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Most people probably know wood floats, but don’t know how far it floats. Yet trees, in the form of driftwood, are the ‘Wooden Mariners’ that were plying the Seven Seas long before the first human thought to take a ride on water.

I learned about seafaring trees as a boy in the late 1940s and early 1950s in western Oregon (USA), where I often visited the Pacific Ocean. The place I went to was a small, secluded beach tucked into an alcove at the base of a high, sandstone cliff, which had a narrow, mostly hidden trail leading from its top, down through a dense pine forest and tall shrubs to the sandy beach. For years, a mountain of drifted trees and parts thereof lay between the base of the cliff and the beach, a seemingly impenetrable barrier over which I had to climb to reach the shore.

From whence did the trees come? How did they get to sea? How long did they travel as they circumnavigated the great waters? How did they end up here, in this great pile, this seeming graveyard upon which I now stand? Where will they go if they return to sea?

These are some of the questions I used to ponder because I also saw many a drifting tree being smashed into the rocky headlands again and again by wild waves, splintering their extremities before stranding them on a seaward-jutting promontory. When next I visited the coast, however, they were gone. Yet seldom did I find such a mangled tree as one of these in the pile of driftwood on the beach, no matter how often I examined it.

Then, one year, the driftwood pile was gone—vanished without a trace, swept mysteriously away by a winter storm, never to return. Now past my mid-sixties, I still wonder where the driftwood trees went and what their fate was.

Besides working along the Pacific Coast for three years as a young man, I have, over the decades, crossed the Atlantic twice by ship, worked along the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and have experienced the shores of the Indian Ocean and the Sea of Japan. But never, in all those miles of travel, have I seen the prodigious amounts of driftwood that accentuated my youthful sojourns to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, despite the fact that the ships’ logs of early sea captains and the journals of explorers chronicled massive amounts of drifted wood upon many an ocean shore.

Where, I began to wonder as I traveled to distant strands, is all the driftwood that graced the memories of my childhood? Although it is today largely gone due to human interference with Nature’s ancient connection between the forest and the sea, a few Wooden Mariners still ply the world’s oceans as in the days of old.

Now I will tell you the seafaring part of their story. Borne on the floodwaters of rivers in near and distant lands, drifting trees, entrained in the currents of water and wind, travel the world’s oceans, as they have done for millennia. In the north Pacific, for example, drifting trees that escape the inshore tidal currents enter the open ocean, where they may eventually contact the North Pacific Gyre. Once captured by this huge, circulating vortex, large trees can remain afloat for long periods and cover great distances to come ashore in such exotic places as the Hawaiian Islands. Other drifting trees that land on the shores of the Hawaiian Islands are indigenous to the Philippines, Japan, and Malaysia.

In olden times, the beached Douglas firs, western redcedars, and coast redwoods from the Pacific Northwest, of what today is the United States, were even integrated into the customs and rituals of the oceanic cultures. Ancient Hawaiians prized these huge trees because local chiefs preferred them for construction of their large, double canoes—once a symbol of wealth and power...

Chris Maser

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