Mainsheet

A JOURNAL OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY MARITIME STUDIES

Front cover

Title: Keep reaching your dreams how high it may seem

Photographer: Vhernard Manalad Hernandez

Location: At sea near Las Palmas Spain

Photographer’s description: “In this photo our cargo hold has stain on the very top of the cargo hold frame, as an AB present that time I will be the one who is responsible for reaching and painting it to cover the stains for our cargo hold to soon pass the inspection, with a three fold ladder, light rolling and pitching as the vessel is underway, I set aside my fear and finish the work, just like my dream to become a master of the vessel in the future, I will still bring this courage and determination with me every time to reach my dreams how high it may seem.”

This issue’s covers feature photographs taken by seafarers for the ITF Seafarers’ Trust annual photography competition. The photographers’ descriptions have been lightly edited.

From the Editor in Chief

Christina Connett Brophy

PEER-REVIEWED

Liquid Motion: Reimaging Maritime History through an African Lens

Kevin Dawson

Our Lady of the Workboats: Solidarity and Spirituality on the Bay of All Saints

Alison Glassie

Dragon Ships to the Dawnland: Eugène

Alice C. M.

Extracting Global Maritime Weather Data from New England Whaling and Portuguese Navy Logbooks (1740–1960)

Timothy D. Walker and Caroline C. Ummenhofer

“The Narraganset Chief, or the Adventures of a Wanderer”: Recovering an Indigenous Autobiography

Jason R. Mancini and Silvermoon Mars LaRose

PERSPECTIVES

(Life) Cycles, (Ocean) Currents, and (Ancestors’)

Rhythms: Dawnland Maritime Histories through Indigenous and Black Voices

Akeia de Barros

FEATURES

Gold Trading and Crocodiles: Two Miniature African Canoes

Kevin Dawson

The Içar Project: Preserving the Ancient Art of Shipbuilders in Brazil

Marcelo Filgueiras Bastos

Unsung Heroes: The Invisible Workforce Powering Global Trade

Katie Higginbottom

Selected Images from The Cargo Rebellion: Those Who Chose Freedom

IN EACH ISSUE

POETRY

"Sea Church," Aimee Nezhukumatathil

"Things We Carry on the Sea," Wang Ping

REVIEWS

The editors are grateful to John Zittel for his generous support of the launch of Mainsheet. We greatly appreciate his visionary investment in a groundbreaking new outlet for current multidisciplinary maritime scholarship from around the world. Thank you from all of us on the Mainsheet team for your essential contribution to this publication.

Mystic Seaport Museum

75 Greenmanville Ave.

Mystic, CT 06355

United States

mainsheet@mysticseaport.org

Editor in Chief: Christina Connett Brophy, Mystic Seaport Museum

Managing Editor: Michelle I. Turner, Mystic Seaport Museum

Issue Editor: Akeia de Barros Gomes, Mystic Seaport Museum

Associate Editors:

Elysa Engelman, Mystic Seaport Museum

Paul O’Pecko, Mystic Seaport Museum

Mary Anne Stets, Mystic Seaport Museum

Claudia Triggs, Mystic Seaport Museum

Editorial Assistants:

Makenzie Metivier, Mystic Seaport Museum

Bridget DeLaney-Hall, Mystic Seaport Museum

Editorial Advisory Board:

Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, University of Connecticut

James Boyd, Brunel Institute/SS Great Britain Trust

Richard Burroughs, University of Rhode Island

James Carlton, Williams Mystic

Jason Chang, University of Connecticut

Richard W. Clary, Mystic Seaport Museum

Kevin Dawson, University of California, Merced

Christine DeLucia, Williams College

Michael P. Dyer, New Bedford Whaling Museum

Dan Finamore, Peabody Essex Museum

Michael R. Harrison, Nantucket Historical Association

Fred Hocker, Vasa Museum

Matthew McKenzie, University of Connecticut

Michael Moore, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Lincoln Paine, University of Maine School of Law

Christopher Pastore, University at Albany (SUNY)

Helen M. Rozwadowski, University of Connecticut

Joshua M. Smith, American Merchant Marine Museum

Lisa Utman Randall, Pocketknife Consulting

Jeroen van der Vliet, Het Scheepvaart Museum

Richard Vietor, Mystic Seaport Museum

Timothy Walker, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Publisher: Mystic Seaport Museum Inc.

Mainsheet is a biannual journal of multidisciplinary maritime studies. Information on subscriptions and back issues, as well as author submission information, is available at Mainsheet’s website, https://www.mainsheet.mysticseaport.org, or by scanning this QR code:

Copyright © 2024 Mystic Seaport Museum Inc.

Mainsheet (ISSN 2996-1602, E-ISSN 2996-1610) is published open access, which means that readers may access the works for free on the open web. Articles carry a Creative Commons (CC) license, allowing users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. Reproduction and transmission of journal articles must credit the author and original source and may also be restricted from commercial use in certain instances. Further information on CC licenses is at: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/.

Some material published in Mainsheet (such as artwork, poetry, and photography) may require additional permissions from the publisher and/or rights holder. Please contact permissions@mysticseaport.org with inquiries.

Dedicated to Paul J. O’Pecko

This inaugural issue of Mainsheet is dedicated to Paul J. O’Pecko, who recently retired as Vice President of Research Collections and Library Director of Mystic Seaport Museum, after a 39-year career at the Museum. A beloved colleague and a tireless advocate for the stewardship and building of our collections, Paul was also the leader behind our efforts to improve researcher access to collections. Decades before digitization and online sharing of collections became standard practice for museums and research libraries, Paul recognized the importance of that work and committed time, energy, and resources toward it. He also founded and edited Coriolis, a peer-reviewed journal that was an inspiration for Mainsheet, and he served on the internal team that created Mainsheet and edited this first issue. Paul’s commitment to multidisciplinary maritime research, along with his kindness and generosity in sharing knowledge and opening doors to scholars around the world, will guide us as we build Mainsheet and continue his work.

From the Editor in Chief

Mystic Seaport Museum is thrilled to launch our first issue of Mainsheet: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Maritime Studies, which fills a field gap in peer-reviewed scholarship that has been left by the dissolution of the marvelous Atlantic Neptune and other like-minded journals over the last twenty years. While several excellent journals still exist worldwide, what sets Mainsheet apart are its multidisciplinary perspectives; themed issues; its mission to attract, share, and inspire global diverse scholarship on issues past, present, and future; and its freshness of design and distribution. Mainsheet not only promotes scholarship but is visually arresting, and celebrates broader perspectives of maritime culture through poetry and the visual arts, photojournalism, and special features on the respective themes. The Editorial Board represents a national and international team of invited expert scholars from various fields and partner institutions, with guest editors for special issue themes.

While a beautifully produced print edition can be purchased individually or by subscription, Mainsheet is available online to provide open and equitable access to new and emerging scholarship in maritime studies. We have also chosen a model that does not require authors to pay for entry into academic journals, which can be a substantial burden for rising professionals. Continued support from our sponsors and subscribers will be critical for us to maintain this exceptional opportunity for maritime studies scholars and other contributors.

The ocean connects us all, and therefore the journal is globally focused and themes are chosen to inspire deeper multidisciplinary study of major topics influencing the field and society at large today. These topics will align with major projects at Mystic Seaport Museum and many of our partner institutions. For example, this inaugural issue features social maritime history and is launched in the year of our upcoming exhibition, Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea, which centers maritime histories in Indigenous, African, and African American worldviews and experiences. From Vikings to Narragansetts to Atlantic Africans and others, this issue of Mainsheet represents stories and voices that will broaden and expand our collective conversations around maritime societies beyond how we have historically engaged in these narratives.

The second issue of Mainsheet will explore maritime economy and technology, as leaders in government and innovators in industry look toward the exponential rise in the pursuit of a sustainable “blue” economy. As Mystic Seaport Museum engages in global conversations about new and efficient ship design, propulsion fuel technologies, sustainable aquaculture, energy sources, and undersea robotics as part of a new blue economy, we also remember our own iconic ship Charles W. Morgan, which represents the height of blue economy and technology when it was launched in 1841, purpose-built for the exploitation of whales. The issue will consider the trajectory of maritime economics and related technologies globally and across time.

There are many people to thank for their part in the creation of this journal. I would like to recognize, first and foremost, our generous supporter of this inaugural issue, Mr. John Zittel, who believed from the start that Mainsheet could play an essential role in elevating maritime scholarship. Championing the effort are Museum Trustees Richard Clary and Richard Vietor and the rest of the Editorial Board members, all of whom have volunteered many hours in their busy schedules to advise on the evolution of this publication. We are deeply grateful to them all for their time and expertise. I am thankful to Mystic Seaport Museum President, Peter Armstrong, for supporting the idea for this journal two years ago when I suggested, with my usual earnestness, that this was an important project for the field and for the institution. And to our Chairman, Mike Hudner, and the rest of the Mystic Seaport Museum Trustees, thank you for the enthusiasm and dedication that made this possible.

We are so fortunate to have an excellent internal Mainsheet staff team to oversee every detail of Mainsheet’s execution under the superb leadership of Managing Editor, Michelle Turner. Of course, to our expert contributors, reviewers, artists, and poets, thank you for producing such excellent and engaging content for our inaugural issue; you have set the bar very high for the next one. And to the global seafarers whose hard work at sea often goes unnoticed, thank you for allowing us to include your incredible photographs that tell your sea stories so eloquently, and to ITF Seafarers’ Trust for all that you do for mariners worldwide.

Lakuna Design has crafted a stunning and elegant journal; thank you, Misi and Dave Narcizo for your vision and expertise. Naming a new journal is almost as challenging as naming a new boat, and I have to thank renowned interior designer and dear friend Leslie Banker for coming up with the winner! Finally, to all of those at Mystic Seaport Museum who have come before us, your legacy is and will always be part of all we do; thank you for your stewardship and devotion to excellence.

Maritime studies are the key to our shared experience. It is impossible to consider our cultural, scientific, economic, social, or even physiological development without consideration of the sea above and below the surface. It is also impossible to understand where we are and where we are going without understanding where we have been. We hope to elevate and broaden deeper insight into how maritime studies, past, present, and future are an essential part of our global heritage. We welcome all of our readers to join us in celebrating and supporting this new and exciting chapter in maritime studies.

Christina Connett Brophy, PhD Editor in Chief Senior Vice President

Figure 1. A village waterscape in West Africa that I travelled to by canoe. It is the village of Ganvie, Benin which was built on Lake Nokoué for protection from enslavers. Photo by the author.

(Life) Cycles, (Ocean) Currents, and (Ancestors’) Rhythms: Dawnland Maritime Histories through Indigenous and Black Voices

Akeia de Barros Gomes, Vice President, Maritime Studies, Mystic Seaport Museum, akeia.gomes@mysticseaport.org

What if the conventional maritime history of the Dawnland (New England) and the “founding” and development of Turtle Island (North America/the United States) had always been told through Dawnland Indigenous and African-descended voices? How would the story of the Dawnland be told? What parts of the story would be prioritized and how would the current narrative change? The upcoming Mystic Seaport Museum exhibition, Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea represents our work with Black and Indigenous communities to do just that—tell the maritime history of the Dawnland through Indigenous and Black voices as the authoritative history. Entwined opens to the public April 20, 2024.

What if the accepted, “legitimate,” central historical maritime narrative of the United States focused on the descendants of the African continent and the people of Dawnland Indigenous sovereign nations encountering one another during a cycle of disruption (dispossession and enslavement)—after millennia of our own maritime cultures, innovation, and development? What if the telling of Black and Indigenous American maritime histories always began before “America” and included our Indigenous and African ancestral contributions to American maritime industry and history?

Within our African and Indigenous worldviews, maritime history cannot be told without our cosmologies, spiritualities, our ancestors, cycles of time (rather than time lines), cycles of trauma and rebirth and acknowledgment of the sovereignty of the sea itself. These have largely been silent (or silenced) in the framing of the Americas’ maritime history. Typically, when traditional scholars engage in Indigenous and Black maritime histories, they “wedge” these histories into a Western, Eurocentric worldview that invalidates Black and Indigenous knowledges and perspectives. What if these perspectives and

(Life) Cycles, (Ocean) Currents, and (Ancestors’) Rhythms: Dawnland Maritime Histories through Indigenous and Black Voices © 2023 by Akeia de Barros Gomes is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit

histories were validated even when they contradict what historians think they know?

I am a scholar who is the descendant of enslaved, “involuntary migrants” to the US who no doubt had deep maritime knowledge, traditions and experiences. I am also the descendant of voluntary migrants—Cape Verdean mariners who came to the Dawnland and established lives, and who themselves had to accommodate the US’s framing of “race.” I work with and within Dawnland Indigenous and African descendant communities to tell our Indigenous and Black maritime histories through our own voices and the voices of our ancestors to provide insight into the legacies, strength and resilience of the sovereign Indigenous nations and African-descended peoples of the Dawnland. My training as an anthropologist and archaeologist on the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Reservation, my spiritual training in Benin on the shores of West Africa (no doubt, the point of no return for many of my collateral ancestors), and my work among Rastafarians on the shores of the US Virgin Islands have given me the knowledge— both personally and professionally—that I must tell these histories in a way my ancestors would tell them, to acknowledge the perspectives of my ancestors and to honor them. As a scholar, with all I have been given, I must reclaim my place in the sea and its tributaries for myself and my ancestors.

I will share some knowledge about this maritime history that has been shared with me (knowledge that I have permission to share) from African, African American and Indigenous community members. Of course, the Indigenous stories are not mine. They are histories that have been told to me for the purpose of sharing and education. And I have been entrusted to relay these stories truthfully, respectfully, and sensitively, with humility and in friendship.

It feels odd to say as a scholar and an academic, but I don’t have many answers—I’m simply learning to ask better questions. I have been taught

to explore this history and ask these questions with a humble heart and the wisdom that not all of the story is meant for me to know or to tell. Nonetheless, I think asking new questions is vitally important in reframing the way we do maritime history—or even what we mean when we say “maritime history.” How would you define “maritime history”? Would you include rivers? Marshes? Wetlands? Landscapes? The divinity and sacredness of water? Ancestral stories? The sovereignty of the ocean? If we are looking at maritime history and maritime stories through Indigenous American, African and African American lenses, we have to see all of the above as inextricable from how we define “maritime.” I am relatively new to the discipline and definitely got the sense when I started that for most, true maritime history is about “white men on big boats”1…but my own history and training outside of the field have led me to approach maritime history differently.

What if scholars changed the way we framed the accepted maritime narrative of the Dawnland and the primary narrative was one of millennia-old Dawnland maritime peoples encountering the descendants of the African continent and sharing their very similar, millennia-old maritime traditions? What if they focused on the centuries of collaboration and conflict between these maritime communities that have had to accommodate and survive through this 500-year cycle of disruption? Changing the narrative in this way wouldn’t be so different from what we (as a larger society) already do—the story we tell is that the founding begins in 1620 with the arrival of the Pilgrims— even though there were already sovereign nations present on the landscape and waterscape. As often happens in colonized lands, Indigenous presence on land and waterscapes prior to 1620 is generally framed as happening before the actual story starts. So, the beginning of the story depends on whose story we’re choosing to center. If we removed European “discovery” and colonization as the cen-

tral narrative in “American” maritime history, we can start to explore African-Indigenous encounters and connections in more meaningful ways and as a primary narrative—including themes like use of environment, different knowledges and sciences, cosmology, spirituality and maritime histories and experiences—really, a new, more holistic epistemology.

We might ask new questions about watercraft. Maritime communities in the Dawnland—for example, nations such as the Pequot, Narragansett, Nipmuc, Wampanoag and others built muhshoons/mishoons (dugout canoes). In the Dawnland and throughout sub-Saharan Africa, dugout canoes were used for fishing, maintaining community connections and for trade along the coasts and on rivers. Throughout Africa, they were also used for naval battles and long-distance travel (the river system on the continent spans from the west coast to the Sudan) and there was a distinction between those who used canoes to travel the open seas and those who navigated rivers in canoes. There are early Portuguese accounts of Senegalese fishermen who “fished up to three, four and five leagues to sea…and were expert and able swimmers and divers.”2 Some West African canoes were quite large and could carry up to 120 men, had cooking hearths, storage for sleeping mats and contained forecastles. They had the ability to carry heavy cargoes. Some were also recorded as having sails.3 Rivers connected inland communities with coastal people, and canoes were also used to navigate up and down the coast—from the Gold Coast to Angola (Figure 1). Throughout the continent, Africans utilized riverine and coastal routes for trade and warfare from Sudan to the Atlantic.

It is intriguing to think about how these existing Indigenous and African skill sets were incorporated into Euro-American boat building and navigation techniques…and we do know from the history of Southern plantations and from communities like the Wampanoag that they were. We also know that enslaved Africans were often employed

in boat construction all along the East Coast and throughout the Caribbean.

We can imagine Africans encountering the Indigenous peoples of the Dawnland and seeing that they often created watercraft using the same methods; that they used a similar selection process for the wood, and they constructed their watercraft in a very similar way—by burning them out. An early description of the construction of an African canoe by a European observer could very well have also been a description of the burning out of a muhshoon/mishoon:

They are made all in one piece, from a single tree trunk…They round off the trunk at each end, then dig it out with an iron tool4...[they] then burn straw in the hollow, in order to prevent the sun from splitting the boat or worms from entering.5

When the Trunk of the Tree is cut to the Length they design, they hollow it as much as they can with these crooked knives, and they burn it out by Degrees until it is reduced to the intended Cavity and Thickness, which they then Scrape and Plane with other small tools of their Invention, both within and without, leaving it sufficient Thickness, so as not to Split when loaded. The Bottom is made almost flat, and the sides somewhat rounded, so that it is always narrower, just at the Top, and bellies out a little lower, that it may carry more Sail. The Head and Stern are raised long, and somewhat hooked, very sharp at the End, that several men may lift them on Occasion, to lay it up ashore and turn it upside down, so that they make it as light as possible.6

On sea-going canoes, the sides are propped up by wooden posts because to [sic] prevent the wood from expanding. Riverine and lagoon watercraft are allowed to expand.7

Throughout the African continent, canoe-builders are considered almost religious leaders.8 Africans, early African-descended peoples in the Dawnland and Indigenous people in the Dawnland had the same personal and spiritual connection with their watercraft and conceived of the universe in similar, holistic ways. How did this contribute to free and enslaved Africans’ choices and desires to live in and marry into Indigenous communities? Was Indigenous spirituality and maritime perspective a means of maintaining their Africanness and their existing worldview? These were two maritime cultures that existed before “America,” and both were dealing with dispossession and enslavement at the hands of Europeans and later Euro-Americans. Conceiving of connections like these can help us rethink the many ways “free and enslaved Africans found respect, spirituality and safety in Native communities”9 and maintained their existing maritime traditions.

As mentioned, Black and Indigenous relationships with the sea and its tributaries predate “America.” There were knowledges of water, waterways, waterscapes and water divinities. On each side of the Atlantic, both Africans and Indigenous North Americans depended on deep knowledge of the sea and tributaries as fluctuating, cyclical ecozones, and they relied upon the sea and travel by water for sustenance, trade, and maintaining community and kinship. In many Dawnland creation narratives, people’s origins are in the marshes and the ocean is a divine and sovereign entity in and of itself.

In thinking about these maritime connections between sub-Saharan Africa and the Dawnland, it is also important to point out similarity with regard to worldview and feelings about the water that would have been a major point of connection between the two geographic locations (the African continent and the Dawnland)—and it is intriguing to think of how this may have played a role in BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People of Color)

identities, participation, experiences and perspectives when large numbers of Black and Indigenous men engaged in whaling and maritime trade.

Maritime scholars have not traditionally asked questions about the impact of traditional African-descended and Indigenous worldviews and how they informed maritime experiences for men of color. For example, among communities in Indigenous Nations of the Northeast, the (under) water world represented both spiritual power, history, and liminal status (being betwixt and between). Wampum, which comes from the quahog shell, has a special significance, in part, because of these associations. I came across beliefs about the sacredness of the ocean and the underwater world in a cemetery analysis I did many years ago as an archaeologist looking at who was buried with what in a mid-18th-century New England Indigenous burial ground. This was a cemetery that had to be removed and reburied/repatriated/rematriated because it was discovered on someone’s private property, and the work was done under the supervision of the tribe whose ancestors were in the cemetery. Upon analysis of the belongings interred in graves, it was clear that only a certain age group was buried with wampum. It was an age group that could be considered “liminal” with one foot grounded in this world and one in the spirit world. No one else in the cemetery was buried with wampum.

I highlight these meanings and uses of wampum as an aside, so that we can start to think about what non-Indigenous scholars and institutions (such as museums) must include in considering Indigenous maritime histories and narratives. These beliefs are also evident in stories of Maushop, the benevolent giant who creates waterscapes and landscapes and nourishes people with the bounty of the sea. There are many other Indigenous maritime histories that have been reduced to “myths” and have been invalidated by scholars and non-Indigenous people. These Indige-

Figure 2. An African figurine representing Mami Wata, from the collection of Kevin Dawson. Photograph by Matteo Dawson

Figure 3. Cowrie shell transported from West Africa by an enslaved individual, discovered beneath an attic floorboard in Newport, Rhode Island. The shell was part of a bundle presumably created for prayer and to accompany its creator home when they crossed the waters. Courtesy of the Newport Historical Society

nous stories are present, valid, relevant and contain a wealth of traditional ecological knowledge—a holistic perspective that includes science, history, creation and the other disciplines that scholars tend to treat as distinct and separate. This knowledge has always sustained and continues to sustain the people of the Dawnland through the present. If this holistic and spiritual lens is how Indigenous people of the Dawnland conceive of materials from the water, envision the sea, and define water in general, it is an important component of telling a holistic maritime narrative if non-Indigenous scholars wish to do a new maritime history that is truly told through Indigenous voices.

The people who were enslaved and brought from the African continent to the Dawnland were sometimes coastal and often riverine maritime peoples. On both sides of the Atlantic, there were fishing communities and boat-building traditions. There were also surfing traditions on both coasts of the African continent. Fishing trips would often end in canoe surfing races. It amazed European observers that no one ever drowned10—because most Europeans could not swim, let alone surf. There were also deep-water diving traditions and other highly skilled maritime practices that were transported to the Americas along with the bodies of the enslaved, such as shark hunting11 and other skills detailed in studies such as Kevin Dawson's Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (2018)

Both Africans and Indigenous North Americans conceptualized (and conceptualize) waterscapes as seamless intersections of land and water that create social, cultural, and spiritual understandings. Water is the source of human life and a life-force that sustains us, physically and spiritually. We know that these beliefs were transported from West, Central and Southern Africa when we hear Southern Black American folklore about “Simbi [also spelled Cymbee] spirits.” Simbi:

are water spirits that hail from western and central Africa. They live in unusual rocks, gullies, streams, springs, waterfalls, sinkholes, and pools, which areas they effectively “adopt” as territorial guardians. The Simbi are said to be able to influence the fertility and well-being of people living in their territory. At the same time, they can and will cause trouble if they are not treated with respect.12

Ras Michael Brown argues that these spirits allowed Africans who were strangers to the area and lacked ties with named ancestors to still have access to the agents of otherworldly powers and to feel attached to the land where they lived. These spirits were on the land and waterscapes “regardless of what inhabitants already occupied those lands and waters and what these indigenes called the spirits found there.”13 In the Dawnland, this may have again created a context within which, “free and enslaved Africans found respect, spirituality and safety in Native communities”14 through similar spiritual connections to land- and waterscapes.

Similar to Dawnland Indigenous knowledge about (under)water worlds and the spiritual significance of bodies of water, throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa and most notably the Kongo regions, the world under the waters is the land of the dead/spirits/ancestors. Stories of Mami Wata, the “mermaid” (the Mother of the fishes, the Mother of us all) encapsulate an African knowledge of the sea as divine, feminine space (Figure 2). The Mende describe death as “crossing the waters” and we see this sentiment repeated through the present day in the story of Ibo Landing, in which enslaved individuals walked off the slave ship in chains, turned around and walked into the water. Historians have interpreted Ibo Landing as a “mass suicide” but African descendants describe it as “flying home” or “crossing the waters.” And finally, although most enslaved African descendants in the

Dawnland were instructed in Christianity, there is evidence from Newport, Rhode Island and Deerfield, Massachusetts that the enslaved maintained their African spiritualities and practices (though hidden) with regard to water by gathering and maintaining nkisi bundles15 that contained shells, broken glass, nails, bones and other materials so that they would have these bundles to bring back home with them when they crossed the waters (Figure 3).

With regard to “conversion” to Christianity, it is important to consider how Africans and Indigenous peoples of the Dawnland were able to thread enforced concepts of Christianity into existing worldviews and maintain their spirituality (for the purposes of this conversation, specifi-

cally regarding beliefs about water). Maintaining African spirituality and community are not as apparent in New England as they are in the Southern United States or in the Caribbean (in practices like Vodoun or Santería), but we have rarely asked these questions beyond simply looking for “Africanisms” or “retentions.” For example, scholars and people of African descent who are far removed from African systems of meaning (because of time and disruption) can ask about meaning systems for enslaved Africans in the Dawnland when they were introduced to the Virgin Mary (the name Mary, which also literally means “the sea” and is whom seafarers pray to for safety at sea). Was Mary a common-sense representation of Mami Wata for African descendants in the Dawnland?

Figure 4. The Bakongo Cosmogram. Image by MiddleAfrica, CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kongo_Cosmogram_01.png

This representation of or exchange of imagery of Mary for Mami Wata is very visible in contemporary spiritual practice throughout the Caribbean and South America, where African belief and practice were kept out of sight through the use of Christian iconography like Mary to maintain spiritual and cultural practice.16

The Bakongo Cosmogram (a symbol of the interpretation of the universe in many traditional African religions) is a circle (representing eternal cycles of life, death and rebirth) surrounding a cross (Figure 4). The horizontal line on the cross is the kalunga, the watery threshold between the world of the “living” and the world of the ancestors and spirits. Would enslaved African-descended peoples in the Dawnland have seen and acknowledged the Christian cross and the story of resurrection in their own cosmogram and the (under)water world? Through hermeneutics and questioning how cultural and religious iconography would have been given meaning by enslaved peoples accommodating new, imposed worldviews, we all might come to understand how African-descended maritime peoples of the Dawnland sustained (and are currently reclaiming) their relationship to the seas.

For enslaved Africans then and both Indigenous and African-descended people now, the sea is fraught. There’s a duality—the same sea that was benevolent and sustained kin and community for millennia became the means by which people were enslaved, and lost communities and ancestral ties to the land; it was also the means by which colonizers came and brought disease and dispossession. And then that sea became one of the few avenues by which Black and Indigenous men could make a living and sustain their families, communities, and tribal nations.

There are many Indigenous, African, and African-descended individuals whose stories represent the complexities and contradictions of race and racism after the disruptions of colonialism and within our traditionally told maritime heri-

tage. We can see these contradictions in individual Indigenous and Black narratives of maritime life. For example, many men of color made their fortunes at sea. And, while the sea and river networks were the paths of enslavement, numbers of enslaved men and women alike also escaped their enslavement by sea—a much safer path to freedom than the terrestrial Underground Railroad.17 Again, utilizing hermeneutics, or the meanings people assign to things, we can explore whether this escape by water was seen by some through the lens of the spiritual power of water and the power of the ancestors beneath. And if we think about men like Venture Smith and Paul Cuffe, who made their fortunes at sea and in maritime-related trades, even though they lived steeped in racism and inequality and had to look at the enslavement of men and women who looked just like them. How did their African identities and knowledges shape and define Smith’s and Cuffe’s relationship with the water? Venture Smith was enslaved and taken from West Africa at the age of eight. By that time, he would have been well versed in the power of ancestors and the power of the sea. Paul Cuffe’s father was West African and his mother was Wampanoag. He undoubtedly grew up learning about the power of the sea, the power of ancestors and the sea as a sovereign entity. There are also numerous stories of Black women who maintained households and communities in port towns and stories of Indigenous women like Hannah Miller, a Pequot woman who acted as community leaders while the majority of men in their communities were out to sea.

We should all continue to explore the nature of the sea and waterways as a double-edged sword for Indigenous and Black peoples after colonial disruption—on the one hand, representing creation, divinity, ancestors, power, strength and agency, freedom and integration…and on the other hand a place of enslavement, trauma and death. Very appropriately, according to both Dawnland Indig-

enous and African wisdom, this framing is fitting—as water and the ocean itself are places of birth, death, and rebirth.

Maritime social histories can make a strong argument that the complex narratives of the modern world are rooted in maritime histories—but we cannot begin the telling of these histories at the point of colonial enterprise. We cannot begin to understand our world and our humanity (let alone the development of the modern world system) without understanding how waterways have shaped human interactions and human relationships from time immemorial. And non-BIPOC scholars cannot continue to force global maritime narratives into a Western frame. Doing so is a disservice to individuals and communities whose maritime histories we tell and is a greater disservice to the discipline.

As a “conclusion” and an aside, it is worth noting that when I asked a colleague, Bridget Hall, to review a draft of this article for flow and grammatical errors, etc., she responded that my use of “our” and “we” was very confusing. It wasn’t entirely clear to her when I meant “our” and “we” speaking as a person of African descent and embedded in African spirituality, and when I meant “our” and “we” speaking as a scholar of this maritime history. I hope that the issue has been clarified for the reader. But ultimately, the confusion is in part because I am not always clear on when I am acting as one or the other. I sometimes do not know when I should act as one or the other. Or perhaps the significance of this article is in pointing out the larger problem—that there is a distinction between one and the other.

Endnotes

1 At the end of the 2022 Frank C. Munson Institute of American Maritime History, one of the fellows stated to me that this was the first time they, as a maritime scholar, had thought about maritime history “beyond white men on big boats.”

2 Robert Smith, “The Canoe in West African History,” The Journal of African History 11, no. 4 (1970): 516.

3 Ibid., 518; Lynn B. Harris, “From African Canoe to Plantation Crew: Tracing Maritime Memory and Legacy,” Coriolis 4, no. 2 (2013): 35-52

4 In the Dawnland it would have been stone.

5 Kwamina B. Dickson, A Historical Geography of Ghana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 297.

6 Thomas Astley, A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels: Consisting of the Most Esteemed Relations Which Have Been Hitherto Published in Any Language, Comprehending Everything Remarkable in Its Kind in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, vol. 3 (London: Printed for T. Astley, 1745), 650.

7 Smith, “The Canoe,” 520.

8 Harris, “From African Canoe," 43; Kevin Dawson, “Liquid Motion: Reimaging Maritime History through an African Lens," in this issue, 16–37.

9 Jonathan James Perry, Aquinnah Wampanoag, personal communication, January 6, 2022.

10 Harris, “From African Canoe,” 38.

11 John Lawson, A New Voyage to South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 140.

12 Natalie Adams, “The ‘Cymbee’ Water Spirits of St. John’s Berkeley,” African Diaspora Archaeology Network Newsletter, June 2007, 10.

13 Ras Michael Brown, African Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Low Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 91.

14 Jonathan James Perry, Aquinnah Wampanoag, personal communication, January 6, 2022.

15 One bundle was discovered under an attic floorboard of a colonial home in Newport, Rhode Island. And there is a description of Jinny Cole, a woman enslaved by Deerfield’s Minister, Jonathan Ashley, collecting and maintaining items for a bundle and then passing the tradition down to her own son.

16 See Alison Glassie, “Our Lady of the Workboats: Solidarity and Spirituality on the Bay of All Saints," in this issue, 42–59.

17 See, for example, Timothy D. Walker, ed., Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021).

Figure 1. African brass figurine of Mami Wata. Unlike many other representations of her, she is shown here in her human form. She is sitting on another half woman, half fish. From the author’s personal collection, photograph by Matteo Dawson

Liquid Motion: Reimaging Maritime History through an African Lens

Corresponding Author: Kevin Dawson, Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, University of California, Merced, kdawson4@ucmerced.edu

Abstract

“Liquid Motion” examines how African women and men perceived, understood, and interacted with oceans and rivers through swimming, underwater diving, surfing, canoe-making, and canoeing. Africans inspire us to rethink assumptions about maritime history, by considering maritime traditions absent in the Western lexicon, like harnessing wave energy to transport goods through the surf or swimming into the depths to salvage goods from shipwrecks or harvest pearl oysters. Enslaved Africans carried these traditions to the Americas, where they used them to benefit their exploited lives and enslavers exploited them to generate wealth.

Keywords

African diaspora, aquatics, dugout canoe, surf-port, surf-canoe, swimming

Submitted May 25, 2023 | Accepted July 13, 2023

Liquid Motion: Reimaging Maritime History Through an African Lens © 2023 by Kevin Dawson is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Introduction

Atlantic Africans have cultivated maritime traditions on rivers and seas since the Neolithic age. Extending from Senegal in the north to Angola in the south, Atlantic Africa is embraced by the Niger River in the northwest, the Congo plunges through its southern heart, while numerous other rivers plunge through its expanse. Most Africans live near navigable waterways. Atlantic Africans did not just live along freshwater and saltwater, they were water-facing people who actively engaged with water to create “human shores.”1 Atlantic Africans seamlessly merged land and water into waterscapes, creating places of meaning and belonging as they crafted aquatic traditions in coastal plains, rainforests, savannahs, and Sahel to understand their diverse hydrographies—marine geography and how tides, currents, and winds inform navigation. Aquatics set African humanity in liquid motion through intimate, daily immersionary engagements with water while swimming, underwater diving, surfing, canoe-making, canoeing, and fishing. Many people were fishing-farmers who fished one season, farmed another, and used dugout canoes to transport goods to market, interlacing spiritual and secular beliefs, economies, social structures, political institutions—their very way of life—around relationships with water.

Most of the enslaved people forcibly transported to the new world2 were from Atlantic Africa. Enslaved Africans recreated and reimagined relationships with waterscapes to maintain cultural ties with home communities, while forging new communities of belonging that provided their exploited

lives with a sense of meaning, purpose, and belonging. Many employed aquatics in attempts to realign their stars, stealing their bodies and dugouts in attempts to regain ancestral waters. While there were ethnically specific traditions, many practices transcended ethnic differences, enabling us to consider the shared ways in which African-descended people were not just on the water, but in the water and of the water.

Africans unsettle assumptions about maritime history and Western maritime supremacy, inspiring us to rethink traditional approaches that center men, ships, and seaports. During an age when most white people were not proficient swimmers, African-descended women and men swam and dove into the depths for work and recreation. Unlike white women, African women were not precluded from aquatic activities, enabling many to pursue lucrative occupations.

Atlantic Africans require us to reconsider seaports and how they were accessed. While Africa is four times larger than Europe, its coastline is shorter (18,950 miles or 30,500 km long, compared to Europe’s 24,000 miles or 38,000 km) because it has few natural harbors, inlets, bays, or gulfs.3 Surf breaks upon most of its shores. Thus, mariners had to cross surf-zones—that space where waves break—to go from shore to sea, developing surf-canoes and surf-ports as environmental solutions. Dugouts were ubiquitous throughout the world, with Amerindians, Oceanians, Indigenous Australians, and Europeans developing designs to meet environmental challenges and particular uses. Africans charted unique designs for equally

unique uses. Responding to environmental challenges, Africans designed surf-canoes, which were, and remain, singular in their ability to slide over and slice through waves when launching into the sea and surf waves ashore while loaded with several tons of cargo. They simultaneously imagined surf-ports. Surf-ports are ports that lack harbors— providing all the same shipping, storage, and distribution functions as a seaport but requiring people to pass through surf-zones to reach offshore fisheries, shipping lanes, and, with the eventual arrival of Europeans, ships.

Surf-canoes and surf-ports were central, though typically overlooked, components of the Atlantic trade system. Exports like gold, ivory, palm oil, timber (mahogany, ebony, teak), malaguette pepper, and violently enslaved African bodies, were important commodities. The Atlantic slave trade was the most lucrative sector of this commercial complex, while enslaved labor drove colonization and plantation slavery. Most goods exported out of and into Africa from the fifteenth century through the 1950s, when seaports were constructed, were lightered between ship and shore in surf-canoes.4 Slave-trading records suggest that probably eight to nine million of the twelve million people funneled into the Atlantic slave trade were taken from surf-ports to slave ships in surf-canoes, punctuating their central functions in overseas commerce, colonization, and the development of new world slavery.5

Unfortunately, assumptions pivoting around notions of race, civilization, and modernity have discouraged sustained scholarly analyses of African maritime traditions. Erik Gilbert, a maritime historian of East Africa and the Indian Ocean, explained that many scholars bind themselves to the “tacit belief in the triumph of modernity over tradition,” assuming Western vessels were superior to those of non-Western people.6 Such assumptions prompted generations of twentieth-century scholars to ignore sub-Saharan African maritime traditions, relegat-

ing them as primitive and unworthy of scholarly deliberation. Discussions of African maritime history were dismissive, as epitomized by an influential anthropologist in 1966, who, after examining one French document, concluded that Africans only engaged in “subsistence fishing.”7 Similarly, early twentieth-century misconceptions that Africans were uncivilized and offered nothing of value or merit to the rest of the world long discouraged the study of African-descended peoples, especially their accomplishments. In 1918, a leading American historian, who continues to inform the field, claimed the Atlantic slave trade and slavery rescued captives from Africans’ savagery by civilizing and Christianizing them, averring that Southern “plantations were the best school yet invented for the mass training of . . . backward people.”8 While such assertions plunged African maritime history into an intellectual abyss, it is ready for exploration.9

Canoes and Wet Bodies: Experiencing African Waterscapes

Built by Africans for at least 8,000 years, dugout canoes epitomize the conjoining of aquatic and terrestrial spaces.10 They were more than material objects. They were living entities that embodied and expressed generational wisdom; charted community expertise; and were engrained with cultural, spiritual, and social meaning. Canoes were companions, collaborators, and members of communities of belonging, transporting canoeists safely across liquid expanses, returning them home with fish and incomes.11 Canoe-making was a widely held skill. Non-professionals made smaller dugouts, while professionals crafted war and merchant canoes that could be over 120 feet long and carry over 100 people. Professional canoe-making was widely regarded as a sacred vocation, as reflected in the Senegambia proverb: “The blood of kings and the tears of the canoe-maker are sacred things which must not touch the ground.”12 A canoe’s worth was not solely measured by construction

costs, but by its ability to safeguard mariners and embody community valuations.13

Dugouts were versatile vessels, with their shallow draft (the distance a boat descends beneath the waterline) enabling them to navigate waters one foot deep while carrying several times their own weight. Unlike Western framed boats, dugouts will not sink, even when filled with water. Design nuances enabled them to better negotiate particular waterways while performing specific functions, like fishing, shell-fishing, transporting cargo, and waging war. There were probably several thousand types of dugouts, with each ethnic group assigning discrete names to the various dugouts they crafted.

Canoes were, and still largely are, hallowed objects. Most were carved from sacred silk-cottonwood trees, as they are widely distributed throughout tropical Africa and their timber is resistant to rot and bug infestation. Other trees were used in regions where cottonwoods did not grow. Over one hundred feet tall, cottonwoods had a soul and they connected heavens, earth, and water. Their spreading branches and buttress roots embraced the sky and earth; thus dugouts made from cottonwoods coupled the here-and-now to the spirit world. The souls of generations waiting to be born resided in their trunks, as Chinua Achebe expressed in his fictional representation of Ibo life in Nigeria: “the spirit of good children waiting to be born lived in a big ancient and sacred silk-cotton tree located in the village square. So women who desire children go to sit under its shadow so as to be blessed with children.”14 Members of many ethnic groups performed spiritual ceremonies beneath their spreading branches. For instance, cottonwoods and canoes figured prominently in initiation ceremonies that transitioned children into adulthood at the Bullom/Sherbro village of Thoma in Sierra Leone. During rites of passage, the spirit of the sacred grove gave birth to new adults. Cottonwood leaves were used to produce a gelat-

inous substance simulating afterbirth, which was rubbed upon initiates. As the forest birthed inductees, community members “beat on the ‘belly’ of the forest spirit (beat on buttress roots of the cotton tree or an up-turned canoe), announcing its labour has begun.”15

Canoes had a gender that determined how they rode, while the souls of the trees that dugouts were carved from continued to reside in their hull.16

Canoemen formed bonds with dugouts, performing welcoming ceremonies that included placing offerings on the bow of newly purchased canoes and calling them “bride” to symbolize symbiotic relationships. Well-treated canoes guided fisherwomen and -men to shoals of fish and merchants on safe passages. Charms were placed inside the hull, while elaborate figureheads and spiritual motifs, carved in high and low relief, articulated canoes’ relationships with water and the spirits residing therein.17

Water was a sacred space populated by deities and spirits whose voices were heard in the sound of moving water. People from Senegal to South Africa and as far inland as Mali believed in deities who were half woman, half fish, with Mami Wata being the most celebrated of these finned divinities. Shape-shifting between a woman and half woman, half fish, Mami Wata embodied dangers and desires while slipping between discrete elements and circumstances: water and earth; the real and surreal (Figure 1). She safeguarded followers from drowning, rewarded them with success, and healed people of physical and spiritual maladies.18 Canoes communicated with the water and aquatic deities, with dugouts and spirits guiding mariners to schools of fish and safe passages.

Many believed the realm of the dead lay at the bottom of or across the ocean or a large river, lake, or lagoon. For Africans, life was cyclical, and water channeled one’s soul across the Kalunga, a permeable divide between the living and dead, to the supernatural world, where it was reunited

with ancestors waiting to be reborn.19 Members of several ethnic groups buried the dead with a miniature canoe to facilitate transmigratory voyages to home-waters, a tradition carried to the Americas. While enslaved in South Carolina during the early nineteenth century, Charles Ball helped an African-born father and American-born mother bury their young son. The father made “a miniature canoe, about a foot long, and a little paddle, (with which he said it would cross the ocean to his own country).”20

Africans’ bodies, like canoes, were living entities that possessed a soul and were enshrouded in spiritual and cultural meaning. People used aquatic fluencies to transform their bodies into watercraft, sculpting them just as canoe-makers carved dugouts, allowing people to enjoy and take pride in their wet bodies while connecting with deities in sacred waters. Bodies were gifts from the creator, muscularly accentuated through aquatics, while ritual scarification, applied during a rite of passage, consecrated and ornamented them to visibly express clan, lineage, and ethnic membership. Bodies were to be proudly displayed; thus semi-nudity and nudity in certain settings, including aquatics, was not stigmatized. Indeed, Shaka, ruler of the Zulu Kingdom, told an English merchant, “the first forefathers of the Europeans had bestowed on us many gifts . . . yet had kept from us the greatest of all gifts, such as a good black skin, for this does not necessitate the wearing of clothes.”21

Swimming was valued as a life-saving skill and a means of personal cleanliness, with many incorporating it into work and recreation.22 Parents began inculcating aquatics into children’s lives between the ages of ten months and three years, transforming waterways into safe play spaces.23 After teaching children the fundamentals, parents promoted expertise through play. Boyrereau Brinch, who was raised along the Niger River in what is now Mali, explained that the Bobo, a Mende people, held swimming in high regard,

saying his “father and mother delighted in my vivacity and agility.”24 Recognizing the dangers of gliding through this potentially deadly element, parents created charms to guard against drowning and marine creatures, with Brinch’s father giving him protective “ornaments,” while encouraging them to use buddy systems as they explored their liquid worlds.25

Africans’ bodies enabled many to descend over one hundred feet deep to harvest seabeds and riverbeds. Coastal and interior women and men gathered oysters for their meat, while shells were burned to produce lime for construction. Carpenter Rock, Sierra Leone was “celebrated for its excellent rock oysters, which are brought up in quantities by divers.”26 Scottish explorer Mungo Park documented interior Senegambian people’s aquatic proclivities during two overland treks (1795-1797 and 1805). For instance, near the Bambara capital, Segou, located over five hundred miles (800 km) inland, Park observed a fisherman dive underwater to set fish traps. His lung capacity permitted him to remain submerged “for such a length of time, that I thought he had actually drowned himself.”27 Peoples of the Upper Congo River were equally expert, with one explorer noting “[r]iverine people can remain under the water for a long time while attending their fish-nets, and this habit is gained from those infantile experiences.” Another observed ivory merchants hide tusks underwater to prevent theft, penning: “It was curious to see a native dive into the river and fetch up a big tusk from his watery cellar for sale,” requiring considerable ability since tusks could weigh over one hundred pounds.28 Asante living around Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana, located about one hundred miles inland, incorporated swimming into fishing as the “anthropomorphic lake god,” Twi, prohibited canoes on the lake. Hence, people used paddleboards, called padua, or mpadua (plural), and dove underwater to catch fish with different types of nets and to set and collect fish traps.29

the eye’s lens shape, sharpening underwater vision up to twice the normal range.33 European travelers observed these physiological changes. During the 1590s Dutch merchant-adventurer Pieter de Marees recorded that Gold Coast peoples

are very fast swimmers and can keep themselves underwater for a long time. They can dive amazingly far, no less deep, and can see underwater. Because they are so good at swimming and diving, they are specially kept for that purpose in many Countries and employed in this capacity where there is a need for them, such as the Island of St. Margaret in the West Indies.34

Divers played a central role in some states’ economic development by obtaining forms of currency and export commodities. On Luanda Island, which was part of the Kongo Kingdom, women harvested nzimbu (cowrie) shells for circulation as Africa’s most common non-specie currency. Sixteenth-century “women dive under water, a depth of two yards and more, and filling their baskets with sand, they sift out certain small shellfish, called Lumanche.” 31 Elsewhere, people dove into rivers to collect gold nuggets, with gold being Africa’s primary medium for exchange by which other things were valued, as well as a major export.32

Diving with only the air in their lungs, Africans perfected what is now known as free diving. Free divers spent years honing their minds and bodies to submarine challenges, a process beginning during youth. Limited medical research suggests that the physiology of free divers adapted to prolonged submersion, water pressure, and oxygen deprivation. Free divers develop large lung capacities and their bloodstream possesses elevated levels of oxygen and reduced levels of carbon dioxide. Oxygen deprivation decreases heart, breathing, and metabolism rates, making divers more proficient. Prolonged, recurring submersion changes

Coastal and riverine states used aquatics to thwart European aggression. Africans experience the same symptoms from colds, flus, and many other diseases as Europeans while typically experiencing less severe symptoms from malaria than Europeans, including a lower mortality rate. Africans also produced iron since roughly 2,000 B.C. and possessed iron weapons and capable navies, enabling them to largely dictate the terms of commerce into the nineteenth century. States could defend home-waters, while some navies projected power against rival states and European trade facilities. Naval battles between African states fought on rivers, lagoons, and lakes could include hundreds of war canoes that could be upwards of 180 feet long, and tens of thousands of naval warriors and marines.35 African forces could defeat and capture European ships. In 1456, the Portuguese endured an early example of African naval strength. Responding to a prior Portuguese raid, Africans, who were probably Diola (or Jalo), dispatched 150 warriors in seventeen canoes to attack two Portuguese ships on the Gambia River. Firing arrows as they darted about, the warriors inflicted casualties, while Portuguese musket and cannon fire proved ineffective. The battle ended when interpreters aboard the Portuguese ships convinced

Figure 2. This is one of several images of mpadua in Robert Rattray’s study of the Asante. These men used mpadua, which were eight to ten feet long and about sixteen inches wide, to traverse Lake Busumtwe and for fishing. While women swam, fished, and employed mpadua, Rattray did not detail or photograph their aquatic traditions.30

the Africans that they sought peaceful trade. Similarly, in 1787, Africans on the Gambia, who were probably Diola, captured three British ships, and “killed most of their crews” after English slave traders kidnapped community members. Africans continued to defeat ships, including steamships, into the early twentieth century.36

African rulers employed male and female salvage divers to transform sunken and grounded ships into hinter-seas of production where they harvested the debris of Western commercial capitalism. Europeans wanted Africans to adopt Western salvage traditions dictating that ship owners retained possession of stricken vessels while permitting salvagers to collect compensation for recovering goods. Instead, rulers claimed Europeans’ inability to maintain control of their vessels caused them to forfeit the right to own shipwrecks, granting them the right to appropriate wrecks, their cargos, and crewmembers, who were ransomed. Rulers dispatched divers to salvage shipwrecks, often recovering goods they had sold to Western merchants. In 1615 a Portuguese official bemoaned that the Bijago in what is now Guinea-Bissua averred “what arrives on the beaches belongs to the first who seizes it.”

