Maritime History

Maritime Style Sheet (with NATO phonetic alphabet)

2011-09-27T09:15:00.004-05:00

Lincoln Paine's Style Sheet for Maritime Authors

A Alfa, Alpha

aftercastle

aircraft carrier

amphora (pl. amphorae)

archrival

art deco

art nouveau

Atlantic ferry

B Bravo

bareboat

baroque

battlecruiser

battle fleet

battle line

battleship

bayman

beachcomber

beachfront

beachgoer

beach grass

beachhead

beachside

Bermuda rig

bilge keel

bilgewater

Blackwall hitch

blockade-runner

blue water (n.)

blue-water (adj.)

boatbuilder/-ing

boat hook

boathouse

boatload

boatman

boatneck

boat people

boat shoe

boatswain

boat train

boatyard

boltrope

bomb-ship, -ketch, etc.

bosun

bowline

box ship; box boat (container ship)

break-bulk freighter

breakwater

build-up (n.)

built-up (adj.)

bumboat

buntline

bycatch

bylaw

by-product

C Charlie

cable-laid rope

cable length

canal boat

capital ship

carrick bend

carvel-built

carvel construction

cat-o’-nine-tails

cat’s-paw (knot)

centerboard

centerline

chain pump

charter party

-class: King George V-class (e.g.)

clinker-built

clinker (or lapstrake) construction

close-hauled

clove hitch

coastwise

compound engine

Coriolis effect/force

counterclockwise

countercurrent

court-martial

crash-land

crisscrossing

cross-braced

crow’s nest

D Delta

day-tripper

deadrise

deadweight tonnnage

deck chair

deckhand

deckhouse

deep-sea

deep-water

depth charge (n.)

depth-charge (v.)

depth sounder

displacement tonnage

dive-bomber

dockhand

dockland

dockmaster

dockside

dockworker

dockyard

downrange

downriver

downwind

dry-dock (v.)

dry dock (n.)

dugout

E Echo

eastern Europe (capitalize for post-WW2)

ebb tide

en echelon [roman]

escort carrier

F Foxtrot

farsighted

ferryboat

ferryman

figure eight

fireship

fisherman’s bend

fishing boat

flight deck

floatplane

floodgate

floodplain

flood tide

floodwater

floodway

flying jib

focsle

fore and aft (adv.)

fore-and-aft (adj.)

fore-and-after

forecastle

foredeck

forefoot

fore gaff-topsail

foreland

foremast

forepeak

forereach

foresail

foresheet

foreshore

forestay

forestaysail

foretop

foretopman

fore-topmast

frame-first construction

freeboard

freshwater (n., adj.)

full speed

full-rigged ship

G Golf

gaff rig; gaff-rigged (adj.)

gaff-topsail

gale force winds

gangplank

gangway

granny knot

gappling chain, ~hook

great galley

gunboat

gunboat diplomacy

gun-deck (OED)

gun-port (OED)

gunpoint

gunpowder

gun room

gunrunning, -er

gunship

H Hotel

half hitch

harbormaster

harbor seal

harborside

Harbor (as in Boston, or any named)

hawsehole

hawser-laid rope

headland

headroom

headsail

headwater

headway

headwind

helm-deck

helmsman

high tide

high water

high-water mark

home port (n.)

homeport (v.)

horsepower (indicated horsepower, etc.)

hurricane force winds

I India

ice age

ice ax

iceberg

iceblink

iceboat

icebound

ice cap

ice-cold (adj.)

icefall

ice field

ice floe

ice fog

icehouse

iceman

ice-out

ice pick

ice sheet

ice storm

ironclad

J Juliett, or Juliet

jolly boat

jury rig (n.)

jury-rig (v.)

K Kilo

keelboat

keelhaul

keel-rope

keelson

L Lima

laborsaving

land breeze

landing craft

landmark

land mass

landward

lapstrake construction

lateen sail

lay-up (n)

layover

leeboard

lee gauge

lee shore

leeward

leeway

Liberty ship

lightship

line-ahead (adj.)

line-abreast (adj.)

line officer

line of sight

line squall

load line (n.)

load-line (adj.)

logboat

long-range

long-time

longship

longshoreman

loose-footed

low water

low-water mark

lubber line

lubber’s hole

lugsail

M Mike

made mast (OED)

main deck

main gaff-topsail

mainland

mainmast

mansail

mainsheet

mainstay

maintop

main-topmast

main yard

man-of-war

manrope

masthead

mast-step (OED)

matériel

Medal of Honor

merchant cruiser

merchant shp

merchantman

midatlantic

mine -laying

minelayer

mizzenmast

mizzen sail

Morse code

mortise-and-tenon (adj.)

motor schooner

motorship

moveable

N November

navaid

Navy Cross

navy yard

near-sister (adj.)

neoclassical

Northeast Passage

Northwest Passage

O Oscar

oarlock

oceanfront

oceangoing

ocean liner

off course

offload(-ing)

offshore (adj., adv., prep.)

orlop deck

outrigger

overhand knot

P Papa

paddleboat

paddle steamer

paddle wheel(-er)

pilot cutter

point-blank (adj./adv.)

pole MAST

poop deck

porthole

port of call

port of entry

port of trade

promenade deck

propeller

PT-boat

purpose-built (adj.)

Q Quebec

quadruple-expansion engine

quarter rudder

R Romeo

retour ship

right(s)-of-way

riverbank

riverbed

riverboat

river-craft

riverfront

river plain

riverside

riverward

rolling hitch

round ship

round-trip

roustabout

rowboat

rowing boat

rowing machine

rowlock

rudderpost

running light

running rigging

S Sierra

sailboard

sailboat

sailcloth

sailmaker

sailing school (n.)

sailing-school (adj.)

sail training

sail training ship

Saint Elmo’s fire

saltwater (n., adj.)

schoolship

sea anchor

seabag

sea bass

seabed

Seebee

seabird

sea biscuit

seaboard

seaborne

sea breeze

sea buoy

sea captain

sea change

sea chest

seacoast

seacraft

sea dog

sea duty

Sea Explorer

seafarer, -ing

sea fire

seafloor

seafood

seafront

seagirt

seagoing

sea green

seagull

sea king

sea-lane

sea lawyer

sea legs

sea level

sealift

sea lion

sealskin

sea-maid

seaman

seamanlike

seamanship

seamark

sea mile

seamount

seaplane

seaport

sea power

seaquake

sea room

sea rover

sea scallop

seascape

sea serpent

seashell

seashore

sea serpent

seasick

seaside

sea slug (sea cucumber)

sea snake

sea stores

seatrain

sea trout

sea turtle

sea urchin

seawall

seaward(s)

seawater

seaway

seaweed

seaworthy

sea wrack

shallow-draft (adj.)

shear-hook

sheepshank

sheerstrake

sheet bend

shell-first construction

ship biscuit

shipboard

shipborne

ship breaker

shipbuilder/-ing

shipfitter

shiphandling

shiplap

shipload

shipman

shipmaster

shipmate

ship of state

ship of the line

shipowner, -ing

shipping lane

shipshape

ship’s papers

ship timber

ship time

shipway

shipworm

shipwreck (n., v.)

shipwright

shipyard

shoal-draft (adj.)

shoal water

shorebird

shorefront

shore leave

shore patrol

shoreside (adj.)

shroud-laid rope

sick bay

side-wheel (-er)

single-handed (adj./adv.)

single-hander

slave owner

slave ship

slipknot

sloop of war

snagboat

spar torpedo

spritsail

squall line

square rig

square-rigged

square-rigger

square knot

square sail

standing rigging

staysail

steamboat

steamboat Gothic

steam boiler

steam chest

steam engine

steamer rug

steamer trunk

steamfitter

steamship

steam turbine

steering oar

stempost

sterncastle

stern chase (n.)

stern chaser

sternforemost

sternpost

stern sheets

sternward

sternway

stern-wheel(-er)

stevedore knot

sundeck

surgeon’s knot

T Tango

tabernacle mast

tall ship

the Crown

the equator

thole pin

tideland

tidemark

tide pool

tidewater

timber hitch

tonnage: gross register tonnage, etc.

topcastle

topgallant

topgallant mast

top-hamper

top-heavy

topmast

topsail

torpedo boat

torpedo-boat destroyer

torpedo bomber

torpedo tube

trade route

trade wind

training ship

transatlantic

transoceanic

transpacific

transship

treenail

triple-expansion engine

turboelectric

Turk’s head

U Uniform

ultra large crude carrier (ULCC)

UN (adj,)

undertow

underwater

under way (adv.)

underway (adj.)

upriver

U.S. (adj,)

V Victor

very large crude carrier (VLCC)

V-bottom hull

Victory ship

W Whiskey

waterborne

watercourse

watercraft

waterfront

water gate

water gauge

water level

waterline

waterlog

waterman

watermark

waterpower

water privilege

waterproof

water rat

water-repellent

water-resistant

water right

waterscape

watershed

waterside

water ski (n.)

water-ski (v.)

water-skier

waterspout

water taxi

watertight

waterway

waterwheel

water wings

waterworks

waterworn

weather gauge

weather-leech

western Europe (capitalize for post-WW2)

wet-rice cultivation

whale catcher

whaleback

whaleboat

whalebone

whale shark

whaleship

wharf boat

wharfmaster

windage

windblown

wind-borne

Windbreaker (™)

windchill

windjammer

windlass

windproof

windscreen

windshield

wind tunnel

windward

wing and wing (adv.)

wolf pack

X X-ray, or Xray

Y Yankee

yacht club

yachtsman

yardarm

yardarm-to-yardarm

Z Zulu

2011-09-22T13:33:00.004-05:00

Attitudes and Latitudes: At Sea in a World of Words

Lincoln Paine

An address to the O'Gara Honor Society of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point, N.Y., September 22, 2011.

Good afternoon. Many thanks for turning out for this honors class lecture. For me this week is something of a homecoming because my first boss was Frank Braynard, the founder and motive force behind this museum and its collection. I first worked for Frank as a volunteer for OpSail ’76, the tall ships parade held to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial and which thanks in large part to his generous and open spirit was watched live by six million people. I worked for him again on Harbor Festival ’79, a parade of working vessels from cruise ships and box ships to dredges and tugs.

Convincing shipping executives to divert their vessels a few miles up the Hudson for a small entertainment might seem a hopeless task. But it was Frank’s genius to convince people that impossibility and opportunity are actually the same thing. He didn’t know the meaning of the word “No,” and however bad things might actually get, until his dying day whenever anyone asked him how he was doing, the reply was always an enthusiastic “Never better.”

Even as he was convincing businessmen that a parade of working ships was the perfect way to honor their industry and themselves, he was also convincing the Academy and the government to establish the American Merchant Marine Museum here in the Barstow Mansion

Either one of these projects would have been enough for most people. But Frank wasn’t most people, and when he set his mind to something, it was as good as done, whether it was OpSail, or his history of the Leviathan, the world’s greatest ship, which he started writing in 1979 and whose six volumes he knocked off in four years

Frank was a man of his word and a man of action, though not an action figure by any means. As a child, he was asthmatic and he didn’t start school until he was about eight years old. But when he saw something that needed doing, he went ahead and did it, regardless of the odds. To overcome opposition, he simply riffed on the old joke about the problems of using English as a universal language in the shipping industry. If someone said “make fast” and he didn’t want to, he would simply translate it to mean “go quick.

If anything might have troubled him about Kings Point, which he loved dearly, it would have been the Academy’s motto: Acta Non Verba, “Deeds Not Words.” Frank was all about inclusion and the Non would have bothered him. He would have much preferred a motto that read Acta Et Verba: “Deeds and Words.” He knew that the two are not mutually exclusive. After all, the whole point of telling stories is to talk about what we’ve done. Stories and ideas—the things we create with words—are what inspire us to go out and do something else

Today, I want to talk about how to bridge the perceived gap between the word and the deed. In particular, I want to suggest how you, as ambassadors of the United States working with and among representatives of far more cultures than most people ever encounter, can make life easier, more productive and more interesting for yourselves

When I wrote the article “Beyond the Dead White Whales,” my intention was to critique the way Anglo-American maritime literature is usually presented, and to identify the source of the standard romantic interpretation. My concern is not with the quality of the works that are considered emblematic. Most of the works selected for anthologies and courses are well worth reading regardless of one’s vocation, and many are considered classics not only of maritime literature but of English and even world literature as a whole. And I don’t want to pretend that these books haven’t put me under their spell. I would be lying if I said that my own interest in maritime history wasn’t piqued by reading Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, or when I was younger still Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books and even Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat.

