What exactly would happen if the Tlingit, or some other Pacific Northwest Native American people, invented the outrigger canoe independently? I know the Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska already had a impressive record of seafaring with their canoes, and already traded across the Bering Strait, but how would a outrigger canoe affect all that, if it was invented in that region at say, 250 AD (it can be invented at any date prior to 1700). This is something I have thought about a long time, and I am interested to learn what you guys think.
Effects of the independent invention of the outrigger canoe by Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest.
- Thread starter HyperMuscularDemon
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The problem with Pacific Northwest seafaring seems to have been their reliance on land features for navigation. Celestial navigation seems to have been either unknown (i.e. among the Nuu-chah-nulth) or poorly developed (i.e. among the Tlingit), so they'd usually hug the coast instead of trying to cross open water. This lengthened their voyages and denied them access to potential resources (most notably better access to whales).
So if they had superior ships for oceangoing, they'd have slightly more resources (the population bottleneck was more on carbs than access to seafood) but also more access to trade. The latter is pretty revolutionary, since "classic" Pacific Northwest culture (i.e. potlatching, formline art, longhouse architecture, and this sort canoe design) seems to have emerged in central British Columbia/southeastern Alaska among the Tlingit, Tsimshians, and Haida, and from there spread south to Vancouver Island and eventually the Salish peoples on the mainland who only partially had adopted it by the time outsiders contacted them. Some groups of Chinookans may have had some influence as well via their Salish neighbours. But here this process would be faster, occur much earlier, and be more thorough. It would likely reach far to the south. How far? At the very least the northern Oregon coast, but maybe even to northern California, maybe occurring in tandem with the Coast Athabaskan migration there in the early second millennium AD.
OTL some inland Athabaskans and northerly Interior Salish in British Columbia have elements of Pacific Northwest culture in their houses and social organisation due to frequent intermarriage and trade. TTL this would spread a lot further south as well, once again as far south as southern Oregon/northern California.
More migrations may or may not occur, since OTL the big ones were caused by tech disparity where one group had more muskets and European goods than the other so could defeat them (the Coast Salish fared a lot better against outside invaders in the pre-contact era). I think the OTL Tlingit push northward would occur, so they'd absorb the Eyak and maybe get to the islands of Prince William Sound which is about the edge of the Pacific rainforests. Further than that depends on if they can assimilate the coastal Alutiiq and others, but they'd certainly trade with them (and war with them). There'd be a larger ivory trade than OTL, and there'd probably be ivory artifacts as far south as the Columbia River spread by this trade network. In the south, the Wakashans would displace a few more coastal peoples in Washington, but the big one would be what happens to the coast of southern Oregon/northern California. Maybe some Salishan group would settle there instead of the OTL Coast Athabaskans, migrating by sea? Or maybe even a Wakashan or Chinookan group?
I could maybe see whaling (found only among the Nuu-chah-nulth and groups heavily influenced by them) spreading more as well.
For a REALLY out there idea, agriculture. The trade networks in the Pacific Northwest had an influence on the distribution of oaks and camas which were two of the staples. Today, camas is found in southeastern Alaska which seems to have been brought during the gold rushes. So if camas plants are brought there say 1,500 years ago alongside someone with cultural knowledge of them (i.e. female slaves or a ship bringing a local notable a wife from far away), perhaps they'd be maintained and the colder, wetter climate of Alaska means typical management such as burning meadows is more difficult meaning attention is directed to the size and speed at which the plant grows. Even if no true agriculture results, it would add another food source for the Tlingit/other northerly coastal peoples (most crucially adding carbs to their diet).
So if they had superior ships for oceangoing, they'd have slightly more resources (the population bottleneck was more on carbs than access to seafood) but also more access to trade. The latter is pretty revolutionary, since "classic" Pacific Northwest culture (i.e. potlatching, formline art, longhouse architecture, and this sort canoe design) seems to have emerged in central British Columbia/southeastern Alaska among the Tlingit, Tsimshians, and Haida, and from there spread south to Vancouver Island and eventually the Salish peoples on the mainland who only partially had adopted it by the time outsiders contacted them. Some groups of Chinookans may have had some influence as well via their Salish neighbours. But here this process would be faster, occur much earlier, and be more thorough. It would likely reach far to the south. How far? At the very least the northern Oregon coast, but maybe even to northern California, maybe occurring in tandem with the Coast Athabaskan migration there in the early second millennium AD.
OTL some inland Athabaskans and northerly Interior Salish in British Columbia have elements of Pacific Northwest culture in their houses and social organisation due to frequent intermarriage and trade. TTL this would spread a lot further south as well, once again as far south as southern Oregon/northern California.