If a vessel “wrecked on any of their islands, they consider it fair gain; and . . . retain the unfortunate individuals whom they may have taken with it in captivity, until ransomed by friends.”37

The earliest written account of surfing was penned on the Gold Coast, now Ghana, during the 1640s.38 Surfing was independently developed throughout Atlantic Africa, though members of some ethnic groups, like the Fante and Ahanta (both part of the larger Akan language/culture group) and Kru from Liberia, as well as West Central Africans, transplanted it along the coast. Sixteenth-century captives from Ghana and West Central Africa (Congo-Angola) introduced surfing to the island of São Tomé, off equatorial Africa. Surfing was only developed by societies with deep aquatic connections who can gauge understand-

ings of fluid environments. Africans used surfing to understand how to navigate surf-zones in surf-canoes. While seventeenth-century accounts are confusing, later ones are unequivocal, suggesting many learned to surf when about five years old. For instance, in 1823, an Englishman documented Fante children “residing” around Cape Coast surfing, saying they

paddle outside of the surf, . . . they place their . . . [boards] on the tops of high waves, which, in their progress to the shore, carry them along with great velocity . . . while their more dexterous companions reach the shore amidst the plaudits of the spectators, who are assembled on the beach to witness their dexterity.”

Here, we see the connection between surfing and surf-canoeing as the children’s surfboards were crafted from “broken canoes."39

Coastscapes—the area bounded by the surf and seashore’s inland reaches—were important playgrounds and places of learning. Youth played with the sea, learning its movements and patterns through experiential play that entailed interacting with surf, currents, and tides; seeing and feeling the ocean’s rhythms. Youth learned the physics of breakers and wavelengths (the distance between two waves), by seeing and feeling how the ocean pushed and pulled their bodies. They learned that to catch waves one needed to match their speed, something Westerners did not comprehend until the 1880s. While at Elmina, Ghana, during the early eighteenth century, a French slave trader watched “several hundred . . . [Fante] boys and girls sporting together before the beach, and in many places among the rolling and breaking waves, learning to swim" and surf, concluding that Africans’ dexterities “proceed from their being brought up, both men and women from their infancy, to swim like fishes; and that, with the constant exercise renders them so dexterous.”40

miles or 11 km west of Cape Coast), with the Dutch slave-trading castle of St. Jago.

enslaved Africans to a slave ship. In the back-

are the Fante

of Elmina (St. Jago Castle), Cape Coast, Mount Monfro, or Amanful (Fort Frederiksborg, later Fort Royal), and

“human shores”

Surfing opened seas of possibilities, with Atlantic Africans being the only known people to harness wave energy as part of their daily labor practices. Many Atlantic Africans had to pass through the surf to access coastal fisheries and shipping lanes, using waves to slingshot surf-canoes laden with fish or tons of cargo ashore. Surf-canoes were modified dugouts up to thirty feet long and eight feet wide. They were fast and responsive, capable of catching and surfing waves up to eight feet high. Sources suggest youth used surfing to develop the sophisticated understandings necessary to crew surf-canoes. When about fifteen years old, men and, to a lesser extent, women began applying youthful surfing experiences as they took up surf-canoe paddles, with women harvesting littoral waters while men fished up to twenty miles (32 km) offshore.42

Figure 3. This image illustrates some aquatic activities related to the Fante surf-ports. The top image shows Fante fishermen, who sometimes comprised fleets of up to 800 canoes catching fish sold in local markets, shipped into the interior, and sold to English officials at Cape Coast Castle to feed English officials and soldiers. There are also captives in the dungeons. In the background is the Fante surf-port of Elmina (about seven

The bottom image depicts surf canoemen transporting

ground

surf-ports

Moree (Fort Nassau), illustrating the concentration of surf-ports that created

that oriented people seaward.41

Surf-canoes were innovative vessels crafted by expert canoe-makers with probably hundreds of variations distinct enough to warrant their own name. Canoeists and canoe-makers used rivers, lagoons, and mangrove swamps as calm-water nurseries where they developed maritime architecture, technology, and techniques, before testing them in churning surf-zones. Developed long before the arrival of Europeans, surf-canoes continually evolved as fishermen and merchants from diverse ethnic groups exchanged design elements, making them strong enough to withstand being slammed against sandbars, while remaining lightweight and maneuverable. Surf-canoes were cut in half lengthwise and keels inserted. Keels remained flush with the surf-canoe’s underside to retain a shallow-draft. Cross-thwarts reinforced hulls while providing brackets for securing cargo while knees, which are curved rib-like braces, radiated from the keel and up the interior sides, providing additional support. Wave-breakers, which are triangular beams, were attached to the bow to deflect the force of oncoming waves. Additionally, planks, called weatherboards, were added to gunwales (the top edge of a vessel’s sides) to elevate their sides, while bows and sterns were further elevated to keep water from splashing into hulls.43

Surf-zones remained the realm of surf-canoes. Western mariners explained that rowboats were too slow to catch waves and regularly capsized in the surf; causing them to conceptualize Africans’ spaces of pleasure and profit as a “surf-bound coast,” and barriers of fear where white people drowned or were eaten by sharks. Thus, Westerners were compelled to hire surf-canoemen for over four hundred years. Royal Africa Company records extensively documented England’s reliance on surf-canoes to float its inhuman trade in human bodies, as did an American naval officer commissioned to suppress the slave trade during the 1850s, writing: “Uncle Sam’s boats are not built

for beaching, we have to trust ourselves again to a big dug-out . . . to bear us through the surf; for which we pay an English shilling, or an American quarter, each.” Into the mid-twentieth century, the British and American navies repeatedly advised ship captains against entering surf-zones but to instead hire surf-canoemen. For example, in 1893, the British Hydrographic Office described the skill of Batanga surf-canoemen of southern Cameroon, noting,“nothing can exceed the skill with which these people launch through a heavy surf which would prove fatal to ordinary ship’s boats.”44

Figure 4. In 1774, William Smith of the Royal Africa Company described England’s reliance on “dexterous Canoe-men” to “carry the Passengers and Goods ashore,” through breakers, “which to me seem’d large enough to founder our Ship.” Conveying European fears, Smith expressed it was “barely possible, that a [white] Man may, if [a canoe] overset here, save his Life by swimming, but it is not very probable, for there are such numbers of Sharks here.” 45

Surf-canoemen’s paddles further illustrate their ability to derive environmental solutions. They were designed to provide rapid acceleration necessary to catch waves while minimizing resistance when the blade accidentally struck chop during the forward stroke. The Fante developed an array of paddles, including the distinctive three-pronged, trident-shaped paddle. While there are numerous variations to this paddle, its three slightly spread fingers increase the blade’s surface area, as little water passes between the fingers when paddled rapidly.47 Most paddles seemingly had long narrow blades that widened dramatically near the handle. For instance, the bottom twenty-eight inches (71 cm) or so of Kru paddle blades was roughly six inches (15 cm) wide, broadening to about eighteen inches near the handle. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Fante paddle became widely disseminated, with many Kru adopting it.48

Figure 5. This stylized image of Fante surf-canoemen landing in what is now Benin illustrates trident paddles, while capturing white people’s fear of being devoured by sharks if they fell overboard from surf canoes. Note the trident-shaped paddles discussed below.46

Surf-Ports

African sailing traditions predate European arrival, and surf-canoes could, as de Marees reported, “sail very well with” the wind, to “develop a great speed” and could sail against, but not close to, the wind. The morning air over tropical seas and large rivers warms faster than over land, causing it to rise and cooler overland air to blow seaward, creating offshore breezes that fishermen rode to fisheries and merchants to shipping lanes. 50 Merchants harnessed prevailing and seasonal winds and currents, sailing and paddling across coastal seas and up rivers. Senegambians seasonally traversed hundreds of miles of coastline while Fante canoemen voyaged “to all parts of the Gulf of Ethiopia [Guinea], and beyond that to Angola.” Riding the Guinea Current southward they traveled along the coast, during return voyages, they cut across the Gulf of Guinea as they rode the Benguela Current.51

The absence of natural harbors inspired the creation of surf-ports, which provided the same shipping and distribution functions as seaports, but, since they lacked sheltered waters, required canoeists to pass through surf-zones when traveling between land and sea. There were hundreds of surf-ports, as most coastal towns were home to seaward-facing communities whose residents owned at least a few surf-canoes. Indeed, many surf-ports were a few miles, or even a few hundred feet, from each other. Beached canoes were meeting places and marketplaces where people of diverse ethnicities met to exchange news, information, and maritime techniques. Seafood processing, marketing, and distribution were primarily performed by women, most of whom were related to fishermen. On beaches, women organized goods for sale, discussed market prices, and created coastal and overland trade networks extending hundreds of miles. For instance, during the 1590s, de Marees noted hammerhead sharks were “dried and taken to the Interior, and constitute a great Fish-present.”52 Market women collaborated with and functioned independently of men, reinvesting earnings in surf-canoes and fishing gear, thus women could own twenty-five to sixty percent of the surf-canoes at any given surf-port, and employ numerous fishermen, making relationships between women and men reciprocal.53 With the arrival of Europeans, surf-ports quickly became central nodes in overseas trade. While never rivalling Amsterdam, Marseille, Lisbon, or Bristol in size, the number of surf-ports enabled African states to construct economies of scale. The Fante, for instance, controlled roughly 150 miles (240 km) of coastline, with eight larger and some thirty smaller surf-ports that were home to probably 4,000 surf-canoes during the seventeenth century.54 In 1482, Kwamin Ansa, the Fante ruler of Anomansah, which became Elmina, permitted the Portuguese to build St. Jago Castle, linking this surf-port to the Port of Lisbon. Over

Figure 6. This 1880s image provides an example of variation of the Fante trident-shaped surf-canoe paddle and how Kru mariners, who were highly skilled in their own right, adopted this paddle design.49

the centuries, many rulers allowed the Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, Danes, Swedes, and Germans to construct what came to be known as slave forts and castles, where they imprisoned Africa’s humanity before shipping them through the surf to slave ships. Some, like Fante leaders at Anomabu, did not permit Europeans to construct forts, preferring, instead, to trade with all comers. Regardless, the Gold Coast’s roughly 300-mile (480 km) shoreline quickly became home to some 60 slave-trading forts which exported roughly two million captives from 1501 to 1867, and over 100 surf-ports without these facilities.55

Figure 7. The Fante allowed the English to build Cape Coast Castle, which was a major slave-trading facility, at their surf-port to attract overseas trade. To the right of the castle is the beach where surf-canoes launched and landed. In the foreground are several surf-canoes, including one rigged with double masts and sails.56

Maritime Maroons

Even as slave ships’ wake disrupted relationships with waterscapes, Africans remained in liquid motion, recreating and reimagining aquatic traditions in the Americas as a method of cultural resistance and a means for forging communities of belonging, as illustrated by maritime maroons who liberated themselves by escaping across water. Their experiences are but one example of how the enslaved explored and charted waterscapes, transforming the waters of bondage into places of meaning and value.57 As maritime maroons slipped their terrestrial moorings, they used islands to chart routes to new lives in communities of belonging in this life and the next.

For Africans, belonging, not freedom, was the antithesis of slavery. Traditionally, African slavery was, in many ways, a temporary punishment for transgressions, compelling offenders to work off debts to individuals and communities or a way of integrating conquered people into conquering societies (with the Atlantic slave trade changing how Africans treated the enslaved). This differed from racial slavery in the Americas, where enslavers owned one’s body and everything they produced, both through their labor and natural reproduction, while forced sales destroyed communities of belonging—including nuclear families—by selling people away from loved ones. Africans in the Americas responded to enslavement by continually seeking to regain their humanity, often through cultural recreation that linked them to communities of belonging in Africa, the Americas, and the spirit realm.58

Figure 8. Enslavers forced enslaved canoemen to build and crew canoes and modified canoes used for pleasure cruises. This image shows how waterside slaveholding provided waterscapes where captives recreated and reimaged African aquatic traditions.59

The structures and contours of slavery— indeed, its very hydrography—facilitated the recreation of aquatic traditions and maritime marronage. Many enslavers established slaveholdings along seashores and riverbanks to facilitate the shipment of slave-produced staples to seaports or ships lying at anchor, regularly clustering captives into ethnic enclaves to facilitate communication and plantation production. The tropical and semitropical waterscapes of much of the Americas were akin to the ones captives were stolen from, providing familiar places to nurture uprooted traditions. Much of the flora and fauna was familiar, including sea turtles, crocodiles, manatee, and many types of fish and shells, while cottonwoods grew throughout much of the tropical Americas, housing the souls of future generations of dispossessed Africans. Where cottonwoods were not found, other trees, including pine, cypress, oak, and poplar, served as substitutes when crafting dugouts. Accounts indicate that by the eighteenth century Mami Wata and other deities populated waters alongside Indigenous spirits.60 Waterscapes were playgrounds where enslaved children learned aquatics. Near Frederick Douglass’ boyhood home in Maryland “was a creek to swim in . . . a very beautiful play-ground for the children.” Likewise, John Washington recollected how Virginia’s Rappahannock River was the favorite play spot for Virginian youth. They slipped off “to the river to play with some boat or other which I could always get or swim.”61

Adults equally found pleasure in aquatics. After working for enslavers most of their waking hours, saltwater and country-born captives slipped into coastal waters and rivers to cool off, soothe aching muscles, and wash away the dirt of plantation slavery. “We wucked in de fie’ls from sunup ter sundown mos’ o’ de time, but we had a couple of hours at dinner time ter swim or lay on de banks uv de little crick an’ sleep,” recalled Bill Crump of North Carolina.62

During their free time, the enslaved fished to augment meager rations, selling surpluses. Fathers and sons carved family canoes that mothers and daughters paddled to weekend seaport and riverport markets to sell seafood, fruit, vegetables, and craft items, providing white residences with most of their fresh food. Women regularly used canoes as bumboats, which were, in essence, floating huckster stalls. As newly arrived ships entered port, women and men paddled out to sell crew members and passengers produce, seafood, and poultry, as well as tropical curiosities, like monkeys, parrots, and baby alligators. Revenues from these sales were used to purchase necessities, like soap, clothing, and small livestock that made their exploited lives more comfortable and enjoyable while restoring a sense of humanity.63

Enslavers realized African aquatics could generate substantial capital for financing colonization and plantation slavery, prompting slave traders to target members of ethnic groups known to possess certain aquatic proclivities, with Spaniards being the first Europeans to do so. In 1526, Spaniards imported enslaved divers to harvest pearl oysters off Venezuela’s coast, making this the first significant source of wealth for colonizers. During the 1540s, free Africans were hired and brought to English waters to salvage shipwrecks, including Henry VIII’s flagship, the Mary Rose. As early seventeenth-century English colonizers sought natural resources to exploit, they imported enslaved divers to harvest pearl oysters before they began salvaging Spanish treasure shipwrecks later that century. English colonists, primarily from Bermuda, Barbados, Jamaica, Antigua, the Bahamas, and South Carolina, employed teams of divers capable

Figure 9. (right) Oil painting, which was rendered post-emancipation, titled Bum Boat in Carlisle Bay, Barbados. While the husband and wife are free, this painting captures how the enslaved used aquatics to restore a sense of humanity to their lives as they sold fruit and vegetables to a newly arrived ship. The monkey seems to be their domesticated pet and not for sale.64

of recovering upwards of forty tons of silver and gold in roughly six weeks. Returns were invested in plantations, enslaved Africans, livestock, and ships, while colonial administrators invested in infrastructure, like fortifications and harbor facilities. Importantly, white salvagers valued enslaved divers over technological options, like diving bells, as divers could easily enter ships’ hulls, while bells were heavy, cumbersome, got snagged on ships’ masts and rigging, and did not allow divers to enter hulls.65

Likewise, enslaved canoemen became key to the success of plantation slavery. Enslavers compelled captives to craft dugouts, which were used by enslaved fishermen. Less desirable types of “trash fish” were used as a cheap source of protein for agricultural laborers and to fertilize fields, while prized fish were served at enslavers’ dinner tables. Enslaved canoemen used dugouts to transport slave-produced cash crops to seaports. During return voyages they carried Africa’s humanity, freshly disgorged from slave ships, to the fields of bondage.66

Even as slavery required canoemen to paddle upwards of ten hours per day, they infused their toils with African cultural meanings, layering familiar soundscapes onto new world waterscapes, providing themselves with manageable African cadences. African canoemen set their paddling rhythm to call-and-response paddling songs. Captives continued this aural tradition, singing in African, Arabic, European, and creolized languages. In the 1790s, while on Guyana’s Demarara River, an Englishman recorded the lyrics of Akan canoemen (the Fante are part of the larger Akan language/culture group) from Ghana, writing that the helmsman

invented extempore lines for a favorite African tune, finishing each verse with ‘gnyaam gnyaam row,’ ‘gnyaam gnyaam row,’ in which all were to join by way of chorus; and we found

that ‘gnyaam gnyamm row,’ never failed to give additional force to the oar—and consequent headway to the boat.67

Gnyaam, or probably Gye Nyame, indicates membership in the Akan cultural group, for it means “except God,” or, more precisely, “except for God, I fear none.” Here, the line seemingly translated to “for the creator I row,” motivating the canoemen as they reflected upon their Akan past. Actions simultaneously articulated communities of belonging. The helmsman traded places with fatigued paddlers, allowing them to rest upon the steering paddle, which demonstrated surprising equity within slavery’s racialized hierarchies of power. Such songs and comradery served maritime maroons well during freedom voyages.68

Fishing equally provided would-be maroons with lessons on collaboration.69 While touring Jamaica in 1823, Englishman Cynric Williams encountered “ten or twelve” enslaved men and women “preparing to haul the seine,” a rectangular fishing net. Taking one end of the seine out to sea in an arching motion, the canoeists surely synchronized their labors to call-and-response songs. On the beach, they sang again while hauling their catch ashore. One fisherman was a Muslim member of the “Houssa” ethnic group and friends with Williams’s enslaved guide, Abdallah. These two Hausa men were enslaved together in what is now inland Nigeria. Both crossed the Atlantic together. The Hausa fisherman synthesized his abilities with those of fisherwomen and -men of other ethnicities and spiritual persuasions, using shared skills to catch an “immense quantity of fish.”70 Such experiences surely helped captives understand how maritime cooperation could facilitate escape.

Self-liberation has long been a topic of intellectual inquiry with scholars recognizing that maritime maroons were not just fleeing one place; they were deliberately navigating to particular places that afforded belonging. Maritime maroons fled as

passengers aboard Western framed vessels, finding freedom and belonging throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, and even the Kingdom of Hawai‘i.71 Many more departed as mariners who took control of their destiny.

As in Africa, captives employed maritime connectivities to create a network of communities, stretching from New England to Brazil, with historian Julius Scott calling this expanse the “Greater Caribbean.”72 A “common wind,”73 churned by the tongues of rootless and restless free and enslaved Black sailors, as well as white sailors and army deserters, spoke of opportunities across seas, across imperial borders. Maritime maroons used this grapevine of information to identify destinations, employing African aquatic techniques, including dugouts, surfboards, and their swimming bodies, to expand their horizons far beyond the dry places enslavers sought to chain them to.74 In 1840 a Scottish abolitionist reported how enslaved Africans, inspired by this “common wind,” unmoored their fettered bodies:

Several thousands of the slaves of Martinique had previously been driven by the severity of their treatment, or incited by their innate love of liberty, to embark in canoes, or on rafts formed for the purpose, in the hope of reaching St. Lucia or Dominica, where they had been informed that their natural rights as men would be respected.75

We can consider how “salt-water” (or African-born) captives connected themselves to home-waters and spiritual realms by examining maritime marronage through an African lens. The number of captives in liquid motion was impressive, far greater than scholars previously assumed, with perhaps tens of thousands escaping.76 Compared to horses, enslaved feet, and ships, canoes were unique in that they enabled captives to flee en masse, sending waves of self-liberated

humanity rippling out from islands and continents of enslavement. A handful of skilled canoewomen and -men could instruct two to four times their number of less skilled canoeists. Thus, escapees used canoes to escape as families and communities, taking young and old, as they crossed imperial borders.77 At times, entire plantation communities escaped in fleets of dugouts. For instance, on St. Croix, in the Danish West Indies, several planter families were financially “ruined, when in a single night, 20 to 25 of their slaves, indeed sometimes more, deserted to” Puerto Rico. No other form of escape permitted such exoduses.78

When dugouts could not be had, captives swam or used paddleboards, completing crossings ranging from one to 30 miles (1.6 to 48 km). Some swam when dugouts were intercepted. In 1840, five captives fled St. Jan in the Danish West Indies for the British island of Tortola where slavery had been abolished. A pursuing Danish patrol boat fired upon their canoe in British waters, killing a woman; they captured a mother and child, while two others swam to freedom.79

Spiritual beliefs infused the Greater Caribbean with alternate—even sub-alternate—routes to belonging. Runaway advertisements indicate that many salt-water captives were inspired to strike out for home-waters soon after being disgorged from slave ships’ hulls. In February 1734, “Hector, Peter and Dublin, all of Angola” stole a neighbor’s “Canoe” as they fled Wando River, South Carolina for Angola. Likewise, in September 1771, Step, who had “Country Marks on his Temples,” and “Lucy” departed South Carolina with “several others, being persuaded that they could find their way back to their own Country.” While enslavers reported that escapees were seeking homelands, we must ask if Africans were pursuing physical or spiritual redemption. Having crossed the Atlantic in a slaver’s hull, salt-water captives knew return passage would be difficult. Routes to belonging probably entailed metaphysical voyages across

the Kalunga, as captives used aquatics to generate undercurrents of power that challenged enslavers’ hegemony as they charted courses to spirit realms where they reunited with loved ones waiting to be reborn in ancestral lands.80

Conclusion

Atlantic Africans were not just on the water, they were in the water and of the water, employing aquatics to create “human shores” on both sides of the Atlantic. Aquatics offer new horizons for examining maritime history, while canoes and African bodies invite scholars to reconsider the alleged triumph of modernity over tradition. Canoes were more than cultural expressions; they were environmental solutions, with surf-canoes enabling Africans to thrive in turbulence, while making Westerners dependent on surf-canoemen from 1444 into the 1950s.81 Even today, as we seek clean energy sources, Atlantic Africans remain the only people to harness wave energy as part of their daily labor practices. Minds and bodies were crafted into seaworthy vessels capable of surfing waves, skimming surface waters, and descending into the depths. During the early modern period, African bodies, not European diving bells, were the most reliable means for salvaging shipwrecks.

Surf-ports illustrate why we must avoid using Western practices as the standard for determining the significance of African practices. We assume the size of watercraft and seaports reflect their ability to inform global circumstances. Like coral reef-making polyps, surf-ports seem diminutive, but, despite their supposed smallness, they demonstrated outsized influence. Just as coral polyps can, in “aggregate” and through “collective labor” construct reefs capable of sinking ships and lifting islands from seafloors, surf-canoemen and market women transformed beaches in economic archipelagos that informed global events for some 500 years.82

Maritime marronage extends our understandings of aquatic traditions. Daring to paddle and swim across slave ships’ wake, escapees recharted their destinies and redefined the ocean according to African valuations. Even as enslavers transformed dugouts into mechanisms of oppression that furthered plantation slavery, captives retained symbiotic relationships with canoes and waterscapes. Trees needed canoe-makers to undergo their metamorphosis into dugouts. African-descended canoe-makers on both sides of the Atlantic peeled away dugouts’ cocoons, enabling trees to transform into swift-winged vessels. Canoeists honored canoes and, in return, canoes safeguarded them. This interdependence took on new meanings under slavery where dugouts and escapees maintained reciprocal relationships. Both were maritime maroons. Both needed the other to escape. Escapees needed canoes to carry them away from enslavers; to speak with aquatic deities; to guide them on physical and spiritual passages. Canoes needed escapees to navigate them away from the waters of bondage; to free them from transporting slave-produced cash crops to market and newly imported Africans from slave ships to fields of subjugation. Both needed the other to reach communities of belonging in this life or the next.

Disclosures: No potential conflicts of interest to report. This project was supported in part by the Kemble Fellowship in Maritime History through Huntington Library.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank the 2022–2023 long-term Huntington Library Fellows who commented on this article during our working group meeting, https://huntington.org/ research/2022-23-awarded-fellowships. Thanks are also due to the blind readers, including Greg O’Malley, who revealed his identity, for their generous and insightful comments.

Endnotes

1 John R. Gillis, The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

2 The term new world is used in lowercase italics to directly recognize Indigenous peoples’ homelands and waters.

3 “Africa,” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Africa, accessed 2/27/2023; “Europe,” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Europe, accessed 2/27/2023.

4 Lighters were vessels used to bring goods between ship and shore.

5 John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43-71. Most of the embarkation points captives were shipped from were surf-ports; see https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates, accessed 3/25/2023; https://www.slavevoyages.org/blog/tag/intro-maps, accessed 3/25/2023.

6 Erik Gilbert, Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar, 1860-1970 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 5.

7 Richard Price, “Caribbean Fishing and Fishermen: A Historical Sketch,” American Anthropologist 68, no. 6 (Dec. 1966), esp. 1371; Kevin Dawson, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 151-152. Books considering traditional watercraft throughout the world typically contain chapters on every continent and Oceania, a chapter on ancient Egypt, and omit sub-Saharan Africa.

8 U. B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1966 [1918]), 339-343, esp. 343; U. B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), 195-199.

9 For Atlantic African maritime history, see: Robert S. Smith, “To the Palaver Islands: War and Diplomacy on the Lagos Lagoon in 1852-1854,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria V, no. I (December 1969), 3-25; Robert S. Smith, “The Canoe in West African History,” Journal of African History 11, no. 4 (1970), 515-533; Robert S. Smith, Warfare and Diplomacy in PreColonial West Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 42-63; John K. Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800 (London: Routledge, 1999), 41-54, 75-98; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 257n5, 257n6, 259n14.

10 Christopher R. DeCorse, An Archeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1400-1900 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 108, 224n17.

11 Jojada Verrips, “Ghanaian Canoe Decorations,” MAST I, no. 1 (2002), 62; Greg Denning, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774–1880 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980), 141.

12 Quoted in W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 49.

13 Michael A. Coronel, “Fanti Canoe Decoration,” African Arts XIII, no. 1 (November 1979), 54-55, 59.

14 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Doubleday, 1958), 46, 138-39. Many of the beliefs about canoes and water still endure as they evolve over time. Author’s observations based on research conducted throughout West Africa.

15 Carol P. MacCormack, “Proto-Social to Adult: A Sherbro Transformation,” in Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, eds., Nature, Culture and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 106-110; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 104-105.

16 Beliefs about canoes changed over time and vary between people. Fante and Ahanta fishermen told the author that canoe-makers determined

the gender by the shape of the tree or canoemen determined gender by how the canoe rode. More graceful canoes that slid over waves were female, while those that plowed through waves were masculine. Verrips, “Canoe Decorations,” 47, 55-56, 63n14.

17 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 191-197.

18 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power.

19 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 33, 83, 200-206; Kevin Dawson, “Moros e Christianos Ritualized Naval Battles: Baptizing New World Waters with African Spiritual Meaning,” in Cécile Fromont, ed., Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2018), 4258. For Kalunga, see T. J. Desche Obi, “Combat and Crossing the Kalunga,” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda M. Heywood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 354; Bolster, Black Jacks, 63-65.

20 Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, or, The Life of an American Slave (New York: H. Dayton, 1859), 193, 197-198; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 3334, 199-203.

21 Henry Francis Fynn, The Diary of Henry Francis Fynn: Compiled from Original Sources (Pietermaritzburg: Shutter and Shooter, 1950), 81-82; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 17.

22 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 13-15.

23 Pieter de Marees, Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea, trans. Albert Van Dantzig and Adam Jones (1602; New York: British Academy, 1987), 26; P.E.H. Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law, eds., Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678–1712, Two Volumes (London: Hakluyt Society, 1992), 532, 501n16, 640; Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea: Divided Into the Gold, the Slave, and the Ivory Coasts. Containing a Geographical, Political and Natural History of the Kingdoms and Countries; with a Particular Account of the Rise, Progress and Present Condition of All the European Settlements Upon that Coast; and the Just Measures for Improving the Several Branches of the Guinea Trade (London: J. Knapton, 1705), 121122; Adam Jones, ed., German Sources for West African History, 1599-1669 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 109; William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea: Describing the Customs, Manners, Soil, Manual Arts, Agriculture, Trade, Employments, Languages, Ranks of Distinction, Climate, Habits, Buildings, Education, Habitations, Diversions, Marriages, and Whatever Else is Memorable Among the Inhabitants (1774; London: Taylor and Francis Group, 1967), 210; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 23.

24 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 23.

25 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 23-24.

26 Richard R. Burton, Wanderings in West Africa: From Liverpool to Fernando Po, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University, 1863), 195; George Thompson, The Palm Land; Or, West Africa, Illustrated. Being a History of Missionary Labors and Travels, with Descriptions of Men and Things in Western Africa (Berkeley: University of California, 1959), 240; Elizabeth Melville, A Residence at Sierra Leone: Described from a Journal Kept on the Spot, and from Letters Written to Friends at Home (London: John Murray, 1849), 113.

27 Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa: Performed under the Direct Patronage of the African Association, in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (New York: W. Bulmer and Co., 1799), 71-72, 210-211; Mungo Park, Travels of Mungo Park containing Book One, The First Journey: Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, and Book Two, The Second Journey: The Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa in the Year 1805 (London: W. Bulmer and Co.,

1954), 53-54, 161, 336; Samuel Phillips Verner, Pioneering in Central Africa (Richmond: Presbyterian Committee of Publications, 1902), 126.

28 John H. Weeks, Among the Congo Cannibals: Experiences, Impressions, and Adventures During a Thirty Years’ Sojourn Amongest the Boloki and other Congo Tribes (London: Seeley, Service & Co., 1913), 99, 109, 333; E.J. Glave, In Savage Africa: Or Six Years of Adventure in Congo-Land (New York: R.H. Russell & Sons, 1892), 201; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 26-27.

29 R.S. Rattray, Ashanti (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), 61–65. Author's collection.

30 Rattray, Ashanti, 61.

31 Fillippo Pigafetta, A Report of the Kingdom of Congo (London: John Murray, 1818), 18-19.

32 Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 53. Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 58.

33 Dawson, “History Below the Waterline,” 3-4; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 65-70.

34 De Marees, Gold Kingdom, 186, italics added.

35 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 136-142. For iron production, see Thornton, Africa and Africans, 46; August F.C. Holl, “The Origins of African Metallurgies,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias 22, no. 4 (June 30, 2020), 415438; Heather Pringle, “Seeking Africa’s First Iron Men,” Science 323, no. 5911 (January 2009): 200-202.

36 G.R. Crone, ed., The Voyages of Cadamosto and Other Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century (London: Hakluyt Society, 1937), 59; Carl Bernhard Wadstrom, Observations on the Slave Trade, and a Description of some Part of the Coast of Guinea (London: James Phillips, 1789), 19-20; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 136-142.

37 Manuel Álvares, Ethiopia Minor and a Geographical Account of the Province of Sierra Leone (c. 1615), trans. and ed. P.E.H. Hair (Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 1990), Chap. 9, 3; Chap. 11, 4.

38 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 28.

39 John Adams, Remarks on the Country Extending from Cape Palmas to the River Congo (London: W. G. Whittaker, 1823); Kevin Dawson, “A Brief History of Surfing in Africa and the Diaspora,” in Mami Wata, Afro Surf (Cape Town: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed, 2021); Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 28-29; Kevin Dawson, “Surf and Surf-Canoeing in Atlantic Africa,” in Lydia M. Heberling and David Kamper, eds., Waves of Hope, Waves of Belonging: Indigeneity, Gender, and Race in the Surfing Lineup (Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming 2024).

40 P.E.H. Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law, eds., Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678–1712, vol. 2 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1992), 532; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 24-25.

41 Awnsham Churchill and John Churchill, Collection of Voyages, vol. 5 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1732), 156. Author’s collection.

42 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 24-25, 122-123.

43 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 100-126.

44 Archer Crouch, On a Surf-Bound Coast; Cable-Laying in the African Tropics (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Riverton, 1887); Robin Law, ed., The English in West Africa, 1691-1699: The Local Correspondence of the Royal African Company of England, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Chas. W. Thomas, Adventures and Observations on the West Coast of Africa, and Its Islands (Macon: Derby and Jackson, 1860), 212; Great Britain Hydrographic Office, Africa Pilot, or Sailing Directions from the West Coast of Africa, Part II (London: Derby & Jackson, 1893), 183; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 121, 126-127.

45 Verney Lovett Cameron, In Savage Africa or, The Adventures of Frank Baldwin from the Gold Coast to Zanzibar (London: Thomas Relson and Sons, 1887), opening vignette. Author’s collection.

46 Alexandre L. d’Albéca, La France au Dahomey (Paris: Hachette, 1895), 7. Author’s collection.

47 A.B. Brown, “The Fishing Industry of the Labadi District,” in F.R. Irvine, The Fishes and Fisheries of the Gold Coast (London: Government of the Gold Coast, 1947), 25; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 114; author’s observations.

48 James Hornell, “The Kru Canoes of Sierra Leone," The Mariner’s Mirror: The Journal of the Society for Nautical Research 15 (1929): 234–35, fig. 1; Louis Gustav Binger, Du Niger au Golfe de Guinée par le pays de Kong et le Mossi, vol. 2 (Paris: Hachette, 1892), 311. Author’s collection.

49 Binger, Du Niger au Golfe de Guinée, 311.

50 de Marees, Gold Kingdom, 116–18, 122; Pieter van den Broecke, Pieter van den Broecke’s Journal of Voyages to Cape Verde, Guinea and Angola, 1605-1612 (London: Hakluyt Society, 2000), 37, 100; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 125-127.

51 Hair, Jones, and Law, eds., Barbot on Guinea, II, 529; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 69, 101, 112, 297n67.

52 de Marees, Gold Kingdom, 124.

53 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 101-103; Patience Affua Addo, “The Sea is No Longer Sweet: Gender and Kinship Relations in Anomabu in Times of Dwindling Fish Stocks,” MA thesis (Department of Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway, 2016), esp. 16-18; 51-59; Kevin Dawson, “Aquatic Culture in Africa and the Diaspora,” in Slavery, Slave Trades, and the Diaspora in African History, ed. Martin Klein (Oxford: Oxford University Press; forthcoming); https://wire.farmradio.fm/farmer-stories/ghana-woman-earnsliving-with-fishing-business/print/, retrieved 4/4/2023.

54 In 1679, Elmina, the second largest Fante surf-port after Cape Coast, was home to “five or six hundred” fishing canoes, as well as a large fleet of merchant canoes, while six of the other larger surf-ports harbored “300-400” surf-canoes “each.” Hair, Jones, and Law, eds., Barbot on Guinea, II, 519-520, 533, 536n1.

55 Kwasi Konadu, The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 58-60; Albert van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana (Accra: Sedco Publishing, 1980), i; DeCorse, Archeology of Elmina, 3, 39-40, 47-51; https://www.slavevoyages.org/blog/major-coastal-regionscaptives-left-africa, accessed March 25, 2023. Harvey M. Feinberg, Africans and Europeans in West Africa: Elminans and the Dutchmen on the Gold Coast During the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989), 10-20, 27-29. The English were permitted to build Fort William, Anomabu during the 1750s. In 1482, Elmina was a Fetu surf-port, and the Fetu were later absorbed by the Fante. See Feinberg, Africans and Europeans, 10-11.

56 John Barbot, “A Description of the coasts of North and South-Guinea . . .,” in A collection of voyages and travels, some now first printed from original manuscripts, in six volumes, ed. John Churchill (London: Hakluyt Society, 1744), v. 5, pl. 10, 169. Author’s collection.

57 Kevin Dawson, “A Sea of Caribbean Islands: Maritime Maroons in the Greater Caribbean,” Slavery & Abolition, 42, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 428–48.

58 For slavery in Africa, see Thornton, Africa and Africans, esp. 74-76; Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

59 J. G. Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South America; from the Year 1772, to 1777, vol. 1 (London: J. Johnson & J. Edwards, 1796), 11-12; author’s collection.

60 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 158, 166-167, 198-200; Dawson, “Moros e Christianos,” 42-58.

61 David W. Blight, ed., A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007), 171, 175-176.

62 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855), 65-66; Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 9, North Carolina, Part 1, Bill Crump. 1936, 208; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 34-40.

63 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 73-74, 75-76, 79, 176-189.

64 Edwin Roper Loftus Stocqueler, n.d. Reproduced from the Ilaro Court Collection (residence of the Prime Minister of Barbados).

65 Kevin Dawson, “History Below the Waterline: Enslaved Salvage Divers Harvesting Seaports’ Hinter-Seas,” International Review of Social History, Special Edition, “Free and Unfree Labor in Atlantic and Indian Ocean Port Cities, c. 1700-1850” (Winter 2018), 43-70; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 72-82; Kevin Dawson, “Enslaved Swimmers and Divers in the Atlantic World,”Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (March 2006): 1327-1355.

66 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 143-163.

67 George Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies: Written During the Expedition Under the Command of the Late General Sir Ralph Abercromby, vol. 3 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806), 321-322.

68 Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies, 321-322; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 222-250.

69 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power

70 Cynric R. Williams, A Tour Through the Island of Jamaica (London: Hunt & Clarke, 1827), 79-81. Beach culture is also based on author’s West African and Caribbean observations.

71 Fernanda Bretones Lane, “Free to Bury Their Dead: Baptism and the Meanings of Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean,” Slavery & Abolition 42, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 458; Dawson, “Sea of Caribbean Islands,” 445n6, 429. For additional scholarship on maritime maroons, see Dawson, “Sea of Caribbean Islands,” 445n6.

72 Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London: Verso Books, 2018), 29.

73 Scott, The Common Wind, 29.

74 Scott, The Common Wind, 29; Dawson, “Sea of Caribbean Islands,” 428-448; Bretones Lane, “Bury Their Dead,” 449-465; Justin Dunnavant, “In the Wake of Maritime Marronage,” Slavery & Abolition 42, no. 3 (Fall 2021), 466-483; Elena A. Schneider, “A Narrative of Escape: Self Liberation by Sea and the Mental Worlds of the Enslaved,” Slavery & Abolition 42, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 484–501.

75 David Turnbull, Travels in the West Indies. Cuba; with Notices of Porto Rico, and the Slave Trade (London: Longman, Ome, Brown, Green, and Logmans, 1840), 562-563.

76 Schneider, “Narrative of Escape,” 484-501.

77 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 99-163; Bretones Lane considers how escapees, who did not obtain outright freedom, found freedoms to engage in African and Catholic rituals that enabled them to find dignity in communities of belonging. Bretones Lane, “Bury Their Dead,” 449-465.

78 Reimert Haagensen, Description of the Island of St. Croix in America in the West Indies (St. Croix: Virgin Island Humanities Council, 1995), 34-37.

79 Dawson, “Sea of Caribbean Islands,” 442-44.

80 South Carolina Gazette, February 16, 1734; South-Carolina Gazette, December 8, 1758; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 33-34, 200-212; Dawson, “Sea of Caribbean Islands.”

81 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 151-152.

82 Michele Curie Navaka, Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), esp. 14.

Akan Counterweight. Photograph by Matteo Dawson.

Gold Trading and Crocodiles: Two Miniature African Canoes

Kevin Dawson

These are two miniature canoes from my personal collection of African art, which focuses on artworks that represent Africans’ connections with the water. One of them is Fante and the other is Dogon. Most of the pieces in my collection are Fante (Akan), because of their connection to the ocean. Others are Dogon, both because of their interior fishing and canoeing practices and because their artwork is visually impressive.

Both canoes date to about the mid-20th century, when they were originally purchased by Europeans. Both pieces were made long after Europeans looted African polities, between the 1870s and about 1910, and I purchased these and other pieces specifically because they are not connected to a legacy of violence.

Both of these canoes are bronze and were made using the lost wax method. A wax mold is made, then clay is packed around the mold and a hole left on the top of the clay mold. Melted bronze is poured through the hole, melting the wax and taking the shape of the mold. Both represent centuries-old traditions of exquisite metalworking. But while these two objects may look similar in many ways, their cultural meanings are very different.

Akan Gold Counterweight. Bronze

The mid-20th-century canoe with three men seen at left, is a counterweight of the kind used by gold traders and merchants to weigh gold nuggets. They were also objects that could be displayed, and because of their small size, children played with them. Because of their utilitarian function, counterweights were mass-produced, so there are lots of them out there. They are often colloquially called “gold weights,” but they were usually made of brass or bronze and are only rarely made from gold. They can be quite small, weighing less than an ounce, while others weigh up to several pounds. This canoe is 5.25 x 2.25” (13.3 x 5.7 cm) and weighs 8 ounces (28.3 g).

This counterweight was made by Fante craftspeople, and counterweights are locally known as mrammou. The Fante are an ethnic group that is part of the larger Akan language-culture in what is now Ghana.

The neighbors of the Fante, the Asante, controlled what came to be known as the Asante/ Ashante Gold Fields, which is historically the third most productive gold mine in the world. They provided Medieval Europe with much of its gold,

Gold Trading and Crocodiles: Two Miniature African Canoes © 2023 by Kevin Dawson is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit

which was shipped out of West Africa through Timbuktu. Throughout early modern West Africa, gold was the medium of exchange by which all other goods were valued, and it was the most common form of specie.

Counterweights are sometimes displayed in museums, but because of their small size and since most are made of bronze or brass, they aren’t considered high-value art. They are valued instead for their pragmatic use and cultural and spiritual expressions.

Counterweights crafted by the Fante, who are a coastal Akan people, often represent their relationships with water and include fish, crocodiles, shellfish, waterbirds, and canoes. Counterweights are still made and used by what are called artisanal gold merchants, who sell gold in market stalls. I have purchased weights from these merchants.

Westerners traditionally called these counterweights “Ashante weights” (Ashante being the British name for the Asante) because the Asante produced so much gold. They are now typically called “Akan” as they were made by several of the Akan ethnic groups. Most were made by either the Asante, who controlled the gold fields, or the Fante, who controlled the surf-ports through which gold was sold to Europeans at slave castles, like Cape Coast and Elmina. It is usually difficult, or impossible, to ascribe counterweights to a particular Akan ethnic group as they were and are traded between gold merchants from the various ethnic groups and come in many different shapes. Since most of mine represent the ocean, they’re probably Fante, as the Asante were inland peoples.

Dogon Crocodile Canoe. Bronze

The Dogon ethnic group are from what is now southern Mali and northern Burkina Faso. The Dogon canoe on the next page depicts the story of ancestors—two male and female couples, as well as two canoeists—arriving in what would become Dogon country on the back of a crocodile. Dogon artwork, particularly the elongated stylized faces, influenced Pablo Picasso and other early 20th-century Western artists. The tail of the crocodile curves upward to form a handle. Unlike the utilitarian counterweight, this is a piece of sacred artwork that was displayed and used for ceremonial purposes. The Dogon crocodile canoe is 11.5 x 3.9” (29.2 x 9.9 cm).

Crocodiles figure prominently in a few Dogon creation stories. One is that Kassambara, an ancestor, was traveling through the arid region of what is now Dogon country and was down to his last gourd of water. He saw a crocodile and, knowing it would go to water, followed it to the foot of a mountain with 33 springs, which became the village of Borko. As a reward, crocodiles were regarded as sacred creatures that are not hunted. Another story connected to the Crocodile Canoe is that the Dogon arrived at their current homeland about 1,000 years ago after fleeing southward, as Islam spread into northern Africa and they refused to convert. Another version is that they fled northwestward from the Mendi. In both versions, these ancestors crossed a river on the back of a crocodile, represented by the canoe. Both versions (really all three stories) could be rooted in truth, as the Dogon could be the cumulation of different refugee groups. The Dogon region was a refuge whose natural features offered protection. Many Dogon still live in cliff villages, which are similar to the Pueblo dwellings at Mesa Verde and surrounding areas.

Dogon Crocodile Canoe. Photograph by Matteo Dawson.

Our Lady of the Workboats: Solidarity and Spirituality on the Bay of All Saints

Corresponding Author: Alison Glassie, Departments of English and Marine and Environmental Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, MA. a.glassie@northeastern.edu

Abstract

At the end of Jorge Amado’s Mar Morto (1936), a sailor’s grieving widow defies a fate that seems inevitable. Instead of resigning herself to a life of precarity, she takes command of her husband’s boat. In doing so, she aligns herself with Iemanjá, a sea deity from the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé. This essay takes this episode, and Amado’s novel, as its intellectual point of departure. Joining literary studies with maritime social history and nautical science, it charts the physical characteristics and cultural histories of the Baia de Todos os Santos in the Brazilian state of Bahia, which influenced Mar Morto on the level of form and theme. In the spiritually charged home waters of Amado and his characters, ocean literacy is both locally specific and diasporic: intertwined with African-descended cosmologies and ongoing struggles for sovereignty and freedom. By attending to these forms of what Justin Dunnavant (riffing on Katherine McKittrick) calls “livingness on the sea,” this essay models a maritime literary studies that recovers gendered and racialized ocean literacies and demonstrates the importance of local ways of knowing the ocean to the global literature of the sea. It is drawn from a book project tentatively titled “Atlantic Shapeshifters: Sea Literature’s Fluid Forms.”

