European Navigators Research Articles

VOLGA-CASPIAN CANAL IN THE 18TH CENTURY: HISTORICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF A SHIPPING ROUTE

The paper analyses the hydrological regime of the Volga River delta, predetermined by the interaction of the river and the Caspian Sea. Its connection with fluctuations of the Caspian Sea level in the area of the Volga River mouths is considered using the example of the functioning of the Yarkovsky mouth where the “Old Volga” fairway entered the Caspian Sea in the 18th century. Documents, notes of Russian and European navigators, maps and sailing directions of the 18-19th centuries, which present both existing and obsolete toponyms of islands, shoals, and channels of the Volga River delta, were analyzed to find the location of the mouth. The history of the mouth investigation and mapping, and its navigation conditions are considered, as well as the reasons for termination of its use.The influence of transgressive-regressive regime of the Caspian Sea on the restructuring of the hydrological network in the lower reaches of the Volga River delta has been found for the 18-19th centuries. The routes of the shipping Volga-Caspian Canal for the studied period have been reconstructed. The stages of a westward displacement of the main bed of the Volga River have been described. Heterogeneous movement of the surface part of the Volga delta under the decreasing sea level is considered for its western and eastern parts.

India’s Renaissance: Leadership in Every Sphere on the International Stage

In the human history man was gregarious. So the groups of people fought each other for control over the lands and nature. So when the centuries passed kingdoms tried to control there never kingdoms and succeed in some extent. On this account empire obtained taxes from princely states. In this regard Greeks tried to expert their kingdom till the ends of the world. On this account the Greek warrior son of the Philip of Macedonia Alexander The Great conquered the entire world and controlled politically with his leadership. Later on Romans extended their kingdom and ruled for some centuries under the leadership of Antonio and Julius Ceasor. In the course of time European navigators discovered the new lands of the entire world. So Dutch people, French people, Porchuguice people and English people competed with one another to control over the geographical territories and natural recourses. They also asserted their power over the lands. At last queen’s English army could have control over many colonies in the world. So many centuries they ruled and drove the wealth of the nations to England in the name of the trade and “civilizing the uncivilized eastern lands”. In the post independent era India is considered as the developing nation in the world and in the post modern era India leads the world in field and became a leader to the world. So the preset investigation is on India’s leadership in the world and its achievements. The major focus is on the political leadership of India in the world.

My First Atlas

Initially, when I was invited to write this essay, I thought about discussing the maps produced by XVI Century European navigators, which showed ‘Terra Brasilis,’ as Brazil was called during the pe...

Dark extinction: the problem of unknown historical extinctions.

The extinction of species before they are discovered and named (dark extinction, DE) is widely inferred as a significant part of species loss in the 'pre-taxonomic' period (approx. 1500-1800 CE) and, to some extent, in the 'taxonomic period' (approx. 1800-present) as well. The discovery of oceanic islands and other pristine habitats by European navigators and the consequent introduction of destructive mammals, such as rats and goats, started a process of anthropogenic extinction. Much ecosystem change happened before systematic scientific recording, so has led to DE. Statistical methods are available to robustly estimate DE in the 'taxonomic period'. For the 'pre-taxonomic period', simple extrapolation can be used. The application of these techniques to world birds, for example, suggests that approximately 56 DEs occurred in the 'taxonomic period' (1800-present) and approximately 180 in the 'pre-taxonomic period' (1500-1800). Targeting collection activities in extinction hotspots, to make sure organisms are represented in collections before their extinction, is one way of reducing the number of extinct species without a physical record (providing that collection efforts do not themselves contribute to species extinction).