More migrations may or may not occur, since OTL the big ones were caused by tech disparity where one group had more muskets and European goods than the other so could defeat them (the Coast Salish fared a lot better against outside invaders in the pre-contact era). I think the OTL Tlingit push northward would occur, so they'd absorb the Eyak and maybe get to the islands of Prince William Sound which is about the edge of the Pacific rainforests. Further than that depends on if they can assimilate the coastal Alutiiq and others, but they'd certainly trade with them (and war with them). There'd be a larger ivory trade than OTL, and there'd probably be ivory artifacts as far south as the Columbia River spread by this trade network. In the south, the Wakashans would displace a few more coastal peoples in Washington, but the big one would be what happens to the coast of southern Oregon/northern California. Maybe some Salishan group would settle there instead of the OTL Coast Athabaskans, migrating by sea? Or maybe even a Wakashan or Chinookan group?
I could maybe see whaling (found only among the Nuu-chah-nulth and groups heavily influenced by them) spreading more as well.
For a REALLY out there idea, agriculture. The trade networks in the Pacific Northwest had an influence on the distribution of oaks and camas which were two of the staples. Today, camas is found in southeastern Alaska which seems to have been brought during the gold rushes. So if camas plants are brought there say 1,500 years ago alongside someone with cultural knowledge of them (i.e. female slaves or a ship bringing a local notable a wife from far away), perhaps they'd be maintained and the colder, wetter climate of Alaska means typical management such as burning meadows is more difficult meaning attention is directed to the size and speed at which the plant grows. Even if no true agriculture results, it would add another food source for the Tlingit/other northerly coastal peoples (most crucially adding carbs to their diet).
The Inuit did, but they are relatively recent arrivals from the Old World and themselves were trading primarily with other Inuit (and apparently the occasional Chukchi since there is a Chukchi name for the Seward Peninsula) across the relatively short distance of the Bering Strait. There is no evidence of any other group doing so that can't be explained by shipwrecks or post-colonial trade. Inuit seafaring is different than that of the other Pacific Northwest peoples because it evolved in Siberia and the boats used totally different materials. IIRC an outrigger would not be stable on a skin boat.
(Thanks for replying!)
Isn’t there the Aleutian Islands? If Pacific Northwest seafarers have improved naval technology, there is the chance that they stop at the Aleutian Islands as a way to stock up on food and supplies that they used up. Plus, there is not much of a gap between Kamakatcha and the Aleutian Islands, so it might very well be possible to between the two places. Indeed, with the right winds, a crew of Pacific Northwest Native American sailors might as well visit the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin Island, and maybe even Hokkaido. Also, knowing how surprisingly violent the Pacific Northwest tribes were, we would probably see large fleets of Pacific Northwest Native American warriors waging war with each other over trade and fishing routes, which may further spur naval development. Not only that, but wouldn’t metallurgy help? IIRC, the Pacific Northwest tribes actually used metallurgy to forge swords out of iron, albeit it was gained either from Japanese shipwrecks or trade for meteoric iron from the more inland tribes.
Isn’t there the Aleutian Islands? If Pacific Northwest seafarers have improved naval technology, there is the chance that they stop at the Aleutian Islands as a way to stock up on food and supplies that they used up. Plus, there is not much of a gap between Kamakatcha and the Aleutian Islands, so it might very well be possible to between the two places. Indeed, with the right winds, a crew of Pacific Northwest Native American sailors might as well visit the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin Island, and maybe even Hokkaido. Also, knowing how surprisingly violent the Pacific Northwest tribes were, we would probably see large fleets of Pacific Northwest Native American warriors waging war with each other over trade and fishing routes, which may further spur naval development. Not only that, but wouldn’t metallurgy help? IIRC, the Pacific Northwest tribes actually used metallurgy to forge swords out of iron, albeit it was gained either from Japanese shipwrecks or trade for meteoric iron from the more inland tribes.
The Aleutians wouldn't be very helpful. It's full of hostile people who are extremely well adapted to local conditions, as the waters around the Aleutians are hazardous with abruptly swift currents and very local winds (I should note the winds in general in Alaska normally blow from the southwest, so away from the Aleutians). The islands are treeless, which is very, very bad since trees are essential to every aspect of PNW Indian culture. They don't have any resource the Bering Sea coast doesn't. I mean, sure, there is ivory, but that has limited demand since precolonial Alaska had maybe 75K people at most. Unlike the Micronesians and Polynesians, this would not be expansion into uninhabited islands but expansion into islands with people who use technology better suited for where they live. Is it impossible? No, but it requires a lot more changes than inventing the outrigger canoe, which are useless when repairing them is next to impossible in a place without trees.
It's also a very long distance. The Aleuts abandoned a few of the more remote islands several times and never made it past Attu toward the Commander Islands. In fact, there is no concrete evidence the latter were ever visited before the Russians landed there, although some propose when sea levels were higher they might have been part of a water route.
