Indigenous Maritime Culture in
North America

Lincoln Paine, Maritime Historian

Wednesday, May 13, 2026 at 7:00 pm
Register for Zoom Presentation

Lincoln Paine

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Native American (perhaps a man named Wasco) with a dugout canoe near Celilo Falls
on the Columbia River in Oregon, 1897. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Friends of Merrymeeting Bay’s (FOMB) final presentation of our 29th annual Winter Speaker Series: Indigenous Maritime Culture in North America features Lincoln Paine, maritime historian. Winter Speaker Series presentations are held via Zoom and accessible via hyperlink at the top of the FOMB web page: www.fomb.org. This event takes place Wednesday, May 13th at 7 pm.

Before the 1950s, if you wanted to get to the Americas, you had to come by boat. This was true for 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 for 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, as well as cultural and economic exchange. This talk will sketch the broad outlines of Native Americans’ waterway and watercraft use over the many millennia before Europeans even imagined such a thing as the Americas.

Lincoln Paine is a maritime historian, author, editor, and curator whose books include award-winning The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World, and Ships of the World: An Historical Encyclopedia. Paine is President of the North American Society for Oceanic History (NASOH) and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Oceans and Coastal Law, University of Maine School of Law.

From 2009 to 2012, Paine was guest curator and archivist of the Norman H. Morse Collection of Ocean Liner Materials at the Osher Map Library, University of Southern Maine. He is chair of the board of the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine, which has been named one of the ten best maritime museums in the world. Paine has lectured on topics across the broad spectrum of maritime enterprise, including literature of the sea, exploration, museum curatorship, decorative arts, maritime law, trade, and naval history.

A frequent guest in academic settings, he has spoken at NOVA University of Lisbon; Ocean University of China, Qingdao; Leiden University, the Netherlands; Tulane Law School; Tufts University; College of the Atlantic; the Naval War College; and the U.S. Naval Academy, among others. Paine has participated in public affairs forums including the Commonwealth Club of California and Times of India LitFest as well as frequently addressing meetings of the North American Society for Oceanic History (NASOH), the International Maritime History Association, and the World History Association. A graduate of Columbia College, NY with a BA in Latin, Paine has helped organize four tall ship events. Before turning to writing fulltime, he spent fourteen years as a non-fiction and reference book editor in New York.

FOMB hosts our Winter Speaker Series October-May, on the second Wednesday of each month. Due to the Covid 19 pandemic and ability for participants to attend from out of the area, the series continues via Zoom.
Speaker Series presentations are free, open to the public. Visit www.fomb.org to see speaker biographies, full event schedules, video recordings of past presentations, become a member, and learn more about how you can help protect beautiful Merrymeeting Bay and the Gulf of Maine.

Stay tuned for FOMB’s 2016 Summer Outside Series schedule!

For more information contact FOMB at 207-666-3372 or edfomb@comcast.net.