Late one January afternoon I arrived with five other people at a cluster of houses beside Mango Creek on the Caribbean shore of Belize. We were en route to the offshore village of Placentia. The road ended at the water’s edge, and the few local fishermen had already hauled in their equipment and settled down for the evening. One young man about sixteen years old volunteered, for a price, to take us over to Placentia in his dugout. While waiting for him to borrow an outboard motor and some gasoline, our group divided. Three people made camp and stayed with the Land Rover, while three of us prepared for the trip over to where we were to meet an archaeologist who was excavating coastal Mayan sites.
Hurrying so that we could cover as much distance as possible before dark, the boy returned with the motor, and we set off down the winding creek that opened into Placentia Bay. Even after dark, he piloted the dugout expertly through the small channels in the mangrove thickets and between the tiny islands, some of which lurked just below the surface of the water at high tide.
We spoke English with the pilot, but his native language was Garifuna, the mother tongue of approximately 100,000 Black Caribs who live on the coast of Belize, around the Gulf of Honduras and along the Mosquito coast. The descendants of shipwrecked and escaped slaves who intermarried with Carib Indians on the island of St.
Vincent in the western Caribbean, the Black Caribs of Central America were brought to the island of Roatan in the Gulf of Honduras by the British in 1796. From Roatan the Black Caribs soon settled neighboring islands and the deserted parts of the mainland shore as far north as Dandriga in Belize and south as far as the Mosquito coast of Nicaragua, where they intermarried with some of the Miskito Indians and to a lesser extent with Sumu and Rama. These black Indians look like Africans, but they speak a Cariban language and they follow the traditional lifestyle of their Carib Indian ancestors.
In subsequent years other blacks emigrated both voluntarily and through compulsion from Jamaica and neighboring islands to work as loggers in the primeval jungles along the Honduras coast, as construction workers building the railroad of Costa Rica, and as laborers in the banana plantations spread throughout the area. The new wave of blacks brought the English language with them and added new ingredients to the already rich and colorful cultural heritage of the region. From these later migrations, the Spanish-speaking countries of Central America acquired Caribbean ports with quite Anglican names, such as Livingston, Guatemala; Bluefields, Nicaragua; and Penshurst, Costa Rica.
Even though our pilot was descended from the Black Caribs, the village of Placentia to which he was taking us was a creole village of blacks who spoke mostly English creole; they did not claim to be Indians. Had we continued north another four miles we would have landed in Seine Bight, a Black Carib village.
Villagers in Seine Bight and Placentia lead similar economic lives, but a cultural gulf divides them. The Garifuna language of the Black Caribs draws sustenance from deep roots in the Indian culture from which it descends, while the English creole culture draws more widely from the Anglo-African traditions of the Caribbean and from the English-speaking world at large. The villagers in both communities live in small wooden houses built up on stilts about five feet off the ground. The traditional palmetto thatching has given way to corrugated tin roofs, and most houses have a small porch with a railing. Numerous windows allow the air to circulate, but ventilated wooden shutters keep out the bright sun and the prying eyes of passersby.
At least one male in every home owns a boat and fishes. Twenty miles offshore lies the Great Barrier Reef, the largest reef in the Americas and second in the world only to the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. The reef off the Belize coast, however, teems with much more sea life than that of Australia. The fishermen harvest a wide variety of fish, conch, spiny lobster, and one of the local favorites, sea turtle. The women know dozens of ways to prepare the turtle, such as cutting it into thin turtle steaks that they pan-fry or grating the tougher pieces of meat and mixing them with spices and hot peppers to make turtle balls that are served over rice or with fried cassava bread and a plate of fried plantains.
After turning into a narrow black opening in the mangrove trees, the pilot carefully steered the boat up to the beach. Because of the black sand and the thick vegetation, the beach absorbed rather than reflected the moonlight, thus creating a very dark scene. The next day l found that the black sand becomes even more of a problem in the sun, for it quickly becomes too hot for human feet to walk in it. To move from one house to another in the daytime, the villagers balance on a series of thin wooden walkways crisscrossing the community.
