Ships Of Discovery And Exploration - Softcover

Paine, Lincoln P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0395984157 ISBN 13: 9780395984154

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2000

Synopsis

Lincoln P. Paine's SHIPS OF THE WORLD: AN HISTORICAL HISTORICAL ENCYCLOPEDIA was honored as one of the best reference books of the year by the New York Public Library, and Library Journal described it as "clearly the most fascinating book of the year." Now, in two equally fascinating new books, Paine focuses on two of the most interesting areas of maritime history: WARSHIPS OF THE WORLD TO 1900 and SHIPS OF DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION.

SHIPS OF DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION tells the stories of 125 vessels that have played important roles in voyages of geographical exploration and scientific discovery, from early Polynesian double canoes to the most technically sophisticated submersibles. Each ship is described in a vivid short essay that captures its personality as well as its physical characteristics, construction, and history. Drawings, paintings, and photographs show the grandeur and grace of these oceangoing vessels, maps help the reader follow the routes of great seafarers and naval campaigns, and chronologies offer a perspective on underwater archaeology sites, maritime technology, exploration, and disasters at sea.

About this title

About the Author:

Lincoln P. Paine, formerly editor of Sea History magazine and director of the Schooners Foundation, is a member of the national advisory board of the American Sail Training Association. He lives with his family in Portland, Maine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

Ships of Discovery and Exploration recounts the stories of more than
130 ships that sailed in exploratory voyages in all parts of the
world and for all sorts of reasons. Until the nineteenth century, all
kinds of ships were used for exploration. Only in the mid-1800s were
ships built for specific exploratory assignments, so it is not
possible to speak of the evolution of discovery ships as a distinct
type before about 150 years ago. It is equally difficult to treat the
history of maritime discovery as a continuous process, for until the
European "age of discovery," which started in about the fifteenth
century, exploration was a regional phenomenon in which limited
horizons were gradually expanded. Some of these regions were small,
almost local, but others -- Europe itself, the Indian Ocean and East
Asia, and Oceania -- were vast areas comprising a multiplicity of
heterogeneous networks. Europe"s overriding contribution to maritime
discovery was to connect these regions and to create a more or less
unified global network for the transportation of goods, peoples, and
ideas. This development occurred only in the last 500 years, but much
of the groundwork that made it possible was laid over the course of
thousands of years before that.
The focus of maritime exploration prior to the late
eighteenth century had a geographic orientation. By that time, the
outlines of the world"s oceans had been well defined and described.
In the Age of Enlightenment, toward the end of the eighteenth
century, the mission of voyages of exploration came to embrace the
study of ethnography, zoology, and botany, and increasingly,
specialists in these fields signed on for long voyages. Advances in
technology -- the need to lay submarine cables, for instance -- and
lines of inquiry related to the economics of fisheries and
environmental and navigational sciences introduced a new dimension
into the work of maritime discovery. This resulted in the
construction of a wide variety of purpose-built vessels designed to
examine the waters of the world beneath the surface in new ways.
For much of the early period of discovery the names of the
vessels used in exploration, if indeed they had names, are unknown.
To tell the story of maritime discovery with reference only to a
handful of specific named ships would be to overlook some of the most
daring and decisive of our forebears" achievements. In recent years,
a number of early voyages of discovery have been re-created in
vessels, and along routes, of greater or lesser authenticity. These
vessels -- Polynesian voyaging canoes, Mesopotamian reed boats, Greek
galleys, Irish curraghs, Arabian dhows -- have drawn attention to
what was possible. Even if the results of some of these modern
voyages are inconclusive, they almost invariably throw new light on
our understanding of the past.

