2018Setting Sail - Special Folder

In contrast to land and air transport, sailing has enabled locales far and wide to be e ciently connected by sea routes for millennia. While the period of its emergence is a subject of debate among historians, there are two predominant theories that currently exist. One argues that sailing rst emerged among the coastal peoples of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, while the other asserts that it arose simultaneously in two distinct locales, after which its use spread to contiguous regions. According to the latter theory, sailing rst emerged on both the Nile River, which later in uenced naval construction in the Mediterranean and the Near East, and in the vast Indonesian archipe- lago, from where the rst human colonisers of the Australian continent departed roughly 60,000 years ago. Given the archipelago’s unique geography and the distances between its roughly 17,000 islands, it is universally acknowledged that sailing was adopted early on in the region.