So, even as I grew up, we had the insurance companies saying, you know, "strong as the rock of Gibraltar." The idea was just inertia. And if we don't get over that idea of the inertia and society is as yet not over it, the last great walls were those of the Maginot line and suddenly, boom! with World War II it's all over. Why? What happened was that in World War I the submarine coming along. The tank and the submarine were coming out of the sea. They are technology of the sea. And they simply climbed up on the up to this time you couldn't carry any great cargoes on the land at all. The great railroads began to carry great cargoes, but you had to have the great canals you had to float things, but with the ocean you can have incredibly large ships. Once you load your cargo you can get it thousands of miles out and ships could carry loads that human beings couldn't carry on their backs, and they couldn't carry on the backs of animals. Sir Halford MacKinder showed the English long ago that when the railroad came along, they started the marine railway. The first railway was the marine railway, and they built the ship to let it down on the sea, using gravity to accelerate it in, and you had, then, with the marine railway the ship could tip over. But they can then double the idea so that your ship won't tip over, and this became the railroad, and they ran the tracks back on the land, developed the steam engine for the ship, and they said put it on the dock engine and ran it back on the land. So Halford MacKinder showed the English that the railroads were the ship technology coming back up on the land this advanced engineering really coming up on the land, and he warned the English that the coastline was not where they thought it was. Because of the ability to carry great cargoes suddenly up on the land.

But the World War II tanks, and so forth, what was called the Blitzkrieg, was the water technology coming up on the land. Because on the land you had siege, it was a trench war you just stay in, siege, siege, siege. But what happened long, long ago, was that human beings were developing city states, and there were successful city states being such as Mycenae. Sometimes they became so successful that they had a chance to also get into producing boats, and probably the fall of Troy is the beginning of the city state masters building ships, and the Greeks had these ships, and they were able then to come up to the castle. Up to this time, the people outside the walls they would be starved. But suddenly the invaders came along with ships, and the ships could keep going off the people inside of Troy just had the most food and they thought it was just going to be great, and the people outside were just going to starve. But the people who were coming along were not starving. They had ships bringing in incredible cargoes. So suddenly the "line of supply" became to be the new grand strategy of who was going to survive on our planet.

We find then, at the time, you look in Italy all those great castellos commanding the different valleys. And their great overlords giving themselves any name they wanted to. And, suddenly, the man who has been developing ships, coming into he's able to carry enormous canons and so forth he comes into the harbor in Italy, and there's a great castello there, and he just let it have a couple of shots. And he says now, I don't want you to know anymore about my grand strategy, because, at sea three fourth of the earth being covered by water, the people who then built ships, and built them to carry great cargoes from great distances it was an enormous, extraordinary risk to do it, did not tell the other man where they were going, or when they would be back, or what they were going to have on board, because the ocean is so big, and with the curvature of the earth, you'd say that man's down under the horizon 14 miles away from a sailing ship. And so that the sea kept his secrets. The people then who went to sea, and were going to produce enormous wealth by the "synergetics" of getting resources that exist over here that don't exist at home, and other resources that exist at home that seem to have no usefulness and they bring these two together and suddenly they produce something of enormous advantage, and great wealth is then generated. So, when I was young, the expression still was very, very prevalent, because I actually grew up with just the tail end of the clipper ship times. And the saying, "Just wait til my ship comes in" one ship in and it's a fortune. So, it was an enormous big risk to build that thing, but if she could endure, it would work. But you didn't want at no time at all when you go to sea, you find that the people who were able to build the very best ships had to be very powerful overlords on the land. Because they had to be able to say, "I'm going to build a ship." And they had to be able to say "I want all of you people to produce all you woodworkers come down and build my ship. And I want all you metal workers to come work on my ship. I want all you people who have been sewing and making clothes, I want you to get to making sails for my ship. They had to command the whole economy, and they had to say, now all you people that grow food do it for the people who are working on my ship. It had to be a very powerful overlord.

And to consolidate they had to have very good advisor, very good designer who was well appraised of the experiences of others before us. So he builds his great risky ship. Then there is another overlord , who isn't nearly as powerful, and he's very jealous of him, so he says "This is easy, I'm going to just build a smaller ship, and I'm going to wait outside the harbor until the night before he gets home, and we'll just take him over." And piracy became very popular. And, simply a question, on the water incidentally, at no time historically could the people on the land anywhere enforce their laws out on the water any further than you could throw something a projectile and the three mile limit and so forth. But three quarters of the earth is outside the law, and the people who then lived in that water-ocean world really became world people were inherently outlaws. And you find that the top ones are called sovereigns, and the other ones are just pirates. So the great pirate became sovereign and gained a great deal of respect; in fact they told everyone in the world just exactly how you carry on. And they set the standards. But finally what came about that changed a lot of this is mathematics.

The, I did not talk to you about the Arabic numerals, did I? The Arabic numerals and the Roman numerals. You're familiar with the Roman numerals, but did you ever try to do any multiplication with Roman numerals? Or division? How did you get on? You don't get on. The Roman numerals were invented again I've talked about power structure. The power structure man could have anybody, he could be very ignorant, a slave and say, I want you to stand here, and every time a sheep goes by, make a scratch. It was a scoring system and it had to do with things that kept life going. This was the wealth. So every time a bag of wheat goes by you make a scratch. And then there was a supervisor, and he'd come along and make a secondary kind of his check mark. This is why we have the "v" check mark today.