Keywords

maritime literature, Brazil, ocean literacies, Jorge Amado, Candomblé

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Presente_para_Iemanja_Praia_do_Rio_Vermelho3.jpg

Submitted June 12, 2023 | Accepted June 29, 2023

Our Lady

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

of the Workboats: Solidarity and Spirituality on the Bay of All Saints © 2023 by Alison Glassie is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit

Figure 1. (left) Fabio Rodrigues, Pozzebom/Agência Brasil, “Presente de Iemanjá na Praia do Rio Vermelho, Salvador, Bahia” (Offering to Iemanjá at Rio Vermelho Beach, Salvador, Bahia), 2008. Photograph. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 BR DEED,

At the end of Jorge Amado’s Mar Morto (1936), a grieving widow becomes a sailor and defies a seemingly inevitable fate. Days after her husband Guma runs afoul of a reef off Porto Antônio and drowns rescuing a smuggler’s son, Lívia declines an offer to sell his prized saveiro, the Paquete Voador, “um dos melhores e mais velozes saveiros do cais” (the Flying Packet, one of the best and fastest sloops on the waterfront).1 Her husband had used this agile, gaff-rigged work sloop for coastal trade on the Baía de Todos os Santos (the Bay of All Saints), the shallow, reefstrewn estuary that gives the Brazilian state of Bahia its name. In a devastating turn of events, what became Guma’s final trip would have been the last in a series of smuggling runs he had taken on to pay off the Paquete Voador and save enough money to join his wife’s uncle’s warehouse in the upper city of Salvador da Bahia as a partner. Put another way, Guma died at precisely the moment of upward mobility. As a member of the middle class, he would have been able to leave infamously risky maritime labor behind for a more stable life—one in which he could assume the bourgeois pastime of recreational sailing. Instead, his death leaves his widow and young son in the precarious circumstances that, throughout the novel, Amado characterizes as the inevitable, even fated, misfortune of the women of the waterfront.

For the bereaved Lívia, selling the Paquete Voador would be like giving away “tudo que restava de Guma no mar” (all that was left of Guma on the sea).2 Not only that, she reasons, it would be tantamount to prostitution—one of the few recourses Mar Morto allows for Bahia’s waterfront widows. That her husband loved the saveiro was clear; “ele o comprara para o filho, morrera para poder conservá-lo” (he’d bought it for their son, he’d died to keep it).3 Instead of allowing herself and her son’s inheritance to belong to another man, Lívia chooses to work the Bay. She approaches one of her husband’s fellow mestres de saveiro—sloopmas-

ters—to arrange a consignment of cargo. “Quem vai levar o saveiro?” (Who’s going to handle the sloop?), he asks her. "Eu" (I am), she responds.4 Mar Morto’s final chapter, “Estrela,” or “Star,” follows Lívia outbound on her maiden voyage. It begins routinely enough—at dawn on a working waterfront, with an old salt watching sailing vessels get underway. Quickly, though, it becomes clear that this morning is different. As the old salt, Guma’s uncle Francisco, watches the Paquete Voador sail out of the harbor in convoy with the other vessels, he has trouble believing his long-practiced eyes. Standing on the foredeck of the saveiro, Lívia, a woman who was not born to waterfront life and whose physical and emotional fragility, Amado writes, makes her ill-suited for hard work, seems to shapeshift into Iemanjá, a powerful sea orixá (deity) of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion, who orients the very novel.

When Mar Morto invites its readers to lend their ears to “as histórias da beira do cais da Bahia” (the dockside tales of Bahia) and blames any inadequacies or inaccuracies on the landsman— Amado—who has written them down, it grants narrative authority to the dockworkers, canoemen, fishermen, sloopmasters, and their families who make their homes and livelihoods on Salvador’s waterfront.5 Amado describes these people as “o povo de Iemanjá”—the people of the maternal, seductive orixá who embodies the ocean and who, according to Candomblé cosmology, gave birth to all the other orixás.6 These “anthropomorphized nature deities” from West Africa were “syncretized with Roman Catholic saints”; Iemanjá, for instance, is associated with the Virgin of Immaculate Conception.7 Having survived the forced migration of some five million captive Africans to Brazil from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Iemanjá is said to make her home in the Bay of Bahia.8 There, she contributes to African-descended “oceanic literacies” that are at once material and metaphysical, and, by extension, to the

spiritual and political charge of the Bay itself.9 If Mar Morto is a chart—and I’m convinced it is—it is one that embeds sociocultural hazards like structural poverty and navigational hazards like reefs, storms, and shoals in an Afro-Brazilian cultural and spiritual hydrography. A regionalist novel that understands maritime risk as both structural and intersectional, Mar Morto anchors literary and political consciousness in its characters’ knowledge of their local waters, and identifies its seafaring Afro-Brazilian women with Iemanjá. In doing so, it charts the gendered and racialized oceanic literacies of the Bay of Bahia.

As they embark on the project of translating the Black Atlantic, Ana Farani, Denise Carrascosa, Geri Augusto, Luciana Reis, Paula Campos, and Raquel L. Souza, perhaps predictably, look to the sea. These decolonial, Black feminist translators describe their collective effort as “Cartas Náuticas Afro-diaspóricas para Travessias Literárias” (Afro-diasporic nautical charts for literary crossings). Such charts depend, they argue, on recalibrating technologies like compasses, sextants, and lighthouses, and on reclaiming spaces like the hold and the port. Instead of the watermarked paper that facilitated imperial worldmaking and the subjugation of Black bodies, they offer fugitive charts tattooed on dark skin, showing escape routes from the waterfront of an old slave port: Salvador da Bahia.10 In keeping with Mainsheet’s inaugural theme of freedom, sovereignty, and the sea, this essay takes their project to heart. Joining literary studies with nautical science and maritime social history, it participates in the blue humanities and coastal studies; these scholarly currents explore the relationships between the biophysical ocean, its coasts, and human cultures, past, present, and future.11 In companionable conversation with archaeologists and historians such as Justin Dunnavant and Kevin Dawson, who have drawn attention to African-descended cultures of swimming, diving, and boatbuilding as practices of mean-

ing-making and marronage, this essay foregrounds Afro-Brazilian ocean literacies.12 Meanwhile, its interest in the coastal cultures and traditional boats of Bahia draws on work by nautical preservationist Marcelo Bastos, by Geri Augusto, and by quilombola (maroon-descended) scholar-activist Elionice Conceição Sacramento, who asks “how identity and ancestry participate in the construction of community, the constitution of territory, and the fight for rights” and foregrounds women’s roles in these struggles.13

As this essay explores the confluence of local maritime knowledge and literary representation, it is mindful that, as Dan Brayton writes, “coastwise navigation is at least partly a hermeneutic activity.”14 At the same time, though, it takes issue with Margaret Cohen’s 2019 contention that “[e]very so often, sea fiction introduce[s] into the masculine fraternity of seamen a woman whose presence there is implausible, without historical precedent.”15 Pace Cohen, Lívia’s presence in Mar Morto as an African-descended woman whose oceanic literacy is the product of a working-class society that assimilates maritime risk through the figure of Iemanjá is both plausible and part of a long historical precedent in which human relations with the ocean intersect with gender, race, and class. These intersections, which often manifest locally, are legible across the global literatures of the sea. Accordingly, this essay begins by orienting readers to the historical, cultural, and physical characteristics of Mar Morto’s home waters, locating the novel and its author in literary history. Paying special attention to traditional boats as a “social map,” its first section, called “The Coastwise Canon,” revalues coastal waters as “geographic, historic spaces in the Black Atlantic.”16 Section Two, “The Capsized Candle,” works in dialogue with Christina Sharpe’s theory of the wake, reading the maritime mourning rituals enacted by Mar Morto’s characters after Guma’s death as a form of spiritual oceanography indebted to the kalunga, or

African-descended Sea of the Dead. And in the final section, “Our Lady of the Workboats,” the widowed Lívia’s alignment with Iemanjá redresses the unfreedom that pervades Mar Morto and alludes to Brazil’s ongoing histories of maritime resistance. Ultimately, by locating Mar Morto in a coastwise canon that extends well beyond blue water nautical adventure fiction—the “form without a function” that, for Cohen, is nostalgically adrift in the wake of the great Age of Sail, this essay demonstrates the contributions of local maritime knowledge to the development of a global literature of the sea.17

The Coastwise Canon Profound unfreedom pervades the maritime world of o povo de Iemanjá. Along the Depression-era waterfront of the city of Salvador, structural inequality governs the “social and cultural contracts of a marine life”—the daily navigation of risk that occurs in maritime communities worldwide.18 Bright youngsters like Guma leave school as early as eleven years old having received only the rudiments of formal education: enough literacy and numeracy to scan a letter or bill of lading and sign their names with a flourish. “Their destinies,” Amado writes, “have already been charted for them.”19 Without opportunities like university and technical school, these destinies are circumscribed to “a proa de um saveiro, os remos de uma canoa, quando muito as máquinas de um navio” (the bow of a sloop, the oars of a canoe, at best, the engine room of a ship). 20 Mar Morto’s children learn to assimilate the risk associated with their professions through lyric refrains like é doce morrer no mar (it’s sweet to die in the sea), a line from a popular song Amado penned in collaboration with Dorival Caymmi, and through devotion to Iemanjá, who, according to the novel, reserves a special reward for drowned sailors.21 Writing a mere forty-eight years after Brazil abolished slavery in 1888—within living memory—Amado describes the men, women, and children populat-

ing his novel as “chained to the sea,” with invisible but unbreakable leg irons.22

“Writers and mariners of various stripes,” observes Dan Brayton, “have been drawn to the representational challenges of seacoasts”—to their cultural, political, and biophysical dynamism as well as to their historicity.23 Jorge Amado is no exception. His grade school composition “O Mar” (The Sea, 1923) and memoir Navegação de Cabotagem (Coasting, 1997), register the lifelong inspiration he drew from his home waters, “o mar da Bahia, do Reconcâvo Baiano” (the sea of Bahia, of the region along its coast).24 “Não é o distante oceano que perdiu a terra de vista” (this is not some distant ocean where the land disappears from view), writes literary critic Ana María Machado.25 Rather, these are coastal waters, largely within the sight of land, embraced by littoral communities populated by “a gente pobre do cais” (poor folk of the waterfront) that Amado, a member of the Euro-Brazilian elite, came to know directly as a young man, when he frequented the bohemian hangouts, brothels, and Candomblé houses of Salvador’s working waterfronts.26 The mariners, fishermen, and dockworkers he met in those spaces made precarious livings in traditional wooden boats like saveiros, escunas (schooners), canoas (canoes), and the jangada, a raftlike craft whose name originates from the Malayalam word changadam and the Southern Indian province of Kerala, where Portuguese merchant ports developed during the sixteenth century.27 When they encountered the Brazilian jangada, the Portuguese described it by drawing upon “a colonial imagination and vocabulary, informed by their presence in southern India.”28

Coastwise navigation, like prevailing winds and ocean currents, is deeply entwined with the histories of imperial world-making and enslavement that shaped Brazil. In caravels adapted from coastal fishing craft, Portuguese marinheiros (mariners) explored the Canary Islands and the West African coast, where they encountered peoples

who “wove…aquatic experiences into amphibious lives, interlacing spiritual and secular beliefs, economies, social structures, and political institutions—their very way of life—around relationships with water.”29 When it came time to sail home to Portugal with cargoes of dyestuffs, gold, and the captive Africans who would be sold as slaves in Lisbon as early as the 1440s, the marinheiros found themselves facing the prospects of beating upwind along the African coast or stemming the Canary current.30 Instead, they sailed offshore; through this counterintuitive volta do mar, a navigational development so consequential that Captain Elliot Rappaport compares it to the “splitting of the atom,” they acquired the increasingly detailed understanding of ocean gyres that by the end of the sixteenth century, undergirded a global maritime empire.31

On either side of the equator, steady easterly trade winds drive surface currents from Africa to the Americas. These equatorial currents divide off the northeast coast of Brazil, with one branch flowing into the Caribbean, the other hugging the coast and flowing south. At 12º50' south latitude, 38º38' west longitude, just south of the narrowest part of the Atlantic, the Bay of Bahia was a convenient downwind sail from Angola, which, by 1620, was the embarkation point of half of the captives transported to Brazil.32 Tens of thousands of these captives were landed at the mouth of the Bay of Bahia in the city of Salvador; from there, many were sent to work in the plantations that, by 1625, supplied Europe with the majority of its sugar.33 The capital of Brazil from 1549 to 1763—and after Lisbon the “most important city in the Portuguese imperial world”—Salvador, with its impressive imperial center, its Casa de Angola, and its 1155 terreiros (worship houses) de Candomblé, is now the cultural and spiritual capital of African Brazil.34

“The history of Bahia,” writes John Sarsfield in a 1985 article in WoodenBoat, “is intimately intertwined with the history of its sailing vessels.”35 As early as the sixteenth century, Portuguese impe-

rial chroniclers described Bahia as a fundamentally maritime region. “There are so many boats in Bahia,” Gabriel Soares de Sousa wrote in 1587, “because all of the plantations were reached by sea, and there isn’t a person who doesn’t have his boat or at least a canoe, and there isn’t a plantation that doesn’t have four vessels and more which serve them very well.”36

During this period, the caravelão, a lateenrigged coastal vessel “perfectly adapted to the reefstrewn coast” of Brazil’s Northeast and constructed using Mediterranean molding techniques similar to the whole-molding techniques that built the sloops and shallops plying colonial North American coasts, connected the “archipelago” of sugar towns along the Reconcâvo Baiano’s plantation coast.37 It is probable that the gaff rig was introduced to Brazil during the Dutch occupation of Bahia and Pernambuco in the seventeenth century.38 In their construction techniques, hull design, and sail plans, the saveiros that populate the writings of Jorge Amado and the songs of his friend and collaborator Dorival Caymmi render these competing imperial influences with local hardwoods, dendê oil, and cotton canvas.39 Ben Fuller, curator emeritus of Mystic Seaport Museum and of Penobscot Bay Marine Museum, has suggested that “the peapod is to Maine what the dory is to Massachusetts, the Whitehall to New York City, the sharpie skiff to Connecticut, and untold other watercraft to the specific shores and tasks for which they were adapted”; by this logic, the saveiro is to Bahia a traditional wooden boat that conjures “romantic memories” and cultural authenticity while also registering the racial capitalist maritime histories that shaped Brazil.40

Built from woods including the Brazilwood that Oswald de Andrade described in his 1924 Manifesto da Poesia pau-Brasil as the ideal building material for a national poetry for export, saveiros da Bahia are literal metaphors.41 As they convey “passengers and cargo from one place to another”—say,

from Cachoeira to Itaparica, or from Mar Grande to Maragogipe—they embody the original meaning of this literary term and register the importance of local waters to literary production.42

In the 1960s, commercial ferry service and newly-built highways decimated Bahia’s culture of traditional boats.43 Projeto Içar’s Marcelo Bastos estimates that today, only about 20 saveiros remain in active service. These vessels give form to a confluence of nautical preservation and epistemological injustice. Although individual saveiros like Sombra da Lua have been recognized as cultural patrimony, the tradition they represent is imperiled because the expertise of their builders—mestres carpinteiros navais (master shipwrights) who build by eye and mental algorithm—remains undervalued and unprotected.44 In Amado’s day, however, Bahia’s working waterfronts represented a contact zone in which the vessels engaged in coastwise trade and fishing embodied an uneasy confluence of African, Indigenous, and European histories.45

Mar Morto renders this waterscape with the specificity of a nautical chart, scrupulously orient-

ing readers to the storms, reefs, tides, and prevailing winds of Brazil’s second-largest coastal bay. Easterlies prevail on the Bay of Bahia during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer months, while southerlies, including the June gales Amado mentions repeatedly in Mar Morto, dominate the winter months.46 These seasonally shifting prevailing winds exert most of their influence at the mouth of the bay, where “foul ground” extends several nautical miles south and east from Ilha Itaparica, into the Canal do Salvador. Here, tidally exposed reefs and overfalls—the “turbulent, potentially dangerous” surface waters caused when “fast tidal currents run over very rough ground”—pose hazards to navigation at the precise zone where inshore and offshore overlap.47 The Bay’s physical characteristics also undergird its spiritual significance. Having come to Bahia from her ancient home on the West African coast to see the Río Paraguaçú, Iemanjá chooses to stay. Although she could live anywhere, Amado writes—“nas cidades do Mediterrâneo, nos mares da China, na Califórnia, no mar Egeu, no golfo do México” (the cities of the Mediterranean,

Figure 2. Tomás Britto, Saveiros da Bahia, 2017. Photograph. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA. https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Saveiros_da_Bahia_de_Todos_os_Santos_01.jpg

the China Seas, California, the Aegean, the Gulf of Mexico)—she makes her home in a sacred stone by a breakwater. The deepest part of the Bay, the submerged river valley at the Paraguaçú’s mouth, becomes one of her favorite haunts.48

Guma’s most daring exploits join these forms of maritime knowledge. When a panicked Baiana Line officer bursts into the sailors’ bar offering a reward of 200 milreis to anyone willing to tack a saveiro into a southerly gale to rescue the distressed steamer Canavieras, outbound for Ilheus and in danger of running aground on a lee shore at the mouth of the Bay, Guma responds. Drenched and smiling, he is welcomed aboard by the steamer’s English captain. In the absence of sea-room, the captain seems all too eager to turn the helm over to a consummate inshore mariner.49 For an evening, Guma is in command. “É ele quem dá ordens. Só mesmo assim um homem da beira do cais pode chegar a comandante de um navio. Só por arte de Iemanjá” (He gives the orders. Only in that way can a man from the waterfront ever get to be captain of a ship. Only through the wiles of Iemanjá).50 On this stormy night, coastal piloting undermines class hierarchy, a subversion that occurs through the agency of an orixá particularly devoted to local waters. Guma’s

rescue of the Canavieras—proof of his favor with Iemanjá—makes the light-skinned youth eligible for an honor usually reserved for the waterfront’s Black community. At the next Festa de Iemanjá, he is dedicated to the orixá based on his seamanship; when he becomes an “African diaspora body,” his embodied, technical, and experiential knowledge of the Bay merges with the spiritual knowledge of Candomblé.51

As it joins one of the hallmarks of sea fiction— sustained attention to the mariner’s craft—with African spirituality and social critique, Mar Morto demonstrates the role of local maritime knowledge in the formation of regional and national literatures.52 In the 1920s, a Brazilian intelligentsia disappointed with the First Republic (1889–1930) searched for a unified cultural and literary identity distinct from the influences of Portugal and France.53 The young Amado, then a political reporter and aspiring lawyer affiliated with the Partido Comunista, began his literary career by dismissing the linguistically and formally inventive modernism of Mário de Andrade as “bourgeois”—contrived precisely to mask its lack of cultural authenticity and political commitment.54 Instead, and in alignment with regionalist thinkers like Gilberto Freyre, whose 1926 Manifesto Regionalista foregrounded the place-bound relationships between culture and environment and marshalled regionalism against the modernism and cosmopolitanism he considered disingenuous, Amado devoted his literary attention to his native Bahia.55 His first four novels, O país do Carnaval (1931), Cacau (1933), Suor (1934), and Jubaibá (1935), adhered to the conventions of the “proletarian political novel and privileged the social position of 'the people'" (o povo).56 Amado’s sixth novel, Mar Morto, retains the political commitment and class consciousness of his earlier “Bahia novels” but advances them by depicting ocean literacies that are at once spiritual and material.

Figure 3. Garcia Bento, Saveiros, 1925, oil on canvas. Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro. Wikimedia Commons,

Figure 4. Jose Patriceo and Manoel Pimental, New Chart of the Coast of Brazil. Published by R. Blachford & Co., 1830. Courtesy of the Harvard Map Collection, Harvard College Library

The Capsized Candle

When the sharks—probably tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier)—pull Guma offshore, beyond his capsized Paquete Voador and out of the sight of a horrified Lívia, who watches from shore, the waterfront community is left without a body.57 Three of the four chapters that comprise the final section of Mar Morto—the section that gives the novel its name— center on the search for his remains. Aboard the Viajante sem Porto, a saveiro skippered by the couple’s neighbor Manuel, a crew comprising friends, the local doctor, Guma’s uncle Francisco, and Lívia, ghost along in the wake of a lighted candle floating in a saucer. A kind of supernatural navigational aid, this candle, according to local tradition, would guide the search party to o afogado—the drowned man. When the candle stops, the saveiro heaves to while men dive in search of the body; when the candle capsizes, extinguishing itself in the water, it indicates that o afogado has gone forever with Iemanjá, to “as terras do sem fim”—the unknown, underwater “Land of the Endless Way.”58 That the world of the living can call off the search.

These three eerie chapters suspend Mar Morto between the romance and nautical adventure of most of the novel and the transformative final chapter in which Lívia trans-corporates into Iemanjá. Literally and figuratively, they are Guma’s wake—a word that refers to the ephemeral tracks left by vessels and bodies as they move through the water and to the watch before burial kept by the family and friends of the deceased; it is as much a temporary region of “disturbed flow” as it is a form of attention that holds space for loss and contemplation.59 In her watershed In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), Christina Sharpe endows the word “wake” with additional intellectual force as “the conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still-unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery,” a forced migration by sea that established Bahia as “the Blackest and most slavery-marked” part of Brazil.60 As these

chapters retrace the voyages Guma took in life, through waters he knew intimately, they challenge readers to recognize the “presence and contemporaneity of spirituality” with maritime culture, history, and practice.61

In Mar Morto, this contemporaneity operates on the levels of language and figurative device. In constituting Guma’s wake, the chapters that follow the saveiros crewed by mourners in search of his body suggest a polysemy—that is, “a word’s capacity to carry two or more distinct meanings”— that moves between Portuguese and English.62 In Portuguese, the word vela can mean sail, candle, and, in certain cases, wake or vigil. For instance, the phrase “no meio da noite a vela andou para longe,” which is translated as “in the middle of the night, the candle went far off,” would also make sense as “in the middle of the night, the sail went far off.”63 Synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a defining part of something names the whole, transforms the candle into a vessel under sail.64 By contrast, “suspendem as velas dos saveiros” (they set the sails on the sloops), can really only refer to sail.65 Most haunting is the image of Lívia, “looking for the body of her husband with a candle.”66 In Amado’s original prose, the phrase “procurava o corpo do marido com uma vela” collapses the distinction between sail and candle and makes both into technologies of the wake—the maritime ritual whereby Lívia conjures Guma’s spectral presence and searches for his beloved body.67 A body that, if it is found at all, will be found transfigured— spongy with saltwater, crawling with crabs, eerily subsumed into the local marine foodweb like the rich, strange body of Alonso in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610), its component atoms persisting in the ocean for as long as 260 million years.68 Alive “in the time of the wake, known as residence time,” Guma’s body, like the slippage of the word vela between sail, candle, and wake itself, anchors the metaphysical in material relations with the ocean.69 Meanwhile, the saveiro’s wake through a

bay that, to Lívia, seems to have died along with her husband, localizes these relations in the couple’s home waters.

The twin voyages of the candle and the saveiro around the evocatively named Baía de Todos os Santos—the Bay of All Saints—thus instantiate a spiritual oceanography: a form of ocean literacy in which the biological or physical characteristics of a particular body of water contribute to its spiritual meaning.70 Although the ocean in Mar Morto is complicated—"belo e terrível" (beautiful and terrible) in the novel’s terms—the adjective “morto” (dead) in its Portuguese title, Ana Maria Machado tells us, “shouldn’t fool anyone.”71 In marine ecological terms, for instance, Amado’s shark-infested urban ocean is very much alive; the waters from the Bay to Abrolhos Bank are a global biodiversity hotspot, and the abundance of marine predators in the novel signals the relative health of the ecosystem. This “livingness,” a term I borrow from Black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick, is spiritual as well as ecological.72 The home of Iemanjá and of a collectivity of drowned sailors known for their profound skill and radical politics, the Bay of All Saints, Machado writes, is “um olimpo brasileiro e liquido” (a liquid, Brazilian Olympus).73 In the Africanist terms more suited to the cultural waterscape of the novel, this spiritually and ecologically charged body of water is legible as the kalunga or “Sea of the Dead,” which links “the world of the Living and that of the Ancestors.”74

Our Lady of the Workboats

For those who ply its waters in search of the dead, the Bay of Bahia is an ally and an obstacle. “No mar encontrará Guma para as noites de amor” (In the sea she will find Guma for nights of love), Amado writes of Lívia. “Em cima do saveiro recordará outras noites, suas lágrimas serão sem desespero” (On the sloop she will remember other nights, her tears will be without despair).75 As much a material choice as a metaphysical one, Lívia’s decision to

work the Bay alongside her young son Federico and Guma’s swashbuckling adoptive mother, Rosa Palmeirão, reanimates an ocean that seems to have died along with her husband. When she assumes ownership and command of the Paquete Voador, Lívia renders women’s maritime labor visible. While Amado frequently depicts Lívia aboard her husband’s saveiro, he does not, strictly speaking, depict the process of “enskilment”—the embodied learning curve whereby a woman from the upper city of Salvador becomes part of the “necessarily collective enterprise” that is life on the waterfront.76 However, as anthropologist Gisli Pálsson writes, maritime enskilment “involve[s] whole persons, social relations, and communities of practice.”77 Moreover, women’s maritime labor, according to sociologist Kate Olson, is especially expansive and fluid, encompassing roles like mending sails and nets, processing and selling catches, caring for children, and, when necessity demands, serving as crew.78 This expansiveness also encompasses the emotional labor of scanning ominous skies and forecasts. Waiting. Wondering.

Mar Morto renders these forms of maritime labor visible through Lívia and other female characters such as the local schoolteacher, who envisions and articulates an alternative to the hardscrabble lives of o povo de Iemanjá:

Você nunca imaginou esse mar cheio de saveiros limpos, com maritímos bem alimentados, ganhando o que merecem, as esposas com o futuro garantido, os filhos na escola não durante seis meses, mas todo o tempo, depois indo aqueles que têm vocação para as faculdades? Já pensou em postos de salvamento nos rios, na boca da barra? As vezes eu imagino o cais assim…

(Have you ever imagined clean sloops with well-fed sailors earning what they deserve, their wives with a guaranteed future, their children in school, not for six months but all the time, and those with talent going on to uni-

versity later? Have you ever thought of rescue stations along the rivers, at the mouth of the bay? Sometimes I can imagine the waterfront like that…).79

Although the novel ends before any of these changes can be realized, when Lívia transforms into a dona de saveiro with an intergenerational crew, she becomes capable of transforming the unfreedom that pervades Sea of Death into the social and environmental change that, for much of the novel, seems both distant and unlikely. Glad to see “one of the best and fastest saveiros on the waterfront” back at work, the other skippers getting underway that morning hang back rather than racing O Paquete Voador 80 Instead, they sail as convoy: showing solidarity with a man whose death, however heroic, could have been prevented by lighthouses, lifeboat stations, and the ability to earn a living wage.

Mar Morto’s concluding show of maritime solidarity registers a regional history in which vernacular boats like the saveiro and the jangada became the vessels of Afro-Brazilian struggles for justice. In the late 19th Century, a group of fishermen led by Francisco José do Nascimento, the “Dragão do Mar” (Sea Dragon), disrupted the internal slave trade, carrying escapees hundreds of nautical miles to Ceará, the first Brazilian state to abolish slavery. These fishermen and their vessels became internationally-recognized symbols of Brazil’s abolition movement and inaugurated a tradition of reides (raids) or maritime protests that continued at least through 1941, when another group of fishermen sailed the thirteen hundred nautical miles from Fortaleza to Rio de Janeiro—a strike aimed at including maritime professions under the social programs and labor reforms of the Estado Novo. Orson Welles’ unfinished 1941 film, Four Men on a Raft, follows their voyage.81 Such maritime resistance continues in the Bay of Bahia to this day. For instance, as they work to maintain their territory

and biocultural knowledge in the face of 21st century extractivism, inhabitants of fishing quilombos (maroon-descended communities) such as Conceição de Salinas practice maréletica, a tidally driven abolitionist political ecology anchored in “diasporic cosmologies and epistemologies in which water occupies a central place.”82 The women of these communities identify themselves with an epithet that seems to come straight from Mar Morto’s pages: “Mulheres da Maré,” Women of the Tides.83

By way of conclusion, I’d like to linger with another epithet, dona de saveiro, the phrase that describes Lívia in Mar Morto’s final chapter. Translated simply, it means the owner of a saveiro, a Bahian work sloop. The feminine word dona functions similarly to the English honorifics Madame, Mistress, or Lady and often carries connotations of domesticity, as in dona da casa, woman of the house. Dona dos saveiros is also one of the many epithets that Amado and his characters use for Iemanjá. These include senhora dos oceános (Lady of the Oceans), sereia (mermaid), and the Yoruba-inflected mãe das aguas (mother of waters). Mar Morto’s concluding image of Lívia on the foredeck of her saveiro, hair streaming, with a flock of seabirds encircling her, also partakes of an Atlantic visual and spiritual vocabulary in which representations of Iemanjá, with their blue dresses and crowns of stars, intersect with the iconography of the Virgin Mary adorning coastal churches like Our Lady of Good Voyage in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where a blue-cloaked statue cradles another workboat of Atlantic diaspora, the fishing schooner. This resonance led me to the loose translation of dona dos saveiros that gives this essay its title: Our Lady of the Workboats.

In adopting this title, I do not intend to overwrite the centuries of violence and unfreedom that led to this spiritual and aesthetic confluence. Indeed, Amado’s Lívia, an explicitly Black Iemanjá, actively resists the whitening impulse of the devotional and popular imagery I have just

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described. While this resistance is literary, its implications are material. As the female counterpart of Mar Morto’s mestres de saveiro or sloop-masters, Lívia foregrounds the expansive and fluid participation of women in waterfront life, while as a seafaring widow and mother, she reconfigures the traditionally male-dominated family workboat as a domestic space. From within Mar Morto’s pages, she renegotiates “the social and cultural contracts of a marine life” as an ally of Afro-Brazilian maritime peoples beyond them—the abolitionist fishermen of the nineteenth century, or the contemporary quilombola “People of the Waters” who maintain their own “contracts with the mud and sea.”84

Although firmly anchored in its home waters in the Bay of Bahia, Mar Morto, like many of Amado’s novels, circulated well beyond it and entered the expansive genre of sea literature—works in which the ocean’s ecological dynamics or cultural histories inflect form or theme.85 This literature depends, like the craft of seamanship itself, on a process in which experiential knowledge of the ocean crosses into the imaginative sphere.86 As this essay has demonstrated, Mar Morto centers maritime experiences that are at once locally and historically specific and diasporic, calling attention to the forms of “livingness on the sea” whereby its characters respond to inequality and loss.87 By demonstrating the connection between sea stories like Mar Morto and ongoing struggles for sovereignty and freedom, maritime literary studies can frame the ocean as both a source of culture and a matter of justice.88 In doing so, it calls all of us to a deeper sense of responsibility to the waters we study and the stories they contain.89

Figure 5. Cover of Revista Illustrada No. 376 (1884), depicting Francisco Nascimento, “O Dragão do Mar” (The Sea Dragon), with the caption, “A testa dos jangadeiros cearences, Nascimento impede o tráfico dos escravos da Província do Ceará vendidos para o Sul” (At the head of the Ceará raftsmen, Nascimento prevents the traffic of slaves from the province of Ceará to be sold in the south).

BY-NC-SA 3.0. Image and translation courtesy of Biblioteca do Senado Federal, Brasília.

Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts. Gift of the Parish of Our Lady of Good Voyage Church, 1984 (2410). Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Our_Lady_of_Good_Voyage,_by_Angelo_ Lualdi,_c._1915,_painted_wood_and_metal_-_ Cape_Ann_Museum_-_Gloucester,_MA_-_ DSC01375.jpg

Disclosures: No potential conflicts of interest to report. This research has been supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University.

Acknowledgments: I am grateful to the many colleagues who have engaged with this work, and whose generous, incisive feedback has shaped it at its various stages. Special thanks are due to the faculty and staff of the Mahindra Humanities Center and the 2021–22 cohort of postdoctoral fellows for their camaraderie and methodological insight, to Josiah Blackmore, who graciously workshopped the chapter-in-progress from which this article is drawn, to Marcelo Bastos, who shared his work on saveiros with me, and to Geri Augusto, who has helped me think more deeply about many of the theoretical and spiritual currents that shape this piece. I am also deeply grateful to Mainsheet’s peer reviewers and editorial team, especially Akeia de Barros Gomes, Michelle Turner, and Elysa Engelman, for their encouragement and assistance with images. And finally, warmest thanks to the panelists of “Reclaiming the Atlantic in Practice” for sharing their scholarship, artistry, and wisdom.

Figure 6. Angelo Lualdi, Our Lady of Good Voyage, 1915. Painted wood and metal.

Endnotes

1 Jorge Amado, Mar Morto (Rio de Janeiro: Companhia de Bolso, 2008), 252. Jorge Amado, Sea of Death, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Avon Books, 1984), 266. With respect to Mar Morto (1936), I quote from the Companhia de Bolso edition (2008) and the English translation by Gregory Rabassa. All other translations from the Portuguese are my own.

2 Amado, Mar Morto, 252; Sea of Death, 267.

3 Amado, Mar Morto, 252; Sea of Death, 266.

4 Amado, Mar Morto, 253; Sea of Death, 267.

5 Amado, Mar Morto, 7; Sea of Death, 1.

6 Amado, Mar Morto, 7; Zora Seljan, Iemanjá e Suas Lendas (Rio de Janeiro: Gráfica Record Editôra, 1967). Seljan offers an introduction to the body of legends surrounding Iemanjá. Originally published in 1967 with a preface by Amado, the compilation includes selections from Mar Morto, as well as works by anthropologists Lydia Cabrera and Cámara de Cascudo. The work is the result of a petition by devotees of the orixá, who originally wanted it to be written by Amado. (Seljan, Iemanjá e Suas Lendas, 110.)

7 Marília de Andrade, “Brazil,” The International Encyclopedia of Dance, edited by Selma Jeanne Cohen and the Dance Perspectives Foundation, accessed July 18, 2023, https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/ acref/9780195173697.001.0001/acref-9780195173697-e-0284.

8 Amado, Mar Morto, 70; SlaveVoyages Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Estimates, accessed July 20, 2023, https://www.slavevoyages.org/ assessment/estimates

9 Karin Amimoto Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). Ingersoll draws from Native Hawai’ian theory and practice to articulate oceanic literacy as “a critical political and ethical literacy” and an “ethical reading of the ocean” (Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, 95). “While it asserts cultural sovereignty,” she writes, “oceanic literacy also invents something new” (Ingersoll, Waves of Knowing, 93). Oceanic literacy as conceived by Ingersoll is distinct from the scienceoriented ocean literacy framework developed by UNESCO, which defines the term simply as “an understanding of the ocean’s influence on you—and your influence on the ocean” (National Marine Educators Association, “Ocean Literacy,” https://www.marine-ed.org/ocean-literacy/overview). As Helen Rozwadowski points out, ocean literacy would benefit from the integration of public humanities. (Helen M. Rozwadowski, “Ocean Literacy and Public Humanities,” Parks Stewardship Forum 36, no. 3 (2020): 365–373, https:// doi.org/10.5070/P536349841.) A better strategy for ocean literacy,” Rozwadowski writes with Kathleen Schwerdtner Manez and Suzanne StollKleemann, “would be to consider people as environmental humanists do, recognizing that the human relationship with the oceans has existed for millennia and understanding that different groups of people at different times have had distinctive relationships with the parts of the seas they encountered” (Kathleen Schwerdtner Manez, Suzanne Stoll-Kleemann, and Helen Rozwadowski, “Ocean Literacies: The Promise of Regional Approaches Integrating Ocean Histories and Psychologies,” Frontiers in Marine Science 10 (July 2023): 3. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2023.1178061). They advocate for a regional approach to ocean literacy that would be “placespecific, represent different knowledge and emotional systems, and reflect the histories of the particular areas in question” (Schwerdtner, Manez et al., “Ocean Literacies”: 5). I use the two terms interchangeably.

10 Denise Carrascosa, Ana Farani, Geri Augusto, Luciana Reis, Paula Campos, and Raquel L. Souza, Traduzindo no Atlantico Negro: Cartas Náuticas Afrodiaspóricas Para Travessias Literárias (Salvador, Bahia: Literatura Negra Ogums, 2017), 21–30.

11 John Gillis, “The Blue Humanities,” Humanities 34, no. 3 (May/June 2013), https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/mayjune/feature/the-blue-

humanities; Joana Gaspar de Freitas, Robert James, and Isaac Land, “Coastal Studies and Society: The Tipping Point,” Coastal Studies and Society 1, no.

1 (March 2022): 3–9, https://doi.org/10.1177/26349817211047765; Steve Mentz, “A Poetics of Planetary Water: The Blue Humanities After John Gillis,” Coastal Studies and Society 2, no. 1 (2023): 137–152, https://doi. org/10.1177/26349817221133199.

12 Kevin Dawson, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Justin Dunnavant, “Have Confidence in the Sea: Maritime Maroons and Fugitive Geographies.” Antipode 53, no. 3 (2021): 884–905, https://doi.org/10.1111/ anti.12695.

13 Elionice Conceição Sacramento, Da Diáspora Negra ao Território de Terra e Águas: Ancestralidade e Protagonismo de Mulheres na Comunidade Pesqueira e Quilombola Conceição de Salinas (Curitiba, Brazil: Editora Appris Ltda, 2022), 87. A master fisherwoman, scholar of environmental studies, and activist on behalf of “traditional, indigenous, and maroon communities” who was born and raised in Conceição de Salinas, Sacramento is also a member of the Movement of Artisanal Fishermen and Fisherwomen (MPP) and the National Articulation of Fisherwomen (ANP). I was introduced to Sacramento’s ideas and practice by her friend and collaborator Geri Augusto in 2022. Quilombola is a word used to describe “descendants of African people who were enslaved and brought to Brazil and who, over time, escaped slavery. Their name is derived from the word quilombo, describing the formation of family groups that resisted the slave system in Brazil, and their ethnic and cultural identity distinguish them from other Black communities in the country.” For more, see Thaís Verly-Luciano, Beniamino Cislaghi, Raquel Barbosa Miranda, Jerusa Araújo Dias, Ximena Pamela Diaz-Bermudez, and Angelica Espinosa Miranda, “Violence in Quilombola women living in rural communities in Brazil,” Revista da Saúde Pública 56 no. 114 (2022): 2.

14 Daniel Brayton, “The Riddle of the Sands: Erskine Childers Between the Tides,” in Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge, ed. Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom, and Jos Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 118.

15 Margaret Cohen, “A Feminist Plunge into Sea Knowledge,” PMLA 134, no. 2 (2019): 375, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2019.134.2.372.

16 Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 228; Dunnavant, “Confidence in the Sea,” 899.

17 Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 180. I adapt the term coastwise canon from Brayton, “Riddle of the Sands,” 114.

18 Deirdre Ní Chonghaile, “Greim an fhir bháite,” Archipelago 12 (Summer 2019): 26.

19 Amado, Sea of Death, 39.

20 Amado, Mar Morto, 44; Sea of Death, 39.

21 Piers Armstrong, “Popular Sovereignty, Bakhtin and the Sea in Jorge Amado’s Religion,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 26 (January 2007):147; Courtney Campbell, “Four Fishermen, Orson Welles, and the Making of the Brazilian Northeast,” Past and Present 234, no. 1 (2017): 200, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtw052.

22 Amado, Mar Morto, 44; Sea of Death, 39.

23 Brayton, “Riddle of the Sands,” 112.

24 Ana Maria Machado, “Posfacio: A Invenção da Bahia,” in Amado, Mar Morto, 263 (translation mine).

25 Machado, “Posfacio,” 263 (translation mine).

26 Machado, “Posfacio,” 263 (translation mine); Armstrong, “Popular Sovereignty,” 138.

27 Machado, “Posfacio,” 263; Campbell, "Four Fishermen," 179.

28 Campbell, “Four Fishermen,” 179.

PEER-REVIEWED SCHOLARSHIP

29 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936): 111-115; Dawson, Undercurrents of Power, 9; Howard French, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021), 2.

30 Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 1986.

31 Daniel G. Brayton, “Rethinking Literature and Culture from a Maritime Lens: The Coriolis Effect, Oceanic Gyres, and the Black Atlantic,” Coriolis 1, no. 2 (2010): 1–3; Daniel G. Brayton, “Networks,” in A Cultural History of the Sea in the Early Modern Age, ed. Steve Mentz (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 83–103; Elliot Rappaport, Reading the Glass: A Captain’s View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships (New York: Dutton, 2023), 170.

32 French, Born in Blackness, 165–183.

33 French, Born in Blackness, 167.

34 French, Born in Blackness, 307–308; Lilia Moritz Schwarcz and Heloisa Maria Murgel Starling, Brazil: A Biography (London: Allen Lane, 2018), 57; Mapeamento dos Terreiros de Salvador, accessed July 18, 2023, www. terreiros.ufba.br.

35 John Sarsfield, “From the Brink of Extinction: Mediterranean Molding,” WoodenBoat 66 (September/October 1985): 84.

36 Gabriel Soares de Sousa, Derrotero General de la Costa del Brasil y Memoria de la Grandezas de Bahia (1587), quoted in Sarsfield, “From the Brink,” 84.

37 French, Born in Blackness, 307; Sarsfield, “From the Brink,” 87.

38 Felipe Castro, Denise Gomes Dias, Rodrigo Torres, Samila Ferreira, and Marcelo Bastos, “Saveiros da Bahia,” Nautical Archaeology Digital Library, Texas A&M University, accessed August 1, 2023. https://shiplib.org/index. php/ship-models/watercraft/saveiros-da-bahia/ Accessed August 1, 2023.

39 Sarsfield, “From the Brink,” 89.

40 Ben Fuller, “The Maine Peapods: Small Workboats with Enduring and Universal Appeal,” WoodenBoat 284 (January–February 2022): 24.

41 Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto da Poesia pau-Brasil was originally published in the newspaper Correio da Manhã on March 18, 1924. For an English translation, see Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry,” trans. Stella M. de Sá Rego, Latin American Literary Review 14, no. 27 (January–June 1986): 184–187.

42 John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward an Elemental Theory of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 101.

43 Sarsfield, “From the Brink,” 84; Marcelo F. Bastos, “Oficio de Mestre Carpinteiro Naval: Registro Especial de Ofício,” Fundação Gregório de Matos, Prefeitura de Salvador, 2023, 14.

44 Marcelo F. Bastos, “A preservação da memória e resgate das técnicas de projeto e construção dos saveiros através de ferramentas paramétricas,”

27 Congresso Internacional de Transporte Aquaviário, Construção Naval e Offshore, Rio de Janeiro, October 23–35, 2018; Marcelo F. Bastos, personal communication, July 17, 2023.

45 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2008).

46 Mauro Cirano and Guilherme Camargo Lessa, “Oceanographic Characteristics of Baía de Todos os Santos, Brazil,” Revista Brasileira de Geofísica 25, no. 4 (December 2007): 363–387, https://doi.org/10.1590/ S0102-261X2007000400002.

47 Tristan Gooley, How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea (New York: The Experiment, 2016), 238.

48 Amado, Mar Morto, 74; Sea of Death, 70.

49 John Stilgoe, Alongshore (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Stilgoe differentiates between offshore and inshore mariners based on the idea of sea room as “maneuvering space, as refuge from the inshore hazards and from the steep waves passing over any ground reached by the dipsey

lead. In the offing mariners feel safe, even in great storms. Inshore they feel otherwise. Inshore lies shipwreck, the end of the ship, the beginning of the small-boat work long-distance mariners traditionally loathe.” Stilgoe, Alongshore, 70.

50 Amado, Mar Morto, 72; Sea of Death, 68.

51 Aisha Beliso de Jesús, “Santería Copresence and the Making of African Diaspora Bodies,” Cultural Anthropology 29, no. 3 (2014), 503–526, https://doi.org/10.14506/ca29.3.04. Beliso de Jesús argues that through ritual initiation in “African-inspired religions” including Candomblé, a person, regardless of gender, sexuality, racial identity, or national affiliation, can become an “African diaspora body,” acquiring, through the copresence of the orishas [orixás], embodied knowledges that are also forms of racial consciousness, because “copresences… embody the physical endurance of black enslaved Africans in the Americas under colonialism and imperialism, as well as contemporary forms of racial feeling and marginalization.” Beliso de Jesús, “Santería,” 504. John Durham Peters understands technique as “the right translation of Techniken if we are thinking about practices of know-how, handicraft, and corporeal knowledge that interact with bodies or instruments.” (Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 90). Guma’s seamanship partakes of both formulations.

52 Cohen, Novel and the Sea

53 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. Malcolm B. Debevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 286; Schwarcz and Starling, Brazil, 393.

54 Casanova, World Republic, 313; Machado, “Posfacio,” 268.

55 Gilberto Freyre, Manifesto Regionalista, 7th ed. (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, Editora Massangana, 1996), 47–75.

56 Casanova, World Republic, 313; Thomas Waller, “The Blue Cultural Fix: Water Spirits and World-Ecology in Jorge Amado’s Mar Morto and Pepetela’s O Desejo de Kianda," Humanities 9 no. 3 (2020), 72, https://doi. org/10.3390/h9030072.

57 Amado, Mar Morto, 242; Sea of Death, 252–3.

58 Amado, Mar Morto, 25.

59 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 21.

60 Sharpe, In the Wake, 2; French, Born in Blackness, 11.

61 Akeia De Barros Gomes spoke to this “presence and contemporaneity” at a panel discussion called “Reclaiming the Ocean in Practice,” which took place on December 2, 2022, at Philips Brooks House, Harvard University. I am indebted to her presentation on the subject.

62 Chris Baldick, The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), s.v. “polysemy.”

63 Amado, Mar Morto, 246; Sea of Death, 260.

64 Baldick, Literary Terms, s.v. “synecdoche.”

65 Amado, Mar Morto, 254; Sea of Death, 268.

66 Amado, Sea of Death, 258.

67 Amado, Mar Morto, 245.

68 Sharpe, In the Wake, 40.

69 Sharpe, In the Wake, 19.

70 Alison Glassie, “Ruth Ozeki’s Floating World: A Tale for the Time Being’s Spiritual Oceanography,” Novel 53, no. 3 (November 2020): 452–471, https:// doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8624642

71 Amado, Mar Morto, 44; Sea of Death, 39; Machado, “Posfacio,” 262, translation mine.

72 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Katherine McKittrick, “On plantations, prisons, and a black sense of place,” Social and Cultural Geography 12, no. 8 (December 2011): 947–963, https://doi-org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/10.1080/14649365.2011.6

24280. McKittrick develops the idea of “livingness” across several of her works; it may be broadly defined as “the production of [Black] narratives and lifeways that enhance our collective human-environmental well-being.”