The South Pacific is the locus of one of the oldest and most
sustained efforts of exploration by any maritime people. The islands
of Oceania are divided into three main groups, reflecting both
geographic and ethnographic characteristics. Farthest to the west,
and settled first, are the islands of Melanesia,* which lie within a
broad band between New Guinea and the Fiji Islands. To the east is
Polynesia, a huge triangle whose sides are described by a line drawn
between Easter Island (Rapa Nui) in the east, New Zealand in the
southwest, and Hawaii to the north. Micronesia, north of Melanesia,
spans the Pacific from Palau to Kiribati and embraces the Marshall,
Caroline, and Mariana island groups. Although many specifics remain
unknown, one widely accepted theory is that the distant ancestors of
the islanders encountered by Europeans from the sixteenth century on
originated in the Solomon Islands just east of New Guinea, that the
pattern of settlement was generally from west to east, and that the
process began about 3,500 years ago.
The first push brought these seafaring settlers to the island
groups of Santa Cruz, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and Fiji in about 1,500
bce. Within another 500 years -- that is to say, around the time of
Homer, or a little before -- they had settled Samoa and Tonga. The
Society Islands (Tahiti) were colonized by about 500 bce, and within
another 1,000 years Polynesians had spread out to reach Pitcairn
Island and Easter Island to the south and east and Hawaii to the
north. Among the last and largest islands to be reached were those of
New Zealand, between 1,000 and 1,300 years ago. The chronology of the
settlement of Micronesia is less well understood, although it appears
that certain islands were settled from Melanesia and others from
Polynesia.
The vessels in which the Polynesians sailed were large double
canoes, probably about 60 or 70 feet (18 to 21 meters) long (though
vessels of 100 feet [31 meters] are not unknown today), capable of
carrying the people, supplies, and material goods necessary for
establishing sustainable communities on uninhabited islands. These
catamarans* had a deck spanning the distance between the two hulls
and they were rigged with V-shaped (or wishbone) sails. As important
as their boatbuilding skills, the Polynesians evolved a sophisticated
set of navigational skills known as wayfinding, which incorporated
many of the elements of navigation used today but without recourse to
mechanical or electronic instruments. Astronomy and latitude sailing
were of particular importance, as was the ability to read and
interpret the patterns of waves and swells, the location of fish and
sea mammals, the flight paths of birds, prevailing and shifting wind
patterns, and other meteorological conditions.
Although the prevailing winds in Polynesia blow from east to
west, there are periodic shifts. It is believed that the Polynesian
explorers took advantage of these changes to sail downwind to the
east on a west wind fully confident that if they did not find new
lands, the wind would shift to the east and allow them to run
downwind back to their point of origin. Thus exploration was for the
most part the product of two-way intentional voyaging; only
occasionally were new islands discovered as a result of accidental
drift voyaging. One such voyage may have brought Melanesian canoes
from Fiji to New Zealand before the arrival of the Polynesian
ancestors of the Maori, who probably arrived from Tahiti in about
1000 ce. But New Zealand lies south of Polynesia, in a high latitude
on the far side of a belt of variable winds across which it is very
difficult to return. This may explain why it was discovered about 500
years later than Easter Island, even though the latter is 3,000 miles
farther from the Solomons, and why the Maoris eventually abandoned
the sea road to the heart of Polynesia. Adverse winds and currents
also help explain why Melanesian and Polynesian contact with northern
Australia was only sporadic and did not result in any apparent
attempt to establish permanent settlements.
As the dating of settlement in individual island groups
suggests, the progress of exploration in Oceania was punctuated by
lulls of considerable duration. By the time Europeans reached the
Pacific, long-distance voyaging within Polynesia seems to have abated
somewhat. In the eighteenth century, there was more voyaging within
central Polynesia than to the extremes, and the English sailors on
Captain James Cook"s expedition in HMS Endeavour in the early 1770s
were impressed with the navigational ability of Tupia, a Tahitian who
returned to England with them and who related that some islanders
undertook voyages lasting as long as twenty days.
The motives underlying these extensive migrations are not
known. Population pressures may have played a part, perhaps under
threat of ostracism and exile. The search for raw materials for trade
was probably incidental to exploration itself, although trade between
colonies and homelands, as well as kinship networks, may have
sustained two-way communication between distant islands following
initial settlement.
For the extent and duration of sea voyages, the discovery and
settling of Oceania has no parallel. Prior to the Viking voyages to
Iceland in the eighth century and Greenland and North America in the
tenth century, most maritime exploration occurred along the shores of
continental landmasses, or within relatively dense island groups such
as those of Indonesia, the Ryukyus off Japan, the Aleutian chain in
Alaska, and the Leeward and Windward islands of the Caribbean. There
is also evidence for long-distance waterborne trade between Ecuador
and Mexico on the Pacific coast, in the early centuries of the
Christian era, and more definitively for trade between Sri Lanka and
Indonesia in the Indian Ocean, but how these routes originated is
unknown.
Ancient records, both written and archaeological, make it
difficult to determine whether the earliest coastal trade routes
resulted from purposeful maritime exploration of the unknown or from
the realization that ships were a more convenient and efficient means
