Sea Changes

Historicizing the Ocean

Bernhard Klein, Gesa Mackenthun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415946513
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135940461
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The sea has been the site of radical changes in human lives and national histories. It has been an agent of colonial oppression but also of indigenous resistance, a site of loss, dispersal and enforced migration but also of new forms of solidarity and affective kinship. SeaChanges re-evaluates the view that history happens mainly on dry land and makes the case for a creative reinterpretation of the role of the sea: not merely as a passage from one country to the next, but a historical site deserving close study.

CHAPTER 1

Deep Times, Deep Spaces

Civilizing the Sea

GREG DENING

“Like the desert,” Gesa Mackenthun and Bernhard Klein write, “the ocean has often been read as an empty space, a cultural and historical void, constantly traversed, circumnavigated and fought over, but rarely inscribed other than symbolically by the self-proclaimed agents of civilization.”¹ The Sea tends to have no history, they have suggested. It is a void they would like to fill. I would, too. I would encompass Oceania, the Sea of Islands.

Roland Barthes himself could have been the source of Mackenthun and Klein’s challenge. He is asking whether in a world flooded with signifiers, there is somewhere that a semiological science would not reach. “In a single day,” he writes while on a beach vacation, “how many really non-signifying fields do we cross? Very few, sometimes none. Here I am before the sea; it is true that it bears no message. But on the beach, what material for semiology! Flags, slogans, signals, sign-boards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages for me.”²

I have to confess that over the years I have had a penchant for beaches as places of history, too. Not the only place for history. I would never say that. But places for special historical insights. In-between places, where every present moment is suffused with the double past of both sides of the beach and complicated by the creative cultures that this mixture makes.

But I am not inclined to Barthes’s polarity between the signless sea and the full-of-signs land. Barthes’s sense of the sea is a little too close to Freud’s notion of “oceanic feeling” as a sensation of eternity, or W. H. Auden’s “barbaric vagueness of the sea,” or Gaston Bachelard’s “substantive nothingness of water” or even Jules Michelet’s sense of the ocean as sublime slime—wet, fecund femininity.³

Claude Lévi-Strauss—a more landlocked thinker, to be sure—makes the same distinction between cultural domains that are historical, touched by time and change, and those that are unhistorical, structured, timeless, unchanging. It is a distinction I would like to oppose. For us who are in a world created by and reflected in Einstein and Picasso, all things are on an “astral plane,” only real in their dimensions without number, only objective in their ambiguity and relativity. Historicizing the Sea is an exercise in deep time, shallow time—both: in deep space, shallow space—both.

Polyglot Time: Polyglot Space

So I would like to make my first step a step away from that polarity of an unhistorical sea and a historical land. Historicizing the Sea, we say. Historicizing. I note the present participle, historicizing. The subjunctive, “as if” mood. The theater mood. Not the “Historicized Sea.” We are making theater of the Sea, imbuing the Sea with narrative. We are talking processes. We are talking of the how of our history making as much as of the what. We are talking tropes and story, fact and fiction, myth and memory, events and agency. Historicizing the Sea is as much a matter of who reads and hears our histories, as who writes and tells them, and what the story is.

Oceania, the Sea of Islands that I would historicize, is a double-visioned place. It has been encompassed these past five hundred years by intruding strangers and encompassed these past three thousand years by the islanders who have settled and visited all its thousands of islands through its vast spaces. Natives and strangers have drawn their different cultural identities from historicizing the same Sea.⁴

The same Sea? That is the issue, isn’t it? By the end of this volume, we will have decapitalized and pluralized our concept of the sea. Not Sea, but seas. A French sea, an American sea, a capitalist sea, an eighteenth-century sea, a Romantic sea, a Viking sea, moana—an islanders’ sea.

Difference and particularizing is not so much my problem. Time and space are polyglot. So is history. A privileged perspective is a problem, though. It is I, not they, the natives and strangers of yesteryear, who has to encompass Oceania in a multi-timed, multi-spaced, multi-visioned way. They are on my “astral plane,” not I on theirs. How do I write a narrative in a unified way of two culturally distinct peoples historicizing the same sea, without privileging a time or a space or a vision that is not there in their historicizations? How do I put a multi-dimensional Oceania on canvas? How do I play Picasso to the Pacific?

Let me reflect a moment on the language of that historicizing. For anthropology, the problem of crossing cultures in space and time is resolved by the creation of a metalanguage—about ritual, symbol, myth, social structure, culture itself. It is a language of human universals that cultures share in their distinctive ways.

History has been shy of such metalanguage, though we easily borrow it and vernacularize it. My narrative strategy is to use that metalanguage in a vernacular way and attach it to a meta-issue—in this case, the issue of cultural identity. As many cultures of natives and strangers historicize their sea, they find their different cultural identities in the same process. They find themselves mirrored in their own historicizations. I try to reveal this mirroring by writing an ethnography of them both historicizing their sea. They do that in theater.

Both land and sea are encompassed by words. Language imprints land and sea with the human spirit, enlarges both with the human spirit. Language encultures land and sea. Language brushes them with metaphor—“South Seas,” “Pacific”—fills them with story—“Hawaii” (Sacred Home), “Tahiti” (Distant Place). I would like to reflect on the mystery of this.⁵ “In the beginning was the Word,” the Judaeo-Christian mythology tells us. Indeed it was. Encompassing begins with the word.

A ship at sea is like an island in the ocean. The horizon is all around. That enclosing horizon seems to fill both a ship and an island with language very intensely. I’ve had my say on the significance of that in relation to ships.⁶ Let me say something about islands.

