Captain Of Ship Research Articles

Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom (review)

Reviewed by: Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom Mary Ryan (bio) Philadelphia Stories: America's Literature of Race and Freedom. By Samuel Otter. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 369. Cloth, $29.95.) Philadelphia Stories is a showcase of textual analysis, firmly set in time and place and commanding the attention of historians of the Civil War. It is an invitation to interdisciplinary conversation that should not be declined, given how it deepens our understanding of race in American history as well as literature. Samuel Otter conducts literary analysis with stunning finesse and at the same time acknowledges "the need to understand the historical situation of … literary achievement" (4). Neither historicism nor formalism, Otter avers, should dominate the study of racial thought in antebellum America. Furthermore, Philadelphia Stories sets a path for collaboration between our disciplines upon methodological grounds we share, the conceptual frame of place and space as exemplified by the antebellum American city. The consummate effect of Philadelphia Stories is to expose the prodigious, wrenching, multivoiced, and high-stakes debate about race that went on north of slavery and before the Civil War. Otter exposes the most patently racist literary fare in the City of Brotherly Love and reports the bold rebuttals issued by the city's free black leaders, who "seize[d] the tenuous opportunities of emancipation, and fiercely negotiated, at the level of the word" (38). Otter squeezes multiple complex meanings out of graphic images as well. He scrutinizes Edward Clay's racist cartoons (which routinely illustrate history books) and places them in a wider satirical tradition that targeted nearly every category of person who walked Philadelphia streets. Otter goes on to pair these images with less well known visual portraits, Charles Willson Peale's popular silhouettes, which minimize racial difference. Otter's explications of documents like these illuminate issues that have long consumed Civil War historians. His investigations of African American domesticity, moral reform, and consumerism amplify the work of Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., and Patrick Rael (but Otter disputes the latter's gentle indictment of African writers for masculinist and bourgeois prejudice). Philadelphia Stories also lends support to the cultural historian's recognition of the pliability and ambiguity of identity in antebellum America. Picaresque writing like that of Hugh [End Page 265] Henry Brackenridge reveled in shifting and reversing identities, not just from black to white but from animal to human, and sometimes introduced these ambiguities into debates about civil rights and the franchise. These challenges to racial certitude were mounted in a specific time and place, in a northern city and especially during the 1840s, when both social geography and the setting of the novel were just beginning to sort class, race, and ethnicity into different districts and along different streets. Otter's exemplary method of interrogating documents is literary history in the best sense. Most of his stories lead to other texts, defer to other critics, and culminate in aesthetic judgments. Otter closes his text with a brilliant exegesis of Melville's novella of aborted slave mutiny, Benito Cereno. He presses his interpretation to the maximum point of African American rebellion, dwelling on the scene in which the mutinous slave pierces the throat of the white ship captain: "just then the razor drew blood, spots of which stained the creamy lather under the throat" (272). Otter refrains, however, from asserting a single reading of this or other texts. He seems to endorse Melville's preferred posture of critical distance: "Melville works hard not to ensure a 'correct' reading" (270). Otter also calls in the aesthetic heavy weapon, Henry James, to assert that "history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of what 'happens' but the much finer complexity of what we read into it and think of in connection with it" (165). At this juncture, this historian is moved to acknowledge compatible and useful differences between our disciplines. Otter's literary argument progresses by way of textual association, moving from one document to another based on the repetition of words and images. Less constrained by considerations of proximity in time or actual relationships, he can move agilely from antebellum Philadelphia to Dutch still...

