CHAPTER 3. LOST EUROPEAN EXPLORERS
In June 1845 the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, both under the command of Sir John Franklin, sailed away from the British Isles in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, a sea channel that could energize trade by connecting western Europe to East Asia. This was the Apollo mission of the mid-nineteenth century, as the British raced the Russians for control of the Canadian Arctic and to complete a global map of terrestrial magnetism. The British admiralty outfitted Franklin, an experienced naval officer who had faced Arctic challenges before, with two field-tested, reinforced ice-breaking ships equipped with state-of-the-art steam engines, retractable screw propellers, and detachable rudders. With cork insulation, coal-fired internal heating, desalinators, five years of provisions, including tens of thousands of cans of food (canning was a new technology), and a twelve-hundred-volume library, these ships were carefully prepared to explore the icy north and endure long Arctic winters.1
As expected, the expedition’s first season of exploration ended when the sea ice inevitably locked them in for the winter around Devon and Beechney Islands, 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle. After a successful ten-month stay, the seas opened and the expedition moved south to explore the seaways near King William Island, where in September they again found themselves locked in by ice. This time, however, as the next summer approached, it soon became clear that the ice was not retreating and that they’d remain imprisoned for another year. Franklin promptly died, leaving his crew to face the coming year in the pack ice with dwindling supplies of food and coal (heat). In April 1848, after nineteen months on the ice, the second-in-command, an experienced Arctic officer named Crozier, ordered the 105 men to abandon ship and set up camp on King William Island.
The details of what happened next are not completely known, but what is clear is that everyone gradually died. Both archaeological evidence and reports from Inuit locals gathered by the many explorers sent to rescue the expedition indicate that the crew fragmented, moved south, and cannibalism ensued. In one report, an Inuit band encountered one of the crew’s parties. They gave the hungry men some seal meat but quickly departed when they noticed the crew transporting human limbs. Remains of the expedition have been located on several different parts of the island. There is also a rumor, never confirmed, that Crozier made it far enough south that he fell in with the Chippewa, where he lived out his days hiding from the shame of sustained and organized cannibalism.2
Why couldn’t these men survive, given that some humans do just fine in this environment? King William Island lies at the heart of Netsilik territory, an Inuit population that spent its winters out on the pack ice and their summers on the island, just like Franklin’s men. In the winter, they lived in snow houses and hunted seals using harpoons. In the summer, they lived in tents, hunted caribou, musk ox, and birds using complex compound bows and kayaks, and speared salmon using leisters (three-pronged fishing spears; see figure 3.1). The Netsilik name for the main harbor on King William Island is Uqsuqtuuq, which means “lots of fat” (seal fat).3 For the Netsilik, this island is rich in resources for food, clothing, shelter, and tool-making (e.g., drift wood).
Franklin’s men were 105 big-brained and highly motivated primates facing an environment that humans have lived in as foragers for over 30,000 years. They’d had three years in the Arctic, and nineteen months stuck in the ice, with their supplies slowly dwindling, to experience the environment and put those big brains to work. The men were all well known to each other after all this time, having worked together on the ship, so they should have been a highly cohesive group with a shared goal. At 105 persons, this group had roughly the same number of mouths to feed as a large Netsilik encampment, without the children or elderly to worry about. Yet the crew vanished, defeated by the hostile environment and only remembered in Inuit stories.
The reason Franklin’s men could not survive is that humans don’t adapt to novel environments the way other animals do or by using our individual intelligence. None of the 105 big brains figured out how to use driftwood, which was available on King William Island’s west coast where they camped, to make the recurve composite bows, which the Inuit used when stalking caribou. They further lacked the vast body of cultural know-how about building snow houses, creating fresh water, hunting seals, making kayaks, spearing salmon and tailoring cold-weather clothing.
Figure 3.1. Head of a Netsilik leister used for fishing. The teeth are made from reindeer horn. Roald Amundsen collected this on King William Island during his visit in 1903–06.
