Chapter Twelve

THE VIEW FROM THE SHORE

THE NATURE OF

SEABOARD CIVILIZATIONS

The Oran Laut—Phoenicia and Scandinavia—

the Maritime Netherlands

The bottom swimmers,

the seafolk couriers,

have told the story:

the words of the story

are these words.

—Traditional song of the Japaneseamaor seafolk,

Yamato period quoted in D. M. Brown,

The Cambridge History of Japan,
vol.1(Cambridge,1993), p.487

.

The land by the sea lies beyond the realm of civilization, But the matched tally earns the Han official respect.

—BAOHE (eighth century),

“Sending the Esteemed Master Li to Quanzhou”

The Sea People: Adapting to the Waves

Seas attract and repel, inhibit and inspire. They are cauldrons of monsters-—“dragon-green, dark, luminous and serpent-haunted” in one line of poetry,-and generous, rewarding goblets of “the wine of earth” in the next. They are life-threatening and life-supplying. It is unusual for people to live in them permanently—though the oran laut of Southeast Asia, the “sea people,” provide anexample of how the sea can become a human habitat. The prospect of colonizing the seabed has become a favorite fantasy of science-fiction writers. But where sea and land are thoroughly interpenetrated—where natural harbors open onto navigable seas—the nature of civilization is determined by the diversification of the environment that the waters offer. The sea can become a source of food, a highway of trade, and a means of expansion.

It cannot easily be reshaped like landscape, nor can it be covered with cities, though shipwrights do a remarkable job of floating elaborate living spaces on or below its surface, and some boat peoples assemble flotillas which might qualify to be called sea cities, or at least sea settlements, until they are dispersed by a blast or forced apart in the search for food or shelter. People who genuinely live at sea—rather than visiting it for temporary purposes, such as hunting, migration, exploration, trade, or war—have to adapt to the environment, rather than trying to remodel it to suit aims of their own. As a habitat, the sea is like the wastelands, only more so: it demands cooperation and cannot be coerced.

Walter Grainge White befriended the northernmost of the sea people of Malaysia, whom he called by their name for themselves, the Mawken, when he served as a chaplain at Mergui in British Burma before the First World War. He admired and sympathized with them, but he instinctively recognized their way of life as uncivilized. By the criterion adopted in this book, they represented the antithesis of civilization: behavior entirely at the behest and survival entirely at the mercy of nature, to which the sea people humbly submitted. A few communities had toeholds on dry land, on unfrequented islands and coves, where they kept huts to which they could retreat at need. Most of them, however—and White reckoned their numbers as at least five thousand at the time—had no home other than their boats and spent virtually all their time at sea. They came ashore only to trade, to build or repair their boats, and, curiously, to bury their dead, whom they would not entrust to the waves. There are many peoples in Southeast Asia who can be said to be at home on the sea; but most—like the Bugis of Sulawesi, who have a great reputation in the West for their adaptability to an aquatic environment—are essentially landlubbers and peasants who have a strong additional vocation for the sea.¹The oran laut of Malaysia are, however, sea people in the fullest sense of the term, and no community among them was ever more resolute in their maritime way of life than the Mawken described by White.

He was touched by their humility and heroism. Families usually of half a dozen to a dozen people made their homes in dugouts of about twenty-five feet in length, with rounded hulls at either end—a form of construction which seemed positively to invite the waves to bounce the occupants up and down and to limit the speed with which they could make headway. Protection against heavy seas was provided by nothing better than long palm stems laid horizontally, one above another, and caulked with resin to form frail bulwarks a few feethigh. Split bamboo stems, lashed with bark thongs, formed a deck which almost covered the boat, except for a hole for bailing, which was done with cupped hands or, preferably, with a hollow gourd. On the deck a small hut, high enough to crouch or lie under, would be roofed with palm fronds to provide the only shelter. When opportune, a mast could be slipped into a hole in a plank amidships, and a palm-leaf sail hoisted by means of a plaited grass rope. Otherwise, propulsion was by oar, pivoted on rowlocks of thong. The Mawkens’ only implement for fishing was a harpoon, traditionally formed of a bone-tipped stake; they would not deign to use nets or pots, and what could not be speared in passing had to be gathered by hand from the seabed or the rocks. The only fish they could normally eat, therefore, were the sluggish catfish, which were vulnerable to the spear, or the crustaceans for which they could dive or clamber. Even at the best of times, this diet could not support life, and they had to trade fish and oyster shells for rice. For cooking these delicacies, they had a hearth of earth, to prevent the deck from catching light, on which a fire was laid and a pot placed. To enhance the spiny, knobbly comfort of the deck, each member of the family had a mat which was spread for sitting or sleeping.

With this truly minimalist technology, they kept afloat on a sea racked by storms throughout the year. The Bay of Bengal is one of the stormiest environments commonly frequented by shipping—a gulf of the sea of Sinbad, where fortunes changed with the wind and, according to a mid-twelfth-century text, the crews of Chinese junks could not endure without strong drink.²Here, “ civilized” seafarers stretched out cycles of wreck and rescue in stories as long as a mast. The sea people endured the season of torrential monsoon rains and cyclones which occurs every year in high summer, when they can hardly have slept for days or weeks and were unable to get food. When the sea was navigable to fair-weather sailors, they had to contend with Malay pirates: poverty, in these circumstances, was the best defense, a rational strategy for survival in White’s view. The waters on which they lived were infested with sharks, so that when they prepared fish to eat they had to scrape whatever was inedible into the bilges: to throw it overboard would be to attract the permanent company of fierce marauders. The life of their vessels was lived in an atmosphere polluted with the stench of the rot.

Their science had two branches: first, to build their boats and accumulate and classify the knowledge of natural materials needed for it; second, as White remarked, “Of shells and fish there is little which can be known by observation which they did not know.”³Their art amounted to little more than the weaving of their mats—and even those were uniform and almost without decoration. Their dance and music, traditionally played with sticks and bamboo flutes, they claimed almost to have abandoned by White’s day, because, they said, “These are the times of sadness.” Their dependence on nature left them, in effect, no leisure for anything else. They lived on the sea cheerfully but did not pretend tohave taken to it willingly. The history they claimed to remember as their own was that of a prosperous farming people, driven from the land by invasions of Burmese from the north and Malays from the south. They fled to ever smaller and less viable islands, keeping to their boats when raiders came, and at last abandoning the shore entirely. Their name for themselves meant literally the “Sea-drowned.”⁴

The experience of the sea people of Malaysia is an extreme case of the intractability of the sea as a mise-en-scene for civilization. But its lessons seem inescapable. The role of the sea in the history of civilization is limited to two contributions: it is an additional resource for land-based communities who live near it; and it is a highway of communication between them. By “seaboard civilizations” I mean those shaped by the proximity of the sea in both these respects. Irrespective of what the rest of their environment is like—hot or cold, rainy or dry—they behave like one another in ways that invite them to be classed together.

