Open Boat Research Articles

Representations of Social Darwinism in Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat and Guy De Maupassant’s Ball of Fat

Representations of Social Darwinism in Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat and Guy De Maupassant’s Ball of Fat

Leaving Saint-Denis on an Open Boat: Creole Migration to the Pacific

Abstract: In the early 1860s, a series of cyclones, the sugar industry collapse and increasing impoverishment among the Reunionese were significant push factors for people to explore greener pastures in other colonies. At the same time, governor Guillain in the new French colony of New Caledonia actively sought to recruit skilled workers from Reunion to start up sugar production in the Pacific, to build the local infrastructure and provide settler bodies for the colonial project. While we are aware of these important push and pull factors, what were the individual, personal motivations for the Creoles of Reunion, particularly the most poverty stricken and dispossessed, to leave home for the unknown island across the oceans? How did they imagine this new colonial space in the Pacific? Using the framework of Édouard Glissant's "The Open Boat," and based on research in the Archives départementales de La Réunion, this article analyses letters to the governor of Reunion written by (or for) prospective migrants, discussing their reasons (and pleas) to be granted passage to New Caledonia. It also considers the motivations to move that have been preserved in oral family histories among the descendants of nineteenth-century Reunionese migrants to the Pacific.

Dynamic Assembly of Cascade Enzymes by the Shape Transformation of a DNA Scaffold

AbstractWithin cells, the close spatial arrangement of cascade enzymes facilitates the channeling of intermediates and enhances cascade reaction efficiency. Reconfigurable DNA nanostructures, owing to their structural controllability and precise spatial addressability, are promising tools for mimicking such processes. In this study, a 3D DNA origami scaffold, with a dynamic shape transformation from its open boat form to a closed hexagonal prism induced by toehold‐mediated strand displacement, is designed to investigate the enzyme cascade reaction of xylose reductase and xylitol dehydrogenase from D‐xylose metabolic pathway. Enzymes are assembled on the DNA scaffold in its open state, which is subsequently closed by the assistance of DNA sequence‐specific closing keys. The enzyme cascade efficiency is much higher in the static encapsulated closed state than in the open state due not only to the enzyme proximity but also the environmental factors of 3D DNA structure. These results provide novel insights into controlling enzyme cascade reactions by inducing the shape transformation of DNA nanostructures and how environmental factors affect the action of multi‐enzyme complexes in the cell.

Vietnamese refugee journeys and the fallacy of certainty

Vietnamese diasporic refugee narratives critically engage images of helicopter rescues and crowded boats that saturate American-mediated memories of war’s aftermath. From a critical refugee studies perspective, Yến Lê Espiritu links war to displacement through these images to define the United States as a ‘militarized refuge’. For Mimi Nguyen, arrival initiates a ‘gift of freedom’ that names the indebtedness of the refugee to the state. In their critical engagements, arrival initiates debt for militarized refugees. To further their work, I problematize the celebration of arrival with what I call the fallacy of certainty. To dismantle the certainty of arrival, I examine expressions of what Vinh Nguyen calls ‘refugeetude’ in depictions of refugee journeys by Ocean Vuong, G. B. Tran, Nam Le and Matt Huynh. Employing Espiritu’s method of ‘critical juxtapositioning’, I engage Édouard Glissant’s relationality of the abyss and the opacity of the open boat to contextualize forced migration narratives within a longue durée of imperialism that Aníbal Quijano calls coloniality. Ending with Long Bui’s discussion of a postmemory generation of Vietnamese diasporic artists and writers’ use of performativity, I show how they forward critical refugee studies when they imaginatively return to the journey, articulating relationalities that cross oceans and temporalities.

