Abstract
In 1890s Britain, cattle ships - vessels used to transport live animals internationally - became a point of public and parliamentary discussion. Cattle shipping was not a new mode of meat supply to Britain, with some European routes well established for centuries; however, in the late nineteenth century, traders based in the United States began running cattle ships across the Atlantic Ocean. I argue that transatlantic cattle ships were a particularly modern site of morality and fertile ground for exploring and extending Victorian Britons’ politics of interspecies relations and care. Looking at two contemporaneous anti-cattle shipping pamphlets, by Samuel Plimsoll (1890) and the Humanitarian League (1894) respectively, this article addresses how the issues of humanitarian character, diet and refrigeration technology relate to images of cows aboard American ships. The fact that several nineteenth-century figures drew comparisons with the transatlantic slave trade in attempts to stop or criticise the movement of live cattle is significant to this study, and helps to inform my discussion of advocacy imagery. By studying the photographs and prints that illustrate both pamphlets, I show that the cows’ likenesses were made through absence, primarily of light and of ink, and ask how this shapes their becoming ‘edible’.
Highlights
Four figures look down from the deck of an anonymous ship, three human and one bovine who together make up the living contingent of a photograph captioned ‘Another view’
Towers, called Cattle Ships, and Our Meat Supply (1894), which was illustrated with three diagrams of an American cattle ship
I am concerned with the circulation of images and bodies, for implicit in printed depictions of cattle ships that crossed and referred to the Atlantic Ocean, are the transformations experienced by the bodies of bovine passengers at sea and once again on land, where they were slaughtered
Summary
Four figures look down from the deck of an anonymous ship, three human and one bovine who together make up the living contingent of a photograph captioned ‘Another view’ (figure 1). Another view featured in Cattle Ships (1890), a ‘notorious’ pamphlet published in London by British public figure Samuel Plimsoll in an effort to reform animal welfare practices in Britain’s food supply chain.[1] Cattle ships were seaborne vessels that were either custom built or adapted to transport live animals - usually cows, sometimes sheep and pigs - on transoceanic crossings.
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