While pinpointing the source of the romantic approach is a positive step, I wanted to be more affirmative by throwing a wider net. This could be accomplished easily enough by turning to the work of other English and American writers, or even by simply looking at the same writers through other lenses like tragedy or comedy

But I wanted to write about how other people have thought about the sea and seafaring: people who write from somewhere other than Great Britain or the United States, and people who lived in an era other than the last two or three centuries

I can think of several reasons why this is relevant to future merchant mariners like yourselves, but I’ll settle an idea that I’ve borrowed from Professor Smith, who divides maritime historians into two camps: utilitarians and traditionalists. In the Smithian universe, utilitarians play to an audience outside of academia, including the general public and policymakers, and many have experience at sea. Traditionalists tend to be scholars most comfortable focusing on research, teaching and preparing the next generation of scholars

Another way of putting it might be to say that Professor Smith’s utilitarians are interested in deeds and traditionalists are interested in words

The fact is that we are all more or less both acta and verba, and no one recognizes this more than educators. This is why instead of being allowed to study only mechanical aspects of marine engineering or steel maintenance and repair in the marine environment, you are required to fulfill the terms of the academy’s core curriculum, which consists of courses in professional utilitarian and traditional academic subjects, including English and history. While it may sometimes seem that the humanities side of the core curriculum is nothing more than a sop to an accreditation committee, it is rooted in the medieval curriculum of the seven liberal arts: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. The idea behind this was that while specialization was necessary for certain tasks—say ship design or engine repair—a healthy society requires people armed with a foundation of general knowledge

Although this curriculum changes constantly to reflect shifts in our understanding of the world, the underlying principle remains the same. Nonetheless, there is a tendency to view the liberal arts as something that caters to the needs and desires of intellectual elites. There are exceptions to every rule, but by and large this is not the case. One of the most radical efforts to shape the humanities side of liberal arts curriculum to explicitly practical ends took place at Columbia College. This was the development of Columbia’s “Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West,” the centerpiece of that college’s core curriculum, which consists of courses in philosophy and literature, a program later expanded to include the history of art and music. Here’s the thing: The origin of Columbia’s core curriculum is every bit as practical as the origin of the Academy’s program in marine engineering systems

When the United States entered World War I, the university developed a “war issues” course geared to the uniformed Student Army Training Corps. As university president Nicholas Murray Butler acknowledged after the war, the course effectively made Columbia “a part of the apparatus of the Government of the United States for the preparation and training of men to carry on that war and for the better organization of our natural resources to aid the combat.”[1

With the war over, professors began pushing for a new course, modeled somewhat on “war issues,” for obviously different but no less practical ends. As dean Herbert Hawkes explained, “The issues of peace are vastly more complicated than the issues of war, but they are far more important as a field of instruction for our college youth. The college course which does nothing to enable a man to meet the arguments of the opponents of decency and sound government fails at the most crucial point to fulfill its opportunity.”[2] You can’t get much more utilitarian than that

If you let your minds drift out of this pleasant building by the Sound and back into the polarized political world of today, you will realize that as a politician or pundit you can get more mileage out of ridiculing climate science than you can get driving a Chevy Volt. And you may think it was always like this. It wasn’t.

Intellectualism in this country used to be prized, not despised, as the merest glance at our history shows. We can ignore obvious models like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, or the ambidextrous President Garfield. According to a popular story, one could ask Garfield a question in English and he could write his answer in Greek with his left hand and in Latin with his right—simultaneously. But three more modern examples demonstrate the close ties between the life of the mind and political careers in the United States once upon a time

President Theodore Roosevelt’s lust for adventure is well known, not just hunting big game, but test-driving a Holland-class submarine while president—just out here off Oyster Bay—and steaming up the Amazon. He also wrote more than thirty-five books, including The Naval War of 1812, which positioned him to cap his career as president of the American Historical Association in 1912. This was the same year that Woodrow Wilson became president of the United States, having spent eight grueling years cutting his teeth in academic politics reforming Princeton University

Then there is Eisenhower, who, between his stint as Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II and the presidency spent four years running Columbia University. When he took that job, he said he did so because he believed in promoting “the American form of democracy” through education—the sort of education you get through Columbia’s core curriculum and in particular its Contemporary Civilization course.[3

Unlike many professional courses, CC is not taught from a textbook. Stranger still, it does not have its own dedicated faculty. Classes are taught by professors drawn from more than fifteen different academic departments from anthropology and architecture through Middle Eastern studies and on to sociology and Spanish. Many of these professors have a lot of reading to do before they start teaching

It should go without saying that this approach does not lend itself to a uniform approach to the material. Still less does it create a class of people who think alike, as some people suspicious of liberal arts educators—including some liberal arts educators—like to believe.

But the obvious question is: How on earth is such a course supposed to make the college—any college—“a part of the apparatus of the Government of the United States?” In the first place, a lot of the books traffic in ideas that run completely counter to those we hold dear. Beyond that, there isn’t a lot of coherence to the reading list. But coherence is beside the point

Assigning Plato’s Republic and the Declaration of Independence and Marx’s Das Kapital and Adam Smith on the Wealth of Nations is not about telling students what to think, because none of those four agree on anything—and the reading list is a lot longer than that.

The point is to show people that they can think, that there are many different ways to think, that thinking takes a lot of effort, and that there are no shortcuts. You can’t fit your mind with a bulbous bow or a winged keel, and there are no pocket calculators for ideas. If you have to think, you have to use the brain you were born with. And while thinking is an act, you can’t do it without words.

It’s important to stress here that while you may think that a bachelor of science from a service academy is better preparation for “the real world” than a bachelor of arts from a liberal arts school, you shouldn’t count on it. As few people as there are who have seriously thought about political philosophy or the English novel, they far outnumber the people who have even heard of fluid dynamics, much less know what they are. And that is why the Flat Earth Society and its sister institutions are alive and well.

One of the most persistent criticisms leveled against the liberal arts has to do with the perception that it promotes the intellectual tradition of dead white males at the expense of people from other cultural backgrounds and traditions. Part of me thinks this misses the point entirely, but the part that wrote “Beyond the Dead White Whales: Literature of the Sea and Maritime History” agrees wholeheartedly. And while I like to think of myself as more of a traditionalist, in Professor Smith’s formulation I am a straight-up utilitarian, because in the end I am much more interested in transforming the way students and the general public think than I am in talking to academics, though I wouldn’t mind changing their minds, too.

So why world literature? As it says in the Academy catalogue, “A ship at sea does not operate in a vacuum. It depends on a framework of shoreside activities for its operations.” It goes on to detail the many types of companies that make up the maritime industry. But what the catalog leaves unsaid is that these companies are made up of people who have not only different areas of expertise but different cultural backgrounds.

In matters of expertise, you will probably find yourselves working with people who have the same professional, utilitarian education that you do. But when you go home at night, you retreat into different cultural universes—different latitudes, different attitudes. You will soon realize, if you haven’t already, that navigating between cultures is tricky business, even if the people you are talking to don’t mistake “make fast” for “go quick.” This is true of cultural boundaries even within the United States—in New York, where there is a world of difference between the way people live and think in Flushing, Flatbush and the Flatiron District, or between the cut-offs and khaki cultures you might find on different campuses.

A foreigner isn’t likely to notice these differences in a brief stay here, and reading a history of the United States won’t necessarily be much help, either. But read a novel or two, and you’ll start to pick up on subtleties that will make it obvious that there are different cultures here, even if superficially people look pretty much the same. This is true even of novels written a long time ago, because we are all creatures of our past. We aren’t necessarily like our ancestors, but we carry more of them in our biological and cultural DNA than first meets the eye.

Reading a novel for anthropological insights may seem a bit far-fetched, but I want to leave you with two examples that illustrate my point, because they reveal a lot about cultural DNA without even drawing us too far into the text. The first is the magic realist novel Master and the Sea by José Sarney, about a poor fisherman in northern Brazil. Now, if you know anything about modern Brazil, the name José Sarney will ring a bell because there was a President José Sarney there in the 1980s. A politician since the 1950s, he is still around and his many detractors consider him one of the most corrupt people in the country. Funnily enough, this José Sarney happens to be the same guy who wrote Master and the Sea.

A while back I mentioned this book to a friend who lived in Brazil. He knew all about Sarney’s political reputation, but nothing about the book, or the fact that he is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Now, I was perfectly willing to believe that he was a corrupt politician—I knew he had been president because it said so on the back of the book, and corrupt politicians are not exactly a rarity. But how do you talk about a corrupt novelist—much less one who writes a novel in which hallucinatory demons reciting random facts about sixteenth-century history figure prominently? If I had to draw an analogy, it was like trying to convince someone that Richard Nixon was the author of Alice in Wonderland.

More to the point, however, magic realism—a blend of supernatural and realistic portrayals of human actions—is standard fare in modern Portuguese- and Spanish-American literature. At one level, what motivates the characters is not too different from what motivates characters in any other story from Greek tragedy to tenth-century Japanese novels to Shakespeare to Harry Potter or The Hunger Games. The fact that people in South America are receptive to it in ways that Americans simply aren’t suggests that reading books of magic realism might teach you something about the people you work with in Latin America that you aren’t going to pick up in a standard history of this or that country.

Turn this on its head, and it will reveal something about our culture and how we are perceived. Why doesn’t the United States produce writers of magic realism? you might ask. Is there no market for such books? What is it in our culture that is so fundamentally different? Then again, would we ever elect a novelist as president? And while people in my generation—your professors’ generation, more or less—might once have thought that magic realism and modern economies are mutually exclusive, Brazil’s economy is the seventh or eighth largest in the world and they have annual GDP growth of 5%, so that theory is out the window. Come to think of it, we might owe it to ourselves to start reading more magic realism.

My other example touches on Frans Bengtsson’s novel, The Long Ships: A Saga of the Viking Age, published in the 1940s. I didn’t write about Viking sagas in my article because they are hard to classify. The sagas are clearly rooted in some sort of historical tradition, but they were written down centuries after the events they describe, and there is a lot of debate about whether they are literature or history or a strange combination of the two. Regardless, you can be sure that the sagas deeply inform the mindset of modern Scandinavians, and their mariners in particular. No one at Maersk is going to mistake a box ship for a longship, but they are very proud of their sea-savvy ancestors who in the Middle Ages ran the show across much of Europe from the Ukraine to Ireland and Iceland.

The hero of The Long Ships was born during the reign of King Harald Bluetooth, the first king to unite Denmark, Norway and Sweden in the 900s, more than a thousand years ago. Because of this act of unification, the Swedish developers of the wireless specification that allows for cable-free connectivity between computers, mobile phones and printers decided to call their product Bluetooth, for the king who had unified Scandinavia—also wirelessly—more than a thousand years ago.

That is cultural DNA at its best, and as a marriage of the deed of invention and the word of naming, you will never do better.

[1] University president Nicholas Murray Butler, in the Columbia Spectator, 26 September 1919.

[2] Herbert E. Hawkes, “A College Course on Peace Issues,” Educational Review 58 (June-December 1919): 143.

[3] “the American form of democracy”: in Travis Beal Jacobs, Eisenhower at Columbia (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2001).

Beyond the Dead White Whales: Literature of the Sea and Maritime History

2011-04-10T07:48:00.008-05:00

International Journal of Maritime History, XXII, No. 1 (June 2010), 205-228.[1]

In the course of researching a maritime history of the world, I became aware of a vastly greater body of maritime literature than the armchair sailor – or armchair historian – usually encounters. I wondered whether this lack of awareness was due to my own want of initiative in recognizing or seeking out foreign works, or whether the corpus of maritime literature upon which historians, teachers and compilers of anthologies draw was too narrowly circumscribed. In an effort to find an answer, I compared the syllabi of more than two dozen courses that focussed on the literature of the sea. As the findings suggest, it is apparent that in the United States and elsewhere what passes for “maritime literature” is almost exclusively the work of English and American authors of the past two centuries. Nor is this bias limited to the classroom. Of the more than 200 selections from the three best-known anthologies of maritime literature of the past two decades – The Oxford Book of the Sea, The Oxford Book of Sea Stories, and The Faber Book of Tales of the Sea – only three were of non-English origin.[2]

Considered in a positive light, there is something of a consensus about what constitutes the canon of Anglo-American maritime literature, or at least who the canonical authors are. By and large, the works and writers most commonly assigned are chosen chiefly for their literary merit; they also grace the syllabi of literature courses with a focus which has nothing to do with the sea. From the perspective of the maritime historian, though, the findings are

206

perplexing, for at a time when maritime historical research is opening new vistas into places far removed in place and time from the epicenters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-American maritime enterprise, this same canon seems little changed from the days when maritime history was regarded as a field of only antiquarian interest.

