Vast Expanses A History Of The Oceans Helen M

Rozwadowski download

https://ebookbell.com/product/vast-expanses-a-history-of-the-
oceans-helen-m-rozwadowski-10128464

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

Yeshe Lama From The Heart Essence Of The Vast Expanse Of The Great
Perfection A Practice Manual For The Stages Of The Path Of Th Jigme
Lingpa

https://ebookbell.com/product/yeshe-lama-from-the-heart-essence-of-
the-vast-expanse-of-the-great-perfection-a-practice-manual-for-the-
stages-of-the-path-of-th-jigme-lingpa-2572232

Heart Essence Of The Vast Expanse Foundational Practices And The

Transmission Of The Longchen Nyingthig Anne Carolyn Klein Adzom Paylo

https://ebookbell.com/product/heart-essence-of-the-vast-expanse-
foundational-practices-and-the-transmission-of-the-longchen-nyingthig-
anne-carolyn-klein-adzom-paylo-11277358

The Life Of Longchenpa The Omniscient Dharma King Of The Vast Expanse
Jampa Mackenzie Stewart

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-life-of-longchenpa-the-omniscient-
dharma-king-of-the-vast-expanse-jampa-mackenzie-stewart-22526848

Vast As The Sea Hebrew Poetry And The Human Condition Samuel
Hildebrandt

https://ebookbell.com/product/vast-as-the-sea-hebrew-poetry-and-the-
human-condition-samuel-hildebrandt-56637548
Vast Stories Of Mind Soul And Consciousness In A Technological Age
Peter Burton Jonathan D Clark Thomas Cline Juliane Graef Ellinor Kall
Ava Kelly Sergio Palumbo Vauhan Stanger Jr Staplesager Stephen Oram

https://ebookbell.com/product/vast-stories-of-mind-soul-and-
consciousness-in-a-technological-age-peter-burton-jonathan-d-clark-
thomas-cline-juliane-graef-ellinor-kall-ava-kelly-sergio-palumbo-
vauhan-stanger-jr-staplesager-stephen-oram-49024194

Vast Universe Extraterrestrials And Christian Revelation Thomas F

Omeara

https://ebookbell.com/product/vast-universe-extraterrestrials-and-
christian-revelation-thomas-f-omeara-52704772

Vast The Scorpion Chronicles Book Three Turnbull Russell

https://ebookbell.com/product/vast-the-scorpion-chronicles-book-three-
turnbull-russell-79196138

Vast And Brutal Sea Crdova Zoraida

https://ebookbell.com/product/vast-and-brutal-sea-crdova-
zoraida-167369250

Vast And Gracious Tide Lisa Carter

https://ebookbell.com/product/vast-and-gracious-tide-lisa-
carter-59376150
va s t e x pa n s e s
 VAST
EX PA NSES
A H i s torY of
the Oceans

Helen M. Rozwadowski

reaktion books
 For Daniel

Published by
r e a k t i o n b o o k s lt d
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London n1 7ux, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2018

Copyright © Helen M. Rozwadowski 2018

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or

transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publishers

Printed and bound in Malta

by Gutenberg Press Ltd

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

isbn 978 1 78023 997 2

 Contents

Introduction: People and Oceans 7

1 A Long Sea Story 13
2 Imagined Oceans 38
3 Seas Connect 71
4 Fathoming All the Ocean 104
5 Industrial Ocean 130
6 Ocean Frontier 161
7 Accessible Ocean 188
Epilogue: Ocean as Archive,
Sea as History 214

References 229
Bibliography 235
Acknowledgements 249
Photo Acknowledgements 253
Index 255
The ocean surface: vast, trackless and opaque.
 Introduction:
People and Oceans
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.
– Derek Walcott, ‘The Sea is History’ (1979)

T he vast expanse of the world ocean, the dominant feature of

planet Earth, has remained at the edges of our histories. Without
conscious choice, writers have embedded a terrestrial bias in virtually
all stories about the past. Dry land is the presumed norm. Even coasts
and coastal dwellers have been viewed as marginal and exceptional,
as have swamps, marshes, cays, reefs and other littoral areas that are
neither entirely wet nor dry. Ocean basins appear on the fringes of
land-based states and actions. Even events that took place at sea are
often narrated as though the ocean is a flat, land-like plane without its
underlying depths, having two dimensions instead of three. The time
has come to put the ocean in the centre of some of our histories, not
to replace terrestrial history but to add the history of the ocean itself
to the other important histories we tell. Such a shift in perspective
will yield rich dividends in our understanding of the past and equally
enrich our present world in which ocean issues loom large.
This book attempts to tell the history of the ocean, extending its
natural history to encompass its interrelationships with people, and
including its depths as well as its surface. People have exploited the
ocean for many reasons, starting with food and transportation, but
also as the focus of myth and culture. New uses of the ocean emerged
over time – science, communication, submarine warfare, mining and

7
 va s t e x pa n s e s

recreation. Alongside new uses, the old ones remain – piracy and naval
warfare, shipping and smuggling, whaling and fishing. The ocean has
enabled and constrained human activities, but people have also affected
the ocean, in some cases dramatically.
Looking across its restless surface and smelling the salt spray, an
observer today might imagine that past generations of seafarers or
coastal dwellers witnessed the same ocean. Ships, breaching whales
and even storms leave no tracks. Differences under the surface are not
apparent. Yet the ocean is no less susceptible to natural and historical
change than is the land. Just as the history of the land is inextricably
intertwined with people, so too is the ocean’s history, however hidden
that history and however absent people have seemed from the sea itself.
The perception of the ocean as timeless is as much a product of his-
tory as other cultural, political or economic changes resulting from the
mutual relationship between people and ocean.
Far from providing a definitive telling of ocean history, this account
offers a model, a starting point, in the hopes of inspiring others to
embark on fuller, more inclusive histories. The goal here is to encom-
pass all of the ocean, not just the slices along its coasts, surfaces or
productive fishing grounds. The voluminous ocean provides over 99 per
cent of the environmental space available for living things and, while
people have not (at least so far) colonized the ocean, human activities
make both tangible and imaginative use of all of the ocean, although
clearly some parts more than others. This book charts a divergence of
the history of a single global ocean appearing and changing over the
lifetime of our planet into multiple histories of seas and coastal waters
experienced by individual communities of people all over the globe.
Since the fifteenth-century European discovery that all seas are con-
nected, it is again possible to tell a story about the world ocean, as this
book attempts to do. Hopefully, future histories will also investigate
plural and individual oceans, defining and enumerating particular seas
through physical geography, marine ecosystems, geopolitics, economics
and also social and cultural conceptions.

8
 Introduction: People and Oceans

The story related in this book weaves together three threads. First,
the long story of the human relationship with the sea – all of it, including
its third dimension – stretches to the scale of evolutionary time and
extends over millennia to the present and future. Far from the ahistorical
place it often seems to be, the ocean is profoundly a part of history.
Second, the connections between people and oceans, though ancient,
have tightened over time and multiplied with industrialization and glo-
balization. Although we think of it as being starkly different, in this sense
the ocean resembles the land. This trajectory runs counter to wide-
spread cultural assumptions of the ocean as a place remote from and
immune to human activity. Third, knowledge about the ocean – created
through work and play, through scientific investigation and also through
the ambitions people harboured for using the sea – has played a central
role in mediating the human relationship with this vast, trackless and
opaque place. Knowledge has helped people exploit marine resources,
control ocean space, extend imperial or national power, and attempt to
refashion the sea into a more tractable arena for human activity.
Knowledge about the ocean, in short, has animated and strengthened
connections between people and their oceans. Writing ocean history,
I argue, must involve attention to questions of how, by whom and why
knowledge about the ocean was created and used.
The first two chapters cover most of the time explored in this book,
emphasizing the enormity of the ocean’s past in the planet’s history.
‘A Long Sea Story’, the first chapter, begins four billion years ago. It
relates a deliberately ocean-centric story of Earth’s development, in
which dinosaurs appear in passing during the ‘Age of Oysters’, when
molluscs dominated. Humans make their appearance as part of nature,
within the natural history of the planet rather than separate from it,
and ocean-oriented activities of early hominids and of Homo sapiens
appear to have played an important role in the evolution of our species.
‘Imagined Oceans’, Chapter Two, continues the long story of people
and oceans, finding that some cultures understood the sea as part of
their worlds and territories, while others consciously turned away from

9
 va s t e x pa n s e s

the ocean. Before the fifteenth century, seas were known only locally
or, at most, out to the boundaries of a usable basin. Specialist traders
and navigators had experience of connections to an adjacent basin, but
none knew the ocean as a global feature.
Although people across the globe lived by and with the sea for
aeons, new knowledge of the ocean forged from the fifteenth through
to the nineteenth centuries set new precedents for human use and
perception of the sea, as chapters Three and Four explore. The era
of geographic discovery by European powers, narrated in the third
chapter, ‘Seas Connect’, etched water routes between all the Earth’s
known lands and laid the foundation for the doctrine of the freedom
of the seas. Trade networks that criss-crossed the world provided the
underpinning for an imperialism whose logic strongly promoted the
exploitation of oceanic resources, especially the storied cod fisheries.
Knowledge acquired through the work of navigation, warfare and fishing
expanded with the Scientific Revolution to include discoveries made by
practitioners of modern science that, in turn, enabled more intensive use
of the ocean. Investigation of the vertical dimension of the seas, long a
part of the work of some navigators and most fishers, began in earnest
in the nineteenth century, as Chapter Four, ‘Fathoming All the Ocean’,
recounts. New uses for the ocean, including the distant blue waters not
previously exploited by people, expanded far beyond the trad­itional
ones. The ocean transformed into a site for science, an industrial setting
for transoceanic communications cables and a cultural reference that
resonated with a generation fascinated by the sea.
Multiplication of new uses for the sea, alongside dramatic intensifi-
cation of traditional maritime activities, has characterized the twentieth
century, as chapters Five and Six show. Chapter Five, ‘Industrial Ocean’,
examines the intensification of traditional maritime activities with indus-
trialization. Expanding fisheries linked people with oceanic resources that
were consumed far from where they were caught. Steam and iron quick-
ened the tempo of development and also of everyday life, affecting the sea
as much as the land. Beginning during the First World War, submarine

10
 Introduction: People and Oceans

warfare enmeshed the ocean’s third dimension in global geopolitics. The

Second World War involved unprecedented scientific investigation of the
ocean to support undersea warfare, amphibious landings and sea-based
aviation. In the wake of hostilities, the ocean emerged as a promising site
for science- and technology-based economic development. As Chapter
Six, ‘Ocean Frontier’, chronicles, inventors, entrepreneurs and officials
transferred the metaphor of the American western frontier onto the
sea to express their optimism for the growth potential of ocean-based
industry. The scramble to claim oceanic resources led to the erosion of
the centuries-long agreement regarding freedom of the seas. Extension
of Exclusive Economic Zones may have ended the fiction of the ocean as
a limitless frontier but did not appreciably curb intensive use of the sea.
As the final chapter and epilogue explain, a new posture towards
the sea had its origins in post-war recreational access to the ocean. As
Chapter Seven, ‘Accessible Ocean’, explains, the technology of scuba
opened the undersea realm equally to frogmen, oil industry workers,
scientists, casual divers, film-makers and others. The 1970s concern for
the great whales and about the dangers posed by major oil spills drew
attention seawards but did not translate into worry about the ocean
itself, only its coasts and a handful of its more charismatic inhabitants.
The accessible ocean, increasingly made visible through recreation as
well as film, began a process of cultural transformation from robust
frontier to fragile environment. Concern for the ocean as a whole gained
traction only recently, however, as the Epilogue argues, with the belated
awareness of overfishing and climate change and the extent to which
these human interventions have remade the ocean.
The time to write ocean history is now. Recent scholarship from
many fields has laid a promising foundation, revealing the underappre-
ciated importance of the ocean and its depths, in both the past and the
present. The fundamental quandary of the sea’s apparent timelessness
makes it difficult for us to accept the unfamiliar view of the ocean as
a place of dynamic change. The humanities remind us that we know
the ocean as much through imagination as through the knowledge

11
 va s t e x pa n s e s

systems of those who worked, or work, at sea. The opacity of the ocean
guarantees that we see reflected back from its surface our fears and
desires. Human motives, then, matter as much as biological interactions
or chemical reactions. While present issues may seem to call for scien-
tific and technological solutions, there remains a central and critical
role for the humanities. Our understanding of the past will be revolu-
tionized by an oceanic perspective that drives home the relevance of
deep time and demonstrates the profound connectedness between
people and the entire planet. The connection forged between people
and oceans has changed both and tied their fates together. Our future
may depend on acknowledging the ocean as part of – not outside of
– history.

