Historia Cultural del Mar

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theSEA the sea the SEA reaktion books Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2011 Copyright © John Mack 2011 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by cpi/Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Mack, John, 1949– The sea : a cultural history. 1. Ocean. 2. Ocean and civilization. 3. Seafaring life. I.

Title 551.4'6-dc22 isbn 978 1 86189 809 8 Contents Preface 7 Introduction 13 1 Different Seas? 36 2 Concepts of the Sea 72 3 Navigation and the Arts of Performance 105 4 Ships as Societies 136 5 Beaches 165 6 The Sea on the Land 188 References 219 Bibliography 242 Acknowledgements 258 Photo Acknowledgements 260 Index 261 7 Preface There are two separate strands which have come together in the plan- ning of this book – or rather two separate, but in the end related questions. The first is a negative one: why did no one apparently think it worth settling on the large island of Madagascar in the western Indian Ocean until late in human history?

It is an island well-endowed by nature and, other than being inhabited by ferocious mosquitoes along its coasts, not inconvenienced by the lions, leopards or other predators that stalk the hinterlands of the nearby African continent. Its famous lemurs are benign residents posing no physical threat to human settlement. A second question is why – coincidentally at about the same time as Madagascar was finally being colonized – did the people of East Anglia take to burying a leader in a huge ship on the top of a hill?

Sutton Hoo is a pleasant place above a sheltered inlet, a good place to bury a prominent person who would have been familiar with the maritime world along this part of the English coastline. But why drag a huge ship all the way up there to do it? The questions occurred in this sequence but at different moments several decades apart. The first obliges a reconsideration of what it means to be at sea and how the maritime world is constituted; the second implies bringing the subject back onto land to think about how the maritime and terrestrial worlds interact.

The movement of the book that follows reproduces that sequence: it starts by thinking about human engagement with the sea in maritime terms, rather than merely as an extension of the activities of the land; and it ends by seeking to bring together the argument round a consideration of the grand ritual gesture of ship-burial. In between it ranges widely across the literature on the human experience of the different oceans and seas.

After working in various inland parts of eastern Africa – and having had the opportunity to spend time along the Swahili coast of Kenya and latterly Tanzania – the outbreak of civil war in southern Sudan in the early 1980s made it inadvisable to continue working with pastoralist communities in what was to become a war-torn area. The opportunity arose to begin an ethnographic survey on the island of Madagascar, which in those days was mostly approached by plane from Nairobi.

The route lay over the north-west coast of the island with a clear sight of the soils leeching off the central highlands and turning the rivers and a wide semi-circle of the waters of the Mozambique Channel a distinctive brownish-red colour. Flying in to land in the highlands near the capital of Antananarivo has become the usual way of getting there. However, on subsequent visits I have been able follow an older practice and approached by sea from Zanzibar entering the ports at Mahajanga, Antsiranana (previously Diego Suárez) and, on the east coast, at Toamasina (Tamatave).

What this experience makes entirely evident is both the proximity of 'la grande île' to inhabited lands and islands in the vicinity and also the availability of a number of sheltered harbours. So the island is vast, neither remote, lacking appropriate harbours (albeit dispersed ones) nor short of resources. True, it lies at the extremities of the monsoonal system which linked together the trading practices of the wider Indian Ocean world. Being off the beaten track, however, was not a criterion which limited the exploration and settlement of the Pacific, the North Atlantic or other areas which were colonized much earlier than Madagascar.

Madagascar was not occupied until very late in human history – probably only within the last 1,200 to 1,500 years. The big question which has preoccupied those concerned with the antiquity of human activity in this part of the Indian Ocean concerns the question of who first colonized the island in the context of increased precision about when the event might have happened. Even if we set aside the questionable assumption that it was a single event, the whole detec- tive cast to this search is hard to avoid. There are a limited number of candidates who might have committed the deed, and, while the scenarios are conflicting, all have persuasive aspects.

Much is down to the imagi- native powers of reconstruction of the researcher and the assessment of new pieces of information as they arise. However, as in the standard 8 The Sea mystery story, none of the current occupants is saying anything defini- tive: Madagascar stands out amongst island populations in retaining virtually no oral tradition about sea voyaging from anywhere else. Even relatively recent arrivals retain only the vaguest history of having come from elsewhere. And for inhabitants of an island nation with an immensely long coastline, very few contemporary Malagasy derive a living from the exploitation of the sea itself.

Contrast that with, for instance, the Polynesians' sense of their origins and connectedness. There, the accounting of ancestral voy- aging is an established part of oral tradition and distinctions between first occupants and later arrivals is part of the understanding of hier- archical relationships. Individual clans may be identified, as in Fiji, as people of the sea rather than the land, expressing – or at least imply- ing – their more recent arrival. In New Zealand the Maori recount their genealogical descent, linking themselves across the generations to the voyagers who first settled the islands, and thence backwards in time to the divinities from whom the Maori derived.

So there are other fundamental questions to be posed than those of a 'whodunnit' kind. 'Why not?' is surely an equally pressing and complex issue to be raised – why was an island the size of Madagascar running parallel to the coast of Africa at a distance of only 400 kilo- metres, lying within the compass of the Indian Ocean's monsoonal winds, not occupied much earlier than it was? And, beyond that, why does the sea not feature in symbolic or political contexts amongst the peoples of Madagascar in the way it does elsewhere?

The fact of Madagascar being both accessible and thinly occupied was, after all, precisely what made it so attractive to the pirates who based themselves in the Bay of Antongil as late as the early eighteenth century, returning for what would nowadays be called 'rest and recreation' from preying on merchant shipping in the rest of the Indian Ocean or pilgrim ships heading to or from Mecca. It is in trying to understand the answers to these questions that the wider treatment in this book arises, for what is implied is not a specific set of historical reflections but a more funda- mental rethink of the ways in which maritime cultures are configured by scholars.

