# How Could a Civilization that Managed to Sail to an Island forget how to make boats? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 17, 2012, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454 "2012-06-17T20:46:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![billfish678](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@billfish678](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/billfish678)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2012, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/21 "2012-06-18T21:50:18Z")
> [@Peremensoe](#): > > On the other hand, the Norse Greenland colony lasted longer than the British American colony has, to date. Not exactly a bad job. Heh. Thats both funny and a very good point. Keeping a marginal colony going for that long way back when is actually pretty impressive when you think about it. And BTW, I think the input on this thread by others has been some interesting reading. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2012, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/22 "2012-06-18T21:51:00Z")
> [@Blakeyrat](#): > > Going back to Jared Diamond’s Collapse, the by far most likely explanation is that they had a bad winter, lost too much livestock, and either all starved before the yearly ship reached them, or were too weak to fight off an Inuit attack. > > He provided much, much evidence that that colony was always extremely marginal, so it’s not that surprising that a single bad winter was enough to wipe it out. Since the visiting ship didn’t write down any specifics about exactly what they found (they just mentioned they didn’t find any colonists and left it at that), that’s probably as good an explanation as we’ll ever get. Some years the “yearly ship” did not reach them at all due to heavier pack ice. (Greenland was settled during a global warming spell). Iceland had its own troubles, and for years nobody botherred to try to reach Greenland at all, or intermitently. By the time someone tried again, decades later, nobody was left. Poor harvests, an attempt to continue a Scandinavian lifestyle of grain and grazing cattle when the climate could not support it. Diamond has the additional theory that the Vikings committed ecocide; they destroyed the fragile thin surface soil, allowed the topsoil to wash away or leach out, and strved because they refused to adopt the habits of the Eskimos that allowed living in a dangerous time (and place). Diamond blames a lot on ecological failures. To anyone - you really should read “Collapse” if this sort of topic interests you. ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2012, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/23 "2012-06-18T21:57:53Z")
When the Canaries were re-discovered, how far had the cultures drifted from island to island? Were the languages intelligible between them? Was each one a totally different place? ---
**Author:** ![Xema](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/9de053/32.png) [@Xema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xema)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2012, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/24 "2012-06-18T22:13:55Z")
> [@phreesh](#): > > 'how could a country that flew to the moon forget how to get back?" I’ve head those urban legends about how if we wanted to get back tomorrow we’d pretty much have to re-learn everything as the data is stored in inaccessable ways and the engineers are all dead or dying. The notion that we’ve “forgotten” how to travel to the moon and back seems quite remarkably silly. Though the chance of them being adequately funded currently seems small, there are detailed & fully credible plans available for how to travel to Mars and back. ---
**Author:** ![Askance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/askance/32/8281_2.png) [@Askance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askance)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2012, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/25 "2012-06-18T22:41:08Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > Diamond has the additional theory that the Vikings committed ecocide; they destroyed the fragile thin surface soil, allowed the topsoil to wash away or leach out, and strved because they refused to adopt the habits of the Eskimos that allowed living in a dangerous time (and place). In particular, the puzzling fact that they got desperate enough to eat their own dogs, but still didn’t eat fish. In their middens there are only a handful of fishbones. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2012, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/26 "2012-06-18T23:51:30Z")
> [@Normal\_Phase](#): > > All I know is that loss of technology in small, isolated populations is _extremely_ common. That’s true. Somewhere Jane Jacobs mentioned that she visited with her church group a small group of people living in an isolated valley in some place like WV or KY. You had to climb a long way to get in or out of this valley and it was settled (by English-speaking North Americans) and then they lost all contact. They also lost a lot of technology. For example, weaving was lost and they wore only animal skins, although they could grow weavable fibers. It seems like the last weaver had died without training a successor. And there were other technologies lost. Much the same thing happened when Tasmania lost its land bridge to Australia. And when the Maoris settled Chatham Island and the settlers (who called themselves Maorori–presumably the original name) lost contact with NZ. ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2012, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/27 "2012-06-19T00:11:14Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > That’s true. Somewhere Jane Jacobs mentioned that she visited with her church group a small group of people living in an isolated valley in some place like WV or KY. You had to climb a long way to get in or out of this valley and it was settled (by English-speaking North Americans) and then they lost all contact. They also lost a lot of technology. For example, weaving was lost and they wore only animal skins, although they could grow weavable fibers. It seems like the last weaver had died without training a successor. And there were other technologies lost. I just looked it up and Jacobs died fairly recently. There was an isolated group of English speaking people in North America wearing animal skins in the 20th Century? ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2012, 12:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/28 "2012-06-19T00:42:11Z")
> [@hajario](#): > > I just looked it up and Jacobs died fairly recently. There was an isolated group of English speaking people in North America wearing animal skins in the 20th Century? Jacobs does talk about a long-isolated population in the mountains of western North Carolina (visited by her aunt in 1923, still there and still mostly isolated at Jacobs’ own visit in the 1930s), who had indeed “lost from memory, largely because of slowly accruing irrelevance, many of the skills they had brought with them from Europe and the U.S. eastern seaboard before their immigration into the mountains and isolation there.” However, it seems weaving was not one the skills lost, nor was rudimentary metalworking. They _had_ lost the knowledge of building with stone, however. > [@Jane Jacobs](#): > > One of my aunt’s tasks there was to see to construction of a church. One of the farmers donated, as a site, a beautiful knoll beside the river and my aunt suggested the building be made of fine large stones which were already quarried, as it were, needing little dressing, there for the taking in the creek and river beds. No, said the community elders, it was a pretty idea but not possible. Entire walls and buildings of stone would not be safe. These people came of a parent culture that had not only reared stone parish churches from time immemorial, but great cathedrals. ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2012, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/29 "2012-06-19T01:02:17Z")
> [@Peremensoe](#): > > On the other hand, the Norse Greenland colony lasted longer than the British American colony has, to date. Not exactly a bad job. Yeah, but prior to 1750AD, a turn lasts for 10 years so that’s not as impressive as it sounds. ---
**Author:** ![Xema](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/9de053/32.png) [@Xema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xema)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2012, 1:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/30 "2012-06-19T01:16:46Z")
> [@Robot\_Arm](#): > > It’s a lot easier to make a boat sail downwind than upwind. Indeed. A possibility to consider is that the original settlers didn’t know much about boats - their nautical technology may have been limited to rafts that could have drifted them to one of these islands in a storm, and perhaps marginally allowed them to reach other nearby islands. ---
**Author:** ![md2000](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@md2000](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/md2000)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2012, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/31 "2012-06-19T03:06:55Z")
> [@Xema](#): > > Indeed. > > A possibility to consider is that the original settlers didn’t know much about boats - their nautical technology may have been limited to rafts that could have drifted them to one of these islands in a storm, and perhaps marginally allowed them to reach other nearby islands. No, the polynesian expansion - Easter Island was the final gasp - was impressive not just for the large canoes, but as prvious posts have mentioned, for the navigational technologies. The extreme distance of Easter Island suggests that maybe this one canoe-load (or set of canoes) lucked out and found their semi-tropical island, but did not have the time or resources to make it home with the news and simply set about colonizing the new island. Between the civil war and the devastation of european slavers, very little oral tradition is left to understand the early years. (One of the other concerns is climate change. They arrived on Easter island,s ettled, and then the same global change made their island more marginal for the tropical lifestyle and crops, since it was right at the edge of the tropics). ---
**Author:** ![MLS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/919ad9/32.png) [@MLS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MLS)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2012, 3:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/32 "2012-06-19T03:08:24Z")
I don’t think I’ve read Jane Jacobs’s work. What is the name of the book being referenced? ---