Empires Old and New

Empires Old and New Walter C. Clemens Jr. (bio) Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Ji Young Lee, China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Cecilia Lindqvist, China: Empire of Living Symbols (Cambridge, MA: DeCappo, 2008 [1989]). Kurt M. Campbell, The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia (New York: Hachette, 2016). Eswar S. Prasad, Gaining Currency: The Rise of the Renminbi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Imperialism can be defined as a policy to take away sovereignty and territory from another actor. But it can also be understood as influence—direct or indirect—over other actors, achieved by economic, cultural, political, or military leverage. Not every empire is the same. Depending on definitions, not every “empire” is an empire. What Joseph Nye calls soft power—the capacity to persuade and co-opt—can rival hard power—command and coercion—in creating and maintaining an empire. Empires in World History shows that imperial power—and contests over and within it—have for thousands of years configured societies and states, opening and closing political and economic possibilities. This book offers students of Asian affairs (and international relations generally) a broad historical and comparative perspective for viewing the actions and interactions of imperial hegemons and their potential or actual subjects. How could anyone understand “China” or “India” without knowing how they [End Page 519] influenced and were influenced by Mongols, Ottomans, Russians, Europeans, and Americans? Burbank and Cooper outline similarities and differences among many great empires beginning with those of Rome and China in the third century BCE. Each lasted for centuries, but China relied on a class of loyal, trained officials, while Rome—at least in theory—depended on empowerment of its citizens. The authors next consider empires that tried to move into Rome’s place—resilient Byzantium, the fissionable Islamic caliphates, and the short-lived Carolingians. These rivals built their empires on religious foundations. Both Christians and Muslims fought to spread their versions of the one true faith, but religious militancy also provoked splits inside empires over competing claims to god-given power. Empires in World History relates how, in the thirteenth century, Mongols put together the largest land empire of all time. Pragmatists, they combined intimidating violence with protection of religions and cultures along with the politics of personal loyalty. They controlled China for much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and influenced also the emerging Russian, Mughal, and Ottoman empires. They protected trade routes from the Black Sea to the Pacific. Burbank and Cooper explain how European maritime extensions were stimulated by the high-value goods exchanged in the Chinese imperial sphere; the Ottoman empire’s dominance of the eastern Mediterranean and land routes east; and the inability of European polities to rebuild Roman-style unity. All this spurred European navigators to reach Asia and the Americas. In the twentieth century, as Burbank and Cooper demonstrate, imperial rivalries intensified. Japan joined the imperial game while China, for many decades, withdrew. Two world wars led to the collapse of European empires and greater weight for the United States, Russia, and China in the global arena. Which comes first—a strong state or an imperial domain? Which is cause and which effect? And how do they interact? Burbank and Cooper argue that a tale of European state development and other people’s “responses” would misrepresent the long-term dynamics of state power. The authors argue that Britain and [End Page 520] France became strong nation-states as the consequence of their imperial expansion rather than the other way around (pp. 7–8). Imperial influence depends not only on the expanding imperial power but also on its targets. Focusing on China’s tribute system, Ji Young Lee also looks at both sides of imperial relationships. Many scholars have portrayed the tribute system as China’s tool for projecting its power and influence in East Asia. They treat Korea, Japan, and other actors as passive recipients of Chinese domination. China’s Hegemony shows that Asia’s international order was not so Sinocentric as conventional wisdom suggests...

European Navigation, Nautical Instructions and Charts of the Cochinchinese Coast (16th-19th Centuries)

The coast of Vietnam is located at the heart of the maritime trade routes that connected China and Island Southeast Asia. During the 16th–19th centuries, as the Nguyen Lords settled and developed central Vietnam also known as Cochinchina, maritime trade flourished in concert with the arrival of the Europeans in the region. The voyages from Europe to the East Indies were long, navigators had to master new trajectories, the trips needed to be conducted as fast as possible to face competition and above all, to comply with the local calendars of the prevailing monsoon winds in order to enter the South China Sea and travel to China. Their cargoes were precious, life on board arduous, and the waters they sailed were unknown. Hence, charting the seas was a fundamental endeavour for competing trading nations between the 16th and 19th centuries to help minimize risk of loss. This paper discusses the maritime routes along the coasts of Champa and Cochinchina throughout the 16th to the 19th centuries, and above all, the charts and instructions that European navigators had in order to navigate safely in the perilous waters of the South China Sea. Unfortunately for the historian or maritime archaeologist, there is very little on the making of Southeastasia’s cartography. There are only few sources in non-European languages on navigation in the South China Sea, and much less on the charting of the Vietnamese waters. Local routes and maritime movements of Cham and Cochinchinese fishers, naval officers and traders are, so far, less clearly delineated than those of European navigators and not readily decipherable. However, European seafarers based themselves on the local knowledge of Malay, Chinese and Vietnamese seafarers, who guided them through safe harbours, sometimes sailed their ships, and provided navigation advice. The following chronology will henceforth also put in perspective the fact that the charting of the Vietnamese coastline was not only the effort of one European nation but the result of a global conjunction that had roots in local experience.

