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Seafaring Capabilities in the Pre-Columbian Caribbean

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It was with a happy heart that the good Odysseus spread his sail to catch the wind and used his seamanship to keep his boat straight with the steering-oar.

~Homer

Abstract

At historic contact Europeans remarked on the skill and proficiency of native Caribbean Amerindians to build and travel in dugout canoes. While archaeological examples of these have been recorded throughout the circum-Caribbean, very few exist in the Antillean chain of islands. Despite this deficiency, indirect evidence of seafaring along with archaeological data has suggested to many that the sea was an artery that linked prehistoric communities together between islands and continents through exchange networks and settlement ‘lifelines’. It is clear that frequent interaction was taking place prehistorically in the region, but examination of seafaring capabilities and the general lack of hard archaeological evidence for contacts in many places suggest this was largely restricted to interaction between the islands and with South America. The fact remains that seafaring in the Caribbean, as one of the smaller aquatic realms inhabited by humans in the past, was highly influenced and largely structured by oceanographic and anemological effects that limited the development of various watercraft designs and navigational techniques which are seen in many of the other world’s seas and oceans. In this paper I: (1) synthesize what is currently known about the antiquity and development of early seafaring in the Caribbean; (2) highlight debates about the level of technologies found in the region; (3) discuss how environmental conditions likely influenced seafaring capabilities and settlement patterns; (4) outline the possible evidence for connections between the different surrounding mainland areas; and (5) provide a comparison with seafaring technologies found in the Pacific to help contextualize the Caribbean into the broader context of global seafaring.

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Notes

  1. Cooper’s (2010a: 104) review of 140 radiocarbon dates and other archaeological data from 1,061 prehistoric sites in Cuba shows that there is a propensity for the earliest sites (ca. 6300–4450 cal BP) to be found along the northern coast of the island, though the number of dates is small (n = 7). Interestingly, the earliest dates for occupation of an offshore island in Cuba are from Punta del Este, Isla de la Juventud (“Isle of Youth”) at Cave 4 (1290–740 cal BP) and Cave 1 (970–680 cal BP). Given that this island is one of the largest in the Caribbean (~2,200 km2), this could suggest that seafaring traditions had either waned since initial colonization, or did not develop until much later in time.

  2. This is actually close to the estimated length of some Polynesian double canoes (Doran 1981).

  3. Doran (1981: 63) actually uses an estimate of 180 lbs per crew member in his analysis of canoe weights in the Pacific.

  4. The absence of artifacts or manufacturing debris near an outcrop or even on the same island should not necessarily be seen as a lack of evidence for exploitation of a resource. History is replete with examples from island environments in which people ventured to a location (often smaller outcrops on another island) to extract tool quality stone, but did not process the material on site. For example, Torrence (1986: 206, 214–216) found that the majority of Melos obsidian from the Aegean was removed as unworked nodules and that it was not necessarily a high value material; instead, it was the crafting of blades by specialists which gave obsidian its value. This is also seen in the Pacific where most of the obsidian found on Santa Cruz Island was brought in unmodified, including one cobble that was of such poor quality that it was never flaked (Sheppard 1993). The point being is that the modification of a resource is what can actually give it value, along with the social links forged by exchange, and the acquirers of a resource are not necessarily the ones who modify it.

  5. The geographical patchiness and early presence of some translocated animals found in the northern Caribbean (Giovas et al. 2012) may point to introductions that were direct from the South American mainland. For example, the earliest dates for guinea pig are found in Puerto Rico around A.D. 600 (LeFebvre and deFrance 2013), with other occurrences in the southern end of the distribution on Carriacou occurring at least 300–400 years later.

  6. All known extant and extinct species of hutia are native to the Caribbean islands, primarily the Greater Antilles (e.g. Woods 1989; Wilkins 2001). Hofman et al. (2011) may be confusing the hutia with the agouti (Dasyprocta sp.), another rodent which was brought into the Caribbean Islands from South America prehistorically. See Giovas et al. (2012) for a recent summary of Neotropical animal introductions into the Antilles.

  7. Barbados is somewhat anomalous in terms of Archaic settlement as it is the only island in the Lesser Antilles south of the Guadeloupe Passage (comprising six major islands and many smaller ones across several hundred kilometers) currently known to have evidence for a pre-500 B.C. settlement (Fitzpatrick 2012). Callaghan (2010) suggests that the high frequency of volcanism may have been a deterrent to settlement; that Barbados is relatively flat and limestone in origin may lend credence to this theory (Fitzpatrick 2012).

  8. For a useful reference guide on Pacific navigation and voyaging, see Goetzfridt (1992).

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Acknowledgments

A shorter version of this paper was originally presented in a symposium at the 2011 Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Jacksonville, FL on prehistoric canoes. I thank the organizers, Donna L. Ruhl and Phyllis E. Kolianos, for the kind invitation to participate in the session. Thanks also go to Leslie Hazell and John Swogger for drafting illustrations of several of the figures used in the paper, as well as Leslie Hazell, John Cherry, Christina Giovas, Robin Torrence, Richard Callaghan, and an anonymous reviewer for providing useful comments and suggestions that improved various aspects of the paper. I also acknowledge the mentoring and friendship of Peter Drewett who recently passed away in April 2013 and was responsible for first introducing me to Caribbean archaeology on the island of Barbados over 20 years ago.

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    Scott M. Fitzpatrick

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Fitzpatrick, S.M. Seafaring Capabilities in the Pre-Columbian Caribbean. J Mari Arch 8, 101–138 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11457-013-9110-8

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