12
 z one y

A Long Sea Story

All sea stories are true.
– Various mariner-storytellers1

P oets and ordinary people alike profess their love for the ocean,
but the ocean does not love us back. It simply exists, although it
does not exist simply, and it has done so since long before Homo sapiens
evolved. Contrary to the tendency to think of it as a timeless, constant
place, the ocean has changed dramatically over time. Throughout its
mutable, four-billion-year lifespan thus far, it has played a leading role
in nurturing life and fostering its diversity. As products of the pro­fu-
sion of life, humans were connected to the ocean first evolutionarily.
Its natural history comprises, then, the earliest chapters of the story of
the long human relationship with the ocean.

zz z
Liquid water makes our blue planet distinct from all others in the
solar system, making the formation of the ocean the first chapter, or at
least the prologue, in our long story. Water became locked into Earth’s
earliest rocks as they took shape from dust particles in space to which
water molecules adhered. On the early Earth, any water brought to
the surface would have been released as steam, as rising temperatures
melted rocks, and escaped from Earth because there was no atmosphere
to trap it. Comets and asteroids carry water, and it appears that asteroids
delivered the water that stayed on Earth as temperatures cooled and
an atmosphere formed. Several cycles ensued of cooling, raining and
continued asteroid bombardment that boiled off the water to produce
dense steam, followed by rain once again as cooling continued.
From these processes, the ocean emerged about four billion years
ago, only half a billion years after the planet itself took shape. At first,

13
 va s t e x pa n s e s

oceans covered most of the Earth’s surface. Minerals that dissolved from
submerged rocks and gases released by volcanoes and geysers entered
the water, setting in motion the geochemical cycle that has kept the
chemical composition of the ocean constant for a billion years.
In that primordial ocean, long before land emerged, rocks formed
that provide evidence that life might have evolved and gained the cap­
acity to photosynthesize by 3.8 billion years ago. Found now in southern
Greenland and formed on an ancient sea floor, the Isua sediments are
the oldest known rocks created at the planet’s surface rather than deep
in its interior. Actual microfossils of bacteria have been found in rocks
dated to 3.5 billion years ago. The oldest ones were discovered in a
Western Australian rock formation known as Apex Chert. This dark-
grey, carbon-rich rock was laid down along the edges of a seaway near
a volcano whose lava flowed over the seabed and sealed the fossils in
place. Eleven kinds of thread-like microbes, some new to science and
others indistinguishable from living cyanobacteria, reveal the ocean
environment as host to morphologically diverse life extremely early in
the Earth’s history.
Until 3.9 billion years ago, our planet was bombarded with material
from space, and a mere 65 million years ago a cosmic impact ended the
age of dinosaurs. Any life that emerged early might easily have been
destroyed, so that there may have been multiple life-starting events on
Earth. Yet all life forms on Earth today are nearly chemically identical,
and their roots trace to the same parental cell line. So it seems that one
appearance of life took hold at an auspicious moment in the Earth’s devel-
opment. By contrast, prebiotic evolution of sorts happened on some
asteroids but did not result in life, suggesting that water was critical.
While the evolution of life from non-life remains one of science’s
most enduring mysteries, one fact is known with confidence – that the
ancient ocean played a major supporting role in this primordial drama.
The most prominent spokesperson for evolution, Charles Darwin,
recognized the centrality of a watery environment with characteris-
tics different from the present Earth in his famous ‘warm little pond’

14
 A Long Sea Stor y

surmise, when he described to Joseph Hooker the conditions under

which organic molecules might have given rise to a living organism.2
His vision resembled that posited by scientists today: lagoons, lakes,
puddles, groundwater and oceans enriched with organic compounds
that, when exposed to atmospheric gases and stimulated by electricity,
could produce molecules such as amino acids, sugars and other building
blocks for life.
While we can be confident that the ocean served as life’s cradle,
there are several candidates for which part or parts of the ocean fostered
this momentous innovation. Deep oceanic settings would have provided
a refuge from cosmic bombardment. Areas at or near the sea floor would
have available ferrous iron, dissolved from rocks, an essential catalyst
for the synthesis of organic compounds. The discovery in 1977 of hydro­
thermal vents on the sea floor opened up a new possibility: that life
evolved in proximity to deep-sea vents emitting hot water and gases.
Vents likely served as a source of carbon for organic synthesis and,
because they pump a volume equivalent to the world’s oceans every ten
million years or so, they regulated the chemical composition of the
ocean.
For more than three billion years, life on Earth consisted of single
cells or aggregations of cells that formed mats of microbes covering the
sea floor. Not until some bacteria developed the ability to photosynthe-
size would the Earth’s atmosphere gain oxygen. Accumulation of oxygen
in the atmosphere, and eventually circulating throughout the seas, set
the stage for multicellular organisms that could survive, and ultimately
thrive, in the once-toxic soup of oxygen. Although earlier animal fossils
have been found, those of the Cambrian period, starting about 540
million years ago, reveal a wild proliferation of life forms, all oceanic.

zz z
The ocean’s role in accommodating the stunning variety of life over
the sequence of geological periods contributes a noteworthy series
of chapters in our long story. The aptly termed Cambrian explosion

15
 va s t e x pa n s e s

generated the first representatives of many of today’s taxonomic groups.

The trilobites, early arthropods, dominated the period and spread over
the globe. With their armoured external skeletons, these creatures
swarmed throughout the warm, shallow seas for over 270 million years,
filling a wide variety of ecological niches as predators, scavengers and
plankton eaters. Other life forms included algae, invertebrates, echino­
derms and molluscs, but not yet vertebrates nor terrestrial plants or
animals. Adjacent to the diverse oceans, the land was relatively barren.
Life did not yet exist in freshwater.
Much is known about Cambrian life thanks to the exceptional pres-
ervation of fossils, including their soft parts as well as their hard shells. In
1909, palaeontologist Charles Walcott discovered fossils in the Burgess
Shale formation in the Canadian Rockies and dedicated his summers
to collecting thousands of specimens. Decades later, scientists recog-
nized the diversity and unfamiliarity of the fauna in his collection and
made the Burgess Shale justifiably famous as a resource for studying
evolution. Stephen Jay Gould’s 1989 book, Wonderful Life, argued that
Cambrian life displayed more diverse forms than exist on Earth today
and posited that many of the unique lineages went extinct and, thus,
represent evolutionary dead ends.
The spectacular fossil records of the Cambrian also record permanent
changes to the sea floor. Competition for food in shallow seas promoted
use of bottom sediments for avoiding predators and searching for food.
Burrowing animals initially fed upon and were protected by the micro-
bial mats covering the sea floor. Animals burrowing vertically began to
break down the mats and make the upper layers of the sea floor softer
and wetter. Their actions also allowed oxygen to penetrate below the
sea floor’s surface, irrevocably changing the environment at the bottom.
In response, organisms dependent on microbial mats went extinct, to
be replaced by new species adapted to the new conditions. Unfortunately
for future palaeontologists, this dramatic environmental change also
meant the end of conditions that permitted the exceptional preservation
of fossils such as those in the Burgess Shale.

16
 A Long Sea Stor y

In the post-Cambrian era, life flourished in the stabilized, shallow

marine environment. About 500 million years ago the first vertebrates
appeared – eel-like creatures that lacked jaws and paired fins but sported
a primitive backbone, head and tail. Unable to swim, they probably
spent their lives wallowing on the muddy seabed, ingesting small food
particles by filter feeding. At least two classes of jawless fish evolved,
diversified and went extinct, or virtually so, during the Palaeozoic era
(from 543 to 248 million years ago), but other fish classes that appeared
during that time remain with us today. The lampreys and hagfishes in
our seas have evolved a wide range of specialized lifestyles from parasit-
ism to scavenging, to filter feeding. Their taxonomic status is disputed,
but they might be descended from ancient classes of jawless fish.
Cartilaginous fish, including sharks, rays and skates, have skeletons
made of cartilage, not bone, and further differ from bony fish in their
lack of swim bladders and lungs. They pre-dated dinosaurs by about
200 million years and survived to fascinate us in the present. Sharks
emerged 400 million years ago and proliferated in the Carboniferous
period that followed. Some groups survived massive changes to the
oceans, which caused several major extinction events and killed other
marine life. Modern sharks first patrolled the seas as dinosaurs roamed
but lived on after dinosaurs disappeared, numbering among the most
ancient creatures on Earth today.
Bony fish, also still common in our seas, included a group that
evolved into amphibians, which only late in the Palaeozoic era ven-
tured onto land. Both ancient and modern amphibians remained closely
associated with water. They had aquatic larval phases and required wet
environments for laying eggs and for keeping adult skin moist. Reptiles
evolved characteristics that finally broke life’s ties to the sea. Hard-
shelled eggs and scaly, dry skin retained moisture, freeing reptiles, and
subsequently birds and mammals, to spread inland and across the globe
to fill all types of environments.
Sea-floor spreading broke the supercontinent Pangaea into separate
landmasses that began moving towards their current positions. Smaller

17
 va s t e x pa n s e s

divisions brought more land in contact with the ocean and created a sea
between the African and Eurasian landmasses, which was christened the
Tethys Ocean by the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess in 1893. Named
after the sister and consort of Oceanus, the ancient Greek god of the
ocean, and extant for 250 million years until destroyed by the movement
of continents, the former Tethys exists today in the form of oil deposits
in the Middle East and off West Africa and eastern South America that
represent 60 to 70 per cent of the world’s oil. Rocks in the Swiss Alps
once lay in the western end of this lost sea, which extended in the late
Cretaceous to cover what is now the Sahara Desert in North Africa, as
well as vast parts of the North American Midwestern plains. Sea levels
rose as the former Tethys Ocean floor bulged upwards, leaving only 18
per cent of the planet dry at the zenith of this episode of sea-level rise.
The Mesozoic era, or Age of Reptiles, was flanked by two extinc-
tion events. The largest mass extinction ever occurred 252 million years
ago, eliminating 70 per cent of terrestrial species and over 90 per cent
of marine species including the highly successful trilobites. As new life
forms spread, dinosaurs dominated the planet for 135 million years.
While schoolchildren everywhere know about the Age of Dinosaurs,
few of us realize that this geological period could as accurately, though
much less glamorously, be dubbed the ‘Age of Oysters’.3
The oceanic food chain then, as now, depended on phytoplank-
ton, primary producers that transform sunlight into food and provide
sustenance for zooplankton. New microscopic plants and protozoans
appeared, including coccoliths, diatoms, foraminifera and radiolarians,
all of which produced shells, or tests, that contributed to different types
of sea-floor sediments and chalks commonly found today. Molluscs pro-
liferated, especially clams and snails that could burrow into the sea-floor
sediment to escape the numerous predators in Mesozoic seas. The hard
shells of oysters often proved insufficient protection from the powerful
claws of crabs and lobsters, while starfish appeared whose suction feet
were strong enough to pry shells apart. Nor were molluscs safe from
predators who lived above the sea floor. Among the marine reptiles,

18
 A Long Sea Stor y

Henry de la Beche, Duria Antiquior, 1830: the first pictorial representation of deep time.

placodonts used broad teeth to crush shells of oysters and limpets. Some
sharks and rays, even certain fish species, could defeat the armour of
many molluscs, possibly to the point of causing the disappearance of
entire species of bivalve brachiopods.
Open waters above the rough-and-tumble seabed were home to
many species of cephalopods, a taxonomic group today represented only
by squid, octopus and nautiloids. Coiled shelled ammonites evolved
rapidly and spread widely throughout the seas. Many were likely good
swimmers and formidable predators, with jaws capable of spearing or
crushing prey, while others free-floated at various depths. Ammonites
ranged in size from the diameter of a quarter-dollar coin to as much as 2
m (6½ ft), and filled many ecological niches. Their extreme abundance
makes them excellent index fossils, helping geologists identify rock
layers in which they are found, while their beauty attracts collectors.
Even the largest ammonites were dwarfed by the carnivorous
marine reptiles that shared their seas. Discovery of large fossils of
plesiosaurs or ichthyosaurs in the nineteenth century fascinated the
public and encouraged reputable scientists to consider seriously that
sea monsters might still exist. Icthyosaurs, striking examples of

19
 va s t e x pa n s e s

Popular literature often featured illustrations such as this one from 1874, of a battling
ichthyosaur and a plesiosaurus, by French illustrator Édouard Riou.

convergent evolution for their similarity in form to dolphins, were admir­

ably adapted to Mesozoic seas, with well-developed paddles for
locomotion and long bills with teeth for catching fish. As today’s
marine mammals did, they evolved from land-based species. While
most ichthyosaurs were only 3 to 5 m (approx. 10 to 15 ft) long, some
were 15 m (49 ft). Plesiosaurs had whale-like bodies, short tails and
paddle-shaped fins. Long-necked forms that resemble the cartoon
image of Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, are most familiar in popular
culture. The smallest species measured around 2 m (6½ ft), while the
largest could be 20 m (65½ ft) long, as large as today’s sperm whales.
These big marine predators pursued fish, sharks, ichthyosaurs, dino-
saurs and other plesiosaurs.
The Mesozoic chapter closed dramatically with a mass extinction
best known for killing off the dinosaurs, sparing only species that would
evolve into modern birds. Possibly set in motion by an asteroid impact
about 66 million years ago that left the Chicxulub Crater on the Yucatán
Peninsula, 50 per cent of all genera disappeared globally in a short