Fusang: The Enlightenment Story of the Chinese Discovery of America.

In 1761 the French scholar and Sinologue Joseph de Guignes announced that "Chinese vessels made the voyage to America many centuries before Christopher Columbus." From the Chinese books in the Bibliotheque du Roi and new missionary reports from Beijing, he concluded that the mythical land of Fusang described by a medieval Buddhist monk could be nowhere other than the west coast of North America, only recently charted by European navigators. Philippe Buache, premier géographe du roi, agreed. At the height of the French Enlightenment, the indigenous geographical tradition of China could be used to further the progress of universal science, providing evidence about issues from the mapping of the Pacific Rim to the organization of the continents. Furthermore, the story of Fusang explained the origins of American peoples, showing that the inhabitants of the New World had arrived there from the Old and contributing to a diffusionist account of the development of civilization in space and time.

Mpact of ice conditions to the navigation in the Novaya Zemlya and Spitsbergen region in XVI–XVII centuries

In the 16th–17th centuries, West European navigators made numerous but mostly unsuccessful efforts to open a new way, i.e. the North-East Passage, to China and India. Among three possible routes of that time the basic one ran through straits of the Vaigach Island but it was almost impassable due to heavy ice situation. At the same time Russian merchants regularly went on their ships from Pomorie to Siberian river mouths, and in the opposite direction, though they did also meet complicated ice situations. Russian navigator and geographer F.P. Litke (1797–1882) noticed that the ice situation in one or another region of the Barents Sea seriously changed from year to year. Russian navigation started in the Russian Pomorie (littoral region of the Russian Arctic) not earlier than at end of June – beginning of July but Europeans knew nothing about this. Because of this, their ships came to the Vaigach region either earlier or later of the time when it was possible to go through the straits. Most often, they came here in the first half- and mid-August. Thus, western sailors could not get this quite narrow navigation «window» of pomors (Russian navigators). And if sometimes (rather rarely) they could catch the right time and go through the strait Yugorski Shar they met extremely heavy ice situation in the Kara Sea. Perhaps for this reason, almost all European expeditions of that time failed.

Killing King Kong: the camera at the borders of the tropical island, 1767-1937

This paper discusses the role of the border of the island as a complex aesthetic zone in the journals of early European and American navigators in the South Seas (such as George Robertson, James Cook, Benjamin Morrell and Charles Wilkes) and in 1920s/1930s American films set on tropical islands. The fascination of the early explorers’ descriptions of islands as viewed from the water, across a distance that is physical as much as cultural, resides in the entanglement of perception, expectation and imagination that marks these journeys as both intense and profoundly uncertain visual experiences. In the 1920s, US-American representations of tropical islands gained new currency as American tourists trooped to the South Seas. As I argue, the strong visuality of the early accounts is one of the reasons why cinema could so readily pick up on them. In films like White Shadows in the South Seas (1929) and The Hurricane (1937), the imaginative transformation in the gaze from the water is associated with the camera as it explores the island in lateral tracking shots. These films cast a critical look on contemporary Western enthusiasm for ‘exotic’ cultures and locations in which they nevertheless participate. Resonating with contemporary anthropological and documentary film practices, emphasizing authentic representation of native cultures (Malinowski and Flaherty, respectively), they nevertheless point to the camera’s own crossing of the island’s border as an act of appropriation. This appropriation becomes explicit in King Kong (1933) as, armed with cameras and guns, the diegetic film crew violently crosses the borders of/on the island. Significantly, it is only after Kong’s death at the highest point of another island (Manhattan) and at another border, now between land and sky, that he fascinates the masses as an aesthetic spectacle. The film, then, meditates on the relations between border crossing, death and the production of aesthetics.