Queens University, “Katherine McKittrick," accessed June 8, 2023, https:// www.queensu.ca/research/researchers/katherine-mckittrick-0. Recently, Justin Dunnavant has taken the idea to sea, working to “resituate[s] Black livingness in the Atlantic.” Dunnavant, “Have Confidence in the Sea,” 901.

73 Machado, “Posfacio,” 265, translation mine.

74 Geri Augusto, “Narrative Sovereignty: Kalungas, Carrancas, and Freedom on the Waves,” 32nd Annual Conference on American Literature, American Literature Association, Boston, July 8, 2021. See also Kevin Dawson, “Waterscapes and Wet Bodies: Beach Culture in Atlantic Africa and the Diaspora 1444–1888," Coastal Studies and Society 2, no. 1 (March 2023): 58–81, https://doi.org/10.1177/26349817231165157.

75 Amado, Mar Morto, 255; Sea of Death, 269.

76 Gísli Pálsson, “Enskilment at Sea,” Man 29, no. 4 (1994): 902, https:// doi.org/10.2307/3033974, 902, quoted in Elspeth Probyn, Eating the Ocean. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 42.

77 Pálsson, “Enskilment at Sea,” 902.

78 Kate Olson, “Here All Along,” Earth Island Journal (Autumn 2021), https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/here-allalong/

79 Amado, Mar Morto, 142; Sea of Death, 142–43.

80 Amado, Sea of Death, 266.

81 Campbell, “Four Fishermen,” 173, 180. Amado would probably have sympathized with these struggles. In the 1940s, as a congressman for the Brazilian Communist Party, he advocated freedom of worship for practitioners of African religions, and for a broader legitimation of Black culture. When he died in 2001, he was mourned by the literary elite, the state, and by the Afro-Brazilian communities to whom he was an ally. For more, see Márcia Rios da Silva, “Jorge Amado: The International Projection of the Brazilian Writer,” in Brazilian Literature as World Literature, ed. Eduardo Coutinho (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 199–220.

82 Geri Augusto, “Reclaiming the Atlantic in Practice: Three Moments,” Panel Presentation, Philips Brooks House, Harvard University, December 2, 2022. Augusto uses the term maréletica to refer to the set of quilombola ecological theories and practices developed by her friend and collaborator Elionice Sacramento in which the tides (mares) offer “metaphor, touchstone… analytical framework [and] narrative sovereignty.”

83 Geri Augusto, “For Marielle: Mulhere(s) Da Maré—Danger, Seeds and Tides,” Transition 129 (2020): 246–264, https://doi.org/10.2979/ transition.129.1.20.

84 Ní Chonghaile, “Greim an fhir bháite,” 26; Augusto, “Reclaiming the Atlantic.” Here, I join Deirdre Ní Chonghaile’s thinking on “the social and cultural contracts of a marine life,” informed by her background as an Aran Islander, with the theory and practice of maréletica advanced by Elionice Sacramento in Conceição das Salinas and introduced to me by Geri Augusto. I draw the quotation “our contract is with the sea and the mud” from Augusto’s 2022 presentation “Reclaiming the Atlantic in Practice: Three Moments.”

85 Bert Bender, Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Machado, “Posfacio”; Hélio Pólvora, “Jorge Amado e o romance do mar,” in Colóquio Jorge Amado: 70 anos de Mar Morto (Salvador: Fundação Casa Jorge Amado, 2008). This definition of sea literature draws on Bert Bender’s idea that sea literature derives “a sense of primal order from the sea” (201). Independently of each other, Ana Maria Machado and Hélio Pólvora locate Mar Morto in a global tradition of sea literature dominated by writers such as Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Victor Hugo, whose novel Les Travailleurs de la mer (1866) was translated into Portuguese by the

novelist Machado de Assis. On the global circulation of Amado’s novels, see Rios da Silva, “Jorge Amado.”

86 Literary scholar Hester Blum calls this epistemological synthesis “the sea eye” and theorizes the relationship between experience at sea and the writing of sea narratives fictional and nonfictional. “As the assimilation of fragmentary knowledge drawn from the totality of a sailor’s maritime experience,” she writes, “the sea eye functions analogously as the epistemological apparatus that grows out of the material practices it organizes…the sea eye is an industry that helps process the broader forces that produce maritime literature.” Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 116. Meanwhile, marine science historian Helen Rozwadowski writes that the ocean is “known through imagination as well as through direct experience.” Helen Rozwadowski,

“Oceans: Fusing the History of Science and Technology with Environmental History,” in A Companion to American Environmental History, ed. Douglas Cazaux Sackman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 456, quoted in Antony Adler, Neptune’s Laboratory: Fantasy, Fear, and Science at Sea. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 6.

87 Dunnavant, “Confidence in the Sea,” 901.

88 Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, “What I Know About the Ocean: We Need Ocean Justice,” In Black Futures, ed. Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham (New York: Penguin, 2021), 200-212. See especially 200.

89 For a call to responsibility that explicitly implicates white scholars, see Valérie Loichot, Water Graves: The Art of the Unritual in the Greater Caribbean (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020), 281.

Photograph of saveiros, © Nilton Souza

The Içar Project: Preserving the Ancient Art of Shipbuilders in Brazil

Marcelo Filgueiras Bastos, founder of the Içar Project

“Everything comes from the mind . . . we don’t have plans, we don’t have anything . . . He asked for a boat, we execute it, and everything falls into place.” – from an oral history interview with Mestre Miranda, one of the last saveiro masters alive

The saveiro is a wooden sailing vessel historically used for both fishing and cargo transport in the Baía de Todos os Santos (Bay of All Saints), a body of water of more than a thousand square kilometers (300 square miles) in the Brazilian state of Bahia. The Saveiros de Vela de Içar are the most representative example of them today and are defined by the sail (Vela de Içar), a four-sided sail that is hoisted by a spar. There are fewer than twenty remaining saveiros still in use today (Figure 1).

These boats have a shallow draft, capable of frequently grounding for loading and unloading materials (Figure 2). The saveiro has a strong structure to resist all kinds of cargo. In the past, this type of boat was frequently utilized for transporting both livestock and agricultural and manufactured products daily, and it was also employed to transport people, especially during celebratory events. Nowadays, the most common use is transporting materials for civil construction around the Baía de Todos os Santos. The bay was an important reason for Salvador to become the first capital of Brazil and keep the title for more than two centuries. These workboats were essential for cargo transportation in the area, which influenced the spread of the rich culture of shipbuilding in the state.

The shipwrights of Bahia, known as mestres carpinteiros navais (master ship carpenters), possess a distinctive and remarkable ability to construct sailboats that surpass speeds of 10 knots and carry over 15 tons of cargo, all without adhering to a formal design process (Figure 3). Though they are often semiliterate, the expertise of these masters is based on mental algorithms, assisted by molds and other tools. Since these technologies supplant the need for paper plans, they pose a challenge for the governmental

The Içar Project: Preserving the Ancient Art of Shipbuilders in Brazil © 2023 by Marcelo Filgueiras Bastos is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Figure 1. Last Saveiros de Vela de Içar. Photo: Marcelo Bastos, 2022

Figure 2. Saveiro loaded with handmade ceramic pieces. Photo: Viva Saveiro Association, 2008

authorities responsible for overseeing these construction practices. The unique skills and knowledge involved in saveiro construction in Bahia have been described by researchers such as John Patrick Sarsfield, Lev Smarcevski, author of Graminho: a alma do saveiro (Graminho: Soul of the Saveiro), Filipe Castro, who studied the masters’ techniques in Valença in 2013, and Marcelo Bastos, creator of the Içar Project.

The Içar Project is named after the Saveiro de Vela de Içar, the most distinguished example of traditional boats built in Bahia. The word Içar translates to “hoist,” aptly symbolizing the project’s mission: to aid in raising the sail, recognizing that the boat has long been ready for its journey. This project seeks to document the craft of Bahia’s shipbuilders and provide them with support to preserve this tradition. Central to this mission are efforts to record the remaining boats and the techniques employed by these shipbuilders. These multifaceted endeavors resulted in the presentation of an article at the 27th International Congress on Waterway Transport, Shipbuilding, and Offshore in 2018 and winning the Jaime Sodré Cultural Heritage Award in 2021. Additionally, the Içar Project produced a dossier, financed by the Gregorio de Matos Foundation, which culminated in the official recognition of the mestres carpin-

Figure 3. Construction process of a saveiro. Photo: Viva Saveiro Association, 2008

teiros navais as a heritage of the Municipality of Salvador in 2023. Due to this recognition, the city is now obligated to develop a safeguarding plan for these masters, further empowering them and ensuring the art’s continued existence.

In recent times, the Içar Project has employed advanced techniques like parametric design and photogrammetry to document and preserve the remaining saveiros and the invaluable knowledge of their shipwrights. The process involves capturing a series of photographs of the boats from all angles, creating a textured three-dimensional model (Figure 4), and extracting the geometric and procedural parameters to develop parametric designs that help to unveil the engineering behind the process. Because the builders did not work from paper drawings, this is the only way to record a saveiro’s design. Currently, the Içar Project is supporting an ongoing project that aims to utilize these sailboats as an official means of transporting food in Baía de Todos os Santos, offering a more cost-effective, environmentally friendly, and culturally significant method of transportation.

Figure 4. Process of generating the 3D models and representations. The process involves taking many 2D photographs from all angles, creating a “point cloud.” Using special software, the photographs are then stitched together into a detailed 3D model. From that model, the dimensions, hull shape, and lines of the boat can be extracted. Image: Marcelo Bastos

Dragon Ships to the Dawnland: Eugène Beauvois and the Vinland Viking Expeditions in the Nineteenth-Century Settler Imagination

Corresponding Author: Alice C. M. Kwok, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of History, alice.main270@gmail.com

Abstract

Between the mid-1700s and the Great War, people in Europe and North America were gripped by a frenzy of enthusiasm for all things Viking. Eminent scholars and ordinary readers discovered an insatiable curiosity for medieval Scandinavia, imagined land of dragon-prowed ships and saga heroes. Among these enthusiasts was the prolific French historian Pierre-Eugène Beauvois (1835–1912). Beauvois was fascinated by the Norse voyages to continental North America, known in Old Norse as “Vinland.” By arguing for extensive pre-Columbian European settlement in the Americas, Beauvois stole the glory enjoyed by Spain and Italy as the first “discoverers” of the “New World,” shifting it to Norse populations that Beauvois linked to France. Such a vindication of early voyages by ethnic “cousins” of the French presented France as genetically destined to colonize foreign lands, thus legitimating their conquest of Africa. Yet Beauvois's arguments extended beyond simply positing a meaningful Norse presence in medieval North America. He maintained that Indigenous culture was really just a watered-down residue of transplanted European culture. By asserting that central components of Indigenous cultures such as language and religion derived from medieval European models, Beauvois usurped Native positionalities and affirmed the rightness of the settler colonial project.

Keywords

Norse, Vinland, France, America, colonialism, Norumbega

Submitted March 1, 2023 | Accepted November 14, 2023

Dragon Ships to the Dawnland: Eugène Beauvois and the Vinland Viking Expeditions in the Nineteenth-Century Settler Imagination © 2023 by Alice C. M. Kwok is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Introduction

The nineteenth-century United States was rife with fanciful—and often outright fraudulent—evidence of settlement by Vikings.1 In Massachusetts, the mysterious petroglyphs on Dighton Rock were celebrated as an eleventh-century mural depicting a landing by Norse sailor Thorfinn Karlsefni.2 Elsewhere in the state, the skeleton of an Indigenous man was mistaken for the corpse of a medieval Scandinavian warrior.3 Harvard agricultural chemist Eben Norton Horsford erected a monument on the site of some colonial-era ruins near the Charles River to commemorate what he assumed was a medieval Norse town.4 Residents of Newport, Rhode Island believed a ruined seventeenth-century mill was their very own “Viking Tower.”5 Even as far west as Minnesota, Swedish immigrant Olof Öhman excavated (or planted) the Kensington Runestone on his property in 1898.6 Collectively, these forgeries testify to the fierce desire to establish a white history for the continent.

Support for the theory of a widespread Viking presence in North America came from an unexpected but vocal quarter: French amateur historian Pierre-Eugène Beauvois (1835-1912). At first glance, he would seem to have no skin in that historical game. Yet, the question of pre-Columbian European exploration in “Vinland,” an overseas Norse settlement described in medieval sources, dominated his publications. He was determined to prove that the Viking heroes he had adopted as his national ancestors were also the true discoverers of America. Moreover, he sought to convince the academic community that Indigenous American culture was merely the thin byproduct of European interference.

dp.39015017541379&seq=355

Contemporary scholars are divided on how to make sense of white people appropriating Native identities. In his field-defining work Playing Indian, Philip J. Deloria argues that white Americans have long adopted Indigenous personas in order to articulate a distinct national character in opposition to Europe.7 Annette Kolodny, Douglas Hunter, Edward Watts, Christopher Crocker, and Andrew McGillvray have delved further into this point, revealing that white nineteenth-century settlers in

Figure 1. Camille Enlart, photograph of the old Newport Tower, in Camille Enlart, “Le problème de la vieille tour de Newport (Rhode-Island),” Revue de l’art chrétien 60 (1910), 311, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=m-

Canada and the United States centered Vinland in their nations’ histories in order to sideline the long Indigenous past in those regions.8 They championed the memory of Leif Eiriksson, supposedly the first Norseman to reach the North American continent in 1000 CE, in order to assuage their own anxieties about the very recent vintage of their stake to American land and to manufacture the timeless racial claim to a given space demanded by Romantic nationalism. Yet Beauvois's arguments extended beyond simply positing a meaningful Norse presence in medieval North America. He maintained that Indigenous culture was really just a watered-down residue of transplanted European culture. By asserting that central components of Indigenous cultures such as language and religion derived from medieval European models, Beauvois usurped Native positionalities and affirmed the rightness of the colonial project.

Beauvois's is inescapably an Atlantic story. Telling it requires locating France relative to other hotbeds of Old Norse studies, but also relative to the very Atlantic itself. The ocean was a key attribute of the Viking identity in the nineteenth century. It signified above all the Viking’s independence and his imperial dominance.9 But it also incarnated (and enacted) his cosmopolitan interconnectedness. Though various countries explicitly tried to yoke the Viking to their nation-building projects, as a historical and symbolic figure he very flamboyantly crossed boundaries via the medium of the sea, sailing promiscuously from port to port. A national identity constructed through the Viking was defined by water, not land. That water functioned not as a hard border or limitation, but as a matrix of linkages that birthed the nation through its network to other shores. This matrix, and its implications for the literal fluidity of identity-making, is articulated by Kamau Brathwaite’s notion of

Figure 2. Drawing of Dighton Rock, in Edmond Neukomm, Les dompteurs de la mer. Les normands en Amérique depuis le Xe jusqu’au XVe siècle (Paris: Bibliothèque des succès scolaires, 1895), 136, https:// archive.org/details/lesdompteursdela00neuk

Figure 3. François Emile Graffe, portrait of Eugène Beauvois for the Société de géographie de Paris, 1882, photograph, courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

“tidalectics,” a creative dynamic of push and pull, give and take in never-ending motion that does not statically resolve.10 The Atlantic joined the countries of Europe and their settler-colonial projects in the Americas and Africa. In prioritizing the ocean, Viking historians saw culture and sovereignty emerge relationally. Relationally is not to say peacefully. As in the medieval north, dynamics between nineteenth-century places and peoples were often violent and coercive—but they were always interconnected. This lens fundamentally colored Old Norse scholars’ understanding of geographies of race, empire, and region. This spatially imbricated vision required thinking the nation alongside and in comparison to other places.11

Eugène Beauvois and the Norse Migrations

Pierre-Eugène Beauvois was born in 1835 in the small village of Corberon in Burgundy to a wellto-do family of local notables.12 He earned his law degree in Paris in 1856, and his family hoped he would pursue a career as a notary. However, he was enthralled by the history of the ancient world, and instead he embarked on a career as a historian, linguist, and anthropologist. Over the succeeding six decades he would publish over 100 books, articles, and translations on the history of Europe and the Americas, while finding time to serve as mayor of Corberon between 1861 and 1875. During the 1860s, his scholarship focused on the culture and mythology of the medieval Norse, particularly on trying to prove that they shared a common ethnogenesis with the French dating back to late antiquity. After 1870, he concentrated on attempting to demonstrate extensive pre-Columbian Norse settlement in North America. Beauvois died in Corberon on June 15, 1912, at the age of 87.

Beauvois did not merely defend settler colonialism with his pen. In 1871, as the Franco-Prussian War was ravaging his country, Beauvois found himself across the Mediterranean in Algeria. As a captain-major in the Third Battalion of mobilisés

from the arrondissement of Beaune, Beauvois took up arms to suppress the Mokrani Rebellion. Initially led by the bachaga El-Hadj Mohammed ben el-Hadj Ahmed el-Mokrani, the biggest anti-colonial revolt in Algerian history prior to 1954 began as an aristocratic reaction against French encroachment on the land holdings of the Algerian elite.13 It rapidly transformed into a popular uprising of over 200,000 insurgents before being brutally crushed by the French, who seized the excuse to further dispossess the Algerians of their territory. During the late spring of 1871, Beauvois himself fought in several battles. The following year, he recounted his service in the epistolary memoir En colonne dans la Grande Kabylie 14 This book reveals the formative impact of his time in Algeria on Beauvois's politics, as well as his intellectual and material support for the French settler-colonial project in Africa. He advocated unremittingly for the French colonization of Algeria and Madagascar.15

To understand Beauvois's efforts to prove a Viking presence in the Americas, we must first look at his attempts to assimilate the French to the Scandinavians. Using dubious historical methods, he traced their roots to a single migratory Celtic tribe that (he claimed) settled both regions in the Classical period. In his 1868 tract Origine de Burgondes, Beauvois argued that the Franks, Burgundians, and Bretons arose from the same migratory “Hénéto-Cimmérien” Celtic tribe that also settled modern-day Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.16 Beauvois's Hénéto-Cimmériens were an amalgamation of the Cimmerians of Crimea and the Eneti mentioned in the Iliad. He claimed that this tribe’s “intellectual superiority meant they were regarded as gods rather than mortals” and Odinic paganism arose from worship of an actual Celtic chief called Odin and his followers the Aesir.17 Beauvois affirmed that the Hénéto-Cimmériens gave rise to the “principal peoples who supplanted the masters of the ancient world and founded the modern nations” of France and

Scandinavia.18 By assigning the French and Norse a shared imaginary ethnogenesis in late antiquity, Beauvois distanced his countrymen from the supposedly dissolute, lazy Latins of southern Europe and grouped them in with the supposedly virile, active northern Europeans.19 This rewriting of the racial map of Europe assuaged national fears that the French were made of lesser racial stock than their German rivals and propped up French claims to whiteness.

For Beauvois, the story of French imperialism actually began with the Scandinavian colonization of North America, and the story of the Scandinavian colonization of North America actually began with Ireland. Beauvois believed that medieval Gaelic legends of a lush green paradise in the west, a “Great Ireland” across the sea, preserved a real historical memory of Celtic voyages to the Americas in antiquity.20 These corrupted recollections propelled Icelandic explorers to later seek out the vaguely remembered western territory, resulting in the discovery of Greenland and Vinland.21 In Beauvois's words, the tradition of Great Ireland, also known as “Hvitramannaland” or “White Man’s Land,” “explains the mysterious attraction that the West, with its imaginary marvels,” exerted on the medieval imagination.22

But why did Irish myths eventually prompt Norse seafarers to sail west? Beauvois located the answer in the Gall-Gaidel, a “mixed, semi-Christian population born of the union of the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland with the Norwegians and Danish. [The Gall-Gaidel] played a great role in the North Atlantic islands of the ninth century.”23 Beauvois believed that this mingling of peoples, inaugurated when the Vikings conquered the British Isles, produced a uniquely favored breed of men: “The Gall-Gaidel, born of the union of the Scandinavians and the Celts, united the aptitudes of both races; from the one, they received the spirit of initiative and the talents of organization; from the other, literary taste and a more advanced civi-

Figure 4. Carte des d é couvertes irlandaises et islandaises selon M. E. Beauvois , in Eugène Beauvois, “La découverte du Nouveau Monde par les Irlandais et les premiers traces du christianisme en Amérique avant l’an 1000,” Congrès international des am é ricanistes. Compte-rendu de la première session , vol. 1 (Nancy: G. Crépin-LeBlond, 1875), 84, https://www.google.com/ books/edition/La_d%C3%A9couverte_du_nouveau_ monde_par_les/1YuO63wJKLoC?hl

lization.”24 Beauvois emphasized the predominant role of the Gall-Gaidel in colonizing Iceland. He believed this explained the emergence of the saga genre in Iceland, which he hailed as one of the great narrative forms of human art. He also argued that the families issued from the Gall-Gaidel provided a disproportionate number of Atlantic explorers, including the illustrious Thorfinn Karlsefni, whose son Snorri was the first European born in Vinland.25

On the Trail of Norumbega Beauvois did not simply believe the Norse visited the Americas. He was convinced they had set-

tled there and raised a massive city: Norumbega. The legend of Norumbega began in 1529, when Girolamo de Verrazzano included an inlet labeled “oranbega” on his map of the North American coastline.26 Over the next two decades, French navigators brought back stories of “Norombègue,” a rich and well-peopled region near Penobscot Bay. In 1548, Giacomo Gastaldi marked a large “Tierra de Nurumberg” on his map of the Tierra Nueva. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English sailors desperately searched for this mythical land of plenty, but never found it. Norumbega then largely disappeared from the white imagination until the late nineteenth century, when Eben Norton Horsford, a correspondent of Beauvois and chemistry professor at Harvard, devoted the later part of his life to proving two unlikely propositions: first, that Norumbega had been located outside of Boston, and second, that it had been a pre-Columbian Viking settlement.27 Horsford was convinced that Norumbega was a thriving center of Norse civilization, endowed with a complex military, political, economic, and physical infrastructure. He dedicated his time and fortune to drawing public attention to Massachusetts’ supposed Viking past.

While Beauvois placed Norumbega further north than did Horsford, in the region of Acadia, he too depicted it as one of the grandest and most sophisticated urban centers of the medieval globe. According to Beauvois, Norumbega’s architecture was majestic, its people multilingual, its faith pious. He described it as “a great city, furnished with towers and ornamented with campaniles, where the inhabitants were tall and beautiful, good and tractable, dressed in rich furs and equipped with cotton thread, where finally the language was related to Latin.”28 Beauvois affirmed that “in the sixteenth and even seventeenth centuries, in [the region that had been] Norumbega, there were not only antique crosses and remembrances of Christianity, attesting to the passage of Catholic mission-

aries . . . but also the remains of a former language which was Old Norse.”29 Beauvois mined early French sailors’ memoirs for references that could possibly be construed as evidence of Norumbega or a prior Norse presence in the area. Like the medieval and early modern people he analyzed, Beauvois was obsessed with the fantasy of a flourishing white civilization embedded deep within a wilderness of non-white pagans.

Like Horsford, Beauvois believed that the name Norumbega was given to the region by the “former masters of the country . . . who were Scandinavians.”30 He argued that the first part of the word came from the Old Norse Nordhan, norraen, or norroen, meaning “northern.”31 The second part he variously identified with bygdh, meaning “country”; buga, meaning “cove”; vik, meaning “port”; or vága, meaning “bay.”32 To justify the latter two possibilities, Beauvois claimed that the Indigenous peoples of the area could not pronounce “v” and changed the sound to “b.” Thus, he asserted that the Norse originally named their settlement either “Nordhanvik (Country to the North of the Bays) or Nordhanbygd (country to the North), as opposed to the Territory to the South, in Old Norse Sudhriké.”33 Over time, these terms were bastardized as Norumbega and Souriquois, the latter an early modern French designation for the Mi’kmaq which fell out of use over the centuries.34

Beauvois found further traces of Old Norse in the Indigenous languages of the region. He cited the account of Marc Lescarbot, an early seventeenth-century French explorer of Acadia skeptical of the existence of Norumbega. In his ethnological study of the Mi’kmaq, Lescarbot recorded “three archaic words of a refrain . . . 'Epigico ïaton edico.’”35 Beauvois asserted that “these three mysterious words that so intrigued the curious and wise observer [Lescarbot], are simply Old Norse, more or less disfigured either by Souriquois pronunciation or by Lescarbot’s transcription. They correspond to the Icelandic words oefiligu gátum etingu

(we have had a great celebration).”36 Beauvois compared this phrase against samples of medieval Icelandic verse to argue that it actually represented a fragment of the poetic meter known as Runhenda.37 He maintained that this proof was especially valuable given Lescarbot did not believe in Norumbega’s existence, so he could not have invented the phrase to prove a point.38 Beauvois additionally referred to Pierre Biard’s Relation de la Nouvelle-France (1616), derived from Jesuit expeditions, for evidence that the early modern Mi’kmaq called confederated tribes ricmanen and their term for courage was meskir cameramon. Beauvois postulated that ricmanen derived from the Old Norse word rikmenni, meaning “chieftains,” and meskir cameramon derived from the Old Norse mestr hammrammadhr, meaning “endowed with the heart of a berserk.”39 He further drew on Champlain’s report of a Mi’kmaq legend explaining the thunderous noise produced by water and wind flowing in and out of sea caves.40 The Gougou was a monstrous woman who inhabited the caves and made the terrible sounds that frightened locals. She abducted humans in a great sack and carried them back to her lair to eat them. Beauvois connected the Gougou to the Gýgjar: man-eating, cavern-dwelling female giants of Norse myth. In light of these linkages, he insisted that “it is impossible to attribute an accidental origin to the Norse words employed by the Acadians themselves. . . . These names attest that [Acadia] had been occupied in a permanent and prolonged fashion by the Scandinavians” who built Norumbega.41

Beauvois frequently sought to demonstrate pre-Columbian contact between Europe and America by drawing homologies between Christianity and Indigenous religions. Specifically, he referenced the memoirs of early French settlers in Canada to show that native populations venerated the symbol of the Cross before modern missionaries ever brought the Gospel.42 Beauvois drew on the writings of Jean-Baptiste de Lacroix Chevrières de

Saint-Vallier, Bishop of Quebec in the late seventeenth century, and Father Chrétien Le Clercq of the Récollets branch of the Franciscans, who went on mission in 1675 to the Ile Percée off the coast of Gaspesia. Beauvois insisted that these missionaries were deeply suspicious of a cult of the Cross in the Americas: they were not predisposed to believe it, did not want to believe it, and initially vehemently rejected it. However, according to Beauvois, those like Saint-Vallier and Le Clercq who encountered native cross-worship directly were so overwhelmed by the evidence, they had no choice but to recognize it for what it was: a vestige of pre-Columbian Christianity.43 They called these tribes the “PorteCroix” or “Cruciantaux.”44

Beauvois also offered a creative reinterpretation of the exploration narrative of Jacques Cartier. During his survey of the Canadian coastline, Cartier erected a giant cross, and in response the Indigenous residents of the area made crosses with their fingers and gestured to the surrounding land.45 Cartier took this to mean that they wanted him to remove the cross because the land was theirs, but Beauvois believed they meant to indicate that there were similar crosses in the nearby country. In support of this analysis, Beauvois evoked accounts from the Champlain voyage that many crosses were found upon initial French arrival in Canada. Beauvois asserted that the Canadian First Nations adopted Christianity so eagerly from French missionaries in the early modern period because it accorded with extant traditions passed down from their ancestors, who had previously received the Gospel from the Norse.46 In Beauvois's opinion, the First Nations were already prepared for Catholic teachings by the vestigial cult of the Cross they had preserved from extended contact with Norse settlers. However, Beauvois also left open the possibility that the Norse had brought Odin-worship to the Americas as well. Drawing on the archeological studies of Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae, who argued that excavated Bronze and Iron Age

des américanistes 1, no. 2 (1904), 191, https://www.persee. fr/doc/jsa_0037-9174_1904_num_1_2_3437

caches of Norse relics represented ritual sacrifices to the gods, Beauvois noted that these “innumerable deposits of arms and instruments or objects in amber [are] attested not only in the Scandinavian countries, but also in America.”47

Beauvois went even further in arguing that Indigenous culture was not a true copy of Europe’s, but a degenerate version evacuated of its real value. He cited the writings of Le Clercq to suggest that the Mi’kmaq of the early modern period had fallen over the centuries from the more devout morality and spiritual practice of their converted medieval forebears thanks to “the negligence and libertinage of their ancestors.”48 This argument helped justify European conquest and genocide. According to Beauvois, the Indigenous tribes lacked their own authentic culture and thus were not a true nation vested with sovereignty.

In further support of his argument for a sustained Norse presence in the Americas, Beauvois

translated into French the section of the medieval Icelandic text Eyrbyggia Saga relating the life of Bjorn Breidvikingakappi.49 In the course of the saga, Bjorn is coerced into leaving Iceland, and his ship disappears—Beauvois dates this event to 998-999. According to the saga, thirty years later another vessel captained by Gudleif Gudlaugsson gets blown off course to a mysterious land far to the west. Gudleif and his crew there encounter a foreign people speaking a variant of Irish who take them captive. Bjorn then appears; he has become a preeminent leader in the region. The locals all honor and defer to him, and he saves Gudleif and his men from death or slavery. However, Bjorn warns Gudleif not to tell anyone else that he is still alive, fearing other Icelanders might risk their safety trying to find him across the ocean. Despite his promise, upon his return to Iceland Gudleif relates the amazing story of his miraculous escape and Bjorn’s survival.50 Beauvois believed that this extract of the Eyrbyggia Saga was a historically reliable account proving Bjorn had settled somewhere in North America and become the chieftain of an Indigenous population.

However, for Beauvois, the true crux that demonstrated Norse dominance in the Americas was the story of Ari Masson. Ari was a descendant of Kjarval, king of Dublin, and “one of the foremost figures in the western quarter of Iceland” in the 980s.51 According to the Landnámabók, or the Icelandic Book of Settlements, Ari was blown off course and shipwrecked in “Hvitramannaland, also called Great Ireland. This country is situated to the west, in the ocean, near Vinland the Good.”52 He there became a great leader, never returning to Iceland. Beauvois placed this event between 981 and 1000, probably around 983, making Ari the first Norseman in the Americas, before even Leif the Lucky or Bjorn Breidvikingakappi.53

Beauvois speculated that the tale of Ari’s survival and establishment as a chieftain was brought back to Iceland by subsequent Norse travelers.

Figure 5. Grande-Irelande et contrées adjacentes avec indication des jours de navigation entre ces divers pays, from Eugène Beauvois, “La Grande-Irlande ou Pays des Blancs précolombiens du Nouveau-Monde,” Journal de la société

He cited a “curious fragment of an ancient Icelandic geography . . . conserved in the manuscript 770 c. of the Arnamagnæan Collection, recopied at the beginning of the sixteenth century” which described sustained maritime exchange between Hvitramannaland and Iceland.54 The Norse and Irish sailors who plied the route “recognized Ari Masson, son of Mar and Katla of Reykjanes, of whom there had been no news for a long time and whom the inhabitants of the country had taken for their chief.” Alternatively, Beauvois supposed that Gudleif Gudlaugsson and his crew could have learned of Ari’s fate from Bjorn, who landed in the same region a generation later.55 Beauvois even postulated that Bjorn may have initially set sail in search of Ari, as they had mutual relations.56

Beauvois similarly noted that the famous Thorfinn Karlsefni was also related to Ari and may have heard of the older man’s settlement in a mysterious territory beyond Greenland.57 In Beauvois's mind, Ari Masson was the catalyst for a whole wave of European movement west.

Beauvois affirmed that Norse exploration of North America continued apace for over three centuries.58 Drawing on Norse annals, he constructed a timeline of voyages that stretched from Ari Masson’s 983 shipwreck to a 1347 expedition of 18 men returning from Acadia.59 So if the Norse had established such a durable foothold in the Americas, according to Beauvois, why did they stop sailing there? He claimed that, beginning with Margrete Valdemarsdatter, queen of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden at the turn of the fifteenth century, the Scandinavian monarchs asserted a monopoly on travel to Greenland and the rest of the Americas.60

Beauvois maintained that, by quashing individual imperial entrepreneurship, this monopoly proved disastrous for both the colonies and their mother countries; the two regions had come to rely on each other for survival.61 He framed the end of intercourse with Vinland as the origin of Scandinavia’s decline, as it lost the ocean-going capabil-

ities that had sustained its wealth and prestige. Eventually, most Europeans, even Scandinavians, forgot the existence of the Americas. For Beauvois, this story provided a powerful lesson in the centrality of imperialism to national strength. In his mind, history proved that governments needed to encourage robust, independent engagement in discovery, conquest, and associated commerce. State-supported colonial expansion was the bedrock of national flourishing.

Beauvois's Strategies of Self-Promotion and Reception

Eugène Beauvois occupied a geographically and professionally liminal position in the global academic map. He lived in France, long revered as an international intellectual hub, but he passed most of his life in the rural village of Corberon, over 300 kilometers (186 miles) from the lights of Paris. He published copiously and was embraced by researchers with the most impeccable credentials, but he himself never earned a doctorate or held a university post. Given this in-between status, he had to hustle to build his academic reputation.

Beauvois extended his reach and name recognition across the Atlantic world by joining numerous learned societies. At the most local level, he was a titulary member of the Société d’histoire, d’archéologie et de littérature de l’arrondissement de Beaune, where he regularly attended meetings and presented his most recent findings.62 He rubbed elbows there with the local notables who composed the rest of the society’s roster: clergy, doctors, lawyers, landowners, aristocrats, and government officials. Building relationships with these men was imperative for Beauvois's second career as a municipal political figure and mayor of Corberon, but it also ensured that they imbibed his unique notions of medieval history. Regionally, he was a correspondent of the Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Chalon-sur-Saône, the Société des Sciences historiques et naturelles de Semur, the Société phi-

lomathique Vosgienne, and the Commission des Antiquités du département de la Côte-d’Or.63 At the national scale, he was a member of the Société française d’archéologie, the Société de géographie de Paris, and the Société asiatique de Paris; deputy secretary of the Société d’ethnographie de Paris; and a corresponding associate of the Société nationale des antiquaires de France.64 Internationally, he was a member of the Danish Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord, the Swedish Société des Antiquités Suédoises, an honorary member of the Finno-Ugrian Society (Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura), and a corresponding member of the Celtic Society of Montreal.65 He was further granted the chivalric honors of the Norwegian Order of Saint Olav and the Danish Order of the Dannebrog.66

Additionally, Beauvois gave his books to other intellectuals in order to solidify interpersonal networks while disseminating ideas about Vinland. Beauvois delivered fully eleven of his short pamphlets on American colonization to the Société de géographie in 1903, and six to the International Congress of Americanists in 1881.67 To further his second career as a local politician, on July 24, 1888, he offered a copy of Les premiers chrétiens dans les îles nordatlantiques (1888) to prominent wine-maker and honorary president of the Beaune chamber of commerce Pierre Ponnelle.68 He also inscribed a copy of his 1899 Echos des croyances chrétiennes chez les Mexicains du moyen-âge et chez d’autres peuples voisines to Gabriel Gravier with “friendly regards.”69 These gestures were sometimes reciprocated. In 1880 Benjamin de Costa sent Beauvois a copy of the New York Herald featuring his most recent research.70 In 1899 the Harvard professor Eben Norton Horsford signed a copy of his own study on The Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega (1890) to Beauvois “with the best regards.”71

Though Beauvois presented at numerous scholarly meetings, his attendance at the biannual sessions of the International Congress of Americanists beginning in 1875 is particularly well documented and proved especially crucial to his foreign

reputation. At the Congress's inaugural meeting in Nancy, France, Beauvois gave a lecture on the “Discovery of the New World.”72 At the second meeting in Luxembourg in 1877, he spoke on “The European colonies of Markland and the l’Escociland in the XVI century and the traces thereof continuing through the XVI and XVII centuries.”73 Over “1,026 persons registered” for the Congress that year, including sitting president Rutherford B. Hayes at the head of the United States delegation.74 At Brussels in 1879, Beauvois presented “Norambègue, with the proofs of its Scandinavian origin as furnished by the language, the institutions, and beliefs indigenous to Acadie.”75 Four years later, in Copenhagen, he presented “The precolumbian relations between the Gauls and the Mexicans.”76

At the 1890 conference in Paris, “the question of the first discovery of America (relating to Scandinavian Vineland) begot a discussion"—which apparently grew quite heated—in which Beauvois took a leading part.77 However, his crowning achievement came at the 1881 session in Madrid. Beauvois there gave two speeches on “La grande terre de l’Ouest dans les documents celtiques du moyen-âge,” and “The kjøkkenmeddings of Dinamarca.”78 That year Botella Federico also nominated Beauvois to the honor of vice president of the Congress; “the proposal was accepted unanimously and with great applause.”79 Moreover, at an evening reception following the conference, Beauvois found himself “discuss[ing] art and literature” with the organization’s honorary protector, the King of Spain himself, Don Alfonso XII.80 Unlike most of Beauvois's work, which was overwhelmingly read by French, American, or Scandinavian contemporaries, his participation in the fourth International Congress of Americanists was intensively reported in Hispanophone sources.81 Presenting in Madrid to a Spanish audience successfully spread his ideas to a new readership and a new national historiography.

Records of nineteenth-century library holdings in Europe and North America further highlight

the spread of Beauvois's writings. In 1868, Alexandre Dezos de la Roquette (1784-1868), a French consul to Denmark and Norway, bequeathed his personal collection to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, forming the nucleus of what is today the library’s Bibliothèque nordique, the largest assemblage of Nordic studies sources in Europe outside of Scandinavia.82 In 1908, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève held 14 works by Beauvois (today they hold 40).83 In 1892, the Quebecois government purchased the private collection of the late Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau (1820-1890), first prime minister of Quebec, to add to the Bibliothèque de la Législature; the so-called Fonds Chauveau contained at least three of Beauvois's publications.84 Half of the original Fonds has since been lost, so it is possible Chauveau owned more of Beauvois's writings during his life. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, today part of Johns Hopkins University, held nine of Beauvois's works.85 In 1905, Cornell University Library acquired the personal collection of Icelandic texts of the late Professor Willard Fiske (1831-1904), including 25 texts by Beauvois.86 Nearby in New England, an expert in Indigenous American religions and the first man to hold a professorship of anthropology in the United States, Daniel Garrison Brinton (1837-1899), also possessed 13 of Beauvois's titles.87 Brinton may have seen Beauvois speak at one of the sessions of the International Congress of Americanists they both attended.88 His library is now housed at the University of Pennsylvania. Beauvois's titles also featured prominently in bibliographies about early America printed in the United States.89 Today, scholars can use these bibliographies to track what American researchers at the time were reading, and the answer is that they were reading Beauvois.

Beauvois attracted a certain amount of criticism from foreign readers. In his July 1881 article “Culdee Colonies in the North and West” for the British and Foreign Evangelical Review, John Camp-

bell offered a survey of Beauvois's Americanist research. 90 Campbell generally praised Beauvois's scholarship, but did not accept all of the Frenchman’s notions. Significantly, he remained unconvinced by the parallels Beauvois drew between Christianity and Indigenous American religions. Campbell argued that, far from proving cultural transmission, the Mi’kmaq traditions that Beauvois interpreted as Christian residue had in fact arisen independently in a wide variety of historical and geographic contexts.91

Notably, even when denying the role of medieval sailors in shaping Indigenous American traditions, Beauvois nonetheless presumed those traditions must have derived from Europe somehow. For example, he clashed with Ebbe Hertzberg and Yngvar Nielsen, who both asserted that the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin learned lacrosse from the Canadian First Nations, who had learned it in turn from shipwrecked Vikings.92 Hertzberg and Nielsen’s hypothesis relied upon the similarity between lacrosse and the medieval Norse game knattleik. Beauvois found it more plausible that Normans descended from Rollo’s Viking army taught a version of knattleik to the Algonquin during the early modern French colonization of Canada. Beauvois imagined all transatlantic exchange as unidirectional. For him, Indigenous Americans had no durable culture of their own and merely soaked up European religious, political, and linguistic influences. This belittling attitude implicitly propped up the nineteenth-century French empire’s “civilizing mission” by assuming colonized peoples could be easily assimilated to European culture.

Why did Beauvois cling so tenaciously to a theory of Gaelo-Norse colonization that principally justified another nation’s empire? The answer is that he was desperate to best Columbus. In his mind, beating the Italian servant of Spain to the discovery of the Americas would safely detach the French from the supposedly “inferior” nations of southern Europe and rank them instead with

modern global superpowers like Germany and Britain. Beauvois was remarkably explicit about his desire to deflate Columbus's accomplishments. He opened his 1859 article Découvertes des Scandinaves en Amérique by baldly proclaiming that “more than five centuries before the memorable voyage of Christopher Columbus, an Icelander who was travelling to Greenland was blown by a tempest towards the shores of America.”93 He repeatedly insisted that even Columbus's peers among Renaissance Italian scientists knew that contemporary explorations of the Americas were not true “discoveries,” but merely “rediscoveries.”94 This aspiration to outdo Columbus and claim primacy (indirectly) for France in the historic scramble for the Americas helps explain Beauvois's particular fixation. By insisting that his Gall-Gaidel had made it to the Americas before the Spanish and their Italian representative, he reemphasized France’s distance from—and superiority over—southern Europe. Late nineteenth-century racialist thinking ranked the peoples of the Mediterranean lower in the biological hierarchy than the peoples of the European north.95 By trumpeting the Vikings’ victory over Columbus, Beauvois amplified this hierarchy and located France near its top. In this respect, his motivations were very similar to “the attempts made by [American] Anglo-Protestants, who claimed to be descendants of the Norse invaders of England and who were driven by anti-Catholic sentiments, to [use histories of Viking settlement in Vinland to] unseat Columbus as the nation’s founding father,” as studied by Christopher Crocker.96

Beauvois's idiosyncratic strategies for legitimating French colonialism clue in today’s scholars to the importance of looking beyond the metropole/ colony binary to begin analyzing how competing imperial projects were simultaneously mutually reinforcing. Charlotte Ann Legg has asserted that “racial discourse was constructed not only between settler colonies and imperial centers . . . Discourses of whiteness were also constructed across empires,

through instances of Europeans’ engagement in each other’s imperial domain.”97 Beauvois articulated a vision for global French empire through reference to other colonial powers: the medieval Norse and the contemporary United States. He particularly borrowed from the imperial lexicon of the latter, appropriating the white American pastime of “playing Indian.”98 Indeed, very little that Beauvois argued was truly unique. Tales of Vinland were rampant in nineteenth-century North America. What makes Beauvois distinctive is his national context, a Frenchman intervening in an essentially Anglo-Saxon historiography. While white Americans usurped Indigenous identity in order to secure their theft of Native land, Beauvois drew on this narrative trope to prop up French aspirations elsewhere, in Africa. He took white settler discourses common in other empires and imported them into a new national framework— France—where they assumed a novel and powerful significance.

Conclusion

White nationalists in the twenty-first century have also embraced Vinland to assert white historical dominance in the Americas specifically and timeless white power generally.99 The Anti-Defamation League lists the Vinlanders Social Club as “one of the larger racist skinhead groups in the United States.”100 Similarly, the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies the Wolves of Vinland as a neo-Völkish hate group.101 Neo-Nazis now fly the so-called Vinland flag—a green, black, and white version of the Nordic cross first developed by the goth metal band Type O Negative in the 1990s. In a 2017 blog post for The Public Medievalist, Paul B. Sturtevant frames contemporary references to Vinland as part of what he calls “Schrödinger’s medievalism . . . a piece of medieval culture found in the wild that you know has been appropriated as a symbol by right-wing nationalists or racists. But, that piece of culture also has a broader, potentially

benign, meaning. You can’t tell which [it is] until you get more information—and sometimes doing so is impossible.”102 White nationalists thus capitalize on the undeniable historicity of Vinland to cloak their hateful ideology with legitimacy.

For Beauvois, Vinland was never just Vinland. It was Algeria and Madagascar, as well as Great Ireland and Norumbega. The Norse settlement in America stood in for all the imperial possessions Beauvois coveted for his nation. By borrowing a founding myth of white settler colonialism from the United States, he advocated French global expansion in the here and now.

To mount a racialized defense of French imperialism, Beauvois looked outward, not just to history but to other contemporary nations and their empires. He positioned France within a transoceanic web of sailing routes and resource exploitation, couching medieval America as an antecedent for modern Africa. Beauvois's violent ethnocentrism did not emerge in a cultural bubble, but in conversation with competing colonial projects the world over.

At the same time, he appropriated Indigenous identities for white settlers. By insisting that Mi’kmaq traditions were actually European imports, he unseated the Native peoples of America from their own stories and slid his own (supposed) forebears into their place. Beauvois turned an Orientalizing gaze westward, playing up the exotic excitement of non-white cultures while also asserting a privileged understanding of those cultures. This insidious sleight of hand dismissed Indigenous personhood while also pushing French imperial aspirations further into the past as well as the future.

Disclosures

Conflicts of Interest: None.

Funding: Millstone Research Fellowship, Western Society for French History (Summer 2023); George L. Mosse Distinguished Graduate Fellowship, Dept. of History, UW–Madison (Fall 2016-Present); Summer Fellowship, Frank Munson Institute of Maritime History, Mystic Seaport Museum (Summer 2022); Love of Learning Award, Phi Kappa Phi (Summer 2020); Research Travel Award, Graduate School, UW–Madison (Fall 2019); Summer Fieldwork Grant, Institute for Regional and International Studies, UW–Madison (Summer 2019); Dissertation Research Travel Award, Dept. of History, UW–Madison (Summer 2019).

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Suzanne Desan, Nancy Rose Marshall, Akeia de Barros Gomes, and the students of the Munson Institute and the University of Wisconsin–Madison History dissertation workshop for their support and feedback on this project.

Endnotes

1 Robin Fleming, “Picturesque History and the Medieval in NineteenthCentury America,” The American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (October 1995), 1080-1082; Annette Kolodny, In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Gordon Campbell, Norse America: The Story of a Founding Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Martyn Whittock, American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America (New York: Pegasus Books, 2023).

2 Douglas Hunter, The Place of Stone: Dighton Rock and the Erasure of America’s Indigenous Past (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

3 Patricia Jane Roylance, “Northmen and Native Americans: The Politics of Landscape in the Age of Longfellow,” The New England Quarterly 80, no. 3 (September 2007): 435-458.