of transportation than land-based caravan routes. Although the
overland route from Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley is shorter than
the sea route, there is evidence of a sea link between the Harappa
states of the Indus Valley and the Sumerian kingdom at the head of
the Persian Gulf as early as 2500 bce. Similarly, Egypt"s Queen
Hatshepsut mounted a trade expedition from the head of the Red Sea to
Punt, on the Somali coast, in 1500 bce. What seems to distinguish the
pioneers of these sea routes from their Polynesian contemporaries is
the fact that they were not sailing into the unknown; they sailed in
search of new routes between two known and inhabited destinations.
The ancient Greeks produced a great number of adventure
stories that seem to explain how they opened sea routes to the world
beyond their Aegean. The most famous of these is that of Jason and
the Argonauts, who sailed in the Argo from the Aegean Sea to the
Black Sea and east to Colchis, in present-day Georgia. It is clear
from the nature of the account that Colchis was a known, if remote,
place; what Jason and his crew discovered, if anything, was not a new
place, but a sea route to it. In addition to such legends, there are
the fragmentary accounts of several real voyages of exploration. In
the late seventh century bce, Egypt"s pharaoh Necho sent a number of
Phoenician vessels on a circumnavigation of Africa from the Red Sea
to the Mediterranean. According to Herodotus, this voyage took three
years, during which the sailors stopped each fall to plant crops for
the following year. He also tells, in some disbelief, how in the
course of their voyage from east to west, the sailors had the sun on
their right, which could have happened only if they were south of the
Equator. About 300 years later, a Greek named Pytheas sailed out of
the Mediterranean to the British Isles, to a land rich in amber
(Denmark or farther east in the Baltic), and to a mysterious place
called Thule, variously identified as Iceland, the Faeroe Islands, or
Norway. In his journey to the British Isles, anyway, Pytheas was
sailing in the wake of the Phoenicians, who had access to the tin
mines of Cornwall. But in any case, neither Necho"s captains nor
Pytheas achieved anything of long-lasting consequence: northern
Europe opened gradually from the south, as the Roman Empire expanded,
and southern Africa would not be rounded again until the fifteenth
century. Yet the possibility that such voyages took place is far from
remote.
Of more immediate significance in the ancient world was the
discovery by Mediterranean traders of the seasonal monsoons that
facilitated navigation between Africa, Arabia, and India. This
discovery, credited to the second-century-bce Eudoxus of Cyzicus, in
Asia Minor, was really an intelligence coup; the sailors of the
Indian Ocean had sailed to the rhythms of the monsoons for centuries.
(Eudoxus is reported to have disappeared attempting to round Africa
counterclockwise, from west to east, in an effort to avoid the
Ptolemy VIII"s confiscatory customs duties after his first two
voyages.)
For hundreds of years following the extension of Rome"s
hegemony over western Europe, such long-distance exploration as took
place was confined to the Indian Ocean and western Pacific. Persian
and Arab traders established direct trade links to China via
Southeast Asia by the seventh century, but these included many ports
of call and the route was spliced together from strands of shorter
routes.
The next burst of maritime exploration came from the Baltic --
Europe"s northern inland sea -- and was initiated by the
Scandinavians. Vikings began by expanding along the east-west
corridor of the Baltic. They established themselves in northern
Russia, and soon their river-oriented trade networks extended south
to the Black Sea and Byzantium and east to the Caspian. West from the
Baltic, the Vikings conquered along the coasts and rivers of the
British Isles and western Europe as far south as the Mediterranean.
Following in the wake of Irish monks -- St. Brendan is specifically
recognized for this achievement -- who reached Iceland around 790,
the Norse reached Iceland in about 860. From there, in 982, Eirik
(The Red) Thorvaldsson sailed west for Greenland to spend there a
three-year term of exile for murder. A quarter century later, his son
Leif (The Lucky) sailed farther west, to Newfoundland, called
Vinland, where the remains of a Viking encampment have been unearthed
at L"Anse aux Meadows. This settlement did not last long. The outpost
was too remote, the population available to sustain it too small, and
the rewards too few. The abandonment of the Vinland colony prefigured
the contraction of the Viking"s Atlantic world. The Greenland
settlements ended regular communication with Iceland in 1347, and
vanished a century later; Iceland"s contacts with Europe also entered
a long period of decline.
By this time, traders of the Hanseatic League, centered on
German cities in the Baltic, had superseded the Vikings as the
dominant seafarers in northern Europe, while Mediterranean seafarers
had begun their first forays into the Atlantic. The latter
initiatives were fueled by the profits from trade and the search for
more. Christian Europe first got a taste of the benefits of commerce
with the East when the Crusaders gained a foothold in the Levant, in
the late eleventh century. By the early thirteenth century, Genoese
and Venetian merchants were also active in the Black Sea. The Genoese
established themselves in Trebizond, on the north coast of modern
Turkey, an entrepôt for overland trade with India. Mediterranean
traders were also engaged in an expanding trade with northern Europe.
In the early thirteenth century, Genoese merchants entered the
Atlantic, and by the 1270s their galleys, as well as those of Majorca
and other trading states, regularly plied between Genoa and Bruges,
initiating the first sustained navigation by Mediterranean sailors
between Mediterranean and Atlantic ports.
The westward shift rec...

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0395984157
• ISBN 13: 9780395984154
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208