Satisfied with Nothing but Going to Sea — Seafaring Lives and Island Hopes

Abstract

The practical individualism of the Crusoe character, much admired and perpetuated by Rousseau, has contributed to Western thought’s emphasis on ‘neatly bounded’ island-like conceptualizations of individual selves, families, communities and nations that has led us to say we are ‘at sea’ when boundaries are blurred and things are unclear. But during the eighteenth century it was with maritime narratives that the British organized — mentally, economically and politically — their new seaborne empire. In this expanding empire, being ‘at sea’ was for many men, in the words of a popular song, ‘where I should ever be’. It was the continents that were filled with blank spaces: the oceans were crowded with islands and with ships plying the well-known sea routes between them’.¹ Importantly, being at sea was the perfect environment for male bodies that were ‘calculated for activity and exertion’.² For male bodies in need of further rehabilitation, islands were ideal for the sort of social’ tinkering’ that historian David Lowenthal says led to such nineteenth-century experiments in criminal rehabilitation as Norfolk Island in the 1840s. Here, along the lines of the ‘pedagogy of Crusoe and Rousseau, men corrupted in the industrial cesspits of Europe would be redeemed by immersion in primeval purity. Tilling the soil on these remote and isolated islands would render criminals virtuous’.³

Arrive at the state of manhood with honour and credit — I am in hell — Become good, and even opulent men — Ploughing the land, ploughing the deep