Teaching at the University of East Anglia led to the second reflec- tion which brackets this volume. East Anglia has a rich maritime context and at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk a major archaeological site of international significance, now run as a National Trust site. In a way it is actually Preface 9 rather a disappointing place to visit since one of the most exciting finds there was only recovered in skeletal form – the ship-burials dis- covered beneath several mounds, the excavations now backfilled and the mounds reconstructed on the hill overlooking an inlet near Woodbridge.

They were Anglo-Saxon burials, not Viking ones, but none the less conform to the practice otherwise characteristic of elite burials in Scandinavia. The large and impressive grave goods are also missing from the site, being regarded as of much greater importance than their local context might imply and now placed under the steward- ship of the British Museum – though parts are lent back for temporary exhibition at the site on an annual basis. Interestingly, the body of the deceased was not found in the excavation either, having apparently succumbed to being buried in less than favourable environmental conditions. So what remains is enigmatic.

But the fact of the burial being of a ship, a very large one at that, and apparently one which once sailed on the local stretches of water and possibly more widely in the North Sea, has attracted less attention than the sumptuous cargo with which it and its human occupant were buried. The voluminous litera- ture on the site and the finds discovered there has very little to offer in explanation of the ship. Who was buried there in such splendour has seemed a much more pressing question. Ships are a very familiar image in coastal communities and no doubt have emblematic and other significance.

But why go to all the effort of decommissioning one from maritime usage and burying it in a difficult location? As with the issues surrounding the occupation of Madagascar, to understand the signifi- cance of a ship when not in its normal milieu at sea seemed to direct investigation back to what it meant to be on the seas in the first place. One overriding reflection was that an understanding of the pre- industrial engagement with the sea is considerably hampered by assumptions derived from the experience of steam ships and modern developments in cartography and marine survey.

These can quite unwit- tingly colour understanding of how people find their way at sea, how they conceptualize it, the kinds of relationships to the maritime environ- ment implied and the observational skills appropriate to being on it. Furthermore, the reasons why people might be at sea in pre-industrial contexts may not be immediately perceptible and interpretation of the social relationships which sustain people inhabiting the sea may be skewed. The introduction of steam to the maritime world may seem to have added speed, efficiency and perhaps increased safety to the 10 The Sea business of being on the oceans; but in practice it did much more than that.

This has all led me to take as a theme the creative and imaginative implications of being on the sea rather than – some might say, at the expense of – a more conventional approach through an account of the technology of ships and boats. Indeed, in some of what follows it is contrasting understandings of technological means and their efficacy which is at issue. Even the compass, which would seem a fundamental technological innovation transforming human experience of the mari- time world in paradigmatic ways, was far from being recognized as such by all navigators.

Thus two questions, arising at different times and in quite differ- ent situations, directed attention back to the human engagement with the sea in a variety of cultural and temporal contexts. Exploring the implications of these questions was the starting point for the voyage recorded in the chapters that follow. Preface 11 13 Introduction People on land think of the sea as a void, an emptiness haunted by mythological hazards. The sea marks the end of things. It is where life stops and the unknown begins. It is a necessary, comforting fiction to conceive of the sea as the residence of gods and monsters – Aeolus, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the Goodwins, the Bermuda Triangle.

In fact the sea is just an alternative known world. Its topography is as intricate as that of land, its place names as particular and evocative, its maps and signposts rather more reliable. jonathan raban, Coasting (1987)1 This is a book about the sea and about the ways in which human beings interact because of it, navigate their course across it, live on and around it. It is, in short, about the variety of ways in which people 'inhabit' the sea.

Its milieu is that of salt water as opposed to fresh water and it takes as its terrestrial limit the interface between the sea and the land, the inter-tidal regions, the beaches, promontories, estuaries and ports which abut the sea, rather than the activities which take place further inland. We might define the subject as the sea itself and the places where the sound and 'smell' of the sea are pervasive. The book is, to a significant extent, concerned with a sensory world for it is fundamentally about the experience of the seas and the oceans.

It is concerned, in short, with what have been described elsewhere as 'saltwater people'.2 Of course, what happens around or even on the sea is often strongly coloured by what happens on the land. People cannot live entirely at sea without some access to the land and its products. Perhaps the closest to an exclusively maritime culture is that of the Bajau Laut, the so-called 'sea gypsies' of the waters of south-east Asia. Their life is led almost entirely on boats or in houses raised on stilts above salt-water estuaries, exploiting the resources of the surrounding lagoons and reefs or moving goods from place to place (illus.

1).3 There are very few occasions on which they are obliged to set foot on terra firma. Although in modern times fewer people pursue this maritime life, those who do remain reliant on the historical role of middlemen who arrange essential sup- plies of fresh food and water and conduct all negotiations with land- based populations on their behalf.

Likewise, sea ports around the world have adapted to catering for the needs of mariners who develop a pass- ing acquaintance with the land, its pleasures and resources, but rarely stray far beyond the immediate confines of harbours, other than when docked at their home ports.4 Those, indeed, who have spent significant periods exclusively aboard ship and out of contact with land, especially before the days of refrigeration, were exposed to the risks of scurvy and other conditions resulting from a lack of ready access to the fresh food and drinking water available on land.

As they were obliged to restock when the occasion presented itself, many of the encounters between the European explorers who took to the seas in the so-called Age of Discoveries and indigenous peoples occurred close to coasts and were occasioned by the need of provisioning. None the less whilst the relationship to the land is essential to the habitation of the sea, being at sea is not simply a version of being on land. Furthermore, although the experience of the sea may be different from that of the land, the historical engagement with it is itself far from uniform in different maritime contexts.