4 Richard R. John, “Eben Norton Horsford, the Northmen, and the Founding of Massachusetts,” in Essays on Cambridge History: Proceedings, 1980-1985, vol. 45 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Historical Society, 1998): 116-144; Janet A. Headly, “Anne Whitney’s Leif Eriksson: A Brahmin Response to Christopher Columbus,” American Art (Summer 2003): 41-59; Brian Regal, “Cornelia Horsford and the Adventures of Leif Erikson: Viking Settlements in the Bay State,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 48, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 36-59; Gloria Polizzotti Greis, “Vikings on the Charles: Leif Eriksson, Eben Horsford, and the Quest for Norumbega,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 49, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 2-27; L. Mara Dodge, “The Viking Saga Continued: Leif Erikson, Anne Whitney, Boston, and the Nation,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 49, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 128-151.

5 F. H. Shelton, “More Light on the Old Mill at Newport,” Bulletin of the Newport Historical Society, no. 21 (January 1917): 1-23.

6 “Kensingtonstenens gåta – The riddle of the Kensington runestone,” Historiska Nyheter (Stockholm: Statens historiska museum, 2003); Larry Zimmerman, “Unusual or ‘Extreme’ Beliefs about the Past, Community Identity, and Dealing with the Fringe,” in Collaboration in Archaeological Practice: Engaging Descendent Communities, ed. Chip ColwellChanthaphonh and T.J. Ferguson (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2008), 55-86.

7 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

8 Kolodny, In Search of First Contact; Hunter, The Place of Stone; Edward Watts, Colonizing the Past: Mythmaking and Pre-Columbian Whites in Nineteenth-Century American Writing (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020); Christopher Crocker, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Vinland: History, Whiteness, Indigenous Erasure, and the Early Norse Presence in Newfoundland,” Canadian Journal of History 55, no. 1 (2020): 91122; Andrew McGillvray, “Manitoba’s Viking Aesthetic: Two Cultural Artifacts in Gimli and the Connection to a Distant Past,” Prairie History, no. 6 (Fall 2021): 41-47.

9 Régis Boyer, Le mythe viking dans les lettres françaises (Paris: Editions du Porte-Glaive, 1986), 83-112; Joanne Parker, “Ruling the Waves: Saxons, Vikings, and the Sea in the Formation of an Anglo-British Identity in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity and Culture, ed. Sebastian I. Sobecki (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011): 195-206; Marion Gibson, “Vikings and Victories: Sea-Stories from ‘The Seafarer’ to Skyfall and the Future of British Maritime Culture,” Journal for Maritime Research 17, no 1 (2015): 1-15.

10 For an exploration of the scholarly implications of tidalectics, see Stefanie Hessler, Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018); Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Tatiana Flores, “Submerged Bodies: The Tidalectics of Representability and the Sea in

Caribbean Art,” Environmental Humanities 12, no. 1 (May 2020): 132–166; Chinedu Nwadike, “Tidalectics: Excavating History in Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants,” The International Academic Forum Journal of Arts & Humanities 7, no. 1 (Summer 2020): 55-67; Emilio Amideo, Queer Tidalectics: Linguistic and Sexual Fluidity in Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2021).

11 Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2014); Robert Rouse, “Dynamic Fluidity and Wet Ontology: Current Work on the Archipelagic North Sea,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 7, no. 4 (2016): 572–580.

12 For Beauvois's biography, see Bernard Bouley, “Un Bourguignon en Kabylie: Eugène Beauvois,” Mémoires / Société d’archéologie de Beaune 74 (1993): 84-90; Hervé Mouillebouche, “Les archives d’un précurseur des études nordiques : Eugène Beauvois,” in Châteaux et palais de la Bourgogne médiévale : recueil d’articles, 482-487 (Chagny: CECAB, 2019); “Décès d’Eugène Beauvois, érudit,” Académie des sciences, arts et belles-lettres de Dijon, accessed December 9, 2021, https://www.academie-sabl-dijon.org/ celebration/deces-deugene-beauvois-erudit/.

13 X. Yacono, “Kabylie: L’insurrection de 1871,” in Encyclopédie berbere, ed. Salem Chaker, vol. 26 (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 2004), 4022-4026.

14 Eugène Beauvois, En colonne dans la Grande Kabylie: Souvenirs de l’insurrection de 1871, avec une relation du siège de Fort-National (Paris: Challamel, 1872). For an analysis of Beauvois's time in Algeria, see Bouley, “Un Bourguignon en Kabylie : Eugène Beauvois,” 84-90.

15 Eugène Beauvois, review of Madagascar, Possession française depuis 1642 by V. A. Barbié du Bocage, Revue orientale et américaine 5 (October 1860 – March 1861): 82-83.

16 Eugène Beauvois, Origine des Burgondes (Dijon: Lamarche, 1869).

17 Beauvois, Origine des Burgondes, 9-10.

18 Beauvois, Origine des Burgondes, 11.

19 For the French perception of southern Europeans such as the Spanish and Italians as racially inferior, see Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

20 Eugène Beauvois, “La Découverte du Groenland par les Scandinaves au Xe siècle,” Muséon 11 (1892): 273-288; Eugène Beauvois, La Légende de Saint Columba chez les Mexicains du moyen âge (Louvain: Lefever Frères, 1887), 1-2; Theresa Bane, Encyclopedia of Imaginary and Mythical Places (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2014), s.v. “Great Ireland.”

21 Eugène Beauvois, “Les Gallois en Amérique au XIIe siècle,” Muséon 14 (1895): 98-101.

22 Eugène Beauvois, La grande terre de l’Ouest dans les documents celtiques du moyen âge (Madrid: Imprimerie de Fortanet, 1882), 16.

23 Eugène Beauvois, “La Grande-Irlande ou Pays des Blancs précolombiens du Nouveau-Monde,” Journal de la société des américanistes 1, no. 2 (1904), 189.

24 Beauvois, “La Grande-Irlande ou Pays des Blancs précolombiens du Nouveau-Monde,” 228.

25 Beauvois, “La Découverte du Groenland par les Scandinaves au Xe siècle,” 273-288.

26 Kirsten A. Seaver, “Nourmbega and Harmonia Mundi in SixteenthCentury Cartography,” Imago Mundi 50 (1998), 34-58; Peter T. Bradley, “Norumbega,” The Oxford Companion to World Exploration, ed. David Buisseret (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), https://www. oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195149227.001.0001/acref9780195149227-e-0478.

27 Fleming, “Picturesque History and the Medieval in Nineteenth-Century

America,” 1080-1082.

28 Eugène Beauvois, La Norambègue. Découverte d’une quatrième colonie précolombienne dans le Nouveau Monde, avec des preuves de son origine scandinave fournies par la langue, les institutions et les croyances des indigènes de l’Acadie (Nouvelle-Ecosse, Nouveau-Brunswick et Etat du Maine) (Brussels: F. Hayez, 1880), 5.

29 Beauvois, La Norambègue, 5.

30 Beauvois, La Norambègue, 28-29.

31 Beauvois, La Norambègue, 29-30.

32 Beauvois, La Norambègue, 30-31.

33 Beauvois, La Norambègue, 32.

34 Souriquois is today being revived as an identity by white settlers of French origin in eastern Canada trying to invent a fictitious Indigenous lineage for themselves. Bernard G. Hoffman, “The Souriquois, Etechemin, and Kwĕdĕch—A Lost Chapter in American Ethnography,” Ethnohistory 2, no. 1 (Winter 1955): 65-87; Andrea Eidinger, “L’Association des Acadiens-Métis Souriquois,” Raceshifting, May 29, 2019, https://www.raceshifting.com/ lassociation-des-acadiens-metis-souriquois/.

35 Beauvois, La Norambègue, 20.

36 Beauvois, La Norambègue, 21.

37 Beauvois, La Norambègue, 25. On Runhenda, see Travis Lyon, Forms of Poetry (Pittsburgh: TeaLemon Publications, 2003), 254.

38 Beauvois, La Norambègue, 20.

39 Beauvois, La Norambègue, 34-35.

40 Beauvois, La Norambègue, 36-40.

41 Beauvois, La Norambègue, 37.

42 Eugène Beauvois, Les derniers vestiges du christianisme préché du 10e au 14e siècle dans le Markland et la Grande Irlande : les porte-croix de la Gapésie et de l’Acadie (Paris: Imprimerie Moquet, 1877).

43 Beauvois, Les derniers vestiges du christianisme, 1-2.

44 Beauvois, Les derniers vestiges du christianisme, 3-4, 11.

45 Beauvois, Les derniers vestiges du christianisme, 17-18.

46 Beauvois, Les derniers vestiges du christianisme, 22-23.

47 Eugène Beauvois, Bulletin critique de la mythologie scandinave (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1881), 4.

48 Beauvois, Les derniers vestiges du christianisme, 4.

49 Eugène Beauvois, Découvertes des Scandinaves en Amérique, du dixième au treizième siècle : fragments de sagas islandaises, traduits pour la première fois en français (Paris: Challamel aîné, 1859), 54-65.

50 Beauvois, “La Grande-Irlande ou Pays des Blancs précolombiens du Nouveau-Monde,” 199-205.

51 Beauvois, “La Grande-Irlande ou Pays des Blancs précolombiens du Nouveau-Monde,” 190. See also Beauvois, Relations précolombiennes des Gaëls avec le Mexique, 75; Beauvois, Découvertes des Scandinaves en Amérique, 52-53.

52 Beauvois, Découvertes des Scandinaves en Amérique, 52-53.

53 Beauvois, “La Grande-Irlande ou Pays des Blancs précolombiens du Nouveau-Monde,” 197.

54 Beauvois, “La Grande-Irlande ou Pays des Blancs précolombiens du Nouveau-Monde,” 193.

55 Beauvois, “La Grande-Irlande ou Pays des Blancs précolombiens du Nouveau-Monde,” 193.

56 Beauvois, “La Grande-Irlande ou Pays des Blancs précolombiens du Nouveau-Monde,” 202.

57 Beauvois, “La Grande-Irlande ou Pays des Blancs précolombiens du Nouveau-Monde,” 205.

58 Beauvois, Découvertes des Scandinaves en Amérique, 65-66.

59 Beauvois, Découvertes des Scandinaves en Amérique, 7, 66-68.

60 Beauvois, Découvertes des Scandinaves en Amérique, 5-6.

61 Beauvois, Découvertes des Scandinaves en Amérique, 5.

62 Société d’histoire, d’archéologie et de littérature de l’arrondissement de Beaune. Mémoires année 1883 (Beaune: Imprimerie Arthur Batault, 1883), 6, 20, 22-23, 28, 30-32.

63 Eugène Beauvois, “Une pénalité des lois Gombette et les lumières qu’elle jette sur l’origine des Burgondes,” Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Chalon-sur-Saône 5, no. 3 (1872), 75; Eugène Beauvois, Origines et fondation du plus ancien évêché du nouveau monde : le diocèse de Gardhs en Groenland, 986-1126 (Paris: E. Dufossé, 1878), 3.

64 Congrès archéologique de France. LVe session. Séances générales tenues à Dax et à Bayonne en 1888 par la Société française d’archéologie pour la conservation et la description des monuments (Caen: H. Delesques, 1889); Bulletin de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1899), 19; François Emile Graffe, Portrait of Eugène Beauvois for the Société de géographie de Paris, 1882, photograph, BnF; Revue orientale et américaine 9 (Paris: Challamel ainé, 1864), 53, 302; Bouley, “Un Bourguignon en Kabylie : Eugène Beauvois,” 84.

65 Mémoires de la Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord. Nouvelle série 1866-1871 (Copenhagen: Thiele, n.d.); Iwona Piechnik, “Ujfalvy’s Place in the Development of Finno-Ugrian Language Studies in the Second Half of the 19th Century in France,” Essays in the History of Languages and Linguistics: Dedicated to Marek Stachowski on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, ed. M. Németh, B. Podolak, and M. Urban (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2017), 487, 488, 500; Constitution and By-Laws of the Celtic Society of Montreal, Inaugural Address of the President, List of Members, Etc. (Montreal: W. Drysdale, 1883), 38-39, 44.

66 Beauvois, Origines et fondation du plus ancien évêché du nouveau monde, 3.

67 “Ouvrages réçus par la Société de géographie,” La Géographie. Bulletin de la Société de géographie 7 (1903), 414; “Cuarto Congreso de Americanistas,” 440.

68 Eugène Beauvois, Les premiers chrétiens dans les îles nordatlantiques (Louvain: Imprimerie Lever frères et soeur, 1888). Inscribed copy now held at the University of Alabama Library.

69 Eugène Beauvois, Echos des croyances chrétiennes chez les Mexicains du moyen-âge et chez d’autres peuples voisines (Louvain: Istas, 1899), accessed November 28, 2023, https://www.ebay.com/itm/1884-1902-

EUGENE-BEAUVOIS-inscribed-13-WORKS-on-PRE-COLUMBIAN-CONTACT-wMEXICO-/192605962078

70 Eugène Beauvois, La Norambègue. Découverte d’une quatrième colonie précolombienne dans le Nouveau Monde, avec des preuves de son origine scandinave fournies par la langue, les institutions et les croyances des indigènes de l’Acadie (Nouvelle-Ecosse, Nouveau-Brunswick et Etat du Maine) (Brussels: F. Hayez, 1880). Inscribed copy now held at the Harvard University Library.

71 Eben Norton Horsford, The Discovery of the Ancient City of Norumbega: A Communication to the President and Council of the American Geographical Society at their Special Session in Watertown (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), accessed November 28, 2023, https://www.ellipsisrarebooks. com/product/norumbega-viking-america.

72 Thomas Wilson, “Report on the Congress of Americanists,” in Report of the Commissioner-General for the United States to the International Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900, vol. 6 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 21-22; “International Congress of Americanists,” in The American Naturalist: An Illustrated Magazine of Natural History, ed. Edward D. Cope and J. S. Kingsley, vol. 27 (Philadelphia: Edwards and Docker Company, 1893), 300-301.

73 Wilson, “Report on the Congress of Americanists,” 24; “International Congress of Americanists,” The American Naturalist, 302.

74 Wilson, “Report on the Congress of Americanists,” 23.

75 Wilson, “Report on the Congress of Americanists,” 25; “International Congress of Americanists,” The American Naturalist, 303.

76 Wilson, “Report on the Congress of Americanists,” 29.

77 Wilson, “Report on the Congress of Americanists,” 32-33.

78 Wilson, “Report on the Congress of Americanists,” 27-28; Congres internacional de Americanistas: Actas de la cuarta reunión, Madrid 1881, vol. 1 (Madrid: Imprenta de Fortanet, 1882), 45; “Cuarto Congreso de Americanistas,” Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid 11 (1881), 454455.

79 Congres internacional de Americanistas, vol. 1, 22. See also “Cuarto Congreso de Americanistas, ” 435. Thanks to Ellen Main for all translations from Spanish.

80 “Cuarto Congreso de Americanistas, ” 455.

81 Cesáreo Fernández Duro, Colón y la historia póstuma: examen de la que escribió el conde de Roselly de Lorgues, leido ante la Real academia de la historia, en junta extraordinaria celebrada el día 10 de mayo (Madrid: Imprenta y fundición de T. Tello, 1885), 71-72; “Cuarto Congreso de Americanistas,” 430-467; Congres internacional de Americanistas, vols. 1 and 2.

82 “Nos collections,” Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, accessed November 2, 2021, https://www.bsg.univ-paris3.fr/iguana/www.main. cls?surl=presentation.

83 Eugène Capet, Catalogue du Fonds Scandinave de la Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (Chalon-sur-Saône: Emile Bertrand, 1908), 43, 99, 479, 495, 565, 583, 593, 603, 644, 783.

84 Clément LeBel, Claire Jacques, and Martin Pelletier, Inventaire du Fonds Chauveau de la Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée nationale (Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée nationale de Québéc, January 2017), 1-2, 32, 110.

85 Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore, 5 vols. (Baltimore: Isaac Friedenwald, 1883-1892); Second Catalogue of the Library of the Peabody Institute of the City of Baltimore Including the Additions Made Since 1882, 8 vols. (Baltimore: Deutsch Lithographing and Printing Co., 1896).

86 Halldór Hermannsson, ed., Catalogue of the Icelandic Collection Bequeathed by Willard Fiske (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1915), 37-39.

87 John M. Weeks, The Library of Daniel Garrison Brinton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2002), 1-6, 64-65.

88 Wilson, “Report on the Congress of Americanists,” 20-43.

89 Joseph Sabin, Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America, from Its Discovery to the Present Time, vol. 1 (New York: Joseph Sabin, 1868), 558; Paul Barron Watson, The Bibliography of the PreColumbian Discoveries of America (Boston: 1881), 9-10; James Constantine Pilling, Proof-sheets of a Bibliography of the Languages of the North American Indians (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1885), 877; Rasmus Bjørn Anderson, America Not Discovered by Columbus: An Historical Sketch of the Discovery of America by the Norsemen in the Tenth Century, 5th ed. (Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1901), 135, 139; Joseph Fischer, The Discoveries of the Norsemen in America, with Special Relation to Their Early Cartographical Representation, trans. Basil H. Soulsby (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1903), xii-xiii; Halldór Hermannsson, Bibliography of the Icelandic Sagas and Minor Tales (Ithaca: Cornell University Library, 1908), 25, 71; Halldór Hermannsson, The Northmen in America (982-c. 1500): A Contribution to the Bibliography of the Subject (Ithaca: Cornell University Library, 1909), 10, 37, 57, 86, 94; G. N. Swan, “Leif Erikson. Amerikas ‘Rätte Upptäckare,’” Year-Book of the Swedish Historical Society of America 6 (1916-1917), 34.

90 John Campbell, “Culdee Colonies in the North and West,” The British and Foreign Evangelical Review 30, no. 117 (July 1881): 455-477.

91 Campbell, “Culdee Colonies in the North and West,” 472-473.

92 Beauvois, review of Nordmaend og Skraelinger i Vinland by Yngvar Nielsen, Journal de la société des américanistes, no. 2 (1905): 319-320.

93 Beauvois, Découvertes des Scandinaves en Amérique, 5.

94 Eugène Beauvois, Le monastère de Saint-Thomas et ses serres chaudes au pied du glacier de l’ile de Jan-Mayen (Louvain: Imprimerie Polleunis et Ceuterick, 1905), 5, 42.

95 Emanuel Rota, “The Worker and the Southerner: The Invention of Laziness and the Representation of Southern Europe in the Age of the Industrious Revolutions,” Cultural Critique 82 (Fall 2012): 128-150; Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Ruth MacKay, “Lazy, Improvident People”: Myth and Reality in in the Writing of Spanish History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Michael Broers, “The Myth of the Lazy Native,” in The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, 1796–1814: Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 217-244; “Forum—Europe's Southern Question: The Other Within,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 26, no. 4 (2004): 311-337.

96 Crocker, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Vinland,” 97.

97 Charlotte Ann Legg, “Resettling Europe: Paul Robin, His Tribe, and Inter-Imperial Constructions of Whiteness in the 1890s and Early 1900s,” French History and Civilization 10 (2020), 73, 81.

98 Deloria, Playing Indian

99 See Verena Höfig, “Vinland and White Nationalism,” in From Iceland to the Americas: Vinland and Historical Imagination, ed. Tim William Machan and Jón Karl Helgason (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 77-98.

100 “Vinlanders Social Club,” Anti-Defamation League, accessed November 17, 2022, https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/vinlanderssocial-club.

101 “Neo-Völkish,” Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed August 24, 2023, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/neovolkisch.

102 Paul B. Sturtevant, “Schrödinger’s Medievalisms,” The Public Medievalist, December 28, 2017, https://www.publicmedievalist.com/ schrodinger/.

SEA CHURCH

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Give me a church made entirely of salt. Let the walls hiss and smoke when I return to shore.

I ask for the grace of a new freckle on my cheek, the lift of blue and my mother’s soapy skin to greet me.

Hide me in a room with no windows. Never let me see the dolphins leaping into commas

for this water-prayer rising like a host of sky lanterns into the inky evening. Let them hang in the sky until they vanish at the edge of the constellations the heroes and animals too busy and bright to notice.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, “Sea Church,” from Oceanic. Copyright © 2018 by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Reprinted with the permission of the Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org

Unsung Heroes: The Invisible Workforce Powering Global Trade

Katie Higginbottom, Head of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) Seafarers’ Trust

Seafaring in the popular imagination is a realm of fearless adventurers heroically battling the elements. Historically, ships carried a cast of characters forging new trade routes and engaging in various forms of legitimate and not-so-legitimate business across the globe. The reality for the men and women working at sea today is rather different. The vital role that contemporary seafarers play in the everyday lives of the consuming population is largely invisible, though no less heroic.

The maritime industry does not exaggerate when it claims to be fundamental to the functioning of today’s global supply chains. Around 90% of traded goods are moved over the waves.1 These goods and raw materials are shipped around the world by approximately 1.89 million seafarers operating over 74,000 vessels in the world merchant fleet.2

Most of the world’s seafarers come from a handful of countries, with the Philippines, Russia, Indonesia, China and India making up 44% of the global workforce, and significant numbers also come from Ukraine and Myanmar.3 With the days of national shipping long gone, the vast majority of ves-

(top left)

Title: Isolation

Photographer: Min Yan Pai

Location: Japan Inland Sea

Photographer’s description: ”Taken in the Japan Inland Sea. A photo description of the loneliness inside the heart. The feeling of isolation, homesickness and frustration.”

(bottom left)

Title: Hero At Sea

Photographer: Ike S. Dagandanan (Winner of the STILL AT SEA photography competition 2020)

Photographer’s description: ”We are en route to China from Argentina, 40 days at sea, total lockdown. We experienced bad weather which caused some of our stanchion posts to collapse. We used our best seamanship to protect the cargo, ship and environment, and most of all our prayers to almighty God for the safe voyage.”

Unsung Heroes: The Invisible Workforce Powering Global Trade © 2023 by Katie Higginbottom is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

sels fly “flags of convenience”4 unconnected to the nationality of shipowner or crew. These flags offer owners tax benefits, light-touch regulation and no restrictions on the nationality of seafarers employed on board.

In the spring of 2020, the world was utterly unprepared for the trajectory and consequences of a global pandemic. The tentacles of COVID-19 extended their reach across borders, curling out through Asia to reach Africa, Europe and North America, not a localized disaster but a fully-fledged global pandemic. Different nations took different measures to limit the spread of disease and to balance the expectations of open, internationally connected societies against the realities of a public health emergency. Supermarket shelves were suddenly empty, essential products rationed. Global supply chains had been rudely interrupted. For the first time in history, nation-states closed their borders, and the population of the world was grounded. Seafarers were either at sea or at home and unable to join vessels.

Although disastrous in many ways, there was one positive outcome of the pandemic: a moment of increased visibility for the world’s seafarers.

The International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF)—a global trade union federation representing 20 million transport workers across 150 countries—and the International Chamber of Shipping—an organization of national shipowners’ associations—called for seafarers to be recognized as essential workers and sought to facilitate the rapid changeover of ships’ crews.

In “normal” times, around 100,000 seafarers are repatriated or join vessels every month; during COVID-19, the closed borders led to an estimated peak of 400,000 seafarers stranded at sea well beyond the terms of their contracts. Depending on rank and nationality, seafarers’ contracts5 normally vary from 4-6 months to 9-11 months

on board. During the pandemic, seafarers found themselves stuck at sea for more than 17 months without repatriation or shore leave.6

In spite of significant, high-level cooperation, it was not possible to find a solution allowing free movement of seafarers. Instead, exemptions were granted to requirements of the 2006 Maritime Labour Convention, allowing for contract extensions. Effectively this permitted state regulators and shipping employers to apply flexibility to seafarers’ working conditions and human rights. In the absence of any international consensus around tackling the pandemic and mitigating its economic consequences, seafarers were obliged to remain working at sea, barred from going ashore and, on many occasions, denied access to essential medical treatment.7

Six months into the pandemic the ITF “slammed government inaction to alleviate the crew change crisis, declaring that current COVID-19 border and travel restrictions risk creating an epidemic of forced labor and modern slavery as seafarers are increasingly forced to stay onboard working against their will.”8

Around this time, the ITF Seafarers’ Trust, a charity registered in England and Wales and funded by the ITF, launched its first seafarers’ photography competition.

STILL AT SEA invited seafarers to submit photos of their experiences on board during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a view to complementing the lobbying undertaken by unions and the shipping industry. The idea was to collect an unfiltered record of seafarers’ firsthand experience and provide a platform for their thoughts and reflections as well as images from daily life at sea. The response was remarkable and fascinating. Many seafarers embraced the opportunity to share their innermost thoughts, as well as the daily routines and dramas of living and working as part of a crew

Title: Home Sick

Photographer: San Ko Oo (Winner of the Life at Sea photography competition 2022)

Location: At the sea

Photographer’s description: “Home sick”

far from home. The photographs are accompanied by the seafarers’ own descriptions, often written on their phones at sea, and with only light editing.

A number of recurrent themes stood out. These themes were exacerbated during the pandemic but in reality illustrate the consistent challenges (and opportunities) of life at sea. Some are unavoidable aspects of working on a vessel in the middle of the ocean, some are due to the structure of employment and the difficulties of applying decent standards in a global labor market. Others are very personal to each seafarer.

An underlying theme is the feeling of isolation and detachment, of being absent from key moments of family life, accompanied by a keen sense of the sacrifices made to support others. In a sense, seafarers are the ultimate migrant workers, sacrificing time spent with family in exchange for an income higher than could be achieved at home.

There is also exhaustion. As commercial pressures have increased, with requirements for fast port turnarounds combined with numerous inspection requirements, fatigue features as another common theme.

On the upside, many enjoy the camaraderie on board and the satisfaction of pulling together as a team. There is enormous pride in carrying out a demanding job with professionalism and stoicism.

An unexpected feature of the photos submitted was the number of images showing seafarers having fun and making the best of their moments of relaxation on board.

In 2021 the ITF Seafarers’ Trust launched its second photography competition: OUT OF SIGHT, NOT OUT OF MIND—this time to collect 40 portraits of seafarers by seafarers in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the organization.9 And with the third competition, LIFE AT SEA 2022,10 ITF confirmed the project as an annual event, tracking the consistent issues faced by seafarers and capturing key events of the moment and their unique impact on seafarers.

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine with devastating consequences for the civilian population and dramatic implications for the employment of both Ukrainian and Russian seafarers. As the COVID-19 restrictions started to ease, the industry faced new challenges in deploying seafarers from both countries. More practical and psychological hardship and difficulties for seafarers ensued. That said, examples of the absence of conflict on board vessels with Ukrainian and Russian crew were notable. In addition, some 2,000 seafarers were trapped in Ukrainian ports as the war broke out. Diplomatic efforts on a national and international level enabled some crew to leave the country, and negotiations to establish a "grain corridor"

Title: Rest, My Fellow

Photographer: Edmar Rosales Ogao-ogao

Photographer’s description: “Seafarers are also frontliners; even when the world locks down, ships continue to trade across continents. Photo was taken after departure from a port, particularly after mooring lines were secured and depicted emotions stemming from exhaustion and the mere fact that during this pandemic, rises a lot of uncertainties.”

(bottom left)

Title: Cheerful Buddies

Photographer: Harold Papa Melendez

Location: Jingtang, China

Photographer’s description: “Being at port is the busiest time for a seafarer. Aside from keeping watch, there is the supply of provision, stores, bunkering, inspections and no shore leave. But whatever the circumstances are nothing can dampen the mood of a jolly person.”

(top left)

Photographer: Vinod

Location: Mykolaiv, Ukraine

Photographer’s description: “We arrived at Mykolaiv Ukraine for loading on 23 Feb 2022 and were supposed to leave on next day, but next morning war started, port operations were stopped and we got stuck in war zone. Even though we have enough food and water stored, to stay there was like a nightmare, families were worried after seeing many vessels were attacked during this conflict. Every day we saw smoke all around after shelling, bombing nearby our ship and each passing day seems to be not less than a year. After many sleepless nights, stressed days and horrible times, Govt of India and our crew management evacuated all of us with other seafarers and reach home safely. This moment was the happiest moment for all of us and smiling faces tells the rest of the story.”

Title: Happy Faces After Evacuation from Ukraine (War Zone)

allowed dry bulk vessels to load and ship grain out of the war zone.11 However, the situation is indicative of the enormous risks faced by international seafarers in an unstable world.

On the other side of the globe, in Myanmar, seafarers have had to contend with the consequences of the military coup that took place in February 2021. Overseas companies closed their operations in the country, and union leaders became targets of the military junta, leading to increased vulnerability of Myanmar seafarers.

The competition has also been able to highlight the importance of women working at sea, and in particular women working as engineers and deck officers. While women account for an estimated 2% of the seafaring workforce, there is increasing interest in encouraging diversity, particularly in the light of the predicted shortage of officers.12

It is clear that much more needs to be done to raise the profile of seafarers and ensure that they are afforded the recognition and respect for the essential work they do in our interconnected and globalized world. There are many stories to tell, some tragic, some heartwarming and joyful. The ITF Seafarers’ Trust is committed to building, maintaining and promoting this unique archive of seafarers’ stories and photos to give a voice to the hidden workforce that "moves the world."

June 2023 | www.seafarerstrust.org

Endnotes

1 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, “Ocean Shipping and Shipbuilding,” accessed October 26, 2023, https://www.oecd.org/ocean/ topics/ocean-shipping/.

2 BIMCO, ICS Seafarer Workforce Report, 2021.

3 Ibid.

4 International Transport Workers’ Federation, “Flags of Convenience,” accessed October 26, 2023, https://www.itfglobal.org/en/sector/seafarers/flags-ofconvenience.

5 International Maritime Organization, “400,000 Seafarers Stuck at Sea as Crew Change Crisis Deepens,” September 25, 2020, https://www.imo.org/en/ MediaCentre/PressBriefings/Pages/32-crew-change-UNGA.aspx.

6 International Labor Organization, accessed October 26, 2023, https://www.ilo.org/dglobal/standards/maritime-labour-convention/WCMS_741024/lang-en/ index.htm.

7 International Maritime Organization, “Seafarer access to medical care a matter of life and death,” accessed October 26, 2023, https://www.imo.org/en/ MediaCentre/PressBriefings/pages/medicalassistance.aspx.

8 ITF Seafarers, “Crew change crisis risks becoming forced labour epidemic as tragedy hits six-month mark on World Maritime Day” (Press Release), September 24, 2020, https://www.itfseafarers.org/en/news/crew-change-crisis-risks-becoming-forced-labour-epidemic-tragedy-hits-six-month-mark-world.

9 ITF Seafarers’ Trust, “Photo competition 2021: Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind,” accessed October 27, 2023, https://www.seafarerstrust.org/what-we-do/photocompetition-2021.

10 ITF Seafarers’ Trust, “Photo competition 2022: Life at Sea 2022,” accessed October 27, 2023, https://www.seafarerstrust.org/what-we-do/photocompetition-2022.

11 Jonathan Saul, “Hundreds of Seafarers Still Stuck in Ukraine Despite Grains Corridor – Industry,” Reuters, September 15, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/ europe/hundreds-seafarers-still-stuck-ukraine-despite-grains-corridor-industry-2022-09-15/.

12 Lena Göthberg, “Empowering Women in the Maritime Industry,” Economist Impact World Ocean Initiative, September 25, 2019, https://ocean.economist. com/innovation/articles/empowering-women-in-the-maritime-industry.

Title: Patintero

Photographer: Arvy Verder

Location: China anchorage

Photographer’s description: ’PATINTERO’ Playing Filipino game’ (Patintero Game) Patintero, also known as block and catch or block the runner, is a traditional Filipino children’s game. It is one of the most popular outdoor games played by children in the Philippines Crew wellbeing while vessel at anchor in China.”

Title:

Photographer: Centfred T. Conde

Location: Gulf of Aden

Photographer’s description: “My

Transiting Pirate Zone

life as a sailor moves in a spiral motion. I come home to go away. I go away to come home.”

Photographer: Sabrina Mccoy Villaruz

Location: Philippine Sea (Forecastle)

Photographer’s description: “Homesickness, change of life style, sleepless nights because of continuous operations, bad weather, trying to get along with different nationalities, you are physically and mentally tired and being a female in a men dominated world. And because of this Covid season many seafarers suffer onboard like difficulty in crew change that results to overdue of contract, no shoreleave and being exposed during this pandemic. But despite the challenges of being a seafarer, we also have ways to divert and cope up with our situations that this pandemic brings us. We also know how to have fun and enjoy the moments that the opportunity gives us because we value mental and emotional health onboard. Indeed life at sea is never easy and I think it will never be however we can always find ways to

make every moment a positive one. Cooperation, camaraderie, respect and love are the basic foundation to enjoy life at sea despite of all the challenges that are physically present onboard.”

(above)

Title: THIS GIRL IS ON FIRE!

Photographer: Christine Melliza

Location: Gibraltar Strait

Photographer’s description: “The light coming from the welding is as strong and wonderful woman she is. A mother, wife, and a kind and caring sister on board, she is a thing of beauty.”

(left)

Title: Sea Witch

Title: Scrub, Scrub, Scrub!

Photographer: Buen Ray Orteguia

Location: Tema, Ghana Anchorage

Photographer’s description: “Ship’s Hull contaminated by dirty slick of Oil from previous port. Insurance claims were raised & cleaning teams sent to have our Ship’s hull be cleaned in Tema Anchorage. Under the blazing heat of the sun it took them almost whole day to finish the cleaning operation. (Had to give them food & drinks as a token of appreciation for their excellent work.)”

Title: I Am a Seaman and I Am a Hero

Photographer: Aljon Manlangit

Location: Yanbu, Saudi Arabia

Photographer’s description: “This is a portrait shot of my fellow crew AB Mark Lester Gamorot imitating the pose of the fictional movie character Superman. Like Superman, all of us seafarers are heroes too, not in a movie but in the real world. We don’t have any super powers like all other super heroes does, but as a seafarer we have a big role to keep this world move forward. Without seafarers our global economy will be paralyzed for we are the main transporter of the primary goods and necessities all around the globe. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development or UNCTAD, around 80% of the volume of international trade in goods is carried by sea, and the percentage is even higher for most developing countries. Our contribution in this time of Covid 19 pandemic is indeed heroic for we are also transporting not just the primary goods but also the medicines and Covid vaccines that are urgently needed to the countries where international flight are still not allowed due to the lockdown and restrictions. Helping the world in this time of pandemic makes me proud cause I am a seaman and I am a hero.”

Still

Blessed in Spite of This Pandemic

Photographer: Mayvine Cloma

Photographer’s description: “I remember the days of my first contract, a little bit scary because of discrimination but time goes by and I felt welcome. I wanted to prove to myself that I can do this—well it’s really difficult but with faith and prayer nothing is impossible. I want to inspire women to pursue their dreams no matter what. Dream high! Fly high! This pandemic is a little bit different we can’t go ashore to buy

necessities (ha ha especially as a woman) like sanitary pads. Well lucky me I bought a lot before lockdown, so not such a big deal for me. I always think that I’m blessed to have a job, not like other people who are suffering now. Me, I have work, I can still support my family, I advise them to be happy, pray always and have faith. God is in control and everything will be alright soon. God bless us.”

Title: A Brave Women That Can Make a Difference!

Photographer: Aljon Manlangit

Location: Underway from Russia to Turkey

Photographer’s description: “This is a photo of my crew mate, an engine wiper after cleaning the oil leaks in the engine room underway from Russia to Turkey. With the lowest rank and a lesser salary, the wipers has always assigned to do the risky job. Without them cleaning and maintaining the good condition of the engine or the so called ‘heart of the ship’ it

will not work properly and may delay the voyage of a ship. Engine crew’s job is to maintain the ships engine running and without any delay in order to deliver the goods in time. It took hard labor sometimes maintaining a ships engine to work properly. Dirty hands, greasy coveralls and a sweaty face are normal to them. They work in a dirty workplace in a high temperature especially during summer. Life at sea is not what they think of, every day we conquer different struggles in order to survive and earn clean money. Respect all seafarers, they are the modern heroes helping the world in moving forward.”

Title: Dirty Hands and a Sweaty Face Are the Signs of Clean Money

Title: Say a Little Prayer

Photographer: Kenneth Ian T. Ricafort

Location: MV Sagar Kanta

Photographer’s description: “Cargo hold cleaning is an essential ship operation which seafarers may find grueling at times. Here, the seafarer is seen mumbling a short prayer before starting cargo hold cleaning operations.”

THINGS WE CARRY ON THE SEA

Wang Ping

Copyright © 2018 by Wang Ping. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Figure 1. Alexander G. Law, Viking Ship Model (1957), Mystic Seaport Museum, 1966.311

Imagined Vikings: Alexander G. Law’s Viking Ship Model

Jenny Carroll, General Collections Cataloger, Mystic Seaport Museum

Of the 25 Alexander Law miniatures in the Mystic Seaport Museum collection, only one depicts the graceful and iconic form of a Viking longship (Figure 1). The model depicts the type of vessel used by Vikings circa 900 A.D., showcasing the longship at a moment when the crew is shifting from using the sail to oarsmen, possibly to change the direction or speed of the ship.

Because it depicts this dynamic moment, it is significant that Law included the oarsmen, even though many of his other works are void of any human subjects. As such, 35 miniature Vikings are included–30 at the ready to begin rowing, and five scattered across the deck.

Unusual, too, for Law’s works is the addition of an interior riser within the glass. The riser slightly elevates the model from its base, and it is thoughtfully decorated with various longships that once sailed the bitter Scandinavian seas.

While three figures are attending to the rigging, the two figures at the prow tell a story evidently happening outside of the display case. On the left, the red-haired figure points, his gaze set far beyond the barrier of the glass case; beside him, his compatriot climbs over the portside edge of the vessel, steadying a spear in his left hand. But what could the group of Vikings be hunting with such diligence? Maybe they’re running low on food after being at sea for an extended period and the shadow of a large fish has caught a crew member’s hungry eye, or perhaps a whale has sidled up next to their ship–putting both the vessel and their lives at risk.

Model maker Alexander G. Law began making miniatures in 1933. His miniature ships have earned him lasting national acclaim. Law’s models are unique because, rather than being mounted on a traditional cradle, they are built atop velvet-lined

Imagined Vikings: Alexander G. Law’s Viking Ship Model © 2023 by Jenny Carroll, Mystic Seaport Museum, is licensed under

Figure 2. Oarsmen preparing to start rowing

drawers designed to hold a book about the ship (Figure 1).1 His intent was to create a truly holistic piece of art. Law saw himself as inventing a new, blended form of miniature:

While it is true that the ships are the central theme, they supply only the drama and miniatura. The hand-drawn period maps incorporate the art of cartography, the book adds bibliography, and the miniature human figures, sculpture. The accuracy of detail and period representation require exhaustive research, which leads to a true history of man’s efforts to master the sea. Design and

the art of the cabinet maker tie the whole together into beautiful gems of maritime fine arts.2

Law’s models uniquely meld art and scholarship together in such a way that inspires the viewer to flesh out the scene so carefully crafted.

Much of what we know about these vessels comes from archaeological studies of Viking ship burials, and Law was likely particularly influenced by the excavation of the Ladby Ship, discovered in 1934 in a burial mound on the island of Funen, Denmark. Although the wood had rotted away, archaeologists were able to reconstruct the ship

Figure 3. Illustrations along the edge of the riser portray various longship styles

based on in situ iron rivets and the imprints of planks in the soil.3 Since Law’s time, a number of additional Viking ship burials have been found throughout Scandinavia. These, along with other Viking research and the 1960 discovery of the Norse site of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, have continued to fuel interest. That fascination continues to compel scholars, writers, and artists to explore and reimagine the Viking past and its impact on history and culture.

Law once wrote, “All my life, I had been fascinated by the wooden wind ships and the iron men who manned them, by maritime history‒the naval engagements, voyages of discovery, the high

drama and the lore of the sea.”4 It is a testament to his vision of the model as fine art that it offers us imagined Viking lives as well as a precise reconstruction of their vessel.

Endnotes

1 Alexander G. Law, January 15, 1957, Mystic Seaport Museum Correspondence Files, 1966.309-328.

2 Law, January 15, 1957.

3 “The Ladby Ship,” Vikingeskibsmuseet, accessed December 8, 2023, https://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/en/professions/education/the-longships/ findings-of-longships-from-the-viking-age/ladby.

4 Law, January 15, 1957.

Figure 4. At the prow

Figure 1. Journal and illustrations by Ira A. Poland of a whaling voyage aboard the ship Bengal of Salem, Massachusetts; George G. Russell, Master; Saturday, March 24, 1832. Special Collections, Providence Public Library; Wh B466 1832j. Photo credit: Jayne Doucette/© Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; used with permission

Extracting Global Maritime Weather Data from New England Whaling and Portuguese Navy Logbooks (1740–1960)

Corresponding author: Timothy D. Walker, twalker@umassd.edu, Department of History, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Caroline C. Ummenhofer, Department of Physical Oceanography, Woods Hole Oceanographic

Institution

Abstract

In climate research, long datasets that describe weather conditions extending back in time to the pre– or early industrial age are invaluable. Such data helps scientists to establish a historical baseline for weather and climate variability, against which to measure changes over time, better understand anthropogenic departures, and illuminate interactions between different components of the climate system. To provide such information, a maritime historian and an oceanographer have combined their skill sets to expand the body of weather knowledge for some of the most remote regions on the planet. A rich trove of maritime weather information is contained in the vast repositories of ships’ logbooks from New England whaling and Portuguese Navy vessels, in which officers recorded weather information multiple times each day over the course of their voyages. Researchers are building a database to extract centuries-old weather information from approximately 4,200 North American whaling and 2,200 Portuguese Navy logbooks dating to the middle eighteenth century.

Keywords

climate research, whaling, logbooks, Portuguese Navy, maritime archives

At the height of the age of whaling under sail in the mid-nineteenth century, nearly 10,000 seasoned mariners and novice “green hands” left ports in the U.S. and Europe each year to hunt for whales. Logbooks from these voyages served as a legal record of the journey; the officers of each vessel kept a daily log to systematically document onboard events and activities. Crucially, these logbook entries include detailed descriptions of weather conditions being experienced by the ship throughout each day. Shared afterward in home ports among owners, agents, and fellow captains, such logbooks informed decisions about when and where to send future whaling ventures. Collectively, this body of documentation constitutes the most chronologically broad and geographically extensive survey of pre-modern ocean conditions and sea life ever conducted—a feat of cumulative observation difficult to replicate, because the natural world has since changed so dramatically.1 These logbooks now provide abundant material for researchers interested in a range of topics, including climate change (Figure 1).

For the safety and success of future voyages, mariners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries knew that it served their best interests to note hazards to navigation on their charts and logs, and to document comprehensive weather data, recorded at intervals of each “watch” rotation, when the crew members on duty changed. The logbooks thus contain, in addition to the vessel’s noon latitude and longitude position, systematic weather observations: estimates of wind strength and direction, sea state, precipitation, cloud cover and fog, air temperature, speed and direction of ocean currents, and notable storm events. However, the notoriously parsimonious whalers rarely carried any but the most essential navigational instruments, even into the twentieth century. So, weather observations given in the whaling logbooks are almost never noted as quantitative instrumental mea-

surements, but instead in qualitative descriptive language, which must be interpreted by modern historians and scientists.

In climate research, long datasets of weather conditions extending back in time help scientists to establish a historical baseline for weather conditions, against which to measure recent changes and better understand human influences on weather and climate. That is, to know if conditions being experienced currently are abnormal, scientists need to understand what weather patterns were like in the past, over the longest possible arc of time. “Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get,” as the saying goes and rightly so: climate represents long-term average conditions for the environmental conditions (temperature, rainfall, pressure, etc.) for a particular spot and particular time of year. In contrast, weather conditions represent instantaneous conditions that vary on synoptic timescales—that is, on a scale of days to weeks. As such, individual weather events represent the individual building blocks that make up a particular location’s long-term climate record.

To provide such information, we have combined our skill sets in modern maritime history and oceanography and climate science, respectively, to undertake an extensive research project that will expand the body of weather records that can be used to assess changing weather and climate conditions over time. Such work is particularly valuable for gaining a better understanding of remote, data-poor regions on the planet. A rich trove of maritime weather information is contained in the vast repositories of ships’ logbooks, especially from New England whaling vessels, in which officers routinely recorded weather information multiple times each day over the course of their voyages.

We have begun to build a database with maritime weather information extracted from currently 150 logbooks of an estimated total of 4,200 North American whaling logbooks going back to the

middle eighteenth century. These primary source maritime documents, which together account for about 80% of extant known logbooks of U.S. age-ofsail whaling voyages, are all conveniently archived in five publicly accessible, geographically proximate repositories in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. These include about 250 logbooks held at the Mystic Seaport Museum G.W. Blunt White Library; 2,500 archived in the New Bedford Whaling Museum; circa 500 at the New Bedford Free Public Library, the Nantucket Historical Association (c. 400 logbooks), and the Providence Public Library in Rhode Island (c. 800 logbooks covering 1,000 voyages) (Figure 2).2

over the Earth (ACRE), the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS), and the Old Weather projects,4 our work recovers, quantifies, and analyzes climate records from these unique but underused caches of sailing logbook records. Further, our project is designed to dovetail with the Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans (CLIWOC) project, which consists of data from over 287,000 logbooks written aboard Dutch, English, French, and Spanish sailing ships. The vast majority of these logbooks date from between 1750 and 1850.5 Finally, by integrating disparate scholarly subfields, historians and oceanographers together can push the climate record back into the first half of the eighteenth century, showing how weather patterns over the oceans have evolved over the past three centuries, with much broader geographical distribution than is currently available to climate scientists.

Instrumental weather data prior to 1900 is sparse, especially for regions beyond Europe and North America, and over the ocean. A growing field of scholarship, namely historical climatology, addresses this knowledge gap by locating, extracting, and interpreting a range of archived historical weather records.3 Building on the lessons and successes of earlier historical climatological research, like the Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions

The United States whaling industry, based in just a handful of New England ports, is perhaps the best documented of any early-modern business endeavor. Vast collections of records that the whaling business produced have been carefully catalogued, preserved in the above-named key New England archives and libraries.6 Of the approximately 15,000 documented “Yankee” whaling voyages, roughly half are accounted for, described in about 5,500 extant logbooks that survive in public repositories or are known to be in private hands.7 Many more are assumed to survive but are either unreported in private collections, or perhaps forgotten, hidden in attic or basement storage. Every year, previously unknown logbooks come to light, newly acquired by repositories through donation or purchase.

This extraordinary body of documentation presents a singular opportunity for climate researchers: through our collaborative project that spans the humanities and hard sciences, historians and climate scientists can derive invaluable, unique logbook weather data going back over 280 years.

Figure 2. Research scene: extracting weather data from the logbook of the whaling ship Isaac Howland of New Bedford, Massachusetts; Tristram Pinkham Swain, Master; Monday, August 13–22, 1836. Special Collections Reading Room, Providence Public Library; Wh I73 1835j, pp. 88–89.