I have taken the lists of works at face value and made no attempt to assess the ways in which individual classes are taught or the unique strategies of interpretation employed by the professors who design them. Broadly speaking, these syllabi represent three distinct approaches to the study of maritime writing. English literature classes in which maritime writing is the unifying theme – on a par with Elizabethan drama or modernist poetry, for instance – incorporate works on the basis of what they can teach us about the formal elements of literary style. Some courses constitute one element of a multidisciplinary program in maritime studies that may also include classes in topics as varied as seamanship, history and oceanography, and may even be taught

aboard ship. The most common approach to studying maritime literature, however, appears to be in more generic introductory surveys, and it is these that are in the greatest need of re-consideration if students are to gain a true sense of the richness of human enterprise afloat.

Table 1: Most Assigned Authors

Author

Times Assigned

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

28

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

22

Homer (8th-century BCE)

9

Jack London (1876-1912)

9

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

8

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

7

Nicholas Monsarrat (1910-1979)

5

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

4

Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

4

Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957)

4

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1949)

4

William Shakespeare (1564-16160

4

Derek Walcott (1930- )

4

Note: Includes works not specified; several courses assigned more than one work by the same author. Sources: See text and note 3.

Fiction, poetry and drama about the sea are nearly as old as writing itself and constitute part of the metaphorical and narrative armature of myriad

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communities, societies and nations worldwide. That they have much to show us about the human condition is indisputable, yet as with any literature they are best understood and teach us most about their subject and their authors’ perspectives when read in both literary and historical contexts. But a review of the syllabi and descriptions of two dozen courses reveals a surprising sameness and interchangeability of approach in the study of maritime literature in the US, a fact all the more remarkable given the diversity of educational institutions involved, ranging from private liberal arts colleges and state universities to state and federal maritime and naval academies. Although only two courses from outside the US were included, their syllabi were indistinguishable from the American ones. While courses without an explicitly historical orientation cannot be faulted for lacking an historical or global approach, courses that purport to examine maritime literature in general but rely on a corpus limited by language, nationality, date or thematic focus give a false view of the myriad ways in which humankind has used, experienced and expressed the sea.

A search of online syllabi and course descriptions and a request via H-Maritime generated twenty-five syllabi and course descriptions, twenty-three from the US and one each from Poland and Japan.[3] This might not satisfy a more rigorous statistician, but there is no evidence that these are unrepresentative of the mainstream view of writing about seafaring or that the findings are not a legitimate point of departure for a discussion about the state of maritime literature studies. Altogether these include 116 named works by seventy-six authors from seven countries (two syllabi include unspecified readings from the Bible). Some name specific works, while others provide only the names of authors. Of the latter, the most popular (see table 1) are Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, cited twenty-eight and twenty-two times, respectively, followed by Homer and Jack London (nine), Ernest Hemingway (eight), Rudyard

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Kipling (seven) and Nicholas Monsarrat (five). All but four write in English; there are two Greeks (one ancient, the other modern) and one each from France and Japan. The Anglophone authors are overwhelmingly American (forty) or British (twenty-nine), with one each from Canada, Haiti and St. Lucia. The most popular works (table 2) are Homer’s Odyssey (assigned nine times), Melville’s Moby-Dick (eight) and Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (five).

Table 2: Most Assigned Texts

Title	Author	Times assigned
The Odyssey (8th-century BCE)	Homer	9
Moby-Dick (1851)	Herman Melville	8
“The Secret Sharer” (1910)	Joseph Conrad	5
Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)	Samuel Taylor Coleridge	4
Heart of Darkness (1902)	Joseph Conrad	4
“The Open Boat” (1898)	Stephen Crane	4
The Old Man and the Sea (1951)	Ernest Hemingway	4
The Sea Wolf (1904)	Jack London	4
Benito Cereno (1856)	Herman Melville	4
The Cruel Sea (1953)	Nicholas Monsarrat	4

Sources: See table 1.

The Romantics’ Sea

Course titles do little to enlighten a prospective student as to what the course will cover or how. Most go under the open-ended rubric of “Literature of the Sea” or “Maritime Literature,” to which one course appended “and Culture.” An historical vision is explicit in a few, particularly those incorporating “discovery,” although it is never entirely clear whether the exploration involved is of the author’s world or the author’s self. The clearest enunciation of a commitment to reading maritime literature in an historical context is a course at the University of California, San Diego, entitled “Navigating the Americas: US Maritime Literature and Manifest Destiny, 1820-1855.” Although many courses include non-fiction works of an environmental bent, only the College of the Atlantic’s “Ecology and Literature of the Sea” explicitly ties the syllabus to the environment.

Not all courses are accompanied by a description, but in those that are the focus is, as the Maritime Studies Program of Williams College and Mystic Seaport (Mystic-Williams) puts it, on works in which “the sea or other marine environments are crucial to the story” or “the sea functions as the physical, philosophical and psychological setting” of the narrative.[4] Choosing works that

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concentrate upon “aestheticized representations [of] the varied relationships of humans to the sea” is a limiting approach, for the mariner’s world is not exclusively a maritime one.[5] Before the opening of the Atlantic and the Cape Horn route between Europe and the Indian Ocean in the late fifteenth century, the seaman’s work was seasonal, virtually all shipboard passages were of short duration and sailors spent far more time ashore than at sea. Across much of the world, this remains true today. Yet these courses have one thing in common: an emphasis on Anglo-American writing since the eighteenth century and deepsea voyages of long duration. This can be accounted for in a number of ways, the most obvious being that the majority of the courses reviewed here are taught in American colleges and universities.

If their approach depended on the location of the classroom, American instructors could dispense with English writers altogether. One might argue that the continuities of the Anglo-American experience are such that any segregation would be artificial, though it is impossible to account for why so few authors from Anglophone countries like Ireland, Canada, Australia, India or anywhere in Africa or Oceania found their way onto these syllabi. Some may agree with Jonathan Raban’s explanation for why The Oxford Book of the Sea (unfortunately out of print) includes only writings in English:

The French sea, the German sea, the Japanese sea are importantly different places – and the meanings of the sea in English alone are so rich and various that it would unnecessarily complicate matters to introduce, say, Baudelaire, or Rilke, to the anthology.[6]

Yet with a collective Homeric nod, they would also have to concur with Raban’s description a few pages later of a clear-cut distinction between British and American writing about the ocean:

The sea was the beginning of English journeys; it was the end of American ones…But the American brings to it a quite different geographical perspective, as he brings to it a quite different national history…The classic British opposition between wild sea and tame land, between nature and culture, has simply not applied to the American experience.[7]

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This is a compelling assessment of how in general American and British approaches to the sea differ, but is this difference any less than that between, say, the British and the Dutch? Luckily for his readers, Raban ignores the logic of his earlier observation and lets British and American authors bunk side by side. Nonetheless, the universal approach of the book’s title – like that of these literature courses – is undermined by the omission of writings in languages other than English. “All sea is sea” runs a Greek sepulchral epigram of the first century BCE, a sentiment worth heeding.[8]

Literature is a product of its time, and this generalization fits Anglo- American sea writing since 1700 no less than any other genre. While there are obvious differences between the voyages of exploration of the eighteenth century, the world-girdling trading passages under sail of the nineteenth and the numbing tedium aboard steam and motorships in the twentieth, the ships engaged in such work can be viewed as self-contained worlds demographically and socially distinct from the rest of humankind. In non-fiction works, it is possible to feel the subtle stress of time even in journal titles like George Anson’s deliberately drawn out A Voyage Round the World in the Years MDCCXL, I, II, III, IV or Ivan Krusenstern’s Voyage Round the World, in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1806. Between the timeless sweep of the sea and the interminable length of the voyage, the ship becomes the perfect setting for the artist’s inquiry into the human spirit in the manner of a Melville, Conrad or the under-represented Eugene O’Neill. In this vessel-centric and sailorcentric universe, the author’s focus becomes the experience of life aboard a ship or boat cut off from the terrestrial world. Seeking to depict the individual in relation either to himself (rarely herself) or to a group of people who are almost invariably strangers more-or-less involuntarily committed to each others’ company for an indeterminate period in a restricted space beset by all the physical hardships a jealous God can throw at them, these writers tend to ignore the rationale for and broader implications or consequences of the voyages they describe. They depict the effects of globalization and industrialization and the accompanying strains of social anonymity endured by sailors confined to vessels on all but endless voyages punctuated by increasingly brief stays in ports far from home or by long-suffering wage earners working in gruelling short-sea trades or as fishermen. How shipping relates to society at large goes all but unnoticed.

The Romantic Idea

It is difficult to account for the remarkable consistency with which the same authors and works recur in these courses, but it is clear that the modern litera-

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ture of the sea course has its roots in an identification of maritime literature with the Romantic movement. This may well be traced to the publication of W.H. Auden’s The Enchafèd Flood, or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea. This work, which began as a series of three lectures at the University of Virginia in 1950, is an “attempt to understand the nature of Romanticism through an examination of its treatment of a single theme, the sea.”[9] As a work of criticism, The Enchafèd Flood does not focus on maritime literature per se but rather examines the Romantic movement through the prism of artistic representations of the sea and seafaring in all its guises, which is a very different mission.

Auden begins by identifying the two environments that God distinguished for mankind, the dry land and the sea. This duality is not peculiar to the Romantic tradition, and Auden traces it to Genesis and finds it in a number of other contexts, but it is a literary conceit which does not accurately reflect the scope of people’s activities on the sea. Auden juxtaposes what he perceives as the reluctant sailor of the classical and subsequent traditions with

The distinctive new notes of the Romantic attitude…1) To leave the land and the city is the desire of every man of sensibility and honor. 2) The sea is the real situation and the voyage is the true condition of man…The sea is where the decisive events, the moments of eternal choice, of temptation, fall, and redemption occur. The shore life is always trivial.[10]

He detects a transition from the classical to the Romantic in the work of Shakespeare, from the “more purely negative” depictions of the sea up to Othello in 1604 to his final plays culminating with The Tempest of 1611. In the latter, the sea remains a place of peril still entered upon reluctantly, but now the dangers endured have a cleansing power previously unknown. Auden ascribes no particular cause to this sea change, but one might trace the attitudinal shift to the new opportunities for peaceful trade that followed the Treaty of London (1604) which ended two decades of war with Spain and followed hard on the founding of the East India Company. Whatever the case, situating this change in the first decade of the seventeenth century is an obviously Anglocentric perspective, and in making the leap from Shakespeare, for whom “the putting to sea, the wandering is never voluntarily entered upon as a pleasure,” to the Romantics,

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he ignored some key transitional events and authors, to say nothing of other literary traditions.[11]

By the early seventeenth century the Iberian powers had been accustomed to long-distance voyaging for more than a century, and Luís Vaz de Camões opens The Lusiads (1572) by demanding that Odysseus, among others, stand aside because “I sing of the famous Portuguese/To whom both Mars and Neptune bowed.”[12] Vasco da Gama’s voyage is not a sacrifice but a destiny for the “triumphant” Portuguese. Nor does Camões share Auden’s binary view of the sea, “that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged,” and the land, the place of “the City or the Garden… where people want and ought to be.”[13] In Camões’s view, both elements are suspect:

On the sea, such storms and perils
That death, many times, seemed imminent;
On the land, such battle and intrigue
Such dire, inevitable hardships!
Where may frail humanity shelter
Briefly, in some secure port,
Where the bright heavens cease to vent their rage
On such insects on so small a stage?[14]

To achieve their fame, the Portuguese had to adopt an amphibious posture, and Camões ends his poem with the prediction that geography will be no barrier to them, who “too ambitious to be content/With the afflictions of solid land/Have launched out on the restless oceans.”[15]

The more successful people are at sea, or in any other environment, the more generous and benevolent their outlook. As it was with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century so, too, it became for the English in the seventeenth. In Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666, his historical poem of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, John Dryden views ships and the sea as susceptible to human authority. He describes Dutch Admiral Jacob Obdam as a man who “presumed to give the law” to the sea, but when he dies and the Dutch retire

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from the battle of Lowestoft, “all was Britain the wide ocean saw.”[16] The English fleet the following year was described as “so vast…/That underneath it the press’d waters fail,/And with its weight it shoulders off the tides.” When the navy advanced, “It seem’d as there the British Neptune stood,/With all his hosts of waters at command./Beneath them to submit the officious flood;/And with his trident shoved them off the sand.” Just as the gods of the sea have become domesticated British deities eager to do the king’s bidding, English ships are now feared monsters of the deep, “huge leviathans [that] give no chase, but swallow in the fry.” For Dryden, England’s future depends on its men’s willingness to abandon the terra firma of their island home to seek their fortunes at sea where the enemy is not the elements but The Netherlands, France or Spain: “Yet like an English general will I die,/And all the ocean make my spacious grave:/Women and cowards on the land may lie;/The sea’s a tomb that’s proper for the brave.”[17] More profound than the distinction between the solitary sailor reluctant to go to sea and the Romantics’ eagerness to do so is the distinction between the sea as theatre where a man can prove himself and as a place for collective enterprise, whether naval or commercial.