The next day the fishing cooperative of the community ran out of gasoline; this landlocked most of the men, who relied on outboard motors for their dugouts or who fished from larger boats.
The only exit that day was by walking up to Seine Bight or by paddling a canoe to either Seine Bight or back up to Mango Creek.
Despite modern technology and nearly half a millennium of contact between the people of this coast and the Old World, the canoe still served as the most reliable transport in the area. Newer technology had brought in faster vehicles, but they depended on outside lines of supply that flowed only sporadically. By contrast, the canoe always worked.
Prior to the arrival of the Garifuna Indians, the Mayas and a few other Indian groups inhabited this coast while the Arawak and Carib Indians occupied most of the islands in what we now call the Caribbean. All of them used the canoe as their primary means of transportation. It is from the Arawakan and Cariban languages that we today have the work “canoe.” Columbus exported the first canoe, taking it to Europe after seeing how agilely and swiftly the sleek boats moved across the water.
Along the edge of Mosquitia, south of Belize, the natives developed a narrow boat with steep sides and a sharp prow. Known in the Miskito language and adapted into English as the “dory,” this vehicle still serves as a common fishing boat on the open seas.
The Mayas hauled trading goods in their canoes up and down the coast of the Yucatan and Central America, and around the Gulf of Mexico possibly as far north as the Mississippi River.
The canoe served as the perfect vehicle along the many shallow rivers and creeks of the area. Indians throughout the coastal and riverine parts of North and South America used the canoe as the primary vehicle of travel and transport. Indians in various areas constructed it of diverse materials. On the coast of Central America and throughout much of lowland, tropical South America where large trees flourished, the Indians most commonly made dugouts.
In the northern part of the United States, which lacked appropriate trees for making dugouts, the Indians constructed a light frame from thin branches and covered it with strips of bark about one-eighth of an inch thick, the thickness of a penny. The best canoes used the bark from the birch tree, Betulo papyrifero, sewn together with spruce roots and sealed watertight with spruce gum.
This light vehicle glided easily over the many lakes and streams of the area, and the paddlers easily lifted it to carry it from one body of water to another.
Early explorers report that the larger Iroquois canoes carried up to thirty warriors.
Three men could easily handle one of these canoes even after they had loaded it with goods. Despite the delicacy of its hull, it could be repaired with very few tools and with materials gathered anywhere in the forest. The major disadvantage of this exceptionally light craft was that on land it needed to be securely tied to prevent the wind from blowing it away.
Small European boats of that time seemed by contrast heavy and bulky, requiring the added power of oars to propel them. In order to use the oars, the oarsman sat with his back toward the bow, and this left him unable to see where he was going. The paddles used in canoes allowed the paddler to face the direction of travel, making the canoe ideal for even a solitary traveler.
Even after the introduction of sailing craft into the American rivers, the Europeans found that the canoes provided faster and more reliable transport. As the experiences of Cartier had already shown in the St. Lawrence River, speed was very important in order to penetrate an area and get out again before all of the water routes froze and trapped the traveler. For this reason, canoes continued as a major source of transportation of people and goods throughout North America until well into the twentieth century, when the railroads proved able to haul people and goods faster and more reliably.
In the Arctic, where no birch trees grow to provide bark for this type of canoe, the Eskimo made a similar boat by stretching animal skins over a framework. The Eskimos waterproofed the boat by covering the top so as to allow only a small opening in which the operator could sit. ‘Even lighter than the birch canoe, this boat, the kayak, could be easily carried and proved excellent at maneuvering among the chunks of ice that constantly clogged Arctic water routes. This boat had the unusual characteristic of capsize recovery; the kayaker could turn right side up after capsizing without having to get out of the boat.
This feature, the “kayak roll,” allowed the Eskimos tremendous maneuverability in hunting walruses, seals, whales, and other sea mammals.
The Eskimo also used a large boat made from skins but applied to a frame more in the shape of a large tub. This umiak transported whole groups of people and their possessions. It often relied on women paddlers and for that reason was known as the women’s boat.
