Port Town Research Articles

The Mediterranean Incarnate: Region Formation Between Sicily and Tunisia Since World War II by Naor Ben-Yehoyada

Reviewed by: The Mediterranean Incarnate: Region Formation Between Sicily and Tunisia Since World War II by Naor Ben-Yehoyada David Loher Naor Ben-Yehoyada, The Mediterranean Incarnate: Region Formation Between Sicily and Tunisia Since World War II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 288 pp. How can anthropology study region formation? In his ethnography The Mediterranean Incarnate, Naor Ben-Yehoyada takes the reader aboard the fish trawler Naumachos. He explores the small encounters and dramas that unfold on deck during a six-week journey while the ship ploughs through the waves in the strait of Sicily between the Sicilian port town of Mazara del Vallo, the small Italian islands of Lampedusa and Pantelleria, and the Tunisian coast. With great detail the book describes how the multinational crew of Italian and Tunisian fishermen work and live together in this restricted space lost somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean. The carefully crafted descriptions and interpretations of this everyday life aboard the Naumachos serve as starting points for the book’s broader aim: to study region formation between Tunisia and Sicily since World War II—an ambitious project indeed. “If we turn such moving sites like the Naumachos into stages, we can make the dramas that unfold on their decks summon the spaces and histories in which these floating stages meander” (237), suggests the author. In doing so, each chapter of the book is structured around a theme that represents an aspect of life onboard. After the Introduction sketches out the argument for studying region formation, Chapter 2, “Whose Strike?”, acts as the prelude to the ethnography of life onboard the trawler. While the ethnographer is roaming around between the quay and bars in search of a contact that will facilitate access to a trawler of the fleet, the book introduces the main political forces in town: fishermen (both Tunisians and Italians), boat owners, and local politicians. The following chapters structure the ethnographic material along different [End Page 1445] types of relationships. Chapter 3, “The Craft of Expansive Navigation,” explores the themes of labor and class, focusing on the hierarchies on board. In Chapter 4, “Fish and Bait,” the author discusses how seafood is used to forge alliances and establish relationships of patronage, both in the micro-cosmos of the Naumachos, and between boat-owners and local, as well as national politicians. A related but different type of relationship—family and kinship—is explored in Chapter 5, “One Big Family,” while Chapter 6, “Pissing Rage,” focuses on honor as a means to delineate group alliances and mark boundaries. “Terms of Transcultural Affinity” (Chapter 7) finally adopts a wider perspective with the theme of cosmopolitanism. In the Conclusion, Ben-Yehoyada comes back to the main argument of region formation, emphasizing the conceptual shift from connections to relationships structured through segmentation. Each chapter’s leitmotif draws on classical themes of Mediterranean anthropology. Starting with the description of these themes through life on board the ship, the book traces “scaling devices,” as Ben-Yehoyada terms them, that link the decks of the Naumachos to the political scene in Mazara del Vallo, all the way up to the national politics in Rome, and reaching across the Mediterranean to Tunisia. These scaling devices serve two purposes. On the one hand, they allow the author to connect the micro-perspective onboard the fish trawler with the macro-perspective of the changing relationship between Italy and Tunisia in the Mediterranean. On the other, they allow a reconsideration of the above-mentioned themes in classical Mediterranean anthropology. The most elaborate example of such a scaling device is seafood, as interpreted through the conceptual lens of patronage. Chapter 4, “Fish and Bait,” explores how the catch is divided between the boat owner, the fishing cooperative, and the crew members according to a complex set of explicit and implicit rules combined with mutual cheating that are linked to social status, affiliations, and hierarchies among the crew members. While particularly exquisite seafood is reserved for the boat owner’s gift-giving, sardines and other seafood that do not have any market-value can be collected and sold later in town by other crew members. The chapter then continues to explore how the...

From Empire to Colony: The Halifax Cholera Outbreaks of 1834 and 1866

This article explores the relationship between emigration and outbreaks of cholera in Halifax between 1832 and 1866. Pressures associated with migration from the British Isles, as well as the threat and reality of transmittable diseases like cholera, reveal the vulnerability and strains felt as a colonial port town located off the North Atlantic. This article presents the struggles and tensions apparent with managing emigrants, many of which were bound for territory beyond Nova Scotia, and contributes not only to the historical understanding of how cholera was dealt with in Halifax but also provides a unique perspective on understanding the greater struggles of 19th-century colonial life.