Let’s briefly consider just a few of the Inuit cultural adaptations that you would need to figure out to survive on King William Island. To hunt seals, you first have to find their breathing holes in the ice. It’s important that the area around the hole be snow covered—otherwise the seals will hear you and vanish. You then open the hole, smell it to verify that it’s still in use (what do seals smell like?), and then assess the shape of the hole using a special curved piece of caribou antler. The hole is then covered with snow, save for a small gap at the top that is capped with a down indicator. If the seal enters the hole, the indicator moves, and you must blindly plunge your harpoon into the hole using all your weight. Your harpoon should be about 1.5 meters (5 ft) long, with a detachable tip that is tethered with a heavy braid of sinew line. You can get the antler from the previously noted caribou, which you brought down with your driftwood bow. The rear spike of the harpoon is made of extra-hard polar bear bone (yes, you also need to know how to kill polar bears; best to catch them napping in their dens). Once you’ve plunged your harpoon’s head into the seal, you’re then in a wrestling match as you reel him in, onto the ice, where you can finish him off with the aforementioned bear-bone spike.4
Now you have a seal, but you have to cook it. However, there are no trees at this latitude for wood, and driftwood is too sparse and valuable to use routinely for fires. To have a reliable fire, you’ll need to carve a lamp from soapstone (you know what soapstone looks like, right?), render some oil for the lamp from blubber, and make a wick out of a particular species of moss. You will also need water. The pack ice is frozen salt water, so using it for drinking will just make you dehydrate faster. However, old sea ice has lost most of its salt, so it can be melted to make potable water. Of course, you need to be able to locate and identify old sea ice by color and texture. To melt it, make sure you have enough oil for your soapstone lamp.
These few examples are just the tip of an iceberg of cultural know-how that’s required to live in the Arctic. I have not even alluded to the know-how for making baskets, fishing weirs, sledges, snow goggles, medicines, or leisters (figure 3.1), not to mention all the knowledge of weather, snow, and ice conditions required for safe travel using a sledge.
Nevertheless, while the Inuit are impressive, perhaps I am asking too much, and no one could have survived getting stuck in the ice for two years in the Artic. After all, we are a tropical primate, and the average temperatures during the winters on King William Island range between −25°C (−13°F) and −35°C (−31°F), and were even lower in the mid-nineteenth century. It happens, however, that two other expeditions have found themselves also stranded on King William Island, both before and after Franklin’s expedition. Despite being much smaller and less well-equipped than Franklin’s men, both crews not only survived but went on to future explorations. What was the secret of their success?5
Fifteen years before the Franklin Expedition, John Ross and a crew of twenty-two had to abandon the Victory off the coast of King William Island. During three years on the island, Ross not only survived but also managed to explore the region, including locating the magnetic pole. The secret of Ross’s success is not surprising; it was the Inuit. Although not known as a “people person,” he managed to befriend the locals, establish trading relations, and even fashion a wooden leg for lame Inuit man. Ross marveled at Inuit snow houses, multiuse tools, and amazing cold-weather attire; he enthusiastically learned about Inuit hunting, sealing, dogs, and traveling by dog sledge. In return, the Inuit learned from Ross’s crew the proper use of a knife and fork while formally dining. Ross is credited with gathering a great deal of ethnological information, though in part this was driven by his practical need to obtain survival-crucial information and to maintain good relations. During their stay, Ross worried in his journals when the Inuit disappeared for long stretches and looked forward to the bounty they would return with—including packages such as 180 pounds of fish, fifty sealskins, bears, musk ox, venison, and fresh water. He also marveled at the health and vigor of the Inuit. Ross’s sledge expeditions during this time always included parties of Inuit, who acted as guides, hunters, and shelter builders. After four years, during which time he was presumed dead by the British Admiralty, Ross managed to return to England with nineteen of his twenty-two men. Years later, in 1848, Ross would again deploy lightweight sledges, based on Inuit designs, in an overland search for Franklin’s lost expedition. These sledge designs were adopted by many future British expeditions.
A little over a half century later, Roald Amundsen spent two winters on King William Island and three in the Arctic. In his refurbished fishing sloop, he went on to be the first European to successfully traverse the Northwest Passage. With knowledge of both Ross and Franklin, Amundsen immediately sought out the Inuit and learned from them how to make skin clothing, hunt seals, and manage dog sleds. Later, he would put these Inuit skills and technologies—clothing, sledges, and houses—to good use in beating Robert Scott to the South Pole. In praising the effectiveness of Inuit clothing at −63°F (−53°C), the Norwegian Amundsen wrote, “Eskimo dress in winter in these regions is far superior to our European clothes. But one must either wear it all or not at all; any mixture is bad.… You feel warm and comfortable the moment you put it on [in contrast with wool].” Amundsen made similar comments about Inuit snow houses (more on those in chapter 7). After finally deciding to replace the metal runners on his sledge with wooden ones, he noted, “One can’t do better in these matters than copy the Eskimo, and let the runners get a fine covering of ice; then they slide like butter.”6
The Franklin Expedition is our first example from the Lost European Explorer Files.7 The typical case goes like this: Some hapless group of European or American explorers find themselves lost, cut off, or otherwise stuck in some remote and seemingly inhospitable place. They eventually run out of provisions and increasingly struggle to find food and sometimes water. Their clothing gradually falls apart, and their shelters are typically insufficient. Disease often follows, as their ability to travel deteriorates. Cannibalism frequently occurs, as things get desperate. The most instructive cases are those in which fate permits the explorers to gain exposure and experience in the “hostile” environment they will have to (try to) survive in before their supplies totally run out. Sadly, these explorers generally die. When some do survive, it’s because they fall in with a local indigenous population, who provides them with food, shelter, clothing, medicine, and information. These indigenous populations have typically been surviving, and often thriving, in such “hostile” environments for centuries or millennia.