The Narrow Shores: Phoenicia and Scandinavia

Typically, seaboard civilizations turn to seaward from desert or mountain hinterlands. The Phoenician civilization, which flourished for about a thousand years from the thirteenth century B.C., began on the fertile but narrow coast of what is now Lebanon, on a strip only a few miles deep, backed by the Lebanon Mountains. The very name of the Phoenicians betrays a commercial vocation: it almost certainly means “purveyors of purple dye”—the “Tyrian” crimson that was Western antiquity’s favorite color. Like all such names, it was imposed from outside; but Phoenicians had a genuine unity of culture, of language, of habitat: to use a name with associations easily recognizable, they were Canaanites of the coast. Three hundred years after they had vanished, they were recalled by a Roman poet as “a clever race who prospered in war and peace. They excelled in writing and literature and the other arts, as well as in seamanship, naval warfare and ruling an empire.” The corresponding Scandinavian-seaboard story unfolded over a longer period and happened in a contrasting environment; but it presents remarkable parallels, which show that the Mediterranean was not Europe’s only civilizing sea.

In front of them, the Phoenicians had waters accessible through many excellent anchorages. Behind them, they had forests of cedar and fir which provided them with shipbuilding materials and with a valuable export. These were the ships which, according to the Bible, brought gold for King Solomon from the lost realm of Ophir; these were the products King Hiram of Tyre supplied to Solomon to build the Temple of Jerusalem, in exchange for food and oil. Phoenician craftsmen made the mixing bowl of Achilles, and Phoenician sailors“carried it over the misty face of the water.”⁵They acquired from Greek competitors in trade a reputation as guileful—the great compliment of being worthy of denigration.

The forests of Lebanon yielded raw materials for the shipbuilders of treeless Egypt. A vivid report of a trip to buy timber was left by Weinamun, merchantambassador of the pharaoh and servant of the cult of the oracle of Amun, in 1075
B.C. “I, Weinamun,” he began, “embarked in Egypt for the Great Syrian Sea, guided only by the light of the stars, until I reached the realm of Zeker Ba’l, ruler of Byblos.” He got himself shelter in a tavern and set up a shrine for Amunofthe-travelers. At first, the king refused to see him, preferring, he claimed, to keep his forests for ships of his own. But the Egyptian source represented what was presumably a negotiating strategy as a dramatic change of stance. Moved by prophetic utterances, Zeker Ba’l summoned the envoy at dead of night.

“I found him,” says Weinamun, “squatting in his high chamber and when he turned his back against the window, the waves of the great sea of Syria were breaking against the rear of his head.” The negotiations were attended by posturing on both sides. “I have come,” Weinamun began, “after the timber contract for the great and august ship of Amun, King of Gods. As your father did, and as your father’s father did, so should you. Give me timber from the hills of Lebanon for the ship.”

Zeker Ba’l resented the implication that his cooperation was due as tribute. He would comply only if paid: “When I call loudly to the Lebanon which makes the heavens open, timber will be delivered to the sea.” Weinamun differed: “There is no ship which does not belong to Amun. His also is the sea. And his is the Lebanon of which you say, ‘It is mine.’ Do what Amun bids and you will have life and health.”

Nevertheless, he went back to Egypt and returned with four jars of gold, five of silver, cloth and veils of linen, five hundred ox hides, three hundred ropes, twenty sacks of lentils, and thirty baskets of fish. “And the ruler was pleased and he supplied three hundred men and three thousand oxen and they felled the timber. And they spent the winter at it and hauled it to the sea.”⁶

Most Phoenician cities had a seaward reach and gaze, “situate,” as Ezekiel said of Tyre, “at the entry of the sea, . . . a merchant for the people for many isles.”⁷Their water gates—as depicted in reliefs from northern Mesopotamia—opened straight onto the sea.⁸The coins they began to mint in the sixth century
B.C. typically show merchant galleys against a background of waves.⁹An Assyrian official’s report captures the quayside life of Tyre in the ninth century B.C.: the busy wharves, the people going in and out of the warehouses, the timber traffic, and the tax riots.¹⁰The vicious, jealous prophecies of Ezekiel display a city proud of its beauty, which “thy builders have perfected.” His list of the city’s commerce is designed to evoke the corruption of luxury. It rings with preciousmetals, exudes the aromas of spice, and swirls with rich textiles steeped in secret dyes. But it starts with the basis of everything else: the shipbuilding materials and personnel, the timbers from the cedar forests of Lebanon, the oak for the oars, benches of ivory, sails of Egyptian linen, mariners and caulkers from the Phoenician coast. “All the ships of the sea . . . were in thee to occupy thy merchandise.”¹¹

Like many later seaboard civilizations, Phoenicians used the sea to expand by founding colonies. The earliest—at Utica, in what is now Tunisia, and Gades, modern Cadiz in Spain—are said in presumably legendary sources to have been established as early as the twelfth century B.C.; the archaeological record demonstrates a remarkably rapid spread of colonies into the western Mediterranean, reaching Malta by the eighth century B.C., Sardinia perhaps in the ninth, and touching Tangier and Tamuda by the sixth. From there, Phoenician navigators broke into the Atlantic, and established a trading post as far away as Mogador. Texts preserved in Roman sources even credit them with circumnavigations of Arabia and Africa.

Where they built cities, they spread the eclectic tastes one might expect of thalassocrats, in rooms with cut-marble floors and mausolea decorated in styles borrowed from all over the eastern Mediterranean. They established the imprints of their characteristic industries—vats for mixing Tyrian dye, clay-lined beehives, glassblowers’ shops. They exported bloodthirsty cults: in loud and lurid rites at Carthage, newborn babies were rolled from the arms of brazen cultstatues of Ba’al and Tanit into sacred flames.¹²

The independent cities which remained in the Lebanon were engulfed by Babylonian and Persian imperialism. The cultural center of the Phoenician world was displaced westwards. Carthage, founded in the late ninth or early eighth century B.C., became its cynosure and the standard-bearer of rivalry for control of Mediterranean trade—first against Greek cities, then against the Roman empire. Carthage was ideally placed to be the capital of a seaboard civilization: a fine harbor just where a lot of shipping needed it, in the middle of the Mediterranean, with a narrow but fertile hinterland, full of flocks, wheatfields, and irrigated gardens of pomegranates and vines. Cato summed it up in a single gesture before the Roman Senate: to demonstrate why Carthage must be destroyed, he displayed plump, fresh figs newly imported from there—which showed both the fertility of the city’s lands and the ease of its communications. The final triumph of Rome in 146 B.C. was so thorough and so vengeful that Carthage was razed to the ground and salt sown in the soil on which it stood. Almost the whole of Phoenician literature was destroyed. Only bits of shivered epigraphy survive. Even the artworks which have lasted are so few and sparse as to make it impossible to be certain how to characterize Phoenician art: if anything united it except eclecticism, we shall probably never know what it was.

