine trees that washed down area rivers during winter storms were also widely used. After splitting the logs with whalebone or antler wedges workers selected only straight-grained planks without any knots to guarantee no cracking or leaks over time. Planks were then trimmed and finished using various adzes including pismo clamshell. The brotherhood then sanded the hull boards with sharkskin before fitting them together. Small holes were bored in the planks with stone or bone awls, and the planks were laid edge to edge and fastened with milkweed fiber cords passed through the drill holes. Tule plant was then stuffed into the cracks as caulking. Additional caulking was done with yop, a mix of natural asphalt from local tar pits and pine pitch melted and boiled together in stone bowls, which was then poured along the edges of the planks and into the drill holes. A crossplank at midship both reinforced the boat and acted as a seat. Another coat of yop was used to waterproof the boat, which was then painted with red ochre, a fourth and final coat of sealant before the finished tomol was decorated with geometric shell designs.
Only male members of leading families were allowed to own tomols. Grizzly or black bearskin capes identified the owners and masters of these boats that, carefully maintained, could last for decades to be passed down from one generation to the next.
Tomols allowed for a widespread trading network among various tribes who lived on Point Conception, Santa Monica Bay, and the Channel Islands. There were designated shipping routes, and signal fires on the islands were used as early aides to navigation. Interestingly, all this maritime trade took place within a day’s paddle of what are now America’s two largest trading ports, Los Angeles and Long Beach.
When Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo explored the California coast in 1542 he saw so many tomols hauled up at one obviously wealthy village he named it Pueblo de las Canoas, or “town of canoes.” It was later renamed Malibu. Another explorer spotted the brotherhood doing their boat carpentry in another village and gave it a name that’s stuck, Carpinteria. Today you can see the Helek, a replica tomol built by modern-day Chumash, at the Museum of Natural History located on a scenic hillside above the old mission town of Santa Barbara.
Partially intact tomols have also been found in ancient Channel Island middens along with dolphin bones; seal and fish bones;...
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