What these cases teach us is that humans survive neither by our instinctual abilities to find food and shelter, nor by our individual capacities to improvise solutions “on the fly” to local environmental challenges. We can survive because, across generations, the selective processes of cultural evolution have assembled packages of cultural adaptations—including tools, practices, and techniques—that cannot be devised in a few years, even by a group of highly motivated and cooperative individuals. Moreover, the bearers of these cultural adaptations themselves often don’t understand much of how or why they work, beyond the understanding necessary for effectively using them. Chapter 4 will lay out the foundations of the processes that build cultural adaptations over generations.
Before moving on, however, let’s again dip into the Lost European Explorer Files just to make sure the Arctic isn’t a special case of an excessively challenging environment.
The Burke and Wills Expedition
In 1860, while returning from the first European trip across the interior of Australia, from Melbourne north to the Gulf of Carpentaria, four explorers found that they had nearly used up three months’ worth of provisions and were increasingly forced to live off the land. The expedition leader, Robert Burke (a former police inspector) and his second-in-command, William Wills (a surveyor), along with Charles Gray (a 52-year-old sailor) and John King (a 21-year-old soldier), soon had to begin eating their pack animals, which included six camels that had been imported especially for this desert trip. The horse and camel meat extended their provisions but also meant they had to abandon their equipment as they traveled. Gray got increasingly weak, stole food, andsoon died of dysentery. The remaining trio eventually made it back to their rendezvous point, an expedition depot at Coopers Creek, where they expected the rest of their large expedition party to be waiting with fresh supplies and provisions. However, this waiting party, who were also sick, injured, and running short on food, had departed earlier the same day. Burke, Wills, and King had just missed them, but the trio did manage to access some buried provisions. Still weak and exhausted, Burke decided not to try to catch the rest of their party, by heading south, but instead to follow Coopers Creek west toward Mount Hopeless (yes, really, Mount Hopeless), about 150 miles away, where there was a ranch and police outpost. While traveling along Coopers Creek, not long after departing the rendezvous depot, both of their two remaining camels died. This left them stuck along Coopers Creek because without either the camels to carry water or some knowledge of how to find water in the outback, the trio could not traverse the last open stretch of desert between the creek and the outpost at Mount Hopeless.8
Stranded, and now with their recent infusion of provisions running low, the explorers managed to make peaceful contact with a local aboriginal group, the Yandruwandrha. These aboriginal hunter-gatherers gave them gifts of fish, beans, and some cakes, which the men learned were made from a “seed” called nardoo (technically, it’s a sporocarp, not a seed). Our trio clearly paid some attention when they were with the Yandruwandrha, but this didn’t improve their success in fishing or trapping. However, impressed by the cakes, they did start searching for the source of the nardoo seeds, which they believed to be from a tree. After much searching, and running on empty, the trio finally wandered across a flat covered with nardoo—which turned out to be a cloverlike, semi-aquatic fern, not a tree. Initially, the men just boiled the sporocarp, but later they found (not made) some grinding stones and copied the Yandruwandrha women whom they had observed preparing the cakes. They pounded the seeds, made flour, and baked nardoo bread.
This was an apparent boon in the men’s plight, because it finally seemed they had a reliable source of calories. For more than a month, the men collected and consumed nardoo, as they all became increasingly fatigued and suffered from massive and painful bowel movements. Despite consuming what should have been sufficient calories (4–5 lbs. per day, according to Wills’s journal), Burke, Wills, and King merely got weaker (see figure 3.2). Wills writes about what was happening to them by first describing the bowel movements caused by the nardoo:
Figure 3.2. Painting of Burke, Wills, and King as they struggled to survive along Coopers Creek. Painted by Scott Melbourne and published in Wills’s diary (Wills, Wills, and Farmer 1863).
