The Manteño were a West-Ecuadorean maritime culture flourishing between the 800's AD -- when Europe was being ransacked by the Vikings -- and the time of the Spanish conquistadores, who arrived in 1526AD.
| As early as 2400 B.C. the people of coastal Ecuador took a critical step: they began to voyage on the ocean. Eventually they were landing on Isla de la Plata, an island 22 miles off shore. Not only did they start landing there, they began colonizing the island and building ceremonial sites. |  Chart of the Manteño region of northwestern South America. |
| The precise beginning of the era of the great sailing rafts is still unknown, but what is known is that a steady progression in the sophistication of societies led to the rise, in 800 A.D., of the Manteño-Huancavilca: an entire culture of voyaging merchants. At its height the Manteño culture spanned the entire coastline in a series of chiefdoms. |  Image of Salango, Ecuador, from Sun-Wind Travel.com. |
| The Manteño were a 'league of merchants.' In the modern day they might be called a cartel. They organized mainly for commercial gain. Their business was the highly lucrative Spondylus trade. The Spondylus conch shell could be converted into beautiful burgundy-colored ornaments, and everybody wanted it, especially the Inka. Spondylus lived in abundance in the home waters of the Manteño, they had the skill to dive for it, and they had the ships—the balsa raft—to move their merchandise. The Manteño ranged up and down the coast of South America for 700 years, buying and selling, trading in Spondylus. |  A spondylus shell. |
| But then one day in 1526, the Manteño sent out one of their balsa rafts and the history of The Americas was altered irreversibly. At sea, they spotted an unusual ship coming over the northern horizon. It measured 50 feet in length and it carried the flag of the Crown of Spain: The Conquistadors had arrived. It was the end of everything. Nowhere in known history has the meeting of two ships at sea heralded cultural change of such unimaginable, unthinkable scope. Within ten years of this first meeting the Inka Empire had fallen, ninety percent of the Manteño had died of European disease, and the Spanish Empire controlled the entire Pacific Coast. The giant raft the Spaniards overtook on that first fateful day in 1526 was a freighter from the port of Salango. It carried gold, silver, fine cloth, and Spondylus. The Spaniards noted that the raft carried 'sails like that of our own ships,' and that the raft was sailing north on a trading voyage. |  Sketch of the first encounter of the Spaniards and the Manteño, by Cameron M. Smith. |
| Over the past 20 years archaeologists and historians have demonstrated conclusively that the Manteño made contacts with Central America on trading voyages, perhaps as far as present-day Mexico. Some of the most remarkable research has centered on artifacts called ax monies. These were tiny slices of bronze, shaped like miniature ax heads. Typically, they were found at archaeological sites, wrapped up in packets of five, ten, and twenty, like packs of dollar bills. Ax monies were produced in both ancient West Mexico and ancient Ecuador, and both cultures used a precise recipe of arsenic and bronze to create a unique color in the thin slices of metal. This color was critical: It gave the ax monies authenticity, much in the same way intricate engravings give authenticity to our currency today, as a way to prevent counterfeiting. The ax monies produced in West Mexico were of the same, precise composition as those produced in Ecuador. |  Ecuadorean 'ax monies.' |
| The goal of The Manteño Expedition is to build the most authentic sailing raft possible, and then test it on a simulated trading voyage to Western Mexico. This has never been done before, and we feel that most of the data produced by previous experiments is fundamentally flawed and does not give an accurate picture of the ancient balsa raft and its performance at sea. |  The 1998 vessel 'La Manteña-Huancavilca', off the coast of Colombia. |
| Several experimental sailing raft voyages have been made in the past, most notably the famous Kon-Tiki voyage of 1947, made by Thor Heyerdahl. But these voyages all sailed to Polynesia, across the vast Pacific, an area in which the ancient Manteño did not sail. Essentially, all of these experiments were undertaken in the wrong conditions. The balsa raft’s real function was to trade up and down the coast of Central America. A voyage across the vast Pacific is a daring exploit, no doubt, but it is nothing at all like a voyage up the Central American coast. An experimental voyage to Mexico would require a balsa raft to navigate around reefs and rocks and to sail into contrary winds and currents, maneuvers that no experimental raft has ever made in the past. |  A crewman works at night during the 1998 voyage. |
| We propose a fundamentally new look at the balsa raft. We do not believe that any balsa raft built for experimental purposes in the latter half of the 20th Century was a correct interpretation of the raft seen by the Conquistadors on that first fateful day in 1526. Nor do we believe that any of those vessels--including even our own--would have had the performance capabilities to complete the trading voyage to Western Mexico. To our mind, the true Manteño sailing raft remains undiscovered. We feel that there is the gaping void in the understanding of the ancient people and the possibilities of long-distane trade. New data is desperately needed to fulfill this void. Our experiments can go a long way toward providing that data. Specifically, we desire to produce a single, well-reasoned document that will describe the true Manteño sailing raft, and the feasibility of a trading voyage to Central America and West Mexico. |  |