Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [10]
However, by the early to mid-1800s, ruthless Alaskan fur traders had spread to most of the Channel Islands, decimating humans and wildlife with guns and disease. The work they left undone was finished by Catholic missionaries in what the California Indian nations call the Spanish Mission Holocaust. So complete was the erasure of Kinkipar’s ancient culture that no living record of a language, religion, or custom survived. Today, San Clemente Island is under protective stewardship of the U.S. Navy, and it’s largely off-limits to everyone but military personnel and scientists, who have been given vast, undisturbed tracts to study these ancient Californians.
From the top of San Clemente, on what we today call Mount Thirst, the early Kinkipar would have had a dazzling view of their world in all directions. And it could hardly have escaped their notice that a pair of small, low islands were visible due west at the horizon’s edge. The nearest of these would have appeared quite small, the farthest a bit more substantial. Neither was so far away as to be unreachable. The Kinkipar regularly paddled the thirty-two miles between Kinkipar and Harasa (Santa Catalina Island), and Kinkipar navigators would have reckoned that the smallest island was about that far out. The most distant island was perhaps forty miles out.
Any decision to set out for the islands would not have been made lightly. What, indeed, would have been gained by risking death and the loss of precious boats on such a journey? The Kinkipar had plenty to eat on their island and in the surrounding waters; besides, hunger would have almost certainly driven them to the mainland, not further out to sea. There were surely a bounty of otters and sea lions near their home, so perhaps the promise of more fur trading with their neighbors offered some motivation. Perhaps they hoped to find new islands to claim, on which to expand their society, but these islands would have been too far away for regular two-way passage, and they shimmered where the seas were most treacherous and violent. Pragmatic rationales would have likely paled before the known dangers, thus making the most compelling reasons almost assuredly emotional, or perhaps spiritual: The islands existed, and so it would have been impossible not to visit them, whether for pure adventure, to test one’s mettle, or simply to put a reassuring label on the unknown. They went because they were there.
At least, the Kinkipar already possessed the sacred craft to make such a voyage. They paddled high-sided boats called Tumol or Ti’at. These vessels linked island and mainland and were no less important to early Californians than the koa wood outrigger canoe was to ancestral Hawaiians. Ti’at ranged from eight to thirty feet in length and featured a steeply raked bowline that helped negotiate swells. They were built of planks of pine or highly revered logs of the mysterious, giant redwood, which washed down the coast from great rivers to the north. Wood was meticulously sawed, carved, and shaped into fitted sections with blades of obsidian, quartz, and bone, then sanded with sharkskin. The planks were then pieced together through drilled-out holes and sewn together with perhaps a mile of cordage wound from milkweed, yucca, and animal sinew. The wood was then sealed and cemented with yop, a pungent mixture of pine pitch and asphalt that washed onto beaches or was dug from natural deposits