Home- THE MANTEÑO EXPEDITIONS
- THE BALSA RAFT
- A RAFTING CULTURE
- THE BOOK
- VIDEOS
- PHOTOS
Loading,
0
% complete-
THE MANTEÑO EXPEDITIONS
- WHO WE AREThe Manteño Expeditions are a completely authentic look at the ancient balsa raft. It's a research adventure based on hard science. It's a search for the true history of the mariners of ancient Ecuador.Our objective is to build an accurate replica of an ancient sailing raft, and then sail that vessel on a simulated trading voyage to West Mexico.Here in the 21st Century, we find ourselves involved in one of the great archeological mysteries of all time. Though many voyages by raft have been made in the modern era, none have shed light on the day-to-day workings of a lost empire - the Manteño of ancient Ecuador. Previous expeditions, like Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki, have captured our imagination, but these exploits have centered around unusual theories or legends.The Manteño weren't a legend. They were a great seafaring people, one that thrived long before the arrival of the Europeans. Unfortunately, they did not posses a written language, and very little is known about them.To date, the Manteño Expeditions have built four balsa rafts. Even taking these voyages into consideration, as well as the voyages before us, we feel that the conclusions made by many about the ancient Manteño mariners, and their great sailing rafts, are most likely flawed.Founded in 1993, the Manteño Expeditions have survived storms, sharks, shipwrecks, madness, and ultimately, discovery. Once described as "a series of primitive little wars, fought against the omnipotent forces of the Earth," the expedition continues today, with the next voyage in full preparation.
-
THE BALSA RAFT
- HOW TO BUILD A RAFTThe Manteño Expeditions have experimented with a wide variety of design ideas over the years, but all the rafts we have built have shared a few basic characteristics. First, they're big. A balsa raft is an immense sailing barge, measuring sometimes as much as 65 feet in length and weighing 35,000 pounds.
All of our rafts have been comprised of nine balsa logs, topped with a bamboo superstructure. Most of our balsa logs have come from the Ecuadorian Forestry Service's experimental forest, near Quevedo, Ecuador. Balsa trees are exceedingly abundant in tropical South and Central America. They grow in bunches, or "stands," in any well-lit, open space. And they grow incredibly fast, too. From a seed that is only a few millimeters in size, they can expand to a 40-foot, 8000-pound mass in just 48 months.
-
A RAFTING CULTURE
- WHO WERE THE MANTEÑOS?
The Manteño were an Ecuadorian maritime culture that began around AD 800, and ended in AD 1526, when the Spanish Conquistadores arrived.The Manteño were a "league of merchants." Today they might be referred to as a cartel - a loose affiliation of city-states, powerful chiefs, trading networks, seaways, and raft ports. Their business was the highly lucrative Spondylus trade.Spondylus is a conch shell, about the size of a small melon, that lived in abundance in the home waters of the ancient Manteño. The shell could be worked and polished into beautiful burgundy ornaments and jewelry, and was prized in much the same way as ivory was in Africa, or jade in Asia. The Spanish Conquistadores, when they first arrived in South America, said that Spondylus "has as much value to the natives as gold, and in some cases more."The Manteños were extremely skilled at diving for the shells and they had the giant balsa rafts to transport their goods. The precise beginning of the era of the great sailing rafts is still unknown, but what is known is that a steady progression in sophistication led to the rise, in AD 800, of the Manteño-Huancavilca, an entire culture of voyaging merchants. At its height, the Manteño culture spanned the entire coastline of ancient Ecuador in a series chiefdoms.
In 1526, Manteño mariners encountered an unusual ship off the coast of what is now modern-day Ecuador. This particular vessel carried the flag of The Crown of Spain: The Conquistadors had arrived. The Spaniards recorded this fateful meeting at sea in their logs and diaries, stating that the raft was a freighter from the port of Salango. It carried gold, silver, fine cloth, and Spondylus. The Spanish seamen noted that the raft "carried sails like that of our own ships," and that the raft was sailing north on a trading voyage.Within ten years of this first meeting, the Inca Empire had fallen, ninety percent of the Manteño had died of European disease, and the Spanish Empire controlled the Pacific Coast.
-
THE BOOK
-
Uploads
-
The Balsa Raft
