Gordon - A history of the world in sixteen shipwrecks

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following colleagues for continuing conversations on the themes of this book: Richard Tucker, Richard Eaton, Patrick Manning, Emma Flatt, and Daud Ali. My mental discussions with historians John Richards and Robert Frost carry on, though both have passed. I wish to thank the organizers for allowing me to explore the books ideas at several talks at colleges across the Midwest. I am grateful to the curators and staff of the following libraries: Hatcher and Clements Libraries at the University of Michigan, the Library of Congress, and the Cleveland Public Library. I would like to thank Stephen Hull, my editor, for thoughtful and productive critiques, and, as always, Roger Williams, my agent, for his support and advice.

1

DUFUNA DUGOUT

In May 1987, a Fulani herder in northeastern Nigeria was digging a new well. At a depth of sixteen feet he struck something hard and quickly realized that this was no rock, but something large, wooden, and likely old and important. First local, then state, and finally national officials visited the site just outside the village of Dufuna, located on the seasonally flooded plain of the small, often-dry Komadugu Gana River, about two hundred miles east of Kano.

In 1994 the team uncovered and photographed a fully intact boat, lying upside down. It is almost thirty feet long, carved from a single log a foot and a half in diameter, with sides and bottom two inches thick; it is missing only a few small pieces along the top edge. Elegantly designed, the boat features long rising tapers at both the bow and stern. It is made of African mahogany, likely either Khaya grandiflora or Khaya senegalensis, both of which grow in drier conditions than the typical rain forest habitat of the other two mahogany species. Mahogany is quite suitable for boats. It is dimensionally stable, survives well in water, and resists rot because the tree synthesizes and infuses phenol (carbolic acid) into its wood, which kills rot. The elegant design of the Dufuna boat suggests a long and well-developed boatbuilding tradition, not a recently acquired skill.

The boat was exposed and photographed. The team did not turn the boat over, so they could not see possible evidence of the use of fire or an adze in its construction. The Dufuna boat was initially reburied, to safeguard it until funds and facilities for full excavation and long-term preservation became available. The German-Nigerian team re-excavated the boat in 1998 and

Local men lift the Dufuna boat from the excavated pit.

PHOTO COURTESY PETER BREUNIG

Today, satellite photos show no agriculture and little settlement outside the floodplain of the Komadugu River. Both north and south of the river are miles upon miles of scrub desert, which in years with some rain supports herding. In the time of the Dufuna dugout, however, this region was a very different place. Lake Chad, now some two hundred miles to the east, was much larger, its shoreline perhaps only thirty miles east of the Dufuna site. It is even possible that the Dufuna site was a lagoon that connected to Lake Chad. It is not difficult to imagine the Dufuna boats ordinary uses for fishing, crossing the Komadugu River, carrying gathered food plants, and visiting other settlements in the lagoons and on the shoreline of Lake Chad.

Dugouts in a PostIce Age World

Dated to about the same time period as the Dufuna canoe, similar dugout craft have been uncovered by archaeologists in Europe. For example, construction workers found a dugout in a peat bog near the town of Pesse in Holland. Currently housed in the Drents Museum near the find site, the canoe is about as unsophisticated a small boat as one can imagine. The builders merely hollowed out a Scotch pine log nine feet long and a foot and a half in diameter. There was no attempt to shape the bow or the stern. Several archaeologists doubted that such a crude craft could even be paddled. A reproduction of the Pesse dugout, however, proved to be both maneuverable and relatively stable.

Just as the Sahara was a very different place eight thousand years ago, so was Europe. Vast amounts of water had been tied up in the glaciers of the last ice age (at its maximum extent about twenty thousand years ago), which covered Holland, northern Germany, Scandinavia, and England. The sea level had dropped four hundred feet. As the glaciers retreated (about ten thousand years ago) they left behind newly cut lakes and much-changed river drainage. It was a time of marshes, bogs, and eventually large forests. Travel by river and across marshes probably spurred development of simple dugouts as humans recolonized the north European plain. Linden trees were suitable, common, and the most frequently used material for the oldest European dugouts. Archaeologists have excavated dugout boats across much of Europe in the period following the last ice age, for example in Stralsund, Germany (7,000 years old), Noyen-sur-Seine, France (7,000 years old), Lake Zurich, Switzerland (6,500 years old), and Arhaus, Denmark (5,000 years old).

In the north of what is today the United States, conditions were similar to postice age Europe: bogs, marshes, lakes, many rivers, and developing forests. The earliest finds of dugout canoes in North America date from the same period, roughly five to six thousand years ago.

What tied these early boats into a world was not communication between peoples using them but common problems and solutions of material, production, design, and use.

How to Make a Dugout

A small dugout requires a tall, straight tree with fifteen feet of usable trunk at least thirty inches in diameter. The fewer knots the better. Ecological conditions of deserts, Arctic regions, and high mountains rule out such trees. On the steppe and plains, dugouts could only appear if one of the few native trees proved suitable. Nevertheless, the rest of the world offered a variety of species suitable for dugouts. It seems logical to assume that experimentation over millennia arrived at the best local trees for dugout canoes. In eastern North America white pine found favor in the north, while cypress dominated the south. On the Pacific Coast, Sitka spruce, redwood, and Douglas fir worked. In Northern Europe, linden was the preferred wood. Tropical forests offered a plethora of tall straight trees that formed the overstory of the rain forest.

An understanding of why ancient dugout makers found these particular woods desirable requires a short discussion of the physics and chemistry of trees. Trees are essentially complicated vertical pipingthat is, long pores move nutrients from the soil up, and other pores shunt energy down. Some trees have large pores (oak, for example), producing prominent grain when the wood is cut. Other trees, such as pine and maple, have tiny, almost invisible pores. Only the outside inch or two of a tree contains active pores, which move nutrients and energy. The entire trunk inside this active zone is dead and merely provides support for the branches and leaves of the crown of the tree.

The bonding material that joins the long vertical pores gives wood its strength. Heavier wood means stronger bonding material. Tight bonding between pores was particularly important for the two ends of the dugout. Tapering these two vulnerable areas left less bonded wood than the sides or bottom. If either end dried unevenly, the boat would split. Over millennia, boatbuilders must have experimented with locally available trees to find the few that were light enough and strong enough to serve as dugouts. They also discovered that a few trees, such as cypress and mahogany, had properties that resisted rot. The best dugout canoe, therefore, came from a big, straight tree with few lower branches (therefore, no knots), which contained relatively small pores, was strong enough to resist splitting in the fore and aft, but was not so heavy that the boat sat dangerously low in the water. Dugouts must be made from green, living wood. Dry, fallen logs have usually shrunk and checked (cracked along the grain) so badly that they could never be structurally sound or waterproof.