Port Towns and Urban Cultures. International Histories of the Waterfront, c.1700–2000. Edited by Brad Beaven, Karl Bell and Robert James

Port Towns and Urban Cultures. International Histories of the Waterfront, c.1700–2000. Edited by Brad Beaven, Karl Bell and Robert James

Book Review: Port Towns and Urban Cultures: International Histories of the Waterfront, c.1700–2000

Book Review: Port Towns and Urban Cultures: International Histories of the Waterfront, c.1700–2000

2017 Global Conference on Polymer and Composite Materials (PCM 2017)

PCM2017 PrefaceThe 2017 Global Conference on Polymer and Composite Materials (PCM 2017), sponsored by Wuhan Advanced Materials Society, was held from May 23 – 25, 2017 in Guangzhou, China. The technical program consisted of 4 international keynote speakers, 62 invited speakers, 40 oral presentations, and a poster session with 42 works. The conference had parallel sessions with dedicated selected subjects related to Polymers and Composite Materials.The present issue of IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) records the proceedings of PCM 2017 and contains 50 specially selected manuscripts submitted to the PCM2017 conference. The electronic submission and handling of manuscripts via the conference website, including the selection of reviewers and evaluation of manuscripts, were identical to the procedures applied to manuscripts submitted as regular contributions for international per-reviewed publications.The organization of this conference and the preparation of proceedings volume would have been impossible without the tremendous efforts and dedication of many individuals, especially from Ms. Yajun Ye, who oversaw the organization of the conference and the program, and a large team of reviewers with their timely submission of quality reports. We express our sincere thanks to all authors and presenters for their contributions. We also thank very much our sponsors for their generous support.The 2018 Global Conference on Polymer and Composite Materials (PCM2018) will be held during April 10-13, 2018, in Kitakyushu City, Japan. This is the best period to catch the Sakura Season in Japan. Located in the west of Japan, the city is situated conveniently close to many rapidly developing East Asian countries. With views over the Sea of Japan and the Seto Inland Sea, and with forty percent of the city's area comprised of rich forest, it is a city blessed with an abundance of nature. Being one of the four main industrial areas of Japan, Kitakyushu City has made great contributions towards the modernization of Japanese industry. Kitakyushu City's many notable attractions include Kokura Castle, the port town of Mojiko Retro, the Hiraodai Limestone Plateau (one of the three major karst plateaus of Japan), and many leisure facilities. Kitakyushu City also has a vast menu of appetizing dishes, such as Kokura beef, and Yaki-udon, as well as many other delicacies harvested from the mountains and sea.All participants are welcome to the renewed and vibrant PCM2018! More information will be available at the conference website: www.cpcmconf.org.Prof. Dr. Esteban BroitmanGeneral Chairman PCM2017Linköping, Sweden, June 2017

The Investigation of Sinop Coastal Area Pattern in Terms of Coastal Management

Sinop is a province located at the Black Sea region and it is rich in scenic beauty and cultural values and has potential touristic resources. Moreover, it is one of the most prominent port towns in the Black Sea region. The area, which can be qualified as the most important and prominent image region of the city, comprise the coastal land use line of the province. However, the city fails to utilize this advantage. The master plan of the city has substantially changed through the years. The present study aimed to determine the changes in the master plans of the city through the years, the distribution of the coastal land use areas and changes in the utilization of the coastal areas through the years. Evaluating the current administrative competence/constraints in the coastal area with respect to the data obtained in the study is also among the goals of the study. Furthermore, by taking the impact of environmental factors on the ratio of the land use areas into consideration, examining these data in terms of coastal management planning to create habitats that better suit the vital requirements is another prospect of the study. In addition, the evaluation of some coastal area-associated issues including the extent of the effect of current erosion issues on the development of the coastal area was also included in the study. The percentage of the current functional coastal areas in the province, the distribution of the number of building floors and the changes in these data by years were also investigated. For these evaluations, zoning revisions and 1/2000, 1/5000 and 1/10000 maps were examined to determine the coastal area zoning changes and filling areas. Fieldworks were carried out in the coastal area of the city to determine and observe the state of the area. The data was collected by contacting relevant institutions and organizations and carrying out fieldworks. Considering the data obtained in the study, measures to remedy the zoning deficiencies in the coastal area and the city center were proposed. The obtained data and evaluations obtained revealed that the province is in need of new and sustainable planning and there is a necessity to include implementations that are based on integrated coastal area management principals.