“Primordial and Gelatinous”?: Civil Society in Imperial Russia

“Primordial and Gelatinous”? Civil Society in Imperial Russia Adele Lindenmeyr (bio) Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism, and Civil Society. xv + 366 pp., illus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0674032798. $55.00. Brian Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia. x + 342 pp. illus. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009. ISBN-13 978-0295988979, $75.00 (cloth); 978-0295988986, $35.00 (paper). E. Iu. Kazakova-Apkarimova, Formirovanie grazhdanskogo obshchestva: Gorodskie soslovnye korporatsii i obshchestvennye organizatsii na Srednem Urale (vtoraia polovina XIX–nachalo XX v.) (The Formation of Civil Society: Urban Estate Corporations and Public Organizations in the Central Urals Region in the Second Half of the 19th and the Beginning of the 20th Centuries). 290 pp., illus., tables. Ekaterinburg: RAN-Ural´skoe otdelenie, Institut istorii i arkheologii, 2008. ISBN 5769116705. Bianka Pietrov-Ennker (Pietrow-Ennker) and Galina Ul´ianova, eds., Grazhdanskaia identichnost´ i sfera grazhdanskoi deiatel´nosti v Rossiiskoi imperii: Vtoraia polovina XIX–nachalo XX veka (Civic Identity and the Sphere of Civic Activity in the Russian Empire in the Second Half of the 19th and the Beginning of the 20th Centuries). 302 pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2007. ISBN-13 978-5824308624. Historians have been looking for a civil society in imperial Russia’s past for at least two decades. Though hardly as protracted or romantic as the quest [End Page 705] by European navigators for a Northwest Passage, the effort to find a viable public sphere in an autocratic state has inspired expeditions of discovery and revealed new features of the Russian historical landscape. Like these explorers, historians have generally agreed on what it is they seek: a public sphere distinct from the state, the economy, and private life, where Russians formed autonomous associations, social relationships, and communication networks in order to “represent interests, deliberate matters of public concern, and voice opinions,” in Joseph Bradley’s definition (7).1 But there is considerable disagreement among historians of civil society about what they have discovered, or whether the object they seek could even exist in autocratic Russia. In one camp are optimists such as Bradley, whose well-written, thoroughly researched new book argues that the evidence of a viable and growing civil society in imperial Russia is strong and irrefutable. On the other side are skeptics such as Lutz Häfner, whose essay in Grazhdanskaia identichnost´ i sfera grazhdanskoi deiatel´nosti v Rossiiskoi imperii criticizes fellow historians who “assume the existence [of civil society] a priori” and “evaluate every effort of society toward emancipation from state tutelage as a sign of civil society” (43–46). While the Ekaterinburg historian Elena Kazakova-Apkarimova finds a thriving civil society in the sparsely populated region of the central Urals, Brian Horowitz emphasizes impediments and disharmony in his history of the largest and most successful Jewish voluntary association in imperial Russia. The books reviewed here illustrate diverse approaches to the history of civil society while providing insights into four central issues: the role of the state; Russian exceptionalism; the social and economic prerequisites of civil society; and finally, the significance of civil society to the country’s historical development. Historians began their quest for a Russian public sphere distinct from illegal political parties and radical movements comparatively recently. As Bradley recounts in his introduction, most of us who studied the history of tsarist Russia in the 1970s learned the version that Antonio Gramsci neatly [End Page 706] summed up in an often quoted remark: “In Russia the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous.”2 Written in the 1920s not about tsarist-era civil society per se but about Lenin and Trotskii, Gramsci’s comment is an example of the kind of offhand comparisons once regularly made between Russian society and the seemingly normative social structures of the West. For many years the very fact of the 1917 revolution, with its attendant collapse of liberal alternatives and their middle-class base, seemed to present prima facie evidence for Gramsci’s characterization. The imperative to explain the revolution still dominated the study of imperial Russia and topped the agenda set for graduate students of our generation. The term “civil society” was little known and rarely...

Das Américas para o Mundo: origem, domesticação e dispersão do abacaxizeiro

O abacaxi (Ananas comosus (L.) Merril), fruto símbolo de regiões tropicais e subtropicais, originário das Américas, foi difundido para todo o mundo, principalmente pelos navegantes europeus, em razão de seu aroma e sabor característicos e exuberante aparência. Batizado como o "Rei das Frutas Coloniais", o abacaxi encontra-se entre as 11 frutas mais produzidas no mundo, sendo cultivada e consumida pelos cinco continentes, e o Brasil destaca-se como maior produtor. Assim, o objetivo desta revisão bibliográfica é abordar a história da cultura do abacaxi, contemplando sua botânica, sua origem e dispersão pelo mundo, seu cenário atual, também aspectos relacionados à conservação de germoplasma e ao melhoramento genético.