“Navel of the World,” “Center of the World,” were the usual Oceanic metaphors for an island. Their gods (atua/akua), their ancient heroes, always came from “beyond the horizon.” Islanders’ penchant for symbols was, and is, for crossing signs—rainbows, feathers, canoes—in-between things, in-between heaven and earth, in-between land and sea, in-between air and soil. Islanders made their cultural identity—they made sense of themselves—in ritual, dance, story, design, and architecture—by making large polarities—Native/Stranger, Land/Sea, Life/Death, Violent Power/Legitimate Authority. They discovered for themselves, by story and talk, the ways in which these polarities were crossed to make themselves who they were.

Islanders read the sea—historicized it—by hearing what they called, in their different dialects, “the language of the sea.” The “language of the sea” began at its edges. If the Inuit had thirty words for snow, and the Nuer had twenty-seven words for the color of their cows, the Hawaiians and other islanders had as many words for the shapes and character of the waves that beat against their shores. Waves, in their season and in their weather, had personal names and histories. They told stories, sang songs, made poetry through the generations how these waves had been surfed and beaten.⁷ They played with the sea at its edges. They would not have seen the sea as a Turner saw it. They played with it, imposed their signature on it with style.

Maybe I should begin encompassing Oceania with an ethnography of swimming. The first beachcomber to return from Oceania was made swimming instructor to the marines at Cronstadt. Mai, the Raiatean whom Cook brought back from the “Society” Islands on his second voyage, amazed his English hosts with the vigor and energy with which he swam to the horizon from Scarborough beach. Stories of how the islanders could swim for hours, even days, from ships miles out at sea were many. The exhilaration with which they plunged into the sea from the tallest masts of European ships was a sign of a familiarity with the sea that Europeans did not dare have.

The wider sea had an even more complex language, and a recognizable system of signs—of ocean swells, seasonal currents, star risings and settings. That is the point of encompassment, isn’t it? To capture the system in the signs, the system in the color of the sea and the shape of its swells, the system in the sun and stars and moon, a system that can be described and correlated, a system that could be verbalized and passed on. Thomas Gladwin’s book of genius, East Is a Big Bird, catches the rationally different system of Caroline Islands navigation in the metaphor of his title.⁸

I think the most enlightening moment for me of this process of encompassment of Oceania through three thousand years came from a sailor-archaeologist, Geoffrey Irwin. He suggested that the movement of island peoples against the prevailing weather patterns to the outmost reaches of this vast ocean was always predicated on a confidence in their ability to return home. A five-hundred-year stopover, a twenty-generation stopover, allowed a regional encompassment. When the language of the sea could be read so fluently that a return home could be assured, a new stage in Pacific exploration could begin.⁹

One more point about language. If I ask how eighteenth-century strangers and their contemporary third-millennium natives historicized their sea, I need also to ask how I historicize this now bound-together Oceania. For nearly five hundred years, native and strangers have been present in the same sea, have been part of each other’s culture-scape. The events of early contact might have been sporadic and disparate, but the exchanged experience and cultural memory of their coming together was more pervasive and permanent. The historicization—the encompassment—of a bound-together Oceania is marked by a process in which the two sides of the cultural divide are changed by one another and discover their separate cultural identity at the same time. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

There was a time forty-five years ago that I felt my twentieth-century person more puritanical and distant from this process. Not now. Outsiders tend to see only discontinuities, write their histories in terms of “befores” and “afters.” My aim these days is to see the continuities that insiders see, to discover the metaphorizing processes in cultural change. My confidence that I can do so is born of my sense of the language of the theater I am going to speak about.

That culture is talk and living is story is the discovery of the twentieth century. Clifford Geertz, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur, Ludwig Wittgenstein have said it so.

Talk is never bare words, of course. Talk is all the ways words are symbolized. It is voice and gesture, rhythm and timing, color and texture. Talk is tattoo. Talk is body paint, and house columns. Talk is never stream of consciousness, either. It is shaped and dramatized in a dance, a story, a joke. Talk is silence. Talk might seem to be blown away by the wind on the lips, but it never is. It is always archived in some way by the continuities of living. Talk joins past, present, and future.

Words swallow time like black holes. And when words carry space as well as time—giving identity to self and other—boundaries are just as blurred.

As I historicize the sea, as I encompass Oceania, I try to hear the language of the sea in this multi-cultural, multi-spatial, multi-temporal way.

Encompassing Oceania

Let me begin at last. Encompassing Oceania.

The word compass and with it encompass is one of those words in the Oxford English Dictionary with a small discursive introduction puzzling at the word’s origins. To “measure,” “walk in pace,” “stride across” belong to the oldest meanings of compass and encompass. But surprisingly, so do “contrivance,” “artifice,” “designing skill,” “stratagem.” So power is in encompass. Something of Colossus astride the globe. There’s trickster in the word, too. A touch of fraud and gullibility. There is comfort in i...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Deep Times, Deep Spaces: Civilizing the Sea
• 2 Costume Changes: Passing at Sea and on the Beach
• 3 The Global Economy and the Sulu Zone: Connections, Commodities, and Culture
• 4 Ahab’s Boat: Non-European Seamen in Western Ships of Exploration and Commerce
• 5 Staying Afloat: Literary Shipboard Encounters from Columbus to Equiano
• 6 The Red Atlantic; or, “a terrible blast swept over the heaving sea”
• 7 Chartless Voyages and Protean Geographies: Nineteenth-Century American Fictions ofthe Black Atlantic
• 8 “At Sea—Coloured Passenger”
• 9 Slavery, Insurance, and Sacrifice in the Black Atlantic
• 10 Cast Away: The Uttermost Parts of the Earth
• Select Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index