The Kwakiutls, Quinaults, and other groups along the northern Pacific coast of the state of Washington and the Canadian province of British Columbia constructed the largest oceanic canoes in America. Made from durable red cedar and over forty feet long with about the width of a man’s arm span, these whaling canoes carried eight men and all of the equipment necessary to catch and haul a whale.
On Lake Titicaca, twelve thousand feet high in the Andes between the nations of Peru and Bolivia, the Aymara Indians made a boat entirely of totora reeds. The Indians propelled it by a long pole. In form and design the boat is very similar to those made in the Middle East in the marshy parts of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, as well as those made on the shores of Lake Chad in northern central Africa.
In the lowland Inca areas, the people made inflated rafts from sealskins. They used these to float piles of guano back to the mainland from the bird islands dotting the coast [Von Hagen, p.143].
This custom parallels a similar practice from Mesopotamia as recorded by Xenophon in the Anabosis; he describes the Greek army inflating goat skins in order to float across a river.
Although not usually accorded much importance as transport vehicles, the rafts of the Indians often surpassed similar constructions in other parts of world. In addition to the inflated rafts of the Peruvian coast, Indians of the area made large rafts of balsa, Ochroma lagopus, which grew in the jungles of South America.
These were the largest water transports constructed in the Americas and could be used on the ocean as well as on the larger rivers.
This tree proved so ideal for making rafts that in Spanish the word balsa came to mean “raft.”
Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl claimed that the Indians of South American probably used these rafts as ocean vehicles that connected them with Polynesia.
To prove his thesis he had such a raft constructed, and under the name Kon-Tiki, he sailed it to Easter Island. Whether or not such commerce actually existed still arouses debate among historians and anthropologists. None of them, however, denies the importance of such rafts for coastal and river trade.
These five boats, the canoe, kayak, umiak, dory, and reed boat, together with the rafts functioned as excellent small vehicles for their particular ecological niches, but nowhere in America did any Indian group make the transition from boats and rafts to ships.
Even though some of the ocean-going vehicles spaciously accommodated several tons of trade goods and had to be paddled by a crew of up to a dozen men, they never became ships.
Although the Indians mastered paddling they never mastered sails, oars, or a rudder, nor did they have any of the navigational equipment of the Old World, such the compass, astrolabe, or sextant. Consequently, the Americans never became sailors of the high seas, and their civilizations remained inward-looking.
For them the sea served only as a source of food and as a convenient way to move from one coastal village to the next, such as from Seine Bight to Placentia or from island to island in the Caribbean.
After the European settlement of America, Indian boats, particularly the canoe and the kayak, spread to prosperous areas around the world for recreational use. No better boats have ever been developed for traveling over white water, into unexplored territory, into shallow waters, or into areas requiring portage of the boat. They became toys of the leisure class with little more practical application than the surfboard invented by the Polynesians. None of these had a significant impact on the lives of most working people.
Where water transport proved impractical in America, the Indians relied almost exclusively on transport by foot over trails and roads. The native Americans invented few transport vehicles for land use. In the far north, Eskimos trained dogs to pull a sled over snow and ice. Indians south of there also invented the toboggan, which could be pulled by humans or dogs. On the plains of North America, the dogs pulled a small travois, which is something like a primitive sled. Farther south around the Gulf of Mexico, people sometimes used litters to carry the sick and palanquins to carry leaders. Such very meager and unsophisticated contraptions contrast markedly with the diversity of Old World land vehicles such as coaches, chariots, carts, wagons, wheel-barrows, and sleds.
America lacked these other vehicles because America lacked the animal power to pull them. Aside from the dogs that pulled sleds or travois, the only domesticated animal in America able to carry even a small load was the llama in the Andes, and its legs and ankles were too frail to transport an adult rider. America lacked horses, cows, oxen, elephants, camels, donkeys, or goats to pull land vehicles. Without draft animals, the Indians never developed the wheel for use on anything more complicated than toys. Yet even though they lacked wheels and draft animals, the Indians built the best roads known in the world.
