Ross A. Laird

Myths of the Primordial Waters:
Ancient Mariners, Human Migration, and the Sea

Plato wrote that the past is like the wake behind a boat; it spreads, and diminishes behind us, and merges with the surrounding sea. The past rolls under and is gone.

We stand upon the foredeck of Plato’s boat, gazing forward, cleaving our path toward the future. Along the track of our traveling many things are lost — because we are always searching ahead, because the wake is jostling and turbulent, because our craft is small and the ocean is vast.

It is by means of this manner of journeying into the future that our knowledge of ancient peoples is vanishingly small. We know a fair amount about the last thousand years of our history, we surmise a sketch of the thousand years before that — and of the remote ages before that, we know very little. Snatches, really, vignettes gathered from scattered documents and fragmentary tales. For the great majority of the history of modern humans — a hundred thousand years, two hundred thousand, no one knows — we understand almost nothing. Along our own coasts, which once were at lower altitude than they are now, ancient villages lie hidden beneath the wake of passing boats above.

And yet, old stories have been handed down from that long, invisible stretch of years: fables, epics, mythologies of archaic and unknown origin. Among those ancient tales is a set of related motifs, from many cultures, that tell of seafarers who found their way to distant shores. In China, Polynesia, Japan, Egypt, Africa, Scandinavia — in most places bordered by the sea — we find fantastic tales of oceanic travel. On our own coasts — in Haida Gwaii, and along the sheltered eastern shore of Vancouver Island, and inland all the way to the Kootenays — similar stories are told of those who came long ago, and lived upon the land, and vanished.

more…