The exploitation of marine resources, the techniques and strategies devised to meet the challenges 14 The Sea 1 'The Floating Home of the Sea Gypsies', from Walter Grainge White, The Sea Gypsies of Malaya (London, 1922). of being at sea – even the ways in which it is conceptualized – are necessarily highly variable for different maritime peoples. Despite this, in writings about the sea the experience of western Europeans – and of Mediterranean mariners in particular – has tended to predominate. The voyaging was itself inspired by a complex of essentially terrestrial factors amongst which commerce, exploitation and empire have always been identified as prominent.

The implicit understanding has usually been that people set off in boats inspired to do so by some compelling rationale deriving from their experience of the land. In European terms, the eighteenth century might at first glance seem to be the exception in the story of this engagement with the sea. Enlightenment thinkers were to elevate 'curiosity' in the roster of intellectual motivations – the British Museum, for example, was estab- lished in 1753 as a resource for the 'curious' and its galleries are an index of where such maritime voyages of exploration led.

Yet such explorations as those undertaken by Captain Cook and contempo- raries of different European nationalities and backgrounds were not acts of pure inquisitiveness. The modern idea of curiosity as an intel- lectual indulgence with no more worldly inspiration misrepresents the historical circumstances.5 Inquisitiveness and acquisitiveness were intimate bedfellows. Being at sea for long periods, then as now, was not something envisaged for the pure thrill of it.

The very acts of commissioning and funding such prolonged voyages of exploration in the first place implied the need to open up new markets, to gain access to scarce resources and to move goods between distant ports and their hinterlands. It was not the sea itself which was to be explored and charted; the goal was to first establish and then to realize the potential of the islands and coastlines which provided its margins. Thus, voyagers like Captain Vancouver, who set sail from Falmouth, England in 1791 bound for the north-west coast of the Americas, were essentially charged with charting the islands and the inlets through the so-called Inland Passage.

It took all of twelve months to get there sailing the length of the Atlantic to the tip of Africa, traversing the breadth of the Indian Ocean to Australia and New Zealand, and travelling north- wards again by way of the islands of Polynesia, to make landfall on the American coast north of San Francisco, then a Spanish enclave. But that was, in a way, precisely the point. The inconvenience of a route which was so prolonged – especially so in the days of sail – compelled the search for other solutions.

The British and the Spanish had already Introduction 15 been in conflict over the right to trade with the indigenous populations, particularly from the base established at Nootka Sound on the seaward side of what was to become Vancouver Island. For the British the lack of ready contact between the north-west coast and the trading stations at Hudson's Bay and elsewhere in Canada was problematical. An earlier survey by Captain Cook had failed to reveal any linkage by sea across or around the continent.

Captain Vancouver was sent to settle the matter, entrusted with the mission of obtaining accurate information with respect to the nature and extent of any water-communication which may tend, in any consider- able degree, to facilitate intercourse, for the purposes of commerce, between the north-west coast, and the country upon the opposite side of the continent.6 His conclusion after three months of detailed charting was that no such routes existed.

It is perhaps no surprise that, writing in 1817, Mary Shelley chose to locate the last sighting of her Frankenstein monster on the frozen wastes of the Arctic as it/he rushed off, loosed forever as another adventurer – the fictional Walton – was forced to turn back, unsuccessful in the quest for the apocryphal North West Passage. However, the possibility of a way through the frozen waters was a prize that continued to obsess European powers – notably, in the early nineteenth century, the Russians.

The sea, then, was as much somewhere to be endured as some- where to be explored in the quest for distant coasts and passages – and, arguably, it was as much the very acts of endurance on such extended voyages, which for most could only be imagined, that elevated argonauts such as Captain Cook to lionized status. They returned with tangible witness to their discoveries – the natural and artificial (or man-made) 'curiosities' which they had assembled on voyages to distant foreign shores and which were to be bestowed on museums, botanical gardens and zoos, many established specifically to receive these cargos.

Whalers were to explore the same seas, but for the moment the voyages of explor- ation were more about the exploitation of the land than any resources located in the oceans themselves. The sea, in these constructions of it, was empty: a space not a place. The sea is not somewhere with 'history', at least not recorded history. There are no footprints left upon it; it consumes and secretes those who 16 The Sea come to grief on its surface and the vessels in which they have sailed. It is not monumentalized. Literature and hymnology are replete with such reflection, rendering the sea a symbolic and metaphorical narrative device rather than a real place.

The predominant Western view of the sea might be characterized as that of a quintessential wilderness, a void without community other than that temporarily established on boats crewed by those with the shared experience of being tossed about on its surface, and a space without ruins or other witness to the events which may have taken place on its surface. Victor Hugo remarks in The ToilersoftheSea (1866): 'The solitudes of the ocean are melancholy: tumult and silence combined. What happens there no longer concerns the human race.'7 Sea, in the words of the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, needs to be historicized. Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory?

Sirs, In that grey vault. The sea. The sea Has locked them up. The sea is History.8 Or again, in a stanza from Mary Oliver's poem 'The Waves': The sea isn't a place but a fact, and a mystery9 The possibility of realizing a 'history' of the sea is neatly presaged in another and much earlier literary context. In an evocative passage in Gargantua and Pantagruel François Rabelais, writing in the mid-sixteenth century, talks of a ship approaching an ice bank in the frozen waters of the north. The passengers gather on deck and imagine they can hear indistinct voices and cries.

As the noises become clearer, they realize that what they are hearing are the sounds of a great sea battle of the past, frozen in the Arctic ice as they were uttered and only now being slowly released with its melting.10 However, if a primary purpose of this book is to reflect on the human engagement with the sea, it is only partly a matter of recover- ing forgotten archival histories. Indeed, many of the parts of the world considered here had no systems of writing until more recent times.