Nor can we reconstruct the context that might help explain the developmentof the Phoenicians’ unique gift to the world, the alphabet. All other writing systems, as far as we know, except those derived from or indebted to the Phoenician prototype, have a syllabic or logographic basis or some combination of the two. In the first of these common systems, each sign represents a syllable, usually composed of one vowel sound and one consonant; in the second, a sign stands for an entire word. These methods have what must have seemed two insuperable advantages to scribes in the civilizations that devised or adopted them. First, they require the user to know a large number of signs—typically, several score in a syllabic system, hundreds or even thousands in a logographic one. They are therefore secrets of the well educated: hieratic mysteries which only the leisured are likely to have time to learn. Second, they seem on first consideration to be economical systems in key respects: they should, in principle, take less time to write and consume fewer valuable writing materials, such as stone or clay tablets, lapidary monuments, papyrus, paper, or costly hides, than a system which demands at least one sign for every single sound. Systems in the Phoenician tradition were not the best for most of history, but they have come into their own in the recent past, in societies of mass literacy and cheap writing materials. Indeed, the ease with which they can be mastered and applied probably encourages wide access to learning and stimulates transactions—both political and commercial—in which written records are helpful. Writing is not essential to civilization—but it helps. And the simpler the writing system, the more manpower it can mobilize for literate activities.

Runic writing—one of the systems remotely indebted to the Phoenician alphabet—illustrates this. In no area has our image of Norse achievement been more distorted by mystification than in the study of runes. These practical and adaptable letters have been degraded to magic by a combination of romanticism and ignorance. Magic and science are not always easily distinguished, but runes probably started, like the Sumerian and Minoan writing systems, as business technology, engraved on wooden tallies to mark trade goods with their owners’ names. They were certainly used in this way on merchants’ labels from twelfthcentury Bergen and the letters of bureaucrats in royal service in the same period, of which enough fragments survive to suggest an extensive correspondence.¹³Like many writing systems, they were regarded by their users as a divine gift, “God-descended,” “glorious,” but this does not mean their use was restricted to arcana. Common on objects of value and monumental inscriptions, they became associated with bids for permanence and perhaps for immortality; but these are ambitions within the range of the writing systems of practical people. The overwhelming majority of surviving inscriptions have no explicitly magical or even ritual or religious content, unless statements of ownership or authorship are counted as such.

It is fair, I think, to identify them as the writing system of a seaboard civilization. They may not have originated there, though many early inscriptionscome from southern Denmark. In Southeastern Europe, which a rival theory advocates as the birthplace of the runes, most inscriptions are on what could have been trade goods—a neck ring, brooches. If we believe the plausible theory which derives rune forms from the Phoenician alphabet via Greek letterpatterns,¹⁴it is likely that the influence was transmitted to the Baltic lands where amber came from along with the well-attested Greek trade, which can be traced back to the second millennium B.C. On the other hand, the earliest known runes are of about the second century A.D., which supports a Roman source of inspiration, mediated through Germany and arriving in Scandinavia late, when the tradition was dying out elsewhere. In any case, the heartland of the runes, where most inscriptions survive, is in the southern regions of the Scandinavian Peninsula.

They came into their own as the medium of Swedish and Danish epigraphy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The stumbling efforts of engravers of evidently limited literacy—at least, errors have to be assumed if modern readers are to wrest sense from the texts—are the surviving splinters of a literature normally written in perishable materials of bark and wood. The copious and ingenious Icelandic sagas, recorded more enduringly in a land without trees, are part and proof of a Scandinavian literary tradition.

The peoples of the western Scandinavian seaboard were the “Phoenicians of the North.” Their narrow coastal habitat, backed by mountains and forests, blended with the ocean in fjords and estuaries, and the sea was always available to supplement the poor livelihood offered by the land. Theirs might be thought a particularly unfavorable environment: the cold North, where the residue of the ice age still clings and creeps, and where the passage of the sun imposes demanding seasonal extremes. There was no tin here to support a Bronze Age civilization: for hundreds of years, Norse craftsmen were reduced to making, in whatever materials they had to hand, slavish imitations of bronze daggers and axes imported at great cost—in exchange, perhaps, for the amber so highly esteemed by Mediterranean peoples who had none of their own.

Yet, in the most favorable parts of the region, in what are now southern Sweden and Denmark, a brilliant and artistically inventive culture began to defy the environment, early in the second millennium B.C., among a people understandably obsessed by the sun. The finest surviving artifact of the age is the midsecond-millennium chariot of the sun, discovered in a bog in Trundholm. From this natural archive, full of objects, and from grave goods and rock engravings, fragments of a picture of Bronze Age Scandinavia can be pieced together: an inkling of the wealth which made it possible to import large amounts of metal; a glimpse of the appearance of the elite in tasseled garments for women and horned helmets for warriors; a sense of the importance in taste or worship of serpentine lines—copied, perhaps, from the curl of antlers—like those which formthe curving prows of the many pictured ships or shape the six bronze trumpets, three thousand years old, from a bog cache in Brudevaelte.¹⁵

The antiquity of ship engravings on rock and the diversity of trade goods leave no doubt that Scandinavia had a seafaring culture thousands of years old when the Vikings—seaborne traders, settlers, and conquerors from Scandinavia—first entered the records of other peoples in the eighth century A.D. Chronicles written by their victims have left the Vikings with a destructive image in our historical traditions; but they were also an immensely creative force. In technology, they built the most effective seagoing ships yet seen in the Western world and perfected methods of navigation superior, for open-sea route-finding, to anything known to the Greeks or Romans or any of the Vikings’ Christian neighbors. In politics, they founded the first documented states in Russia and Iceland and—through conquest and settlement—contributed distinctive traditions to the constitutional and legal development of British and Norman institutions, and therefore to the many countries subsequently influenced by Norman and British imperialisms. Their artistic legacy includes sumptuously decorated objects: the ceremonial sleds interred with their owners in ship burials, woodcarving, jewelwork, and needlework comparable in quality to most of what other European peoples were capable of at the time. In literature, though little has survived, something of their traditions can be sensed in the Icelandic sagas, written down in the thirteenth century. The seagoing peoples of Scandinavia became Christianized in the late tenth and the eleventh centuries of the Christian Era and gradually blended into the civilization of Western Christendom; but their independent attainments up to that time show how a seaboard homeland, however cramped or inhospitable, can be a launching place of civilization if the sea is incorporated and exploited.¹⁶

In memories preserved in the medieval literature of Iceland, all their Atlantic colonizations were heroic products of stormy seas and stormier societies: like the first sighting of Greenland, ascribed to Gunnbjorn Ulf-Krakason in the early tenth century, driven west by a freak wind, or the colonization of the same island by Erik the Red, expelled for murderous feuding in 982 , or the first sighting of the New World by Bjarni Herjulfsson in 986 , when he was trying to follow his lost father to Greenland and overshot the mark. In reality, nothing was more natural than that Norse navigation should span the Atlantic, proceeding, bit by bit, between islands and along current-assisted stretches of ocean. Their ability to find havens and cross open sea without charts or technical aids seems miraculous to sailors dependent on the compass. But, like the Polynesians, these were practiced seamen, whose powers of observation were uncorrupted by advanced technology, and who could make a rough judgment of their latitude, relative to a well-known point, by scanning the height of the sun or the Pole Star with the naked eye. The availability of the so-called sun compass has been argued persuasively,on the basis of a single surviving fragment of what may be such an article: in perfect state, it would have consisted of a stick drilled into a round or roughly round wooden base. At his place of departure, the navigator could trace the shadow cast by the gnomon on the base. Comparison of this arc with the shadow cast on the journey would show how the elevation of the sun varied, and therefore how far he had deviated from his initial latitude.¹⁷When it was cloudy or foggy, Norse navigators could only sail on by guesswork until the sky cleared. Like the Polynesians and some modern Atlantic fishermen, they may also have been guided by familiar swells. When they approached land, they read the cloudscape or followed the flight of homing birds—like the legendary discoverers of Iceland in the ninth century, who carried ravens which they released at intervals.