The first piece of Inca road I saw was the section that snaked through central Ecuador. The Incas opened this stretch of road about 1493, just after Columbus landed in the West Indies but still two generations before the whites found Peru. The road leaves the high city of Quito, which served as administrative capital of Chinchasuyu, the Inca land of the Puma, and heads south toward the mountains of Cotopaxi and Chimborazo, which rise to 20,561 feet and 19,347 feet respectively. In the nineteenth century, scientists counted these as the highest peaks in the world.
Indeed they are the highest if one measures distance from the center of the earth rather than from sea level. Located at the equator, which bulges out slightly from a true sphere, they poke out about two miles farther from the earth’s center than do the much more northerly Himalayas. For several days’ walk, the road twists among these giant mountains.
Chimborazo is an extinct volcano, but Cotopaxi is one of the world’s highest active volcanos, and when the first Spanish traveled this road in 1534 the volcano erupted in full force. The volcano erupts periodically for several successive years but then remains quiet for several decades as a new cone of ice and snow forms about its massive summit.
The Inca road crosses the dry plain at the foot of Cotopaxi. Odd forms of plants dot the landscape, and at the lower altitudes herds of mustangs abandoned by the Spanish still ravage the meager flora.
Even though the Inca highway does not ascend Cotopaxi, the gentle slope makes it an inviting excursion. The steep but persistent slope of Cotopaxi resembles a cold lunar landscape.
Climbing up it my feet sank to my ankles in the fine volcanic powder, and I gasped for breath with every step. Above fourteen thousand feet, breathing becomes increasingly difficult and the bitter wind ever colder. The wind blasts so persistently that it sweeps the raised volcanic ribs clear of snow and turns every drop of moisture in the air into pelting ice that stings the mouth and nose like a swarm of bees. The Quechua (or Quichua, as they prefer in Ecuador) Indians breathe without difficulty, but I, unaccustomed to the altitude, struggled for air. At this altitude cigarette lighters. will not flame because of the lack of oxygen, and only the Indians can coax a smoldering slow fire to burn the precious pieces of wood that they have lugged up the slopes.
When Cotopaxi explodes, it spews down a flood of mud from the suddenly melted snows trapped on its top. The mud sweeps away surrounding villages and towns, the closest of which is Latacunga, about twenty miles away. According to the early Spanish chronicles, Latacunga boasted gold-encrusted figures of llamas on its temple, making it one of the most magnificent resting places along the highway.
The road continues south through the volcanoes, following a route roughly parallel to but ten miles from the Pan American Highway. The ancient route had a tombo every fourteen miles.
These were combination storehouses and inns, offering shelter and food supplies for the traveling Inca army or officials. The Incas maintained over a thousand tambos along the entire length of the highway. Unlike Old World armies, the Inca armies did not march with large supply trains in tow, nor did they have to forage off the land and exploit the peasants in their path.
At selected spots along the highway, Incas built larger complexes such as the one at Ingapirca, or “Inca walls,” high above the steep gorge of Intihuaynca. These ruins have the only Inca room left above ground in Ecuador. The site began as a major tambo and reputedly as a fortified palace where the Inca emperor always rested on the 1,230-mile journey along this road from Cuzco to Quito. Still today the road to Ingapirca is guarded by a megalithic Intinahui, sometimes called the Eyes of the Road.
The Indians also carved into the living rock what appears to be a large chair or possibly throne called the Ingachunguna. Local Quechuas make the apocryphal claim that the ancient Incas made human sacrifices on this spot, and they point to small stone gullies where the human blood supposedly drained.
Today the Inca road lies largely untended and crumbling, but local farmers on foot, on horseback, and with their llamas still use stretches of it. Most parts of the road, however, remain inaccessible to wheeled vehicles, because the Incas built the highway literally on high ground. Building the roads up high discouraged lowland Indians from invading and also made it easier for the Incas to keep watch on the surrounding countryside as they moved.
