Read an Excerpt
the SEA a cultural history
By John Mack
REAKTION BOOKS
Copyright © 2011
John Mack
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-86189-809-8
Introduction
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)
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'.
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). 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 supplies 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 passing 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. 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 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 established 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 contemporaries of different European nationalities and backgrounds were not acts of pure inquisitiveness. The modern idea of curiosity as an intellectual indulgence with no more worldly inspiration misrepresents the historical circumstances. 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 northwards 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 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 considerable degree, to facilitate intercourse, for the purposes of commerce, between the north-west coast, and the country upon the opposite side of the continent.
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 somewhere 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 exploration 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 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 Toilers of the Sea (1866): 'The solitudes of the ocean are melancholy: tumult and silence combined. What happens there no longer concerns the human race.' 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.
Or again, in a stanza from Mary Oliver's poem 'The Waves':
The sea
isn't a place
but a fact, and
a mystery
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.
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 recovering forgotten archival histories. Indeed, many of the parts of the world considered here had no systems of writing until more recent times. 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 documentation – 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 recounting aided by a notched stick on which each indentation has a distinctive 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. 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 written accounts, this is the sea as revelatory of history, not as an instrument 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 engagement 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. Either way, 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 Mediterranean 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 hinterland, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II as he entitled his major work (1949). What this encouraged is attention 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 principally 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. 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 and because of it, the contacts effected, cemented or cast asunder, are all largely absent from this historiography.
In parallel with this, a form of national history writing has also conspired to diminish the attention to the seas as globalized transnational 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 statehood, 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, 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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from the SEA a cultural history by John Mack Copyright © 2011
by John Mack . Excerpted by permission of REAKTION BOOKS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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