The precise year of the hammock's invention is impossible to tell, but estimates of 1000 B.C.E. are considered reasonable, with the Mayan Indians most often credited with the invention. However, there is no evidence for this, and the hammock's creation is often attributed to a later inventor. In Greece, Alcibiades (c. 450-404 B.C.E.) was a student of Socrates, and some sources attribute its invention to him.
Western European society was first introduced to the hammock in 1492 when Christopher Columbus returned from the Bahamas where he had found the native people resting and sleeping in them. He took some hammocks back to Europe and within a century or so they were standard issue for European sailors. In the cramped ships of the time their value was obvious, as they could be stowed away or hooked up for use almost instantly. More than any other form of bed, they allowed sailors to sleep in paradoxical harmony with the rocking movement of their ship, hanging downward under the pull of gravity while the ship rolled, pitched, and yawed around them.
Arriving in the wake of Columbus in 1500, the Portuguese explorer Pero Vaz de Caminha saw a Caribbean native asleep in a suspended fishing net. He called this innovation a rede de dormir, or "net for sleeping," and rede remains the Portuguese name for a hammock. At much the same time the Spanish conquistadors were also encountering hammocks used by Caribbean Indians. The term they used was homoca, itself derived from hamaca, the Indian name for the hamak, or hammok, tree whose bark supplied the fibers from which the hammocks were woven, Aside from twenty-first-century materials being adopted, the hammock's design has remained largely unchanged over the centuries.