The Inca highway through Ecuador twists along the top of ridges and at times leaps over deep gorges via several kinds of bridges, including the suspension bridges constructed from twenty-two thousand feet or more of handmade rope. Even though the Incas wove their cables from natural fibers, they used the same techniques later used to make steel cables for such modern structures as the Brooklyn Bridge. Where necessary the Inca engineers cut into the side of the very mountains and reinforced the road with large retaining walls of stone. In places the road feels almost like a tunnel because it slices so deeply into the mountain, and in one spot on our way to Ingapirca, the road passed on the underside of a waterfall which fell into a small pool at our feet. Usually the highway is broad enough for several people to walk abreast in each direction, but in the higher mountain passes and along the steeper escarpments it narrows to only enough room for two lines of people to pass without one of them having to stop.
Called the Capac Nan or Beautiful Road by the Incas, this paved, all-weather road had gutters and curbs in areas where it rained and draining ditches where necessary. In hot areas, the Incas lined the road with trees to supply shade. In addition to the swinging suspension bridges, plank bridges were built on stone supports where possible, and the Incas devised a complex system of aerial ferries consisting of a small gondola attached to ropes and propelled over gorges and rivers by pulleys. In arid valleys, the Incas built underground cisterns called puquios and kept them filled with fresh water for the travelers.
In flood zones, the Inca engineers built causeways of stone or built the road over stone culverts. The type of road varied with the terrain and the requirements of each ecological zone.
The road stretched for approximately three thousand miles, but including its major arteries it surpassed five thousand miles. The Beautiful Road was by far the longest road in the world. The main branch of it covered a distance equal to that from London to New York or from London to Jerusalem, while the total system roughly equaled the distance from Beijing to San Francisco. This highway system also tied in with small road systems throughout the empire, uniting an area larger than western Europe. So far fourteen thousand miles of primary and secondary routes have been charted by archaeologists, and the total may never be known. In some of the lower valleys, the jungle vegetation now obscures the road and makes passage difficult without a machete to hack the lianas, bushes, and small trees clogging the route. In other lowland areas, the Inca road has been absorbed into modern highways, including the Pan-American Highway that runs from Alaska to Chile.
Parallel to the great highway, the Incas incorporated a number of lowland roads near the ocean into a single coastal highway.
This highway stretched to over twenty-five hundred miles, a distance longer than the Mississippi River. Wherever possible the engineers maintained a standard width of twenty-four feet on the coastal highway. Because most of it crossed deserts to link the small river valleys of the coastal area, Inca engineers built adobe walls to the side to keep out drifting sands. They also added road markers or topos at intervals just under five miles.
The Inca highways served as the communications network of the empire through a system of messenger runners called chasquis.
Operating out of the tambos, they carried government messages quickly from one end of the empire to the other through a relay system, each chasqui running about two miles. These runners endured harsh training from childhood to make them capable of running at altitudes up to fifteen thousand feet. The chasquis carried messages all the way from Quito to Cuzco in five days, averaging about 250 miles a day. This is about the same rate of travel achieved by the Pony Express in the United States several centuries later, but whereas the Pony Express relied on horses, the Incas used only human power. The similarity in speeds is partly due to the excellent training of the chasquis, but it is also a tribute to the quality of the road on which they ran. A message sent by chosqui five hundred years ago traveled faster than a letter mailed today from Quito to Cuzco. The chasquis also connected towns that have never again had regular message delivery service since the Spanish abandoned the runner system in the nineteenth century.
Without the expert highway system in place, the European conquest of America would have been significantly slower than it was. The horse would have been useless and the heavy cannons would have quickly become mired in the mud without the paved road.
Ironically it was the very superiority of the American highway system that made the native civilizations so vulnerable.
Those areas with the best roads were conquered first. The areas that lacked good roads did not see conquest until much later.
Still today the people of the Old World have failed to penetrate some of the isolated parts of the Amazon Basin where there are no Indian roads or navigable rivers.
The Indians of North America constructed fewer and less sophisticated highways than did the Incas. One of the best-preserved but least-understood highway systems radiates from the ruins of Chaco Canyon in the southwestern part of the contemporary United States. Stretching over an area roughly the size of Ireland, the road system weaves together the Four Corners areas of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, with many of the roads crisscrossing the present Navajo Nation. The roads run in nearly straight lines, slicing through long stretches of desert, and all focus on the settlement at Chaco Canyon.