Their ships were not the slinky dragon-ships used by Viking raiders, or the “gold-mouthed, splendid beasts of the mast” sung of by Norse poets, but broad, deep vessels of a kind unearthed by archaeologists at Skudelev in 1962 . Their keels and ribs were of oak, and the overlapping planks of the outer shell were of pine, fastened with snuggly expanding pegs of limewood. Other fixings were made by iron rivets, made, perhaps, by the solemn, bearded smith who works with bellows, hammer, and tongs in a twelfth-century carving at Hylestad. The gaps between the planks were stopped with animal-hair skeins soaked in pine pitch. The central mast had a square sail of coarse woolen cloth (useful only with a following wind), which rested on great T-shaped crutches when furled, with perhaps a small extra sail for maneuverability. There were just a few oar holes fore and aft for working inshore. Rudderless, the ships were steered by a pole dangled over the starboard side towards the stern. Lacking a full upper deck for drainage, they had to be almost constantly bailed with wooden buckets. Stores—salted provisions, sour milk, and beer—were stowed in an open hold amidships in skins or casks which could not be kept dry. No cooking could be done on board, but the excavated ships were provided with huge cauldrons for use on shore when possible—a hint of the longings with which sea voyages were endured. As to “your enquiry what people go to seek in Greenland and why they fare thither through such great perils,” the answer, according to a Norwegian book of 1240 , is “in man’s threefold nature. One motive is fame, another curiosity and the third is lust for gain.”¹⁸

The Viking image is owed to victims’ accounts and to scholarship which fillets civilization out of early Scandinavian history in pursuit of bloody stories—or, in the case of some nineteenth- and twentieth-century versions—of justifications of the barbaric vigor exalted by Nazis and Nordic nationalists. Like all people obliged to fight, the Norse struck their enemies as destroyers rather than creators; yet they could also produce elaborate textiles for an elegant life, like the embroidered procession of pert Viking horses—instantly recognizable from manner and gesture to anyone who knows the breed—which survives in a fragmentat the Oslo Ship Museum. They made the fabulously carved conveyances, studded with gilt nails, which stand today in the same exhibition. They fashioned whalebone and walrus ivory into some of the most impressive artworks of the Europe of their day. They qualified as heroes of civilization by erecting laboriously constructed cities in Iceland and Greenland, where almost no timber was to hand.

The Atlantic Edge

Most of Scandinavia belongs to Atlantic-side Western Europe, which, to my way of thinking, forms a single civilization. I want to call it Rimland. At first glance, it looks like an incoherent category. Rimland stretches from the Arctic to the Mediterranean, across contrasting climates, ecozones, menus, churches, folklores, musical traditions, historical memories, ways of getting drunk. Languages become mutually unintelligible, with unshared roots in the last four thousand years or so. Though Norwegians have a naturalized national dish called bacalau, after a Spanish or Portuguese prototype—a recipe that, at its best, calls for olive oil— there are few such traces of shared experience. As you follow the coast from north to south, everything seems to change, except the presence of the sea.

That sea has given Europe’s Atlantic-side peoples a singular and terrible role in world history. Virtually all the European maritime world-empires of modern history were founded from this fringe. There were, at most, three possible exceptions. Italy had a brief and modest little empire, built up at intervals between the 1880 s and 1930 s, in Libya, the Dodecanese, and the Horn of Africa. It could be reached through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, without imposing on the Atlantic. Russia had a Pacific empire of sorts, in the Aleutian Islands, with outposts on the West Coast of North America, until Alaska was sold to the U.S.A. in 1867 . Russian dreams of creating an Antarctic empire via the Pacific, not surprisingly, never came to anything. Finally, the Baltic Duchy of Courland was briefly a world-imperial power in the mid-seventeenth century, when the visionary Duke Jacob bought Tobago and established some slave-trading factories in West Africa in order to exploit the booming sugar market. This grandiose venture did not long survive the Swedish invasion of Courland in 1658 and the duke’s subsequent death.¹⁹Sweden herself is not an exception to the rule which links maritime imperialism to an Atlantic-side position: Gothenburg, opening onto the North Sea, which is an arm of the ocean, makes her an Atlantic-side power, and for much of the period in which her own colonial expansion via the Atlantic was concentrated, she controlled or had privileged access to Norwegian ports and to Bremen.

Not only were virtually all maritime empires founded by Atlantic-sidestates; there was, effectively, no Atlantic-side state that did not have one. The only possible exceptions are Norway, Ireland, and Iceland; but these states did not achieve sovereignty themselves until the twentieth century and so missed the great ages of oceanic empire-building. Iceland is anomalous in almost every way. The Irish, though they had no empire of their own, were participants as well as victims in that of Britain. When I visited Norway to talk to a socialist congress in 1996 , I was enchanted to find that, with a certain delicious Schadenfreude, Norwegians are rediscovering the guilt of their ancestors’ own quasi-imperial past as participants in Danish and Swedish slaving ventures. It is worth recalling, too, how important a contribution the ubiquitous Norwegian seaman and skipper made to European shipping around the world in the nineteenth century, and how disproportionately Irish and Norwegians were represented in what was certainly the greatest colonial phenomenon of the era (though it is not often classed as such): the imperial expansion of the United States across and beyond America, mainly at the expense of Mexico, Canada, and Native American polities.²⁰For the rest, every European state with an Atlantic seaboard has, in the course of modern history, taken to the ocean with prows set on empire. This applies to relatively puny and peripheral communities, like Portugal and the Netherlands, and even Scotland, briefly, while it was still a sovereign country, as well as to others, like Spain, Germany, and Sweden, which have only relatively short Atlantic-side coasts, and Janus-looks and large hinterlands pulling their interests in other directions.

These are incontestable facts—though not every reader will like the way I put them. The nature of the connection between an Atlantic-side position and an imperial outlook will be explained in its place (see page 419 ); it is necessary to acknowledge at once, however, that, over most of the Western face of Europe, that outlook was adopted very late. Until the late Middle Ages, only Scandinavians can be said to have had it, or something like it. Seafarers from the other Atlantic-side communities did not emulate long-range Scandinavian voyages for a remarkably long time. In order to understand the timing, speed, and success with which Western Europeans’ Atlantic projects were eventually launched, it is helpful to ask now, “What were they doing meanwhile?”