Photo credit: Jayne Doucette/© Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; used with permission

This project initiates and leverages cross-disciplinary international synergies of effort by bringing together a team of experienced researchers in oceanography, climatology, and maritime history.8

Together with a team of student researchers, in 2019 Walker began examining an initial group of logbooks (Figure 3), extracting information from the handwritten entries and entering it into a computer database, from which Ummenhofer and her students can conduct climate analysis. An initial proof-of-concept phase included the examination and data extraction from a group of 150 logbooks, selected purposely to represent chronological and geographical criteria. First, the chosen logs cover a broad range of voyage dates; second, they all chronicle journeys that passed through the Azores archipelago en route to the Indian Ocean—the least

studied of the tropical oceans. The yield of this first phase of archival work, which also facilitated the refinement of the project’s research methodology, was approximately 80,000 days’ worth of data, with each day at sea typically providing three to four weather reports in a 24-hour period.

The COVID-19 pandemic closed archives and slowed the project, but in 2022, having demonstrated the effectiveness of our research concept and methodology, we began expanding our project to include Portuguese naval logbooks archived in Lisbon. Using these two profoundly important but as yet unexploited caches of archival documentation—New England “Yankee” whaler and Portuguese Navy ships’ logbooks—our project assesses historical weather patterns over the far reaches of the world’s oceans, rarely visited and largely undocumented by other global mariners between approximately 1740 and World War Two.

Until the early twentieth century, most weather observations given in the New England whaling logbooks, as well as the Portuguese, were almost always qualitative descriptive terms using a specialized nautical vocabulary common to age-ofsail mariners. To convey meaning accurately to other contemporary professional mariners during the sailing ship era, the language whalers used to describe weather phenomena had to be consistent and coherent. Thus, the shipboard terms that officers used to describe weather at sea were remarkably standardized, making it possible for modern researchers to assign quantitative values to historical qualitative terms.9 For example, when a logbook keeper wrote that his ship experienced winds described in the log as a “fresh breeze” or a “strong gale,” climate researchers today can match these terms to the Beaufort Wind Force Scale, devised by the Irish hydrographer Francis Beaufort in 1805, to derive a quantitative wind speed value.10 While approximate, of course, this method yields weather data for remote times and places—regions of the globe rarely visited by other mariners—that cannot

Figure 3. Dr. Timothy D. Walker, maritime historian of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, working to extract and record climate data from a logbook at the Nantucket Historical Association research library reading room. Photo courtesy of Timothy D. Walker

be easily known in other ways, and is therefore of exceptional value to scientists.

Systematic research on Portuguese Navy logbooks archived in Lisbon has not yet begun for this project, but an initial survey has been completed, so some comparative comments are possible. Portuguese Navy logbooks differ from “Yankee” whaling logbooks in a number of significant ways. First, the date range of the Lisbon collection is longer, running from the 1760s (following the massive earthquake of 1755 that destroyed earlier records) to the 1960s. Military ships typically carried larger crews that operated these vessels with greater regimentation. There were numerous junior officers whose on-board training regimen included logbook-keeping and making navigational calculations. Hence, the logbooks of the Portuguese Navy tend to be quite detailed (Figure 4), with more frequent wind and weather observations given each day while underway (sometimes even hourly), in comparison to the more relaxed log-keeping habits of the New England whalers. Beginning during the late nineteenth century, Portuguese naval vessels began to carry more sophisticated nautical instrumentation than the earlier whalers had, so we expect that the data available from these ships will be more precise. So, later Portuguese logbook records may even provide instrumental measurements for surface air temperature and pressure.

Because the focus of this research begins in the mid-eighteenth century, the project chronology tracks with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and follows the subsequent expansion of human fossil fuel use globally. So, this research can help provide insights about alterations consequent to expanding industrialization during this key period of history—sometimes called “the Great Acceleration” of the Anthropocene era.11 Once immersed in archival investigation, poring through scores of volumes of preserved manuscript records, project researchers are likely to uncover additional unexpected data.

It is important to stress that, unlike the wealth of information that earlier researchers have already retrieved from British, French, and Spanish mercantile or military age-of-sail logbooks,12 extant New England whaling and Portuguese Navy logbook collections from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries are underused for this purpose. Additionally, whaling and Portuguese Navy records provide a much broader, more diverse global geographic coverage than do the logbooks from most other contemporary sailing vessels, which tended to closely follow what were, even by the mid-1600s, well-established sea lanes, for reasons of navigational efficiency and safety. Put simply, the whalers and the Portuguese military ships regularly sailed in waters where other European vessels rarely ventured, so the weather data they collected is valuable, and can fill in critical gaps in the historical

Figure 4. Logbook page of the Portuguese Royal Navy brigantine Audaz on a voyage from the Cape Verde Islands to Angola (August 27–28,1848); Arquivo Histórico da Marinha, Nr. 1159 (6-VII-6-3). Photo courtesy of the Arquivo Histórico da Marinha, Belém, Portugal

climate record. The meteorological and hydrographic data in these logbooks cover the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian oceans—including coastal regions of former Portuguese colonies in the Mozambique Channel, Arabian Sea, the waters around Madagascar, and transits to/from western India. Moreover, these maritime records predate most extant instrumental maritime weather observations that are useful for climate research.

Project Research Methods

We survey, mine, and analyze age-of-sail logbooks, along with related documentation, held in various libraries and archives in New England and Portugal. We first assessed this material, identifying and compiling lists of relevant logbooks; we then began to systematically extract the required data and enter it into a purpose-built, dedicated project database using a webpage with fillable data fields—from which it can be exported for climate data analysis. To date (late November 2023), researchers have analyzed approximately 150 whaling logbooks and collected about 86,000 individual days’ worth of data. Each day contains, on average, three separate weather observations.

To check the consistency of weather data reported in the logbooks of different vessels, researchers are tasked with noting when two or

more ships are navigating in the same place at the same time. Portuguese military vessels often sailed jointly as part of a flotilla or squadron. Whaling vessels were usually solitary sailors; as competitors for the same prey, they rarely navigated in company with other whaling ships for any length of time. However, while cruising the waters within known whaling grounds around the globe, encounters between whaleships at sea were relatively common. The whalemen noted such encounters in their logbook entries, naming familiar whaleships, aboard which they often had family or friends. A normal practice when two or more whaling vessels would meet on the high seas was to “speak” a passing vessel, exchanging basic information rapidly, including longitude calculations to check their position reckoning. Whaling captains might even decide to heave to and have a “gam”—a longer visit when crewmen could board another vessel to exchange news, supplies, or, if one of the ships was homeward bound, send letters to family.13 Such incidents allow cross-reference and comparison of weather observation data in each vessel’s logbook, to ensure that atmospheric conditions are being consistently reported. That is, when archival researchers know that two ships were in the same place at the same time, they can compare the two vessels’ logbook entries to see if they are in agreement.

Figure 5. Freehand illustration of Saint Helena Island, Atlantic Ocean; in the journal of Robert Weir, aboard the whaling bark Clara Bell of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts; March 27, 1856. Mystic Seaport Museum; G. W. Blunt White Library; Log 164

An important point to highlight is that this work cannot at present be done by computer or machine reading. No two logbooks are alike (Figures 4‒10). The paleography (old-style cursive handwriting) is varied and complex, with spelling, grammar, and abbreviations that are not standardized. Further, the organization and the penmanship of every logbook is unique. The formatting of the unruled pages is idiosyncratic, as varied as the personalities of each log keeper. Extracting data, therefore, depends on trained human readers who not only can decipher archaic cursive penmanship but also recognize historical maritime jargon—the esoteric vocabulary of professional seamen prior to mechanized seafaring. Computer analysis or even transcription of this manuscript material is simply beyond the capacity of current digital technology.14

By following research protocols established by the ACRE and Old Weather projects, historical records’ estimates of marine and coastal weather conditions can be quantified to be of use for climate analysis purposes. Portuguese ships’ records in particular are likely to supply a complementary dataset to existing records, since most shipping in the age of sail followed seasonal winds, but maritime routes heading toward disparate Portuguese colonial enclaves allow for the collection of weather pattern information well outside of regions known or typically frequented by other European powers, for which we have data.

After relevant information from the historical logbook documents is transcribed and recorded, qualitative descriptive terms are then interpreted and encoded into quantitative formats. The Old Weather project employs similar logbooks from various whaling archives (but focused instead on the Arctic region to collect data on northern hemisphere sea ice coverage,15 rather than general weather across global oceanic regions). In due course, project data is intended to complement efforts by the ACRE project team, as well as ICOADS.

Recorded information about marine weather conditions will be quantified to address salient scientific questions of current climate research—again following protocols established by ACRE and the Old Weather project. These include measuring the robustness and the long-term context of variations in the Earth’s atmospheric circulation, namely changes in “basin-scale”16 surface wind and pressure patterns, such as the equatorial trade winds, global monsoons, or storm tracks.

The systematic daily meteorological information obtained from a ship can provide revealing information to modern researchers, giving valuable (if limited) insights about the surface wind conditions encountered, particularly over areas with historically poor data coverage—as is the case with the ocean regions where many New England whalers and Portuguese Navy vessels navigated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the absence of any data at all for a given time and place, a ship’s logbook can provide a window on past weather.

Figure 6. “What Is Your Longitude?” flag hoist; journal of a voyage of the whaling bark Smyrna of New Bedford, Massachusetts; George Bliss, Master; Sunday, July 5, 1857; encounter with the whaler Elizabeth; South Atlantic Ocean. Special Collections, Providence Public Library; Wh S667 1853j, p. 279. Photo courtesy of the Providence Public Library

Figure 7. Representative pages from the logbook of the whaling bark Charles W. Morgan of New Bedford, Massachusetts; voyage of 1841–1845; November 9–21, 1844. Mystic Seaport Museum; G. W. Blunt White Library; Log 143, pp. 65–66

Figure 8. Representative pages from the logbook of the whaling ship Neptune of New London, Connecticut; voyage of 1842–1844; December 29, 1842–January 6, 1843. Mystic Seaport Museum; G. W. Blunt White Library; Log 63

For examples of geographic areas where this research can shed useful new light, consider the following: due to North Atlantic prevailing wind and current patterns, almost all whaling vessels that departed from New England ports passed either near or through the Azores archipelago. Data gathered from these Atlantic Ocean voyages could allow tracking of variability and change in the Azores High, a large subtropical semipermanent center of high atmospheric pressure critical to regional weather. For example, the Azores High steers rain-bearing weather systems that bring moisture to Western Europe, including the Iberian Peninsula. It is also a core region of interest due to its associated wind patterns that age-of-sail mariners had to contend with during their voyages.

A similar high-pressure center exists over the South Indian Ocean, which is another main focus area of this project. The Indian Ocean has experienced robust warming trends in recent decades, yet the region suffers from particularly sparse long-term instrumental weather observations. The Indian Ocean is the least observed tropical-temperate ocean; it is also particularly vulnerable to human influences.17 One of the defining characteristics of the region, the South Asian monsoon system, is the largest of Earth’s monsoon systems, and thus an important part of the global atmospheric circulation. Moreover, the Asian monsoon is a vital source of freshwater for the mostly agrarian societies surrounding the Indian Ocean, with well over a billion people vulnerable to the vagaries of the monsoon and its effects on agriculture and economic well-being. This research project aims to provide a long-term context for variability of winds and pressure changes across the Indian Ocean.

We intend to combine our newly recovered historical data with existing observational and reanalysis information to understand how wind patterns in the North Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans have varied in the past across a range of timescales

from seasonal and decadal to multi-decadal timescales. Of particular interest are changes in strength and position (latitudinal and meridional) of the subtropical high systems complementing paleoclimate records,18 as well as changes in the monsoon in the Indian Ocean (especially seasonality and timing of the arrival of the monsoon winds).

Project Challenges—Keeping Researchers on Target

One of the challenges for the project researchers (who are mostly graduate and undergraduate students) is to keep on task with their eyes on the prize—collecting key weather data—and not get distracted by the abundance of fascinating human interest detail found in the whaleship logbooks. Because they were intended to be a legal record of all important events on board during a given voyage, logbooks often contain, written alongside the mundane weather and navigation information, riveting insights into the arcane lives of long-ago crew members. Whaling was a dangerous business. Untimely deaths by drowning, falling from the rigging aloft, having a whaleboat stove in by a leviathan’s flukes, or other accidents, are all too frequent occurrences described in the curt prose of voyage records. Tensions between crew members, living for years together in the tight confines of the forecastle, sometimes boiled over into fights with lethal consequences.

A single vessel can provide multiple examples of the drama and misfortune that might befall a whaling ship’s company on multiyear voyages to the other side of the world. As a case in point, the bark Atlantic sailed from New Bedford under the command of Benjamin Franklin Wing on October 2, 1865, bound for the Cape of Good Hope and the Indian Ocean. This vessel had been at sea for nearly nine months when racial tensions among the crew erupted into violence. On May 22, 1866, the African American cook, James Brown, stabbed

a European-descended Yankee seaman, James M. Foster, with a double-edged knife, inflicting a mortal wound. The log entry notes that Brown, who was described as “mulatto” in the Atlantic crew roster, was overheard justifying his assault because Foster had referred to him using an ugly racial slur. The ship’s officers responded to this murder by clapping the perpetrator in double irons, and setting a course to Port Louis in Mauritius, where on May 29 “Brown the Assassin,” under authority of the U.S. Consul there, was transferred to a homeward-bound whaler, the bark Osceola II of New Bedford (operated by the same consortium of ship owners as the Atlantic), so he could be tried in the United States.19

Six months later, while cruising the Mauritius whaling grounds east of Madagascar, the Atlantic suffered a serious head-on collision after midnight on November 12, 1866, with a vessel the crew was not able to identify—though it was not another whaler. The force of the collision carried away the Atlantic’s entire head rig: the jibboom and bowsprit, figurehead, starboard headrails, anchor, and cathead; it also broke the fore topmast and sprung the foremast. When hailed, the captain of the unknown vessel, described in the Atlantic logbook as a “large double topsail ship…painted dark…with a considerable gilt work about her stern,” refused to identify himself or his ship. However, before proceeding on his journey he acknowledged his fault in the accident, saying that the whaler had had the right of way—which explains his desire to remain anonymous. Following this extraordinary hit-and-run incident, the Atlantic was left to limp back to Mauritius, where a steam tug towed her into Port Louis. There the unfortunate whaler was surveyed for insurance purposes, after which the crew conducted extensive, time-consuming, and very costly repairs.20

Misfortune continued to stalk captain Benjamin Franklin Wing and the bark Atlantic in the

waters around Mauritius. A decade later, not far from the scene of the nocturnal collision, the same whaler suffered what the voyage logbook termed “a disaster at sea.” On June 10, 1877, two entire whaleboat crews—ten men altogether—were lost in a single evening when, as night set in, a storm blew up unexpectedly while the boats were away from the ship in pursuit of their prey. The remaining crew aboard ship kept lanterns hung in the rigging all night to guide the boats home, but several strong squalls swept the area, and at daybreak no sign of the whaleboats was visible to the horizon. Although the Atlantic cruised the immediate vicinity for six days, hoping the men would find their way back, eventually the captain decided to sail to Mauritius in hopes that his crewmen had somehow managed to make landfall there and save themselves. Such was not to be, unfortunately.21 This lone incident accounted for the loss of nearly one third of the Atlantic’s entire crew.

Project Goals and Objectives

Clearly, whaling and Portuguese Navy logbooks are indispensable records, an invaluable resource for creating climate reconstructions. Experts of the global ACRE Project have identified these caches of preserved records as important for ongoing climate research. These collections contain unique indications of weather conditions—evidence from all over the world, at known, carefully recorded places and times, representing literally millions of daily weather observations for the world’s maritime regions. This material needs to be inventoried, scanned, and digitized by skilled archival specialists, and then analyzed by academics for climate data. Advocating for, facilitating, and assisting in the digital preservation of this material is an additional central project goal. While images of logbooks will not be included in the project weather data database, having entire whaling logbook collections made freely available to the public

as high-definition digital images on the Internet Archive22 is key to the project’s research model, allowing for the data mining and analysis of these maritime records from any computer at any time. Digitized Portuguese naval records will be maintained on the website of the Historical Archive of the Portuguese Navy.23

In the coming years, this research project will build up a vast mosaic of weather data points from thousands of vessel logbooks. All together, we have identified approximately 6,400 U.S. and Portuguese logbooks to mine for this study. Based on our experience to date, about 500 days’ worth of data can be derived from an average whaling logbook—though no two logbooks are the same, and voyage lengths varied tremendously, from six months to several years in duration. Seagoing vessels typically recorded their position (latitude and longitude) at noon; the whalers logged weather conditions two to four times a day, while Portuguese naval logbooks commonly include eight or more daily weather observations.

Our project will add significantly to the vast stock of historical data points that already exists for other early European and American vessels. Because of the geographical distribution of Portuguese colonial spaces, and of the global whaling grounds frequented by whalemen, these records collectively constitute unique extant historical material, documenting weather data in far-flung, isolated, and understudied places.

Our project aims to document nearly three centuries of weather and climate variability related to large-scale oceanic wind patterns; it will allow us to assess how changes in maritime weather observed in recent decades fit into a long-term context— something currently severely hampered by the availability of only a short instrumental record for many remote ocean regions. Given its innovative and interdisciplinary nature, this work will also serve as a general proof-of-concept project, that can inspire analogous future projects using additional sources, expanding this promising approach

Figure 9. Page from a journal kept by David Young aboard the whaling ship Franklin of Sag Harbor, New York, with land profile drawings; voyage of 1833–1837; March 14–18, 1835. Mystic Seaport Museum; G. W. Blunt White Library; Log 898

to other untapped archives in the U.S., Portugal, and beyond. This work aims ultimately to help scientists and public policy makers with a practical understanding of past climatic variability—with a view toward addressing the many modern-day challenges of societal vulnerability to extreme weather and climate change.

Innovation and Anticipated Project Impact

The first intended impact of the project is to extend known climate and weather records in the Indian and Atlantic oceans. It is crucial to gain a better understanding of the Indian Ocean’s variability and long-term trends, which have large implications for rainfall and drought in surrounding countries. The project will provide new data from data-sparse regions of the world’s oceans, going centuries further back in time than is currently possible. This temporal extension and geographic infilling will strengthen ongoing international efforts (of which the ACRE and Old Weather project databases are integral parts) that form the backbones of climatological datasets upon which reanalyses and other climate scholarship depends.

The second intended impact of the project involves education and collaboration. Beyond the implications for science, the project provides an opportunity to create collaborative interdisciplinary working relationships between Portuguese and U.S.-based researchers. This interaction will build international research capacities and strengthen ties between several institutions of higher learning in Europe and the U.S. Further, this project will help to educate the next generation of interdisciplinary scientists by mentoring and training students across several fields: in archival historical research, physical oceanography, climate science, and paleo-reconstructions.

The primary tangible project outputs will be the project database and research articles showcasing the project’s research methodology in scholarly journals in several research fields: maritime and early modern Portuguese history, and climate

Figure 10. Page from the logbook of the whaling bark Congress of Mystic, Connecticut; voyage of 1842–1844; January 24–27, 1844, with drawings of ships they encountered and a whale. Mystic Seaport Museum; G. W. Blunt White Library; Log 770

science. This research complements other efforts by, for example, ACRE, to inform a much larger ongoing international effort using age-of-sail logbooks and other maritime records to gather and assess historical climate data.

Disclosures: No potential conflicts of interest to report. Funding from the Henry L. & Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation, National Science Foundation under BCS-1852647, FM Global, the UMASSD Provost Office, and the James E. and Barbara V. Moltz Fellowship for Climate-Related Research at WHOI.

Acknowledgments: This work was supported by the Henry L. & Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation, National Science Foundation under BCS1852647, and FM Global (all to CCU and TDW). TDW gratefully acknowledges support from the UMASSD Provost Office, and CCU the James E. and Barbara V. Moltz Fellowship for Climate-Related Research at WHOI. Archival research by Abigail Field, Len Travers, Madison Eastman, Michael Zajac, Stephen Luce, Samuel Chace, Riley O’Connor, Amanda Cutler, Jennifer Sullivan, Olivia Weise, Aidan Barlow-Diemer, Sandra Cruickshank, and Maria Rocha is gratefully acknowledged.

Endnotes

1 Richard King, Kripa Bansal, Mia Hines, et al., “Captain Joy’s Last Voyage: What a Whaling Captain’s Logbook Can Teach us about Sperm Whales and our Oceans,” in Earth Island Journal , Summer 2023, https://www.earthisland. org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/how-data-from-whalers-logbooksinform-marine-and-climate-research.

2 Not all the volumes in these collections are logbooks suitable for the project’s planned research, so the figure of 4,200 usable documents is an estimate from the 4,450 volumes held in these repositories.

3 Martin J. Ingram, David J. Underhill, and Tom M. L. Wigley, “Historical Climatology,” Nature 276, no. 5686 (1978): 329–334; Rudolf Brázdil, Christian Pfister, Heinz Wanner, Hans Von Storch, and Jürg Luterbacher, “Historical Climatology in Europe–the State of the Art,” Climatic Change 70 (2005): 363–430; Dagomar Degroot, Kevin Anchukaitis, Martin Bauch, et al., “Towards a Rigorous Understanding of Societal Responses to Climate Change,” Nature 591 (2021): 539–50, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586021-03190-2; Dagomar Degroot and Steven Ottens, “Climatological Database of the World’s Oceans,” Historical Climatology, accessed November 6, 2023, www.historicalclimatology.com/cliwoc.html); Dagomar Degroot, Kevin Anchukaitis, Jessica Tierney, et al., “The History of Climate and Society: A Review of the Influence of Climate Change on the Human Past,” Environmental Research Letters, 17 (2022), doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ac8faa; Sam White, Qing Pei, Katrin Kleemann, et al., “New Perspectives on Historical Climatology,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 14, no. 1 (2023): https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcc.808.

4 Respectively, http://www.met-acre.org/; https://icoads.noaa.gov/ and https://www.oldweather.org/. The research output of these initiatives is extensive, but representative examples include, for ACRE: Rob Allan, Philip Brohan, Gilbert P. Compo, et al., “The International Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) Initiative,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 92 no. 11 (2011): 1421–1425; for ICOADS: Scott D. Woodruff, Henry F. Diaz, Steven J. Worley, et al., “Early Ship Observational Data and Icoads,” Climatic Change 73 (2005): 169–194, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-005-3456-3; Eric Freeman, Scott D. Woodruff, Steven J. Worley, et al., “ICOADS Release 3.0: A Major Update to the Historical Marine Climate Record,” International Journal of Climatology 37 (2017): 2211–2232, https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.4775; and for Old Weather: Philip Brohan, Rob Allan, J. Eric Freeman, et al., “Marine Observations of Old Weather,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 90 (2009): 219–230, https://doi.org/10.1175/2008BAMS2522.1

5 R. García-Herrera, G.P. Können, D.A. Wheeler, et al., “CLIWOC: A Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans 1750–1854,” Climatic Change 73 (2005): 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-005-6952-6; G.P. Können and F.B. Koek, “Description of the Cliwoc Database,” Climatic Change 73 (2005): 117–130, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-005-6946-4; P.D. Jones and M. Salmon, “Preliminary Reconstructions of the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Southern Oscillation Index from Measures of Wind Strength and Direction Taken During the Cliwoc Period,” Climatic Change 73 (2005): 131–154, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-005-6948-2; Degroot and Ottens, “Climatological Database of the World's Oceans” (2021) (available at: www.historicalclimatology.com/cliwoc.html).

6 See Michael P. Dyer, “O’er the Wide and Tractless Sea”: Original Art of the Yankee Whale Hunt (New Bedford: Old Dartmouth Historical Society/New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2017), 13–17; 39–47.

7 Judith Navas Lund, Elizabeth A. Josephson, Randall R. Reeves, and Tim D. Smith, American Offshore Whaling Voyages, 1667–1927, vol. 1 (New Bedford: Old Dartmouth Historical Society/New Bedford Whaling Museum, 2010),

4–5. See also Stuart C. Sherman (compiler), Judith M. Downey, and Virginia M. Adams (editors), Whaling Logbooks and Journals, 1613–1927 (New York: Garland, 1986), vii–viii.

8 Evan Lubofsky, “Mining Climate Clues from our Whaling Past,” Oceanus Magazine 54 (2019): 32-35, https://www.whoi.edu/news-insights/content/ mining-climate-clues-from-our-whaling-past; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, “Mining Climate Data through Historical Records,” https:// ummenhofer.whoi.edu/historical-records/.

9 See Roberto Gustavo Herrera, Ricardo García-Herrera; Luis Prieto, et al., CLIWOC multilingual meteorological dictionary, An English-Spanish-DutchFrench dictionary of wind force terms used by mariners from 1750–1850 (De Bilt, Netherlands: Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, 2003).

10 United Kingdom Meteorological (MET) Office, “Beaufort Wind Force Scale,” https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/guides/coast-and-sea/beaufortscale

11 See John Robert McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 1–12.

12 See, for example, W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Jones and Salmon, “Preliminary Reconstructions of the North Atlantic Oscillation,” 131–154; Woodruff et al., “Early Ship Observational Data,” 169–194; Brohan et al., “Marine Observations of Old Weather,” 219–230; Andrew R. Mahoney, John R. Bockstoce, Daniel B. Botkin, et al., “Sea-ice Distribution in the Bering and Chukchi Seas: Information from Historical Whaleships’ Logbooks and Journals,” Arctic (2011): 465–477; David Barriopedro, David Gallego, M. Carmen Alvarez-Castro, et al., “Witnessing North Atlantic Westerlies Variability from Ships’ Logbooks (1685–2008),” Climate Dynamics, 43 (2014): 939–955; Dennis Wheeler, “Hubert Lamb’s ‘Treasure Trove’: Ships’ Logbooks in Climate Research,” Weather 69, no. 5 (2014): 133–139; Matthew Ayre, John Nicholls, Catharine Ward, et al., “Ships’ Logbooks from the Arctic in the Pre-Instrumental Period,” Geoscience Data Journal 2, no. 2 (2015): 53–62; Ricardo Garcia-Herrera, David Barriopedro, David Gallego, et al., “Understanding Weather and Climate of the Last 300 Years from Ships’ Logbooks,” WIREs Climate Change 9 (2018), https://doi. org/10.1002/wcc.544; Javier Mellado-Cano, David Barriopedro, Ricardo García-Herrera, et al., “Euro-Atlantic Atmospheric Circulation during the Late Maunder Minimum,” Journal of Climate 31 (2018): 3849–3863, https://doi. org/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0261.1; Javier Mellado-Cano, David Barriopedro, Ricardo García-Herrera, et al., “Examining the North Atlantic Oscillation, East Atlantic Pattern, and Jet Variability since 1685,” Journal of Climate 32 (2019): 6285–6298, https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-19-0135.1; Javier Mellado-Cano, David Barriopedro, Ricardo García-Herrera, et al., “New Observational Insights into the Atmospheric Circulation over the Euro-Atlantic Sector Since 1685,” Climate Dynamics 54 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-019-05029-z

13 Margaret S. Creighton, Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 82–3, 168–72, 193.

14 That’s not to say that information technology research teams are not trying—several projects based at academic institutions in Europe and North America have been working on this problem, but the results are not yet sufficiently developed to “machine read” and extract the required data from highly varied and often damaged maritime records. See Bram Caers, “Automated Reading of Medieval Manuscripts: An Alternative for Paleography Classes?,” Leiden Medievalists Blog, July 20, 2022, https:// www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/automated-reading-of-medievalmanuscripts-an-alternative-for-palaeography-classes. See also Jenna Schoen and Gianmarco E. Saretto, “Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Medieval

Manuscripts: Reconsidering Transcriptions in the Digital Age,” in Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures 11, no. 1 (2022): 174–206, and Vincent Jolivet, “Handwritten Text Recognition for Documentary Medieval Manuscripts,” in Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities (2023).

15 Mahoney et al., “Sea-ice Distribution,” 465–477; Ayre et al., “Ships’ Logbooks,” 53–62.

16 That is, on the scale of a full ocean basin, with weather patterns influenced by the geography and topography of the region. See Adrian E. Gill, Atmosphere-Ocean Dynamics (San Diego: Academic Press, 1982), 31–38.

17 L.M. Beal, J. Vialard, M. K. Roxy, et al., “A Road Map to IndOOS-2: Better Observations of the Rapidly Warming Indian Ocean,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 101 no. 11 (2020): E1891–E1913.

18 Nathaniel Cresswell-Clay, Caroline C. Ummenhofer, Diana L. Thatcher, et al., “Twentieth-century Azores High Expansion Unprecedented in the Past 1200 Years,” Nature Geoscience, 15 (2022), 548–553; Diana L. Thatcher, A. D. Wanamaker, R. F. Denniston, et al., “Iberian Hydroclimate Variability and the Azores High during the last 1200 Years: Evidence from Proxy Records and Climate Model Simulations,” Climate Dynamics 60 (2023), 2365–2387.

19 Logbook of the Atlantic (bark), of New Bedford, MA; Benjamin Franklin Wing, master, on a whaling voyage between 1865 and 1868 (New Bedford Whaling Museum, number NBWM.ODHS 797), 46–48; May 22–29, 1866.

20 Ibid., 69–74; November 12-December 28, 1866.

21 Logbook of the Atlantic (bark), of New Bedford, MA; Benjamin Franklin Wing, master, on a whaling voyage between 1876 and 1879 (New Bedford Whaling Museum, number NBWM.ODHS 798), June 10–16, 1877.

22 The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library based in the United States, founded in 1996; it provides free access to collections of digitized materials such as websites, music, and audiovisual and print materials. https://archive.org/

23 Historical Archive of the Portuguese Navy, https://ccm.marinha.pt/pt/ biblioteca/arquivohistorico

“The Narraganset Chief, or the Adventures of a Wanderer”: Recovering an Indigenous Autobiography

Jason R. Mancini, Connecticut Humanities Council, Inc., Middletown, CT jmancini@cthumanities.org

Silvermoon Mars LaRose, Narragansett Indian Tribe, Tomaquag Museum, Exeter, RI

Abstract

This article introduces The Narraganset Chief, a recently recovered autobiography written by a Native American mariner and published anonymously in 1832. Portions of the original narrative are woven together with archival research and historical context to present a series of vignettes that illuminate the lives and experiences of three generations of one family from 1760 to 1832. First-person accounts from the authors (one a member of the Narragansett Tribe) also explore the process of recovery, interpretation, and reconnection. Illustrations depict the intersections and disconnections of gender, power, sovereignty, and the sea.

Keywords

Indigenous, reconnection, mariners, autobiography, slave trade, Narragansett Indian Tribe

Submitted July 31, 2023 | Accepted October 25, 2023

“The Narraganset Chief, or the Adventures of a Wanderer”: Recovering an Indigenous Autobiography © 2023 by Jason R. Mancini and Silvermoon Mars LaRose is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 . To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

More than nine million acres of Indian Country in southern New England and Long Island were reduced to less than thirty thousand acres before the American Revolution (1775–1783).1 Following a series of devastating epidemics and genocidal wars, Europeans consolidated control not just over land, but also over legal and economic systems. Indians2 across the region persisted, resisted, and adjusted in different ways to this rapidly changing world. One important and largely unseen shift involved the participation of Indian men in various forms of maritime labor—from shipbuilding to naval service to whaling. Thousands of Indians and those of Indian descent found work in the ports of New London, New Haven, Providence, New York, Sag Harbor, Boston, and New Bedford. The vessels on which these men worked soon connected them to ports around the world.

In popular literature, Tashtego, the Wampanoag harpooner from Martha’s Vineyard in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), may be the closest most readers ever get to imagining Indians at sea. Only recently have scholars of maritime history begun to document and understand Indian presence and experiences on the waters of the world and other places far away from their homelands. 3 New lines of inquiry emerge once Indians are untethered from their supposed place on the land—the reservations. For example, what variables influenced their labor and mobility? How do prolonged absences affect the individual, their family, and tribe? How are identity and race understood and negotiated in different contexts? How did Indians experience other places and other cultures?

Outside of the fragmented archives, oral histories, photographs, illustrations, and belongings (objects) that scholars meticulously weave together, the only known autobiography of a Native American mariner was published by Paul Cuffe, Jr., in 1839. A mariner of Pequot, Wampanoag, and West African descent, his Narrative of The Life and Adven-

Figure 1. Title page of The Narraganset Chief with "Isaac Peirce" penciled in at the top (Mancini, personal copy)

tures of Paul Cuffe, a Pequot Indian: During Thirty Years Spent at Sea, and in Travelling in Foreign Lands provides a twenty-one-page sketch of his travels on some forty voyages to fifteen or more countries.4 It is a window that begins to give shape to the nuances of global travel, labor, and mobility of mariners of color. With Cuffe growing up as the son, namesake, and employee of a wealthy entrepreneur, one might ask if his account is an anomaly or if it is reflective of the experiences of the hundreds (though, more likely, thousands) of other Native mariners.

What if another account existed that allowed us to probe more deeply into the questions asked above? The Narraganset Chief, or the Adventures of a Wanderer (Figure 1)5 is one such text that has been right in front of us for over 190 years.6 Today, it is registered as a work of fiction by the Library of Congress, but when it was published anonymously in June 1832, it rang true enough to the editor of the Quaker publication The Friend; or, Advocate of Truth. In the July edition, he announced, “just received and for sale at this office, ‘the Narraganset Chief, or the Adventures of a Wanderer’—price 50 cents. This is a history of the life and adventures of one of the most singular and extraordinary characters of which I’ve ever read . . . His talents seem to be of the higher order, and the style would not disgrace the best classical scholar of the age.”7 Aside from this review, The Narraganset Chief does not seem to have gained much attention after it was printed in 1832. With 37 known copies in existence, no other mention of its printing or sale in abolitionist or other newspapers has been found.

So why has this book been overlooked for so long? And how can we untangle the mystery of authorship? The Narraganset Chief has been considered a picaresque novel, a fictional genre and an “early form of novel, usually a first-person narrative, relating the adventures of a rogue or lowborn adventurer (Spanish pícaro) as he drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another in his effort to survive.”8 Perhaps one of the

more noteworthy examples of this style emerged only six years after The Narraganset Chief was published when Edgar Allan Poe wrote the fictional account of another young mariner’s adventures in his novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. 9

Complicating matters is the lack of clarity associated with attribution. On six pages of the The Narraganset Chief, the anonymous author references himself as “Charles.” Nothing more is made of this name but, at some point after publication, pencil notations on the title page of known copies of the book attributed authorship to Isaac Peirce. Peirce makes clear that he was responsible only for the editing, however. He also added a declaration of authenticity on the book’s “advertisement” page stating about the anonymous author,

The mysterious stranger, (for he does not wish at present, for reasons rendered sufficiently obvious in the sequel, to give his name to the public,)10 claims descent from a noted chief of the Narraganset tribe of Indians. Ambition to elevate the character of his nation, and “to show the white man that an Indian can write a book,”11 are his avowed motives for preserving a record of his adventures. In relation to the genuineness and authenticity of the narrative, the editor will only observe, that many of the facts have been verified; many more are susceptible of it, if true; or of being disproved, if false.12

Peirce’s connection to the author is best understood through mutual abolitionist sentiments. Based initially in Delaware and then New York City, Peirce was a leader in the region’s anti-slavery movement with mention in such antebellum publications as Freedom’s Journal, The Liberator, National Anti-Slavery Standard, and The Emancipator. 13 He was also a founding officer in the Wilmington Society for the Encouragement of Free Labor and an active delegate in the American Anti-Slavery

Society.14 The anonymous author would have overlapped with Peirce’s political circles since New York is where he occasionally shipped to and from and was his last reported destination prior to publication. If Peirce‘s claim that he was not the author is to be believed, we are left to wonder who was, in fact, “the mysterious stranger.”

The single most important clue to deciphering the anonymous author’s identity emerged a century later in a 1931 New York Times newspaper article with the headline, “Old Manuscript Tells of Lansing the Pirate.”15 The story identifies the author as Charles Lansing. According to the article, the untitled—but edited—manuscript was found at the Kansas farm of Walter Peirce, Isaac Peirce’s grandson. The article goes on to describe many details of Lansing’s life that are reproduced in greater detail in The Narraganset Chief. The book, it seems, had long been forgotten as the New York Times story claims erroneously that the manuscript was never published. A search for the original manuscript has been, thus far, unsuccessful.

Charles Lansing’s 195-page narrative spans fifteen chapters not including the preface and conclusion. His “wanderings” occurred over the course of twenty-five years (between 1806 and 1831). During this time, he sailed on three dozen voyages and further documented his time in twenty countries on five continents. While most of the book is a recounting of his personal experiences, he comes to learn more about the detail of his ancestry and his descent from the titular “Narraganset Chief” that expands the scope of events back in time to the 1760s.16 Through his story, we learn about three generations of men from one family (Figure 2) that illustrate how Native people responded to the maelstrom of empire and the associated acts of violence, disconnection, and racism of colonization. Even with such global turbulence, there was agency and opportunity. Often, as the reader will see, the sea and freedom are entwined.

Beyond authorship, validating Lansing’s account presents many challenges that include:

establishing a basic timeline (given the absence of any dates in the narrative); accessing archives across global repositories, management systems, and languages; and understanding race and identity in the context of colonial systems and policies. More to the point, what available records can be used to confirm his “adventures”? Throughout the published book, he is loath to use dates but frequently recollects and describes events and people in varying detail.

Based on the available information provided in his text, one can reconstruct a rough timeline of events ranging from approximately 1760 to 1832. By carefully cross-referencing the author’s clues with independent archival resources and scholarly works, a sequence of verifiable accounts emerges. Though key events in the narrative have been confirmed by independent archival sources, we remain cautious. That some of Lansing’s narrative is chronologically out of order might be attributed to the editor, the process of recollecting and recording, or to an imperfect human memory.17 He also takes care not to reveal (or possibly obfuscates) certain information involving his criminal activities.18 Some details that have been validated in Lansing’s narrative are so specific that only someone present could be aware.19 And yet, some contemporaneous crew lists do not name “Charles Lansing,” a sign that Lansing may have been using an alias.20

Having confirmed key parts of Charles Lansing’s autobiography (in this essay, his presence on the USS Guerriere), we seek to share raw portions of this extraordinary account as well as some research that has progressed more substantially. In the subsequent accounts, we present a handful of the dozens of stories that, in varying lengths, comprise The Narraganset Chief as written by Charles Lansing. Where possible, this essay is lightly contextualized. The vignettes that follow are labeled with place and date headings and include our own experiences with the recovery and interpretation of The Narraganset Chief. We have reorganized Charles Lansing’s narrative into four sections: PRISONER;

SACHEM (Charles’ grandfather, whom we identify as William Sachem); SLAVE (Charles’ father, who remains unnamed at the time of this writing); and WANDERER (Charles himself).

Dodge City, Kansas. 1931.

With a dateline from Dodge City, Kansas, the New York Times reported on March 4, 1931 the discovery of an “Old Manuscript Tells of Lansing the Pirate— Found in Kansas Farmer’s Home, It Describes Adventures of Ruthless Freebooter” (Figure 3).

The Reno County farmer, Walter Peirce, found the manuscript, titled Adventures of a Wanderer, “while going through old volumes formerly owned by Isaac Peirce, his grandfather, who was once a publisher and bookbinder in Philadelphia” (Figure 4).21 At the time of this discovery, Peirce

Figure 2. Charles Lansing family tree showing his descent from William Sachem (whom we propose is the Narraganset Chief) and connection to King Tom Ninigret. Graphic by Arleen Andersen, Mystic Seaport Museum

Figure 3. New York Times article, March 8, 1931—the first to report the discovery of the manuscript written by Charles Lansing.22 Reproduced by permission from The New York Times Company

was operating a “general farm” in Lincoln Township with his wife and son.23 The report of his “prized antique”24 soon made it to the newspapers 1500 miles (2400 km) away in New York and, a week and a half later, in Rhode Island—in part because of the story’s ties to these places.25

The whereabouts of the manuscript remain unknown.

Westerly, Rhode Island. 1980.

I (Silvermoon Mars LaRose) am Narragansett. I was born in Westerly, Rhode Island, and raised in Charlestown within the boundaries of our tribal reservation. My family’s land, where I grew up, is part of a very small portion of acreage that has never left Native hands. That is what I was always told. This land is important and keeping it in our family is part of a legacy we leave to future generations, an unbroken tie to our traditional homelands. Through centuries of connivance and deceit, our homelands were slowly dispossessed. The few families lucky enough to hold on to these sacred spaces have the burden of fighting to maintain these ancestral ties. It is a constant fight to keep our homelands.

Our tribal nation has always been led by the voice of the people. Our leaders were representing the interests of the community. A sachem acted as the governing head and this individual (male or

female) could be born into that position of leadership, a legacy passed down generationally (Figure 5). However, they had to earn the right to lead by proper representation and service to their community. A sachem could be removed from leadership if the community deemed them inadequate and chose another to lead in their place.

You were only a leader so far as your community followed you. Additionally, the sachem did not act alone, that person would be surrounded by a council of leaders, sub-chiefs if you will, that gave counsel in all matters. The elders of the community acted as advisors, providing insights into past events to inform future decisions. Leaders amongst the women, who controlled matters of home, garden, and food stores, would also be consulted. When I think of leadership in our tribal community, it has always been a collective effort. These communal systems of governance were disrupted by colonization. European invaders equated our Sachems to their Kings, monarchs with power over their citizens. Throughout early colonialization, they sought out leaders to side with them and ignored our structures of government that were meant to keep rogue actions in check. They manipulated, threatened, and even cheated individuals to their will, to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their ancestral lands. This history saw a breakdown in traditional forms of government, pitting leadership against community. In the late eighteenth century, amongst the Narragansett, there was a community movement away from the hereditary Sachem leadership to a body elected council, led by an elected Sachem. This may appear to be a change in tradition, but I see it as a return to traditional values. A government once again led by the people, empowering the voice of each community member, and limiting a governing rule that acts on self-serving interests or can be manipulated by outside influence. However, it is an unfortunate truth of history that this change came too late to stop the misappropriation of our

Figure 4. Youngstown Vindicator story, May 10, 1931—a more expansive account with photographs of the first page and last page of Chapter 1 (page 9 and page 14) of The Adventures of a Wanderer.26

homelands. And so, we do our best to hold on to every meaningful acre we can.

Pequot Indian Reservation—Mashantucket, Connecticut. 2005.

Four years into my role as Senior Researcher at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, I (Jason Mancini) finally began to understand why there were such large gaps in the records of Pequot men on the reservation. The following year, as a newly minted Cuffe Fellow at Mystic Seaport, I began a new phase of my research that eventually became the Indian Mariners Project. The project focused on customs records that, when aggregated, revealed Indians were not only significant to New England’s maritime industries but formed expansive and global social networks around maritime labor.27 These labor networks contributed to the survivance28 of tribal communities through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time when tribes were being deliberately erased from local records.29 While I could document the presence of Native men at sea, and was building an archive of their stories, belongings, and images,

there were few firsthand accounts of their experiences that provided the texture of their lives as they traveled the waters of the world.30

Searching through digitized historic newspaper archives, I found the 1931 New York Times article above. It was here, in the first story I ever encountered about him, that Charles Lansing was fashioned an Indian pirate. It fascinated me. In graduate school, I read Marcus Rediker’s Villains of All Nations and thought hard about how little was known about the “all nations” part of piracy. The exploits of pirate captains such as Bartholomew Roberts, Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, William Kidd, Samuel Bellamy, Charles Vane, Edward Low, and “Calico” Jack Rackham are both celebrated and reviled in popular histories and media. That the stories’ subjects are white and English comes as no surprise. What is overlooked is that estimates of 50 to 60 percent of pirate crews were people of color—Black and Indigenous.31

Astonished by an account of an Indian pirate, I began calling historical societies across Kansas in hopes of locating this reportedly unpublished and annotated work—to no avail.

Figure 5. The Sachem Ship, © 2023 Silvermoon Mars LaRose

As I continued with my research, I made a number of presentations about my findings to the public and to the region’s tribal communities. One presentation in particular, around 2010, was attended by some of my Mohegan friends. After the talk, Faith Davison, a Mohegan tribal elder and archivist (with an encyclopedic memory) approached me to ask if I had ever heard of a book called The Narraganset Chief. I had not but found myself so intrigued that I googled the book as soon as I got home. Indeed, as noted above, the manuscript had been published, albeit anonymously! My path soon crossed with Charles Lansing’s, as I began a nearly twenty-year effort to untangle this story and return it to the Narragansett Indian Tribe.

PRISONER

San Sebastian Prison—Cadiz,, Spain. 1823. Of all of the stories Charles Lansing evokes in The Narraganset Chief, it is his time in a Spanish prison that is the most dramatic and foundational to this essay. For, in the waning pages of his book, Lansing writes of the time in his life when he felt his luck ran out. Along with his shipmates, he was among the newest inmates incarcerated at San Sebastian, a castle-like prison located on a tiny spit of land pointing into the eastern Atlantic Ocean, just outside of the Bay of Cadiz, Spain.

He had spent the prior months along Cape de Gatte on the Argentine privateer, Young Constitution, pursuing English ships loaded with Spanish cargo and looting Spanish galleons. Unable to ignore the disruption to commerce, the Spanish navy caught sight of Lansing’s ship one evening and began pursuit. The Young Constitution ran.

It was the midnight cries from aloft, warning of breaking waves visible only to the lookout, that came too late. The Baltimore-built brig on which Lansing sailed struck a reef. As the currents pushed the vessel higher onto the rocks, the masts shattered, and sailors abandoned ship. Grabbing onto

whatever they could, they became fish in a barrel. The Spanish opened fire. Lansing documented the fate of the few survivors, noting,

They took us in tow. Many of us were mortally wounded, and others bleeding to death for want of medical aid. The frigate sent her boats to take charge of the wreck. We were all bundled on board of the first brig, which immediately set sail for the city of Cadiz. We were allotted a small portion of the birth [sic] deck, where we who were able were allowed to bind up the wounds of our less fortunate shipmates as well as we could, no other succor being granted.

We arrived at Cadiz. We were ironed two and two, and conveyed to prison. Those of us who could walk, were hurried forward, while the disabled were carried in the arms of the soldiers. Although some of the latter might have survived had aid been extended to them, yet a number bled to death in prison. This prison was a large stone building, with a tiled roof and floor, surrounded by a strong wall. It is called St. Sebastian. The ward in which we were confined was about fifty feet by thirty-six. We could have communication with the other wards by gratings. Four sentinels stood at our door, who were regularly relieved. Famished and faint, we threw ourselves upon the pavement, and fell asleep.32

Spain was in turmoil by the early 1820s. It had been for over a decade, since Napoleon destabilized the Spanish monarchy in 1808 and installed his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, as king. The impact was far-reaching as Spain’s colonies on the other side of the Atlantic soon pursued independence and openly rebelled against the crown. The Spanish navy was combatting rebel privateers (on which Lansing served) in fronts in the eastern Mediterranean and along the Argentine coast.

