Abstract
AbstractThe introduction to the edited volume outlines the topics covered by the essays that follow and places them within historical and academic contexts. Turning for examples to several literary and non-literary texts, most notably the 1820s diaries of Edward Beck and Richard Henry Dana, Jr.’sTwo Years Before the Mast(1840), it considers the differences and the continuities that prevail in shipboard environments across time, while also discussing the ways in which the human experience of time itself is complicated by seafaring. Particular attention is paid to the role of literary practices in shaping the experience of seafaring—to how such practices construct and reshape shipboard hierarchies, and also to how they help seafarers come to terms with the shipboard environment and with the ocean itself. While thus shaping shipboard cultures, the introduction argues, literary practices are also themselves affected—or ‘stained’—by the ocean environment.
Highlights
On a collier plying the route between Sunderland and Quebec in the 1820s, the apprentice seaman Edward Beck kept a diary in which he recorded, among other things, the remarkable events of the voyage; his conversations with migrant passengers and with crew; his developing grasp of the art of navigation; and his private sensations as he crossed the vast Atlantic for the first time
Our contributors ask how literary practices are shaped by the experience of being at sea—and how they forge that experience. They are interested, that is, both in how such practices adapt to the maritime world, and in how individual and collective shipboard
Though our contributors focus predominantly on ships with Anglophone seafarers, they follow them through the world’s oceans, while vessels under scrutiny range from a man-of-war participating in the English Civil War (1642–51) to contemporary container ships, with those of the nineteenth century—perhaps the greatest age of Anglo-American maritime mobility—best represented
Summary
On a collier plying the route between Sunderland and Quebec in the 1820s, the apprentice seaman Edward Beck kept a diary in which he recorded, among other things, the remarkable events of the voyage; his conversations with migrant passengers and with crew; his developing grasp of the art of navigation; and his private sensations as he crossed the vast Atlantic for the first time. Beck recorded interactions with seabirds and with creatures of the deep, beginning one entry in mid-ocean : Abundance of whales have been about the ship this afternoon, one in particular came very close to us & gave me a full view of him, & a most huge & clumsy looking fellow he was, they play in the water much like porpoises & are [...]. Our contributors ask how literary practices are shaped by the experience of being at sea—and how they forge that experience. They are interested, that is, both in how such practices adapt to the maritime world, and in how individual and collective shipboard
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