The Romantics’ focus on the individual helps explain why, apart from unidentified selections from the Bible, the sole work from antiquity assigned in any course is Homer’s Odyssey. Against the backdrop of modern maritime literature, the defining elements of Odysseus’ journey are its duration and his sense of alienation. Auden asserts that an underlying feature of Odysseus’ travail is the fact that in the classical imagination

[a] voyage…is a necessary evil, a crossing of that which separates or estranges. Neither Odysseus nor Jason goes to sea for the sake of the voyage; the former is trying to get home and, if it were not for the enmity of Poseidon,…it would soon be over, which is what Odysseus most desires.[18]

Odysseus certainly seeks a homecoming, as Homer announces in the opening lines of The Odyssey, but there is no suggestion that crossing the sea is only a “necessary evil.” As the catalogue of nearly 1200 ships in The Iliad made abundantly clear, seafaring was a way of life in Homeric Greece, but even for the most hardened sailors the season lasted less than a quarter of the year.[19]

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When Auden distinguishes the land – “the world where the changing seasons create a round of different duties and feelings” – from the ocean – “the world where the change of seasons makes no difference to what the crew must do and where there is no visible life other than theirs” – he is describing a mode of seafaring that has existed only since the late fifteenth century and which became widespread only in the eighteenth. It is not one that can stand for all time and all places.[20] Consider the particulars of Odysseus’ case. According to Hesiod, Homer’s contemporary, the sailing season began with the summer solstice and lasted fifty days, or perhaps twice that if one were willing to push one’s luck. Given that he spent seven years with Calypso and one with Circe, in the decade between leaving Troy and returning to Ithaca Odysseus may well have logged little more than three to six months at sea, a fact that Homer’s listeners knew and modern readers of The Odyssey as maritime literature should keep in mind.[21]

The Ship of State

That the ancient Mediterranean mariner was as fearful of the sea as Auden supposed is not supported by other literary or historical evidence. True, one can point to authors like Horace and Ovid who feared or loathed the sea for one reason or another, but shipping was too integral to the survival of states large and small for people to live in fear of it. As Pompey the Great claimed, “[t]o sail is necessary, to live is not.”[22] Thousands of years before his time, the Egyptians were familiar enough with sea and river travel – though not the extreme isolation of a years-long circumnavigation or whaling voyage – to appreciate the metaphorical possibilities of ships.

One of the oldest and most vivid is that of the ship of state, an image that surfaces first in “The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant” composed during the Eleventh Dynasty (about 2130 to 2060 BCE). In this tale an unscrupulous landowner accuses the peasant Khunanup of trespassing and takes two of his mules. Khunanup appeals to the pharaoh’s advisor, High Steward Rensi, as he is about to board his barge on the Nile. In the first of a series of appeals, Khu-

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nanup compares the justice of his cause with the running of a well-sailed ship: “If you go down to the Lake of Truth,” he tells Rensi, “you shall sail on it with a fair breeze; the bunt of your sail shall not strip away, your ship shall not lag, no mishap shall befall your mast; your yards shall not break, you shall not founder nor run aground, the current shall not carry you off, you shall not taste the evils of the river.” Rensi reports this incident to the pharaoh, who enjoys the peasant’s rhetoric so much that he orders his minister to ensure his family’s well-being while stringing Khunanup along for the sheer pleasure of hearing his arguments. Khunanup rises to the challenge and becomes increasingly demonstrative. “The king is indoors and the steering oar is in your hand, yet trouble is caused in your vicinity,” he observes. Expanding on the idea of Rensi’s function in the ship of state, he says “[y]ou are the steering oar of the entire land, and the land sails in accordance with your command.” On another occasion the exasperated peasant likens Rensi to “a ship in which there is no captain, a confederacy which has no leader.” In the end, the eloquent Khunanup wins his case and is rewarded with his accuser’s house and possessions. Moreover, his protests are transcribed for presentation to the pharaoh, “whom they pleased more than anything which was in this entire land.”[23] This identification of the ship with the state recurs five centuries later in a biographical inscription of a New Kingdom official that likens Queen Hatshepsut to the mooring lines securing the ship of state: “The bow-rope of the South, the mooring-stake of the Southerners; the excellent stern rope of the Northland is she.”[24]

Writers usually resort to the image of the ship of state when it seems about to founder, as in the “Tale of the Eloquent Peasant” and again two thousand years later in a celebrated ode by Horace:

Oh ship! The flood will drag you back to sea again.
Watch out! Make for port!
Don’t you see your oars are gone,
how the fierce wind howls through the shattered mast and spars,
that with her lines parted,
your shell is no match for the cruel sea?

The identification of this ship with the Roman state is of ancient vintage. According to Quintilian, Horace “names the ship for the state, the waves and

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tempests for the civil wars, and the port for peace and concord.” In English, the best-known allusion to the ship of state is perhaps Walt Whitman’s haunting “O Captain! My Captain!” (1865), written on the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln after the American Civil War: “when our fearful trip is done;/The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;/The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,/While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring.” The analogy has come to encompass the church, notably in Sebastian Brant’s fifteenth-century German satire, The Ship of Fools, and in the twentieth century the planet itself.[25]

The image of the state as a ship is readily grasped because both can be considered as self-contained entities subject to a strict hierarchy with an absolute leader. The verb “to govern” derives from the Greek word meaning “to steer” by way of the Latin gubernare, meaning both “to steer” and “to govern.” As Aeneas’ fleet approaches the coast of Italy at the end of the Trojans’ odyssey from Ilium to their promised land, Aeneas’ gubernator, Palinurus, falls overboard and drowns near Cape Palinurus. This can be read as symbolizing the end of the helmsman’s work steering the exiles’ ships across the sea, and the start of Aeneas’ role not merely as admiral of the fleet but also as helmsman of the ship of state.[26]

Familiar though the image of the storm-tossed ship of state is, the dangers and difficulties of seafaring should not blind us to the literary depiction of ships and the sea as places of refuge and protection. Sargon of Akkad (r. 2334-2279 BCE) was born in the highlands of the upper Euphrates of humble origins but with a miraculous infancy not unlike that ascribed to Moses a millennium later: “My mother, the entum, conceived me, in secret she bore me;/She placed me in a basket of rushes, she sealed ‘my door’ [the lid] with bitumen;/She cast me into the river which did not rise over me;/The river bore me up and carried me to Aqqi, the water-drawer.”[27] Likewise, when God saved Noah and his family from the flood, he did not sequester them on a dry mountaintop but had them build an ark for the salvation of mankind and the

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animals of the earth. Brant’s Ship of Fools notwithstanding, the positive religious symbolism of the ship remained strong in Europe. Indeed, the ultimate place of sanctuary is the church, the centre of which is the nave – so-called because of its resemblance to an upside-down ship’s hull – a word first used in this sense in English in 1637, just as England’s overseas expansion was getting under way.

Shipwreck

If writers generally reserve the metaphor of the ship of state for times when ruin seems inevitable, it is because the shipwreck story is a compelling one, even (or especially) for people who have never had a ship lost from under them. The oldest extant shipwreck narrative is an Egyptian story contemporary with “The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant.” It is embellished with layers of fantasy that when peeled away reveals a narrative that can be soberly compared with other written, pictorial and archaeological records. The narrator of “The Shipwrecked Sailor” is the sole survivor of a crew of 120 from a ship bound to Punt via the Red Sea. (Such voyages by Egyptian ships date from at least 2500 BCE, about four centuries before this story.) Cast away on an apparently uninhabited island, the narrator is befriended by a serpent, and in gratitude the sailor offers to have brought to him “barges…laden with all the products of Egypt.” The serpent laughs and says: “You do not have much myrrh/I am, sir, the Prince of Punt/Myrrh belongs to me.” After assuring the sailor that he will be rescued and see his home and family again, the serpent presents him with a cargo of “myrrh, oil, ladanum, spice,/Cinnamon, aromatics, eye-paint, giraffe tails,/Large cakes of incense, ivory tusks,/Hounds, apes, baboons, and all fine products.” As the serpent predicts, the sailor is rescued and returns home with gifts for the pharaoh.[28]

Shipwreck is also the subject of some of the oldest examples of maritime writing from India. These came from The Jatakas, a collection of 550 stories about the Buddha’s past lives as a bodhisattva (enlightened being) first written down in the third century BCE, about 200 years after the death of Gautama Buddha. Two are especially noteworthy as being among the earliest sustained narratives about Indian seafaring. The “Samkha-Jataka” tells the story of Samkha, a wealthy man of Molini (Benares, or Varanasi), renowned for his generosity in endowing alms houses, to which he contributed daily. “One day he said to himself: ‘When I have exhausted all the money that I have at my house, I will no more be able to give anything; therefore, before it is exhausted, let me go in a boat to the Land of Gold [Suvarnabhumi, mainland Southeast Asia] and bring wealth.’” En route to the port, he gives his umbrella

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and shoes to a needy pratyekabuddha (another type of enlightened being) and continued to the port to board his ship. After a week at sea, the ship began to leak, but while “the multitude trembling for the fear of death, invoked each his own god and created a great noise,” Samkha prepares himself and his servant for the loss of the ship.[29] After seven days, the two are saved by the goddess of the sea, Manimekalai, who provides a ship filled with seven kinds of precious stones in which the bodhisattva and his servant return to Molini with the goddess herself as pilot.

In the “Mahajana-Jataka,” Prince Mahajanaka is the posthumous son of Aritthajanaka. When he learns that his uncle killed his father, Mahajanaka vows to reclaim his throne but decides first to raise funds by becoming a merchant, declaring to his mother that

“I will go to Suvarnabhumi and get great riches there, and will then seize the kingdom,” and having got together his stock-in-trade, he put it on board a ship with some merchants bound for Suvarnabhumi and bade his mother farewell, telling her that he was sailing for that country. “My son,” she said, “the sea has few chances of success, and many dangers – do not go – you have ample money for seizing the kingdom.” But he told his mother that he would go, and he bade her adieu and embarked on board…There were seven caravans with their beasts on board; in seven days the ship made 700 leagues, but having gone too violently in its course it could not hold out. Its planks gave way, the water rose higher and higher, the ship began to sink in the middle of the ocean while the crew wept, lamented and invoked their different gods.[30]

Mahajanaka’s ship sinks, but again Manimekalai rescued the bodhisattva who “had had his whole body burnt while remaining in sea water for seven days.” This time, rather than build a ship for Mahajanaka, Manimekalai carried him home in her arms, and in time he became king.

Common to both stories is the description of how the bodhisattva prepares to survive shipwreck, the details of which are almost identical and descriptions of which are absent in most other literature. In the “Mahajana- Jataka,” the prince

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never wept nor lamented nor invoked any deities, but knowing that the vessel was doomed he rubbed some sugar and ghee [clarified butter], and, having eaten his belly full, he smeared his two clean garments with oil and put them tightly around him and stood leaning against the mast. When the vessel sank the mast stood upright. The crowd on board became food for the fishes and tortoises, and the water all around assumed the colour of blood.[31]

These preparations against hypothermia by smearing oneself and one’s clothes with oil are realistic, as are the gory details regarding the bodhisattva’s shipmates and the gruesome effects on Mahajanaka of dehydration and a week’s exposure to salt water.

The Book of the Wonders of India

The sorts of details revealed in The Jatakas, and the heroes’ rather casual decisions to cross the Bay of Bengal to trade in Southeast Asia in particular, reveals an intimate familiarity with seafaring from an Indian perspective. The majority of extant sources about the Indian Ocean in antiquity are by Western writers in Greek and Latin. An indigenous maritime literature, initially in Persian and Arabic, began only in the ninth century when Islam was well established around the Indian Ocean littoral. The best known of these works are the Sinbad stories from the Tales from a Thousand and One Nights. These are likely of Persian origin, with even older Indian and Homeric antecedents, but Sinbad – whose name is Persian – is portrayed as a resident of Baghdad in the time of Harun al-Rashid (r. 786-809), and the oldest manuscript, in Arabic, dates from the fifteenth century.