The Frustrations of Rimland: The Early Phase

For as long as anyone can remember, or documents recall, all my paternal ancestors have been Galicians of northwestern Spain—members of one of the westernmost of Europe’s historic communities, thrust out into the Atlantic on granite rocks, slippery with rain but clasped by the sea in a grip formed of fingerlike glacial fjords; in Europe—short of Iceland, the Canary Islands, and theAzores, if you count those—only a few Portuguese and Irish share these sodden, sea-green meridians of longitude. I can therefore say, without fear or favor, that we Western Europeans are the dregs of Eurasian history, and our lands are the sump into which that history has drained.

Western Europeans like to congratulate themselves on the initiatives they have launched to mold European history: the outward thrust of Latin Christendom in the Middle Ages; a Renaissance or three; the scientific Enlightenment; the French Revolution, industrialization, and the European Union. It is true that these have been important formative experiences which have unfolded across Europe, on the whole, from west to east. But suppose one contemplates European history in the longer term—from the perspective, say, of one of those cosmic observers I am fond of conjuring to the imagination. European culture—if there is such a thing—is then seen to have been at least as much the product of influences exerted from east to west as the other way round: the spread of farming and of Indo-European speech; the Greek and Phoenician colonizations; the migrations of Germans and Slavs; the coming of Christianity, that Oriental mystery-religion which Europe has appropriated; the steppeland invasions; the Ottoman pressure; the spread of what used to be called “ international communism,” which has lost its empires but left its mark. And all these movements have to be seen against the background of the long-constant flow of technology and ideas from farther east: Arab science, Indian mathematics and spirituality, and Chinese inventions. The importance of these in the making of Europe is still only beginning to be acknowledged in the West, but the evidence of it is all around us.²¹

All the movements and migrations threw up their refuse and their refugees, who usually ended up on Europe’s ocean rim. The Atlantic Seaboard has been populated by peoples driven as well as drawn to the resources and opportunities of the ocean. This rimland, from Portugal to Scandinavia, has been the last halt of so much jetsam: of Celtic peoples driven out by Germanic invaders; of Suevic fugitives in Galicia and Portugal; of the Basques, crowded into their corner by even earlier migrations; and of the desperate northward migrants, prepared to fight and suffer against nomads and cold for the dubious privilege of turning an intractable sod in freedom—the types whose dilemma Shakespeare imagined so vividly:

Truly to speak, and with no addition,

We go to gain a little patch of ground

That hath in it no profit but the name.

To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it,

Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole

A ranker rate, should it be sold in fee.²²

Lapped by a single ocean, their homelands were shaped by common environmental features. Atlantic Europe covers a range of climatic zones—subarctic, temperate, and Mediterranean—but is unified by high rainfall and common, or at least widespread, geological histories which stabbed Norway and Galicia with fjords and strewed Wales, Cornwall, Galicia, and Lower Andalusia with rich metal deposits: the veins of the “New World” of the ancient Romans, the El Dorados of antiquity. Rivers flow east through low reliefs. These directed ancient commerce into the fairly narrow sea lanes that skirt the Bay of Biscay, uniting the region like a neighborhood service road, one that already linked Andalusia to Galicia and both to Cornwall and the Scillies before Phoenician and Greek traders arrived in the first millennium B.C.

Overwhelmingly, Europe’s Atlantic-side peoples are classifiable today, in the light of their modern history, as maritime peoples. The Atlantic provided them with vocations as fishers, seafarers, and regional traders, and, once navigational technology permitted, with highways of seaborne migration and empirebuilding. Yet the unexplained paradox of Western European history is that the call of the sea was unheard for centuries, even millennia. When they reached the sea, most of these peoples were stuck there, as if pinioned by the prevailing westerlies that blow onto all their shores. Coastwise shipping kept their communities in touch with one another; pelagic hermits contributed to the mystique of the sea; and some places developed deep-sea fisheries at unrecorded dates. But except in Scandinavia, the achievements of civilization in north-west Europe owed little or nothing to the maritime horizon until what we think of as the late Middle Ages. This riddle has a solution, which is best approached after a brief review of the centuries of relative seaward inertia.

Since the end of the last ice age, about twelve thousand years ago, Rimland has been an advantageous environment to live in, with soils watered by high rainfall, a climate made temperate by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, mountains rich in minerals, and seas rich in fish. Its potential as a heartland of civilization was apparent by the fourth millennium B.C., when slow-grinding “structures” of social change can be detected, building a background in which luxury objects could find a market and monumental building could be organized and supplied. Some of these early signs are found among the bones of a new fashion in burials which spread across the West: an individual grave was equipped with a kit of offerings, usually including a weapon and a cup or beaker with a waisted shape. From the time such graves began to be found until the 1970 s, they were generally supposed to be the marks of the passage of “Beaker Folk.” The notion inspired elaborate, intriguing, and, for a time, convincing fantasies. These complete imbibers were thought to be precursors of Spanish conquistadores, fanning out over Europe on horseback from a supposed homeland in Andalusia; or they were Gypsy smiths or tinkers traveling back and forth in states of flux and reflux postulated to accommodate various sites’ claims to priority.The artifacts that make up the “Beaker Culture” are now almost universally regarded as the products of social change occurring independently but in parallel among neighboring peoples: as particular members of the group achieved special status, they were rewarded with individual graves and appropriate offerings at their deaths; the drinking vessels of heavy-toping aristocrats—memorials of elite symposia or the drunken revels of a warrior class—were traded and copied from place to place without necessarily being accompanied by migrations.²³

Greater—or perhaps just different—chiefs were buried under stupendous stone vaults, often near rings of standing stones which can be presumed to have been their ritual centers. The first monumental underground tombs in Brittany predate those of Mycenae, which they broadly resemble, by well over a thousand years on any reasonable reckoning. Their stones are less smoothly dressed, but they anticipate the Myceneans’ corbelled chambers and conical forms. The most spectacular examples have long drystone galleries leading to the place of burial, smothered by mounds and hinting at unrecoverable symbolism.²⁴

A dramatic approach to this world of chiefs is through what looks, at first glance, like one of its remotest outposts, in the Orkneys, settled about 3500 B.C. An elaborate tomb at Meas Howe is close to a temple complex at Barnhouse, where the central building is filled with light at the summer solstice. The stone circles of Brodgar and Stengess hint on a smaller scale at the geomancy of Stonehenge. The expertly stone-built village of Skara Brae lies buried with hearths and fitted furniture still in place. It is tempting to imagine this as one of the farthest-flung colonial stations of a megalithic metropolis in Wessex or Brittany, a sundowner society in a cold climate, preserving the styles and habits, the “cultural baggage,” of a distant home. Yet the dangers of facile assumptions about the direction of cultural transmissions in prehistoric Europe can at once be sensed if we invert the model: the real relationship could almost equally be the other way round. The Orkneys might perhaps have been the Cycladic Islands or the Crete of the Atlantic, developing with little debt to the outside world and then colonizing or influencing the mainland. The Wessex culture that grew up around Stonehenge could be the colony which slowly and painfully came to exceed the Orkneian mother-country, as, say, the U.S.A. came to excel Great Britain. These uncertainties, like the piles of speculative scholarship in which they are multiplied, spill into the gaps unfilled by written sources. As such sources gradually become available from the second half of the first millennium B.C., we get a sense of societies transformed from those of the times of the megaliths and rich burials: transformed by new developments in metallurgy, in particular, towards the hotter furnaces in which iron could be forged; further modified by progress in the extraction of salt and glass and the widening circles of trade such products encouraged; extended by the spread of rye along northerly stretches of the Atlantic shore; renewed and in some ways retarded becausea recurrent theme in the frustrations of Rimland has been the arrival of new migrants and new elites from deep inside the continent, with little interest in the ocean and no vocation for it. The lining of most of the Western European rim with Celtic-speakers was, in part, a process of this sort.