History of Ecological Sciences, Part 38B: Naturalists Explore North America, 1838–1850s

History of Ecological Sciences, Part 38B: Naturalists Explore North America, 1838–1850s

The Harm of "Swedening": Anxieties of Nativism in Katherine Anne Porter's "Noon Wine"

The Harm of "Swedening":Anxieties of Nativism in Katherine Anne Porter's "Noon Wine" David Yost (bio) "Yes, sir, Homer T. Hatch is my name," the bounty hunter of Katherine Anne Porter's 1937 "Noon Wine" declares, "and America is my nation" (86). While this introduction is clearly part of Hatch's stock patter—he also asks to buy a horse, then reveals that it's "an old joke" of his designed to put people at ease (85)—his emphatic foregrounding of his nationality reveals a key anxiety of the novella's characters: who, exactly, can be considered an American? Though Mr. Thompson and his family at first see their Swedish-descended hired man purely and explicitly as a "forriner" (65), just as they view other American minorities (63), Olaf Helton's helpfulness and work ethic gradually persuade them to see him as a "man" first and a "Swede" second. The villainous Hatch, in contrast, exploits nativist anxieties to attack the "Americanness" not only of Helton but also of the third-or fourth-generation Irish American Mr. Thompson. By demonstrating both the hypocrisies of nativist reasoning as well as the violence that it inexorably creates, "Noon Wine" forms a powerful critique of this conflation of national and racial identities. Though "Noon Wine" has received a number of psychoanalytical and feminist readings, its themes of nationalism and nativism remain largely unaddressed. Janis P. Stout, for example, contrasts Hatch's garrulousness with Helton's taciturnity and observes how Mr. Thompson finds himself [End Page 75] caught between these two extremes (212), while Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. focuses his reading on Hatch's and Thompson's failures of storytelling (144-145). Although these readings usefully contrast the verbal styles of main characters, neither reading addresses the pervasive racial subtext of their conversations. Even M. Wynn Thomas, who builds his insightful analysis of the novella around the repeated use of the word "stranger," sees the discussion of foreignness as a theological metaphor for alienation and estrangement, "the fateful privacy of meaning" in God's world (159), rather than as a commentary on the politics of race and immigration. Darlene Harbour Unrue reads the moment similarly, seeing the labels of "stranger" and "foreigner" as symbolizing the isolation inherent in "basic human nature," rather than in a specific political context (Understanding 81). This critical lacuna is all the more surprising considering the amount of attention that critics have bestowed on anti-nationalist themes in Porter's only novel, Ship of Fools.1 Set on an ocean liner en route to Germany in 1931, Ship of Fools chronicles the varying prejudices of a massive cast of characters, ranging from the economic, racial, and sexual snobbery of Thiele, the ship's captain, to the explicit call of Herr Siegfried Rieber, a magazine publisher, for Jewish extermination: "I would put them all in a big oven and turn on the gas" (207). Though German anti-Semitism understandably receives the most narrative focus in this setting, Porter makes it clear that the American passengers harbor many prejudices of their own, particularly the young Texan, William Denny. First introduced as "exhausted" by his efforts to maintain "the proper white man's attitude" while "among strange languages and strange lands" (24), Denny makes clear his distaste for "niggers, crazy Swedes, Jews, greasers, bone-headed micks, polacks, wops, Guineas, and damn Yankees" (333-334). Even the German-run ship is not segregated enough for Denny, who longs to return to his hometown, "where a man knew who was who and what was what" (333). Throughout Denny's scenes, the novel thus demonstrates not only his racism, but the anxieties that underpin his white identity: Denny's own "whiteness" can only be preserved by keeping others—including "crazy Swedes," who occupy an unenviable place in Denny's hierarchy of prejudice between "niggers" and "Jews"—in subordinate roles. For Denny, the racial mixing involved in foreign travel leaves these delineations deeply threatened, though the ironic name of his fictional hometown—"Brownville" (333)—hints that even there, white identity may not be as absolute as he would wish. The turn-of-the-century South Texas of Porter's "Noon Wine" is the setting for William Denny...

Species of the Month: Anti-Whaling, Mediated Visibility, and the News

Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and captain of anti-whaling ship the Steve Irwin, has emerged as one of the world's most visible environmental protesters. This essay, based in part on a long interview with Watson in Australia in 2009, analyzes his mediated visibility and thus capacity to participate in public debate by isolating various components of his strategic activities under four themes: mediated protest, symbolic power, media practices, and celebrity. It argues that Watson's visibility involves a complex flow of information and meanings across various “old” and “new” media form, but remains reliant on news media. Thus, despite his generally astute media practices and strategies, Watson's visibility is contingent on a set of professional practices and logics unlikely to provide sustained news access or long-term legitimacy to a political “outsider.”