20
Fossil skeleton of an early form of whale in Wadi Al-Hitan, the Valley of the Whales,
a palaeontological site southwest of Cairo, Egypt.
 va s t e x pa n s e s

geological period, including the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs that had

ruled the seas, and all the ammonites, but also many species of micro-
plankton, brachiopods, fish and land plants. In place of the large reptiles,
birds and mammals diversified and remarkably rapidly filled every avail-
able ecological niche, including in the seas. Our own geological era, the
Cenozoic, witnessed the evolution of land-based species of mammals
into marine creatures.
Why did mammals return to the sea? Seafood might be the answer.
Marine mammals first appeared as global temperatures and primary
productivity in the oceans increased during the Eocene, and all groups
evolved adaptations for feeding in water. As the Eocene ended and the
Tethys Sea closed, part of the Southern Ocean opened when Australia
moved northwards away from Antarctica. The drift of South America
away from Antarctica opened the rest of the Southern Ocean, allowing
the circumpolar current to flow. Connections between oceans resulted
in mixing of ocean water, which increased productivity.
Fifty million years ago, ancestors of manatees, or sea cows, and
cetaceans appeared in riverine and nearshore environments. By 40 mil-
lion years ago, fully oceanic forms inhabited seas in southern Eurasia
and the western tropical Caribbean. A unesco World Natural Heritage
site in an Egyptian desert presents an unexpected glimpse of the ocean’s
past embedded in windswept sand and rock. Wadi Al-Hitan, or Valley
of the Whales, holds hundreds of skeletons of marine mammals in
the final stage of losing hind limbs. These reside alongside skeletons
of sharks, bony fish, crocodiles and sea turtles deposited between 40
and 39 million years ago and preserve evidence of a shallow marine
habitat which appears, from the large number of young marine mammal
specimens, to have been a calving ground.

zz z
The spectacular diversity of life fostered by the ocean responded
in some instances to its extremes and in others to its more ordinary
settings. Life evolved, and endures, unequally throughout the sea and

22
 A Long Sea Stor y

uniquely in response to the extraordinarily varied conditions that form

the subject of another chapter of the long story.
Fossils of marine mammals can be found on every continent, from
the poles to the tropics, although they are most common in northern
temperate regions. Today’s marine mammals have a global but patchy
distribution. Nutrients reach the surface through upwelling, a process
that brings cold, dense, nutrient-laden water upwards when wind-
driven circulation patterns push warm surface water away from coasts.
Upwelling zones, usually on the western edges of continents or along
seamounts or coral reefs, attract prolific marine life including fish and
mammals. The daily vertical migration of zooplankton such as krill, to
feed on the surface at night but avoid sunlight during the day, attracts
other marine life to such zones.
Patchiness is a general characteristic of the ocean, as of land. That
the sea covers 71 per cent, or almost three-quarters, of the surface of
the planet, is a familiar fact. Less familiar is the statistic that the ocean
comprises 99 per cent of the habitable space on Earth. It’s a staggering
thought. It means that the varied environments contained within the sea
offer vastly more potential habitat than the immense mountain ranges,
the sprawling rainforests and the wide plains and deserts of the Earth
put together. But life is far from equally distributed throughout the
ocean. Whale falls, cetacean carcasses that drop to areas about 2,000 m
(6,560 ft) deep, provide resources for opportunistic deep-sea organisms
in a localized patch of ocean floor for decades, and collectively play a
crucial role in supporting the deep ocean floor ecosystem. Many ocean­
ic life forms cluster in highly productive places such as richly prolific
offshore shallow banks; cold, fertile upwelling zones; plankton-laden
circumpolar open seas around Antarctica; waters close to features such
as reefs; shelf breaks or seamounts; and the mysterious hydrothermal
vents in the dark depths.
The discovery of hydrothermal vents in 1977 in a zone where the sea
floor is actively spreading paved the way for the more startling encounter
with strange, highly specialized communities of creatures living near

23
 va s t e x pa n s e s

active vents. Water percolates through cracks in sea-bottom spread-

ing zones, gets heated and chemically modified by encountering hot
rocks, and shoots out of available channels as hot springs, mixing with
dissolved minerals in seawater. The first vent field found with life, poet-
ically christened Rose Garden, was covered with giant tubeworms over
2 m (6 ft) tall. Persistent springs initially attract crabs, which subsist on
bacterial mats. Then colonies develop of tubeworms, mussels, clams,
crustaceans, specialized worms, or other invertebrates. These animals
live within millimetres of superheated water, as hot as 350°C, because
the pressure at great depths prevents hot water from turning to steam.
The microbes at the base of these food chains do not, as elsewhere
on our planet, rely on sunlight; they instead use hydrogen sulphide
from vent fluid to create simple sugars. Some larger animals, such as
tubeworms and mussels, depend on symbiosis with such microbes for
their food. The productivity of vent communities rivals that of shallow-
water coral reefs or salt marshes, but communities appear and disappear
as the vents turn on and off.
Hydrothermal vents, with their incredibly steep temperature
gradients, number among the many examples of oceanic extremes.
Utterly unbeknownst to the Romantic thinkers of the nineteenth cen-
tury who embraced the sublimity of extremes in terrestrial nature, the
ocean hides the globe’s largest mountains, the most gigantic volcanoes
and the tallest waterfalls. The deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana
Trench (which reaches 10,994 m, or 36,070 ft), would drown Mount
Everest (which is 8,848 m, or 29,000 ft, tall) and extends more than five
times the length of the 446-km (227-mi.) Grand Canyon, stretching to
2,550 km (1,580 mi.). The mid-ocean ridge, whose 72,000 km (44,739
mi.) scar the sea floor all around the Earth, covering 28 per cent of it, is
the single largest geological feature on the planet’s surface.
Oceanic extremes are not limited to geology. Fossils reveal former
giants that patrolled ancient oceans, such as the Megalodon shark, at
14 to 18 m (46 to 59 ft) one of the largest and most powerful vertebrate
predators ever. A relative of today’s sperm whales and similar in size to

24
 A Long Sea Stor y

Megalodon, the giant carnivorous whale Livyatan melvillei had massive

teeth in both the upper and lower jaws that it used to tear off flesh from
its prey, probably baleen whales smaller than today’s humpback whales.
Cretaceous seas were also home to bivalves with shells over 2 m (6½
ft) in diameter and marine turtles almost twice that size. Today’s blue
whale remains the largest creature ever to live on Earth, growing up to
30 m (just under 100 ft) long.
The ocean may also hold the planet’s oldest creatures. Deep-sea
corals, which prosper without sunlight in deep, cold water, are the
oldest marine organisms on Earth. One individual colony found off
the Hawaiian coast was determined to be about 2,700 years old, while
another individual colony of a different species had lived over 4,000
years. The Greenland shark is the longest-lived vertebrate known, grow-
ing less than 1 cm (½ in.) per year, reaching sexual maturity around 150
years of age and able to live perhaps up to four centuries. Arctic bowhead
whales have been caught in the twenty-first century with harpoon points
dated to the late nineteenth century, bolstering traditional indigenous
knowledge asserting that bowheads could live two human lifetimes.
Modern analysis of amino acids in whale eyeballs estimates lifespans of
up to two hundred years. By contrast, elephants can live seventy years
and occasional humans to about 100.
Oceanic life not only evolved to inhabit all possible niches including
the extremes, but it developed behaviours to take advantage of regular
changes in the ocean environments. The vertical migration of zooplank-
ton, for example, allows them to follow darkness to escape predators
by day and feed at night. Seasonal shifts in water circulation and tem-
perature affect distribution of food resources, and marine populations
have learned to follow. North Pacific humpback whales, for instance,
migrate from cold, fertile northern feeding grounds off Alaska to breed-
ing grounds in the warmer waters around Hawaii, while separate
populations of southern humpbacks travel between Antarctic feeding
grounds and tropical seas. They do not mix with their northern counter­
parts because seasons are reversed in the two hemispheres. Humpbacks

25
 va s t e x pa n s e s

Left Gold coral

(Gerardia).
Below Black coral
(Leiopathes);
one specimen of
Leiopathes was
found to be over
4,000 years old.

probably learned to migrate in response to an evolutionary carrot-and-

stick combination of seeking sufficient food and avoiding predation on
calves. Another very long whale migration, possibly the longest, is the
16,000- to 23,500-km (10,000- to 14,000-mi.) trip of the eastern Pacific
grey whale to and from the Bering, Chukchi and Okhotsk seas from
and to the Baja lagoons and the coast of California.
Other lengthy oceanic migrations are similarly tied to reproduction,
including those of salmon, sea turtles and eels. Sea turtles, which must
find beaches to nest and lay eggs, can swim 3,200 km (2,000 mi.) to do

26
 A Long Sea Stor y

so, as green turtles do between the coast of Brazil and Ascension Island.
Leatherback turtles have been found 4,000 km (2,485 mi.) from nesting
beaches, presumably in pursuit of the jellyfish they eat. European eels
presented a mystery that remained unsolved until the early twentieth
century: young eels entered rivers and adults left, but no one knew
where they went to spawn. In a series of expeditions between 1904 and
1922, the Danish marine biologist Johannes Schmidt located smaller,
younger eels the farther he travelled out to sea, piecing together the
life history of the eel. The larvae float along the Gulf Stream to European
coasts, growing over one to three years into transparent eels that move
into inland waters where they feed and grow for a decade or more
before maturation propels them on the 6,000-km (3,700-mi.) open
ocean journey back to the Sargasso Sea of their birth to spawn.
The life-cycle journey of wild salmon is the mirror image of the eels’
travels. Hatchlings grow up for one to three years in rivers surrounding
the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and then migrate to the ocean to feed
and grow to maturity before returning to their natal river to spawn.
Knowledge of their oceanic wanderings was virtually non-existent until
fisheries developed in open sea areas in the post-Second World War
period, touching off competition for the resource that motivated tag-
ging studies which proved that the targets of these fisheries did, indeed,
return to rivers where existing fisheries fully utilized the stocks.

zz z
Oceanic animals are, of course, not the only ones that undertake
long migrations. Terrestrial creatures such as Monarch butterflies,
Canada geese and caribou do as well, and the longest migration known
is the 35,000-km (21,750-mi.) journey of the Arctic tern to Antarctica.
Hominids numbered among the species which migrated seasonally to
take advantage of food and other resources and also dispersed to colo-
nize varied new environments throughout the world. When human
ancestors evolved, they did so in a world that included ocean as well as
land. Movement along, around and over the ocean begins the earliest

27
 va s t e x pa n s e s

chapter of the long story of hominid and human relationships with the
sea, which features use of the ocean for food and other resources as well
as for transportation.
Archaeologists have long understood Homo sapiens and its ances-
tors as fundamentally terrestrial for most of evolutionary history. Until
relatively recently, most scholars believed that intensive seafaring and
fishing societies only appeared about 10,000 years ago, or less than
1 per cent of the time our genus has been on Earth. New scholarship in
archaeology and historical ecology has dramatically extended awareness
of the degree to which people have relied on the ocean. Archaeologists
and other scholars are discovering earlier evidence of humans voyaging
across deep water and along coasts and relying on marine resources to
survive and thrive.
Global human migration depended on the ocean longer ago than
scholars have previously believed. Compelling evidence comes from
the tiny island of Flores, which lies east of the Indonesian island of Java.
A hominid species arrived there roughly one million years ago, in the
era known as the Early Pleistocene. To offer some perspective, Homo
sapiens did not colonize this region until between 100,000 and 50,000
years ago. The fossils discovered at Flores so far reveal hominids similar
in body and cranial size to australopithecine (an earlier hominid thought
to have been confined to Africa). Archaeologists have concluded that
their fossil discoveries represent a new species, Homo florisiensis.
Experts are not sure whether the immigrants to Flores were Homo
erectus, which subsequently evolved under selection pressure in a calo-
rie-poor environment for small body size, or whether they might have
been an unknown, small-bodied, small-brained hominid. Either way,
the implications for our understanding of prehistory are staggering.
Archaeologists wonder at the thought that we shared our planet with
other hominids much more recently than we have believed, including
at about the time that agriculture was first invented, and long after
Neanderthals became extinct. This discovery also opens up new chapters
of ocean history.