Of all their neighbors, apart from the Persians, the Greeks and Romans paid most attention to the Celts, whom they knew as enemies, trading partners, and, ultimately, cooperators in an empire which came to include most of the Celtic lands. They saw them as an astonishingly homogeneous group of peoples, considering the vast extent of Celtic territory, with kindred languages and a uniform, self-chosen name. The Celts were fearsome—and some of the stories about them ripple with Greek and Roman gooseflesh. They hunted human heads, for instance, and hung them on their saddle gear. They practiced human sacrifice, stitching and burning victims inside huge wicker images of gods.

Their bravery was proverbial—undaunted by “earthquakes or waves.” Their impetuosity was the subject of contempt: they were easily beaten in battle because of it. Their drunkenness was a matter of awe and profit: for Italian merchants, the Gallic love of wine was their “treasure trove.” The importance of drinking rituals in Celtic culture is borne out by grave finds, like the famously sumptuous grave of a rich thirty-five-year-old hostess at Vix, buried with an enormous Greek wine-vessel of fabulous workmanship—so large that it had to be imported in sections and assembled on arrival—and an array of cups.

In antiquity, the ultimate test of a civilization was invincibility. “Natural slaves,” condemned to servitude by inferiority, included captives in battle. In Greek and Roman eyes, the Celts therefore got a low rating as a doom-fraught people of visceral pessimism. The most famous story about them to this day—thanks to Goscinny and Uderzo—is that they feared the sky would fall on their heads. Yet, by a less severe test, they had a civilization of glister and luster. The professional learned class, the Druids, was said to be suspicious of writing its ancient wisdom down, out of the understandable secrecy of a hieratic elite; but enough inscriptions have survived—in Etruscan, Greek, Iberian, and Roman alphabets—to show their willingness to experiment in literacy. Writing was used to record laws—another indicator, by Aristotle’s criteria, of the difference between civilization and savagery—and administrative data. When Caesar invaded Gaul, he was able to calculate the number of men he faced from captured census returns. Statistical sophistication was founded on more theoretical mathematics. Fragments of a divinatory calendar buried at Coligny—though probably of a late date, when Roman influence was strong—show mastery of semilunar timekeeping, involving centuries of records of celestial movements. This justifies Caesar’s esteem for the Druids’ astronomy.

Urbanization—which Romans identified with civilization—was patchy: when the British chief Caractacus was borne in triumph to Rome, he is supposedto have marveled that the creators of such a city could covet his people’s hovels. Yet the towns that Celts built before the Romans invaded had eminently civilized amenities: fresh-water supplies and sanitary drainage. Even while towns were few, sparse, and, by Roman standards, gimcrack, by the time of the Transalpine War, early in the last quarter of the second century B.C., the Celts of Gaul had a society the Romans recognized as like their own: no longer stuck in tribal structures but richly differentiated, with individuals ranked by wealth, prowess, and ancestry as well as by status in a kinship system. Nobility was measured in livestock, not land; peasant tenancies with great lords were for the use of cattle, paid in calves, pigs, and fodder.

The economy was restrained by the way wealth drained out of it. Those most unproductive of consumers, the dead, gobbled up vast sums in grave goods. Celtic princes’ insatiable tastes for high-cost imports from the Mediterranean world imposed a permanent trade deficit which had to be made up in gold. From the late fourth century B.C. luxury imports were too precious to bury with the dead. Though the more-or-less progressive adulteration of Celtic gold artifacts with copper may owe something to aesthetics—the red glow of gold alloyed with copper has a gaudy appeal—it is likely to have been the result of a slowly tightening squeeze on bullion supplies. The prestige of wine-bibbing from Greek situlae could only be enjoyed at a price. The Celts’ invasions of Mediterranean lands had been a substitute for trade: in a story told by Pliny, Gaulish conquerors had first crossed the Alps seduced by the souvenirs—a dried fig, grapes, wine, and oil—brought home by a Helvetian migrant.

Celts were said to be rash enough to take up arms against the sea, but most Celtic peoples were slow to develop a maritime culture, even in the islands beyond the English Channel, which they must have reached by sea. Caesar admired the sea craft of the Veneti, in what is now Brittany: controllers of navigation to Britain who “excel the rest in their knowledge and practice of seafaring.”²⁵Ireland became a pirate nest in the fourth century A.D., and a launching bay for the seaborne peregrinations of self-exiled hermits by the sixth. In other respects, the long-range potential of Atlantic-side Europe, south of Scandinavia, remained unfulfilled until the late Middle Ages or early-modern period. To understand the reasons for this continuing frustration (see page 409 ), it is worth looking ahead at the kind of seaboard civilization which could take shape in Western Europe in what we think of as the early-modern period, when the call of the sea had been felt and answered and ocean-spanning commerce and conquest had become characteristic activities of the people of the region.

“An Equilibrium of Mud and Water”:
Coaxing Civilization from the Shoals

A Dutch lady at a dinner party once told me that she found, to her resentment, a widespread and astonishing assumption among Americans that her country was part of Scandinavia. I shared her surprise but told her that I felt there was a certain poetic truth in this mistake. Groningen and Frisia are close, in place and resemblance, to Denmark. The languages spoken there have much in common with those of Scandinavia. Like Scandinavia, most of the provinces of what is now the kingdom of the Netherlands look out towards the North Sea and have been shaped by its common history. Dutch shipping has a history of participation in Baltic navigation which has lasted for as long as records have been kept. Like the Scandinavians, the Dutch are a seaboard people with a hinterland of limited economic potential who have always needed food and wealth from the sea—extra sustenance and wealth creation from an arena of hunting and trade which enormously extends the cramped space available to landward.

No land has more perfect credentials as the home of a seaboard civilization, for in none are sea and soil so thoroughly interpenetrated. You have to see it to appreciate how perfectly sea and shore combine, or watch them edge into each other in one of the calm shoreline scenes Dutch painters loved. The flat lands of the interior, sopping with bogginess, decline almost imperceptibly in vast, waste shoals and mudflats, which stretch to the sea under a gleaming slick of water. Of what land there is, so much has been reclaimed from sea and salt marsh by dikes and polders that an English propagandist in 1651 felt justified in calling Holland “the vomit of the sea.”²⁶

We know little of the antiquity of the people who became the Dutch; but the Franks, who lived for a time on the neighboring coast of Toxandria, considered themselves to be sprung from a sea monster. This kind of aquatic myth is intelligible in the context of their waterlogged geography. In modern times, the ennobling of families whose wealth came from trade, of the kind which cursed so much of Europe, was impossible in most of the northern Netherlands: there was no land for them to buy. Wealth they accumulated had to be reinvested in trade, fishing, or whaling ventures, land reclamation, or banking. The elite was an urban patriciate, its ethos commercial and its wealth largely seaborne.