Their Body is Different, Our Body is Different: European and Tahitian Navigators in the 18th Century

This paper examines exchanges of navigational knowledge between Tahitian navigators and European explorers in the mid‐18th century. Although Tahitian and European sailors accomplished way‐finding at sea in ways based on very divergent assumptions about the ocean, the cosmos and persons, Tahitian navigators were able to board European ships, and pilot them safely through the islands. At first each side drew upon their own familiar practices to make sense of the other; using ostension or pointing, linguistic exchange and experience of each other’s vessels as bridgeheads to produce a kind of rough intelligibility. Much was lost, however, in these partial and approximate exchanges. Here, exchanges between European and Tahitian sailors and their very different knowledge systems are used to explore the intricacies of cross‐cultural encounters.

Walpole, a "Mystery Island" in southeast New Caledonia? In A Pacific Odyssey: Archaeology and Anthropology in the Western Pacific. Papers in Honour of Jim Specht

Walpole Island, the southernmost island of Melanesia, is a spectacular raised limestone formation 135 km south of the Loyalty Islands within the New Caledonian archipelago. Occupied by enormous numbers of seabirds when the first westerners landed, this rocky spot was mined for guano. Workers frequently reported archaeological finds that indicated prehistoric occupation and an early collection of artefacts was sent to the Australian Museum in Sydney. Over the last 30 years, research on the archaeological heritage of the island has been carried out through the study of museum collections and excavations. This paper reports the results of recent stratigraphic excavations, and synthesizes current archaeological knowledge about the human occupation of Walpole spanning at least 2,500 years. SAND, CHRISTOPHE, 2004. Walpole, a “Mystery Island” in southeast New Caledonia? In A Pacific Odyssey: Archaeology and Anthropology in the Western Pacific. Papers in Honour of Jim Specht, ed. Val Attenbrow and Richard Fullagar, pp. 109–122. Records of the Australian Museum, Supplement 29. Sydney: Australian Museum. Records of the Australian Museum, Supplement 29 (2004): 109–122 ISBN 0-9750476-3-9 www.amonline.net.au/pdf/publications/1407_complete.pdf During the last two decades, Melanesian and Polynesian prehistory has come of age (Kirch, 2000). Jim Specht was a pioneer with an insatiable drive to explore new directions in Pacific prehistory. Amongst numerous other projects, he initiated modern archaeological studies of the pre-European settlement on Norfolk Island (Specht, 1984). Before discovering Norfolk on the 5th October 1774, James Cook put a new archipelago on the European map—New Caledonia (Beaglehole, 1961). One week previously he had passed just out of sight of a small uplifted coral island, at the southeastern tip of the Grande Terre. Its name, given a few decades later, is Walpole. Very few people know of this island at the southernmost point of Melanesia. Although Walpole appeared as a “mystery” early in the literature (see Sand 2002: 14 for a review), it is not normally listed in studies of the Pacific “mystery islands”, which focus only on Polynesia and eastern Micronesia (Bellwood, 1978: 352–353; Kirch, 1988; but see Di Piazza & Pearthree, 2001: 165). A historical connection links Walpole to the Australian Museum in Sydney, where the oldest archaeological collection from the island is stored. In this paper I summarize the historical and archaeological data of Walpole and propose a tentative chronology. “Mystery Islands”: a short review When European navigators started to systematically explore the Pacific, they visited uninhabited islands with signs of former human occupation, like Pitcairn in East Polynesia, and Norfolk off eastern Australia. These abandoned islands were mostly in Polynesia (Kirch, 1984: table 9), although some east Micronesian islands were also identified (Terrell, 1986: fig. 28). The “mystery” of their pre-historic settlement and abandonment led to early research (e.g., Emory, 1928, 1934). As Kirch (1984: 89–92, 1988) pointed out, although all these “mystery islands” were grouped on the basis of isolation, resource scarcity and absence of occupation at

'Le Pre´sident des Terres Australes': Charles de Brosses and the French Enlightenment Beginnings of Oceanic Anthropology