Introduction 17 They may escape 'history' in the sense of not being participant in objective documentary accounting until brought into contact with literate mariners; and even then it is more likely to be their terrestrial activities than their maritime ones which are the focus of documen- tation – the land-based Bajau are more completely documented than their maritime namesakes. None the less, many maritime or partly maritime peoples do preserve detailed oral chronicles of the sea which may go back across the generations.

For instance, Maori chronicling of the voyaging which brought them to the islands of New Zealand may list the achievements of twenty or more generations, the recount - ing aided by a notched stick on which each indentation has a dis- tinctive pattern representing one generation.

In some aspects such narratives may be regarded as merging into the mythological; the Maori trace their maritime origins back to the divinities from whom they ultimately derive.11 However, to recount this past is not simply to recite a dispassionate list of historical events; for Maori, as for other Polynesians, it is to be filled with a profound sense of a maritime ancestry, to be infused with a past which is fundamentally linked to the sea in a way which diverges from the Caribbean sense of the absence of appropriate linkage. Even without contemporaneous writ- ten accounts, this is the sea as revelatory of history, not as an instru- ment of its concealment.

Such assertion of ancestral connection to the sea is in itself one of the ways in which people 'inhabit' it, even if they are otherwise largely terrestrial. In contemporary times this may be less a physical connection than it was in the past, but for Maori it remains for all that a deep-seated – we might even say, an 'existential' – bond.

Histories of the Seas None the less, if the historical disciplines have struggled to match Polynesian genealogical detail in their accounting of human engage- ment with the sea, it is still historians and historically inclined geographers who have been able to assemble the richest material through which to think about the phenomenon of the sea as a social, cultural and especially a commercial space.

The inspiration for some of this derives from the influential writing of Fernand Braudel, which has attracted proponents and critics in equal measure.12 Either way, 18 The Sea his work stands as a significant moment in historical thinking about the seas – or rather about one sea in particular, the Mediterranean. In many accounts of the region it has seemed more appropriate to refer not to a single sea but to the many which arguably make up the Mediter- ranean basin and the surrounding regions, each of them already with a separate geographical name.

But that would be to misrepresent Braudel's basic thesis which, whilst recognizing diversity, comes in the end to assert the fundamental unity of the Mediterranean. It is also, perhaps, to misrepresent his topic, for the sea (or seas) is less his focus than the wider region which includes an extensive hinter- land, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II13 as he entitled his major work (1949). What this encouraged is atten- tion to the distinctive and interrelated historical continuities of the Mediterranean region as a whole.

His approach was less preoccupied with the narrative aspects of history – with anything associated with the initiatives of Philip ii as an individual actor, for instance – and more concerned to ascribe causal priority to the environment. Thus, as city states develop and decline, as regional economies boom and bust, the underlying disparities of resources across the region remain the same and set in motion the need for extensive trading networks as far north as the Baltic and, via the Black Sea, deep into the Russian heartlands.

The Mediterranean is expanded by the river systems which penetrate deep into Europe – and Braudel's focus is princi- pally directed northwards rather than towards Africa. Thus, the merchant ships with their polyglot crews which criss-crossed the Mediterranean itself throughout recorded history were responding to the diverse hands which nature had dealt out across a vast region, not just of islands and coastal areas, but of the continent itself. The Mediterranean, as the word itself implies, was simply the space in between these lands.

Of course, much of this historical debate has centred on the Mediterranean to the exclusion of other seas and oceans, though there have been some attempts to apply the same approaches elsewhere, notably to the Indian Ocean.14 Yet, in practice, the seas are portrayed either as the backdrop to the stage on which the real action is seen to take place – that is, the land – or they are portrayed simply as the means of connection between activities taking place at coasts and in their interiors.

The characteristics of the sea itself, the nature of man's interactions with it, the alliances and liaisons which take place on it Introduction 19 and because of it, the contacts effected, cemented or cast asunder, are all largely absent from this historiography.15 In parallel with this, a form of national history writing has also conspired to diminish the attention to the seas as globalized trans- national spaces that might have developed.

This history is largely focused on the emergence of national navies, imperial ambitions and to some extent merchant shipping which, because they are instruments of state- hood, tend to be cast in terms of admirals and captains, their deeds in defence of the nation and the sea battles in which they and their fleets have participated. Whilst the work of historians such as N.A.M. Rodger stands apart,16 there is otherwise an inherent triumphalism evident in some of this literature, especially in more popular writing. The extensive documentation of the transgressive history of pirates gives some sense of alternative aspects to the recounting of maritime history.

Yet it too is often cast in terms which, in the same vein, can appear overly romantic. To explore the range of cultural experience of the seas we need to move beyond the confines of any individual sea or oceanic system. In a world where Eurocentric preoccupations have found their way to the very heart of historical thinking, an attention to oceans in a wider context immediately opens up a globalized perspective, for oceans have themselves exercised the major role in this process.

Their history may be clouded, but their part is unarguably one of major importance.17 Well before Europeans had set out on journeys of circumnavigation, the Phoenicians had sailed round Africa and back again to the Mediterranean; the Pacific islands had been explored by Polynesian mariners who criss-crossed the Pacific occupying Rapa Nui (Easter Island) by ad 400 and Hawaii possibly a century later, and who had found and settled New Zealand by ad 1000; the Norsemen mastered the challenging waters of the North Atlantic to arrive in Newfound- land by way of Iceland and Greenland by the eleventh century; and the Chinese had sailed to the east coast of Africa a century before Vasco da Gama ventured round the Cape and into the Mozambique Channel.

The history of any one sea or ocean quickly becomes the history of others. The history of the seas has, thus, a major contribution to make to the contemporary project of seeking to understand the mechanisms of globalization.18 Given this degree of interaction and exploration even in more distant historical times, it is difficult to sustain the idea of any single 20 The Sea oceanic identity – nor should we expect such cohesiveness of culture or of historical experience. Oceans do not necessarily function to pro- mote uniformity.