So, we have the scoring, and people, the whole Mediterranean world, the Roman empire is using this scoring system. Not until 700 A.D. did we come into what you and I were taught historically was civilization around that Mediterranean World in 700 A.D. the Arabic numerals began to come in, but they were employed by people as a shorthand for the roman numerals. So it was easier to go like that than to make three marks. And they were just thought of that way. The Arabic numerals, however, I'm quite they had the cipher, and in the scoring system you can't eat "no sheep" so you didn't need a scoring symbol for "no sheep." You didn't want to know exactly how many "no sheep" there were. There was no need for it. So the cipher had absolutely no meaning to these people who used roman numerals because it was a scoring system. So they thought that the cipher of the Arabic numerals was some sort of a decoration, sort of a period that you put at the end of your work or whatever it is. And, so the Arabic numerals, then, came into the Roman world, the total Mediterranean world in 700 A.D. It was not until 500 years later, 1200 A.D. that a treatise is written by a Latin in North Africa explaining the function of the cipher.

Now, my own speculative, going back into things of archeology of the sea, which I have been so interested in, and the evolution of the design of ships at various places due to the kinds of woods they had and the kinds of water they had the fish or whatever it might be (I'm not forgetting my Arabic numerals and so forth,) but, just as I mentioned earlier, an archeology of the sea where I was very fundamentally aware as a sailor that in the, they were building ships in the Sea of Arabia, exactly as they described being built in the Bible.

When human beings did go out on the water and were safely back, they began to like that particular ship very, very much. And you couldn't get those people who were building the ships, and sailing them, to change once they had found a fairly successful one. So, I found that the boats all around the world, they were quite different as you went around one cape into another the fishing conditions were different, the seas were different, the different woods to work with. And so they were fascinating to me, the different types there were around the world, but they had been holding steady for thousands of years. And I could see the interrelationship, and I could see which one came before the other. So I saw then there really was a visible evolution, an archeology, and the sea was still operating over the thousands of years, and the land one was over long ago, and we're just unburying it uncovering it and trying to put some strands together. But this was something from which you could really get tremendous information from. The fact that you could carry those cargoes enormous distances, and that people were still using ships in exactly the same way they had been one can still go to India today and still see the numbers of the extraordinary boats of yesterday that have been running the monsoon seas for thousands of those captains say they have been sailing between Africa and India for 10,000 years. That's their own reckoning. But there has been very, very little evolutionary change, and you learn exactly which ship has come before the other, and why they the kind of winds there were, the conditions that they did what they did, and so I became tremendously interested in being able to explain history from the water side in contradistinction to trying to piece it together archaeologically on the land side. Though there were relatively few people there it had to make sense, it was an engineering kind of logic that would be much more revealing, I felt, than the kinds of things that people could make with their superstitions, and so forth on the land. They could kid themselves into even though this is historically the wait it was, it didn't necessarily have to be very logical.

The, I come back to the abacus. I am quite confident, I spoke to you about the probability of life really beginning on those South Sea Islands, and what I'm going to explain to you now, is tending to prove to be correct. My theory of a half century goes is getting to be very, highly substantiated.

During World War I, beginning at the outset of World War I, the Germans controlled the Caroline Islands in the Pacific, and on one of the Caroline Islands I think it was the most eastward of them, the German commander suddenly found himself being the English ships would come in and take him over. He wanted to get word quickly because World War I had not been announced. He wanted to get word to his commander who was on an island l,000 miles to the westward. There was a legend on the islands that the people, the sailors with their outrigger canoes, very fast-sailing prowers that they were able to go off shore, off of soundings, they could somehow or other were able to navigate, and... So he gave a message to the leading navigator boatman there, and asked him if he could get this message to his commander 1,000 miles westward. The answer came back in a few weeks. He had done so! This is the first time the Europeans ever knew that the Pacific Island sailors did know how to sail off soundings, and work on celestial navigation of some kind. There was an enormous European conceit that went along with the Magellans and the Drakes and so forth going around the world seeming to be very superior with their ships. And thinking about those naked people in the Pacific, "They don't know anything they are very ignorant people naked."

Since World War II when the United States had a very large mandate to deal with in the Pacific, the navies had to do a great deal of work, and it is now generally conceded by the students of Maritime Science, that navigation clearly began in the South Seas, in the Pacific. There are various things that I can tell you about this that are to me very fascinating, because I became a student of this subject.

The, I'm going to take a large map of the world and we can go, for instance, to my map over here. The Pacific, the great Pacific basin, all this enormous area in here here we're looking at it, the South Seas are in here, and in this enormous Pacific basin there is something very important. The language is all the same language for this enormous area. There are alliterations and dialects that come from it, but it is all one language. There is a Professor who was at my Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. And then he went out to the East-West Institute in Hawaii, and he was a great expert on that language, and he also then, put the problem, then, into the computer. Because you can tell, if you are an expert in languages, what is an alliteration what is the prominent way of saying this and the ignorant way of saying it how things change. Taking all the pronunciations of the Pacific and using vectors, he found that all the languages of the Pacific, which are all the same, all went back to the island of New Britain, just east of New Guinea right here.