In 1756, Charles de Brosses, President of the Burgundy parliament, published his Histoire des navigations aux terres australes , the first systematic summary of voyaging narratives by European navigators in the Antipodes. While historians of Pacific exploration have long recognised the significance of this text, its reflections on the human inhabitants of the South Seas appear never to have attracted critical attention. The present essay focuses on de Brosses's division of the main part of this 'fifth part of the globe' into regions he named 'Australasia' and 'Polynesia', and his speculations on the racial derivation and societal types of their native populations. It will be shown that these ideas had a major impact on how subsequent writers, especially Bougainville and J.R. Forster, understood the indigenous peoples of the Pacific. Similarly, Histoire des navigations aux terres australes will be considered in relation to de Brosses's wider ethnological corpus, and to a general flowering of anthropological thought in Enlightenment France.

Black Carp and Sick Cows

T he tragedy befalling livestock and those who raise them in the United Kingdom and Europe is so gripping that it's hard to relate it to the News story on p. [203][1] in this issue, which reports that a new and potentially invasive fish, black carp, is now being cultured in the southern United States. Yet the two—infectious disease epidemics in agriculture and the invasion of ecosystems by alien species—are linked phenomena. Each is driven by social and economic forces that are almost certain to generate future crises. As humans have grown in numbers and mobility, we have become the agents of a biogeographic diaspora. The early European navigators traveled with what Alfred Crosby has called the “portmanteau biota”: livestock, grain seeds, Norway rats—and pathogens such as smallpox, which devastated indigenous populations in the “neo-Europes.” More recent international translocations brought the chestnut blight to North America, rabbits to Australia, and zebra mussels to the Great Lakes. The contemporary explosion of economic globalization has brought us a new and even more troubling array of problems, exemplified by the 230 species of alien marine invertebrates established in San Francisco Bay through ballast water pumped out by ships from distant ports. It may seem odd to equate epidemics of infectious disease with the problem of invasive species. But in the complex distribution chains we humans have created, they become interdependent. Consider the following skein of circumstances. Rubber seedlings, brought in the 19th century from Brazil to Kew Gardens in England and then used to establish plantations in South Asia, came unaccompanied by the South American leaf blight fungus. Those plantations now supply most of the world's natural rubber and fuel several national economies. So if you arrive at Kuala Lumpur airport having visited South America on the same itinerary, you walk in on fungicide-soaked carpet and have your luggage irradiated. Meanwhile, the globalizing trade in radial auto tires, powered by natural rubber from Asia, brought the Asian tiger mosquito ( Aedes albopictus ) to the United States from Japan as a stowaway in used tire casings. It is well established as a nuisance in its new homeland, and because it is a competent vector for dengue fever, it worries public health officials as well. The global economy of rubber has thus created an unusual ecosystem that includes the Amazonian rain forest, Malaysian plantations, Japanese tire factories, and New Jersey marshes. In East Africa, Tony Sinclair has described an equally complex linkage that began with the introduction of rinderpest virus in the late 1800s, probably from Asian cattle brought in to feed the Anglo-Egyptian army of the Sudan. In the Serengeti, it decimated the wildebeeste and other grazing herds, contributing to the conversion of grassland to dense acacia savanna. That provided new breeding grounds for tsetse flies, the vector responsible for nagana in cattle and, in the early 20th century, for epidemics of sleeping sickness in people. The costs have been heavy. Were a careless tourist or an agroterrorist to loose leaf blight fungal spores in Malaysia, the costs could be even heavier. We know that international commerce and domestic economic forces were involved in the reemergence of foot-and-mouth disease in the United Kingdom—as they were, less directly, in the story of rubber above. We also know that the animals we tend and the plants we cultivate inhabit a world full of mobile pathogens, capable of unexpected emergence; sometimes, as in the Serengeti, through invasions that led to secondary ecological changes. The Law of Unintended Consequences is alive and well here, and we have amplified it by artificial selection regimes that favor yield, often at the expense of decreased resistance. We doubt whether agencies such as the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in the United States have the capacity to prevent these epidemics, just as the Malaysian government may not be able to interdict every spore of the fungus it dreads. Are there policy solutions. Modest gestures have already been made, such as special laws regarding ballast pumping and used tire inspection. But there is neither a general strategy for dealing with these invaders nor a widespread awareness of our vulnerability. We have made the globe a biological Cuisinart, and we will either have to deal with the consequences or use our scientific capacity to improve forecasting and monitoring. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.292.5515.203

A Little History of Australia

This history of Australia tells the whole story of the Great Southern Land, from its Aboriginal origins to 1997, including: discovery by European navigators who claimed the land as their own - even though it was already inhabited; the First Fleet, convict settlements, the gold rushes and turn-of-the-century questions about whether Australia could be a perfect society; the birth-pangs of a federated nation, and the experience of Australians in the world's wars; and continuing tension over links with Britain, massive post-war immigration, successes and problems of the 20th century, and the celebration of a distinctly Australian way of life.