I cannot understand this nardoo at all; it certainly will not agree with me in any form. We are now reduced to it alone, and we manage to get from four to five pounds per day between us. The stools it causes are enormous, and seem greatly to exceed the quantity of bread consumed, and is very slightly altered in appearance from what it was when eaten.… Starvation on nardoo is by no means unpleasant, but for the weakness one feels and the utter inability to move oneself, for as far as appetite is concerned, it gives me the greatest satisfaction.9
Burke and Wills died within a week of this journal entry. Alone, King managed to continue by appealing to the Yandruwandrha, who took him in, fed him, and taught him to construct a proper shelter. Three months later King was found by a relief expedition and returned to Melbourne.
Why did Burke and Wills die?
Like many plants used by hunter-gatherers, nardoo is indigestible and at least mildly toxic unless properly processed. Unprocessed nardoo passes through only partially digested and contains high levels of thiaminase, which depletes the body’s store of thiamine (vitamin B1). Low levels of thiamine cause the disease beriberi, resulting in extreme fatigue, muscle wasting, and hypothermia. To address this problem, the customary nardoo processing practices of aborigines appear to have multiple elements built in that make nardoo edible and nontoxic. First, they grind and leach the flour with copious amounts of water, which increases digestibility and decreases concentrations of the vitamin B1-destroying thiaminase. Second, in making the cakes, the flour is directly exposed to ash during heating, which lowers its pH and may break down the thiaminase. Third, nardoo gruel is consumed using only mussel shells, which may restrict the thiaminase’s access to an organic substrate that is needed to fully initiate the B1-destroying reaction. Failure to deploy these local practices means that our unfortunate trio managed to starve and poison themselves while keeping their stomachs full.10 Such subtle and nuanced detoxification practices are common in small-scale societies, and in later chapters we will see additional examples.
The effect of the nardoo, coupled with their lack of clothing, which was falling apart, and their inability to make a proper shelter, meant that the trio suffered greatly during the cold June winters. The effects of exposure probably accelerated their weakness and eventual demise. Their chances of learning from the locals, like Ross and Amundsen did, was diminished by Burke’s flights of anger and impatience with the Yandruwandrha. At one point, in response to their requests for gifts, he fired a shot over their heads, and they disappeared. Bad move.
If the Australian desert still seems too extreme, maybe our intelligence and/or evolved instincts might serve us better in subtropical climates. Let’s dip into the Lost European Explorer Files again.
The Narváez Expedition
In 1528, just north of Tampa Bay (Florida), Pánfilo Narváez made a crucial mistake. He split up his expedition, taking 300 conquistadors inland in search of the fabled cities of gold while sending his ships further up the coast for a later rendezvous at a new location. After wandering around the swamps and scrublands of northern Florida for two months (with no luck in finding the golden cities), and dealing treacherously with the locals, the mighty conquistadors attempted to head south to meet their ships. However, despite making great efforts through swampy terrain, they couldn’t travel overland to their ships. Missing the rendezvous date, the remaining 242 men (50-some already dead) constructed five boats and planned to paddle along the Gulf coast to a Spanish port in Mexico.
Unfortunately, the conquistadors had dramatically underestimated the distance to Mexico, and the crude boats they constructed gradually stranded their crews on the barrier islands along the Gulf coast. The now-scattered Spanish parties starved, sometimes engaging in cannibalism, until they were aided by peaceful Karankawa hunter-gatherers, who had long lived along the Texas coast. Accounts suggest that with the Karankawa’s help, the surviving parties were able to resume their journey to Mexico until starvation again marooned them in a wretched state. However, at least one of these groups got better at finding food, having learned from the locals to harvest seaweed and oysters. Interestingly, the floundering Spaniards, as well as later European travelers, always described the Karankawa as particularly tall, robust, and healthy-looking. So, this was a rich and bountiful environment for hunter-gatherers, if you knew what you were doing.
Though most died of starvation, a handful of Spaniards and one Moorish slave did reach the more densely populated heart of Karankawa territory. Having barely survived to arrive at this point, the remaining adventurers were promptly enslaved by these fiercer Karankawa and may have been forced into female gender roles. Among North American aboriginal populations, this male-to-female gender role switching was not uncommon. For our conquistadors, it meant a lot of toilsome work, such as carrying water, gathering firewood, and other unpleasant duties.