On land, the Constitutionalists, under the guerrilla leader General Francisco Mina, had just suffered a stinging defeat.33 Many of his captured rebel army found themselves sent to San Sebastian. While in the prison yard with the men who served under Mina, Lansing noticed that:

amongst the rest of this rude band, I had observed a man of very peculiar manners and appearance; always pensive and solitary; wandering apart from his fellows, absorbed in gloomy reflection. He seldom spoke to any one, but when he did speak, his delivery was cogent, perspicuous, and graceful. He had an accurate knowledge of the English tongue. His swarthy complexion, long straight hair, and dark piercing eyes, bespoke him a North American Indian, and although his forbidding aspect gave no encouragement to New England curiosity, I felt an indescribable interest in him, and a sort of thrilling sympathy ran through my heart as often as I looked upon him. 34

Eventually, the two began a conversation and inquired about one another. Quickly, almost unbelievably, they realized that they were father and son! It had been twenty years or more since they were last together. Lansing was a young child when his father left home so had no memory of him, only stories from his mother. In this most unlikely place, they enjoyed a fortuitous, but brief, reunion. And, though they engaged as combatants in different theaters, they fought towards a common purpose—not just for independence, but against absolute power of European sovereigns.

As they shared more about their experiences, Lansing soon learned about his grandfather. His father related that:

my father was one of the greatest Chiefs belonging to the Narragansett tribe of Indians.

Although he had long been forced to leave his native soil, and flee far to the west, still he possessed sufficient power and interest to secure him a peaceful possession in the western wild; this spot, however, attracted the attention of those white speculators who had warred upon us from the beginning. 35

With his luck turned, this improbable, yet entirely possible, meeting connected Lansing to his people and to a different time.36 It was the key to unlocking his identity and a roadmap in his search for others like him.

SACHEM

Narragansett Indian Reservation—Charlestown, Rhode Island. 1772.

Charles Lansing’s chance encounter with his father was revelatory. As the search for prisoner records continues, even the most doubtful reader must wonder, what more can be made of this unnamed Narragansett chief and how does the arc of his life connect to the clues in Lansing’s narrative?

My (Mancini) research took me through many archival sources that contained lists of Narragansett names—sometimes hundreds of names. They appear in the Colonial Records of Rhode Island, census records, Papers of Sir William Johnson, Ezra Stiles Itineraries, letters and records associated with the Wheelock School, Brothertown migration history, Charlestown (Rhode Island) Land Records, local histories, and more.37 Throughout this search, the clues guided me to eliminate the following: women (obviously); men who died before or after key dates established in my timeline; enlisted men who died during the French and Indian War or the American Revolution; men who migrated away from Narragansett homelands and later returned; men who died in Rhode Island; converts to Christianity; literate men; and, men

who were not in positions of authority. This process focused my attention on a critical and transformative time in Narragansett tribal history: the sachemship of Thomas Ninigret, the role of his councilors or chiefs, and the rise of the anti-sachem party within the tribe.38

Over the course of months of searching, one name emerged from hundreds: William Sachem. What follows is the backstory to The Narraganset Chief.

It was by December 1772 that William Sachem had had enough. Sachem, as his surname suggests, was a member of the extended “royal” family of the Narragansett Tribe. Confronted with signing another deed transferring Narragansett lands out of tribal possession, he refused.39 As one of the principal councilors or “chiefs” of the tribe, he was in the unenviable position of settling the estate of the recently deceased Thomas Ninigret or “King Tom,” late sachem (leader) of the Narragansett Tribe of Indians.

King Tom ascended to the leadership of the Narragansett tribe a quarter of a century earlier, in 1746, after his father passed away. By King Tom’s time, the tribal reservation of approximately ten thousand acres was a mere residue of what Narragansett homelands had been when Europeans first arrived in the region. Here, in the southern coastal town of Charlestown, is where the Narragansett Indian reservation was located and where tensions over the power and rights of the sachem soon divided the tribe.

At his ascension, when he was an impressionable child of ten years, young Tom was separated from his peers and sent away to schools in Newport, Rhode Island and at Oxford University in Oxford, England. In these places, among powerful elites and far from his “royal” parents, he learned to live a privileged and ostentatious life. These early experiences proved formative and starkly disconnected from the needs and inter-

ests of the tribe. This upbringing eventually came at great expense to both Ninigret and his tribe.40

After returning from his education in England, Tom set his mind to building an English-style estate on the reservation, later known as “King Tom Farm.” He lavishly entertained guests and commissioned the building of a personal sailing vessel. Such splendor was not free. Through the 1750s, as he accumulated material wealth, he also acquired numerous creditors. Beginning in 1759, those creditors came calling. As he learned from his father, to settle debts, he began to sell the one thing of value to the English and also what mattered most to his tribe—the land. Between 1759 and 1766, King Tom sold nearly 5500 acres—roughly half of the remaining Narragansett land—to settle his “just debts.” These sales resulted in the removal of Narragansett families from their homes, limiting access to the salt ponds they used for fishing (a critical part of tribal subsistence).41

As panic began to set in among members of the tribe, an anti-sachem party led by Samuel Niles emerged. (Niles was a tribal member and Christian minister who established and led an independent Narragansett church.42) This faction of the tribe petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly for an intervention. Unsuccessful, they brought their case to the attention of Sir William Johnson, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the American Colonies.43

By 1767, Ninigret’s life began to unravel. Following a public divorce from his wife, “Idleness and intemperance soon reduced him to poverty and wretchedness. His authority was denied him; his friends deserted him; and, in brief, most of his property passed out of his hands to cancel his debts.”44 All of his fortunes had evaporated and he was now alone. As it was noted in a Historical Sketch of Charlestown, Rhode Island, “his wife [Mary], and Thomas Ninigret, his only son, left him and emigrated to the West.”45 After a decade

of tumult, fatefully, perhaps suspiciously, Thomas Ninigret met his end, reportedly by falling off a horse late in 1769.

Tom Ninigret’s council, which enabled much of his behavior earlier that decade, was now responsible for cleaning up the mess and clearing his debt. The council was composed of five men, all “chiefs” or principal men of the tribe.46 Of these men, only William Sachem had an especially important relationship with “King Tom”—he was Tom’s maternal uncle (see Figure 2). This uncle-nephew relationship in Narragansett country was precious and central to the governing authority and structure of the tribe.47 In fact, what stands out in the midst of the flurry of Ninigret’s land sales to white “yeomen” is a parcel that he transacted in July 1767 “in Consideration of ye love good will and Effection I Have and do bare unto my beloved Uncle William Sachem,” and his children and grandchildren.48 Of the thousands of acres of land Ninigret sold away from the tribe, the 181.5 acres granted to William Sachem was the only land privately granted to another tribal member/family.

William Sachem and the council were now in control and went about completing the unfortunate business of selling Narragansett lands to satisfy Tom’s creditors. It was King Tom’s farm that William refused to sell. Rhode Island authorities noted the act as an obstruction, albeit temporary. The last known land transfer aimed at settling Ninigret’s debts occurred in January 1773 without William Sachem’s mark (signature).49 Four years later, Sachem vanished from Rhode Island records.50

According to my research in the historical archives of Rhode Island, William Sachem’s last act in the colony was one of defiance. If, for now, we can hypothesize that the Narragansett Chief was indeed Sachem, then we might just see a connection in the prison yard story that Lansing shared in his book. In the dying words of the Narragansett Chief, he remained defiant. As remembered by his son and memorialized in his grandson Charles

Lansing’s book, he gasped: “I am going away to those fair regions which lie beyond the setting sun. Remember the last words of your father: Never forgive, never unite with the whites; but injure them whenever it lies in your power.”51

SLAVE

To date, with a paucity of supporting documentary evidence about Lansing’s father, we are left to interpret clues about his life from the secondhand account related in The Narraganset Chief. The search for corroborating archives and oral histories continues.

Oneida/Haudenosaunee homelands, New York. Ca. 1783.

During his time with Lansing in San Sebastian prison, Lansing’s father recounted his own story, claiming, “’Ere I was born, the contractors had so far overcome my father’s scruples as to gain his approbation of selling part of the land to the United States.”52 In the immediate aftermath of American victory in the American Revolution, the state of New York and land companies learned from their predecessors in New England and accelerated the process of dispossession through the legal and political processes. The expropriation was so rapid that in the thirteen-year period between 1784 and 1797, the Haudenosaunee lost control of the western half of New York and northwestern Pennsylvania. This included, on one day in 1787, approximately 13 million acres.53

As Native people migrated and relocated across the region, the Oneida worked to secure what remained of their homelands and to maintain a strong Indian presence. Earlier in the century, they welcomed the Tuscarora from the region that is now North Carolina, and following the American Revolution, they invited members of New England tribes, such as the Stockbridge Mohican (from western Massachusetts) and Brothertown

(from Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Long Island, New York) to join them.54

After the sale of tribal land, Lansing’s father goes on to say that

at the same time they proposed, that at my birth, (my mother being then pregnant,) I should be taken to the seaboard, and trained up and educated in the English style. In a weak hour, they likewise prevailed with him to join in the cause of civilization!55 Accordingly I was brought up and educated among the whites, and early imbibed a sufficiency of their manners and customs to believe that they were in the right and we were in the wrong.56

Following generations of praying towns, Christian missionaries, the Wheelock school, and others, this was part of the Indian education experience before the Federal-era Indian boarding schools that sought to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”57

Later in their exchange, “hearing of a legacy left me by my father, I [Lansing’s father] ventured to show myself, and was commissioned to go to Congress.”58 This clue in the text points to Oneida lands in central New York. By the late 1790s, the only land claims or reparations available at the time to Indians were through provisions laid out in the 1794 treaty between the United States Congress and the Oneida, Tuscarora, and Stockbridge Mohican.59 In spite of all else, this was an acknowledgment of their service to the United States, when all other Haudenosaunee fought alongside the British.

Peaceful relations in the region did not last long and, as the United States began to assert control over more and more land, conflict became inevitable. For all Indian nations, the incursion into their homelands was a grave and intolerable affront.

Northwest Indian Wars. Ca. late 1780s–mid-1790s Lansing continued reporting his father’s story in The Narraganset Chief. While at school in the East, he learned of a “disturbance upon the western frontiers” and set out to visit his father’s [the Narragansett Chief] village. “After a weary journey, I arrived at the spot where late my father and all his friends had been driven from their homes now chased farther into the wilderness towards the Pacific surges.”60 He arrived soon after “a band of murderers, under the sanction of the United States government, had that evening surrounded the defenceless village, burned, murdered, and plundered it. I met a party of Indians retreating before the troops of captain Boltworth."61 The expansion of American empire across Indian Country was just the beginning of the long “trail of broken treaties.”62 The succeeding dispossession and dislocation soon saw Indian peoples occupying the world’s stage.

Napoleon’s Army—Acre [now Akko, Israel]. 1799. In despair, Lansing’s father recalled that “seeing all my prospects ruined in America, I fled to Europe; I went with Napoleon to Egypt; and at the battle of Acre63 was taken prisoner, and carried to Constantinople, thence to Algiers, where I remained a slave.”64 Constantinople,65 the capital of the Ottoman Empire, drew in the survivors of Napoleon’s defeated army and then dispersed them across its vast Mediterranean reach. Algiers, the capital city of the North African country of Algeria, was a key port city in the Ottoman trade networks and a home base of the Barbary pirates that threatened American and European commerce.

I fell into the hands of a humane master, who entrusted me freely with his affairs, and allowed me considerable liberty. He had several other slaves, amongst whom were a Circassian lady, with a beautiful daughter. Between them I soon contracted an intimacy. I

became attached to the daughter, and she soon showed some partiality for me. I resolved to effect my escape, and to carry off the fair creature with me.

My master had a small schooner, in which he had made several trips to Gibralter, and although he had once ventured to take me with him, I saw no opportunity to make my escape. Another voyage was now contemplated. On the night before our departure, I prevailed on a Moor, whom I had bound to my interest, to convey my dulcinea on board the schooner, and secrete her below deck. We sailed early the next morning. The wind proved favorable. In the course of several days we reached the coast of Old Spain, and Cape Palliser hove in sight. "Now," said I to Sidi the Moor—"now is our time, if we would regain our liberty." My master, with two Moors, was then asleep below, and there was not a breeze upon the wave. We took some fire down into the hold and kindled a blaze, jumped into the boat with my girl, and pulled for the shore.66

Freedom. For a time . . .

WANDERER

Near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. 1806.

“Nine winters had passed over me,” Charles Lansing (b. ca. 1797) begins his story about becoming aware that he was different.67 Until that moment, “I had not perceived, in all that time, that I was other in form, feature, or complexion, than my associates.”68 Raised in a remote town in rural northwestern Massachusetts, he remembered the moment clearly: “I was a schoolboy. My playmates first taught me to repine. It was an afternoon in the month of May, when I ran home to my mother, and in the anguish of my spirit, begged to know if I was indeed stigmatized by that stamp, which had

procured me the derision of my school-fellows.”69 Dispirited, Lansing remembered of his mother:

she caught me in her arms, and, affected by the artless simplicity of my question and manner, burst into tears. She told me, that I was indeed distinguished from my fellows, by a darker hue than that which now marks the lords of the soil, but that the original inhabitants of the country wore the same swarthy complexion and sable straight hair which was condemned by the usurpers of this fair region.70

I was—"a [fucking] Indian.”71

Of the nearly 34,000 inhabitants of Berkshire County in 1800, only 494 were Black (less than 1.5 percent). Though Indians weren’t counted, there were almost certainly fewer at that point, as the remaining Mohican lands at Stockbridge were overrun by white settlers. Most of the tribes’ members had sold their remaining land allotments by 1790 and relocated to New Stockbridge in Oneida homelands 150 miles (240 km) to the west in central New York.

Beyond that, local contempt of Indians lingered long after the 1704 massacre of white settlers by the French and their Mohawk, Wyandot (Huron), and Abenaki allies in nearby Deerfield. Most Natives who remained in western Massachusetts (such as William Apes, Sr., a Pequot who moved his young family between Colrain, Massachusetts, and Colchester, Connecticut) were itinerant tradespeople such as cobblers and basket makers making and selling their wares to local white farmers.72

Contemptuousness didn’t come from all quarters, however. Lansing distinguished white people by their treatment of him, noting that “I experienced more respect and consideration from persons of standing and respectability, than I did from the most debased class of white men.”73 Lan-

sing’s self-awareness and disconnection grew as his mother consoled him. The pale-skinned daughter of a Circassian woman,74 displaced from her own homelands on the edge of the Black Sea:

She said the only relation in America of whom I could boast, was herself; that my father, whom she had married while in slavery in Barbary, was far away; that his career had been wayward—he had followed in the train of Napoleon—but that now she knew not the place of his abode. Yet, she assured me, that I might confidently rely upon her protection, although my color differed from her own.75

It wasn’t enough. On one early mid-summer morning, Lansing left home. In so doing, he proclaimed that:

the reader is now to behold me a solitary wanderer over the world’s wide stage; commencing my recreant course even in childhood, without a friend to direct, or a protector to soothe—a voluntary exile from my home, banished by my own unyielding pride, and only supported by the reflection that I was alone on the earth, and that as nobody cared for me, I must care for myself, and maintain what little respect I still had for my own character, until I might be called to the land of darkness, where we should be all of a color.76

He was nine years old.

New Orleans, Louisiana. Between 1813 and 1816. Lansing first arrived in New Orleans a year or so after Louisiana was admitted to the Union in 1812. His was a brief, relatively uneventful trip. With a pocketful of prize money from his service on a Venezuelan privateer, he had returned to the United States intending to visit his mother. But, rather quickly, he remembered:

I had formed associations in Boston, especially with a certain gambler, a notorious villain, who paid me great attention. He was about setting out for New-Orleans, and, in a weak hour, prevailed upon me to accompany him to that place. He paid my passage, and I arrived with him safely in New Orleans. Upon our arrival, He set up a shop, and I attended the bar. My patron used me well, apparently, and I remained satisfied with my situation.

In this place, I learned more of mankind than I had ever done before; and became quite an adept in worldly policy. In the course of a few months, I had learned sufficient with respect to my friend, to know self-interest was the main spring of all his actions.77

From French possession to American, the Louisiana Territory (sold by Napoleon in 1803) soon put America on the path to empire. Upon completion of the sale, the United States had more than doubled its size and was eager to assert control over millions of acres of land. Indeed, the lower Mississippi River was soon flooded with American traders and settlers.

As with the interior, the United States also needed to assert control over the Gulf Coast and its maritime economy. By April 1812, Louisiana had become the country’s eighteenth state and less than two months later, the United States declared war on Great Britain for its frequent disruption of American commerce, including in its southern waters. Near the mouth of the Mississippi River, New Orleans was the principal port of commerce in the South and it soon became one of its largest cities. As with the United States and Canadian borderlands in the North and the heaths of west London where Lansing spent some of his formative years, the limits of governmental control were constantly tested. Rapid growth in this cultural crossroads, coupled with an underdeveloped administrative

structure, created fertile ground for those willing to flout the law and participate in the region’s black markets.78 Those who knew intimately the meandering waterways and bayous could simultaneously evade customs officials and subject unsuspecting passenger boats to the ways of the river bandit (careful, of course, not to disrupt commerce on the river and raise the ire of the merchants).

Lansing soon calculated his departure to “the sickly season coming on,” when “I embraced a favorable opportunity to escape from his clutches; and leaving him, by stealth, embarked for New York, which place I reached in good health, and in good circumstances.”79 In New Orleans, the “sickly season” meant the onset of yellow fever, also called the “saffron scourge.”80 With major outbreaks in 1809 and 1811, it remained a perennial threat to the health of the city, especially between August and November.81 Well before germ theory provided an explanation for the causes of epidemic disease, mortality rates in excess of 10 percent gave rise to New Orleanians’ enduring belief in ghosts, vampires, witches, and haunted spaces.82

Not long after his first trip to New Orleans, Lansing returned to the port city. But this visit (in 1814 or 1815) was different for the sailors aboard the arriving schooner. For those made apprehensive by the area’s lore, enough was enough. Lansing confessed that

I had previously heard of haunted houses and haunted vessels; I was now on board of one. Singular noises were heard in the hold at the hour of midnight, but when a light was taken to the spot, nothing could be seen. How to account for these things, I do not know. I never saw a ghost, but I am sure if there is any such thing, I heard them at loggerheads in that schooner’s hatchways.83

The men with whom Lansing sailed were already a superstitious lot, and consequently, the

author noted, “When we arrived at New Orleans, the crew determined to sail no longer with their ethereal shipmates, and we all deserted together one night, leaving their shadowships in full possession of the forecastle.”84 Alas, the mighty sailor was no match for the moanings of the haunted vessel.

A sailor’s pay on the relatively short voyage from New York to New Orleans would not amount to much and was often spent on clothing, tools, food, and lodging. Upon his arrival, Lansing acknowledged that when he wrote, “My cash account was by this time nearly closed,” but he needed a room at a boarding house and food. Lansing was young but a quick study and absorbed many lessons from the more seasoned criminals he encountered in his travels. Noting that “I had recourse to some of the pedler’s arts to obtain ‘the needful,’”85 he turned to pickpocketing and petty theft.

With sticky fingers, he soon “had considerable change in my pocket” and, with that, he “went to Natchez in a pole-boat.”86 Natchez, Mississippi, is 240 miles (386 km) upriver from New Orleans. Only four steamboats navigated the Mississippi River in the period from 1811 to 1814, so pole boats were the most prominent mode of upstream transportation. Lansing doesn’t specify, but at ten miles per day of push-poling, it would have taken almost a month to ascend the river.

Natchez was also the capital of the Mississippi Territory, with a population that exceeded 1,500 people.87 Cotton agriculture rooted the local economy88 and, following New Orleans, it soon became the second largest slave-trading center in the South. Upon his arrival, Lansing “had good success in gambling, and obtained about three hundred dollars.” He seemed content with the action in this budding metropolis, but “after being two months in this town, I got into a squabble one night, was robbed of every farthing, and pitchpoled neck and heels out of a window, which fall injured me considerably.” Perhaps it was his young age,

his race, his intellect or arrogance, or his “pedler’s arts” and a history of scrapping that brought him to this unfortunate outcome. But, he recalled, “As I could get no assistance in Natchez, I resolved to return to New Orleans, and falling in with a boatmate, he took me with him to the city. I went into the hospital, where I soon recovered.”89

After his recuperation, Lansing’s adventures brought him to more distant locations: time in Venezuela and involvement in the Spanish American wars for independence (1808–1833); service in the Mediterranean sea on privateers and on U.S. naval vessels during the Greek War for Independence (1821–1832; and two encounters with Lord Byron!); on a pirate ship in the Straits of Florida; to Burma [Myanmar] during the first Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826); to China on a hospital ship; to South Africa, witnessing an elephant hunt; and a mutiny on a whaleship and subsequent stranding in the Galapagos Islands.

All throughout his travels, he seems to reflect on a common thread: the meaning of sovereignty, of independence, and of freedom. For Lansing, it was a familiar, intensely personal, and occasionally unavoidable journey, beginning with the trauma in childhood that motivated him to leave home to the trauma he endured during his service on a slave ship.

Rio Pongo, Guinea. ca. 1827–1828. Sometime in 1827 or 1828, according to Lansing’s narrative, thirty-eight enslaved Africans were chained in the cargo hold of the Brig Saratoga 90 The Saratoga, anchored in the channel of Rio Pongo, was more than 60 miles (96 km) into the West African country of Guinea, awaiting an additional cargo of 140 enslaved people. After approximately six days in darkness, unnourished, laying in their own urine and feces, the enslaved people heard the shouts of an unfamiliar language and rushed movements above them. The captain and the mate finished their consultation and two orders

were given. First, bring the Africans on deck and pinion them together in pairs. As one of the crew members following these orders, Charles Lansing observed that “they came willingly on deck, seemed pleased with the change in their situation, caressed the crew, and very quietly submitted to be pinioned.”91 Then the second order came: “Sling a stand of grape to every couple, and throw them overboard. ”92

The void of humanity that followed left Lansing aghast. In his telling that describes the horror,

One couple was cast overboard, before the devoted wretches knew their fate. A panic seized the survivors. They fell on their knees, begged for mercy, kissed our hands and feet, and asked why we would kill them, for they were willing to go to America. They asked if they had committed any crime, or whether they had been remiss in the discharge of any duty. No answer was given them; but still the work of death went on. Couple after couple was plunged into the black waters, and the scream of agony rose above the fiery wave.93

Indeed, as the British anti-slavery patrol clipper HMS Black Joke bore down on the Saratoga, “This was the last hope left us of saving our necks from the halter.”94

Only months earlier, in 1826, while in Havana, Lansing joined the crew of “a large and rakish brig,” referring to the Saratoga which was anchored near Morro Castle on the northeastern side of the port’s entry.95 With 14 guns, it presented as a ship of war and the crew was led to believe they were “setting out on an expedition,” the details of which were initially concealed.96

By the time of Lansing’s account, the Atlantic slave trade was three centuries in the making and Havana, Cuba, was a key landing and distribution port of enslaved Africans. Over 1,100 slave ships had landed in Havana97 with little done to

stem the demand for, or the supply of, free labor from Africa.

The captain, an American from Baltimore, harangued the eighty-five mostly American and English crew, offering that “we were engaged in a hazardous business, that our liberty and lives were at stake.”98 He reminded the crew that “as we had good wages … if successful [we] would receive an extra compensation.”99 Success depended on preparation and training with the ship’s cannons, so the captain “wished to accustom us to the exercise of the guns, and fit us for action.”100 He proclaimed that they must “unite in the prosecution of such measures as would most redound to the general good, the success of the voyage, and defence against the cruisers with which the African coast was lined.”101

In fact, Britain had deployed the West African Squadron as an anti-slavery patrol along the African coast. The frigate HMS Sybille and its tender, the clipper Black Joke, were feared and reviled by all engaged in the trade.102

Following combat training, Lansing observed,

In good time we arrived on the coast of Africa, and made Cape Mount.103 Here we traded with the natives, and got considerable gold dust. We then proceeded up the coast, passed [sic] Sierra Leone, and run in at Mount Serado, (now called Liberia).104 There were some Americans here at this time, who suspected our intentions, and gave us to understand that we were not welcome; but, as the place was not fortified, we disregarded their grim countenances.105

Awaiting a second group of enslaved Africans, the Saratoga lay anchored in the channel of Rio Pongo.

The captain said that as we should be obliged to wait for these slaves, and as there were many English and French cutters cruising up

and down the coast, it would be best to set a watch. Accordingly the long boat was victualled, armed, and manned, and sent to the mouth of the harbor to row guard, and keep a sharp look out for sails.

About four days after the departure of the boat, we heard the report of muskets at midnight, which the captain understood to be signals from the boat. “Something is in the wind!” cried he; “call all hands!” Just as the crew came on deck, the long boat was pulled alongside. The men were much exhausted; and the mate said that the English frigate Cybelle [sic] lay at the mouth of the river, that her boats were in chase of him, and could not now be more than four or five miles distant.

Hereupon the captain and mate held a short consultation; for short it must be. They well knew that if we were caught with slaves on board, the rigor of the law would be exerted against us. Set them on shore we could not, for want of time, as the splash of the Enlishmen’s [sic] oars was now heard.106

Lansing’s life must have flashed before him. And then came the awful, unimaginable choice that he faced: their death or his? As described above, the most brutal crime against humanity ensued. For a reader in the 1830s, this was another piece of literature that called attention to mounting evidence of the brutality and inhumanity of the slave trade. For Charles Lansing, at the moment he stepped off the Saratoga in Havana, he was resolved: “I would engage in any expedition excepting a voyage to Africa.”107

USS Guerriere, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 1829.

Following an accusation of mutiny aboard a Yankee whaleship and subsequent stranding in the Galapagos Islands, Lansing found his way to Brazil, which

was in turmoil under the reign of Emperor Pedro I. In the final paragraph of his autobiography, he expeditiously recorded, “As it would enlarge this narrative beyond all reasonable limits, were I to mention all our adventures in Rio Janeiro, I will only say, that I shipped on board the U. S. ship Guerriere, under Commodore Thompson, and went to the Pacific Ocean.”108

In fastidious pursuit of all available evidence to corroborate Lansing’s claim, I (Mancini) located the logbook of the Guerriere in the archives of the New York Public Library. Indeed, it showed the vessel in “Rio Janeiro” from April 8 to 12, 1829. And, having previously located the crew list of the Guerriere in the National Archives (Figure 6), one can clearly see that Charles Lansing, “ordinary seaman,” joined its crew on April 11, 1829.109 Over the course of the next two months, the ship rounded Cape Horn and voyaged into the Pacific Ocean and up the coast of South America to Callao, Peru, where a contingent of United States naval vessels were stationed.110 On return, the Guerriere anchored in Norfolk, Virginia, before completing its journey to New York.

U.S. Naval Hospital. Norfolk, Virginia. 1831. The Guerriere, on its return voyage from the Pacific Ocean, anchored in the port of Norfolk, Virginia. A number of its crew were suffering from ailments such as rheumatism, smallpox, chronic diarrhea, and inflamed eyes. On December 10, 1831, Charles Lansing, “ordinary seaman,” was admitted to the U.S. Naval Hospital suffering from scrofula, a form of tuberculosis affecting the lymph nodes. His condition, while uncomfortable and rendering him unfit for service, was not life threatening. Ultimately, it landed him in the hospital for 107 days.111 It was almost certainly during these three and a half months that he penned the manuscript he would later hand to Isaac Peirce.

He was discharged from the naval hospital on March 26, 1832, and returned to the Guerriere, which was destined for New York. Only three months later, The Narraganset Chief was published.

Tomaquag Indian Museum. Exeter, Rhode Island. 2023.

As a citizen of the Narragansett Indian Tribe, I (Silvermoon Mars LaRose) am a descendant of the history Charles Lansing relates. My ancestor, James Niles, was the brother of Rev. Samuel Niles (noted above), the first minister of the Narragansett Indian Church and instrumental in opposing the sale of our tribal lands by “King Tom” Ninigret (Charles Lansing’s father’s first cousin).112 As far as I know, prior to its recovery, my family and my tribal community were unaware of this book and its contents. What follows are my thoughts and reflections about The Narraganset Chief

Charles Lansing’s early experience of racial identity speaks to me. The realization that you’re different from others based on your skin color is something most brown and Black children in America cannot escape. It is something of a rite of passage. I remember my own awakening in

Figure 6. 1829 Crew List from the Guerriere, Commodore Thompson (U.S. Naval Records, National Archives)

kindergarten—the stares, the confusion, the comments, the embarrassment, singled out as the only brown face in a classroom of white students. At a very early age, children of color are introduced to the nuances of race and forced to navigate these complexities; enduring micro-aggressions before developing the language for defense; exposed to stereotypes and discrimination. It is a complete double standard when white children are shielded from these conversations and our children don’t have a choice. Reading of Lansing’s racial awakening makes me think little has changed in the nearly two hundred years between his childhood and mine.

When I read from this account, I hear the story of a man, “a wanderer,” disconnected from his tribal community and cultural heritage. This is a story known to many Indigenous people. Separated from his father, his direct connection to his tribal identity, he grew up a stranger to his culture. For many tribal communities, tribal affiliation follows the mother’s line. I heard so often growing up, “You are what your mother is.” It would stand to reason that if the Narragansett chief, William Sachem, had a child (Charles Lansing’s father) as we suspect by an Oneida, or more broadly, Haudenosaunee woman, his tribal affiliation would follow from his mother. And we know Lansing’s mother was Circassian, a non-Native woman. So, while Lansing was “Indian” through his father, his birth affiliation would be neither Narragansett nor Oneida/Haudenosaunee. Lacking a direct maternal tie to any tribal community, however, it is most likely that his paternal grandmother would have adopted him into her clan family. These nuances, often overlooked by scholars and the public who don’t know or understand our tribal kinship ties, provide us the means to interpret Lansing’s identity in other ways.

Indigenous people of the Dawnland, the East Coast, were on the front lines of European colonization. The dispossession of our ancestral lands

led to a diaspora of our community members. The decrease in land base would have made it impossible to continue living in a traditional manner. There simply would not have been room or resources for all of our community members to continue their cultural practices undisturbed. Some traveled westward to seek refuge among other tribal communities less disturbed (at that point in time) where they could continue as a collective.113 Others, by force, choice, or necessity, assimilated into colonial society, to find employment and self-sufficiency. Despite the challenges, others remained within Narragansett enclaves in Shannock (Charlestown), Westerly, Providence, Quonsett, or in the Peace Dale (Wakefield) area,114 trying to hold on to a communal way of life as their land base and sovereignty were increasingly challenged and snipped away. This disruption to community is directly responsible for the losses to our language, oral history, and spiritual and cultural practice. It’s more difficult to pass on Indigenous knowledge when your community has dispersed. Nevertheless, we have survived (Figure 7).

Stories like The Narraganset Chief reveal the personal traumas experienced by our kinfolk during a time in our history when foreign people and systems were hell-bent on dismantling our identities, cultural practices, and socioeconomic connection to tribal community. For our tribe, the period covered in this narrative is remembered as a huge transition for our ancestors. Nearly a hundred years after King Philip’s War (1675-1676), our community had suffered enslavement, displacement, dispossession of land, racism, and enforced caste (even by our own sachem!), resulting in trauma that would be passed on generationally.

Lansing’s search for those like him, a tribe as it were, began before he stepped aboard any vessel. He noted that:

notwithstanding these kind assurances [of my mother], I now began to feel myself an insu-

lated being. Circumstances, in which I had no agency, had severed me from the society of my equals. I wondered why nature had so unkindly dealt by me; and my spirit, naturally high, recoiled at the idea of yielding precedence to those who could boast no advantage over me, save that their skins were paler than mine. . . I at length. . . resolved to leave the partners of my childhood, and try if in the world’s wide sphere there might not be found those who would look with complacency on a being formed like themselves, with all the distinguishing properties of humanity, though shaded by the hand of varying nature.115

The Narraganset Chief relates our history through the travels and experiences of men. But, in our Tribal nations, women are the gathering place, holding our families together. When I look historically at the governance of our people, there were many great Sauncksquûaog, female leaders, who guarded our

communities.116 These women were leaders who negotiated and fought for the protection and security of their people. They were the nurturers who sought to preserve our culture and communities, keeping us together, tied to our lands, as colonists threatened our existence. Women hold the community together, ensuring our survival, passing on tradition, teaching us who we are. It was this sense of belonging that Lansing was in search of. Even to this day, there are many great matriarchs in the Narragansett tribe. These are the women we gather around for love and learning. So many in my own lifetime are directly responsible for the cultural educator I am today. This includes the late Dr. Ella Sekatau, a tribal historian and medicine woman, whose legacy preserved and passed on traditional arts, language, culture, and ceremony. There is also Alberta Wilcox, a beloved elder, who for years has passed on traditional knowledge and arts to the community. These two women are directly responsible for educating many of us who

Figure 7. Moshup © 2023 Silvermoon Mars LaRose

took their cultural classes as children, including Tomaquag Museum’s director Lorén Spears, my professional mentor. My paternal grandmother, the late Laura Fry Mars, a historian and genealogist, along with my grandfather and others, started the Charlestown Historical Society to ensure the inclusion of Indigenous history within the town. The late Grace Babcock Brown Spears, my maternal grandmother, was the most beautiful soul, known for her open door and open heart. A highly intelligent woman with a gift for gab and hospitality, everyone was welcomed at her door, fed magnificently, and sheltered gracefully. She passed her knowledge of edible and medicinal plants on to me through my mother, and her daughter, Starr Lee Spears Mars. These women taught me to be like our Nukhasahkee, our earth mother, to be a nurturer, to feed, heal, and care for others. These and so many others, are the Matriarchs who raised me, ensuring that I grew up within my community, and safeguarding the transfer of traditional knowledge for future generations.

The recovery of stories like The Narraganset Chief provides an opportunity to hear from and reconnect with our ancestors. These first-person accounts help us understand the personal impact of colonization on our tribe. Exploring these narratives with one another kickstarts the work of unpacking and dismantling the cycles of trauma still affecting our community today.

Conclusion

Charles Lansing is alone in the canon of American literature: his autobiography has been misattributed to the book’s editor, Isaac Peirce, and subsequently defined for 190 years as a work of fiction. He is both a man without a country117 and, for more nuanced reasons, an Indian without a tribe. He has written a firsthand account, a first draft, of global history from below—one that documents the circuitry of empire as much as it details

the black markets functioning in borderlands and unregulated or contested seas.

The stories presented above are extracted from a larger book project that includes more rigorous inquiry and contextualization. Even beyond its classification as a picaresque novel, the recognition of the Narraganset Chief text as an autobiographical narrative presents interpretive challenges. The erasure of Native histories and the obscured significance of women, coupled with the global scope of Lansing’s experience, makes the process of archival recovery and validation extremely difficult. While research is ongoing, archives associated with this story will be truly global in nature and rely on others to contribute their knowledge and expertise. So, we invite readers to identify and share with us any clues relating to “the adventures of a wanderer” and remain hopeful that the publication of this essay will lead to new information about Charles Lansing’s life.118

Our collaboration wraps a community’s arms around an obscure book. And the scattered archives naming Narragansett ancestors coupled with community memory/oral history reanimate the book and allow us to travel across time to compose our story. This embrace allows us to navigate an inherent juxtaposition we encounter in Lansing’s narrative. It is access to the sea that provides freedom for men but that brings to bear a broad disconnection from community, from place, land, and identity, and from femininity and female power, as well as a sense of belonging, connection, and community—EVERYTHING that Lansing is seeking in his wanderings.

As a Native American autobiography, The Narraganset Chief emerged along with the works of the Pequot minister and activist William Apes, who published his own autobiography in A Son of the Forest (1829, 1831) and later experiences concerning civil rights violations while living among the Mashpee Wampanoag in Indian Nullification of

the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe, or, The Pretended Riot Explained (1835). Similarly, as previously referenced, the Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Paul Cuffe: A Pequot Indian: During Thirty Years Spent at Sea, and in Travelling in Foreign Lands (1839) offers a companion for understanding the maritime careers of Indian men. Lansing’s account bears witness to this displacement of Indians from the land and their shift towards the sea. The Narraganset Chief text is, chronologically, the first autobiography to expand the scope of maritime literature to American Indian maritime experience and literary tradition.

The Narraganset Chief should also be considered along with the American abolitionist literary genre, at the very beginning of the “golden age” of the slave narrative (1830-1860). Registered as a publication on June 15, 1832, The Narraganset Chief emerged—seemingly without much fanfare— between the establishment of the New England Anti-Slavery Society (January 1, 1832) and the New York Anti-Slavery Society (January 1, 1833). While it chronicles the “wandering” life of the author, the book relates his earliest experience of racism and discrimination, and later, his participation on a slave ship in which living enslaved people were thrown overboard to avoid capture by an anti-slaving patrol.

When contextualized and understood as an autobiography, The Narraganset Chief reveals a much more complicated and nuanced picture of lives and experiences of Native people who existed at the intersection of empire. The stories related in this narrative are not generic events, but an accumulation of specific moments, each of which compromises the identity, sovereignty, and freedom of people. Throughout are the behaviors and voices of Native peoples, African peoples, South Asian peoples, etc. that illuminate persistence, resistance, and agency. The settler-colonial enterprise seeks to divide and disperse, separating Native people

from documentation about Native people. The recovery of texts like this begins to repair the archival harm done over centuries and reconnects past voices with tribes today, helping to plant seeds of self-determination for tomorrow. The recovery of, and research into, this book releases silenced voices and returns them to their people across the globe. The ancestors are indeed still speaking.

Acknowledgments: This work is dedicated to Narragansett ancestors and gifted to Narragansett grandchildren. Taûbotneanawáyean (thank you) to all who have contributed to this work over the years, including Katie Raia, Deb Jones, Bill Starna, Kevin McBride, Elysa Engelman, Akeia de Barros Gomes, Michelle Turner, Everett “Tall Oak” Weeden, Faith Davison, Chrystal Mars Baker, Lorén Spears, Cassius Spears, Jr., Ramin Ganeshram, Gregg Mangan, Kathy Foulke, Jaqueline Veninger-Robert, Rich King, Linford Fisher, Chris Newell, endawnis Spears, Tony Bogues, and to the many members of the Narragansett Tribal Community who have generously shared their insights and supported this project. We are also grateful to the Tomaquag Museum, Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, Mystic Seaport Museum, and Brown University Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice—all have been key partners and supporters of this project.

Disclosures: This work was supported in part through a fellowship for Jason Mancini at Brown University Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice with funding from the Mellon Foundation for the Reimagining New England Histories project.

Conflicts of Interest: Connecticut Humanities (CTH) is a funder of Mystic Seaport Museum; no CTH funding was used for this publication.

Endnotes

1 About 0.3% of the total land mass.

2 The use of the term “Indian” is deliberate but problematic and must be contextualized. Tribal specific labels are preferred, though often “Native” and “Indigenous” are used now in place of “Indian” as generalized descriptors. In the United States, the term “Indian” has legal and political significance to tribes and how they manage their relationship with state and federal governments. “Indian” is codified in the U.S. Constitution and in subsequent “Federal Indian Law” and the “Bureau of Indian Affairs.” Historically, “Indian” people were legally excluded from the federal census (1790–1860) or relabeled using other race categories like “mulatto” or “colored” that resulted in their erasure from colonial, state, and federal records, a process that Native people describe as “documentary genocide.” Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau, “The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era,” Ethnohistory 44, no. 3 (1997): 433–62, https://doi.org/10.2307/483031. Some tribal individuals today self-identify using the term “Indian,” including some members of the Narragansett Indian Tribe. Keeping this in mind, to better connect readers to the historical documents that serve as the foundation of this article, the term “Indian” is used to describe the Indigenous peoples of New England (and their descendants) when specific tribal labels are not applicable.

3 There is a growing body of scholarship that has begun to reveal the presence and experiences of Indians at sea including: Daniel Vickers, “The First Whalemen of Nantucket,” The William and Mary Quarterly 40, no. 4 (October 1983): 560–583; Russel L. Barsh, “‘Colored’ Seamen in the New England Whaling Industry: An Afro-Indian Consortium,” in Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America, ed. James F. Brooks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 76–107; Jason R. Mancini, “Beyond Reservation: Indians, Maritime Labor, and Communities of Color from Eastern Long Island Sound, 1713–1861,” in Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Power in Maritime America: Papers from the Conference Held at Mystic Seaport, September 2006, ed. Glenn S. Gordinier (Mystic: Mystic Seaport Museum, 2008), 23–46; Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Nancy Shoemaker, Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the Contingency of Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

4 Paul Cuffe, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Paul Cuffe, a Pequot Indian: During Thirty Years Spent at Sea, and in Travelling in Foreign Lands (Vernon, NY: Horace N. Bill, 1839).

5 The official and recognized spelling of Narragansett is with two ‘t’s at the end. With one exception, the name throughout the book is spelled with one ‘t.’ The spelling in the book will be maintained in italics; elsewhere, the official name will be used.

6 The Narraganset Chief; or, The Adventures of a Wanderer (New York: J.K. Porter, 1832), accessed November 20, 2023, https://books.google.com/ books?id=ByAeAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q&f=false

7 The Friend; or, Advocate of Truth [New Series] 1, no. 7 (1832): 111. 8 Britannica, “picaresque novel,” accessed December 5, 2023, https:// www.britannica.com/art/picaresque-novel.

9 Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1838).

10 Criminal activities described in the book include counterfeiting, theft, smuggling, piracy, murder, mutiny, desertion, and slave trading.

11 The author is apparently unaware that the Pequot minister, Rev. William Apes published his autobiography, A Son of the Forest: The Experience of William Apes, a Native of the Forest, Comprising a Notice of the Pequod Tribe of Indians, three years earlier.

12 Narraganset Chief, vi. Interestingly, and reminiscent of Peirce’s “advertisement,” the preface of Poe’s Pym references a “half-breed Indian” as a sole source of evidence to validate his account, stating:

One consideration which deterred me [from writing my account] was, that, having kept no journal during a greater portion of the time in which I was absent, I feared I should not be able to write, from mere memory, a statement so minute and connected as to have the appearance of that truth it would really possess, barring only the natural and unavoidable exaggeration to which all of us are prone when detailing events which have had powerful influence in exciting the imaginative faculties. Another reason was, that the incidents to be narrated were of a nature so positively marvellous, that, unsupported as my assertions must necessarily be (except by the evidence of a single individual, and he a half-breed Indian), I could only hope for belief among my family, and those of my friends who have had reason, through life, to put faith in my veracity—the probability being that the public at large would regard what I should put forth as merely an impudent and ingenious fiction. Poe, Pym of Nantucket, i–ii, (emphasis added).

13 Described as member of Delaware Free Labor Society of Wilmington, Freedom’s Journal (New York, NY), February 1, 1828; mentioned as attending American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, February 22, 1828; The Liberator (Boston, MA), May 17, 1839; May 24, 1839; Obituary, April 2, 1858; National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York, NY), September 22, 1842; Obituary, April 3, 1858; mentioned as delegate of the National Anti-Slavery Convention meeting in Albany, The Emancipator (New York, NY), August 8, 1839.

14 Ruth Ketring Nuermberger, The Free Produce Movement: A Quaker Protest Against Slavery (Durham, NC: 1942), 13; https://archive.org/details/ NuermbergerTheFreeProduceMovementAQuakerProtestAgainstSlavery/ page/n10/mode/1up; American Anti-Slavery Society, Executive Committee, Annual Report (New York: William S. Dorr, 1838), 4.

15 “Old Manuscript Tells of Lansing the Pirate,” New York Times, March 8, 1931, https://nyti.ms/4605iAw

16 Cuffe’s pithy 21-page account of his experiences at sea covers 40 voyages in approximately 15 countries.

17 The same can be said for Paul Cuffe, Jr. (Pequot/Wampanoag/African), a contemporary of Lansing, whose 1839 autobiographical account is widely accepted despite some anachronisms. Cuffe, Narrative

18 He does not name any of his associates from a counterfeiting and horse stealing gang; he does not reveal the name of the U.S. naval vessel that he deserts from; and, similarly, he does not name the pirate vessel on which he served.

19 For example, on page 143 of the book, Lansing states, “At Plymouth [England], ‘the [HMS] Boadicea got under way with a convoy of East Indiamen, bound to Madras, Bombay, &c. On the third day after our departure, we sprung a leak. We made water so fast that all three pumps could scarcely keep her free. We put about and ran into Spithead; hoisted signals of distress, and two steamboats were immediately sent out to us, and by them we were towed into dock. We were overhauled and repaired, and in two weeks ready for sea. Nothing remarkable occurred during the

passage to Madras, except that we touched at Rio Janeiro.” Validation of this account comes from the logbook of the HMS Boadicea itself which states, “Remarks &c. H.M. Ship Boadicea Monday [February] 14th [1825] …A.M Light airs and hazy weather 7.15 [warning] from the hulk and towed to Spithead by the Lighting Steam Boat 8.50 moored at Spithead”; “Remarks &c Friday April 8th 1825…bore up and made sail for Rio Janiero…”, “Remarks Thursday June 16th…At Single Anchor at Madras Roades.” The National Archives of the UK (TNA), ADM 52-4055.

20 Crew lists for two voyages that Lansing describes contain the name John Warner or Wardner, which could be an alias he used (HMS Boadicea and USS Ontario).

21 Roy Buckingham, “When Pirates Roved the Yankee Main,” Youngstown Vindicator (Youngstown, OH), May 10, 1931, https://books.google.com/ books?id=5I9cAAAAIBAJ&lpg=PA45&dq=charles%20lansing%20the%20 Narraganset%20Chief&pg=PA45#v=onepage&q=charles%20lansing%20 the%20Narraganset%20Chief&f=true.

22 “Old Manuscript,” https://nyti.ms/4605iAw.

23 U.S. Census Bureau, 1930, Lincoln Township, Reno, Kansas.

24 Buckingham, “When Pirates.”

25 “A Pirate of Our Own,” Providence Journal (Providence, RI), March 20, 1931, Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

26 Buckingham, “When Pirates.”

27 Jason R. Mancini, “Beyond Reservation: Indian Survivance in Southern New England, 1713–1861” (Ph.D. Diss, University of Connecticut, 2009); Mancini, Gender, 23–46; Jason R. Mancini, The Indian Mariners Project, accessed October 25, 2023, https://indianmarinersproject.com/; Jason R. Mancini, Connecticut Indian Mariners, Mystic Seaport Museum, accessed December 4, 2023, https://educators.mysticseaport.org/sets/ ct_indian_mariners/

28 The Decolonial Dictionary, s.v. “survivance (n.).” https://decolonialdictionary.wordpress.com/2021/04/15/survivance/

29 Herndon and Sekatau, “The Right to a Name,” 433–462; Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

30 One exception, of course, is Paul Cuffe, Jr.’s Narrative.

31 Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 38–59.