28
 A Long Sea Stor y

Even at times of low sea levels, travel to Flores would have required
the crossing of a deep-water sea barrier of 20 to 30 km (12 to 18 mi.), a
crossing beyond the dispersal abilities of most land animals. Indeed, the
only ones to colonize Flores without human assistance were rodents,
which presumably arrived on natural rafts or other flotsam, and Stego­
don, ancestors of elephants, which had the capability to swim there.
The presence of these hominids on this otherwise inaccessible island
provides indirect evidence of the oldest human maritime voyaging any-
where in the world. Previously, scholars thought that the organizational
and linguistic ability to undertake sea voyaging appeared first in modern
humans and only late in the Pleistocene. Some archaeologists insist that
earlier crossings must have been accidental, but evidence is mounting
in favour of intentional Pleistocene seafaring. The Flores findings also
suggest that more groups dispersed out of Africa earlier than experts
previously believed.
The span to be crossed to reach Flores was, in fact, part of the most
pronounced biogeographic division on our planet, known as the Wallace
Line in recognition of Alfred Russel Wallace, the nineteenth-century
British naturalist and explorer better known as the co-discoverer of
the theory of evolution by natural selection. In his travels throughout
Indonesia he noticed stark differences between the northwestern and
southeastern parts of the archipelago. On the Eurasian side, in places
like Sumatra and Java, the mammals disappeared, seemingly replaced
on the Australian side by such zoological oddities as marsupials and
giant lizards such as the Komodo dragon. Such stark differences across
similar climate and terrain presented a puzzle until Wallace recognized
that the barrier was oceanic, not terrestrial – a swathe of ocean had kept
Eurasia and Australia separated since the Last Glacial Maximum about
21,000 years ago. Scientists studying coral reefs in Indonesia today find
evidence that the distribution of marine species is similarly influenced
by a marine version of the Wallace Line.
Between the islands of Lombok and Bali, today 193 km (120 mi.)
apart, there exists a strip of extremely deep ocean that remained a seaway

29
 va s t e x pa n s e s

throughout the movements of landmasses and the cycles of sea-level

drops that allowed animals to migrate between many places that are
now islands or separated landmasses. Few terrestrial mammals man-
aged to cross the Wallace Line – just rats and people – until hominids
deliberately transported dogs, pigs, macaques and other animals. Even
terrestrial animals that swim well, including pigs, hippos and deer, did
not cross unaided.
Evidence from Flores and along the Wallace Line suggesting that
Pleistocene seafaring began at least one million years ago gained support
from a surprising source. A finger bone from a young girl found in a cave
north of Mongolia in Siberia set in motion a series of genetic studies
that may connect her people to the sea. Based on the dna in the bone,
scientists have identified a previously unknown group of hominids
named the Denisovians – the first example of such a discovery resting
on genetics instead of anatomical description. More closely related to
Neanderthals than modern humans, the Denisovians became a separate
group sometime between a million years ago and perhaps 400,000 years
ago. Evidence that they interbred with modern humans has been found
through genetic comparisons with indigenous populations in Australia,
New Guinea and surrounding areas. Surprisingly, the mysterious girl
appears unrelated to people around the Siberian cave harbouring the
only existing fossil specimens of her people. This distribution prompts
some scholars to ponder whether the Denisovians themselves might
have crossed the Wallace Line, or indeed whether Homo florisiensis was
a Denisovian.
Hominids before Homo sapiens probably used the sea for travel, and
may have achieved significant sea crossings. Members of our own spe-
cies certainly engaged in ocean travel, initially, so anthropologists now
think, moving along the coasts of the Indian Ocean. Genetic evidence
suggests that people reached places in Melanesia and Australia that
required sea crossings earlier than central Europe or inland Asia. Yet
evidence is sparse, so mainstream archaeology has been slow to con-
sider seriously early human migration by water. One problem is posed

30
 A Long Sea Stor y

by today’s sea level, which is more than 90 m (300 ft) higher than it was
18,000 years ago. Past ice ages, including the most recent one starting
50,000 years ago, locked up seawater and created habitable land, now
inundated, that might have provided clues. Most knowledge of prehis-
tory comes from inland sites. Underwater archaeology now possesses
the tools and knowledge to extract information about human habitation
from formerly dry land that is presently under the sea, although the
expense of ship time compounded by continued terrestrial bias has kept
this emerging field small.
Finds illuminating ancient human settlements come from fortuitous
discoveries in rare places that were long ago close to the sea and still
remain so, such as caves high up on steep cliffs. One such place is a
high-elevation cave near Mossel Bay, South Africa. Evidence from the
Pinnacle Point cave revealed that a group of humans there used shellfish
intensively at a critical time, 164,000 years ago, when harsh environ-
mental conditions caused by glaciation may have forced them to survive
on food resources from the sea.
Marine food sources, which archaeologists had long believed early
humans only recently exploited in evolutionary terms, are now recog-
nized as having been important much earlier, and during at least one
critical juncture for humanity’s survival. It is well known that Homo
sapiens likely emerged about 200,000 years ago in Africa. A glacial
period stretching from about that time until 125,000 years ago created
cold, dry conditions, making terrestrial food sources less productive
and perhaps driving early humans to find or depend more heavily on
new food sources. The Pinnacle Point cave findings suggest that a small
population of modern humans may have hunkered down by the coast
and expanded their diet to include shellfish. In South Africa, archae-
ological evidence indicates that this dietary dependency on shellfish
coincided with symbolic behaviour and technological developments
that together suggest these early humans displayed key elements of
modern behaviour. The time and place of this find corresponds to a
bottleneck in human evolution, making it possible that the inhabitants

31
 va s t e x pa n s e s

of Pinnacle Point cave might just possibly have been ancestors to all
modern humans.
There is no need to rely entirely on the drama of an evolutionary
bottleneck, however. Recent scholarship concludes that wherever
aquatic resources were abundant and relatively accessible, our ancestors
have likely always used them, probably longer ago than at Pinnacle
Point. Neanderthals ate molluscs and also exploited seals, dolphins and
fish during the Middle Palaeolithic period (200,000 to 40,000 years
ago). Evidence from multiple sites suggests that such resource use was
regular and sustained, a part of purposeful visits to coastal and estuarine
environments. Agriculture emerged only very recently by comparison,
about 10,000 years ago. For most of human history, foraging and hunting
provided sustenance – and food came from both land and sea.
Reaching back further in time, hominids pre-dating Homo erectus
also used aquatic food as far back as two million years ago. Archaeological
investigation in northern Kenya found evidence of the butchering of
turtles, crocodiles and fish from wetlands and the coasts of rivers and
lakes of the East African Great Rift Valley. This area, unlike prehistoric
savannahs or forests, offered a year-round food supply that was easy to
access. Because these aquatic foods are rich sources of nutrients, par-
ticularly fatty acids (needed in human brain growth), it is possible that
human evolution may have been spurred when hominids began eating
fish and other such foods.
A theory about an aquatic phase during human evolution which
faced intense scepticism for decades has garnered more serious, if still
cautious, consideration in recent years. The so-called ‘aquatic ape’
hypothesis is credited to the highly regarded marine scientist Alister C.
Hardy who revealed his thoughts, apparently kept hidden for decades,
in 1960, three years after he was knighted. His theory rested on the
observation that apes can walk upright but don’t unless wading through
water (or carrying fruits or sticks) and posited adaptations such as
human hairlessness and the relatively large amount of subcutaneous fat
as vestiges of a semiaquatic lifestyle, in which early humans inhabited

32
 A Long Sea Stor y

swampy or marshy areas to escape predators and dove to shallow depths

to get food. In the 1970s, the feminist author Elaine Morgan questioned
the scientific basis for theories asserting that hunting by men drove
human evolution. She promoted the aquatic ape hypothesis as an alter-
native that would account for contributions by women to subsistence
gathering as a force for evolutionary change.
Regardless of a possible aquatic phase in hominid development, the
bare facts of human use of the ocean for migration and food suggest that
use of the ocean has not been well integrated into our understanding of
prehistory. Coastal living allowed for the exploitation of inland as well
as coastal resources, which together could sustain a community year-
round. The ease of shellfish gathering meant that women, children and
the elderly could contribute regularly and significantly to subsistence.
Plentiful food may have provided the time and opportunity for humans
to develop tools and crafts, to build communal structures or possibly
to experiment with cultivating plants. Access to water likely promoted
communication and trade with other groups, perhaps ultimately stim-
ulating dispersal along coasts and around the globe. Much of the story
of ancient human relationships with the ocean remains unwritten.

zz z
The chapter chronicling human migration to North and South
America exists as an old familiar tale undergoing active revision as
archaeologists learn more. Did the first Homo sapiens to set foot in the
Americas arrive after an arduous trek across the Bering land bridge
and through a long ‘ice-free corridor’ soon after glacial ice lost its grip,
devoting generations to reach North America and more to expand
southward? Or did they put their possessions in boats and skip along
the coast, pulling up on the shores of islands or favourable beaches for
long or short pauses? At glacial periods with lower sea levels than today,
very broad coastal zones provided natural highways for human explo-
ration and dispersal, entirely at sea level and with very few geographic
barriers. Shore environments up to 200 km (124 mi.) wide offered

33
 va s t e x pa n s e s

varied terrestrial and marine food sources, relatively flat terrain and
possibly convenient beach access for watercraft that may have speeded
travel.
The old theory is fraying that the Bering land bridge and ice-free
corridor were the keys to the peopling of North America. Evidence
is mounting of older settlements, whose inhabitants could only have
arrived by sea. The people who first settled the Americas were long
believed to be big-game hunters from Siberia and Beringia who tra-
versed the ice-free corridor as the Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated, about
13,000 years ago. Archaeologists have found numerous sites character-
ized by tools of the Clovis culture, named after the Clovis, New Mexico,
location where they were first discovered, and evidence that the arrival
of these tools’ users coincided with the disappearance of big game. Even
as the Clovis first theory gained acceptance, though, anomalous finds
of likely older evidence of human habitation raised questions.
Monte Verde, Chile, lies thousands of kilometres south of Beringia.
There archaeologists discovered artefacts dated to between 15,000 and
14,000 years ago. This corresponds to the time that the ice-free corridor
first opened, but it may not have been biologically viable until a couple
of thousand years later (13,000 to 12,000 years ago). The artefacts do not
resemble Clovis-type tools, and there was not sufficient time for people
to move 16,000 km (10,000 mi.) to create the settlement found there.
Other sites pre-date Clovis technology and the opening of land access
to the Americas, including one at Paisley Five Mile Point in Oregon,
where plant seeds dated to 14,400 years ago were found in desiccated
human faecal matter. Dependence on plant foods also diverges from the
Clovis model of a hunting-based society. Another site, dated to as much
as 15,000 years ago, near Buttermilk Creek, Texas, yielded artefacts that
may be precursors of Clovis technology, suggesting the origin of that
culture from within the Americas rather than from Asia.
California’s Channel Islands have several archaeological sites that
support such challenges to the land bridge theory and provide evidence
for migration by sea. Between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago, the Channel

34
 A Long Sea Stor y

Islands would have required a 9- or 10-km (about a 6-mi.) voyage from

the mainland of North America. By that time, as the remains from sev-
eral archaeological sites testify, seafaring peoples were living on Santa
Rosa and San Miguel islands, which were probably first colonized 13,000
or more years ago. Significantly, no Clovis artefacts have been found
at these sites, but projectile points similar to those found in the early
layers of the Paisley Caves have. These people must have had watercraft
sufficient to transport themselves from the mainland. Their descendants
continuously occupied the northern Channel Islands from more than
10,000 years ago until the Island Chumash population was removed to
the mainland in 1820, a story told in Scott O’Dell’s novel, Island of the
Blue Dolphins (1960). These people depended heavily on marine food
sources for millennia.
Kelp forests along the North Pacific coast are among the most pro-
ductive environments on Earth. At the end of the Pleistocene, they
extended from Japan to Beringia and along much of the North and
South American west coasts. These offshore, three-dimensional habi-
tats foster varied and plentiful marine populations, including shellfish,
seaweeds, fish, marine mammals and seabirds. Sea levels between 90
and 120 m (between 300 and 400 ft) lower than today’s left vast tracts
of flat, coastal land, now inundated, which by about 16,000 years ago
provided an unobstructed migration route. Archaeologists dubbed this
likely alternative to the land bridge the ‘kelp highway’, an avenue that
would have allowed maritime hunter-gatherers to move speedily coast-
wise with plentiful availability of food and other material resources.
Coastal foragers enjoyed access to animals and plants that inhabited
marshes, estuaries, rivers, coastal forests, sandy beaches, rocky shores –
any of the varied ecosystems found in the borderlands between the ocean
and the continental interior. The wealth of the littoral included seaweed;
shellfish exposed at low tide; seals and other marine mammals that were
vulnerable to hunters on land; the occasional beached whale; marine
fish; salmon and other anadromous fish that returned from the sea to
spawn in rivers; migrating birds; and also the full suite of land animals

35
 va s t e x pa n s e s

and plants. Initially coastal migrants may have used shores lightly, moving
on when they exhausted a particular location, rarely settling for long
periods of time. Reliable access to shellfish and other coastal resources,
however, seems to have encouraged sedentary communities.
Habitable coastal areas from this time are now underwater, follow-
ing the episode of rapid sea-level rise that ended about 7,000 years ago.
We know that agriculture developed about 10,000 years ago. It appears
increasingly likely that long-held assumptions about the path to civi­
lization beginning with hunter-gatherers and proceeding through
agriculture might be premature. Our understanding of the develop-
ment of agriculture and civilization has emerged from the archaeology
of interior sites, but new research suggests that coastal environments
also supported large, sedentary communities and fostered the activi-
ties associated with complex societies and civilization. Sufficient food
resources fuelled population growth in permanent coastal settlements
and may have provided inhabitants with the time to produce craft
goods, build public or even monumental structures, and experiment
with game-keeping, gardening and active resource management. We
can surmise that sea-level rise after the Last Glacial Maximum drove
coastal people inland, perhaps promoting terrestrial lifeways. There is
ample evidence, however, that the story of people and ocean is not only
a long one but one in which connections between them were pivotal
for the plot.

zz z
People over the millennia have used the ocean for many reasons,
starting with food and transportation. The ocean, including its tides,
currents, storms, exploitable resources, sea-level rises and falls, and
other features, profoundly shaped human development from prehis-
toric times to the present. The impact is mutual and moves in both
directions. The long story of people and oceans would not be complete
without acknowledging that people have joined other elements of
nature that act as agents of change in the ocean.