Fabrication of [formula omitted]As targets for heavy ion nuclear reactions

Thin uniform targets of 75As isotope with Pb/Au backing layer were fabricated for nuclear structure studies and sub-picosecond lifetime measurements of nuclear excited states using the Doppler shift attenuation method (DSAM) for nuclei populated in the heavy-ion induced fusion-evaporation reactions. The 75As targets of thickness 2.8–4.0 mg/cm2 (4.9–7.0μm) were prepared by in-vacuo sublimation of the As metal powder on to the backing (∼10 mg/cm2) of Pb (9.4μm) or Au (5.2μm), which were prepared by rolling method. The prepared targets were further rolled to improve their uniformity and avoid any interlayer gaps. The amount 75As material required for target preparation could be significantly reduced to ∼80 mg by increasing vapour flux by replacing the open dimpled tantalum boat with the pinhole tubular form. The uniformity, purity and thickness of As and Pb layers in the fabricated targets were assessed using a non-destructive Energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence (EDXRF) technique set-up. The measured thickness values of As and Pb/Au layers were found to agree within ∼3% with those deduced from the weighing method. The prepared targets have been successfully used with 28Si and 31P ion beams and the in-beam γ-ray spectroscopic studies in excited nuclear states in 98,99Rh, 99,100,101Pd and 102Ag isotopes.

Indigenous Navigatory Devices used during the High Floods in North Bihar

This paper takes into account the methods of adaptations to the extreme situations of floods in the rainy season of 2020 in the rural and urban areas of Darbhanga district in northern Bihar, India. Boats made of different types of woods are the first choice of people. The region has a sprawling boat industry that provides a basis of livelihood to the wood smith community. Boats are generally made available to the needy people by the agencies of Government. However, those deprived of the boat facility adapt to the situation by carving makeshift devices made from banana pseudo stems, water hyacinth fronds, dry wood pieces, pitcher floats, bamboo rafts, cement bowls for feeding the livestock etc. High floods of 2020 witnessed people using boats of thermocol and rubber tubes on a large scale. All these devices, whether natural or man-made, work on the principle of Archimedes. The paper reports an innovative practice of using the hollow gas cylinders intricately strung in the fashion of an open boat that was used for about 15-20 days till the high floods receded in the village Harichanda of Hanuman Nagar C.D. Block of Darbhanga district India. The system was devised by local young men to tide over the crisis of ferrying people to local orchards for defecation and also for maintaining the supply chain of drinking water, cooking gas and other essential services. The plant items achieve buoyancy due to their density lower than water. Those made of flattened wood or tin plates achieve floatability on account of large volume of water that they displace. The weight of people carried on these boats is lighter than the weight of the volume of water displaced in the process.

Shaw and Legacy: Introduction

Shaw and Legacy: Introduction

Modernist Doubt in James Hanley’s The Ocean

This paper examines James Hanley’s novel The Ocean (1941). The novel falls into the genre of open-boat stories, of which several modernist examples exist. Hanley interrogates and develops modernist concerns established in previous texts such as Stephen Crane’s ‘The Open Boat’ (1897). Hanley’s working-class context and his reference to the events of World War II are key to understanding how he differs from Crane. Specifically, Hanley includes an incident where a lifeboat is machine-gunned by a submarine. Some historical context is provided for this incident, and this paper suggests its importance in terms of a modernist preoccupation with meaninglessness. This paper pays special attention to Hanley’s use of shifting narrative perspectives in order to examine psychological trauma. In part, this paper argues that Hanley’s radical materialism distinguishes him from other modernist writers of the ocean such as Stephen Crane, and, more generally, Joseph Conrad.

Estimation of Forces Acting on a Sailboat Using a Kinematic Sensor

Amateur keel boat racing has becoming more and more popular on coastal regions with an old sailing tradition, such as in Adriatic. Although the traditional experience is transmitted to new generations of skippers and crews that compete on national and international regattas with open class boat, the material limits of the boat are often measured subjectively, by sail or mast failure, and transmitted by a story. Most sailors know why some component failed, but often they don’t know what force was needed for the particular failure. Forces acting on a boat are usually estimated with CFD and towing tank experiment for relevant sailing conditions, but full scale data in seaway are rarely taken. Here we wanted to show a low budget method to get a rough estimate of aerodynamic and hydrodynamic forces acting on a keel sailboat using a kinematic sensor. Some approximations are taken into account to construct a simplified mathematical sailboat model, which allow to relate kinematic data to forces acting on sail, hull, keel and rudder. Some data as the geometry and mass distribution of the boat has to be known, other parameters such as water resistance instead has to be experimentally measured. Results of a series of measurements are presented and discussed. Looking on the limitations of such a method, a proposal for a new sensor is made.