They are, rather, arenas of transnational interchange.19 If Braudel saw the influence of the maritime world of the Mediterranean as contributory to a longue durée, an imprisoning conception in which human activity is seen as constrained and directed by the environ- ment, this comparative approach imparts to the seas a critical agency, revealing them as a dynamic engine of historical change. Among the historical pursuits it might be argued that maritime archaeology has a certain priority for its consistent attention to ques- tions of the role of the maritime world in promoting cultural diffusion.

Yet it, too, is restricted in its approach, being, after all, reliant either on the remains of seaborne activity preserved on land, or on seeking the marks of man's passage not on the surface but at the bottom of the sea in the vicinity of coasts and ports. The very location already compels a perspective which is unavoidably terrestrial.20 Yet, there is certainly recognition in recent archaeology of the value of adopting a perspec- tive which is imaginatively as much in the sea as on land.

Barry Cunliffe has explored the role of the peoples of the north-west Atlantic coasts in shaping what might be called a European sense of identity and of the role of the maritime sea routes in forging it.21 A number of archae- ologists working beyond Europe have been inspired by other models of human engagement with the sea to suggest expansions to European technological understandings of the engagement of coastal peoples with the sea, with their emphasis on harvesting maritime resources and enabling safe passage across its surface. A comparative approach draws attention to the richness of maritime cultures with their mix of spiritual and ontological investment in the environment of the sea.

And, indeed, the stories examined by Cunliffe and others of the Irish monks who explored the north-west Atlantic in the first millennium ad already suggest that such an ideological – or theological – engage- ment with the sea also has its parallels in Western experience. Through the cross-fertilization of ideas which arises from a comparative approach – and often one drawing on the insights of ethnographic accounts – a traditional archaeological focus on landmarks and shipwrecks is expanded.

What some envisage is an archaeology of 'seascapes', an approach to the sea that incorporates the land rather than the other way round.22 On this basis Paul Rainbird, an archaeologist with exten- sive field experience in Micronesia, has made the case for an island Introduction 21 archaeology which he sees as implying a shift from material and envi- ronmental evidence towards the lives and experience of mariners. Braudel's approach concentrates on the influence the environment has had on historical circumstances but not on the influence man has had on the environment.

In his understanding, the underlying historical realities are unified and continuous because the interactions of man and environment are portrayed as static. The focus, Rainbird suggests, needs to be placed on the people who create the material world in the first place and their perceptions of the environment, rather than the reverse.23 The ambition, however, remains a future prospect and would seem to foreshadow a move beyond the materials conventionally assessed by archaeologists. Unaided by other disciplinary approaches, archaeology would not seem to be capable of taking the decisive step offshore on its own.

Geographers provide one stimulating resource to turn to; and oceanography in particular is attracting increasing inter- est and sophistication in analysis as the impact of climate change on sea levels, temperature and the movements of currents becomes evident.24 Geographers, indeed, have been at the forefront of developing a sophis- ticated interdisciplinary critique of the extent to which seas and oceans can be objectively regarded as units with a common narrative in any meaningful sense at different periods of history.25 The notion that seas might be constructed as communal spaces which differ significantly from the terrestrial concepts embedded in the idea of the nation state has gained some currency in recent years.

To Braudel's somewhat static view of the Mediterranean as a trading space has been added an understanding of seas and oceans as unstable dynamic entities. New constellations of common interest emerge and dissolve as coalitions are forged; and these themselves have a bearing on the whole process of state formation itself. Some of these emergent coalitions are trans- and inter-oceanic in scale and extend well beyond any terrestrial concep- tion of territoriality. Attention to the seas thus challenges the otherwise reifying conceptions of nations and continents.

Geographical perspec- tives also highlight a continuing tension in approaches to the governance of the sea, notably that between strategies which seek to build up a prac- tice of regarding the sea as common territory, and that which sees the exploitation of its resources or its geopolitical implications as sus- ceptible to national claims to territoriality. The issue revolves around the changing approaches to stewardship in an international context and, 22 The Sea in cartographic terms, around whether the lines drawn on the ocean connect or divide.

Clearly this in itself has a changing historical and spatial context.26 First-hand accounts But, if we are to take seriously the observation that the understand- ing of the sea is predicated on an understanding of the people who inhabit the sea, accounts of mariners must clearly play a large part in what follows here. Some of these are explicitly ethnographic (or more broadly anthropological) in content; others are first-hand autobio- graphical accounts, some in the guise of fiction. In truth, though, ethnography has rather less to offer than literary sources.

It has rarely reported on the experience of being on the seas; instead, to the extent that reference is made to the sea at all, it has almost always focused on the implications of being close to the sea, of having a relationship to it, not actually of being on it. Roland Barthes once described the beach as a place bedecked in flags and bunting, as a symbolically charged environment. It is a frontier marked by colour and noise, the interface between a world which is celebrated and enriched and one which is devoid of such overt signification. If the sea risks becoming an ahistorical zone for historians, for many anthropologists the sea is, in parallel, culturally barren.

Yet, of course, Barthes is talking only of the European beach – and, given that the European engagement with beaches and swimming in the sea has its own distinctive history, he is only talking of the beach as he encountered it in the first half of the twentieth century at that.27 As cultural spaces beaches are far from uniform in their significance across time and across cultures – and so too, it might be surmised, must be the seas further offshore. There is, however, no established anthropology of seascapes to com- plement the burgeoning anthropological attention to the perception of landscape.

28 There are, of course, innumerable ethnographies of coastal popula- tions, of fishermen and traders who are none the less largely land-based. But, if fishermen provide one kind of trope and farmers another, it still remains the case that most fishermen, even those who exploit the resources of the seas rather than freshwater lakes or rivers, return home to unload their catches at the end of the day and spend their evenings Introduction 23 in coastal villages. Likewise farmers are not restricted to tilling the soil if their resources can be supplemented from the rivers or the seas. The tropes interrelate and interpenetrate. Plato famously commented: 'We inhabit a small portion of the earth .