36
 A Long Sea Stor y

Humans made significant inroads into marine populations starting

hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. The number of Caribbean sea
turtles is now in the tens of thousands, whereas a few centuries ago
there were tens of millions. In studies going back 7,000 years, Caribbean
island people targeting top predators including large fish and turtles
caused local extirpations. Coastal inhabitants in what is now Maine
likewise appear to have overfished cod locally, shifting fishing efforts
to flounder and other species when cod catches declined. Evidence
from middens suggests that Island Chumash people ate many large
red abalone for a period of time between about 7,500 and 3,000 years
ago, possibly because their hunting for sea otters removed the primary
predator for abalone, enabling their numbers to increase. Recent part-
nerships between ecologists, historians and archaeologists have led to
the conclusion that human exploitation, even long ago, could affect the
size of fish available to catch, the geographic range of marine mammals
or even the local marine ecology.
While the human relationship with the ocean includes cultural
dimensions, explored throughout the rest of this book, that connection
is firmly rooted in physical and ecological interactions. People, as part
of nature, are inextricably connected to the ever-changing ocean. Their
activities have, in turn, affected the ocean for millennia. Understanding
this deep history makes apparent that the human relationship with the
ocean started right at the beginning. The seas have provided food and
transportation as long as people have lived near them, however long that
may have been. Modern humans evolved eating seafood and living near
coasts. As they migrated around the planet, groups of people diversified
culturally, politically and economically in their uses of the sea and their
understanding of its role in their lives.

37
 z two y

Imagined Oceans
It is not possible to measure the full extent of the ocean
except with the eye of fantasy. No one will ever delve to
the bottom of that sea except by plunging into the waves
of his wildest dreams.
– From an account of a voyage to Siam (Thailand)
by a seventeenth-century Persian traveller1

S tarting in prehistoric times, communities whose subsist-

ence or identities were inextricably tied to the sea had temporal
and spatial connections to all three of its dimensions. Many coastal
and island cultures employed their intimate knowledge of the sea
to exploit its connectivity and its living and non-living resources,
illustrated dramatically by such examples as long-distance naviga-
tion in Oceania, Ama diving and the practice of cormorant fishing.
Thalas­socracies such as the Phoenicians and Vikings projected
power over targeted areas and fostered cultural identities that were
tightly tied to the sea. The land-based powers around the Indian
Ocean relied on navigation and trade as the bulwark of their terres-
trial empires, while the spectacular voyages dispatched by the
Chinese Ming dynasty during the first half of the fifteenth century
subordinated the projection of naval power to the display of over-
whelming wealth, with the aim of establishing tribute relationships.
Chinese oceanic expansion, dram­atic as it was, remained in the
realm of the known world. Through the fifteenth century, people,
commodities and ideas flowed easily and far, but oceans and seas
were known and experienced individually, or as adjacent to a neigh-
bouring sea, rather than as interconnected parts of a global ocean.
Cultures around the world developed unique relationships with
the sea reflecting the resources available to them, the geographic

38
 Imagined Oceans

challenges and opportunities they faced, and also less tangible

elements associated with their histories, spiritual beliefs and collec-
tive experiences.

zz z
most histories begin when written records of the past are available.
Since the human relationship with the ocean stretches back to evo­­
lutionary time, archaeology and folklore must inform ocean history.
Prehistory has laboured under the same terrestrial bias as history, no
doubt in part because inundation of coasts around the world following
the end of the last great ice age has hidden sites of coastal settlement
out of sight and consequently out of mind. If we embrace the broad
definition of ‘civilizations’ proposed by the historian Felipe Fernández-
Armesto as societies engaging in systematic refashioning of nature,
then seaboard settlements should be added to the riverine, inland and
desert regions where civilizations have been defined by agriculture,
cities, writing or other traditional civilizing markers.
We know nothing of the first watercraft that carried humans, and
even earlier hominids, to places we can demonstrate that they migrated
to. Ancient cultural perception of the ocean likewise remains unknown,
but perhaps not entirely unknowable. Examining how people used the
ocean illuminates how they imagined the sea in relation to themselves.
Knowledge of the ocean was derived from experience with the sea, such
as long-distance voyaging, the familiarity with offshore banks gained
by fishers or the ability to build and operate vessels to project power.
Use of the sea promoted relationships between groups of people along
coasts and across seas, establishing patterns of movement of people,
goods and ideas that affected not only coastal communities but at times
those far inland as well.
Ancient coasting enabled people to spread throughout the
world and likely fostered settlement of coastal zones harbouring res­
ources of both land and sea. The resulting communities and cultures
diversified in response to geography, accident, historical experience

39
 va s t e x pa n s e s

and other influences, but they often shared features that may reflect
common connections to the ocean. The populations of most seaboard
civilizations consumed significant amounts of seafood, including
finfish, shellfish and marine mammals, as evidenced by analysis of
skel­etal remains and also by the enormous shell middens associated
with some of these settlements. The same types of knots have been found
in north­ern Europe, Africa, Peru and Oceania, suggesting multiple,
independent innovations taking place in locations once viewed as
marginal to the story of human history.
The myths, folklore and superstitions of coastal cultures suggest
extremely long-standing and important connections between people
and the sea. The place of water in riverine and desert civilizations
attracts more attention from folklorists than the mythology of coastal
commun­ities, but many of the world’s oldest myths associate creation
with water that is oceanic in scale. These oceanic origin stories are told
in India, Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, as well as in Mayan, Hebrew
and Christian cultures. Many Native American peoples posited an initial
primordial ocean from which an inhabitable world emerged, a sequence
shared with other cultures north of the equator as far from the Americas
as Siberia. Our understanding of the deep past leans heavily on examples
of cultures that emerged inland and along rivers, but coastal hunter-
gatherers spread to every part of the globe in the wake of the last great
ice age, no doubt embracing oceanic waters as part of their myths and
origin stories.
Mythology is often tightly connected to knowledge of the ocean.
Coastal peoples of the Canadian Northwest hand down legends of
escapes by canoe from inundations by the sea, and the survival of the
Moken people in Thailand who, anticipating the 2004 tsunami, moved
to high ground seems a modern instance of ancient knowledge of the
ocean. Homer’s evocation of Odysseus’ choice to sail close to either
Scylla or Charybdis, in myth a six-headed monster and a whirlpool,
respectively, likewise reflects familiarity with the sea. As hazards on
either side of the narrow Strait of Messina, influenced by strong tidal

40
 Imagined Oceans

currents, the rock shoal and the natural whirlpool are commemorated
in the sailor’s expression, ‘between a rock and a hard place’.
People spread out along the North Atlantic coasts 10,000 years ago.
Europe has the largest ratio of shoreline to inland area of almost any part
of the world. Its Atlantic coastline has greater biodiversity in its coastal
regions and islands than the long-settled Mediterranean shores. The
forests and meadows of the area called Doggerland between Europe and
the British Isles provided resource-rich living space until sea-level rise
about 8,500 years ago drowned those settlements. Although Europe’s
many peninsulas and wide coasts shrank, the cultures that remained
facing the Atlantic shared the experience of depending on the rich and
accessible resources of the littoral and of grappling with the ocean as a
natural force challenging their efforts to use its restless waters to travel
and move goods.
The common experience of plying the sea fostered social relation-
ships that began with ceremonial gift exchanges and developed into
trade. From Scandinavia to Brittany, to Iberia, ancient Atlantic commu-
nities built megalithic tombs for the collective burial of ancestors on
islands or coasts that involved and relied upon the manipulation of giant
stones, astronomical knowledge that might relate to ocean travel and, at
times, burial in shell middens. As archaeologist Barry Cunliffe argues,
peoples who lived along the Atlantic coasts of Europe shared common
beliefs, lifeways and values over thousands of years, ‘conditioned largely
by their unique habitat on the edge of the continent facing the ocean’.2
The sea’s threshold, the site of arrivals and departures, was faced
with dread but also with expectation, viewed as a mysterious and super-
natural place. The dangers associated with crossing liminal zones and
going to sea have long been managed through ceremonies to propitiate
gods before departing from land. Common practices and stories, such
as of lands that sink into the sea, are known along and around North
Atlantic coasts. Coastal communities there shared a firm belief, likely
dating back to ancient times, that a drowning man belonged to the sea
and should not be rescued lest the sea then claim the rescuer in his place.

41
 va s t e x pa n s e s

Recent research at carefully chosen archaeological sites around

the Atlantic, but also along the coasts of South America, the northern
Pacific and other places around the globe, suggests that coastal societies
relying on the resources of land and sea achieved population densities
that stimulated cultural development. In such seaboard civilizations,
fishing as well as trade, conducted initially by coasting rather than on
long voyages crossing seas, invested a segment of the population with
specialized knowledge and promoted the development of classes or
social groups who took care of navigation or trade or warfare for their
communities. Conceptions of ocean tenancy touched off conflicts with
neighbours but intensive use of marine resources also motivated trade
with inland or distant communities to exchange fish, shells or other
coastal bounty for commodities unavailable to them. Access to plentiful
food and other resources of the littoral zone appears to have fostered
permanent communities that began to consider the coast and sea as
part of their territory. In short, the sea has been central to the devel-
opment of civilization. Although there were common features among
ancient coastal communities around basins or even across the world,
civilizations in different parts of the globe developed a diverse array of
unique relationships with the sea.

zz z
the first basin to be spanned by human activities was the Indian
Ocean. Its seaboard societies came to view the deep sea as a place out-
side of society. The ocean existed as a transport surface for trade but was
understood as non-territory by regional powers that were more inter-
ested in spreading culture and promoting trade than projecting political
power. This cultural understanding of the ocean emerged from the sea-
sonal regime of monsoon winds and from the local coasting exchanges
that over time developed into a trading network criss-crossing the entire
Indian Ocean region. Starting probably 125,000 years ago – when Homo
sapiens arrived on the shores of numerous seas that, with sea-level rise,
merged into the Indian Ocean basin – people in this region fished and

42
 Imagined Oceans

moved along coasts or crossed enclosed bodies of water in small vessels

built from materials at hand: for example, dugouts, rafts or bark boats
where wood was available, or reed boats in areas with marshlands. Navi­
gation along the northern rim of the Indian Ocean may date to about
7000 bce, initiated by networks of fisherfolk rather than by centralized
or land-oriented powers.
The uneven distribution of both natural resources and manufac-
tured goods motivated trade, initially over short distances but spreading
to include wood and ivory of Africa, cotton textiles from India, spices
from Southeast Asia and silk from China. The centralized state of Meso­
potamia cultivated trade networks to exchange its agricultural surpluses
for wood and stone from the western side of the Persian Gulf, but much
trade remained small-scale and conducted by coastal fishing commu-
nities for thousands of years. By about 5000 bce, long-distance trade
connected Egypt, Arabia and the west coast of India. This trade involved
communities in the littoral region; communities further inland were
not as tightly connected to the emerging Indian Ocean world as their
coastal counterparts.
In Hindu myth, life began in the sea or from primordial water, but
when Vishnu is in the ocean, turmoil ensues. The cultural geographer
Philip Steinberg argues that these beliefs inspired in some a fear of the
sea, motivating mariners to cross it quickly and possibly stimulating
innovation to do so. According to the Greek geographer Pliny, some
Indian navigators carried birds to sea, releasing them if winds or currents
pulled them away from land in hopes of following them back. Perhaps
in this way sailors experienced first the waters just out of sight of land
and eventually learned to cross bodies of water.
Characteristics of the Indian Ocean promoted the development of
open-sea navigation, made possible by the evolution of larger vessels.
In the western Indian Ocean, keel ships called dhows, built from planks
laid side-by-side, sewn together with rope and then waterproofed with
bitumen, became the workhorses of trade in the region. Clear tropical
skies promoted observations of stars. The pattern of monsoon winds, once

43
 va s t e x pa n s e s

decoded around the first millennium bce, enabled regular crossings

from Arabia and western India towards Africa during the months of
November to January, when the dry northeast monsoon winds carried
vessels along. The opposing southwest monsoon, with accompanying
heavy rains, enabled the return journey during the months of April to
August. Surface currents complemented the monsoon winds, further
accelerating ships travelling from north to south during the northeast
monsoon and the opposite when the winds reversed. The same physical
features that forged seasonal trade also worked to prevent its intensifi-
cation. During the months of June and July, very strong winds often
precluded sailing. The regime of monsoon winds stimulated seasonal
trade to the east or the west but halted vessels for part of the year and
prevented an increase in the number of annual transits.
The enforced idle periods for ships promoted the development of
large and cosmopolitan port cities full of sailors, traders and travellers,
a mostly male society that extended from the enclosed and separate
world of ships onto land. Sailors on board vessels were generally subject
to the laws and customs of the society from which they came. In ports,
people from disparate parts of the region lived crowded together during
the periods when travelling was impossible. Expatriate communities,
given a significant degree of autonomy by host powers, controlled trade.
Life in ports promoted the mixing of people and their cultures, spread-
ing new religions, starting with Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism and
ultimately Islam.
The bubonic plague, which moved easily throughout this highly inte-
grated region, disrupted trade in the sixth century. Slow initial recovery
accelerated with the rise and spread of Islam and the near simultaneous
establishment of the Chinese Sui dynasty (581 to 671), quickly followed
by the Tang dynasty (618 to 907). Islam contributed a lingua franca in the
Arabic language and also a set of widely acknowledged laws that bene-
fited trade, while the consolidation of political power in China created
a combination of political stability and demand for luxury goods that
promoted economic exchange along what is known as the Silk Road.