After several years of living among these scattered hunter-gatherers, four members of Narváez’s crew were brought together by the annual prickly pear harvest season, during which time many local groups would congregate, feast, and celebrate. In the excitement, the foursome managed to slip away. After a long and rather circuitous route, staying among many different peoples in Mexico and Texas while operating as healers and shamans, they eventually found their way back to New Spain (colonial Mexico), eight years after they had begun in Florida.11 Thus, the foursome had managed to survive by adopting a valued social role in these aboriginal American societies.
The Lone Woman
We can contrast these Lost European Explorer accounts, in which intrepid bands of hardy and experienced explorers find themselves struggling in novel environments, with another account, that of a lone young woman who found herself stranded for eighteen years in the place she grew up. Seventy miles off the coast of Los Angeles, and thirty miles from the nearest land, foggy, barren, and windswept San Nicolas Island was once inhabited by a thriving aboriginal society linked by trade to the other Channel Islands and the coast. However, by 1830 the island’s population was dwindling, in part due to a massacre by Kodiak hunter-gatherers from the then Russian-controlled Aleutian Islands who had set up camp on San Nicolas to hunt otters. In 1835 Spanish missionaries from Santa Barbara sent a ship to transport the remaining island inhabitants to the mainland missions. During a rushed evacuation, one young native woman in her mid-twenties dashed off to search for her missing child. To evade a looming storm, the ship ended up leaving her behind on the island, and due to some unlucky quirks of fate, she was largely (but not entirely) forgotten.
Surviving for eighteen years, this lone castaway ate seals, shellfish, sea birds, fish, and various roots. She deposited dried meats on different parts of the island for times of sickness or other emergencies. She fashioned bone knives, needles, bone awls, shell fishhooks, and sinew fishing lines. She lived in whalebone houses and weathered storms in a cave. For transporting water, she wove a version of the amazing watertight baskets that were common among the California Indians. For clothing, she fashioned waterproof tunics by sewing together seagull skins with the feathers still on and wore sandals woven from grasses. When finally found, she was described as being in “fine physical condition” and attractive, with an “unwrinkled face.” After overcoming an initial scare at being suddenly found, the lone woman promptly offered the search party dinner, which she was cooking at the time they arrived.12
The contrast with our lost European explorers could hardly be starker. One lone woman equipped with only the cumulative know-how of her ancestors survived for eighteen years whereas fully provisioned and well-financed teams of experienced explorers struggled in Australia, Texas, and the Arctic. These diverse cases testify to the nature of our species’ adaptation. During eons of relying on large bodies of cumulative cultural knowledge, our species became addicted to this cultural input; without culturally transmitted knowledge about how to locate and process plants, fashion tools from available materials, and avoid dangers, we don’t last long as hunter-gatherers. Despite the intelligence we acquire from having such big brains, we can’t survive in the kinds of environments so commonly inhabited by our hunter-gatherer ancestors over our evolutionary history. While our attention, cooperative tendencies, and cognitive abilities have likely been shaped by natural selection to life in our ancestral environments, these genetically evolved psychological adaptations are entirely insufficient for our species. Neither our intelligence nor domain-specific psychological abilities fire up to distinguish edible from toxic plants or to construct watercraft, bone awls, snow houses, canoes, fishhooks, or wooden sledges. Despite the critical importance of hunting, clothing, and fire in our species’ evolutionary history, no innate mental machinery delivered to our explorers information on locating snow-covered seal holes, making projectiles, or starting fires.
Our species’ uniqueness, and thus our ecological dominance, arises from the manner in which cultural evolution, often operating over centuries or millennia, can assemble cultural adaptations. In the cases above, I’ve emphasized those cultural adaptations that involve tools and know-how about finding and processing food, locating water, cooking, and traveling. But as we go along, it will become clear that cultural adaptations also involve how we think and what we like, as well as what we can make.
In chapter 4, I will show how evolutionary theory can be successfully applied to build an understanding of culture. Once we understand how natural selection has shaped our genes and our minds to build and hone our abilities to learn from others, we will see how complex cultural adaptations—including tools, weapons, and food-processing techniques, as well as norms, institutions and languages—can emerge gradually without anyone fully apprehending how or why they work. In chapter 5, we will examine how the emergence of cultural adaptations began driving our genetic evolution, leading to an enduring culture-gene co-evolutionary duet that took us down a novel pathway, eventually making us a truly cultural species.