32 Narraganset Chief, 163–164.

33 The reference to Mina appears in Charles Lansing’s account, Narraganset Chief, 186.

34 Narraganset Chief, 169.

35 Narraganset Chief, 182. “White speculators” appears to be a reference to the land companies in New York that rapidly accumulated Haudenosaunee lands across the new state in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 142–202.

36 Perhaps difficult to comprehend, chance meetings are not unknown. For example, Paul Cuffe Jr. was living on Raiatea (Society Islands) in a remote area of the Pacific Ocean for five months when, as he noted, “I accidentally found a ship at the harbor which belonged to Martha’s Vineyard, in the United States. This was the first vessel which I had seen since I had been here. The Captain’s name was Toby. After getting acquainted with this man, he proposed my going home with him. He said I had not better stay among the natives any longer—that my folks at home would be glad to see me, I finally concluded to go with him.” Cuffe, Narrative, 20; Olaudah Equiano’s account of being enslaved and separated from his sister only to encounter her again: “…while I was journeying thus through

Africa, I acquired two or three different tongues. In this manner I had been traveling for a considerable time, when, one evening, to my great surprise, whom should I see brought to the house where I was but my dear sister!” Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (London: T. Wilkins, 1789), 59.

37 John R. Bartlett, Census of the Inhabitants of the Colony of Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations 1774 (Lambertville, NJ: Hunterdon, 1984); Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England. Vol. 6, 1757–1769, ed John R. Bartlett (Providence, RI: Knowles, Anthony, & Co., 1861); Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England. Vol. 7, 1770–1776, ed John R. Bartlett (Providence, RI: A. Crawford Greene, 1862); Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England. Vol. 8, 1776–1779, ed. John R. Bartlett (Providence, RI: Cooke, Jackson, & Co., 1863) ; Itineraries, 1760–1794, Ezra Stiles Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven; William Johnson, The Papers of Sir William Johnson (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1921–1965): Vol. 4: 152–164, 588–595, 659–663, 690–693; Vol. 5: 490–492; Vol. 11: 412–414, 431–435; William DeLoss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1899); James D. McCallum, The Letters Of Eleazar Wheelock’s Indians (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1932); Town of Charlestown, Rhode Island, Land Records, https://i2l.uslandrecords.com/RI/Charlestown/D/Default. aspx; Narragansett Indian collection, c. 1735–1970’s, Rhode Island State Archives, https://catalog.sos.ri.gov/repositories/2/digital_objects/924); Mildred M. Chamberlain, The Rhode Island 1777 Military Census (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1985); William F. Tucker, Historical sketch of the town of Charlestown in Rhode Island: from 1636 to 1876 (Westerly, R.I.: G.B. & J.H. Utter, 1877).

38 John W. Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 20, 44–49; Linford Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 153–154.

39 “Whereas, two of the council of the Narragansett tribe of Indians, in this colony, are dead, and William Sachem (one of the said council), refuseth to sign the deeds, for the sale of the lands of Thomas Ninegret, deceased, late sachem of the said tribe.” Records of the Colony, Vol 7, 202.

40 Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening, 144; William S. Simmons, “Red Yankees: Narragansett Conversion in the Great Awakening,” American Ethnologist 10, no. 2 (1983), 253–71; Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission. 1981. Historic and Architectural Resources of Charlestown, Rhode Island: A Preliminary Report, 10, 45–46.

41 Town of Charlestown, Land Records, https://i2l.uslandrecords.com/ RI/Charlestown/D/Default.aspx. Based on a search of various spellings of Ninigret (including Ninigrett, Ninegret, Ninigrett, Ninigreat), 59 land transactions between 1758 and 1773 were part of satisfying King Tom’s creditors.

42 Fisher, Indian Great Awakening, 113–117.

43 See Johnson, Papers, Vol. 4: 152–164, 588–595, 659–663, 690–693; Vol. 5: 490–492; Vol. 11: 412–414, 431–435.

44 Tucker, Historical Sketch, 51; see also Letter from Eleazer Wheelock to Sir William Johnson, Oct. 21, 1765, noting Narragansett complaints of “drunken Sachem who has got in debt and is selling their lands fast to the English,” in James N. Arnold, comp., A Statement of the Case of the Narragansett Tribe of Indians, as Shown in the Manuscript Collection of Sir William Johnson (Newport, R. I., 1896), 43.

45 Tucker, Historical Sketch, 51.

46 Narragansett tribal members also use the term subchiefs to describe these other leaders.

47 Note the earliest accounts of Narragansett leadership during the era of the Pequot War describe an avuncular relationship between the chief sachem Canonicus and his nephew Miantonomi. See Anne Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 164; Kathleen Joan Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1650–1775 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 60; Sweet, Bodies Politic, 28.

48 Town of Charlestown, Land Records (July 20, 1767), 2:341. This included William’s son Thomas Sachem and his wife, Esther Ninigret (King Tom’s sister), William Sachem Jr., William’s daughters, Sarah and Damaras, and William’s grandchildren.

49 Town of Charlestown, Land Records, 3:151–152.

50 William Sachem does not appear in the 1774 Rhode Island Census, though there are some Narragansetts noted and not others. In July 1776, William Sachem sold the land Tom Ninigret gave him to a neighboring English “yeoman.” He repurchased the same parcel in October 1776 and was noted as a “laborer.” The following year, whether present or not, William Sachem was listed in the 1777 Rhode Island military census (age 60+). William Sachem does not appear in military enlistments for service during the American Revolution (he was now over 60 years old and not eligible for combat). He is not listed in the 1782 Rhode Island Census, and no death record or probate record for him has been located in Rhode Island.

51 Narraganset Chief, 184. The reference to the setting sun may reflect the Narragansett belief that upon death, one returns to “Kautantowwit the great South-West God, to whose House all soules goe.” See Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, [1997], 1936), 124.

52 Narraganset Chief, 182.

53 Taylor, Divided Ground, 166–168, 171. For reference, the entire state of New York today includes 34.9 million acres.

54 Brothertown was a Christian Indian community formed by Mohegan minister Samson Occom just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. The new tribe migrated to Oneida homelands beginning in 1785 and consisted of Pequots, Narragansetts, Niantics, Mohegans, Montauks, Tunxis, and other Indian peoples. See Love, Samson Occom; Craig Cippola, Becoming Brothertown: Native American Ethnogenesis and Endurance in the Modern World (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013); David J. Silverman, Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).

55 Meaning prior to this that the “Narragansett Chief” did not farm the land (thus not a yeoman).

56 Narraganset Chief, 182–183. Currently, his education, referred to as at a “seminary,” remains unknown. This school would postdate the Wheelock School (1754–1769) in Lebanon (now Columbia), Connecticut and predate the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut (1816); distance from the “seaboard” would preclude Dartmouth College and Hamilton-Oneida Academy.

57 R.H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” in Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections at the Nineteenth Annual Session Held in Denver, Col. June 23–29, 1892, ed. Isabel C. Barrows (Boston: Press of Geo. H. Ellis, 1892), 46, https://carlisleindian. dickinson.edu/sites/default/files/docs-resources/CIS-Resources_1892PrattSpeech.pdf.

58 Narraganset Chief, 186.

59 The latter two tribes, living in Oneida homelands. See treaty provisions, accessed December 5, 2023, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_ century/one1794.asp.

60 Narraganset Chief, 183–184.

61 Narraganset Chief, 183–184. This is likely in the Northwest Territory (Ohio and areas north and west to the Mississippi River) the United States Congress of the Confederation created in 1787. The territory was governed by Major General Arthur St. Claire in anticipation of white settlement of the region. After St. Claire’s defeat in the Northwest Indian War (near Fort Recovery, OH) in 1791, President George Washington recruited General “Mad Anthony” Wayne to command the newly formed Legion of the United States in 1792, a precursor of the U.S. Army. Various military campaigns against a confederation of tribes resulted in the destruction of a number of Indian towns or villages.

62 “The Trail of Broken Treaties,” National Park Service, accessed December 1, 2023, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/trail-of-brokentreaties.htm

63 March – May 1799.

64 Narraganset Chief, 184.

65 Now Istanbul, Turkey.

66 Narraganset Chief, 184–185.

67 Narraganset Chief, 10.

68 Narraganset Chief, 10.

69 Narraganset Chief, 13.

70 Narraganset Chief, 13.

71 Narraganset Chief, 19. Lansing’s text is redacted with an asterisk and an editor’s note below that states: “(*Vulgar and offensive expletives, however characteristic of those who use them, it is deemed best, for the sake of juvenile readers, to omit.—ED.)” “Goddamn” is another possibility.

72 Mancini, Beyond Reservation, 149–151; see also William Apess, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, A Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Drew Lopenzina, Through an Indian’s Looking-glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017).

73 Narraganset Chief, 19.

74 The series of news articles in 1931 (New York Times, Providence Journal, Youngstown Vindicator) referenced earlier infer incorrectly that Charles’ enslaved mother was “a Negro slave.” In fact, his account describes her as “the daughter of ‘a Circassian lady’” (Narraganset Chief, 184), a Caucasian ethnic group from the eastern Black Sea region.

75 Narraganset Chief, 13–14.

76 Narraganset Chief, 15.

77 Narraganset Chief, 41–42.

78 Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

79 Narraganset Chief, 42.

80 Transmitted by mosquitos, symptoms of the virus include “fever, chills, headache, backache, and muscle aches; Three to six days after they are infected. About 12% of people who have symptoms go on to develop serious illnesses: jaundice, bleeding, shock, organ failure, and sometimes death. “Yellow Fever,” Travelers’ Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed November 28, 2023, https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/ diseases/yellow-fever.

81 Jo Ann Carrigan, “The Saffron Scourge: A History of Yellow Fever in Louisiana, 1796–1905,” Ph.D. Diss., Louisiana State University, 1961, 31, 40, https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1665&context=gradschool_disstheses

82 Leah Donella, “How Yellow Fever Turned New Orleans into the ‘City of the Dead,’” NPR Code Switch, October 31, 2018, accessed November 28, 2023, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/10/31/415535913/

how-yellow-fever-turned-new-orleans-into-the-city-of-the-dead.

83 Narraganset Chief, 99.

84 Narraganset Chief, 99.

85 Narraganset Chief, 99.

86 Narraganset Chief, 99.

87 The population of Natchez reported in the 1810 Census was 1511. U.S. Census Bureau, 1810, Natchez, Mississippi.

88 “History of Agriculture in Mississippi,” Mississippi Genealogy, https:// mississippigenealogy.com/uncategorized/history_of_agriculture.htm.

89 Narraganset Chief, 99.

90 No vessel with the name Saratoga exists in the Slave Voyages database: https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database; similar names such as Zaragoza do not align with the timeline of events described by Lansing.

91 Narraganset Chief, 112.

92 Narraganset Chief, 112.

93 Narraganset Chief, 112–113.

94 Narraganset Chief, 112.

95 Narraganset Chief, 107.

96 Narraganset Chief, 107.

97 See the Slave Voyages database.

98 Narraganset Chief, 108.

99 Narraganset Chief, 108.

100 Narraganset Chief, 108.

101 Narraganset Chief, 108.

102 The instigation of the anti-slavery patrols was rooted in British public sentiment which had turned against the “peculiar institution” in the wake of the Zong Massacre that occurred some 45 years earlier. The incident that occurred in late November 1781 involved the crew of the slave ship Zong Hundreds of miles west of Jamaica, having miscalculated both location and water supply, they threw overboard 132 living stolen Africans. Faced with this, others committed suicide. Rather than suffer financial loss, the ship’s owners made an insurance claim that was refused and taken to court. Though insurance claims often involved injured or sick Africans who were thrown overboard, it appears that no incident like this had been recorded until Charles Lansing published his account in 1832. James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

103 County in northwestern Liberia bordering Sierra Leone.

104 Cape Mesurado, also called Cape Montserrado (now Monrovia), Liberia.

105 Narraganset Chief, 108–109. This is a reference to the nascent colony of Liberia established by the American Colonization Society in 1822. See “Colonization,” The African-American Mosaic, Library of Congress, https:// www.loc.gov/exhibits/african/afam002.html

106 Narraganset Chief, 110.

107 Narraganset Chief, 118.

108 Narraganset Chief, 193.

109 USS Guerriere, Commodore Thompson - 1829 crew list; No. 519 | Date of Entry - April 11, 1829 | Name - Charles Lansing | Station - ord. seaman (U.S. Naval Records, National Archives Miscellaneous Records of the Office of Naval Records and Library), Publication Number: T829, Roll 53Muster Roll, 1813–1831, Guerriere.

110 Including the USS Brandywine, USS Vincennes, and USS Dolphin John M. Berrien, 1829. U.S. Navy Logbooks Guerriere and Brandywine, New York Public Library Special Collections.

111 Department of the Navy, Record Group 52. Records of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. Case, Files for Patients at Naval Hospitals and

Registers Thereto: Registers of Patients 1812–1929 (1831 Entry for Charles Lansing), Ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/ view/98318:9268?tid=&pid=&queryId=e7362d20-2b27-485d-bcc06c632817e472&_phsrc=Nma235&_phstart=successSource.

112 The community appointed Samuel Niles to be their leader, a minister who could neither read nor write but who committed the word of God to memory, interpreting meaning through vision and dreams as traditional medicine keepers had always done. The influence of Baptist Church leadership sought to dispose of him and install another minister of their choosing, Simon James aka James Simon (records unclear), a Pequot minister steeped in Baptist doctrine. The Narragansett community rejected this usurpation of the pulpit and left the church they had built in protest until they were successful at removing Simon from the post and reinstalling Samuel Niles, who would forever after be remembered as the first minister of the Narragansett Indian Church; see also Fisher, Indian Great Awakening, 115.

113 See also the story of James Chaugham in Kenneth Feder, A Village of Outcasts: Historical Archaeology and Documentary Research at the Lighthouse Site (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1994). The Narragansett migration to Brothertown is discussed in Love, Samson Occom; Silverman, Red Brethren; Cipolla, Becoming Brothertown. See also a footnote in Lewis Henry Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (Washington City: The Smithsonian Institution, 1871), 219n: “In the year 1862 I met on the Mississippi River a half-blood Narragansett woman, with two Pequots, her grandchildren, then on their way to Kansas, where they resided. She was descended, on the mother’s side, from the Narragansetts, amongst whom descent as well as nationality follows the female line. This made her a Narragansett. She further informed me that both the Pequot and Narragansett dialects were now extinct.”

114 Gladys Tantaquidgeon, Bureau of Indian Affairs Report (678-1935), 1935. Re Location, History, Government, Language, etc. of the Narragansett Indians. Indian Office File No. 150, National Archives.

115 Narraganset Chief, 14.

116 Awashonks of the Sakonnet was placed in a leadership position by her community as a result of her excellent skills in diplomacy and negotiation. Weetamoo of the Pocasset commanded an army of warriors, fighting alongside them. Quaiapen of the Niantic led warriors against the colonists and was killed protecting her people. Weunquesh of the Niantic drew the Narragansetts and Niantics together and petitioned to stop territorial encroachments. Ester of the Niantic petitioned for the building of a school to educate her people and ensure their future.

117 According to his father, Lansing was born in Tangiers, Morocco. Narraganset Chief, 185.

118 For example, prison records for San Sebastian prison in Cadiz, Spain; crew lists for H.B.M. Don Pedro (flagship of the Brazilian Navy); Indian student enrollments at a seminary at “the seaboard” ca. early 1790s.

IN AMERICAN WATERS: THE SEA IN AMERICAN PAINTING

Edited

by Daniel Finamore and Austen Barron Bailly. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2021

Reviewed by Michael R. Harrison, Nantucket Historical Association

In a country linked by river and coastal networks, founded on fishing and ocean trade, and enlarged by both free and forced transoceanic migrations, it is no surprise that the sea has frequently preoccupied the national imagination. American artists’ engagement with the sea—with its beauty, its symbolic potential, and its history as a place and means of human engagement and exploitation—forms the subject of In American Waters: The Sea in American Painting, the catalog for an exhibition of the same name organized by the Peabody Essex Museum and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in 2021.

Edited by curators Daniel Finamore from PEM and Austen Barron Bailly from Crystal Bridges, with essays by them, Mindy N. Besaw, Sarah N. Chasse, and George H. Schwartz, the book presents a synthesis of scholarship on American painters and pictures that have examined maritime activity and the water. It is illustrated with a heterogeneous and appealing range of works, many of them justly familiar. Bringing so many important paintings into the same room, as it were, was an outstanding achievement of the original exhibition, and the book represents a welcome surrogate for and legacy from that gallery experience.

This

As Finamore and Bailly explain in their introduction, their project aimed to expose the many ways “the sea and marine motifs have pervaded American consciousness” (p. 29). Their painting selections and thematic organization

intended to elucidate how divergently American artists have been inspired to capture the beauty, violence, strength, and poetry of the sea relative to national identity. . . . We seek to illuminate the range and continuum of American histories and American artists’ interest in the sea as a subject, a symbol, and an emotional catalyst that can shape and transform identities, attitudes, and cultural values (p. 21).

As a result, in these pages readers find Georgia O’Keeffe engaging with the Atlantic Ocean from a New England shore in Wave, Night (1928), Fitz Henry Lane observing nature as the backdrop for American coastal commerce (Halfway Rock, 1850s), and Paul Cadmus commenting raucously and suggestively on wartime sailor/civilian encounters in The Fleet’s In! (1934). Thomas Hart Benton’s Up Periscope (ca. 1944), William Bradford’s Icebound Ship (ca. 1880), Theresa Bernstein’s The Immigrants (1923), and many other works bring us right into diverse maritime circumstances and ask us to consider the individual experiences, national narratives, and cultural assumptions that American painters have captured, interpreted, and even invented. Sailors, immigrants, stevedores, kidnapped Africans, cowboys, fishwives, Pilgrims, even teenage friends on a beach—these and other people touched and transformed by the water appear across the book’s pages and form the focus for two chapters, “A Motley Crew” and “Portraiture and the Marine.” In the chapter with the teenagers, we stand on the shore—“Beachcombing”—and consider through multiple artists’ perspectives those liminal littoral spaces where boundaries are in “constant flux.” Elsewhere, the authors examine the nature of “Voyages,” some real, some imagined, but all ripe with import and humanity. Maritime places and the meanings we assign to them provide the core of three essays, “The Horizon as a Region of Interest,” “Sea Metaphors and the Great Plains” (those cowboys you no doubt wondered about), and “Just Offshore and In Port.”

This summary might prompt the question, Where are the heroic naval engagements? the ship portraits? the pirates? the clippers and the racing yachts with their billows of white canvas? To be sure, these stock types from the canon of marine art are all present and accounted for. In fact, they are represented by some of the best examples from both museum and private collections, such as Ship America on the Grand Banks by Michele Cornè (ca. 1799), Vigilant in last days Race against Valkyrie by William Formby Halsall (1893), Marooned by Howard Pyle (1909), and Portrait of Capt. James Josiah by Charles Willson Peale (1787). Their appearance alongside works by O’Keeffe, Benton, Aaron Douglas, Felrath Himes, Norman Lewis, and others realizes a central goal of Finamore, Bailly, and their team: to define and promote an expansive and inclusive definition of marine painting, one that goes beyond just the tropes visitors might have seen in an old-fashioned American maritime museum of fifty years ago. As the introduction declares, In American Waters aims to “look anew at American marine painting,” and to challenge “the assumption that marine painting . . . is limited in focus to visual representations of the sea and ships in the tradition of nineteenth-century realism.” (p. 16) Only by pulling from a broad pool of works have the curatorauthors been able to truly “reflect upon the ways Americans have perceived, utilized, and lived with the sea and its impact over time.” (p. 40) The result is a book deserving of being on the shelf of everyone interested in the sea and all it represents.

THE CARGO REBELLION: THOSE WHO CHOSE FREEDOM

By Jason Chang, Benjamin Barson, Alexis Dudden, and Kim Inthavong (illustrator). Oakland: PM Press, 2023

Reviewed by Ramin Ganeshram, Westport Museum for History & Culture

The Cargo Rebellion: Those Who Chose Freedom is the story of mutiny by indentured laborers on board the American ship Robert Bowne in 1852. Through this event, the book examines Asian immigration to the Americas as indentured laborers following the 1833 end of African enslavement in the English Caribbean and South America. Employing a unique format of graphic novel followed by three scholarly articles, The Cargo Rebellion recalibrates accepted histories of Asians in the Western Hemisphere from California to Latin America and the Caribbean with respect to time of arrival, type of immigration, narratives of personal agency, and relationship to the racialized society of the West.

A slim volume, The Cargo Rebellion, like PM Press’s other publications The Day the Klan Came to Town and Maroon: Origins and Destinies, hews closely to the publisher’s credo as an “independent, radical publisher of books and media to educate, entertain and inspire.” As an illustrated work, The Cargo Rebellion draws readers into its pages via an entertaining medium that resonates across generations. Read further, and the depth of primary source information and rigorous scholarship that form the underpinnings of this book become immediately clear.

This book review © 2023 Ramin Ganeshram is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/

The brilliance of The Cargo Rebellion is its artful, multilevelled access points to a complex and undertold aspect of Asian and Asian American history. Opening with the simple yet loaded truth that in the 19th century American capitalism—and the global economy of which it was an integral part—depended on the “disposable” human labor of the enslaved to such an extent that, with the end of slavery, new victims for the forced labor economy were desperately sought. This new workforce was found among indentured laborers from Asia and South Asia who putatively signed work contracts of their own free will—a questionable concept given the stranglehold and coercion that came with British imperialism in these regions. Many of the ships’ captains and contract agents plying the cargo of indentured laborers whom they called “coolies”—a derisive term that retains its sting even today—were nothing more than rebranded slavers who used retrofitted slave ships and the same brutal methods to “break” their indentured cargo as they had used with enslaved Africans less than a decade before.

Just as on slave ships throughout the tenure of the Atlantic trade, mutiny was not uncommon on the so-called “coolie” ships. The Cargo Rebllion provides a list of mutineers on ships from 1850 to 1872 in its opening pages. But the book is focused on the specific mutiny on the Robert Bowne. Its passengers believed it was bound for California but it was likely headed for the guano mines in Chincha, Peru, where ammonia produced by bird dung harvested for fertilizer killed two-thirds of the indentured laborers sent there. Learning their fate, and enervated by their inhumane treatment on board ship, the Chinese men aboard the Robert Bowne revolted and killed the ship’s captain. What followed would become the basis for an unusual international incident revolving around the recapture of survivors, survivors at large on the island near which the ship foundered, and the American desire to hush up what amounted to a new and illegal type of human trade.

The graphic novel portion of The Cargo Rebellion does an excellent job at distilling the many complex details of the Bowne Rebellion in an easily digestible format. Three scholarly pieces at the end of the book—by Alexis Dudden, Jason Chang, and Benjamin Barson, respectively—examine the details of the mutiny and legal arguments for and against the mutineers; a guide as to how Asian immigration to the Americas must be retaught considering indenture; and the impact of Chinese musical culture in formerly enslaved communities of 19th-century Louisiana. Using the story of indentured servitude, The Cargo Rebellion draws parallels to human trafficking that has continued through history to the present day. Rich citations offer opportunities for further exploration for scholars of maritime history, enslavement, and indenture, as well as for those who study liberation movements. The Cargo Rebellion is suitable for use in secondary school classrooms as part of a more holistic examination of the Asian presence in the western hemisphere.

SELECTED IMAGES FROM THE CARGO REBELLION: THOSE WHO CHOSE FREEDOM

Illustrations from The Cargo Rebellion: Those Who Chose Freedom by Jason Chang, Ben Barson, and Alexis Dudden, illustrated by Kim Inthavong. Reproduced by permission from PM Press. https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1288

Figure 1. A mural in the galleries uses the IAAM’s initials to say “I am still here.” Photograph by Akeia de Barros Gomes

GULLAH GEECHEE, AT THE INTERNATIONAL AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM, CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA

Reviewed by Akeia de Barros Gomes, Vice President, Maritime Studies, Mystic Seaport Museum

“Maybe, ultimately, the most surprising and profound thing about the IAAM is that by standing at the edge of this historic wharf, it helps bring African Americans back to the ocean, back to the turbulent Atlantic, back to a place of origin, death, sustenance—and now, self-healing.”1

When I reached out to visit the newly opened International African American History Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, I was cautioned by Chief Curator Martina Morale, “We do not offer much in the way of maritime history within the exhibitions.” As a visitor with a mind toward maritime history, maritime culture, and maritime narratives, I saw maritime history threaded throughout the museum and within almost every story told.

The International African American Museum (IAAM) was first conceived in the year 2000 by then-mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. Twenty-three years later, on June 27, 2023, the museum opened with nine galleries that tell the histories of how enslaved Africans and their descendants—both enslaved and free—shaped the economic, political, and cultural development of the South Carolina Low Country, the nation as a whole, and the larger diaspora. It is quite fitting that a museum that works to reclaim Black histories and creativity is located on the Cooper River and occupies Gadsden’s Wharf— the only wharf in Charleston that was permitted to engage in the transatlantic slave trade. Gadsden’s Wharf is a location where approximately 30,000 Africans disembarked and where, between

1807 and 1808, 700 Africans perished from poor nutrition and exposure. For the community, it is hallowed ground.

After Transatlantic Experience, a fully immersive and diasporic media experience at the entry of the museum, the maritime story begins in the theater with a narrative of the Gullah Geechee community. Visitors are introduced to Seeking: Mapping Our Gullah Geechee Story (Julie Dash, 2023). This short film grounds the visitor in Indigenous perspectives on African and European arrival by sea; we learn about African belief systems and practice, and how

Gullah Geechee, at the International African American Museum, Charleston, South Carolina © 2023 by Akeia de Barros Gomes is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Figure 2. Exterior view of the museum. Photo courtesy of the International African American Museum

belief and practice were incorporated into survivance. I left the theater space grounded in the perspective of the museum, knowing that everything I was going to see and every story in the museum would be rooted in Black voices, the power of community, creative adaptation to enslavement and Christianity, survival and resistance, and joy. The museum and its galleries take the visitor on a journey to “explore the history, culture and impact of the African American journey on Charleston, on the nation, and on the world, shining light and sharing stories of the diverse journeys, origin, and achievements of descendants of the African Diaspora.”2 Maritime narratives are woven throughout the museum, from an early twentieth-century statue depicting a dugout canoe with six rowers at the entrance of the Atlantic Worlds gallery to the exhibition’s telling of the Middle Passage. A highlight in this gallery space is an Afro-futurist cowrie shell helmet with a captivating video of the cosmos within it (Figure 3). The Atlantic Worlds gallery also has an entire wall facing the Cooper River and the Atlantic Ocean. It is a maritime space. One wall in the gallery is reserved for a large 7-by-32-feet video screen which currently provides an immer-

Figure 3. Vodunaut (Hyperwizer), 2021, by Emo de Medeiros, Benin. Cowrie shell helmet with HD video smartphone. Photo courtesy of the International African American Museum

Figure 4. A bateau traditionally used by the Gullah Geechee. Photo courtesy of the International African American Museum

sive audiovisual experience capturing a contemporary artist’s interpretation of an Atlantic journey.

There are maritime narratives to be seen throughout the exhibitions, including African Roots, Carolina Gold, South Carolina Connections, American Journeys, and other special exhibitions. However, nowhere is the story of maritime life and a maritime community clearer than in the Gullah Geechee exhibition. While there is still debate over the origins of the name Gullah Geechee, it is a term that encapsulates African-descended cultural and language (African and Caribbean influenced) groups that live in southeastern coastal areas and island groups of the United States from North Carolina to Florida.

The centerpiece of the gallery is a bateau (Figure 4). These flat-bottomed canoes were used for navigation around the South Carolina sea islands inhabited by the Gullah Geechee. Because of their relative isolation and maintenance of African language, foodways, and cultural practices, the Gullah Geechee have been the subject of numerous studies, films, and television programs.

The exhibit challenges the notion that the Gullah Geechee are a “backwards” people by highlighting and demystifying their history of “activism, organization, and cultural practices and preservation.” From a recreated praise house with audiovisual elements (Figure 5), to a cookbook opened to a page featuring salmon cakes, shrimp and fried okra, and one-dish seafood casserole, to a handcrafted fishing net made by community member Joseph Legree of the St. Helena Islands, the Gullah Geechee exhibition is the story of a people who are rooted in and sustained by the sea and their African roots. It is also a maritime story that neither begins nor ends with slave ships, but originates in millennia-old African maritime traditions that continue on. For example, there is a collection of oyster shells in the exhibit:

…symbols of immortality…often used during the burials of enslaved people to help guide the deceased into the afterlife. Many saw seashells as symbols of the ocean that brought them or their ancestors from Africa, and they hoped the ocean would return them when they died.

The Gullah Geechee are a people who see the land and water not as binaries, but as complementary entities that enable survival and maintenance of culture. For the Gullah Geechee, “marshes, woodlands, fields, creeks, and rivers supported farming, fishing, and hunting and offered medicinal plants and craft materials.”

Figure 5. Recreation of a praise house. Photo by Akeia de Barros Gomes

Bringing the story into the present, the visitor is also confronted with the threats to Gullah Geechee coastal and island communities, including racism, displacement, pollution, and sea-level rise. But because the exhibit roots the Gullah Geechee story in resistance, creativity, and survival, one leaves with a feeling of hope (Figure 1). The exhibition is a powerful example of reframing narratives. While the Gullah Geechee have been studied extensively by outside scholars, often either romanticized or portrayed as backward or “primitive,” it is now Gullah Geechee scholars, historians, artists, and educators who are telling their ancestral stories from their own perspectives and reframing the narrative of their history and community.

Endnotes

This exhibition—indeed, the entire museum— is well worth the visit. Visitors were enthralled by the panels, objects, and histories. Many, like me, spent five or more hours visiting the exhibits and then going back to revisit…to see it again (Figure 6). For some, they were learning new histories— empowering histories. For others, it wasn’t so much new information, but information presented in new, enlightening ways and through new perspectives. Two hundred fifteen years after Africans disembarked from Gadsden’s Wharf, robbed of their identities and their voice and sometimes their lives, the International African American Museum is allowing them to speak. And they are being heard.

2 Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are taken from the IAAM website or from within the exhibition.

Figure 6. Visitors in the galleries. Photo courtesy of the International African American Museum

1 Tara Roberts, “Charleston’s Newest Museum Reckons with the City’s Role in the Slave Trade,” National Geographic (November 2023), https://www. nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/charleston-black-history-international-african-american-museum.

International African American Museum, Charleston, SC

FREEDOM, SO VEREIGNTY, AND THE SE A OPENING APRIL 20, 2024

Entwined: Freedom, Sovereignty, and the Sea is a new major exhibition opening this spring at Mystic Seaport Museum that will center maritime histories in Indigenous, African, and African American worldviews and experiences. Unraveling the threads of existing maritime narratives for the history of the Dawnland (New England), Indigenous dispossession, and racialized slavery, this exhibition is rooted in voices and histories that have been silent or silenced.

Kuhtah and Kalunga are the Pequot and Bantu words for the Atlantic Ocean. Kuhtah/Kalunga and its tributaries with its cycles of ebb and flow, push and pull, and trauma and healing forever connect the histories, cultures, peoples, and legacies of ancestral African societies and kingdoms to the Sovereign Indigenous Nations of Turtle Island, or North America. Like waterways, contact between Africans and the Indigenous Nations of the Dawnland attests to the power of African and Indigenous ancestors, the circularity of time, and fundamental cycles of death and rebirth.

Entwined explores the enduring legacies, strength, and resilience of Sovereign Indigenous Nations and African-descended peoples of the Dawnland. Foregrounding ancestral and descendant voices,  Entwined reweaves a narrative of African and Indigenous maritime cultures whose histories are forever interwoven in the stories of freedom, sovereignty, and the sea.

From the Editors: This summer, the maritime world lost a groundbreaking pioneer, Captain William Pinkney, who passed away on August 31, 2023. Born on the South Side of Chicago, Pinkney followed an early stint as a navy corpsman and a successful marketing career by turning his focus to sailing and sail education. In 1992, he became the first person of African descent to sail alone around the world via the great capes. He used his voyage as an object lesson in perseverance for 30,000 American schoolchildren and the wider public through an award-winning documentary film.

He subsequently wrote several books. From 2000 to 2002, he served as the inaugural captain of the replica Amistad, taking teachers and students on voyages along Long Island Sound and across the Atlantic while delivering lessons on the Atlantic slave trade. Pinkney influenced several generations and organizations through his service, including Mystic Seaport Museum, where he served as a Trustee. In 2022, Mystic Seaport Museum presented Pinkney with its America and the Sea Award. J. Revell Carr, former President of Mystic Seaport Museum, offers the following tribute to his friend.

Captain Bill Pinkney and Revell Carr look forward aboard Amistad during the ceremony in which Mystic Seaport Museum officially turned the Freedom Schooner over to Amistad America and Captain Bill. Courtesy of J. Revell Carr

Bill Pinkney aboard the Mystic Seaport Museum schooner Brilliant in September 1995. Mystic Seaport Museum, Mary Anne Stets photo, 1995-9-140

Bill Pinkney – ZEST for life! – a Remembrance

J. Revell Carr

From the moment I first encountered Bill Pinkney, he exuded a zest for life that was inspirational. That spirit and enthusiasm carried forward through the time I worked with Bill in his role as a Mystic Seaport Museum trustee, during his captaincy of Amistad, and in our friendship in the years after I retired.

We first met when he joined the Museum’s board of trustees. Over the decades, the Museum has been well served by its distinguished and committed trustees. When Bill joined this group in 1994, he was certainly distinguished and demonstrably a man of commitment. Drawing on his life experience, he brought a unique perspective that enriched the board and greatly benefitted the Museum. I can attest to the fact that his opinions on board issues were well considered and carried weight with his board colleagues.

Naturally, Bill played a key role in the Amistad project, which had been inspired by Chris Cox, the Seaport’s Director of Development. Largely through Chris’s efforts and the skills of the shipyard crew led by Quentin Snediker, Amistad became a reality. Bill was always there to champion the project, work through the complex details of the vessel’s future, observe the construction, and ultimately become the schooner’s first captain. He served Amistad well, as he did the many who sailed with him.

But, of course, the central event in Bill’s full life was not when sailing with others but when sailing alone–around the world. Bill’s solo circumnavigation in the early 1990s, when he was in his mid-50s, began as a way to inspire his grandchildren. It evolved into a classic example of perseverance, courage, and commitment that inspired thousands of students in Boston and Chicago schools who followed his progress and heard directly from him as he faced the rigors of this often perilous voyage. It has also inspired countless others of all ages who have seen the documentary The Incredible Voyage of Bill Pinkney or have read his books. During visits in Puerto Rico after we had both retired from our roles at Mystic Seaport Museum, we talked about the joys and terrors he experienced during that voyage, in his aptly named vessel Commitment, and how they both humbled and strengthened him.

Bill faced other challenges with fortitude. In 2017 he and his wife Migdalia lost their Puerto Rican home to Hurricane Maria, but rebuilt their lives there with Bill’s abundant energy. If there was ever a vividly clear example of Bill’s zest for life, for me it was as he celebrated his 85th birthday dancing the salsa with fluidity, grace, AND every move in the book!

Two years ago, Bill received the appropriate honor of being inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame and, with his family around him, he was given its Lifetime Achievement Award. Bill’s life was indeed one of continuous, admirable achievement. Bill’s passing is a painful loss for Mystic Seaport Museum and all who knew him.

Bill Pinkney – ZEST for life! – a Remembrance © 2023 by J. Revell Carr is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

New and Upcoming Exhibits

A selection of current and upcoming exhibits with a maritime connection. Please check museum websites for the latest dates and information.

Mirror of the World—Spotlights on Seascapes from Three Centuries

Internationales Maritimes Museum

Hamburg, Germany

Until April 14, 2024

A special exhibit of paintings from the museum’s collections, focusing on the relationship between maritime art and politics in the 300 years between the seventeenth century and the late nineteenth century. https://www.imm-hamburg.de/museum/ sonderausstellung/special-exhibition/

The Science of Surfing

California Surf Museum

Oceanside, California, USA

Until April 30, 2024

This exhibit uses multimedia displays to explore the physics of surfing and the custodianship of the ocean. Designed to comply with STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) standards, the exhibit is designed to engage all visitors, regardless of their familiarity with surfing. https://surfmuseum.org/current-exhibits/the-science-of-surfing/

Grand Opening

Canadian Canoe Museum

Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

Opening May 2024

The final portage of over 600 canoes, kayaks, and boats is underway, and the museum is scheduling its grand opening events for this spring. The new museum building will preserve this key portion of Canada’s cultural heritage and share Canadian stories. https://canoemuseum.ca/

Kadir van Lohuizen: Food for Thought Het Scheepvaart National Maritime Museum

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Until June 9, 2024

Photographer and filmmaker Kadir van Lohuizen explores the role of the Netherlands as the second largest exporter in the world, investigating how this small country produces and exports food for the world.

Pulling Together: A Brief History of Rowing in Seattle

Museum of History and Industry

Seattle, Washington, USA

Until June 2, 2024

An exhibit in celebration of the new film The Boys in the Boat, about the gold medal upset win by a team from the University of Washington at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It includes artifacts and photographs relating to that crew and to the history of rowing in Seattle. https://mohai.org/exhibits/pulling-together-a-brief-history-of-rowing-in-seattle/

Sailing Against the Tide: Women of Cape Cod & the Islands

Cape Cod Maritime Museum

Hyannis, Massachusetts, USA

Through 2024

An exhibit on the role of women in local maritime history. https://capecodmaritimemuseum.org/virtual-exhibits/sailing-against-the-tide-women-of-capecod-and-the-islands

Grand Reopening

Musée de la Marine

Paris, France

The Musée de la Marine, one of the oldest maritime museums in the world, has recently reopened after six years of renovations. The museum uses scientific tools, paintings, and artifacts of all kinds to tell stories of the marine world. The inaugural special

Photo credit: Kadir van Lohuizen, courtesy of Het Scheepvaart National Maritime Museum

exhibit, Objectif Mer: l’océan filmé, which explores the history of the ocean as a subject of cinema, is open until May 5, 2024. https://www.musee-marine. fr/en/our-museums/paris.html

Women of the RNLI

National Maritime Museum

Greenwich, England

March 2–December 1, 2024

This year marks 200 years of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. This exhibit shines a spotlight on the various roles that women have—and always have had—in this lifesaving organization. At the heart of Women of the RNLI is the photography of Jack Lowe. His evocative images, captured using Victorian glassplate technology, allow us to see the modern work of the RNLI through a historic lens.

https://www.rmg.co.uk/national-maritime-museum/ top-things-to-do/polar-worlds-gallery

The Awe of the Arctic: A Visual History

New York Public Library

New York, New York, USA

March 15–July 13, 2024

This exhibit draws on the collections of the New York Public Library to consider how the Arctic has been visually depicted, defined, and imagined over the past 500 years and how those representations have shaped our current understandings. https://www. nypl.org/events/exhibitions/awe-of-the-arctic-preview

Chaim Ebanks, bookbinder, and Susan Ebanks, designer, of Exeter Bookbinders (Devon, England). Moby Dick; or, The Whale, published 1930. Courtesy of Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Rowley, MA

Draw Me Ishmael: The Book Arts of Moby Dick

Peabody Essex Museum Salem, Massachusetts, USA

June 1, 2024–January 4, 2026

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is the most continuously, frequently, and diversely depicted of American literary works. This exhibition focuses on the book arts of the hundreds of editions published since 1851: the illustrations, binding designs, typography, and even the physical structures. It will shed light on Melville’s original inspiration and include a contemporary update through recent artists’ books, graphic novels, a translation into emoji, and pop-up books.

https://www.pem.org/exhibitions/draw-me-ishmaelthe-book-arts-of-moby-dick

To submit an exhibit for possible inclusion in the next issue of Mainsheet, please email a brief description and link to mainsheet@mysticseaport. org. Photographs are appreciated.

The grand reopening of the Musée de la Marine. Photo credit: MnM/Gabriel De Carvalho, courtesy of the Musée de la Marine

Academic Opportunities and Happenings

Internships & Fellowships

Knauss 2025 Fellowship Program

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Washington, DC, USA

Applications due by February 15, 2024

An opportunity for graduate students pursuing ocean resource management, the Knauss Fellowship offers a one-year paid experience, working with the legislative and executive branches of the federal government.

https://seagrant.noaa.gov/knauss-fellowship-program/

Gulf Research Program’s Science Policy Fellowship Program

National Academies

Numerous sites around the Gulf of Mexico, USA

Applications due by February 7, 2024

Centered around the protection of environmental and human health, policy-making decisions, and resource management, this one-year fellowship offers the opportunity for hands-on work related to resource management, public policy, public health, and engineering solutions.

https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/science-policy-fellowship

2024 Frank C. Munson Institute of American Maritime Studies

Mystic Seaport Museum

Mystic, Connecticut, USA

Applications due by March 8, 2024

During the summer of 2024, the Munson Institute will offer two courses focused on the American maritime experience, tracing U.S. maritime heritage from before “America” to the present, exploring maritime communities, cultures, and industries through lectures, discussion, and independent research. Fellows receive a $2,000 stipend and housing. Fellowships are intended for junior faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students. Applicants with a specific research and writing project are encouraged to apply for the Paul Cuffe Memorial Fellowship for additional funding of up to $2,400. https://mysticseaport.org/munson/

New England Black and Indigenous Maritime Histories Summer Internship

Mystic Seaport Museum

Mystic, Connecticut, USA

Applications due by February 16, 2024

Mystic Seaport Museum welcomes applicants for the 2024 New England Black and Indigenous Maritime Histories Summer Internship. This interdisciplinary internship engages with BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People of Color) maritime histories and contemporary communities through academic exploration and hands-on practice in public engagement, curation, and community conversations.

https://mysticseaport.org/about/internships-at-mystic-seaport/

Conferences

9th IMHA International Congress of Maritime History

Busan, South Korea

August 19–24, 2024

Hosted by the International Maritime History Association at Korea Maritime & Ocean University, this conference will include interdisciplinary papers on maritime history and maritime futures. The theme, “Oceans: Local Mobility, Global Connectivity,” emphasizes the various aspects of the relationship we, as humans, have with our oceans globally.

https://imha.info/2023/04/04/call-for-papers-9th-imha-congress-of-maritime-history/

International Conference on Maritime Law and Practice (ICMLP)

Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

May 2–3, 2024

This conference brings together leading academic scientists, researchers, and research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results on all aspects of maritime law and practice.

https://waset.org/maritime-law-and-practice-conference-in-may-2024-in-honolulu?utm_source=conferenceindex&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=listing

Council of American Maritime Museums Annual Conference

Boston, MA, USA

April 24–26, 2024

The 2024 CAMM conference will be held at the USS Constitution Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, April 24–26, 2024.

https://councilofamericanmaritimemuseums.org/ annual-meeting/

ICMM Biennial Congress 2024 “Low Lands, High Tides”

The Netherlands and Belgium

September 15–20, 2024

The International Congress of Maritime Museums biennial congress will be held in the “lowland” countries of the Netherlands and Belgium and jointly hosted by four maritime museums, the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, the Maritiem Museum Rotterdam, the Zuiderzee Museum of the Netherlands, and the Museen aan de Stroom in Antwerp, Belgium. The conference explores the roles that maritime museums can play in our contemporary world.

https://icmm-maritime.org/2023/09/15/icmm-congress-2024-call-for-papers/

17th International Symposium on Boat & Ship Archaeology

Naples, Italy

October 21–26, 2024

This conference on progress and developments in nautical archaeology will be held at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, Italy. The theme for the main session will be “State and Private Shipbuilding Through the Ages.”

https://isbsa.org/

UNESCO 2024 Ocean Decade Conference

Barcelona, Spain

April 8–12, 2024

This international event, organized by UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, will bring together various actors, including governments, decision-makers, maritime sectors, philanthropy, academia, the private sector, and civil society, to engage in a constructive dialogue

around progress and joint priorities for the future of the Ocean Decade and continued success of ocean sustainability efforts.

https://oceandecade-conference.com/home.php

New Researchers in Maritime History

Glasgow, Scotland

March 22–23, 2024

This annual conference, organized by the British Commission for Maritime History, allows emerging scholars to share their work in a supportive environment and build relations with other maritime historians. At the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

https://www.maritimehistory.org.uk/news/items/ call-for-papers---new-researchers-in-maritime-history-2024

To submit an event for possible inclusion in the next issue of Mainsheet, please email a brief description and link to mainsheet@mysticseaport.org

A JOURNAL OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY MARITIME STUDIES

About Mainsheet

Mainsheet is a journal of multidisciplinary maritime studies published by Mystic Seaport Museum. Blending rigorously peer-reviewed scholarship with art, poetry, book reviews, and other materials of interest to the maritime studies community, Mainsheet aims to be accessible globally, across academic fields, and also to a general public interested in maritime studies. Each issue gathers work on a particular theme.

Mainsheet maintains a double-blind peer review process, and accepted articles will be published open access on our website, with no publication fee. Mainsheet is also published in a high-quality print version, professionally designed and perfect-bound.

Subscribing to Mainsheet:

Subscription information is on our website. Visit mainsheet.mysticseaport.org/about or follow this QR code.

Submitting Original Research to Mainsheet:

As a multidisciplinary journal, Mainsheet welcomes original research from any field that relates to our upcoming theme. We particularly hope to highlight work from emerging scholars. Accepted manuscripts will be published open access under a Creative Commons license and with no publication fee.

Research paper submissions should be made through our author portal. Visit mainsheet. mysticseaport.org/about or follow the QR code above to see our current call(s) for papers and our author instructions.

Art, Poetry, and Nonacademic Submissions:

In addition to research papers, Mainsheet also publishes art, poetry, artifact spotlights, and other kinds of short, accessible content relating to our issue themes. We are also open to photo essays and nonscholarly pieces that creatively explore the perspectives and personal experiences of researchers or non-academics relating to issue themes.

We particularly seek visual art to complement and enrich our issue themes, and a small honorarium may be available for original artwork.

Please contact the editors at mainsheet@mysticseaport.org if you have ideas or suggestions for non-research content that aligns with our themes.

Back cover

Title: Can we move?

Photographer: Ed Lyndon Garrido

Location: Nantong China

Photographer’s description: “Trying to move the rudder. Picture was taken before the pandemic during dry dock and was not going to miss taking this picture.”

This issue’s covers feature photographs taken by seafarers for the ITF Seafarers’ Trust annual photography competition. The photographers’ descriptions have been lightly edited.

A JOURNAL OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY MARITIME STUDIES