. . living round the sea like ants and frogs round a pond.'29 His observation, of course, was mostly stimu - lated by the experience of the eastern Mediterranean. Yet it is in the anthropological accounts of the Pacific that the fullest exploration of maritime lore is to be found.30 In addition to more conventional descriptions, much of it emphasizing indigenous ideas of astronomy and its relation to navigation, there is one source on which we draw which stands out. David Lewis, a New Zealand-born medical doctor and round-the-world yachtsman, worked with indigenous navigators in 1968–69 in various parts of the Pacific.

His practice was to sail with local mariners whether in outrigger canoes or in his own boat, but to undertake journeys without the aid of compasses or other instrumen- tation. The resulting account – We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific (1972) – is a readable, personalized ethnography providing comparative data on navigational systems from Fiji to the Admiralty Archipelago off the north of Papua New Guinea and the Carolines.31 Suggestive as this literature is, it is limited in extent. A leading feature of this book is thus the value it places on literary sources to expand these perspectives and re-site discussion as far as possible on the sea rather than on land.

Many academic authors might read novels of the sea as a means of 'warming up', of getting into the mindset of the mariner alongside more formal reflections and historical accounts. Captain Marryat or Patrick O'Brien might sit on the shelves alongside N.A.M. Rodger, Felipe Fernández-Armesto or Jonathan Raban. Here, however, we take advantage of the many fictional accounts of life at sea which are none the less based on actual experience and act as a form of ethnographic text.

Joseph Conrad's enigmatic old sea dog in his story 'The Nigger of the "Narcissus"' (1897) – named, significantly, Singleton – is described as having spent 45 years afloat during which he had been ashore for barely 40 months.32 He is, in fact, based on a sailor called Sullivan who crewed with Conrad. Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, obsessive hunter of Moby-Dick, was 40 years at sea and only three ashore. This intensity of human interaction with the sea, which both Melville and Conrad witnessed at first hand before beginning their literary careers, 24 The Sea is largely absent from conventional academic accounts of 'maritime cultures'.

Novels of the sea can, of course, be about subjects in addi- tion to seafaring – indeed their value as literature is precisely that they do embody larger themes. Robinson Crusoe (1719), often identified as the first work of fiction in a modern sense, is not just about the hardships of an isolated, shipwrecked sailor; it has been regarded as both a religious narrative and an allegory of early capitalist imperial- ism.

Moby-Dick (1851) is about a whaling expedition; but it is also both a spiritual treatise and a study of obsession which at least one author has analysed as an anticipation of the rise of fascism in the twentieth century.33 None the less the passages on man's relationship to the sea remain. A selective use of literary sources enables us to retrieve this aspect of seafaring. Much writing about the sea, of course, employs the idea of the sea as metaphor rather than as lived reality.

It is revealing, for instance, that in a definitive anthology such as The Oxford Book of the Sea (1992), which focuses explicitly on writing about the sea itself, there are no texts by William Shakespeare reproduced despite the fact that he, above all authors, has penned some of the most memorable lines in the English language – some 26 examples being listed in the sister publication the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations under the word 'sea'.34 Of the late plays several have explicit scenes set at sea – notably the two plays which are actually set at sea, Pericles and The Tempest, whose open- ing scene is well-informed on handling ships in a storm.

It seems Shakespeare was conversant with reports of voyages and shipwrecks, and certainly he was well placed to seek out the company of the mariners of his day. Yet, almost all Shakespeare's allusions to the sea are poetic analogies between the human condition and the bound- lessness of the oceans, its moods of storm and calm, or its capacity to utterly consume those lost in its wastes. Likewise his use of nautical language is not in itself any indication of an engagement with the sea since the English language is replete with phraseology which derives from seafaring. Indeed there is no evidence that Shakespeare himself ever went aboard ship.

This is the case with much writing about the sea; it is rarely observational in the way that, for instance, the natural- ist Rachel Carson is in her beautifully crafted descriptions of the life of the coastal areas of the American east coast.35 Even in a recent novel by Richard Collins whose title – The Land as Viewed from the Sea (2004) – suggests a perspective very close to that advocated here (and which Introduction 25 is echoed in an article of my own which foreshadows the contents of this book),36 the sea remains essentially a metaphor for terrestrial expe- rience.

The movement of the tides, the storms, the residues washed up on beaches, the experience of sailing are all counterpoints to the devel- opment of a tempestuous relationship taking place on land. The sea is a place of contemplation of the vicissitudes of lives otherwise played out on land. As Herman Melville wrote: 'Meditation and water are wedded forever.'37 That said, many literary sources never the less have what we might call a strong ethnographic element to them. Moby-Dick is known as a classic novel of the sea by virtually every child brought up in an English-speaking education system, even if it is not necessarily read cover to cover.

The focus on the doomed, single-minded search for the great white whale – and the implications of such fixation – have no doubt been recommended principally as imaginative drama and instructive material through which to reflect on the moral implications of grand obsession. Less well-remarked is that the original version is accompanied by a map showing the voyage of the ill-fated Pequod and by a series of illustrations which show in great detail and with named 26 The Sea 2 Rigging and Cross-section of a Whaler, from Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (New York, 1851). parts a cross-section of the rigging of a whaler, the 26 different sails (illus.

2), the layout of the deck and all the different implements carried on a whale boat of the mid-nineteenth century (illus. 3). The implements used to cut up a successfully 'landed' catch are illustrated and accompanied by detailed drawings to demonstrate where the incisions are made on different types of whale. This is no formal manual of the techniques of the whaling industry, yet even so Melville has felt compelled to portray the mariner's life aboard such a ship. For half of a very long book the 'plot' disappears as Melville effectively stands down narrative structure in favour of long descriptive and meditative passages.

