Before the 1950s, if you wanted to get to the Americas, you had to come by boat. This was true of the waves of celebrities aboard art deco-inspired ocean liners, of nineteenth-century European immigrants, of enslaved Africans from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, and of Spanish, English, and other European conquistadors from the late fourteenth century. It was also true of successive waves of people who, starting around 15,000 years ago, migrated from Northeast Asia to North America and then spread south, east, and, as the ice sheet retreated, north, many of them relying on rivers and lakes for migration, fishing, hunting, and exchange. This talk will sketch the broad outlines of Native Americans’ use of waterways and watercraft over the many millennia before Europeans even imagined such a thing as the Americas.

This is the seventh of the 2025 Summer Lecture Series. The lectures will be held on Wednesday evenings at the Bath Freight Shed (27 Commercial St, Bath Maine). Recordings will be available here a couple of days later.  You can also join by Zoom. Zoom codes will be available here a few days before the lecture.

The lectures are free, but if you consider them valuable, please donate to Maine’s First Ship in person or online.