The earliest Eurasian maritime expansion may have been
the one that
took the Eskimos, or their Palaeo- Eskimo forerunners, across the
Bering Strait some five thousand years ago. Unlike earlier migrants who
had used this route, they did not wait for an ice age; presumably they
had canoes comparable to those they still used in recent times, or they
may have crossed the sea while it was frozen over in winter. As we saw
in chapter 5, the Eskimos possessed a material culture well adapted to
the Arctic coastlands of North America, and they occupied this niche
all the way across to Greenland. What they did not do on any scale was
to move deeper into the Americas. Such a move would have required
considerable change to their specialized Arctic culture; and it seems
that the mere presence of hunter- gatherers to the south was enough to
inhibit such an adaptation, or to limit its success. Thus the Eskimo
expansion from northeast Asia was confined to the American Arctic.
At the east end of Eurasia long dugout canoes with
some kind of
outrigger were in use in Japan by the late Jomon period, at a time when
deep-sea fish already formed part of the Japanese diet. By the
sixteenth century A.D. both the Chinese and the Japanese had developed
considerable maritime skills, and were using them energetically. In the
Chinese case there was extensive seaborne trade in East and Southeast
Asia, and this was supplemented in 1405, by a series of naval
expeditions organized by the Chinese state and led by the eunuch Cheng
Ho (Zheng He). While they lasted, these expeditions were large and
ranged as far afield as East Africa. In the Japanese case the state
played no comparable role, but trade, fishing, and piracy flourished
even—or especially—in the absence of a strong central government.
Japanese ships visited several destinations in Southeast Asia, and
settlements were established there. Nearer home, Japanese pirates had
menaced the coasts of Korea and China on and off for centuries. Their
depredations climaxed in the 1550s; they had their bases in southern
Japan, though many of the supposedly Japanese pirates of this time were
in fact Chinese. Given this varied and active maritime scene, it would
not have been at all surprising if East Asian shipping had sooner or
later found its way to the New World or the Antipodes. But at the point
at which the Portuguese appeared in East Asia, in the first half of the
sixteenth century, there was no immediate prospect of this.
The maritime scene at the other end of Eurasia was
also ancient. The
Near Eastern farming package that reached Britain toward 4000 B.C.
could have done so only by sea, since Britain had already been cut off
from the Continent by rising sea levels some three thousand years
earlier. Likewise, in the fourth to second millennia B.C., the
communities of the Atlantic fringe constituted something like a single
cultural zone linked by the ocean. At the same time the region had the
advantage of easy communication with both the Mediterranean and the
Baltic; the Mediterranean, as we have seen, was one of the world's most
precocious regions of maritime development. The Pacific fringe of East
Asia, by contrast, was less closely linked to the Indian Ocean, where
interaction was in any case less intense; and access to the Sea of
Okhotsk—should you happen to know where it is—did nothing for anyone.
The Baltic, Atlantic, and Mediterranean scenes were all very active in
the later Middle Ages, and the interaction of the Atlantic and
Mediterranean was particularly fertile. It was to be personified in the
Bart played by mariners from the city-states of northern Italy in the
Iberian voyages of discovery. But perhaps more important was a
confluence of maritime technology that arguably rendered the shipping
of the Iberian Peninsula the most likely candidate to breach the
traditional limits of Old World seafaring. The key development here was
the caravel, which combined the maneuverability of the traditional
galley with the relatively small crew of the traditional sailing ship.
Yet we should not exaggerate the significance of this technological
lead. We have a credible account of a circumnavigation of Africa by the
Phoenicians around 600 B.C., and they could doubtless have crossed the
Atlantic had they had a mind to.