They ruled a remarkable empire: born fully armed at the inception of the state. The parent state of the modern kingdom of the Netherlands was the republic of the United Provinces, formed in the course of a civil war—or, in Dutch perceptions, a war of liberation—against Habsburg rule and its partisans, between 1572 and 1648 . The United Provinces acquired an overseas empire in the course of the war, raiding and seizing Habsburg possessions in the Americas and the Far East. Their school of empire—the context in which they developeda tradition of nautical expertise in the preceding period of peace—was a kipperers’ route between the salt pans of Set’bal and the herring pond of the Baltic, along almost the entire Atlantic face of Europe. Among the legacies of that experience was a permanent surplus of trained seamen. It was said to be easier to recruit a thousand sailors in the United Provinces than a hundred soldiers. It was also a common assumption in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that Dutch businesses had acquired the monopoly of Europe’s herring fishery because others would not stand the poor conditions and low returns. Frugality, however, was not the natural condition of Dutchmen: it was a virtue imposed by necessity. They had to keep their shipping cheap for want of other commodities or services in which to compete. In the early seventeenth century, it was understood that they could operate as carriers at a third of rivals’ costs.²⁷

Prowess at sea enabled them to carry the war against other Habsburg subjectsto the remotest dominions of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. Their naval and economic strategies could draw on the largest commercial fleet of any European power. When denied Portuguese salt, they sailed to the Venezuelan salt lagoon of Punta de Araya and broke salt blocks from below the surface of the water with iron bars.²⁸When driven from one fort or factory on the rim of the Portuguese world, they could concentrate forces against another. By 1630 , a Dutch propagandist could dream of a seaborne empire that would embrace “the naked Mexican, the one-footed cyclops, the envious Chinese, the cruel Patagonian, the black Mozambiquan and the roguish Sumatran.”²⁹They never realized quite such a variegated fantasy, but did achieve the most widely distributed empire in the world. Although Spain’s was far bigger and more populous, it stretched neither so far north nor so far east. Dutch trading factories, sovereign forts, plantations, and whaling stations were scattered, north-south, from the White Sea to the southernmost tip of Africa and, east-west, from Nagasaki to Pernambuco and the Hudson. Their trade knew “no other bounds than those which the Almighty set at creation.”³⁰The name of Amsterdam “was known in remote regions round the world that had never heard of London, Paris and Venice.”³¹The world unfolded in the pages of Blaeu’s Atlas. In engravings and tympana, Holland hoisted the globe onto his back.

Where it served their interests as traders, Dutch theorists formulated an ideology of “open sea”—free competition for trade. Other people’s monopolies provoked outrage. The pope was as much entitled to allot spheres of navigation “as the donkey he rides.”³²In 1608 , responding to English demands for a share of the herring catch or, at least, of its profits, the legislature of Holland swore that they would never, “in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, withdraw, surrender or renounce the freedom of the seas, everywhere and in all regions of the world.”³³Peaceful resolutions are usually honored in the breach, and in practice, freedom was a privilege the Dutch arrogated to themselves, not a right they conceded to their enemies. Where they had the power to enforce a monopoly, they used it.“We cannot carry on trade without war, nor war without trade,” was the just summary of the most ambitious of their imperial satraps, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, who founded Batavia on the ruins of Jakarta, in 1619 .³⁴

Like many maritime empires, that of the Dutch originated in piracy and never quite lost its swashbuckling character. The great medieval empires of the Genoese and Catalans in the Mediterranean were launched by predators on the richer trade of the Muslim shore of that sea. Sidelines in seaborne banditry by the entourage of the prince known as Henry the Navigator provoked many complaints, especially from the crown of Aragon, before he turned to Atlantic empire-building. Many of the mariners who carried Spanish power across the Atlantic in the 1490s had been trained as privateers on Portugal’s routes to Guinea in the previous two decades. The beginning of the British empire is usually—if somewhat implausibly—traced by historians to the piratical adventures of English “sea dogs” on the Spanish main in the reign of Elizabeth. The Dutch, too, began long-range navigation in Spanish and Portuguese wakes, as active parasites, flitting and stinging where they could. In the Eastern seas they became, in Chinese eyes in the seventeenth century, more pirates among many:

The people that we call Red-hairs or Red Barbarians are identical with the Hollanders and they live in the Western Ocean. They are covetous and cunning, are very knowledgeable concerning merchandise, and are very clever in the pursuit of gain. They will risk their lives in search of profit, and no place is too remote for them to frequent. . . . If one falls in with them, one is certain to be robbed by them.³⁵

An empire of their own was the reward of successful piracy, and, for all their rhetoric about free trade, Dutch leaders never quite grew out of the idea that commerce had to be fought for. In the end, the grinding costs of war proved destructive, like a fairy’s curse bestowed at an otherwise auspicious birth. The Netherlands was too small to sustain the manpower required, the empire too extended to maintain defense on all fronts, the systems of control too warped to stop the leakage of wealth to fraud, contraband, and interloping. In the eighteenth century, Dutch withdrew from many coasts, fisheries, and trades and created a territorial sugar- and coffee-growing empire in Java, on which their imperial program became increasingly concentrated. The collective vocation for the sea, though never lost, was attenuated. It became hard to recruit crews. The oligarchs of Amsterdam deserted active commerce for the rentier’s or banker’s relatively low-risk life. A European consciousness and slavery to French fashions stripped much of the distinctive Dutchness out of the high culture of the Netherlands.

In the interim, however, there was time to erect not only an impressive empire-across the world, but a unique civilization at home. If the essence of civilizationis the modification of the environment, pride of place must go to the great project with which Dutch engineers in the seventeenth century conjured land out of water. An English visitor in the mid-seventeenth century affected contempt for this quagmire of a country but grudgingly admired the Dutch as “gods” who “set bounds to the Ocean and allow it to come and go as they please.”³⁶Pumping with windmills was the new technology which made possible the spectacular progress of that era and made hydraulic engineering the art for which Dutch personnel were sought by drainers of lakes and fens all over the world. Two hundred thousand acres were recovered between 1590 and 1640 . The heroic engineer Jan Adriaenszoon Leeghwater reclaimed 17,500 of them with a battery of forty-three windmills north of Amsterdam.³⁷The effect of canalcutting and dike-building was not only to turn water into land but to shape that land with the civilizing geometry of right angles and straight lines. From a distance, the site appears branded with the grid of the classical city.