44
 Imagined Oceans

Although goods, people, germs and ideas circulated throughout

the region, waters were generally perceived as local or regional rather
than oceanic. Only the waters off India itself were referred to as the
‘Indian Ocean’. The waters to the west were the ‘Erythraean Sea’, a name
initially applied only to the Red Sea and then extended outwards to
include what is now the northwest Indian Ocean. The manuscript sailing
directions known as the ‘Periplus of the Erythraen Sea’ documents the
Indian Ocean trading system of 2,000 years ago and the entrance of the
Roman Empire into that world. The Roman name Mare prosodum, or
‘Green Sea’, denoted what we now consider the central Indian Ocean
at the latitude of Sri Lanka.
With the rise and spread of Islam, Arab knowledge of the Indian
Ocean, based on the indigenous Indian local knowledge that solved
the puzzle of the monsoon winds, increased and began to be system-
atically collected and recorded. Nautical charts featured carefully
drawn coastlines showing landmarks important for coastwise sail-
ing. The open ocean was not represented to scale but was, rather,
left as simply abstract space to be crossed between sightings of land.
In open water, Arabic navigators relied on stars and the knowledge,
for example, of how high the pole star should be before turning
towards their destination. To measure height, navigators employed
a device called a kamal, made of wood and knotted string. They also
used their knowledge of currents, winds, tides and the colour of the
sea. By the time Ahmad ibn Majid wrote his late fifteenth-century
treatise summarizing navigation in the Indian Ocean, Arabs had
adopted the compass from China.
Arab and also Chinese knowledge of the world extended to the far
corners of the Indian Ocean. An anonymous Egyptian authored the
cosmological treatise The Book of Curiosities around 1020, which fea-
tured the first world map that included names of cities rather than only
regions. The volume’s Indian Ocean map used a Swahili name for the
East African island of Zanzibar and depicted specific locations in China.
A Ming dynasty world map created before the arrival of the Portuguese

45
Gravestone with a lateen-rigged sail in a 12th- or 13th-century
Muslim cemetery in Istanbul, Turkey.
 Imagined Oceans

in the Indian Ocean likewise included accurate representations of parts

of Southeast Asia, India and Africa.
Emerging land-based states such as in India and China had an interest
in promoting trade and suppressing piracy, but kept ports and coasts
insulated from interior regions. People inland were not entirely dis-
connected from the sea, as demonstrated by a sixteenth-century story
of a guru worrying about a merchant captain devotee whose ship was
stuck in the doldrums. Another devotee, fanning the guru and sensing
his concern, blows the vessel to safety.3 To most non-mariners, the
ocean delivered desirable commodities but served mainly as a transport
surface, a space outside society, but one where freedom of navigation
and commerce was generally recognized.
Even after Islam dominated the Indian Ocean, its land-based states
remained more intent on promoting trade and spreading culture than on
projecting naval power or restricting navigation by other powers. On the
eve of European arrival, this multi-ethnic region featured an integrated
and extensive commercial system. For most people outside of ports
and coastal communities, the ocean itself exerted a relatively minor
presence in their daily lives. Sailors were likewise marginal, respected
for their expertise in navigation and valued for their role in delivering
goods but not considered part of society. The sea existed externally to
society, constructed as a space devoted to trade. It represented distance
to be crossed rather than territory belonging to the state.

zz z
trading vessels connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian
Ocean thousands of years ago. In contrast to Indian Ocean states which
did not view the sea as territory, ancient Greeks and Romans extended
imperial domination seawards to a limited extent. The outer boundary
of Greek geography was the forbidding Ocean River, flowing around
the habitable world. Ruled by the deity Oceanus, the waters of the
Ocean River were held as the font of all terrestrial rivers and streams,
but Oceanus itself was mysterious, infinite and forbidding. The circle

47
 va s t e x pa n s e s

inscribed by Oceanus put the Mediterranean Sea in the centre of Greek

geography. In Aesop’s fables and in Roman mosaics, Thalassa, the pri-
meval spirit of the sea, rises from the sea’s surface holding an oar. Use of
the Mediterranean for trade, fishing and the extension of power created
a distinctly different human relationship to the sea than that forged
around the Indian Ocean.
Physical geography laid the foundations for Mediterranean popu-
lations’ use and conception of the sea. Due to flooding of coastal plains
in the wake of sea-level rise, the Mediterranean coasts are narrower
than those of either the Indian or the Pacific Ocean. Coastal dwellers,
deprived of the resources of wide littoral plains, found themselves
strongly oriented to the sea and detached from inland society. Marine
fish provided an important source of food that was used first for sub-
sistence but came to support commercial activity, while the uneven
distribution of resources motivated coastal communities to trade with
one another.
Before the Greeks, the mysterious Phoenicians, a confederation of
maritime traders, occupied the coasts along the eastern Mediterranean.
These two powers were the first to forge sea-based colonial empires.
By the eighth century bce, Phoenician trading posts ringed the entire
Mediterranean. A painting in a rock shelter overlooking the Strait of
Gibraltar depicting stick figures around a sailing ship may represent con-
tact between Phoenicians and local people in the western Mediterranean
who were unfamiliar with Phoenician maritime technology. The cre-
ation of the Atlantic port of Gadir (now Cadiz) enabled the Phoenicians
to link the Mediterranean with the Atlantic for trade and other kinds of
exchange. Gadir also became the centre for the earliest commercial sea
fishery, which trapped the majestic bluefin tuna as it migrated through
the Strait of Gibraltar returning to spawn.
Phoenician innovations in maritime technology enabled their
domination of trade between eastern cultures in Asia and Iberia in the
west. Thanks to mortise-and-tenon joints, Phoenician vessels were
stronger than earlier designs that employed planks sewn together.

48
 Imagined Oceans

Phoenician ship carved on a sarcophagus, from the 2nd century CE.

Maritime archaeology has also revealed a lead-filled wooden anchor

as a Phoenician invention. Ships and knowledge of the sea enabled
Phoenicians to accumulate wealth and power, creating one of the earli­
est thalassocracies, a term describing seaborne empires or states with
a significant maritime realm. Like that of the Greeks, the Norse and
other similar powers that followed, Phoenician power derived from
the sea rather than land.
Little is known about the Phoenicians, including what they called
themselves: possibly Canaanites. Greeks coined the name ‘Phoenician’,
perhaps referring to the prized purple dye produced from a type of
mollusc. Phoenicians acted as middlemen not only for trade but for
culture. They spread the modern alphabet, their creation, as well as
myths and knowledge from Assyria and Babylonia throughout the
Mediterranean, helping to set in motion the Greek cultural revival
known as its Golden Age.
Throughout the periods dominated by ancient Greek and Roman
cultures, the Mediterranean Sea remained in the centre of a widen-
ing world. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Phoenician

49
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 the references above given, and a more detailed and circumstantial account
furnished by Mr. Langford at the writer’s request, effectually demolish this
theory.

Terry Engr. Co. Haynes, Photo., St. Paul.

The Teton Range.

The Grand Teton in the center.

They were astonished to find, on a point but little lower than the main
summit, a rude shelter of granite slabs evidently put in place by human hands
ages ago.
Nez Percé Creek (18 miles) is the largest branch of the Firehole, and is of
historic interest from its connection with the Indian campaign of 1877. It forms
the north boundary of the Lower Geyser Basin. Two miles beyond it is the
Fountain Hotel.
To attempt any thing like a detailed description of the Firehole Geyser
regions would be intolerable alike to reader and author. Of the objects of
interest, any one of which in other localities would attract marked attention,
there are several thousand. In the present description, therefore, only the more
important features will be noticed—those notable objects to see which is an
indispensable part of any well ordered tour of the Park.
The Fountain Geyser is a typical example of the first class of geysers
described in a previous chapter. Its proximity to the hotel (one-fourth mile)
causes it to be much visited.
 The Mammoth Paint Pots, a little way east of the Fountain, are probably the
most prominent example of this class of phenomena in the Park.
The Great Fountain Geyser lies a mile and a half south-east of the Fountain.
It is the chief wonder of the Lower Basin, and, in some respects, the most
remarkable geyser in the Park. Its formation is quite unlike that of any other. At
first sight the visitor is tempted to believe that some one has here placed a vast
pedestal upon which to erect a monument. It is a broad, circular table about
two feet high, composed entirely of hard siliceous deposit. In its surface are
numerous pools molded and ornamented in a manner quite unapproached, at
least on so large a scale, in any other part of the Park. In the center of the
pedestal, where the monument ought to stand, is a large irregular pool of great
depth, full of hot water, forming, to all appearances, a lovely quiescent spring.
At times of eruption, the contents of this spring are hurled bodily upward to a
height sometimes reaching 100 feet. The torrent of water which follows the
prodigious down-pouring upon the face of the pedestal, flows away in all
directions over the white geyserite plain. No visitor to the Yellowstone can
afford to miss the Great Fountain Geyser.
In this vicinity are several of the handsomest springs in the Park. One in
particular lies just across the hot stream which flows a little to the south of the
Great Fountain. It is shaped like an egg set endwise in the ground with the
upper part of the shell broken off. It is an exquisite trifle.
In a small valley, extending to the north-east from the Great Fountain, are
several objects worthy of notice. One of these is an immense hot lake, by far
the largest in the Park. Steady Geyser and Young Hopeful, near the head of the
valley, are not remarkable in this land of geysers.
The principal attraction of the locality is what has come to be called the
Firehole. It is at the extreme upper end of the valley, difficult to find, and
unsatisfactory to visit when the wind agitates the water surface. It is a large
hot spring from the bottom of which, to all appearances, a light colored flame is
constantly issuing, only to be extinguished in the water before it reaches the
surface. At times it has a distinct ruddy tinge and it always flickers back and
forth like the lambent flame of a torch. When seen under favorable conditions,
the illusion is perfect, and the beholder is sure that he has at last caught a
glimpse of the hidden fires which produce the weird phenomena of this region.
But it is only illusion. Through a fissure in the rock gas or superheated steam
escapes and divides the water, just as bubbles do on a smaller scale. The
reflection from the surface thus formed accounts for the appearance, which is
intensified by the black background formed by the sides and bottom of the
pool.
 The Lower Geyser Basin has an area of thirty square miles. Conspicuous
among its topographical features are the Twin Buttes, two prominent peaks
west of the river which dominate the entire basin. A little way south of these is
Fairy Fall, a pretty cascade 250 feet high.
There will be included in this chapter, as more properly belonging to it than
to the next, a description of the Midway Geyser Basin. Its principal interest lies
in the stupendous character of its phenomena.

Terry Engr. Co. Haynes, Photo., St. Paul.

Excelsior Geyser.