Selected Problems of Transport in Port Towns – Tri-City as an Example

Abstract Port towns are strategic places from the point of view of transport systems. They form integration junctions for various transport branches , apart from the traditional - road and railway ones , also for water( sea) transport which is active there. Moreover, air transport comes also into consideration , whose efficient functioning must be connected with good accessibility, that concerns sea transport as well. Efficient and safe servicing the ports is crucial for their functioning. Problems associated with the overloading of lorries, which leads to degradation of road surface structure , observed in Gdynia, are discussed as an example in this paper. Problems of road traffic safety (RTS) are presented in this paper on the example of Gdańsk. The two issues: the road traffic safety and road surface degradation constitute only some transport problems of port towns , but they are very important, from the point of view of their specificity, for integration junctions of all the transport branches for people and goods. However, in discussing selected aspects of transport in port towns it is necessary to refer to the managing of integrated transport system with taking into account its traffic safety aspects.

Classification of port town of Japan by topography and city form

Classification of port town of Japan by topography and city form

Mexico Awards Its First Deepwater Blocks; What Comes Next?

Mexico’s historic public tender for its deepwater real estate resulted in the awarding of eight out of 10 blocks on offer. Held last December in Mexico City, the event marked the fourth and final auction of the country’s Round One, which reopened doors to foreign oil and gas investment for the first time since the country’s energy sector was nationalized almost 80 years ago. The awarded blocks went to 13 companies whose exploration and production operations are expected to generate around USD 34 billion over the next 15 years. The winning bids also committed to drill at least eight deepwater wells. All four blocks offered in the deep-water Perdido area were awarded, including two to Chinese Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and one to a consortium of Chevron, Pemex, and Inpex—Japan’s largest oil company. An additional four blocks in the Salina Basin were contracted to three different consortiums, including one formed by Statoil, BP, and Total. Another block encompassing a deep-water discovery known as the Trion field was awarded as a farmout agreement between BHP Billiton and Mexico’s state-owned oil company Pemex. BHP will acquire 60% of the project’s interest under the terms of the contract, which it won through a tie-breaking offer of a USD 624 million cash bonus to Mexico’s petroleum fund. BP was the losing bidder. Including the three previous onshore and shallow-water auctions, Mexico has awarded 39 exploration and production contracts to companies from nine foreign countries. In a press conference following the auction, the government said it expects to receive close to 60% of the combined profits from the eight blocks and the lone farmout. Mexican officials also said they are hoping the deepwater contracts eventually will yield 900,000 B/D of crude, a volume that would help stem the country’s declining production from existing fields. Government officials added that first production from Trion might be reached within 6 years, while it is expected that the other areas will need up to a decade to be developed. What’s Next? According to many observers, the production potential that the deep water holds for Mexico was the chief driver behind the country’s sweeping energy reforms that became law in 2013. But now that a number of the prime blocks have been allocated, what comes next? For the companies that have already signed offshore contracts, their next steps are likely to include the expansion of Mexico’s port facilities to accommodate the arrival of larger deepwater vessels and rigs. Some expect the small port town of Dos Bocas to become a deepwater hub because of its proximity to the southern Salina Basin blocks.