Numerical Study of Hydrothermal Wave Suppression in Thermocapillary Flow Using a Predictive Control Method

Hydrothermal waves in flows driven by thermocapillary and buoyancy effects are suppressed by applying a predictive control method. Hydrothermal waves arise in the manufacturing of crystals, including the “open boat” crystal growth process, and lead to undesirable impurities in crystals. The open boat process is modeled using the two-dimensional unsteady incompressible Navier–Stokes equations under the Boussinesq approximation and the linear approximation of the surface thermocapillary force. The flow is controlled by a spatially and temporally varying heat flux density through the free surface. The heat flux density is determined by a conjugate gradient optimization algorithm. The gradient of the objective function with respect to the heat flux density is found by solving adjoint equations derived from the Navier–Stokes ones in the Boussinesq approximation. Special attention is given to heat flux density distributions over small free-surface areas and to the maximum admissible heat flux density.

"A Problem in Small Boat Navigation": Ocean Metaphors and Emerging Data Epistemology in Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" and Jack London's "The Heathen"

"A Problem in Small Boat Navigation": Ocean Metaphors and Emerging Data Epistemology in Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" and Jack London's "The Heathen"

Perry Harrison: an appreciation.

Herbert Percival Cooper (Perry) Harrison, FRCGP, Glasgow University, a founder member of the RCGP, died aged 100 on 29 September 2016. He practised as a single-handed rural GP for 35 years and was responsible for the College’s coat of arms and its guiding motto: Cum Scientia Caritas [‘Compassion with knowledge’]. He studied at the University of Glasgow where he gained a hockey blue, graduating in 1940. During the war he was a medical officer in the Merchant Navy with the Clan Line before serving in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander. This included spending 3 hours in an open boat when he was responsible for recovering badly-burned survivors from the wreckage of the frigate HMS Tweed: selecting those whom he believed most likely …

Om bord på vikingetidens langskibe – En analyse af besætningsorganisation og kommunikation

On board Viking Age longshipsAnalysing crew organisation and communicationBy analysing the relations between man, ship and sea it is possible to gain a fundamental understanding of the sea voyages undertaken by Scandinavians during the Viking Age. This article examines crew organisation and communication on board Viking Age longships. Archaeological and written sources relating to Viking Age Scandinavian seafaring are scrutinised and combined with experience gained from sailing trials and voyages employing full-scale reconstructions of Viking Age longships: Conditions on board Viking Age longships and the seamanship of the period are investigated afresh (figs. 1-3).It is argued that sailing and rowing experiments are important components in the analysis of archaeological finds of ships and ship-related materials. These experiments function as catalysts for processes that may lead to new interpretations of the source material (fig. 4). The practical approach represented by participating as crew on a reconstruction of an archaeologically-found ship offers possibilities for examining aspects like the flexibility of the hull, the seaworthiness and speed of the vessel under different weather conditions and logistical limitations, as well as human factors such as the physical abilities and nautical skills required of the crew. This article presents examples of how sailing trials and voyages with the Viking Ship Museum’s Skuldelev 2 reconstruction The Sea Stallion from Glendalough have led to a new understanding of the hull flexibility and strength of Viking Age longships. It is also argued that studies of crew organisation and communication on board The Sea Stallion from Glendalough provide a fundamental insight into conditions on board Viking Age longships (figs. 5-8).A middleman is proposed as a key element in the communication on board a longship. The middleman is located close to the mast and is responsible for relaying commands and messages from the skipper, situated in the aft of the ship, towards the bow of the vessel, as well as relaying the look-out’s observations back to the skipper. In relation to this, it is interesting that sailing scenes depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry often highlight three people on board the vessels: One aft (the skipper or helmsman?), one amidships, close to the mast (the middleman?), and one close to the bow (the look-out?). These three people seem to communicate with each other, either verbally or using gestures (figs. 9-10).In conclusion, based on the experience gained from the sailing trails and voyages employing full scale reconstructions of Viking Age longships, it is evident that the large crew and limited space on board calls for a well-defined organisation with a clear and unambiguous command structure. When combined with the need to trust and protect each other while at sea in an open boat, this creates close-knit communities of practice, as also seen among soldiers in military units. It seems likely that the practices and living conditions on board the longships contributed greatly to the creation of the Vikings’ notoriously efficient and coherent military units (fig. 11).Morten RavnVikingeskibsmuseet i Roskilde