I played with this in my TL (which goes a lot further in changes to PNW societies than outrigger canoes, although those and catamarans are present), where the Aleutians are a mix of alt-Tlingit and Aleut culture and the islands have a very specialised economy mostly trading ivory in exchange for timber, and said quest for timber drives them to Kamchatka. From the perspective of PNW Indians, Kamchatka is especially interesting because it has a species of salmon not found in Western North America (cherry salmon).
They did not forge iron swords or other iron tools, but did know how to reshape them. The big one was copper which they made into sacred plates used in ceremonies, but it was made from native copper which was heated and pounded into sheets (not true metallurgy IMO). Reportedly they were very good at judging the quality of copper from the time of the earliest European journeys. They never used meteorite iron either, although if they did have metallurgy, then the Willamette Meteor once found near Oregon City would be very much sufficient.
If they had metallurgy, then I could see it going to Mesoamerican direction of being primarily decorative/religious, but maybe it wouldn't for some reason or another. The PNW is rich in copper, gold, silver, etc. The copper deposits are often rich in arsenic, producing arsenical bronze. Although to go back to the "long distance seafaring" POD, the US and Canada are poor in easily accessible tin (i.e. cassiterite placers worked in the Old World) outside of the Southwest, southern Appalachia, and Alaska. In Alaska, the Seward Peninsula is among the places with tin placers, so one could imagine a Tlingit trading post in some remote place one day stumbling across a strange silvery ore and creating an even stranger metal, and from there discovering it makes a bronze superior to the arsenical stuff and best of all, can make much more precise alloys (ancient societies could not measure the arsenic content of their bronze making, not to mention few things are worse to breath than arsenic fumes, hence why tin was preferred).
I don't think longer distance sailing would necessarily lead to more wars, especially not in the precontact period where no one has a technological edge.
Ah, okay. I mean, further along the coastline, in costal Oregon and California, there will probably be tribes who did not have the outrigger canoe or any other type of canoe for that matter, which will probably make attacks on them way easier. Then again, if there is trade between the Pacific Northwest and costal Washington Oregon and California, attacking those trading areas of Oregon and California would make no sense. Say, could there be a way to reach Hawaii? IIRC, a couple of experimental archeologists in a albeit modified Pacific Northwest canoe with sails sailed from Vancouver to Hawaii, and if we are able to get a crew of Pacific Northwest Native American sailors after caras has been domesticated driven all the way to Hawaii, then there may be enough trade for pigs and chickens to spread to the Pacific Northwest, greatly adding to the Tlingit and other tribes diet, as well as caras spreading to Hawaii.
I doubt it, since battles at sea were rarely a decisive factor in indigenous warfare in the Northwest and the natives had canoes anyway.
And attacking the trading areas makes plenty of sense since the basic political unit in Northwest Coast culture were houses whose clans shared a common descent, and these houses were often very competitive with each other. One house's valued ally is another house's prime target to attack.
Very likely not. The longest voyage of settlement in premodern times was the settlement of the Marianas and Guam, where the ancestors of the Chamorro came from 2,000 km away. Hawaii is almost twice that distance from the West Coast, and there are no islands between there.
How would metallurgy change the cultures of the Pacific Northwest? If the Tlingit discovered tin, then they could discover other metals and that could lead into metallurgy. Also, given that there were Japanese shipwrecks in the Pacific Northwest OTL, could there be enough Japanese shipwrecks ITTL to garner major Japanese interest in America?
Th
This is something I had in mind. Given how close the Aleutian Islands were to Kamakatcha, it should be possible for a Tlingit trading party following the Aleutian Islands to contact Kamakatcha, maybe Sakhalin or the Kuril Islands, or even Hokkaido.
The Ainu and the Tlingit from the little bit of knowledge of the aforementioned tribe had generally similar living patterns so I can assume that they may intermingle and perhaps have a better chance of resisting the encroachment of the Nipponese when the time comes for them to inevitably clash.
Actually, since the Tlingit and the Aleut disliked each other (at least on the Tlingit side, I think), but still traded with each other, I was thinking more like Tlingit trading parties search for the source of goods so they can trade directly with the source along with the Aleut and stumble onto Asia, from trade relations with North-Eastern Siberia, Hokkaido, Manchuria, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.
Tin is found in Alaska in the Seward Peninsula and in a few places in the interior (Yukon basin). Mindat.org has some good sources for where cassiterite was historically mined in Alaska. It's definitely a place a bronze age might start since copper isn't too far away and the Tlingit were a culture who valued copper (as did their Athabaskan neighbours). The problem is they need to learn actually smelting metal, which is hard since they didn't have pottery. But if they're smelting metal, they might as well be smelting nuggets of whatever they find in streams--gold, silver, tin.