Bubonic Panic: When Plague Invaded America by G. Jarrow

Jarrow, Gail. Bubonic Panic: When Plague Invaded America. Calkins Creek, 2015.If public health seems like it would be one of those topics that would send you to sleep, then Bubonic Plague: When Plague Invaded America by Gail Jarrow will change your mind. This is the final book in her trilogy about Deadly Diseases for middle grades and higher.Jarrow is fairly succinct in presenting the history, transmission, and trajectory of various waves of plague around the world. She briefly charts its first appearance in 541 in Turkey, then vividly describes the second wave that started in 1346 and at its most virulent was named the Black Death, killing millions in Europe and parts of Asia and North Africa. The majority of the book focuses on the third wave, when it reached North America.The third pandemic began in the mid-1800s when China became ground zero for this next wave, which spread to Hong Kong by 1894. Hong Kong was a busy port town and trade and travel on steamships allowed for rapid dispersion of the disease. Researchers from a number of countries sought feverishly to identify the source of the epidemic and learn how it was spread. By the late 1890s two of them had proven it was rat fleas. Unfortunately almost nobody believed them, which became problematic when in 1900 San Francisco saw its first deaths in Chinatown.Jarrow provides a fascinating look at the political and social climate of this period in relation to the attitudes of Americans towards Chinese immigrants and the impact quarantining San Francisco’s Chinatown would have on businesses reliant on trade and tourism. It became a complicated and fraught tug-o-war between politicians, businessmen, doctors and public health officials, fighting about whether to recognize and publicize the deaths and quarantine when the evidence seemed inconclusive as to their cause. Even after proof was offered action was surprisingly slow to follow and the disease was able to spread, although the number of deaths was comparatively low, being in the low hundreds.This well researched book also includes information about contemporary cases in the United States, ongoing research and treatments for all three strains of plague. There are extensive source notes and bibliography, a glossary, timeline, index and an author’s note explaining her keen interest in public health and the importance it had in the past,and will have when the next global pandemic hits. Also included are numerous photographs (some a little gruesome), newspaper clippings, cartoons, posters and illustrations to engage readers’ interest.This will pair perfectly with a middle grade novel, Chasing Secrets by Gennifer Choldenko, 2015 that gives a fictional account of the outbreak in San Francisco.This is a strong finish to a fascinating series that combines history, social issues, scientific research, technological developments and culture in America, showing long term implications for today’s government policies towards health.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Tammy FlandersTammy is the Reference Coordinator in the Doucette Library of Teaching Resources at the University of Calgary. She also reviews juvenile resources with an eye to classroom use in her blog, Apples with Many Seeds.

Art-Making as Social Justice in Za'atari and Calais

In late February 2016, French authorities entered “the Jungle”—an unofficial migrant settlement in the port town of Calais—equipped with tear gas, water guns, and bulldozers to demolish the souther...

The Small Reflection of Things

The Small Reflection of Things Dusty Cooper The ferry was late, a white speck of debris bobbing to the island. It worked against the coming storm, the gulf roiling with a restless rhythm. Feeling shook the marbles in his pocket with the same nervous energy. Only a dozen or so tourists had unloaded from each of the first three ferries, and his cart was still more than half full of coconut drinks. Normally, he would have sold out by the second ferry, and spend the rest of the day with his friend Driver. Feeling took off his shoes and dangled his toes off the pier. His shirt, a hand-me-down from his brother, billowed in the wind, pulling him backwards. He accepted the challenge and inched forward, testing gravity. Koh Phangan was a small island, and he'd never been farther from home than this edge. As he leaned forward a wave splashed against the cement wall. Feeling jumped back to avoid the spray, but a warm gust splattered his face with salty water. He rubbed his eyes, shook his T-shirt, and slapped his leg to check that his marbles were secure in the corner seam of his pocket. He spent most afternoons in the alley behind the open markets watching other boys shoot marbles. But tourist traffic dwindled in the rainy season, and it had been over a week since he'd been to the alley. His father's rule, or business agreement, being that he could do whatever he wanted until dinner as long as he sold all his coconuts. He wondered if the weather knew it dampened his sales and cut into his free time. The stubborn speck of a ferry lingered in the distance, and the storm seemed to be moving even slower. If he left for the alley now he could watch a few games and return to the pier by the time the ferry arrived. Feeling mounted his bike, an overgrown tricycle with a cart on the back, and rode through Thong Sala, the island's port town. The main street cut through brick and glass buildings until asphalt gave way to dirt, and you were in the open markets, the twine tied, thatch-roof huts hanging with T-shirts and necklaces, or dried carcasses of fish, brown and spiny, their eyes shriveled and cracked. As he rode past, two smells fought for dominance, the metallic sting of raw seafood and the earthy spice of curry, but hidden underneath, he caught the sweetness of fresh fruit: watermelon, lychee, and pineapple. Trip, Feeling's brother, introduced him to the marble games. After working the pier together, they'd share a sack of lychee. Trip peeled the furry, purple skin for Feeling while explaining the player's shots like a commentator at a Muay Thai fight or football game. His excitement was contagious, transmitted to Feeling from the start. At night, they'd recount the games, volleying their delight across the short space dividing their beds. In the alley, a dozen or so boys were gathered around two people on the ground. Feeling stretched over a shoulder to see his friend, Driver, sitting at a circle drawn in the dirt. To play, you had to have at least five mibs, the smaller marbles, and one shooter, the ones big as an eyeball. The boys only played five ringer or ten ringer. The object, of course, to use your shooter to knock your opponent's mibs out the circle to claim them as your own. Driver's opponent was the best player on the island who Feeling [End Page 3] called Lok, so named for his shooter, deep blue glass with green, smoky tendrils zigzagging through it, just like a globe of Earth. Driver, already losing by three, scuttled around the arena, the marbles scattered like a tiny, chaotic solar system. Fiery yellow and orange Jupiter, bright red Mars, and cool, blue-white Neptune. Colossal worlds shrunk into miniature globes in the dirt, hovering just out of Feeling's reach. One knee on the ground, the other folded against his chest, Driver positioned his fist on the ground ready to shoot. Feeling wedged himself through...