Activism and Indifference

From his earliest work as an apprentice reporter working with his elder brother, to his last days sending dispatches from the Greco-Turkish war, Stephen Crane was actively exploring the pitiless stance of “nature” in the face of human trauma and strife. Here, the adventures he sought out—by going “slumming,” going West, and going to war—and his reportage about them are traced forward through his short life, to explicate how his reportorial voice became such a powerful fictional voice. In particular, the reality of his “open boat” experience is contrasted with his three written versions of it, one reportorial and two fictional.

The Open Boat and the Shipwreck of the Singular: American Poetry and the Democratic Ideal

A poet investigates an essential contradiction within American poetry’s counter-tradition. How is it that vanguard works of poetry and prose repeatedly re-enact foundational narratives of Americanness ? What is the wager between being self-made and being part of ? How do scenes of self-determination and conquest play out generically and syntactically ? Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the trans-Atlantic movement of poetry, political theory, and property reiterates a tension between singularity and inclusion, political and linguistic representation. Works by Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, and Walt Whitman are considered in relation to the competing pressures of idiolectical invention and public address, of literary making and unmaking.

Conformational changes in Cmethyl-resorcinarene pyridine N-oxide inclusion complexes in the solid state

Aromatic N-oxides interact with Cmethyl-resorcinarene resulting in marked changes in the conformation of the host resorcinarene. In the solid state, 2- and 3-methylpyridine N-oxides form pseudo-capsular 2 : 2 endo host–guest complexes with Cmethyl-resorcinarene stabilized by C–H⋯π interactions. The Cmethyl-resorcinarene·2-methylpyridine N-oxide complex has a C4v crown conformation, while the Cmethyl-resorcinarene·3-methylpyridine N-oxide complex has a slightly open C2v boat conformation. On the contrary, other para-substituted and benzo-fused pyridine N-oxides form only exo complexes with Cmethyl-resorcinarene. In the exo complexes, the asymmetry of the guest, conformational flexibility and preferred inter-host hydrogen bonding of Cmethyl-resorcinarenes exclude endo complexation. All the exo complexes form robust 1-D hydrogen bonded chains between the host hydroxyl groups assisted by the guest N–O groups, resulting in a C2v boat conformation.

Suppression of breakers in stormy seas by an oil film

The mechanism by which an oil film is able to still stormy seas has remained mysterious. Accounts by shipmasters of the effective use of oil collected by the US Hydrographic Office in the 1880s contain little quantitative information. In only one episode was the time of response to a sudden application of oil recorded. In this case, storm breakers were annulled by use of fish oil to enable a small open boat to rescue the crew of a sinking vessel. The cessation of breaking seas occurred only after the oil had spread over a large area to windward of the ships. It appears that wave growth stopped in this oiled region. The reaction of regulatory bodies and public responses to the rescue illustrate features of the political and social contexts in which shipping and trading activity was conducted in the late nineteenth century.

Objective function choice for control of a thermocapillary flow using an adjoint-based control strategy

The problem of suppressing flow oscillations in a thermocapillary flow is addressed using a gradient-based control strategy. The physical problem addressed is the “open boat” process of crystal growth, the flow in which is driven by thermocapillary and buoyancy effects. The problem is modeled by the two-dimensional unsteady incompressible Navier–Stokes and energy equations under the Boussinesq approximation. The goal of the control is to suppress flow oscillations which arise when the driving forces are such that the flow becomes unsteady. The control is a spatially and temporally varying temperature gradient boundary condition at the free surface. The control which minimizes the flow oscillations is found using a conjugate gradient method, where the gradient of the objective function with respect to the control variables is obtained from solving a set of adjoint equations. The issue of choosing an objective function that can be both optimized in a computationally efficient manner and optimization of which provides control that damps the flow oscillations is investigated. Almost complete suppression of the flow oscillations is obtained for certain choices of the objective function.