Use of Insects by Australian Aborigines

For more than 40,000 years before European navigators visited the shores of the Great South Land, Aborigines occupied Australia, including its arid deserts, tropical rainforests, coastal plains, mountains, and especially its major river systems. Estimates by anthropologists put the population of Australian Aborigines before 1770 at more than 300,000. They spoke 500 different languages grouped in thirty-one related language families (Shane and Ellis 1988).

Le continentalisme et l'exploration du Pacifique Sud

The belief in the existence of an Austral Continent, the mass of which could strike a balance between the North continental masses provided a decisive theme for the sea exploration voyages from the Renaissance to the last third of the XVIIIth century. It was in the course of their search for this continent in the South Pacific that the European navigators discovered the vastest ocean and the Polynesian islands. Ultimately, this article deals with the thèmes of wrong geographical hypotheses which had led to actual discoveries and to récurrent residual myths.

Voyaging Canoes and the Settlement of Polynesia

Sailing trials with two reconstructed Polynesian double canoes indicate that these craft can make good a course to windward up to approximately 75 degrees off the wind on long ocean voyages. This windward performance would have enabled Polynesians to exert a degree of control over their movements that would have been denied them had they only been able to sail or drift before wind and current. Indeed, without this windward sailing capacity there probably never would have been a Polynesian people today, for in a sense they are a product of their maritime technology. Had there been no great voyaging canoes, the settlement of Polynesia might have had to await the relatively late entry into the Pacific of the European navigators. But the Pacific was the scene of early innovation in weatherly sailing canoes, and as the European navigators "discovered" island after island, they were surprised to find that neolithic seafarers had preceded them into this vast ocean realm.

EARLY MICRONESIAN VOYAGING: A COMMENT

In Andrew Sharp's response to Dr. S. H. Riesenberg's article on Micronesian voyages, the former appearing in the latest issue of Oceania (September, 1966), Sharp raises a question in his last paragraph (p. 65) to which I would like to answer. Sharp thinks that the first thing a practical-minded Micronesian boat-builder would want from the early European navigators, traders and missionaries who came to his island would be nails and spikes to strengthen his vessels , and supposes that this could have increased the range of safe two-way voyaging . From my own experience in the Marshall Islands at intervals since 1946, and as recent as 1964, I can attest that nails and spikes are just not the things the Marshallese canoe-builder wants to strengthen his craft. I have had Marshallese repeatedly answer me, when I have put the same question as does Sharp, that the demands of the sea upon a canoe, both hull and outrigger, are such that lashing with sennit is the only practical way to hold the craft together. They have tried nails and screws and find that the craft will break up more easily then, under the constant pitching and yawing that is encountered on the waves at sea. The craft must be flexible in order to withstand this punishment. Even lashings tend to yield, loosen, and break apart, and have to be redone even during a voyage. It is not only from the mouths of informants that I can speak of this. Frequently on lagoons in the Marshalls I have ridden in outrigger canoes, 20 to 30 feet long, for distances that took as long as eight to ten hours, especially if we were moving upwind and having to tack constantly. Further, I have had the experience three times of travelling between the atolls on the high sea, once for as long as 38 hours. During these voyages I have watched the parts of the outrigger frame and its attachment to the float, and even the planks of the hull itself, move with wave motion, and the lashings that held them together gradually deteriorate. At sea, repairs were made without great difficulty. Once the stay that held the mast upright parted and the entire rigging fell into the water ; but everything was put right within an hour and we were on our way. If nails and bolts were used instead of lashings on these craft, the wood itself would have parted. When it is a matter of Marshallese building and handling European-type sail boats, it is another matter, of course, and there they follow the Western custom.