The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560–1640 by Reinier H. Hesselink

Reviewed by: The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560–1640 by Reinier H. Hesselink Lane R. Earns The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560–1640. By Reinier H. Hesselink. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016. 300pages. Softcover $49.95. Reinier Hesselink’s book represents a prodigious effort to confront the complexity of issues involved in writing a history of early Christian Nagasaki and demonstrates the multifarious skills required to do so effectively. To accomplish his ambitious task, it was necessary for Hesselink to research Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian missionaries (Jesuit, Franciscan, Augustinian, and Dominican) and traders who came to Japan via India, Southeast Asia, China, the Philippines, and Mexico to spread word of the [End Page 76] Catholic Reformation and gain riches by filling a void in the lucrative world and regional silver trade. And this work was just on the European side; the author, of course, also had to navigate numerous contemporaneous Japanese documents generated at the central and local levels. The introduction of Christianity into Japan, and specifically Nagasaki, depended on Jesuit missionaries serving as trade and cultural intermediaries between southern European traders on the one hand and Japanese political, military, and merchant officials on the other. This strategy proved to be dangerous in the long run, however, as it resulted in the exile, torture, and sometimes death of not only European missionaries but many of their Japanese Christian followers as well. While it took less than a century for the Christian vision to end in tragedy for the missionaries and converts, for Japanese leaders the Christian encounter ultimately endowed them with primacy over the country’s foreign trade and political, military, and administrative dominance over the territory of Nagasaki. It also led to Japanese control measures that eliminated Christianity in the port town and sent surviving Japanese Christians underground into rural hamlets, coastal towns, and sparsely populated islands in the region. Hesselink lays out the book’s theme in the opening statement of his introduction: “This is the story of the birth of the city of Nagasaki, where two different worlds [Japan on one side and Portugal and Spain on the other] intersected in a prolonged and intensive manner” (p. 1), most intensely in the arenas of trade and religion (and possibly political administrative control). Through military might, the Portuguese established trading posts and administrative centers for their sea-based empire in Arabia, India, Southeast Asia, and China before making their way to Japan in search of a trading entrepôt in Kyushu. They eventually established a port town at Nagasaki, which allowed them to fill the vacuum of trade for Chinese silk and Japanese silver that had been opened up following the Ming government’s crackdown on rampant piracy in the area. The Society of Jesus, then recently established, took the lead in spreading Catholicism to Asia and, as in Europe and the Americas, had considerable early success converting the upper classes, who in turn forced the conversion of others in their territories. In Japan, this meant that the Jesuits not only tried to convert the samurai, especially the daimyo, but at times even behaved as samurai themselves. To Hesselink, the Jesuits “became the founders of a military colony, called Nagasaki” (p. 4). Soon, however, their strategy presented problems, in that the “Society of Jesus ostensibly [was] dedicated to spiritual goals and its priests in Japan [had] founded a strategic stronghold dedicated to monopolizing the China trade brought by the Portuguese merchants. Without the China trade, it was impossible for the mission to survive in Japan” (p. 5). This contradiction, between faith and trade, eventually led to the Society’s downfall in Japan. It also contributes to one of Hesselink’s primary challenges in the book: he claims the Jesuits’ positioning between economic and religious interests makes their records ultimately historically unreliable because they tried to deny, or at least dramatically downplay, their role in the temporal affairs of Kyushu and Nagasaki. [End Page 77] Hesselink organizes the book into three overarching chronological parts, each composed of subsections assigned a topical title and a representative individual. While this framework offers a structured and personalized approach...