Excelsior Geyser, as a dynamic agent, has no equal in the Park. It is really a

water volcano, and its eruptions have nothing of the characteristic display of a
genuine geyser. Its crater is a vast seething cauldron close by the brink of the
Firehole River, into which, in non-eruptive periods even, it pours 4,000 gallons
of water per minute. The shape of the crater is irregular. Its dimensions are
about 330 by 200 feet, and 20 feet deep. It was not known to be a geyser until
1878, and did not really disclose its true character until the winter of 1881.
During the remainder of that year and 1882, it gave continuous exhibitions of
its power. Its water column was more than 50 feet in diameter, and at times
rose to the enormous height of 250 feet. At such times, it doubled the volume
of water in the Firehole River. Its eruptions were frequently accompanied by the
ejection of large rocks. A second period of activity took place in 1888, since
which time it has remained inactive.
 Prismatic Lake is the most perfect spring of its kind in the world. It rests on
the summit of a self-built mound, sloping very gently in all directions. Down this
slope the overflow from the spring descends in tiny rivulets, every-where
interlaced with each other. A map of the mound resembles a spider web, with
the spider (the spring) in the center. The pool is 250 by 300 feet in size. Over
the lake hangs an ever-present cloud of steam, which itself often bears a
crimson tinge, reflected from the waters below. The steam unfortunately
obscures the surface of the lake, and one involuntarily wishes for a row-boat, in
which to explore its unseen portions. Wherever visible, there is a varied and
wonderful play of colors, which fully justifies the name.
Turquoise Spring is another large pool, 100 feet in diameter, and rivals
Prismatic Lake in the beauty of its coloring.
The Midway Geyser Basin contains hundreds of other springs, some of them
very beautiful, but the Basin is mainly noted for the three features just
described.

CHAPTER XVI.

A TOUR OF THE PARK.

Lower Geyser Basin to Upper Geyser
Basin.
Distance, nine miles. Road follows the Firehole River. Midway Geyser Basin,
already described, is passed four miles out. No other object of interest is met
until the visitor actually arrives at the Upper Basin.
This locality is probably the most popular with the tourist of any in the Park.
Its two rivals, the Grand Cañon and the Yellowstone Lake, are so unlike it as
not to admit of any comparison. It is the home of the genus geyser, as seen in
its highest development. There are fifteen examples of the first magnitude and
scores of less important ones. [BC] The quiescent pools and springs are also
numerous and of great beauty.
[BC] For list of names of geysers, with heights of eruptions, see Appendix A,
VII.
 The first important feature en route is the Biscuit Basin, which is reached by
a side road leading to the west bank of the Firehole River. It contains a fine
geyser and several beautiful springs. The most interesting are the Jewell Geyser
and the Sapphire Pool. Near this locality is the Mystic Falls, a fine cascade, on
the Little Firehole River.
Artemesia Geyser comes next to the attention of the tourist. It has been
known as a geyser only since 1886. It is on the right of the roadway, at a
considerably lower level.

Opp. page 228.

The Morning Glory is a little further up stream. In this beautiful object the
quiescent pool is at its best. Its exquisite bordering and the deep cerulean hue
of its transparent waters make it, and others like it, objects of ceaseless
admiration.
 The Fan Geyser is close by the Firehole on the east bank, not far above the
Morning Glory. The Riverside is also on the east bank at the point where the
road crosses the river. It is an inconspicuous object when not in eruption, and
one would scarcely suspect it of being a geyser. It spouts obliquely across the
river, and not, like most geysers, vertically.

Gandy.
Grotto Geyser Cone.
Next in order, after crossing the river to the Westbank, is the Grotto,
remarkable for its irregular and cavernous crater. A little further on, close to the
river, stands the broken crater of one of the Park’s greatest geysers, the Giant.
Lieutenant Doane compared its crater to a “huge shattered horn.”
A few hundred feet further up stream, still close to the river, is the Oblong.
Directly across the road, but a short distance away, is the Splendid, well worthy
of its name; and near it, sometimes playing simultaneously, is the Comet.
To the westward from the Firehole, nearly on the divide between it and Iron
Creek, is a lovely spring, called the Punch-bowl. Across the divide in the Iron
Creek valley is the Black Sand Basin, a unique but beautiful pool. Near it is
another attraction, Specimen Lake, so named from an abundance of specimens
of partly petrified wood. The limit of curiosities in this direction is Emerald Pool,
which competent judges pronounce to be the finest quiescent spring in the
Park.
Returning to the Firehole by a different route, we pass a large spring or
geyser known as the Three Crater Spring. Its three craters are connected by
narrow water ways, making one continuous pool, though fed from three
sources.
 A thousand feet to the north, stands the most imposing crater in the Park,
that of the Castle geyser. It is frequently seen in moderate eruption, but rarely
when doing its best. As ordinarily seen, it throws a column of water only 50 or
60 feet, but at times it plays as high as 150 or 200 feet.

Terry Engr. Co. Haynes, Photo., St. Paul.

Castle Geyser.
Terry Engr. Co. First sketch ever made. [BD]

Castle Geyser Cone.

[BD] See foot note, page 168.

Crossing the river to its right bank, nearly opposite

the Castle, there are found within a narrow compass
three noted geysers, the Sawmill, Turban, and Grand.
Of these, the last is by far the finest, and ranks among
the very greatest geysers in the world. It was not
seen by the Washburn Party, in 1870, but it seems to
have been the first geyser to welcome to the Upper
Basin the Hayden and Barlow parties in 1871. Captain
Barlow says of its eruption: [BE]
"This grand fountain continued to play for several
minutes. When dying down, I approached to obtain a
closer view of the aperture whence had issued such a
powerful stream. A sudden gush of steam drove me
away, following which the water was again impelled
upward and upward, far above the steam, till it
seemed to have lost the controlling force of gravity,
and that it would never cease to rise. The roar was
like the sound of a tornado, but there was no
apparent effort; a steady stream, very graceful and
perfectly vertical, except as a slight breeze may have
waved it to and fro. Strong and smooth, it continued
to ascend like the stream from a powerful steam fire-
engine. We were all lost in astonishment at the
sudden and marvelous spectacle. The proportions of
the fountain were perfect. The enthusiasm of the
party was manifested in shouts of delight. Under the
excitement of the moment, it was estimated to be
from three to five hundred feet in height."
[BE] Page 25, “Reconnaissance of the Yellowstone
River.”—See Appendix E.

Further up the river on the same side and at some

distance back, are the Lion, Lioness and the two Cubs,
an interesting group, including one notable geyser.
Half way up a high mound of geyserite which covers a
large area on the north side of the river, is an
exquisitely beautiful formation called, from its
appearance, the Sponge.
On the top of the
mound is another of
the great geysers,
thought by the
Washburn Party to be
the greatest in the
world, the Giantess. It
belongs to the class of
fountain geysers, and
when not in action
strongly resembles a
quiescent spring. Its
eruptions are
infrequent and
irregular, but when it
does play it is a sight
not to be forgotten.
Mr. Langford thus
describes the first
eruption known to
have been seen by
white men: [BF]
"We were standing
on the side of the
geyser nearest the
Terry Engr. Co. sun, the gleams of
 Haynes, Photo., St. Paul.
which filled the
sparkling columns of
The Bee Hive Geyser.
water and spray with
myriad rainbows,
whose arches were
constantly changing—
dipping and fluttering hither and thither, and
disappearing only to be succeeded by others, again
and again, amid the aqueous column, while the
minute globules, into which the spent jets were
diffused when falling, sparkled like a shower of
diamonds, and around every shadow which the denser
clouds of vapor, interrupting the sun’s rays, cast upon
the column, could be seen a luminous circle, radiant
with all the colors of the prism, and resembling the
halo of glory represented in paintings as encircling the
head of Divinity. All that we had previously witnessed
seemed tame in comparison with the perfect grandeur
and beauty of this display."
[BF] “The Wonders of the Yellowstone.” See
Appendix E.

Between the Giantess and the river is the Bee

Hive, also one of the most prominent geysers. The
symmetry of its cone is only surpassed by the
regularity of its water column. From an artistic point of
view it is the most perfect geyser in the Park. Its
slender jet attains a great height and is vertical and
symmetrical throughout.
Crossing again to the west bank of the stream and
ascending to the very head of the basin, we come to
the last and most important of the geysers, Old
Faithful. Any other geyser, any five other geysers,
could be erased from the list better than part with Old
Faithful. The Giant, Giantess, Grand, Splendid, and
Excelsior, have more powerful eruptions. The Bee Hive
is more artistic. The Great Fountain has a more
wonderful formation. But Old Faithful partakes in a
high degree of all these characteristics, and, in
addition, has the invaluable quality of uniform
periodicity of action. It is in fact the most perfect of all
known geysers.
To it fell the honor of welcoming civilized man to
this region. It was the first geyser named. It stands at
the head of the basin and has been happily called
“The Guardian of the Valley.”

Terry Engr. Co. U. S. Geological Survey of the Territ

Castle Geyser.

Geyser in action.

Crater of Old Faithful.

Upper Geyser Basin.

It is located in the center of an oblong mound, 145

by 215 feet at the base, 20 by 54 feet at the summit,
and about 12 feet high. The tube, which seems to
have originated in a fissure in the rock, has an inside
measurement of 2 by 6 feet.
 Terry Engr. Co.
U. S. Geological Survey of the Territories.

Old Faithful.

The ornamentation about the crater, though limited

in extent, is nowhere surpassed for beauty of form
and color. In particular, the three small pools on the
north side of the crater and very close to it are
specimens of the most remarkable handiwork which
Nature has lavished upon this region. A singular fact is
that the waters in these three pools, although so close
together as apparently to be subject to the same
conditions, are of different colors. Speaking of these
marvelous appearances, Lieutenant Doane says: [BG]
 “One instinctively touches the hot ledges with his
hands, and sounds with a stick the depths of the
cavities in the slope, in utter doubt of the evidence of
his own eyes…. It is the most lovely inanimate object
in existence.”
[BG] Page 29, “Yellowstone Expedition of 1870.”
See Appendix E.

In its eruption this geyser is equally fascinating. It

always gives ample warning, and visitors have time to
station themselves where the view will be most
perfect. The graceful column rises, at first with
apparent effort, but later with evident ease, to a
height of 150 feet. The noise is simply that of a jet of
water from an ordinary hose, only in intensity
corresponding to the greater flow. The steam, when
carried laterally by a gentle breeze, unfurls itself like
an enormous flag from its watery standard. The water
is of crystal clearness and the myriad drops float in
the air with all manner of brilliant effects. To quote
Lieutenant Doane again:
"Rainbows play around the tremendous fountain,
the waters of which fall about the basin in showers of
brilliants, and then rush steaming down the slopes to
the river."
The uniform periodicity of this geyser is its most
wonderful and most useful characteristic. It never fails
the tourist. With an average interval of sixty-five
minutes, it varies but little either way. Night and day,
winter and summer, seen or unseen, this “tremendous
fountain” has been playing for untold ages. Only in
thousands of years can its lifetime be reckoned; for
the visible work it has wrought, and its present
infinitely slow rate of progress, fairly appall the
inquirer who seeks to learn its real age.
It is worth while, however, to note the enormous
work which this geyser daily performs. A conservative
estimate, based upon an extended series of
observations made in 1878 by the United States
Geological Survey, shows that the outpour for an
average eruption is not less 1,500,000 gallons, which
gives 33,225,000 gallons per day. This would supply a
city of 300,000 inhabitants. The combination of
conditions by which the supply of heat and water, and
the form of tube, are so perfectly adapted to their
work, that even a chronometer is scarcely more
regular in its action, is one of the miracles of nature.

Terry Engr. Co.

U. S. Geological Survey of the Territories.

Kepler Cascade.
 CHAPTER XVII.

A TOUR OF THE PARK.

Upper Geyser Basin to the
Yellowstone Lake.
Distance, nineteen miles. The route ascends the
Firehole River to the mouth of Spring Creek, which
stream it follows to the Continental Divide. For seven
miles it then lies on the Pacific slope, after which it
descends the mountains to the Yellowstone Lake. The
drive is one of the most pleasant in the Park, and the
scenery is unconventional and wild.
Kepler Cascade (1.25 miles) is a fascinating water-
fall. Lieutenant Doane, who first wrote of it, says: [BH]
“These pretty little falls, if located on an eastern
stream, would be celebrated in history and song;
here, amid objects so grand as to strain conception
and stagger belief, they were passed without a halt.”
[BH] Page 27, “Yellowstone Expedition of 1870.”
See Appendix E.

We counsel the tourist not to so pass them.

Half a mile up the Firehole, above the mouth of
Spring Creek, is the Lone Star Geyser (4 miles). This
geyser is conspicuous chiefly for its fine cone. It plays
frequently to a height of 40 or 50 feet.
Madison Lake, ten miles further up the valley, is
the ultimate lake source of the Madison River. This
lake, with possibly the exception of Red Rock Lake,
the source of the Jefferson, is further from the sea by
direct water-course than any other lake on the globe.
Returning down the Firehole, we enter the mouth
of Spring Creek Cañon (3.5 miles), which the road
traverses for a distance of two and one-half miles.
This narrow, winding, rocky cañon, under the shadow
of the Continental Divide, is full of picturesque turns
and surprises.