**Author:** ![Xema](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/9de053/32.png) [@Xema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xema)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2012, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/33 "2012-06-19T03:18:50Z")
> [@md2000](#): > > No, the polynesian expansion - Easter Island was the final gasp - was impressive not just for the large canoes, but as prvious posts have mentioned, for the navigational technologies. I didn’t make it clear that my comment applies to the Canary Islands, which are close enough to Africa that good watercraft might not have been needed. I believe it’s beyond dispute that Easter Island was settled by people with considerable nautical skills. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2012, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/34 "2012-06-19T22:31:49Z")
> [@supery00n](#): > > How could a culture that managed to get to the Islands beyond the horizon of the African coast (from Africa, it is assumed), and managed to settle all of the seven main islands lose knowledge of navigation by sea to the point that they couldn’t even build boats, to the point that not only had they lost connection with the mainland, but the islands had become isolated from each other as well? The former is somewhat conceivable, since the mainland was beyond the horizon, but from any of the seven islands, at least one of them is visible in the horizon in plain sight. Furthermore, most of the islands had abundant forests, which the islanders used to make fire, and it is certain that the boats that they had come on would have been made of wood, so how could they not connect the dots and at least try to build boats? And how could this knowledge be lost or be allowed to not be passed down with utmost care? As others have noted, this is quite common amongst small isolated groups of people, most notably the Tasmanians who lost virtually all their technology aside from spears, sharpened stones and coarse weaving.. It’s particularly common when people arrive on isolated islands because their is so much food available. I’m not sure what the original wildife of the canary islands was like, but if it was like every other tropical island in the world, when humans arrived was crawling with flightless birds, giant lizards and tortoises and other food species. These would all have been quite naive of the concept of human predation, meaning that people could have literally walked up them and picked them up, carried them back to camp, and then killed and cooked them. Under those conditions, a lot of technology gets lost fast. With no need for complicated hunting equipment, no need to travel offshore to find seafood, and no need to take risks with dangerous technology, people simply stop using them. Even if someone from the first generation tries to teach the technology to their children, the children won’t be interested in learning it and they won’t have any incentive to practice it. So even if the first generation of kids learn the principles well enough that they could master the craft with practice, they won’t practice and their kids will earn from them and have even less knowledge and even less incentive. Within two or three generations the knowledge is so bastardised and theoretical that even if someone does try to build a boat, it is so poor that it will scarcely be worth the effort. At that point the technology becomes lost. This is especially true of something like ship building. Building an ocean-going craft isn’t a casual task. The Polynesian canoes took about 500 man-hours to construct. IOW a man would take around three months to build one single handed. When you have no need to fish or trade, then it takes a special kind of person to undertake such a task just so the knowledge won’t be lost. This is exacerbated with small , isolated populations because the deaths of one or two people will remove a whole slew of critical knowledge. If the population isn’t isolated that knowledge can be regained from other regions into which it has dispersed. On an island, not so much. Even with practiced skills, this process of knowledge loss can lead to complete loss of technology in relatively a short time. Of course the generational loss of knowledge isn’t unknown in our own society. How many people today have more than a vague idea how to saddle a horse? This is a skill that would have been near universal 100 years ago, but we are on the cusp of losing it. This is a very close approximation to the way that island populations feel about boats. While we are all aware that horses can be saddled and that it is a skill that might potentially be useful if we ever run out of oil, we don’t actually try to learn it from the people who know because we don’t believe we will need to learn it in our lifetime. People on an island inhabited by naive giant tortoises and dodos feel exactly the same way about boat building: potentially useful if we ever run out of dodos, but not something I am going to need in my lifetime. > [@](#): > > One last question: Were the Polynesian seafarers in Easter Island able to leave their island by boat by the time they were visited by Europeans? I recall reading in _Collapse_ by Jared Diamond that they had cut down all of their trees and were therefore unable to build boats (wood logs rot quickly?). I am not sure of whether the problem was that 1) they knew how to navigate the waters, but they couldn’t build the boats needed to do so since they had cut down all of their trees 2) even if they didn’t cut down the trees, they had lost the knowledge of boat building by that time so they wouldn’t be able to make boats anyway. The knew how to make watercraft. There were several driftwood canoes on Easter Island at the time of European contact. Being made of driftwood they were pretty shoddy affairs and not something that you would risk an ocean voyage in, but they were highly valued because they allowed people to harvest eggs from offshore islands, which was one of the few protein sources left on the islands. So they knew how to make boats, but I suspect that the knowledge of how to build ships, in the sense of ocean-going craft, had been lost. ---