What Melville has done in Moby-Dick is to paint 'a body of men at work, the skill and the danger, the laboriousness and the physical and mental mobilization of human resources, the com- radeship and the unity, the simplicity and the naturalness'.38 The book has all the apparatus of an ethnographic monograph before the dis- cipline of anthropology was yet underway, drawing on Melville's 'par- ticipant observation' as a professional seaman on whalers and frigates operating principally between New England and the Pacific between 1839 and 1844.

The book's theme, indeed, was itself suggested by a real event in which an American ship was rammed and sunk by a whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Melville, of course, was not alone in his close attention to the lived experience of the sea. Richard Henry Dana, Jr might be accounted Introduction 27 3 Implements Belonging to a Whale Boat, from Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. more of a diarist than a writer of fiction. Son of a famous New Eng- land poet, Harvard student and member of the Massachusetts elite, Dana set out in 1834 as an ordinary seaman on the Pilgrim, a little brig engaged in the trade of hides from the Californian coast back to his native Boston.

He learnt en route that the Pilgrim's voyage would take them longer than imagined. So he determined to transfer to another ship and eventually returned, rounding Cape Horn a second time, on the Alert. Even so he was at sea for two years, during which time he forewent the society of his Harvard contemporaries entirely. His method compares favourably with that of the present-day ethnogra- pher. Dana lived life 'before the mast' as a common sailor, taking notes as he went along and developing it into a larger narrative.

The resulting book gives a comprehensive picture of initiation into American sea- faring life – with all its pleasures and its discomforts.39 As an objective autobiographical account of the life of an ordinary merchantman it received popular acclaim, its effect enhanced by a simple narrative style rather than informed by any self-regarding literary intent. Indeed, in an epilogue written when Dana returned to California 24 years later he reports that he re-met many of the people he had known as a sailor and that his book was much in circulation amongst ordinary seamen with experience of the life of the merchant seamen involved in the early nineteenth-century hide trade.

He was to be one of Melville's main inspirations. Like many an ethnographer since, he went on to champion the cause of those amongst whom he had worked, deploying a legal training picked up when he returned to improving the conditions of merchant seamen. The documentary turn of these accounts is notable in American writing about the sea. Raban makes the interesting point that for American authors the wilderness was not so much the sea as the inter - ior of the continent itself.40 It was terrestrial wastes that obsessed many of them. The direst of experiences tended to be relocated to the mountainous wilds of the Rockies rather than at sea.

Not that the seas were uniformly regarded as benign; but they are approached without the baggage of the European 'sublime', that potent mix of awe and sheer terror which haunted so much British writing about nautical experience from the vast Gothic novel of Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, to the verse of Lord Byron. Byron, of course, was a serious yachtsman who maintained a professional crew on his boat in the Mediterranean. Shelley was an 28 The Sea amateur enthusiast, though the boat he commissioned famously sank in a storm in the Gulf of Spezia barely two months after he came into its ownership, his inexperienced pursuit of the thrill of sailing in a gale leading to his demise.

Experienced authorial mariners, however, abound both major and minor in literary terms. Other than Shakespeare, the most significant exception is perhaps Coleridge, whose classic Romantic poem of the sea The Ancient Mariner (1798) vividly evokes maritime experience.

It was conceived against a background of deep interest in accounts of sea voyages and a long-standing fascination with ideas of the spirits of the deep, but in fact it predates his first proper sea-voyage – a crossing from Yarmouth to Hamburg which he reportedly found disappointing.41 And there are some which focus rather on their characters' complete lack of seamanship, as in Redmond O'Hanlon's Trawler (2004): when the man on the Clapham omnibus takes to sea, his account of the whole physical challenge of nautical experience, the confrontation with seasickness, the nauseous smell of fish, the disruption of routine – especially sleeping patterns – vividly brings into focus the distinctiveness of maritime experience.42 From these sources, all of which are drawn on below, we learn not just about the sea and the handling of ships but also about the society of seafarers.

As with those described by Braudel in the Mediterranean, the crews on the ships described by Dana, Melville, Conrad and others were truly cosmopolitan. Indeed, it is not just that major long- distance migrations took place by ship and that sea ports were amongst the first urban centres to develop cosmopolitan populations; the ships themselves, regardless of the nationality of their owners or their home port, were very often sailed by crews which were multi- ethnic in composition. This is not just true of the European or American shipping which is the context of most maritime literature.

There is evidence that Muslim ships trading in the Indian Ocean in the thirteenth century were also crewed by multi-ethnic sailors. Despite differences in language and culture, the ways in which the dis- cipline and mutuality on which successful voyaging depended was achieved (or not) is also suggested by many informed literary sources. Sometimes survival itself is the issue. Stephen Crane in his short autobiographical story about being shipwrecked off the coast of Florida on New Year's Day 1897 found himself – inexperienced as he was – afloat in a life raft and rowing for a distant and dangerous shore with the four survivors of the ill-fated ship.

They formed a motley Introduction 29 crew with their range of skills and some, notably the captain, injured and unable to assist. Crane reflects: It would be difficult to describe the subtle brotherhood of men that was here established on the seas. No one said that it was so. No one mentioned it. But it dwelt in the boat, and each man felt it warm him.

They were a captain, an oiler, a cook and a correspondent [Crane himself, who at the time was a war correspondent], and they were friends, friends in a more curiously iron-bound degree than may be common.43 It is only by concerted efforts, setting aside personal discomfort and overcoming incipient exhaustion to take turns at the oars, that, finally, they make shore – and safety. Ships' companies were also marked by another feature which dis- tinguishes them from terrestrial society: the almost complete absence of women, or at least their occasional – but almost always transgres- sive – presence aboard ship in the days before passenger ships and cruise liners.

