Abstract
This chapter gives an outline of the study of sea literature in the past, arguing that the traditional maritime literary studies and maritime cultural history haven’t looked at the oceanic environment as a whole, which resulted in too much an emphasis on fishing, trading, voyages, explorations on the ocean. Such a slant view to maritime activities might have to do with: first, humans’ existence as terrestrial beings, who have tended to look at the ocean as a plane figure; and second, the view that the land (terrestrial) and the sea (oceanic) are rigidly separated and opposed. As a new way to better look at sea literature, the author reinterprets some representative sea literature by finding how we can find oceanic experience embedded in some of the terrestrial experience. The authors to be mainly discussed are William Bradford, Olaudah Equiano, Washington Irving, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Joshua Slocum, and Peter Matthiessen.
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Hugo Grotius. The Freedom of the Seas: or, The Right Which Belongs to Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade: A Dissertation by Hugo Grotius; Translated with a Revision of the Latin Text of 1633 by Ralph Van Deman Magoffin; Edited with an Introductory Note by James Brown Scott. London: Oxford University Press, 1916. (37). Print.
Christopher Connery. “There was No More Sea: The Supersession of the Ocean, from the Bible to Cyberspace.” Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006): 494–511. (509).
Ulrick Knzel. “Orientation as a Paradigm of Maritime Modernity.” Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture. Ed. Bernhard Klein. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. (29).
Christopher Connery. “There Was No More Sea: The Supersession of the Ocean, from the Bible to Cyberspace.” Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006): 494–511. (508).
Philip E. Steinberg. The Social Construction of the Ocean. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (207). Print.
Roderick Nash. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967. (2–3).
William Bradford. Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620–1647. Intro. By Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: Knopf, 1966. (61). Print.
Ronald E. Seavoy, An Economic History of the United States: from 1607 to the Present. New York: Routledge, 2006. (35).
David Cressy. “The Vast and Furious Ocean: The Passage to Puritan New England.” The New England Quarterly 57.4 (1984): 511–532. (511).
Michel Foucault. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” 1967. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf (3). May 29, 2014.
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000;
Marcus Rediker. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
In this respect, C.L.R. James in his Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Dartmouth College, 2001) presents a reading of Moby-Dick as a allegory of modernism just passed, and he interprets the Pequod’s crews as industrial exploited workers. His interpretation of maritime experience succeeds in analyzing how the oceanic environment symbolizes the terrestrial industrialism extending its power over maritime activities; however, because James doesn’t distinguish the terrestrial and the oceanic industrialism, the more successful his monograph is, the less persuasive it seems why Moby-Dick has to be maritime fiction in order to critique growing industrialism.
Hugh J. Dawson claims in his “John Winthrops Rite of Passage: The Origin of the ‘Christian Charitie’ Discourse” in Early American Literature (Volume 26, 1991) that his “Model of Christian Charity” sermon was wrote not on the Arbella but before his departure to America, and the Puritan belief of “brotherly affection” seems to have something in common. There is in fact a large difference between the Puritan community and maritime community formed on the ship notwithstanding; one is religious and the other is practical.
James Walvin. An African’s Life: the Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745–1797. Washington, D.C.: Cassell, 1998. (16).
Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. (16). Print.
John Smith. A Description of New England: Or, Observations and Discoveries in the North of America in the Year of Our Lord 1614, with the Success of Six Ships that Went the Next Year, 1615. Boston: W. Veazie, 1865.
K. Jack Bauer. A Maritime History of the United States: The Role of America’s Seas and Waterways. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. (32). Print.
Henry Hall. Ship-Building Industry of the United State. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1884. (4). Print.
John J. McCusker. “The Shipping Industry in Colonial America.” America’s Maritime Legacy: A History of the U.S. Merchant Marine and Shipbuilding Industry Since Colonial Times Ed. Robert A. Kilmarx. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1979. (12). Print.
Carolyn Merchant. American Environmental History: An Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. (12). Print.
Washington Irving. “The Voyage.” The Sketch Book. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1843. (15). Print.
Evelyn Edson. Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. (16). Print.
Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Two Years before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea. 1840. New York: Penguin, 1981. (14). Print.
For a comprehensive study on sea fiction subsequent to Moby-Dick, see Bert Bender’s Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).
Joshua Slocum. Sailing Alone around the World. 1900. New York: Sheridan House, 1995. (27). Print.
This is a discussion first elaborated in Bert Bender’s “Joshua Slocum and the Reality of Solitude” (ATQ: American Transcendental Quarterly (1992): 59–71), but I wish to put it in the context of the terrestrial and the oceanic oscillation.
Victor Slocum. Capt. Joshua Slocum: The Life and Voyages of America’s Best Known Sailor. New York: Sheridan House, 1950. (302). Print.
Walter Magnes Teller. The Voyages of Joshua Slocum. New Brunswick and New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1958. (201). Print.
George Plimpton. “The Craft of Fiction in Far Tortuga.” The Paris Review 60 (1974): (79–80).
Rebecca Raglon. “Fact and Fiction: The Development of Ecological Form in Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 35 (1994): 245–59.
William Kennedy. “Sea Spun Tale.” The New Republic (June 7, 1975): 28–30. (28).
Peter Matthiessen. Far Tortuga. New York: Bantam, 1975. (4). Print.
Bert Bender. Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. (218). Print.
For example, Matthiessen’s later novels such as Shadow Country (2008) revolves around a tragic and violent life of Edgar J. Watson, who seems to represent in many ways the relationship between American culture and the natural environment. Or his first book of non-fiction Wildlife in America (1959) accounts a wide variety of the American natural life as well as its depletion.
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© 2014 Shin Yamashiro
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Yamashiro, S. (2014). American Sea Literature—on the Sea. In: American Sea Literature: Seascapes, Beach Narratives, and Underwater Explorations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463302_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463302_2
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