The so-called Anasazi Indians built these roads around the twelfth century of the present era. The roads widened to about thirty feet in some areas, and the builders added causeways and stairways cut into the living rock to connect settlements in the canyons with the road system in the desert above them. Parallel to the roads the Anasazis built and maintained signal relay stations on top of hills and mesas.
From these spots the Anasazis telegraphed messages by smoke signal or light reflection from one town to another almost instantly.
Archaeologists do not know why the Anasazis built such a sophisticated system in an area that lacked the wheel or pack animals. The increased efficiency that it provided for walking did not justify the labor required to build such roads. They may have been ceremonial avenues used in rituals, emergency roads for hurrying bands of warriors to distant communities, or trade routes for merchants, or they may have combined these and other unknown functions. Even though the Anasazis abandoned these roads before Columbus arrived in America, the dry climate preserved them until the present day.
Nothing superseded them in technical efficiency until the recent introduction of paved roads in the twentieth century.
Most of North America lacked such complex systems of roads.
In those parts of the country where river and creek transportation proved insufficient, the Indians used a network of interlocking trails. More than merely haphazard footpaths crisscrossing the continent, these trails were built and consciously maintained for the transportation of trade goods and passage of warriors. The Iroquois maintained one of the best trail networks, by which they easily dispatched armies deep into Canada or down to the Carolinas at the slightest provocation.
The white colonists settling America always had a distinct advantage in their travels westward from the Atlantic Ocean because they pushed the Indians before them.
The Indians constantly opened up new paths and widened old paths as they went. The expulsion of eastern Indians opened up the lands of Georgia, Alabania, and Mississippi in the south and Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in the north. The Indians were truly the pathfinders of America. Just as the Inca highways of South America facilitated the movement of the Spanish conquistadors, the trails of North America facilitated the settlement of the British pioneers.
The European settlers who arrived in America did not have to hack their way through the thick forests of America or wander forlornly around the Great Plains. The Indians had already blazed clearly marked paths for them. The trails of the Indians deteriorated rapidly after the arrival of the colonists. The trails had been built for human passage, but the hooves of horses and oxen pulling wagons destroyed them and reduced them to muddy bogs in many places. Eventually colonists rebuilt the system to facilitate passage of heavy vehicles and motorized vehicles. The present road and highway system, railroad network, and even the canals of the United States and other American nations largely follow Indian trails and roads.
The Indians maintained a major trail west from the Mississippi River to the northern edge of Mexico. The two ends of this trail became the modern cities of St. Louis, Missouri, and Santa Fé, New Mexico, and the road between them was the Santa Fé Trail, which by 1850 supported regularly scheduled stagecoach service once a month. This continued on from Santa Fé to California by the Old Spanish Trail, which terminated at Los Angeles. A northern route left Kansas City, Missouri, heading northwest. From there one branch continued on as the Oregon Trail and another headed for San Francisco as the Central Overland Route, following roughly the same route chosen for the Pony Express riders in 1860. Today the Interstate Highway System follows essentially these same paths.
Despite some significant achievements by the Incas in road and bridge construction, the Americans had not developed very diverse transportation technology.
The Old World systems showed a much wider array of travel techniques using a variety of animals and contraptions as well as oceangoing vehicles. As in the case of architecture, Indian transportation systems offered little to the remainder of the world.
It should be equally clear that every explorer, conquistador, and settler who arrived in America used the existing transportation systems, which proved well suited for their needs and the requirements of the terrain and climate. Despite the many self-serving and self-glorifying accounts of brave adventures written by white explorers and pioneers, America was by no stretch of the imagination an overgrown continent through which the Europeans had to hack their way searching for new settlements.
Over tens of thousands of years, Indians had already opened the land, built roads or paths, and developed a system of canoes and small boats to reach every corner and crevice of the Americas from the Bering Straits to Tierra del Fuego.