More firmly grounded in actual experience is The Book of the Wonders of India by Buzurg ibn Shahriyar, a Persian merchant who gathered 137 stories from friends and acquaintances hailing from the flourishing Persian Gulf ports of Suhar, Siraf and Basra. Buzurg names twenty-five of his informants, who collectively are responsible for half the stories, some of which relate fantastic or highly embellished events or miracles similar to those associated with Sinbad. Many reflect the ordinary interests of merchants everywhere, and the compilation is an invaluable mirror of Arab and Persian seafaring in the tenth century. (Twenty-six of the datable stories take place between 908 and 953; the oldest dates from the reign of Harun al-Rashid.) Although India and Sri Lanka are the places mentioned most often, the stories relate voyages to East Africa, Jeddah, Aden and China, the last of which is the setting for a dozen episodes.

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Merchants lucky and luckless, navigators with a sixth sense for the weather and survivors of shipwreck comprise the cast of the more sober narratives. A brief tale told by an Omani merchant named Ismail, for instance, recounts how he sailed from the Malay Peninsula to Shihr on the coast of central Yemen. After beating off a fleet of pirates, he made the 3000-mile passage in forty-one days. His cargo was worth 600,000 dirhams, not including the value exempted by the Sultan of Oman “or the goods which escaped the customs and were not discovered” – which were, in a word, smuggled. Buzurg never adopts a moralistic tone, which imparts a chilling quality to some of the stories: of a shipwrecked girl raped by a sailor as she clings to flotsam while the narrator looks on, of Indian suicides who hire people to drown them and of slaves who in all but one instance are enumerated with complete indifference— a hundred in this ship, two hundred in that one.

The exception is in an account by Ismail who landed in central Mozambique where his crew began bartering with the locals – “a trade that was excellent for us, without any hindrances or customs duties” so common in the rest of the Indian Ocean world. When the trading was completed, the king boarded the ship to see off the merchants. “When I saw them there,” recalled Ismail, “I said to myself: In the market in Oman this young king would certainly fetch thirty dinars, and his seven companions sixty each.” So he seized the king and his retinue and put them together with the other 200 slaves already aboard and sailed for home. The unnamed king was sold at Oman. Converted to Islam, he escaped, and having visited Basra, Mecca, Baghdad and Cairo eventually resumed the throne. Years later, Ismail returned to trade only to be brought before the king, who told of his wanderings and conversion. “Like myself,” he tells the justifiably nervous Omani, his people

embraced the religion of Islam…And here I am, happy and satisfied with the grace God has given me and mine, of knowing the precepts of Islam, the true faith, prayers, fasting, the pilgrimage, and what is permitted and what is forbidden… And, if I have forgiven you, it is because you were the first cause of the purity of my religion.

Bidding farewell to Ismail, the king asks him to “let Muslims know that they may come here to us as to brothers, Muslims like themselves. As for accompanying you to your ship, I have reasons for not doing so.” The king’s refusal to avenge his kidnapping on Ismail testifies to his reverence for Islam, but as his penultimate remarks reveal, his people’s adoption of Islam had a practical

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side, and they could promote their faith in the same way a business might post a sign saying “Arabic spoken here.”[32]

Modern Maritime Literature

The diffusion of religion, language and other cultural markers is a natural if frequently unintended consequence of maritime trade. Whether such transfers should be viewed in a positive light depends entirely on individual perspective. Less debatable is the spread of disease: the plague carried by Italian slave traders from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean world in the fourteenth century or the Columbian exchange of virulent pathogens from Eurasia and Africa to the Americas and Oceania in the age of European expansion. Such exchanges could take place on a much smaller scale, as is the case in Akira Yoshimura’s Shipwrecks (1982), set in a remote, unnamed “village flirting with starvation” on the coast of Japan in the Edo period (1603-1868).[33] Here the people eke out a living from the sea, the women and children gathering shellfish and seaweed from the beach, the boys and men fishing for sardines, squid, saury (sanma) or octopus according to the season. The poverty is such that people sell themselves or their family members into indentured servitude for up to ten years. “But sometimes the rough seas would bring unexpected blessings, so much more bountiful than anything from the beach or the barren fields that no one would have to be sold into bondage for years.”[34] The blessings are the flotsam washed ashore from ships “wrecked on the reef that stretched out in front of the village…such things as food, utensils, luxury goods, and cloth, which would substantially improve the lives of the villagers.”[35] These shipwrecks result from the villagers’ deliberate decision to boil water for salt on the beach during the fall nights. After luring the ships to their doom with light from the fires, they would massacre the crew. In this case, when the villagers plunder the ship they find the crew already dead, although they do not realize the cause until disease has swept through the village. In normal circumstances, the death of the shipwrecked sailors would have been the result of human rather than natural agency; Yoshimura’s dead embody a sort of divine retribution for the villagers’ intentions. This twist exemplifies the dangers of regarding the land and the sea as opposite poles of a Romantic dualism, such as Auden imagines,

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and offers a more nuanced if darker view of the interpenetration of land, sea and people.

The Romantic attitude towards the sea emerged from a set of unique historical circumstances not replicated in late twentieth-century Japan any more than they were in sixteenth-century Portugal or seventeenth-century Britain. The farther removed we are from an historical period, the easier it is to give it narrative shape, and tracing the interplay of national literary and political history becomes easier with hindsight. We can follow the rise and fall of the Portuguese empire because it has lost its essential vitality centuries ago and by the twentieth century was a marginal power. The case of Great Britain is more difficult because its empire and command of world trade expanded steadily from the time of Shakespeare until the mid-twentieth century. In the decades since, these have shrunk with breathtaking speed. The longing for the days when Britannia ruled the waves, which is well within living memory, has to be balanced against the reality of its diminutive navy and merchant marine. Historical memory has a habit of conflating past eras and tricking us into seeing continuities that are little more than a function of nostalgia. Jonathan Raban notes the powerful attraction of sailing ships for nineteenth- and twentiethcentury authors whose times were actually dominated by the steamship, and he deplores the fact that “a depressing quantity of prose writing about the sea in the late twentieth century has been content to recycle the language and iconography of its nineteenth-century predecessors.”[36] This is reason enough to cast a wider net for new sources of sea writing, but maritime literature also offers hints about how the memory of something as obvious and absolute as Britain’s maritime supremacy can vanish.

In José Sarney’s Master and the Sea (1963), the fisherman Antão Cristório has for a companion Aquimundo, the incarnation of a drowned pilot named Aires Fernandes, “in whom time has not passed.” As Aquimundo tells the bewildered Cristório at their first meeting:

I have gone through many lands, Sofala, Querimba, Ibo, Pemba, Mombasa, Melinde, Pate, Ormuz, Diu, Goa, Cochin, Malacca, Ceylon, Meliapore, Macao, Timor, and I reached Nagasaki with Francis Xavier, the priest who’s a saint today but who sailed with me on the ship the Amacau, the Ship of the Red Seal of August, which made the trip to Japan.

To this Cristório replies simply: “I don’t understand a word of this talk; I don’t know at all what you’re talking about. It’s the tangled-up language of a

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specter.”[37] That a son of Portugal’s most successful colony, and a sailor to boot, should be ignorant of the achievements and extent of Portugal’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century empire would have been unimaginable to Camões, but it is a natural consequence of the passage of time. People and nations do forget, and ignorance of the past is a condition into which we naturally relapse and against which historians constantly struggle. Yet just because Cristório knows nothing of his debt to Portugal’s maritime empire does not mean he is either without or outside of history, and Master and the Sea can be read for the light it sheds on the very different perceptions of the sea held by coastal fishermen of mid-twentieth-century Brazil and for insight into the nature of their communities.

Sarney’s tour de force of magic realism takes place amid the islands of Maranhão state on the Atlantic coast southeast of the Amazon. The novel recounts the love of Cristório for Quertide, who is kidnapped by demons; after three years of searching for her, he resolves to marry another woman and to continue his life as a fisherman. Cristório’s quest to find Quertide is at once as real and fantastic as Odysseus’ drive to return home, and Sarney’s magic has a mythic, other-worldly quality. But his realism is firmly rooted in the daily life of his subjects. Cristório is a man of his time and place, and though he had to battle demons, he also has to get on with his life. While the sea and land are distinct environments, they are strange or banal in equal measure, and although there is no lack of either drama or a sense of wonder, that sailors and fishermen should lead amphibious lives is taken for granted, and Sarney imposes no separation on the two media of human existence.

Yukio Mishima takes a comparable approach in The Sound of Waves (1956), set in postwar Japan. Like Master and the Sea, this is a love story whose hero, Shinji, is a fisherman. Although there is nothing magical in Mishima’s straightforward realism, boats and ships are as much a part of the fabric of Shinji’s life as they are of Cristório’s. The novel’s tension arises from the forbidden love between Shinji, the poor hero, and Hatsue, the daughter of the island’s most prosperous merchant. To win her father’s approval, Shinji has to prove himself by working aboard one of his merchant ships alongside a rival for Hatsue’s affections. Although the 185-ton freighter is larger than the fishing boat to which Shinji is accustomed, as are the physical challenges and the rewards for success, the trial is a shift in scale only. Shinji’s test takes the form of swimming a hawser to a buoy in a typhoon, a trial for which competence, character and experience of the sea are prerequisites. As he prepares to go overboard, “accustomed to rough weather in a small fishing-boat, the heaving deck on which his feet were firmly planted was nothing but a stretch of

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earth that was frankly a bit out of sorts.”[38] Shinji is not a ne’er-do-well hero in the mould of Rudyard Kipling’s Harvey Cheyne, Jr., who in Captains Courageous undergoes a Romantic metamorphosis in the face of the sea’s unrelenting challenge. He saves his ship because that is what needs to be done. Shinji’s life as an island fisherman requires no transformation, and by the book’s end his attachment to his home and its way of life remains as they are in the beginning, when

[h]is fisherman’s conception of the sea was close to that of the farmer for his land. The sea was the place where he earned his living, a rippling field where, instead of waving heads of rice or wheat, the white and formless harvest of waves was forever swaying above the unrelieved blueness of a sensitive and yielding soil.[39]

Despite besting his rival and winning the approval of Hatsue’s father, Shinji’s personal ambition remains unalterably wedded to his place and occupation.

Hatsue’s attraction is not simply that her father is rich and she is beautiful, but that she is good-natured and, as it happens, a highly skilled abalone diver, a leading occupation of islander women. Her father had let her (and her three sisters) be adopted by “a family of diving women” on another island, and he reclaimed her only after his son dies. The seaside communities given over to harvesting the ocean know a strict division of labour between men and women:

Men go out fishing. They board their coasting ships and carry cargo to all sorts of ports. Women, not destined for that wide world, cook rice, draw water, gather seaweed, and when summer comes dive into the water, down to the sea’s deep bottom. Even for a mother who was a veteran among diving women this twilight world of the sea’s bottom was the world of women.[40]

The season is limited, and the hardships and dangers considerable: “There was the cold, the strangling feeling of running out of breath, the inexpressible agony when water forced its way under the water-goggles, the panic and sudden

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fear of collapsing that invaded the entire body just when an abalone was almost at the fingertips.” As fishing is for boys, it is a livelihood to which girls are introduced at an early age, working their way up from diving for pebbles at the water’s edge to diving from boats, a littoral education in which the land is hardly distinguishable from the sea.

The Uses of Maritime Literature

As the study of maritime history has become more widespread so, too, has the offering of courses in maritime literature. While the scope of maritime historical studies has grown to encompass ever more regions of maritime endeavour, and to consider periods previously overlooked, the study of maritime literature, or the literature of the sea, remains hard aground on the shoals of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone experience. This is curious because the primary rationale for putting to sea is to establish connections, which the astonishingly parochial canon of maritime writings fails to do. It is unfortunate because this narrow approach ignores the literature’s potential for shedding light on corners of maritime history for which other written evidence is in short supply or altogether unavailable.

