Traveling Along the Veins of the Earth

The other day a friend of mine said, “There are some places that are much better to visit by water than by land.”

The statement instantly impressed me as unequivocally true. And the farther back in history you look the more true it was. Today we have advanced air, auto and rail travel. But before the rise of trains in the 19^th century, the fastest form of land travel was horses. Traveling distances overland was slow and laborious.

For all previous human history, nautical transportation was by far the superior mode for travel over any substantial distance. And while there were no trains or cars before 200 years ago, it’s hard to imagine the rise of civilization without boats and ships.

Nautical transport was the only way to travel the great distances of the explorers and colonizers. The technology of sailing ships was one of the most powerful innovations in human history, an essential driver of human development.

The growth of civilization was powered by the movement of people and goods along the great rivers, the veins of the earth’s biosystem, as well as out on the open seas. For moving goods for trade, barges, boats and ships were far superior to land transportation. And barges and cargo ships are still vitally important today for shipping and world trade.

Boats represent the culmination of countless centuries of development of a technology to build a craft so perfectly designed that it can float on the water, carry loads, and not sink to the bottom. That required precise ratios of weight to height and a streamlined shape that would enable it to cut through the water. Elegance and grace were necessities for such a craft. That’s why we call boats “she.”

Whenever I am on a boat or a ship small enough to give some intimacy with the nautical experience, I feel that I am tapping into an ancient experience embedded deeply into human memory, and the accumulated lore of millennia of seamanship.

The oldest known marine travel was 60,000 years ago, a crossing by modern Homo sapiens to Australia. We don’t know much about the meanderings of prehistoric humans, or the voyages of the ancient mariners, but 60,000 years leaves a lot of room for speculation.

There are still many places that can only be visited by water, and many more that, although reachable by land, are still much better to visit by water.

I’ve been on river cruises in Asia, Africa and South America, and each one has been great. It’s a superb way to travel wherever…