Fictions of the Sea

Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture

Bernhard Klein, Bernhard Klein

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351936552
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literatur
• Categoria: Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

This timely collection brings together twelve original essays on the cultural meaning of the sea in British literature and history, from early modern times to the present. Interdisciplinary in conception, it charts metaphorical and material links between the idea of the sea in the cultural imagination and its significance for the social and political history of Britain, offering a fresh analysis of the impact of the ocean on the formation of British cultural identities. Among the cultural and literary artifacts considered are early modern legal treatises on marine boundaries, Renaissance and Romantic poetry, 19th- and 20th-century novels, popular sea songs, recent Hollywood films, as well as a diverse range of historical and critical writings. Writers discussed include Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Scott, Conrad, du Maurier, Unsworth, O'Brian, and others. All these cultural and literary 'fictions of the sea' are set in relation to wider issues relevant to maritime history and the historical experience of seafaring: problems of navigation and orientation, piracy, empire, colonialism, slavery, multi-ethnic shipboard communities, masculinity, gender relations. By combining the interests of three related but distinct areas of study-the analysis of sea fiction, critical maritime history, and cultural studies-in a focus upon the historical meaning of the sea in relation to its textual and cultural representation, Fictions of the Sea offers an original contribution to the practice of existing disciplines.

1 Who Owns the Sea?

JAMES MULDOON

At first glance, the notion of owning the sea seems silly. How could any nation or group of nations own that vast expanse? Indeed, who would want to do so? Rephrase the question, however, replacing ownership with jurisdiction, asking, ‘Who has jurisdiction over the sea and over who sails upon it, and who can exploit its resources?’ and the question makes more sense. While again at first glance, the question might still seem silly, in fact, there are several ways to claim jurisdiction over at least part of the sea and a variety of reasons for doing so. After all, nations bordering the sea have always claimed some jurisdiction over the waters adjacent to them. Indeed, any society dependent on sea-borne trade would assert some jurisdiction over the sea if only to protect the sea-lanes that supplied it from pirates. When, for example, the Romans scoured the Mediterranean to eliminate piracy and stationed fleets there to police the sea, they were in effect claiming jurisdiction over the mare nostrum.¹ During the Middle Ages, several governments claimed possession of parts of the sea. These precedents for possession of the sea in turn provided much of the basis for the well-known 17th-century debate about whether the sea, especially the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, was open to all who wished to sail there, mare liberum, or closed, mare clausum, that is, whether navigation and trade could be limited to a specific country or countries.

Furthermore, debate about ownership of or jurisdiction over the sea is not simply an historical issue associated with the 17th century. For the past several decades the nations of the world have been wrestling with two issues involving jurisdiction over the sea. One concerns control of the ocean fisheries; the second concerns the ownership of ore-bearing nodules that litter the seabed. These issues arose because of the increasing number of states, especially the numerous small states created by post-World War II decolonization, that have come to claim a voice in issues involving the sea, often in opposition to the traditional states that dominated international law.²

Since the early 18th century, states have claimed jurisdiction over a zone extending three miles into the adjoining sea, a distance determined by the Dutch international lawyer Cornelius van Bynkershoek (1673-1743) who noted that three miles was the distance that a cannon could fire.³ This standard generally applied until 1952 when ‘Chile, Peru, and Ecuador proclaimed “sole sovereignty and jurisdiction” over an area of the sea extending not less than 200 nautical miles from their coasts - which seemed to indicate that what they claimed was equivalent to a 200-mile territorial sea.’⁴ A major reason for this change was to restrict foreign access to the tuna-fishing grounds, a move that angered the American fishermen who were active in that fishery. Subsequently, however, beginning in 1975 ‘several developed states ... established their own 200-mile fisheries ... the United States being among the first to do so.’⁵ By moving to the 200-mile limit, the United States was responding to pressure exerted by fishermen in New England who were angered at the presence of large Russian and Polish factory fishing ships on the Grand Banks and the other grounds traditionally fished by New Englanders.⁶

The second issue that emerged in recent years to challenge traditional opinions on possession of the sea concerned the existence on the floor of the sea of ‘polymetallic nodules’ that contained valuable ores that could be extracted.⁷ That the ocean floor contained such resources was not a new idea, having been around for about a century. In the 20th century, however, the increased use of metals that exist in very limited supply, magnesium for example, led to greater interest in the ocean where magnesium exists in many of the nodules found there. In 1965, a geologist published a book on these nodules claiming that great wealth lay on the ocean floor, wealth now accessible because of advances in mining technology.⁸ This article attracted the attention of the ambassador of Malta to the United Nations, Arvid Pardo, who gave a speech at the United Nations in 1967 ‘calling for the recognition of the area and the limits of national jurisdiction [over the sea] and its resources as the common heritage of mankind.’⁹ Ambassador Pardo’s views reached a larger audience when he published them in several articles. His overall theme was the ‘intolerable injustice of reserving the plurality of the world’s resources for the exclusive benefit of a handful of nations’ if the usual rules of international law were applied, that is placing the sea and its bed under the control of those countries that bordered it, leaving the remainder open to any and all others who could exploit it, rules that had been in place for three centuries.¹⁰

Instead, Pardo proposed a resolution on the future control of the sea that would replace the traditional notion of jurisdiction over the sea with what he saw as a new one that reflected both economic interests and moral values:

1. The sea-bed and the ocean floor are a common heritage of mankind and should be used and exploited for peaceful purposes and for the exclusive benefit of mankind as a whole. The needs of poor countries, representing that part of mankind which is in most need of assistance, should receive preferential consideration in the event of financial benefits being derived from the exploitation of the sea-bed and ocean floor for commercial purposes.