The homogeneity of these syllabi is not the result of intentional design, tradition or imitation, but at some point our approach to maritime literature became identified with the heyday of the Pax Britannica and its American shadow. In itself this is no bad thing, for this period produced some exceptional maritime writing. But these perspectives on and interpretations of the sea and seafaring (to say nothing of the human spirit) are not universal. Basing a maritime literature course – much less two dozen of them – on the writings of a handful of modern and contemporary Anglophone authors while ignoring the rest of the world runs counter to the strength and logic of maritime studies. Seafaring is one of humankind’s most naturally cross-cultural enterprises, and while other disciplines must fumble to find or invent multicultural connections, developing a course in maritime literature that avoids obvious linkages between different cultures over time would seem to require more rather than less effort.

From an historian’s perspective, because one of the primary obstacles to the study of world maritime history derives from an imbalance in the available source material – it is easier to study regions or periods for which written, archaeological or ethnographic evidence is more abundant – imaginative literature can prove an invaluable source of historical information. This is particularly true of older periods, when stories told in epics, verse or dramatic works may offer the only written accounts of maritime history. It is likewise the case for more recent periods because authors of fiction and poetry give voice to the voiceless and the overlooked in ways that historians do not. Fiction cannot necessarily substitute for primary sources, but while a picture may well be

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worth a thousand words, the degree to which the use of boats and ships pervaded the everyday life of ancient Egypt is more obvious from Khunanup’s casual comparisons of Rensi to “the steering oar of the entire land” than it is from scores of ship models, pictures, bas reliefs and archaeological finds tucked away in museums. Nor should historians ignore the sheer delight of reading maritime literature and standing back from the drudgery of research to consider the people we study more as their contemporaries might have done.

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Appendix 1

Suggested Foreign-Language Readings in English Translations

The following list includes the non-English-language works mentioned above as well as other works representative of other cultures or historical periods (and available in English translation) that might be considered for courses in maritime literature. It is not intended as a comprehensive list, and it is heavily weighted towards antiquity and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The author welcomes additional suggestions. The four works assigned in one or more of the courses discussed above are indicated by an asterisk next to the author’s name.

Author	Work	Origin	Date
Amado, Jorge	Home is the Sailor: The Whole Truth Concerning the Redoubtful Adventures of Captain Vasco Moscoso de Aragaõ , Master Mariner	Brazil	1961
Anonymous	“The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor”	Egypt c. 2100 BCE
Anonymous	“The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant” Egypt	c. 2100 BCE
Anonymous	“Samkha-Jataka”	India	3rd century BCE
Anonymous	“Mahajana-Jataka”	India	3rd century BCE
Anonymous	Epic of Gilgamesh	Mesopotamia	3rd millennium BCE
Anonymous	Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot	Ireland	8th century
Apollonius of Rhodes	Argonautica	Greece	3rd century BCE
Baricco, Alessandro	Ocean Sea	Italy	1993
Baudelaire, Charles	Fleurs du Mal (“The Albatross,” “The Man and the Sea,” “The Beautiful Ship”)	France	1857
Bengtsson, Frans G.	The Long Ships: A Saga of the Viking Age	Sweden	1954
Boullosa, Carmen	They’re Cows, We’re Pigs	Mexico	1997
Brant, Sebastian	The Ship of Fools	Germany 1494
Buchheim, Lothar-Günther	Das Boot	Germany	1973
Buzurg, Ibn Shahriyar	The Book of the Wonders of India Persia	10th century
Camões, Luis Vaz de	The Lusiads	Portugal	1572
Heine, Heinrich	“The Slave Ship”	Germany	1853

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Author	Work	Origin	Date
*Homer	The Odyssey	Greece	8th century BCE
Horace	Odes 1.3, 1.14	Rome	23-13 BCE
Hugo, Victor	Toilers of the Sea	France	1866
Larsson, Björn	Long John Silver: The True and Eventful History of My Life of Liberty and Adventure as a Gentleman of Fortune and Enemy of Mankind	Sweden	1995
Lenz, Siegfried	The Lightship	Germany	1960
Lermontov, Mikhail	“The Sail”	Russia	1872
Lucian	Dialogues of the Sea-Gods	Greece	2nd century
Lucian	The Ship, or The Wishes	Greece	2nd century
Mishima, Yukio	The Sound of Waves	Japan	1954
Mishima, Yukio	The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea	Japan	1963
Montello, Josue	Coronation Quay	Brazil	1975
*Murakami, Haruki	“The Seventh Man”	Japan	1998
Nadolny, Sten	The Discovery of Slowness	Germany	1983
Neruda, Pablo	On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea	Chile	2003
Novikov-Priboj, Aleksej Silytsj	Tsushima	Russia	1936
Ovid	Tristia 1.2	Rome	1st century
Rimbaud, Arthur	“The Drunken Boat”	France	1871
Sarney, Jose	Master and the Sea	Brazil	1963
*Seferis, George	Argonautica	Greece	20th century
[Sinbad]	The Tales of the Thousands Nights and One Night	Persia	10th century
Stimson, J. Frank (ed.)	Songs and Tales of the Sea Kings	Oceania	1957
Verne, Jules	An Antarctic Mystery	France	1897
*Verne, Jules	Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea	France 1870
Virgil	The Aeneid	Rome	1st century BCE
Yoshimura, Akira	Shipwrecks	Japan	1982
Yoshimura, Akira	Storm Rider	Japan	2004

[1] For their help in preparing this article I would like to thank Joshua M. Smith, US Merchant Marine Academy; Timothy Lynch, California Maritime Academy; Sarah Pedersen, Evergreen State College; Anne Witty, Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum, Bowdoin College; Richard King, Williams-Mystic Program; Colin D. Dewey, Cornell University; Maurizio Vito; C. Herbert Gilliland, US Naval Academy; Christopher Merrill, International Writing Program, University of Iowa; and Lewis R. Fischer.

[2] Jonathan Raban (ed.), The Oxford Book of the Sea (New York, 1992); Tony Tanner (ed.), The Oxford Book of Sea Stories (New York, 1994); and J.O. Coote (ed.), The Faber Book of Tales of the Sea (London, 1991), published in the United States as The Norton Book of the Sea, Vol. 2 (New York, 1994).

[3] The schools and courses included California Maritime Academy, “Literature of the Sea;” College of the Atlantic; Cornell University, “Sea Stories – Exploring Oceanic and Maritime Texts;” Evergreen State College, “Sea Stories/Seamanship;” Long Island University, Southampton College, “Literature of the Sea;” Metropolitan College, Boston University, “Classics of Maritime Literature in Historical Context;” Middlebury College, “Maritime Literature and Culture;” Rice University, Freshman Writing Seminar, “Literature of the Sea;” Rutgers University, “Maritime Culture” (offered as American Studies); Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology; US Naval Academy; US Merchant Marine Academy; University of California, San Diego: “Themes in English and American Literature; Navigating the Americas, US Maritime Literature and Manifest Destiny, 1820-1855;” University of Connecticut, “Maritime Literature;” University of Maine at Presque Isle; Uniwersytet Opolski, “Angielska Literatura Marynistyczna (English Literature of the Sea);” Williams College, “Herman Melville and Mark Twain” and “Voyages of Discovery;” and the Maritime Studies Program of Williams College at Mystic Seaport (Williams-Mystic), “Literature of the Sea.”

[4] Williams-Mystic, “Literature of the Sea.”

[5] California Maritime Academy, “Literature of the Sea.”

[6] Raban (ed.), Oxford Book of the Sea, xvii.

[7] Ibid., 20-24.

[8] 8Peter Jay (ed.), The Greek Anthology and Other Ancient Greek Epigrams: A

Selection in Modern Verse Translations (New York, 1973), 195.

[9] W.H. Auden, The Enchafèd Flood, or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea (New York, 1950), 3.

[10] Ibid., 13.

[11] Ibid., 12. The emphasis is in the original.

[12] Luís Vaz de Camões, The Lusíads (Lisbon, 1572), trans. Landeg White (New York, 1997), Canto 1.3.

[13] Auden, Enchafèd Flood, 7-8.

[14] Camões, Lusíads, Canto 1.106.

[15] Ibid., Canto 10.91.

[16] John Dryden, Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders (London, 1666), §22.

[17] Ibid., §177, §184, §203 and §101.

[18] Auden, Enchafèd Flood, 9.

[19] Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York, 1990), 2:584-862.

[20] Auden, Enchafèd Flood, 71.

[21] “Fifty days after the solstice, when the season of wearisome heat is come to an end, is the right time for me to go sailing. Then you will not wreck your ship, nor will the sea destroy the sailors…Another time for men to go sailing is in spring when a man first sees leaves on the topmost shoot of a fig-tree as large as the foot-print that a crow makes.” Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 663-677, in The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (London, 1914).

[22] Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (11 vols., Cambridge, 1914-1926), V, 247.

[23] “The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant,” in William Kelly Simpson (ed.), Literature of Ancient Egypt (New Haven, 2003), 31-49.

[24] James Henry Breasted (ed.), Ancient Records of Egypt: Historical Documents from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (5 vols., Chicago, 1906-1907; 5th ed., New York, 2001), II, §341.

[25] Horace, Ode, 1.14. For the standard interpretation, see Steele Commager, The Odes of Horace: A Critical Study (Bloomington, 1962), 164. See also Sebastian Brant, Das Narranschiff (Basel, 1494). Writing of his purpose in gathering traditional sailing ships as a means of building international goodwill as a counterpoise to the nuclear arms race of the 1960s and 1970s, maritime historian Frank O. Braynard said that “we are all seamen on the ship Earth.” The quote is from his obituary, New York Times, 14 December 2007.

[26] Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (London, 1945), 103, hints at this possibility. Connolly’s epilogue, “Who was Palinurus?” demonstrates that The Aeneid can be read profitably for its nautical themes as well as for its symbolism.

[27] Amélie Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East (2 vols., New York, 1995), I, 48.

[28] “The Shipwrecked Sailor,” in William Kelly Simpson (ed.), Literature of Ancient Egypt (New Haven, 2003), 50-56.

[29] “Samkkha-Jataka,” in Edward B. Cowell (trans.), The Jataka; Or, Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births (6 vols. London, 1973), IV, 9-13.

[30] “Mahajana-Jataka,” in ibid., VI, 21-22.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Buzurg ibn Shahriyar of Ramhormuz, The Book of the Wonders of India: Mainland, Sea and Islands, trans. G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville (London, 1981), 31-36.

[33] Akira Yoshimura, Shipwrecks, trans. Mark Ealey (San Diego, 1982), 4.

[34] Ibid., 10.

[35] Ibid., 12.

[36] Raban (ed.), Oxford Book of the Sea, 33.

[37] José Sarney, Master and the Sea, trans. Gregory Rabassa (Minneapolis, 2005), 65.

[38] Yukio Mishima, The Sound of Waves, trans. Meredith Weatherby (New York, 1984), 162-163.

[39] Ibid., 19.

[40] Ibid., 18 and 68.

Maritime History Journals and Magazines

2005-10-30T16:14:00.000-05:00

This list is by no means exhaustive or comprehensive. Additional recommendations are welcome.

American Neptune
Peabody Essex Museum and Essex Institute
www.pem.org/neptune/default.htm
(Publication suspended.)