Writing Places

Writing Places Mairi MacInnes (bio) Reading Life: On Books, Memory, and Travel by Michael Pearson (Mercer University Press, 2015. 242 pages. $24 pb) Travels in Vermeer: A Memoir by Michael White (Persea Books, 2015. 178 pages. $17.95 pb) In 1773, barely thirty years after the battle of Culloden that brought about the total defeat of the ’45 uprising and the annihilation of the Stuart cause, Samuel Johnson paid a visit to the western parts of Scotland in company with his admirer and future biographer, James Boswell. Amongst other aims, they were determined to visit the Isle of Skye and Sir Alexander MacDonald, whom Johnson had met in London and admired. After a bad night at a filthy inn at Glenelg on the mainland, they took an open boat and were duly rowed to Armadale, a mile away, where the MacDonalds of Sleat lived in hereditary splendor. In his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides—not published till 1786—Boswell recorded their boat’s arrival, Lady MacDonald jumping up and down right to the water’s edge, in a welcome that the visitors found idiotic and deeply embarrassing—though as an heiress from Yorkshire she may have been demonstrating newly learned prowess at Highland dancing. The incident does not appear in Boswell’s published account—only in an early draft found more than two centuries later in a bundle of papers at Malahide, in Ireland. Of course one prefers the more bizarre version: you can’t make these things up, and this version may tell more than Sir Alexander may have wished about his wife. Boswell had to make other retractions, after all, for fear of libel. In the case of Reading Life, under present review, Michael Pearson begins his book by making a valiant attempt to introduce himself as a bluff, humorous, compassionate professor who is guiding a party of giddy American students in Spain on a pilgrimage from Villafranca del Bierzo just south of the French border to Santiago de Compostela, westward in far-off Galicia. From the start, the students get lost, get drunk, and even demand taxis to help them along the pilgrims’ road. So childish are they that I longed for brutal reality to strike and Pearson to sum up and shut up. To quote from one of the puffs at the front of the book: this is, after all, “a primary experience in robust life” (alas, though, unrevealing and soon not at all funny). Expurgation is to be expected in books about place, as the experiences of places naturally differ with each person. You edit your experiences, and readers have to find common ground with their writers. What the readers know otherwise, they have to discard. When it came to light, for example, that Thoreau, the father of such books, managed to burn down some 300 acres of precious woodland at Walden, such news didn’t join what Pearson calls “the common contemplation of Thoreau’s life’s meaning”—it would jar too much. Pearson is on more solid ground when he interviews writers rather than the places [End Page xxxvii] they write about: John McPhee, for example, on New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, or E. B. White on Maine. McPhee told Pearson “that he spent about eight months exploring the area [the Pine Barrens] travelling the forty miles from Princeton . . . spending days or weekends over that period. When he had collected his material, had gathered all his notes, he sat down at home and asked himself in a mild kind of panic, ‘What the devil do I do with all this stuff? The canvas was so miscellaneous. I was absolutely blocked. So I lay on a picnic table in the back yard and stared at the leaves. I lay there for about two weeks. Then it dawned on me: make Fred Brown the organizing principle.’” Fred Brown was, as you might guess, his guide and informant: “the central character, a sinewy, tough old bird . . . idiosyncratic and representative of the Pine Barrens.” When I read those words, I wondered what organizing principle Michael Pearson had used as I followed him from northern Spain to John McPhee and the Pine Barrens, E. B. White...

The Primordial Affirmations of Literature

Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat”—a tale “intended to be after the fact”—affirms Merleau-Ponty’s conclusion that “The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence.” The story dramatizes and reflects on the men’s situation in the world, their inter-subjective experience against the background of non-human nature. In facing the imminent possibility of their own deaths as, for each of them, “the final phenomenon of nature,” the men become “interpreters” of what is primary in the human condition. The line between the world of the reader and the world of the story, like the line between consciousness and being, is less a line than a horizon.