Terry Engr. Co. Haynes, Photo., St. Paul.

Lone Star Geyser.

The first crossing of the Continental Divide (8.5

miles) is through a narrow cañon, Craig Pass, hemmed
in by precipitous cliffs, inclosing a lily-covered pond,
Isa Lake, which rests squarely upon the doubtful
ground between the two oceans.
Terry Engr. Co. Haynes, Photo., St

Shoshone Lake.

Shoshone Point (10.5 miles) is in the center of the

large amphitheater-shaped tract which is drained by
the branches of De Lacy Creek. It overlooks Shoshone
Lake and the broad basin surrounding it, and gives a
second glimpse of the Teton Mountains.

Terry Engr. Co.

 Isa Lake and Craig Pass.
Shoshone Lake is a lovely body of water, with an
area of twelve square miles and a most picturesque
shore line. On its west shore is a geyser basin, second
in importance only to those on the Firehole. Among its
many interesting features may be mentioned the
Union Geyser, of which the middle crater plays to a
height of 100 feet; and the Bronze Geyser, very
striking because of the perfect metallic luster of its
formation.
From Shoshone Point, the road again ascends to
the Continental Divide, and then drops down the
Atlantic slope toward the Yellowstone Valley.
Lake View (18 miles) is at a point where a sudden
turn in the forest road brings the tourist, quite without
warning, in full view of one of the most striking water
landscapes in the world. The whole vista of the
Yellowstone Lake is spread out before him, still 300
feet below where he is standing. Far to the right and
left, along the distant eastern shore, extends the
Absaroka Range of mountains, many of its summits
still capped with snow. Every-where the dark pine
forests come down to the water’s edge, in fine
contrast with the silver surface of the lake. The
sparkling of the waves, the passage of the cloud
shadows, and, in sheltered coves, the tranquil mirror
of the waters, all combine to make the picture one to
be long remembered.
The Yellowstone Lake is about 7,741 feet, nearly a
mile and a half, above the level of the sea. It has a
shore line of 100 miles, and an area of 139 square
miles. Its maximum depth is 300 feet, and its average
depth about 30 feet. It is fed almost entirely from the
springs and snow drifts of the Absaroka Range. Its
waters are icy cold, clear and transparent to great
depths, and literally swarm with trout. It is subject to
heavy south-west winds, and at times is lashed into
tempestuous seas.
Terry Engr. Co. U.S. Geological Survey of the Terri

Yellowstone Lake.

The shape of the lake was compared by the early

explorers to the form of the human hand. The
resemblance is exceedingly remote, and one writer
has well observed that only the hand of a base ball
player who has stood for years behind the bat could
satisfy the comparison. The “fingers” have now been
generally dropped from the maps and replaced by the
usual names; but “West Thumb” seems to have
become a fixture.
Surpassing the Yellowstone Lake both in area and
altitude there are but few lakes in the world. Lake
Titticaca, in Peru, and one or two others in the less
explored regions of the Andes; and also a few lakes
on the lofty table-land of Thibet, comprise the
number.
The Yellowstone Lake has been a theme of
enthusiastic praise by all who have ever seen it; but
what seems to us the most exquisite tribute it has
ever received is to be found in the farewell words of
Mr. Folsom, when, in 1869, he regretfully turned away
from its western shore into the deep forests which
surround it: [BI]
"As we were about departing on our homeward
trip, we ascended the summit of a neighboring hill and
took a final look at Yellowstone Lake. Nestled among
the forest-crowned hills which bounded our visions,
lay this inland sea, its crystal waves dancing and
sparkling in the sunlight as if laughing with joy for
their wild freedom. It is a scene of transcendent
beauty which has been viewed by but few white men,
and we felt glad to have looked upon it before its
primeval solitude should be broken by the crowds of
pleasure seekers which at no distant day will throng
its shores."
[BI] Page 20, Langford’s reprint of the “Valley of
the Upper Yellowstone.” See Appendix E.

Terry Engr. Co. Gandy.

Fishing Cone.

On the west shore of the lake is an extensive and

important hot springs basin. The principal features are
the Paint Pots, not inferior to those near the Fountain
Hotel; two of the largest and most beautiful quiescent
springs in the Park; the Lake Shore Geyser, which
plays frequently to a height of about 30 feet; an
unnamed geyser of considerable power but of very
infrequent action; and the celebrated Fishing Cone
where unfortunate trout find catching and cooking
painfully near together.
From the west shore of the lake a visit can be
advantageously made to Hart Lake and Mount
Sheridan. The lake is probably the prettiest in the
Park. Near it, on the tributary Witch Creek, is a small
but important geyser basin. The principal features are
the Deluge, Spike and Rustic geysers, and the Fissure
Group of springs. The Rustic Geyser is remarkable in
having about it a cordon of logs, evidently placed
there by the Indians or white men many years ago.
The logs are completely incrusted with the deposits of
the springs.
Mt. Sheridan would rank with Mt. Washburn as a
popular peak for mountain climbers were it only more
accessible. No summit in the Park affords a finer
prospect.
From the west shore to the Lake Outlet the tourist
may travel either by stage around the border of the
lake, or by boat across it. If he does not want to miss
one of the notable features of the tour he will not omit
the boat ride. In fact, a steamboat ride, at an altitude
more than a quarter of a mile greater than that of the
summit of Mt. Washington is not an every day
diversion. From near the center of the lake the view is
surpassingly fine. To the south and south-west the
long arms of the lake penetrate the dark forest-
crowned hills, which are but stepping stones to the
lofty mountains behind them. Far beyond these may
again be seen for the third time the familiar peaks of
the Tetons. All along the eastern shore stand the
serried peaks of the Absaroka Range, the boundary
which nature has so well established along the eastern
border of the Park. A notable feature of this range is
the profile of a human face formed by the
superimposed contours of two mountains, one several
miles behind the other. The best effect is had from
points between Stevenson Island and the Lake Hotel.
The face is looking directly upward. A similar profile,
noted by the early explorers from the summit of Mt.
Washburn, and nearly in the same locality as this,
although of course not the same feature, was called
by them the “Giant’s Face,” or the “Old Man of the
Mountain.”

Terry Engr. Co. Gandy.

Natural Bridge.

On the north-east shore of the lake are Steamboat

Spring, and other thermal phenomena worth visiting.
From Bridge Bay at the north-west of the lake, a trip
of a mile will take the tourist to an extremely
interesting freak of nature in the form of a Natural
Bridge over a small tributary of Bridge Creek. The arch
is forty-one feet high with a thirty foot span. As seen
from the down stream side it is very regular and
symmetrical.
Some twenty miles above the head of the lake is
the celebrated Two-Ocean Pass, long known to the
early trappers. It is probably the most remarkable
example of such a phenomenon in the world.
Although the fact of its existence was asserted and
stoutly maintained by Bridger for many years prior to
the discovery of the Park region, it was generally
disbelieved until Captain Jones crossed the pass in
1873. It has since been visited and described by
Hayden in 1878, by Hague in 1884, and by Prof.
Evermann of the United States Fish Commission in
1891. The following facts and map are taken from
Prof. Evermann’s report:

Terry Engr. Co.

Sketch of Two-Ocean Pass.

The pass is in a nearly level grassy park hemmed

in by the surrounding hills, and is 8,150 feet above the
level of the sea. Its extreme length is about one mile
and its extreme breadth about three-fourths of a mile.
From the north a stream issues from a cañon, a, and
divides at b, part flowing to Atlantic Creek and part to
Pacific Creek. A similar stream, c, with a similar
division, d, comes from the south. At extreme low
water, these divisions may possibly disappear and all
the water flow either one way or the other. But at
ordinary and high stages the water flows both ways.
These streams are by no means insignificant rivulets,
but substantial water-courses capable of affording
passage to fish of considerable size.
Here, then, we have the very interesting
phenomenon of a single stream upon the summit of
the continent dividing and flowing part one way and
part the other, and forming a continuous water
connection between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans
over a distance of nearly 6,000 miles.
A most singular and interesting acoustic
phenomenon of this region, although rarely noticed by
tourists, is the occurrence of strange and indefinable
overhead sounds. They have long been noted by
explorers, but only in the vicinity of Shoshone and
Yellowstone Lakes. They seem to occur in the
morning, and to last only for a moment. They have an
apparent motion through the air, the general direction
noted by writers being from north to south. The
following descriptions are from the pens of those who
have given some study to these strange sounds. Prof.
S. A. Forbes says:
"It put me in mind of the vibrating clang of a harp
lightly and rapidly touched high up above the tree
tops, or the sound of many telegraph wires swinging
regularly and rapidly in the wind, or, more rarely, of
faintly heard voices answering each other overhead. It
begins softly in the remote distance, draws rapidly
near with louder and louder throbs of sound, and dies
away in the opposite direction; or it may seem to
wander irregularly about, the whole passage lasting
from a few seconds to half a minute or more." [BJ]
 [BJ] “Overhead sounds in the vicinity of
Yellowstone Lake.” See Appendix E.

Mr. Edwin Linton thus describes it:

“It seemed to begin at a distance, grow louder
overhead where it filled the upper air, and suggested a
medley of wind in the tops of pine trees, and in
telegraph wires, the echo of bells after being repeated
several times, the humming of a swarm of bees, and
two or three other less definite sources of sound,
making in all a composite which was not loud, but
easily recognized, and not at all likely to be mistaken
for any other sound in these mountain solitudes.” [BK]
[BK] “Overhead sounds in the vicinity of
Yellowstone Lake.” See Appendix E.

No rational explanation has ever been advanced

for this remarkable phenomenon. Its weird character
is in keeping with its strange surroundings. In other
lands and times it would have been an object of
superstitious reverence or dread, and would have
found a permanent place in the traditions of the
people.

CHAPTER XVIII.

A TOUR OF THE PARK.

The Yellowstone Lake to
Grand Cañon of the
Yellowstone.
Distance seventeen miles. The road follows the
Yellowstone River along the west bank all the way.
 Just after the tourist leaves the Lake Hotel, he will
see on the right of the roadway a small monument. It
was placed there, in 1893, by the United States Corps
of Engineers to mark a position accurately determined
from astronomical observations by the United States
Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1892. It is of value as a
point of reference in surveys and other similar work.
[BL]

[BL] Latitude, 44° 33' 16.1" north.

Longitude, 110° 23' 43.1" west.

Magnetic variation about 19° east.

Mud Volcano (7.5 miles) is a weird, uncanny

object, but, nevertheless, a very fascinating feature
and one which the tourist should stop and examine. It
is an immense funnel-shaped crater in the side of a
considerable hill on the west bank of the river. The
mud rises some distance above a large steam vent in
the side of the crater next the hill, and chokes the
vent until the steam has accumulated in sufficient
force to lift the superincumbent mass. As the
imprisoned steam bursts forth, it hurls the mud with
great violence against the opposite side of the crater,
making a heavy thud which is audible for half a mile.
These outbursts take place every few seconds.
Terry Engr. Co. Haynes, Photo., St

Yellowstone River, between Lake and Falls.

A striking example of the strange commingling of

dissimilar features in the hot springs districts is found
in the Grotto, a spring of perfectly clear water, not far
from the Mud Volcano. It is acted upon by the steam
in a manner precisely similar to that of the Mud
Volcano, but its waters issue directly from the rock,
and are entirely clear.
Mud Geyser, now rarely seen in action, was an
important geyser twenty years ago. As it became
infrequent in its eruptions, and tourists rarely saw
them, the name was unconsciously, but mistakenly,
transferred to the Mud Volcano, which has none of the
characteristics of a geyser.
The locality where these objects are found has
considerable historic interest. The ford just below the
Mud Volcano was long used by the hunters and
trappers who passed up and down the river. Folsom
crossed it in 1869, and the Washburn party in 1870.
The Nez Percés encamped here two days, in 1877,
and here transpired a part of the episode elsewhere
related. Hither came General Howard, in pursuit of the
Indians, although he did not cross the river at this
point.
Trout Creek (9.5 miles) has a most peculiar
feature, where the tourist route crosses it, in the form
of an extraordinary doubling of the channel upon
itself. It was this stream which Mr. Hedges, in 1870,
called “a lazy creek coiled up like a monster serpent
under a sand bluff.”
Sulphur Mountain (11.5 miles) is half a mile back
from the main route. At its base is a remarkable
Sulphur Spring, always in a state of violent ebullition,
although discharging only a small amount of water.
This is highly impregnated with sulphur, and leaves a
yellow border along the rivulet which carries it away.
The best time to visit Sulphur Mountain is on a clear
sharp morning. The myriad little steam vents which
cover the surface of the hill are then very noticeable.
Hayden Valley is a broad grassy expanse extending
several miles along the river and far back from it on
the west side. It was once a vast arm of the lake. It
comprises some fifty square miles, and is an important
winter range for the Park buffalo and elk.

Terry Engr. Co.

Gandy.

Rapids Above Falls.

Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com