Argonauta
Newsletter of the Canadian Nautical Research Society www.marmus.ca/cnrs/tnme000.htm

Chasse-Marée: Histoire et Ethnologie Maritime
www.chasse-maree.com/

Classic Boat: The Love of Traditional Craft
www.classicboat.co.uk/cb/home.htm

Great Circle: Journal of the Australian Association for Maritime History
Australian Association for Maritime History
www.aamh.asn.au/greatcircle.html

Inland Seas
Great Lakes Historical Society
www.inlandseas.org/WebPages/About.html

International Journal of Maritime History
Journal of the International Maritime Economic History Association
www.mun.ca/mhp/ijmh.htm

International Journal of Nautical Archaeology
Nautical Archaeological Society
http://www.nasportsmouth.org.uk/

Itinerario
The Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (F.E.E.G.I.)
http://www.itinerario.nl/

Journal for Maritime Research (e-journal)
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
http://www.jmr.nmm.ac.uk/

Log of Mystic Seaport
Mystic Seaport: The Museum of America and the Sea
http://www.mysticseaport.org/

Mains'l Haul: A Journal of Pacific Maritime History
San Diego Maritime Museum
www.sdmaritime.com/ContentPage.asp?ContentID=33

Marine News
World Ship Society
www.worldshipsociety.org/links/marinenews.php

Mariner’s Mirror
Society for Nautical Research
http://www.snr.org/

Naval History Magazine
U.S. Naval Institute
www.usni.org/navalhistory/navalhistory.html

Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord
Canadian Nautical Research Society
www.marmus.ca/cnrs/tnme000.htm

Sea Breezes: The World Magazine of Ships and the Sea
Mannin Media Group, Ltd.
www.manninmedia.co.im/website.html

Sea History
National Maritime Historical Society
www.seahistory.org/

Ships Monthly Magazine
IPC Country & Leisure Media, Ltd.
www.shipsmonthly.com/ships/home.htm

Steamboat Bill
Steamship Historical Society of America
www.sshsa.net/

U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings
U.S. Naval Institute
www.usni.org/proceedings/proceedings.html

Warships International Fleet Review
HPC Publishing
www.warshipsifr.com/

Warships Magazine
World Ship Society
www.worldshipsociety.org/links/warships.php

WoodenBoat Magazine
WoodenBoat Publications, Inc.
www.woodenboat.com/

For additional journals published in languages other than English, see Lars Bruzelius’s Maritime History Virtual Archives: Bibliography—Journals: www.bruzelius.info

Praeger Explorations in World Maritime History

2005-10-30T14:52:00.000-05:00

Praeger Explorations in World Maritime History
Series Editor, Lincoln P. Paine

The Praeger Explorations in World Maritime History series features individual volumes on key maritime topics, both civilian and naval. The object is to publish books that offer reliable overviews of particular aspects of global maritime history while incorporating the most up-to-date scholarly interpretations. Books are intended to be narrative surveys that serve as practical introductions or handbooks to their topics. Each title in the series will be an original work of the highest scholarly and professional quality.

The purpose of the books in the Praeger Explorations in World Maritime History series is to engage readers and educate them about important but often neglected aspects of global maritime studies. Authors should assume that their audience—which comprises interested, educated general readers as well as advanced high school and college-level students—will bring to their reading little background knowledge of the subject. Authors should explain clearly the subject or event under discussion, its historical context and its significance. Authors should also provide materials that increase the books value as a reference, including bibliographies, chronologies and maps.

Books published in the series will be attractively designed and packaged, with artist-designed, full-color dust jackets. The series will be marketed aggressively to general readers; public, community college and university libraries; book clubs; and to specialty maritime history audiences.

Authors: Individual titles may be written by one or more authors.

Length: The entire manuscript, including all components, should be no more than 100,000 words (about 260 printed pages in the published version).

Illustrations: Each volume should include 30-40 illustrations, including maps.

Supplementary materials: Timelines, charts and other features to make books reader friendly are welcome.

Author royalties: The approved author royalty rates for books in this series will be discussed with authors by the commissioning editor at Praeger. Royalty rates escalate based on the number of copies sold.

Contact: Lincoln P. Paine [LPaine1@maine.rr.com], series editor.

Praeger Publishers has published scholarly books in the social sciences and humanities since 1949. These books serve the needs of scholars and general readers alike by providing the best contemporary scholarship to the widest possible audience.

Maritime History Blogs

2005-10-30T14:37:00.000-05:00

The following are other maritime history blogs. Additional recommendations are welcome.

In English:

http://maritimecompass.blogspot.com

http://lakeshipwrecks.blogspot.com/

In Portuguese:

http://www.maritimo.blogspot.com/

http://www.naufragium.blogspot.com/

A Pax Upon You

2005-05-23T15:08:00.001-05:00

The following article was written in the spring of 2003, on the eve of the United States' invasion of Iraq, and published in Clio’s Psyche 10:3 (Dec. 2003): 91-97. A central if unstated premise of the article is that the ability of the United States to project power worldwide proceeds from its overwhelming naval power. Thus the historical parallels, or preludes, are drawn from empires founded on naval and maritime power.

("A pox upon you" is a sixteenth-century English curse meaning "May you get syphilis." Pax is the Latin word for peace, not the clap.)

A Pax Upon You: Preludes and Perils of American Imperialism

The United States’ invasion of Iraq has given rise to a long overdue debate about whether the Republic has become an empire and, if so, of what kind. Those who view the United States as an imperial power usually point to the Roman or British empires as relevant or even appropriate models, but their comparisons raise a number of objections. In the first place, however we choose to reinterpret Roman or British forms of imperial governance and law in hindsight, the ethical and ideological foundations of their empires are antithetical to the privileges, responsibilities, and freedoms embodied in the United States Constitution. There are echoes of Roman and British rule in the United States today, but they are—or should be—as faint as cosmic echoes of the big bang. A second objection is that while neo-imperialists rummage through history for precedents that might look good in the light of 21st-century sensibilities, today’s architects of an imperial United States simultaneously flatter themselves with the novelty of their ideas. It takes a fatal arrogance to imagine that the Bush administration invented the pre-emptive use of brute force in defense of national interests, the so-called “Bush Doctrine.” Mix this with the questionable belief that Western democracy is the natural state of mankind and you have all the makings of a Pax Americana.

Empire-building has always comprised two elements, an economic end and an ideological rationale. The latter is subject to variation, but there is always a vein of continuity. The Bush administration’s claim that we had to change the regime in Iraq because of its stock of non-traditional weapons resonates because of our recent experience with terrorism. Likewise, overthrowing a tyranny to make way for a democratic government is consistent with our nation’s self-image as the arsenal of democracy. Both these rationales have something to do with reality, but in ignoring real world complexities, they leave us with false options. The failure to recognize the dual nature of imperial enterprise—the one ideological, the other material—makes it impossible to see our nation’s actions for what they are, or to address the profound perils of a Pax Americana.

Grand though this Latin phrase sounds, it should strike fear in the hearts and minds of Americans, our allies, and the objects of our covetous gaze. Whatever imperial apologists or historical shorthand may say to the contrary, the peace of the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannica were fictions. Peace was enforced by pacification, all but endless warfare in the interest of winning strategic advantage for material gain. A Pax Americana can be no different, and it can only undermine the institutions and high ideals upon which our republic was founded.

The longing to emulate either the Roman or British empire is based on a selective reading of their accomplishments and tactics. It will foster a clearer understanding of American ambition to examine other imperial models as well. The first to consider is surely that of Athens, in whose imperfect and short-lived democracy we like to see our political origins. On closer examination, there is much to be said against it: slaveholding, women without political rights, and a compulsion to worship the state gods, among other things, including its brevity. Athens’ golden age lasted only half a century after her victory over the Persian Empire in 479 bce. In this period the Athenians sowed the seeds of their own destruction by transforming a naval alliance created for collective defense against the Persians into a grasping empire. Athens’ demise resulted not from alien invasion, but because of her erstwhile allies’ hostile reaction to her imperial reach, which culminated in the devastating 27-year-long Peloponnesian War.

The resulting weakness led to the rise of the kingdom of Macedonia, whose people contemporary Greeks regarded as barbarians. In a decade of military campaigns, a young Alexander the Great trailed a thin veneer of Greek culture across a large swath of the Near East as far as the Indus River, but he died on the march, well before he could take steps to organize his rule. His conquests were divided among three of his generals, who embarked on a great arms race to vie for control of the Eastern Mediterranean and its contiguous lands.

At the same time, in the central Mediterranean, Rome was also embarked on an imperial career. We tend to view the accomplishments of the Roman Empire through rose-colored glasses that highlight its military successes, cultural attainments, and the logistical sophistication that spread goods, people, and ideas—Romanitas and later Christianity—across vast territories. It does not discount these achievements to acknowledge that they had a tremendous human cost. Slavery was extensive, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few, and the people’s baser appetites were sated with liberal doses of panem et circenses—bread and circuses. Most glaring, the price of imperial administration was exorbitant, especially the maintenance of a large, highly trained professional army by whose arms the empire was enlarged and protected.

Rome’s transition from republic to empire occurred under Augustus, who assumed for himself an unprecedented degree of political power. But in its territorial expansion, Rome had been an empire in the modern sense for hundreds of years. In the first century bce, Rome already controlled most of Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and parts of Spain, North Africa. and the Balkans. By the death of Augustus in 14 ce, these gains had been consolidated: Gaul, Britain, and Egypt (with its invaluable granaries), and vast tracts of Asia Minor and the coastal Near East had been annexed. For several centuries thereafter, the empire was preoccupied variously with the expansion and/or security of its long, heavily fortified borders. In Roman Britain, Hadrian’s Wall stretched from the North Sea to the Irish Sea to protect Romano-British settlements against invasion from Scotland, while a line of forts in the west guarded against incursions from Wales. The empire’s continental border was defined more or less by the Rhine and Danube Rivers, natural boundaries of considerable size that the Romans nonetheless had to reinforce with more than a hundred forts. A further measure of security was achieved by establishing colonies peopled by retired legionnaires as a sort of veterans’ benefit for people whose allegiance was presumably assured.

It is a testament to the inherent instability of the empire that by the 300s, the Pax Romana was being maintained by more than thirty legions. Ultimately, the armies and associated bureaucracy upon which the state relied for its existence proved both unaffordable and unreliable. The level of unrest in the empire varied by place and time, but they included local uprisings (slave revolts and the Jewish revolts of the 60s and 130s ce, for instance), as well as probes by Germanic tribes along the Rhine/Danube line, which culminated in the “barbarian” invasions of the fourth century. There was also chronic instability in the East, where security depended largely on the weakness of the Parthian Empire and the willingness of buffer states to submit to Rome.

In addition to their intended role as guardians of the frontier, the armies played a decisive role in domestic politics. In the first century of the Pax Romana, when the lands ringing the Mediterranean were at their most serene, being emperor was at its most dangerous. A large part of the army’s pay derived from booty acquired on campaign, which more or less dictated that it be kept gainfully employed if the soldiery were to be kept in check. Inattention to this fact, combined with other political pressures, often proved fatal. Of the first 12 emperors, five were murdered and two killed themselves in disgrace.

In the United States, there is a comparable problem, not with the patriotic military (hence the cavalier downgrading of veterans’ benefits), but with its self-serving civilian arm—the industries of the military-industrial complex. Their revenues depend on the consumption of an enormous array of weapons, goods, and services, and these industries go to great lengths to make sure their products are in demand. The degree to which military contractors have perverted American politics and foreign policy can be seen in these companies’ strategic establishment of factories and offices in virtually every single Congressional district in the United States, a fact that enables them to exert an incalculable influence on government from the local to the federal level. Against such an entrenched interest, the Son of God would have to campaign on a platform of Pax Christiana rather than of Pax Christi.

In its 19th-century phase, America’s conquest of the lands south and west of the original 13 states towards the Gulf Coast, the Great Lakes, and the Pacific seems reminiscent of the expansion of the Roman Republic, although there was greater technological parity between Rome and her neighbors than between American settlers and Native Americans. The American experience more accurately reflects that of the Russian Empire in its eastward expansion into Siberia and North America from the 16th to the 19th centuries. With exemplary bad timing, the Russians sold Fort Ross, in California, to John Sutter seven years before the gold rush began at Sutter’s Mill in 1849, and then sold Alaska to the United States three decades before the Klondike gold rush. Despite these losses, Russian expansion was spectacular. Even after the break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Russia remains the largest country in the world. The nation that began with 13 states on the eastern seaboard of North America is the third.

An apt parallel for America’s more recent imperial exertions can be found in those of 15th- and 16th-century Portugal: evangelical, commercial, essentially non-territorial, militarily advanced and often ruthless in the pursuit of its aims. Two forces drove Portuguese expansion. As latter-day crusaders, the Portuguese believed it was their mission to fight Muslims and convert heathens. As merchants, they sought access to the spice trade and to monopolize it at the expense of Indian Ocean merchants (many of whom were Muslim) and in the Mediterranean, where their chief rivals were fellow Christians. In much the same way, the United States seeks to convert to democracy nations and regions where we have a quantifiable economic interest. The war against Saddam Hussein came about not because the people of Iraq suffered under the government, or because the regime’s weaponry posed a clear and present danger to the United States, but because the government controlled vast stocks of oil.

The man credited with kick-starting Portugal’s overseas adventures was Prince Henry, whom a 19th-century British historian dubbed “the Navigator.” A strong advocate of the Church militant, Henry cajoled his father to embark on a crusade against the Moors. After casting about for a likely target, in 1415 Henry took part in the capture of the Moroccan port of Ceuta, a place of little economic or strategic significance to Portugal. The victory proved a white elephant, for the territory was costly to maintain but impossible to surrender without losing face. A subsequent attack on the more powerful port of Tangier failed, and Henry eventually turned to more commercial pursuits that took his caravels into the archipelagoes of the western Atlantic, especially Madeira, and south along the Guinea coast of West Africa, a source of gold, slaves, and cheap pepper.