Cheever's Yankee Heritage

/W hat is the difference between a minor and a major writer? Certainly it is not subject-matter: The Wapshot Scandal and Anna Karenina are both about adultery. Nor is it a question of control John Cheever has an aerialist's sly command over just how taut the line of a sentence should be, and just how much power must be applied or withheld in the risk of ascent. Nor can the disparity be uncovered, finally, in any theory of what sustains an original characterization-the plain fact is that Leander Wapshot and Honora Wapshot are among those figures who continue to stand even after the novels that housed them have disintegrated into total non-recall. They outlive and overwhelm every artifact and sunset on the premises, and the reason is the premises are exactly thatnot merely a farm and a house in a New England port town called St. Botolphs, but the premises and hypotheses of Cheever's idea of America. It is not that major writers work from major premises and minor writers from minor ones Chekhov alone is evidence for the

Keeping in Touch

Keeping in Touch Ilka Scobie (bio) Love, H: The Letters of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones Hettie JonesDuke University Press www.dukeupress.edu/love-h 384Pages; Print, $29.95 Beatniks of the 1960’s represented a transgressive glamour that is unimaginable today. At twelve, my friends and I wandered around the Village, mesmerized by the cool girls wearing black tights, long hair and clunky Fred Braun shoes. One of those slum goddesses could have been Hettie Jones, except she may have been pushing a stroller. Author of more then twenty books, Hettie Jones is a beloved New York City poet. When Love, H opens, she is a young mother married to an ambitious black poet, Leroi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka. They lived on the Bowery, (where Hettie still resides) in the heart of downtown bohemia. Together, they edited the coolly influential literary magazine Yugen, and published books. In 1960, Hettie met Helene Dorn, and a foundational friendship was born. A bit older, Helene Dorn, an artist left her first marriage to marry the poet Edward Dorn, and they pursued an unconventional creative life, three kids in tow. When Helene and Ed moved to England, a passionate correspondence that spanned handwritten letters, postcards, faxes, and finally emails, began and was maintained until Helene’s death in 2004. Arranged chronologically, these are missives from the front lines of creativity, feminism, single motherhood, ageing, politics, and poetry. Interspersed with Jones’s compassionate and occasionally brilliantly barbed observations, the chapters are introduced with women’s poems selected by the author. As a mother with an interracial family, Jones was on the forefront as an activist and New Yorker. She writes, “I keep asking myself what exactly kept us in touch through our long silences, and invariably, come back to the faith that in time we’d simply pick up where we let off.” Both marriages ended, and Hettie, a single mother worked hard to support her family. She acquired a car and a dog and still found time to hang out with Beat luminaries and enjoy “quiet affairs.” She wrote, “But I also felt that hard work—freelance editing and proofreading was saving my life, so I’d never have to give it away because someone else needed it.” In 1966, she is prescient enough to write “I am bored by Timothy Leary’s guru-ness,” at a time when the counter cultural world was enamored of the LSD pioneer. That same year, she was “fired from a job for ‘black militant beliefs.’” When she discovered an absence of people of color in kids literature, she wrote her own book, which led to a string of children’s books, including the classic American Indian poetry selections, The Trees Stand Shining (1971) and the young adult Big Star Falling’ Mama: Five Women in Black Music (1995). Yet in 1991, Viking’s Portable Beat Reader published a story of Hettie’s, and listed her as a “secretary” while ignoring two decades of publication and teaching. Still a reluctantly dutiful wife, Helene in 1965 reports from England, “I’ve about five pgs. to type for Ed plus a bunch of quotes to look up and copy…” and towards the end of a chatty, supportive missive, reiterates, “I’ve got to quit and work for Ed.” In 1966, missing New York, she writes, “I went on the moors and have a sprig of heather for you.” A later letter complains, “He’s got three books to finish by September and just as I found the time to do some painting, the bastard needs me…” In 1969, Helene, at forty “a discarded wife,” returned to the States, settling in the small port town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, near her great friend, poet Charles Olson. Two years later, she had her first show of mosaics, “discards” of glass and metal found on the harbor beaches. A true autodidact, passionate reader and avid library patron, she extolled Sandra Cisneros, Lorca, Jean Rhys, Emily Dickinson and Alice Walker, and as Hettie’s personal librarian recommended endless eclectic books. In 1989, Dorn records; ”I’m listening to Coltrane, the studio door shut to keep in...

