Evolution

After a little thought and much experimentation, Ejan attached Torr’s sturdy bark canoe to his own with two long crosspieces of wood. With this arrangement, the two canoes connected by an open framework of wood, it was almost as if he was building a kind of raft, founded on the canoes.

As his concept developed he became excited by the idea. Perhaps with this new way he could combine the best of the two designs. The rowers and their possessions would be tucked snugly inside the body of the dugout canoe, rather than being exposed on the surface of a raft, but the second canoe would give them the stability of a raft’s wide platform.

With Rocha he took the new arrangement out for trials, in the river and skirting the ocean shore. The double-hull design proved more difficult to maneuver than a single canoe, but it was far more stable. Though they progressed farther out into the ocean than the first time they had tried out the dugout, they didn’t capsize once. And because they didn’t have to work constantly to keep the craft upright as they had the simple dugout, the journey was much less tiring.

At last Ejan felt he was ready.

He tried one last time to dissuade Rocha from coming with him. But in Rocha’s eyes he saw a kind of hard restlessness, a rocky determination to meet this great challenge. Like Ejan’s, her name had been handed down from the past; perhaps somewhere in the line of Rochas before her there had been another great traveler.

They loaded up the canoes with provisions — dried meat and roots, water, shells and skins for bailing, weapons and tools, even a bundle of dry wood to make a fire. They were trying to be prepared. They had no idea what they would find on that green shore to the south, no idea at all.

As they set off this time, there was no sense of celebration. People turned away, attending to their chores. Even Torr was not there to see the double canoe sliding smoothly out of the estuary. Ejan could not help but feel oppressed by their disapproval, even as he felt the smooth rocking of his craft as it cut through the deepening water.

But this modest expedition was the start of a great adventure.

All over the peninsula, Ejan’s outrigger design was being derived independently. In some places the design evolved from double canoes, like Ejan’s, with the eventual outrigger float descending from a degenerate second canoe. In some, the design was more like an opened-up raft. Elsewhere people were experimenting with simple poles lashed across a canoe’s gunwales to improve its handling. Whatever its disparate origins, the outrigger design was a solution to the instability that before now had confined canoes to the rivers.

And in the generations to come the descendants of these folk in their outriggers would spread out across Australasia, the Indian Ocean, and Oceania. They would reach as far west as Madagascar off Africa’s coast, east across the Pacific to Easter Island, north to Taiwan off the Chinese coast, and as far south as New Zealand, taking their language and culture with them. It was an epic migration: Indeed, it would take tens of thousands of years.

But in the end the children of these riverine folk would travel around more than two hundred and sixty degrees of the Earth’s circumference.

Their smooth crossing of the strait to the new land was so easy as to be almost anticlimactic.

Ejan and Rocha followed an unknown coast. Eventually they reached a place where they could see a stream of what must be fresh water cutting out of the inland tangle of vegetation. They turned their craft to face the shore and paddled hard, until they felt the canoes’ prows grinding into the bed of the shallowing sea. They had landed on a strip of beach, fringed by dense, tangled forest.

Rocha cried, "Me first, me first!" She leapt out of the dugout — or tried to; after a couple of days at sea, her legs gave way under her, and she slipped and fell on her backside in the water, laughing.

It wasn’t a very dignified landing. Nobody made a speech or raised a flag. And there would be no monument here; in fact, in another thirty thousand years, this first landing site would be drowned by the rising sea. Nevertheless this was an extraordinary moment. For Rocha had become the first hominid ever to touch Australian soil, the first to set foot on the continent.

Ejan clambered out more carefully. Then, knee-deep in the warm, coastal water, they dragged their canoes until they were firmly grounded.

Rocha ran straight to the freshwater stream. She threw herself into it and rolled, sucking up great mouthfuls of it and scraping at her skin. "Ugh, the salt! I am caked in it." With the exuberance of youth, she scrambled up the stream and into the fringe of forest, seeking fresh fruit.