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By Root 429 0

ply the waters as they have done on the "Longest River" for forty centuries. Higher up the Nile, at Lake Tana in Ethiopia, they are called tank was. They are made of papyrus, and except for their lateen sails are identical in style to the boats depicted on the frescoes at Luxor and Karnak. You can sit by the Nile at Aswan and if you are lucky, you may see the feluccas drifting by in the light of a blood red moon. The Pharaohs pushed their empire steadily south passing Abu Simbel and Dongola and the Second Cataract, as early as 2300 B.C., conquering the settled kingdoms they found there, and by 2000 B.C. Nubia was under Egyptian control. The gold trade increased and with the gold came wealth, and commerce on the river increased. By the second millennium B.C. boats were coming down from Meroe and Kush, as high as the Fourth Cataract, carrying trade goods, livestock, and piles of what look like lumber in the frescoes. They already carried square-rigged sails amidships.

By Homer's time, sails were ubiquitous in the Mediterranean world, and traders were fetching cargoes from Africa and the Levant. The most sophisticated sailors of early history were the Phoenicians; it was their skills with sail that earned them their dominance of the western seas. Some evidence suggests that the Phoenicians made their way into the Red Sea and thence as far down the coast as Zanzibar. They certainly rounded the bulge of Morocco into the Atlantic, and by some reports made a circumnavigation of Africa a thousand years before Vasco da Gama left his markers on the shore in Table Bay, in what is now Cape Town.

Sailors used the prevailing winds, and the rivers of the sea, the ocean currents, to get around. They could only sail downwind, and either had to row back or to catch another wind somewhere else, and a further one to take them home. In the Mediterranean, a map of the prevailing winds soon appeared. Arab sailors used the monsoons to take them to India and the more southerly easterlies to bring them back. The Chinese used the currents and the prevailing winds to thread their way through the islands and isthmuses of southern Asia, and across the Indian Ocean to Sofala, then the Swahili-dominated portal to the ancient African empire of Zimbabwe. The lateen sail, a curious triangular thing on a movable boom, was developed somewhere in the Far East, made its way through the Middle East by way of Arab traders, and finally appeared on Roman ships a few decades before Christ. This made vessels much more maneuverable, and less dependent on the direction the winds blew. Even so, you couldn't sail into the wind, or even close to it. You wouldn't be able to do that for another thousand years at least.

The history of exploration is the history of sail and therefore of wind exploitation. The Norse knorr and its successors the cog and the carrack and the caravel made global exploration possible. We know the Norse reached Newfoundland by around A.D. iooo; Basque and Portuguese fishermen were not far behind. The Norse used the subpolar easterlies to head for America, and the midlatitude westerlies to get back, at least until the mini ice age, when the polar seas filled with ice, and transatlantic voyages perforce had to wait for Columbus, who would use the tropical trade winds for his crossing. The Chinese developed similar vessels at about the same time, probably independently. The notion that the Chinese discovered America for outsiders long before Columbus did has been propounded (and not—yet—debunked by historians). If they did so, they would have used the clockwise Pacific gyre, both current and wind, to get there. It was certainly true that for a brief period, about 1300 to 1400, the Chinese mastered the oceans, building 350-foot vessels with nine masts; the Mings once raised a fleet of more than 3,500 ships, mostly for trade—they rather disdained conquest, not wanting too much truck with lesser cultures.10 By the fifth century, Indian and Indo-Malayan merchant ships traveled from ports on India's east coast to Guangzhou (Canton); later, Arabs and Persians