The Slave Trade, One Voyage at A Time

The Slave Trade, One Voyage at A Time Gregory E. O’Malley (bio) Jonathan M. Bryant. Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope. New York: Liveright, 2016. xii + 376 pp. Figures, map, notes, and index. $28.95. Sean M. Kelley. The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xii + 290 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. Whereas quantitative studies dominated slave-trade historiography in the second half of the twentieth century, recent years have seen numerous attempts to put a more human face on the traffic. Some scholars focus on the experiences of captives departing particular African regions to bring culture and language to the fore with precision. Examples of these would be Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery (2007), and Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers (2001). Others, such as Emma Christopher’s Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes (2006), examine the crews working aboard slaving vessels and their face-to-face encounters with the enslaved. Meanwhile, in The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007), Marcus Rediker studies slaving vessels as technologies of oppression, with a strong focus on individual experiences. Another approach to humanizing the study of the slave trade has been more micro-historical, focusing on individual slave-trading ventures in great detail. Numerous studies have examined infamous and exceptional voyages such as the Zong (from which 133 captives where thrown overboard and drowned in an attempt to collect an insurance settlement, touching off an important legal battle in Britain) or the Amistad (which was overtaken by captives off the coast of Cuba and eventually landed in New York in 1839, leading to a highly publicized Supreme Court case over the status of the rebels). By contrast, Robert Harms’ The Diligent (2002)—and to some degree Nigel Tattersfield’s The Forgotten Trade (1991)—highlight more routine slaving ventures to expose how the traffic functioned, the profits derived from it, and the devastating effects on captives (and sailors). Sean M. Kelly and Jonathan M. Bryant offer welcome additions to this burgeoning genre of single-voyage slave-trade [End Page 26] studies, with Kelley examining a fairly routine voyage and Bryant narrating a more exceptional, controversial case. In The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare, Kelley uses a Rhode Island–based voyage in 1754–55 to expose the involvement of New England merchants in the slave economy, to examine slave trading in the Sierra Leone region, and to explore the possibilities for cultural continuity for slave-trade survivors in South Carolina. It is a deeply researched and elegantly written book that takes full advantage of one of micro-history’s greatest strengths—capturing a sense of historical events unfolding in a real world for real people. Reading about the Hare’s voyage, one gets a glimpse of daily life in the Atlantic world, including such experiences as finding employment as a mariner on the docks of Newport, needing to use dead reckoning at sea, buying and selling captives as a trader of mixed descent in coastal Sierra Leone, and surviving as a captive from enslavement through settlement on a Lowcountry rice plantation. Tracing the journey of a single ship all around the Atlantic also exposes meaningful connections between these sites ringing the ocean. Kelley’s story starts in Newport with profiles of the ship’s investors, the crew, and the town itself, offering a nice snapshot of a colonial New England port town. Kelley also puts the Atlantic in Atlantic History with a depiction of the Hare’s voyage to Africa, introducing readers to eighteenth-century navigation, work routines at sea, and the importance of Atlantic provisioning way-stations such as the Cape Verdes, where salt-raking was big business. The Hare acquired captives through numerous small transactions in the Sierra Leone region, which Kelley describes in rich detail to illuminate as much as possible the background of the Hare’s captives (mostly non-Muslim Mande speakers), the mistrust and violence that characterized trade between Europeans and Africans on the Upper Guinea Coast, and the cross-cultural brokers who often served as middlemen between...