2. Claims to sovereignty over the sea-bed and ocean floor beyond present national jurisdiction, as presently claimed, should be frozen until a clear definition of the continental shelf is formulated.¹¹

In effect, the ambassador was suggesting formal recognition of the corporate nature of human society so that the sea’s resources could be employed for the common good of mankind. Pardo’s proposal would require reconsidering the meaning of state sovereignty and necessitate conceiving mankind as some kind of corporate whole under the jurisdiction of a supranational authority. Whether or not he realized it, when Ambassador Pardo made his proposal, he was suggesting a morally-based redistributionist world order in which the sovereignty of nation-states would be subordinated to the interests of all mankind under the direction of a universally recognized authority.¹² One observer pointed out that, in effect, Pardo was proposing ‘a radical reconsideration of the existing public order of the oceans.’¹³ To a medieval historian, however, Pardo’s proposal suggests a secularized version of medieval papal and canonistic thinking about the nature of mankind and the possibility of a just world order.¹⁴

The ‘public order of the oceans’ that Ambassador Pardo’s proposal would overturn was the result of three centuries of legal thought and practice about world order that followed the publication of Hugo Grotius’ (1583-1645) De Jure Belli ac Pads Libri Tres in 1625.¹⁵ Even before this book appeared, Grotius had published anonymously his Mare Liberum, an argument for the right of free travel across the seas that provided the basic text on the right of all mankind to unimpeded travel and trade across the sea. In the 17th century, his notion of the sea as open to all comers replaced the notion that the sea could be closed, that is the right to travel and to trade with those who lived there could be the monopoly of one nation or a limited number of nations that could exclude any and all others.

Furthermore, Grotius rejected any notion of international oversight of the sea to allocate monopolies and to settle disputes. The countries that he was discussing were, as he pointed out quite forcefully, absolutely autonomous, that is sovereign and thus answerable to no one, a concept fully developed in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.¹⁶ Critics have described Grotius’ conception ‘of the relationship between man and the state’ as ‘Hobbesian’, a term that might be applied to his conception of inter-state relations as well.¹⁷ Grotius’ concept of a world order consisted of a series of sovereign powers in tension with one another. They could not interfere in any way with the universal right to travel and trade freely everywhere, a curious limitation on sovereign power. If taken literally, this would mean there could be no bans on trade with a nation’s enemies or no way to prevent the entrance of those who might upset the social order. Grotius, of course, argued that there was no paradox here, because sovereign states could not violate the natural law that authorized free travel. In making this argument, Grotius was attacking those who defended the claim of Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) to restrict European access to the New World to the Portuguese and the Castilians, thus subordinating national sovereignty to papal universal jurisdiction. The Catholic position was that although all men had the right to travel freely, the spiritual reasons presented in Inter caetera and related bulls could justify the subordination of that right to the Church’s responsibility to preach the Gospel to all mankind.

Seen in light of the medieval notion of mankind as a single species descended from Adam and Eve, potentially at least forming a corporate whole, subject to the same natural law, and under the headship of the pope who, according to one 13th-century pope, Innocent IV (1243-54), could judge all mankind by that law, Ambassador Pardo’s proposal does not appear radically new. While not drawn directly from the medieval tradition, it echoes many of the fundamental themes that Grotius attacked so that Pardo might be seen as a harbinger of a move to reconsider the entire Grotian conception of international order in order to reformulate the law of the sea to the advantage of poor and landlocked states.

The Grotian concept of free travel emerged out of a particular incident that focused the attention of 17th-century lawyers on the question of ownership of the sea. In 1603 a ship belonging to the Dutch East India Company seized a Portuguese ship, the St Catherine, in the Straits of Malacca.¹⁸ Some of the shareholders in the Dutch East India Company, pacifist Mennonites, were upset by the seizure of the Portuguese vessel and its subsequent sale as a prize of war. To ease their consciences and to justify the seizure, the Company asked the young Hugo Grotius to write a legal treatise justifying the seizure and, even more important, justifying the Dutch presence in Asia, a presence that was itself a contested legal issue.

The Dutch had made their first permanent settlement in Asian waters in 1598, and, in 1602, they formed the Dutch East India Company, granting it a monopoly of Dutch trade with Asia. These activitie...