**Author:** ![Blakeyrat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ecd19e/32.png) [@Blakeyrat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blakeyrat)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2012, 11:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/35 "2012-06-19T23:49:15Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > The knew how to make watercraft. There were several driftwood canoes on Easter Island at the time of European contact. Being made of driftwood they were pretty shoddy affairs and not something that you would risk an ocean voyage in, but they were highly valued because they allowed people to harvest eggs from offshore islands, which was one of the few protein sources left on the islands. > > So they knew how to make boats, but I suspect that the knowledge of how to build ships, in the sense of ocean-going craft, had been lost. IIRC from my reading of Collapse, the bigger problem was the lack of construction material. They’d used up all of the trees large enough to make good canoes, so driftwood canoes is the best they could manage. The last trees were cut down only about a generation before Europeans first visited, so it’s quite possible much of the knowledge for creating ocean-going canoes still existed in the society. I really need to re-read that book. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [June 20, 2012, 2:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/36 "2012-06-20T02:17:21Z")
> [@MLS](#): > > I don’t think I’ve read Jane Jacobs’s work. What is the name of the book being referenced? The quote I gave about stone building was from _Cities and the Wealth of Nations_, the other was a passing reference from _Dark Age Ahead_. ---
**Author:** ![snowthx](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowthx/32/10660_2.png) [@snowthx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snowthx)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2012, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/37 "2012-06-22T22:20:07Z")
This is a very interesting thread - thanks to everyone who has posted. > [@Blake](#): > > So they knew how to make boats, but I suspect that the knowledge of how to build ships, in the sense of ocean-going craft, had been lost. I wonder about this. While the inhabitants of the isolated island may have lost the knowledge of shipbuilding in a generation or two, is it a fair assumption that the people from their homeland were still building, perfecting, and sailing long distances for some time? Maybe Easter Island was a one-shot deal and found only by chance - perhaps a sailing party got lost in a storm and lucked onto the island. That may have been a dead-end, ship-building wise if there was no further contact with their homeland. However, in the case of the Hawaiians, I think they were visited by and traded with the Tahitians for some time after initial settlement. So they were still exposed to shipbuilding and ocean navigation technology. I suppose once the traders stopped visiting, the knowledge stream would have stopped as well. Why did the Easter Islanders (Rapa-nuians) and Hawaiians not continue island hopping or exploring? Why did they settle down? I guess we would have to ask why their forefathers took to the sea in the first place. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2012, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/38 "2012-06-22T22:54:17Z")
Why didn’t the polynesians continue on to N/S America? Islands are limited-resources are easily depleted, and living too close to your neighbors provoke quarrels. Are there any places on these continents showing evidence of colonization? ---
**Author:** ![snowthx](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowthx/32/10660_2.png) [@snowthx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snowthx)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2012, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/39 "2012-06-22T23:02:21Z")
> [@ralph124c](#): > > Why didn’t the polynesians continue on to N/S America? Islands are limited-resources are easily depleted, and living too close to your neighbors provoke quarrels. Are there any places on these continents showing evidence of colonization? There is some theory that they did make it to S. America. It is documented that the Polynesians brought sweet potatoes to Hawaii - a crop originating in S. America. How did that happen? ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2012, 11:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454/40 "2012-06-22T23:04:49Z")
The real question to me is why anyone DID keep trading with Hawaii from Polynesia. No matter how good at navigating the polynesians were, an open-ocean voyage that long had to be INCREDIBLY dangerous and difficult. How much value would you have to get from some small-by-modern-standards vessels of trade goods (minus the space taken by provisions, water, rowers, etc.) in order to repeatedly take that much of a risk? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-could-a-civilization-that-managed-to-sail-to-an-island-forget-how-to-make-boats/625454.md?page=3)