Gatico (Sansay), límite sur de la gobernación del Perú en el despoblado de Atacama (paralelo 22º 30" lat. Sur) según información del Virrey Francisco de Toledo (1573)

It is published and discussed a detailed description (1573) on marginal provinces of government of Peru, supported by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, before the Spanish court. The document provides precise information about the border between the kingdoms of Chile and Peru, which places in grade 22 and a half, explicitly up to Sansay, close to the port town of Cobija, coastal of the Atacama Desert. The article postulates that Sansay correspond to the modern port of Gatico, located south of Tocopilla.

Key to the Indies: Port Towns in the Spanish Caribbean: 1493–1550

Seaborne commerce, communication, and transportation to a great extent defined and enabled the Spanish enterprise in the Caribbean from the time Europeans first arrived in the islands. With the exception of a minority of towns such as Concepción de la Vega in Española that were established in the interiors of the islands to provide access to gold mines and the indigenous labor to exploit them, the majority of new towns and cities were located on the coasts. Although Santo Domingo, San Juan, and eventually Havana emerged as the principal ports and administrative capitals of the large islands of the northern Caribbean in the first half of the sixteenth century, many secondary and small port towns played essential roles in the rapid development of systems of local and regional exchange, indigenous slave raiding, and transatlantic commerce that linked the islands to Seville, the Canaries and other islands of the Atlantic and the southern Caribbean. Allowing island residents to take advantage of waterborne transportation often via indigenous-built canoes, linking the islands to one another and the circum-Caribbean mainland, and serving as staging grounds for slave-raiding and other expeditions that radiated out from the islands, these towns helped to forge a diverse and dynamic region that was closely tied both to Spain and later to the developing societies of Spanish America.

A triumph of realism? Britain, Aden and the end of empire, 1964–67

ABSTRACTThe Labour Government's decision to withdraw from Britain's overseas bases east of Suez in the 1960s had profound repercussions for British grand strategy. One of the last colonies to be evacuated was the port town of Aden, located on the south-western tip of the Arabian Peninsula. First seized by the East India Company on behalf of the British Empire in 1839, it became a Crown Colony almost a century later in 1937. By 1963, the British government had presided over Aden's entry into the fledgling Federation of South Arabia, a transitional body that was envisaged as a vehicle for independence. Drawing on the Labour's Party's archives, amongst a range of other sources, this article examines the shift in policy within the Labour government on the issue of Aden. It makes the case that, in contrast to the Conservative government's wholehearted support for Britain's tribal allies in South Arabia, Labour hedged its bets by balancing its policy off between the tribal rulers and the new radical nationalist opposition. By refusing to back the fledgling Federation government, Labour, instead, adopted a non-committal stance that would lead to greater strategic inertia in its policy towards the Middle East during the Cold War.

The Liverpool Economy during the War of American Independence, 1775–83

ABSTRACTMuch has been written about how the American War of Independence, a key imperial event, affected the British Isles. However, within this body of work there is limited reference to Liverpool, which was arguably becoming ‘the second city of empire’. This article attempts to fill this gap in the historiography, and addresses the economic impact of the war upon this key port town. It shows that there were four overall stages to Liverpool’s foreign commerce during this period—initially trade remained broadly steady, then there was a noticeable decline, the penultimate stage marked a sluggish improvement, and finally it was not until the post-war years that a sustained recovery took hold. That said, despite these overall trends, individual markets such as the trans-Atlantic slave trade often had their own dynamics. Although privateers (private ships of war) contributed towards the town’s eventual commercial recovery, this activity was by no means the only factor in explaining this rebound. Furthermore, the American war had an impact upon other sectors of the Liverpudlian economy, including shipbuilding and infrastructure projects. Combined, this evidence suggests that eighteenth-century warfare had positive and negative repercussions for the UK economy. As a result, we learn more about being ‘at home with the empire’.