There is also sporadic cassiterite placers in a few streams in southeastern Alaska, but probably not enough to start a tin industry. This would rely on a very large trade network. For that matter, southern BC, WA, OR, and ID only has a few sporadic cassiterite deposits--the nearest large ones are in NW Nevada (Black Rock Desert), northern CA, and the Black Hills of South Dakota. Although far eastern Chukotka has a few tin deposits too which the Tlingit might be able to access.
Japan's outlook depends entirely on how their politics evolve. They relied on the Ainu as middlemen to the point they converted the Ainu into a middlemen society (i.e. uprooting rice fields of Ainu who wanted to make a profit farming) although that was mostly with Nivkh, Tungusic, and Chinese trade and not Kamchatka's trade (I'm not sure what degree walrus ivory was traded to Japan in medieval times). There was likely a point that a Japonicised Ainu group like the Abe clan, Northern Fujiwara, or Andou clan (all are related)--9th-14th centuries--could have formed an "Ainu" state which may or may not be like Scotland vs England (i.e. their language would just be a distinct version of Japanese instead of Ainu like how Scotland spoke Scots and not Scottish Gaelic). The Mongol Invasions are a great POD for an expansionistic Japan, but likely not the only one since a lot of Japan's issues stem from the fact their society fell apart in the latter half of the Heian Era and the Shogunate theoretically could have solved the problem (i.e. Kenmu Restoration or some POD related to it like Nitta Yoshisada founding a Shogunate).
The dislike was mutual, since the Russians in the 18th century wrote of a battle between Tlingit and Kodiak Island's natives.
There were keen distinctions. By the 15th century, the Ainu concentrated a lot more around rich men who would build hill forts to protect their rights vs other Ainu elite. The Tlingit were very much clan-based and their villages consisted of a few allied clans and the walls they maintained and they didn't have that sort of "hill fort" culture. The Ainu also had a very rich land-based culture which the Tlingit almost entirely lacked--the Tlingit viewed the forest as a place of danger and darkness which only through elaborate rituals they could be safe to hunt in which is quite different than the Ainu who were the heirs to thousands of years of Jomon forest hunting and who only learned sea hunting when they assimilated the Nivkh who once lived in Hokkaido.
Of course there are similarities like similar village patterns and of course the shared love of salmon--the fact Kamchatka (which IIRC has salmon runs of every salmon species beside the Atlantic salmon), the Kurils/Chishima, and Hokkaido has a unique species of salmon would probably be an important factor for trade.
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Outrigger canoes are largely irrelevant. What they really want is proper sails.
Regarding what you said about Japan, is it possible that Japanese traders and merchants in the Pacific Northwest could set up states of their own among the Native Americans? (Or at least have Native American tribes allied to them?)
Probably not--the natives want partners, not someone trying to rule over them. The Japanese can't get that sort of authority from native tribes, outside of marrying into the native elite and having their sons rise to become chiefs (which produces something like the historic Creek or Cherokee nations or for that matter several chiefs on the West Coast who had French or English fathers). The other way is getting the power from the Japanese authorities themselves, much like the trading fiefs on Hokkaido in the Matsumae Domain or the Kakizaki/Matsumae clan's own struggle to gain authority over Hokkaido (which they seized from the Andou clan). This basically would make them rulers over a wilderness area with the right to manage all trade with the natives.
There's some suggestion that agriculture in the Andes was initially kickstarted by the need for fabric for sails for fishing ships, leading to adoption of cotton as a crop prior to food crops (referred to as the Maritime Foundation of Andean Civilization hypothesis). Perhaps something similar could occur in the Pacific Northwest, with some local fiber crop (typha latifolia?) being the initial founder crop for a later broader agricultural package. (If typha is your founder crop, perhaps wapato and northern riceroot create the conditions for a wetland agricultural system?)
H
How about wild rice? Rice has been the founder of Chinese civilization because of how productive it was so if the Tlingit domesticate wild rice and it spread the Pacific Northwest could see a Native American civilization.
Actually, I'd originally written my comment with wild rice in the place of northern riceroot, but a quick glance at a wild rice distribution map doesn't show wild rice making it across the Rockies to the Pacific Northwest. If it was present there, or could easily be acquired from somewhere, it would be a great potential founder crop for a Pacific Northwest Indigenous Agricultural Complex.
Could work in the Northwest. There's evidence of tribes farming tobacco as their only crop before contact with Europeans when they began farming potatoes. IIRC the sails in the Northwest (evidently made in imitation of European sails) were made from tules. Maybe Indian hemp (Apocynum cannibinum) would also work since it grows near streams and marshes and is quite a useful fiber (and medicine). Since both plants have edible parts, maybe they'd also become an increasing part of the diet and this would spur experimentation with similar plants.
Riceroot IIRC is not truly aquatic but prefers marshy ground. Wapato (Sagittaria latifolia) and its close relative northern arrowhead (Sagittaria cuneata) are aquatic plants, widely consumed, and would certainly be useful.