Ships are, very largely, 'manned'. Again, the implications are prominent in much nautical literature. Scottish trawlermen, even before embarking on a dangerous passage to fish in the seas of the North Atlantic, need to observe many taboos.

Women are not allowed on ship or even to touch the guard rails when in port.44 Conrad writes of another 'old sea dog', very much in the mould of Singleton, whom he met at a funeral: I learned afterwards that he was looked upon as the terror of sailors, a hard man; that he had never wife or chick of his own, and that, engaged from the tenderest years in deep-sea voyages, he knew women and children merely by sight.45 Gender relations relocated to the seas are reordered in complex ways – and this is so in many cultures, as we shall see.

Pictorial sources Cartography and marine painting share a common beginning, and, arguably, they are in origin fundamentally ideological rather than 30 The Sea strictly representational forms of imagery. Some of the first 'maps', indeed, are more readily described as ideograms than as replications of objective geography and as such were of little or no use in terms of planning prospective long-distance journeys. So-called T-O maps are essentially circles with a T in the middle dividing them into three sections representing the three known continents in the Middle Ages: Asia, Europe and Africa.

The point of their intersection was centred on Jerusalem with the area beyond the circle occupied by the seas and the heavens. The Christian conceptualization of space gave a strong sense of centre and periphery with the oceans as the limiting factor of the known world.46 In Europe more accurate sea charts emerged with lines to show the connections between different ports in the Mediter- ranean, the portolan maps familiar to medieval sailors. However, the lines themselves were straight, making no allowance for the reefs, winds and currents.

Mariners' logs therefore began to include indica- tive outline drawings of prominent parts of the coastline, sometimes including ships to give an impression of scale. Being images pro- duced from the sea, they are the precursors of subsequent marine painting but produced initially for navigational rather than aesthetic purposes. If these appear to be devoid of ideological contents, subsequent imagery of the sea often has a nationalistic context.

Discussions of marine art have mainly been restricted to discussion of pictorial rep- resentations – and inevitably have not included indigenous cultures around the world.47 Although representations of the sea are to be found on Egyptian tomb painting and on ancient Greek vases, amongst the first images of the coastline are those done by European mariners. Marine painting as a category of European art was developed princi- pally by the Dutch in the seventeenth century, of whom Jan van Goyen, Aelbert Cuyp and Simon de Vlieger were amongst the most prominent.

From thence a practice of sea- and ship-painting spread to other countries, often being taken up by artists who otherwise specialized in landscape painting. The scenes depicted are sometimes beaches and strands; and ships are often included, especially in the representation of naval encounters. However, the boundless sea itself is rarely portrayed in pictures. The artists usually had direct experience of the sea and of sailing and this emerged in their various depictions. Jan van Goyen made innumerable trips along the Dutch coastline, hiring fishing boats for the purpose and coming back with sketchbooks Introduction 31 filled with scenes drawn on the spot.

By the mid-1600s it was cus- tomary for seascape painters to be included in naval fleets and they often sketched battle scenes as they were occurring. Their depictions reflected a knowledge of how sailing ships of the period responded to the winds, how they handled in various weather conditions, and a direct observation of the labours of seafarers.

Scenes which showed ships riding on seas in tumultuous fury substantiated popular conceptions of the sea as an untrammelled force of nature.48 A cardinal moment in the development of a parallel British trad- ition of practice was the emigration of the van de Veldes from their native Netherlands to England in 1672.49 Willem van de Velde the elder would make sketches of marine scenes which were turned into impressive canvasses by Willem the younger.

Their influence on the British marine painting tradition associated particularly with Isaac Sailmaker and Peter Monamy was significant and by the eighteenth century included painters working in the Romantic tradition who were equally adept at landscape and seascape painting.50 An interesting example is the link between Richard Wilson, the distinguished painter of landscapes portraying scenes in both his native Wales and in Italy, and William Hodges, the artist who accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific between 1772 and 1775.

Hodges had studied with Wilson and transferred the practice of enlivening landscape by dramatic use of light and shade to depictions of the sea, which is evident in pictures of, for instance, Cape Town, the Antarctic and Polynesia.51 J.M.W. Turner is often identified with the Romantic tradition.

Turner's exploration of sea painting included adaptations and 'improve- ments' on the works of the Dutch masters, producing pictures which play on the construction and themes of familiar marine paintings but significantly dramatizing their composition.52 Turner's later celebrated seascapes extend this and take atmospheric painting into a new realm which is at times almost wholly expressive in conception. That Turner should be drawn to the sea is readily explicable.

Its many different moods, from raging turmoil to reflective calm provide a ready palette of effects through which to explore the possibilities of light, whilst water itself provides a reflective surface which even in his landscape painting he exploited to full effect. The 'sublime' in its literary sense of a confrontation with the savage grandeur of nature found ready expression in Turner's sea pictures.53 32 The Sea Art historians have focused mostly on discussions of a Euro- American tradition of pictorial representation.

Even Japanese works such as some of those by the print-maker Katsushika Hokusai or the evocative work on the seas by the contemporary photographer Sugimoto Hiroshi are rarely included in reviews of representations of the sea. Other forms of visualization associated with maritime practice, such as the Marshall Islands so-called 'stick charts' from Micronesia or pageants in various parts of the world which involve floats in the form of highly decorative ships, have escaped attention altogether and are not mentioned in any broader survey of the arts of the maritime world – a project which, in truth, has yet to be embraced in such inclusive terms.

The character of what follows, therefore, is promiscuous in terms of its sources and wide-ranging in terms of the seas and oceans it considers. It reflects on accounts which go beyond my own immediate areas of academic interest – in anthropology and latterly art history – and immediate experience in the Irish Sea and the western Indian Ocean. The purpose here is neither to repeat nor to attempt a detailed…