The aims and rationale of this 600-year-old European anticipate the strained arguments of the Bush administration. Although crusading was properly an altruistic activity undertaken for spiritual rather than material gain, Henry was unquestionably a merchant prince who had no problem mixing commercial opportunity with the work of the Church militant. Similarly, President Bush’s version of militant democracy serves as an ideological banner around which business interests rally in search of market share. In his denial of the obvious economic rationale for U.S. adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq—but not in Saudi Arabia, which has too much oil, nor in North Korea, which has none—he protests too much. Afghanistan gives access to the gas fields of Central Asia and Iraq has the world’s second largest reserves of oil.

Rather than admit what the whole world knows, the Bush administration insists that the American invasion of Iraq is not about oil. With some qualification, this is correct: It is not about oil—alone. Any number of opportunists are hiding in the wings, from the administration’s friends and associates at corporations such as Halliburton—whose former chairman is Vice President Dick Cheney, and whose board of directors includes President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State, George Schultz—and Bechtel—whose board of directors includes George H.W. Bush’s other Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger. Other luminaries who stand to gain enormously include American businessman and hawk Richard Perle, and Saudi arms dealer and businessman Adnan Khashoggi, trusted veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal. There are myriad ways to cash in on rebuilding and rearming Iraq, if you know the right people and have the right access.

An especially striking parallel between Prince Henry and President Bush is their staunch adherence to outmoded legal concepts to justify their actions. Prince Henry promoted the notion that fighting Muslims was just war as sanctioned by the Church. His insistence on this point disregarded a growing body of ecclesiastical and lay legal writing that maintained that neither popes nor princes had the authority to wage war against non-Christian states simply because they were not Christian. With similar ideological fervor, President Bush has argued the need to export democracy to the people of Iraq, even if it means disregarding international law and opinion, or even, as it may transpire, the wishes of the Iraqi people.

At the end of the 15th century, the Crusader ethos was still alive and well in Portugal, and when Vasco da Gama reached the Indian port of Calicut in 1498, one of his first acts was to drive a wedge between the Hindu rulers and the city’s community of Muslim merchants. So eager were they to find co-religionists with whom they could make common cause against the Muslims that the Portuguese determined that the local Hindus belonged to a previously unknown sect of Christians. This tendency to see things not as they are but as we want them to be is a salient characteristic of Bush’s foreign policy, in which all issues are divided into black and white and democracy is treated like a marketable commodity. The president’s announcement that if you are not with us, you are against us, has a corollary of uncertain value: if you are with us—in this case, against Hussein—you must also be like us, that is, democratic.

This error is not unique to Bush. It was tragically made in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, when we armed the fundamentalist factions who went on to form the Taliban government and Al Qaeda. We are poised to make the same mistake in Iraq, where the anti-Hussein lineup comprises virtually every shade of the political spectrum from Kurdish Communists, to Sunni clerics, to democrats-in-exile whose political credentials and legitimacy are thin. This is not to suggest that no Iraqis believe in democracy, but opposition to Ba’ath Party rule takes many forms, and it is not clear that a secular majority has much chance of winning a clear mandate to form a democratic government, especially if the winner is perceived as an American puppet. Any government that truly represents the fractured will of the Iraqi people will have to make concessions and embrace ideologies that are anathema to the militant democracy espoused by Bush’s own “Republican Guard.”

Once in the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese might have adapted themselves to the laissez-faire patterns of an ancient network of trade that passed goods from East Africa and China. Instead, they seized strategic ports; built and garrisoned fortresses; demanded protection money from Muslim, Hindu, and other merchants; and attempted to monopolize the Indian Ocean spice trade. In so doing, the crown relied upon soldiers who died by the hundreds of disease or in battle, and on viceroys and governors who usually exploited their offices for personal gain. The American empire already emulates this approach with military bases strung like a necklace around the world. The jewels in the western Indian Ocean region include Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Iraq, and Diego Garcia (whose entire population was forcibly removed between 1965 and 1973). Together these help shape the patterns of world trade—especially the oil trade—in America’s interest. Those nations dependent on Middle Eastern oil and Central Asian natural gas must tread lightly for fear of antagonizing the United States.

The last empire to consider in this brief comparative survey is that of Great Britain, one of several successors to the Portuguese and by most measures the most successful. At its height, its territories were the most extensive in the world, including Canada, Australia, India, vast tracts of Africa and Asia, and smaller holdings in the Americas, Antarctica, and Europe—Ireland and Gibraltar. The underlying factors for English expansion in the 16th century were essentially practical—a desire to compete for spices and to provide an outlet for their domestic trade, which the Spanish had curtailed. But like the Portuguese before them, the English were animated by a militant ideology, one originally founded on a virulent hostility to Catholicism in general and to Spain and Portugal (by then part of the Spanish empire) in particular.

This ideological foundation quickly took on a life of its own. In the early 1600s, English propagandists decided that in their failure to develop the abundant resources available to them in the European manner, Native Americans had effectively ceded their right to the land. North America was considered “virgin” territory “that hath yet her maidenhead” and which was, therefore, “attractive for Christian suitors.” The attraction was not, however, absolute, and much of the raw labor for the colonies had to be provided by indentured servants, criminals, and religious dissidents from the British Isles, and African slaves. The latter were a staple of the English Atlantic trade for centuries, and when the slave trade was finally abolished in the 19th century, British traffickers in human cargoes simply shifted to the coolie trade—the shipment of Indian and Chinese laborers in conditions that abolitionist Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, described as “almost as heart-rending as any that attended the African slave trade.”

Despite their differences, abolitionists and slavers alike believed that the world was filled with inferior races. They parted company on the issue of what to do about them. The former argued they could be civilized, the latter that they were good for little more than brute labor. One can sense the tension between these two lines of thought in Rudyard Kipling’s turn-of-the-century ballad in which he urged people to “take up the White Man’s burden … to serve your captives’ need.” By 1899, the British had their empire well in hand (their meddling in the Middle East would have to wait until after World War I) and Kipling was addressing himself to the people of the United States, who had just taken up “the White Man’s burden—The savage wars of peace” in the Philippines, newly won in the Spanish-American War.

If religion and ideology account for the zeal with which the British undertook their expansion, their success must be attributed to their relative commercial sophistication and their essentially pragmatic approach to business. The chartered companies that initiated foreign trade and colonization were run by merchants who were quick to adapt to changed circumstances. Investors in the East India Company fully intended to profit from the spice trade, but when the Dutch established a monopoly in the East Indies and shut them out, the Company withdrew to India. At first, they were all but ignored by the Mughal court, but they persevered, especially in Calcutta. As the Mughal Empire declined (as all empires must), by the end of the 18th century the Company had all but annexed Bengal through the deft use of trade, diplomacy, and arms. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, it exercised either direct or indirect control over most of the lands that now comprise India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. The British government’s involvement in India grew gradually from the mid-17th century, but it was only in 1858 that the government assumed formal control of India.

A crucial reason for the British success in India was the lack of homogeneity in the subcontinent. The East India Company exploited divisions of race, religion, and caste to gain commercial and territorial concessions. Another was the British reliance on trafficking in low-value, high-volume goods within the framework of traditional intra-Asian trade, especially in Indian cotton, lead, silver, and pepper, and Chinese silk, porcelain, and lacquer ware. Profits from these trades were significant, but, as important, such commerce did not justify the imposition of a monopoly and the huge expenses required for its maintenance; such costs ate deeply into the profits of the Portuguese and Dutch spice trades.

The East India Company’s trade remained profitable and balanced until the 1720s, when demand for tea in Britain grew sharply, a development with profound consequences for Britain, China, and indeed much of the world. Starting in the 1720s, tea comprised more than half of the Company’s exports from China, and a century later it accounted for all of them. The government’s keen interest derived from the duty it imposed on tea, which by the 1820s accounted for 10 percent of government revenues. As China was self-sufficient for virtually all its needs and traders had almost nothing they wanted in exchange for tea, Europeans were forced to pay in silver. The British need for silver to pay for the Napoleonic Wars and for the pacification and administration of India at the end of the 1700s forced the Company to search for an alternative to bullion, which they found in the form of opium. So successful was the East India Company’s cultivation of China’s appetite for opium that it stopped carrying silver to China in 1805, and two years later it was actually importing silver from China. (American merchants also shipped Turkish opium to China, to the chagrin of the British and the consternation of the Chinese.)

The only problem with this trade was that it was completely illegal in China, where the first laws proscribing opium had been enacted in 1729. The effects of opium use were widespread and had both moral and economic effects that the Chinese could ill-afford. Trade in daily goods declined as addicts devoted more and more of their income to the drug. Bullion outflows from China had a direct impact on the treasury, which collected taxes in silver. In response to these growing problems, in 1839 the emperor’s imperial commissioner at Canton seized and burned about 140 tons of opium. In response, the British government dispatched a force of 16 ships and 4,000 soldiers to demand satisfaction. The British victory over the antiquated Chinese forces in what became known as the First Opium War was swift and total. By the Treaty of Nanking, the British secured millions in restitution and forced the Chinese to open additional ports to foreign trade. China lost two more drug wars, and Britain ultimately secured the legalization of the opium trade, which towards the end of the century brought in £10 million a year.

The opening of the treaty ports had a number of unintended consequences, two of which are of particular relevance to the United States. Having observed the overwhelming superiority of British arms against the Chinese, Japan responded promptly to U.S. demands to open its ports to foreigners after several centuries of relative isolation. Thereafter, Japan industrialized rapidly, working especially closely with Britain to develop its naval and merchant fleets. In 1895, Japan overwhelmed the modernized Chinese fleet in the Sino-Japanese War. Ten years later, it destroyed a powerful Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima to find itself the dominant naval power in the Pacific. Forty years later, the Japanese met their match at the hands of the United States, whose crushing but slow victory in World War II helped pave the way for American hegemony in the Pacific—half a century after taking up the White Man’s burden there—and dragged it deep into East Asian regional politics.

The Opium Wars may have illustrated China’s technological and cultural decline under the Qing dynasty, but the unequal treaties forced by the British undermined any prospect that China would soon achieve its former stature on the world stage. In fact, the drug-induced malaise fueled by the British certainly contributed to the collapse of the Celestial Kingdom in the 20th century and to the turbulent decades of civil war and oppressive communist rule that followed. A century-and-a-half after Britain’s shocking and awesome victory, China has begun to find its way in the world once again, while Britain’s empire is virtually extinct, a victim of overreach and to a lesser extent its unintended clarity in preaching the virtues of individual rights to the very people it sought to oppress on four continents.

None of these imperial models is an exact fit for the United States at the start of the 21st century. But even a glance at their salient features offers a grim reminder that, stripped of revisionist hyperbole, empires yield a ghastly human toll. No one can fault the bravery, luck, and sheer force of will characteristic of imperial pioneers of any age. Against these we must weigh their hideous legacy of brutal intimidation, human bondage, and appalling exploitation.

What fruit will the current round of American imperialism in Iraq bear? A few American businesses will reap huge windfalls from rebuilding the country’s infrastructure. As of this writing, the Bush administration has installed a military authority to run the country while it scrambles to install a puppet regime whose interests align with its own. This will give the United States control of Iraq’s oil production and revenues, and an unprecedented voice in OPEC. Such superficial achievements benefit only a small and shrill minority of powerful interests, however. For the majority of Americans, this and similar imperial ventures will provide no more than an outlet for demonstrations of jingo patriotism and flag-waving xenophobia.

As for the loftier premises deployed to justify our imperial ambition, it takes a chilling indifference to history to believe that people anywhere will swarm to democratic ideals as articulated by an invading army, or that the people of the Middle East, who in their day have shucked off many versions of Western imperialism—Greek and Roman, Portuguese, British and Russian—have any inclination to be subject to a Pax Americana. Three things are certain: Their reluctance will come at a high price. The burden of sustaining the empire will be spread more evenly than the benefits of creating it. And for Americans, the most immediate and gravest risk is to neither people nor property, but to that great preserver of them both, the Constitution.

--Lincoln Paine

Author	Times Assigned
Herman Melville (1819-1891)	28
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)	22
Homer (8th-century BCE)	9
Jack London (1876-1912)	9
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)	8
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)	7
Nicholas Monsarrat (1910-1979)	5
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)	4
Stephen Crane (1871-1900)	4
Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957)	4
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1949)	4
William Shakespeare (1564-16160	4
Derek Walcott (1930- )	4