The art which celebrated maritime vocations, landscapes refashioned, urbane-lives, and civilized leisure was also in a sense the product of environmentalconstraints. “The reason of this store of pictures and their cheapness,” reported John Evelyn in 1641 , “proceeds from want of land to employ their stock, so that it is an ordinary thing to find a common farmer lay out two or three thousand pounds in this commodity. Their houses are full of them and they vend them at their fairs to very great gains.”³⁸

Amsterdam is the finest monument of the civilization of the Dutch “golden age”—sagging in places, where splendid terraces buckle and dip with subsidence, but still providing a backdrop of elegance for drug-pushers, soccer hoodlums, shabby tourists, and importunate whores. Modestly dressed, with clean lines, chaste moldings, and plenty of neatly glazed windows, the facades wear an air of restraint along the Keizersgracht and even on that most socially desirable of canals, the Herengracht, where old merchant palaces are now colonized by banks. The rich of Amsterdam could afford this kind of understatement on the outside, for all the conspicuous wealth of their homes was displayed within. You can still peer in at modern offices that drip with rococo plasterwork and sprout lush overmantels under ceilings that blush and blaze with the vivid color of fresco. “You will find no private buildings,” a late-seventeenth-century economist assured his readers, “so sumptuously magnificent as a great many of the merchants’ and other gentlemen’s houses are in Amsterdam,” profuse in pictures and marble, “extravagant to folly” in buildings and gardens.³⁹The “ innerworldly asceticism” said to inform the predominant Calvinist value-system, if it existed at all, generally reached no farther than the front door.⁴⁰

The most coveted goods were the most exotic; there has probably never been a society, however poor or unacquisitive, in which this has not been true.⁴¹But at its extreme, the collector’s obsession is an acute form of the civilizing syndrome: wresting objects from their natural contexts and relocating them in aWunderkammer that only a human imagination could contrive. Transylvanian rugs, Italian glasses, Persian silks, furs of Muscovy, Colombian emeralds, Indian sapphires, Chinese pots, Japanese lacquer, and tulips acclimatized from originally Turkish specimens—these are the badges of consumption with which painters scattered domestic genre scenes. They came from abroad—the farther the better, from their exhibitors’ point of view. The effect of combining them, however, in architectural and decorative settings that were wholly Netherlandish, represents the distinctive art of the peculiar culture. Dutch society, too, was unique—uniquely bourgeois, a society in which aristocracies and rabble had been squeezed to the edges, in which “vertical structures” had been superseded, and in which most townsfolk were middle-class. While people exchanged complacent admiration in the group portraits of Frans Hals, the cozy economic order painted by Gabriel Metsu and Gerard Terborch took shape.

Beyond the Beach: Identifying Seaboard Civilizations

Though their hinterlands were narrow, the seaborne reach of these civilizations was long. The Norse reached America, the Phoenicians the Atlantic—both against the prevailing winds. Long-range routes are, in a sense, the architecture of the sea, the measures of man’s defiance of the environment; though he cannot permanently score the face of the sea, sea lanes are the marks he makes on his map of nature. Some impressively rich and inventive societies have grown up just beyond the beach without making more than local or regional use of the sea for fishing and trade. No place in prehistoric Europe gleams more astonishingly than Varna, on the shore of the Black Sea. Nearly two thousand years before the treasures of Ur or Troy were buried, a king was interred at Varna clutching a gold-handled ax, his penis sheathed in gold. Nearly a thousand gold ornaments were arrayed around him, including hundreds of studs or discs that must have spangled a dazzling cloak. This single grave contained one and a half kilograms of fine gold. Other rich graves were symbolic burials of earthenware masks without human remains. We know maddeningly little about the context of this burial, but it was close to some of the earliest copper mines and metallurgical workshops in the world, on the Middle Danube, sources of the transmutative magic that made smiths such potent figures of early myth. Not far away, in Tartaria, Romania, clay tablets incised with marks uncannily like writing have been unearthed; the impression of writing is so strong that the first scholars to examine them assumed that they revealed the spread of a writing system of Mesopotamian influence, but these objects came from strata much older than the earliest indications of Sumerian writing.⁴²

Other coasts where spectacular effects might be presumed to have flowed from contact with the sea, despite the absence or impossibility of long-rangetrade, include the western underbelly of Africa, where the Niger trade fed into coastal traffic which the unfavorable winds and currents kept from wider ventures; the Pacific coast of North America; the zone of Maori trade and warfare; the balsa-raft world of the Peruvian coast, whence the Inca Tupac Yupanqui was fabled to have sailed to “Isles of Gold”;⁴³and the Gulf of Mexico, where canoeborne cabotage and island traffic is well attested in the time of Columbus. Indeed, Columbus encountered a large Maya trading canoe in the Bay of Honduras, and he and his fellow commander Martín Pinzon relied on native pilots to find their way around the Caribbean.⁴⁴In all these cases, however, I think the civilizations which arose around the coasts concerned must be judged to have been shaped by the landward environment and to have owed relatively little to their coastwise outlooks.

True seaboard civilizations, which comprehend a vocation for long-range navigation, are surprisingly few, when one considers how much sea there is on our planet and how many peoples live near coasts. Some coasts are restricted or bound by ice; others are lee shores, punished by adverse winds and currents. Others open onto seas easily patrolled or enclosed by enemies with control of vital straits. Others are inhabited by people with no maritime calling, “shy traffickers” who wait for others to come and undo their corded bales on the beach. Others were too poor or too remote to set up long-range contacts until they became useful as emporia or staging posts in the economic systems of visitors or colonists. It is remarkable that, although northwestern Australia is tightly linked to the monsoonal system of maritime Southeast Asia, almost no one bothered to go there, except for very intermittent and perfunctory trading, after the aboriginal migrants arrived—precocious sea-travelers—perhaps forty thousand years ago. The maritime technology which took the inhabitants there—whatever it was—was forgotten.

In East Africa, although the monsoon system might have encouraged venturers abroad, and although, for as long as records existed, large indigenous trading interests have been doing business inland, oceangoing shipping was generally left to outsiders, except on limited routes to southern and western Arabia. In North America, indigenous peoples might have been tempted to exploit the wind system, which provides prevailing outbound westerlies but guarantees occasional easterlies with which to return. Or they might have practiced currentassisted navigation—like the Norse, only in the reverse direction, with the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Current. Yet, as far as we know, none ever did (though an ingenious but wayward scholar has invented a fantastic voyage by native Caribbean women who “discovered” Columbus before 1492 ⁴⁵ ). The reasons for people’s reluctance to go far into the Atlantic from the west are presumably cultural, though we have no hope of ever knowing exactly what.

These exemptions and exclusions mean that seaboard civilizations, until modern times, happened only in the regions of the Phoenicians and scandinavians—theMediterranean and Atlantic-side Europe—and in maritime Asia. Some of them are conventionally thought of as belonging to seaborne worlds: those of Gujarat and the Kutchi—age-old sailors who possessed elements of the most impressive preindustrial technology of the sea; or of the Cholas of Southern India and their medieval Southern Asian rivals for maritime empires; or of the aquatically minded Dutch; or of the commercially irrepressible culture of the Fukien coast, which probably held the world record for the volume of shipping and the value of trade for most of history. Others we have to visit in the next two chapters are less often classified as maritime societies: the Japanese, the Arabs, and the Greeks of classical times.