水先人による操船号令を確実に伝達するための留意点と要件についての考察

The "Japanese Pilotage Act" was altered in 2007. The new act set grade license system. The third grade license doesn't require experience of the ship's captain. Therefore, it seems that third grade pilots may encounter communication troubles more than traditional pilots in future. Pilots have to guide various ships in congested sea area, and communicate with crews whose mother languages are different for each. If miscommunication occurs in pilot's works, the safety of pilotage will be decreased. In this study, questionnaire was distributed to the ISE-MIKAWA WAN LICENSED PILOT ASSOCIATION that asked occasion of miscommunication in pilot works. According to that result, there are some miscommunications between pilot and crews / tugboats, and many pilots take supplementary communication measures to avoid these situations. And it was pointed out by foreign captains in other interviews that they want to know the meaning of order in Japanese which Japanese pilot issues to Japanese tugboats, and pronunciation of "0" in English is often confused with "7" in the bridge. Pilot's order depends on oral conununication to convey own intensions. The oral communication, even though a supplementary gesture is done with, is temporal that means that the media is sound and it will be vanished in time passing. And it is easy to have ambiguity. Therefore, it is needed to apply normalized and not-temporal communication measure in pilot works. Finally, this paper proposes the concept of "Bridge Language" for more safety pilotage. It defines codes that describe all of pilot's orders systematically, and provides measure to indicate current pilot's order to all members in the bridge continuously. It seems that "Bridge Language" removes ambiguity in bridge communication.

The Traitor of Zion

Ben Stroud the traitor of zion fiction 85 They had become something of a fascinationof mine: communes cut out of the interior, new societies where all were equal and either Jesus or Liberty reigned. Some days, after reading an account of a blind prophetess leading her followers to Illinois, or of a mill town where all shared labor and wealth equally, I yearned to give up my life and join them. I felt as if I lived in a hurtling age. It seemed all humanity stood on a precipice, that in the distance, beyond the coal smoke and the tangle of telegraph wires, could be spied a shining metro­ polis where men would be re-formed. But I spent my days stuck in my father’s shop—at twenty-three I was his peer in making the fiddles and other cheap instruments we sold to travelers embarking from the docks— and my nights in drink with friends. I need only walk the streets of my Baltimore, pass a slave carrying bricks on his crooked back or a rheumy-eyed sailor, ruined by the sea, begging alms and ale, to feel the rottenness in my soul. Men could not be changed, and I, one among millions, would never make it to any dream city. Even so, the yearning never left me. One night, during yet another of our regular debauches, I rose without a word and left my friends in a steaming oyster house. I had seen notices in the paper of a Hebronite meeting: their leader and revelator, Josiah Kershaw, was touring the East to summon new followers to the city he was raising on Peaine Island, a wilderness in the far northern reaches of Lake Michigan. All week the papers had mocked Kershaw. To them he was a gross fabricator —the great paradise he promised a myth, the prophecies on which he claimed his authority pure forgeries. But I was intrigued. His talk of harmony, of plain lives lived according to rule, stirred my hopes. I had passed the last weeks in a violent melancholy, pining for a woman who didn’t even know me, a ship captain’s young wife, and increasingly I had seen my future, bound by an invisible chain to the worktable, just like my father. And so, unsteady on my feet after five whiskeys, I searched for the inn where the meeting was to be held. By the time I found it my heart beat heavily and sweat dripped from my skin. My nerves were electric with anticipation. Eyes turned to look at me when I stumbled into the room. The meeting was already underway. At the front a graybeard clutched a Bible and kept his eyes shut as he recited a prayer. I sat in the back, gripping my knees to keep from swaying. The graybeard droned on. 86 ecotone People yawned and scratched their noses. After fifteen more minutes of this—the prayer was unending!—I could barely master myself. I was an imbecile. There was nothing for me here. I glanced at the door, but before I could rouse the courage to get back up, the graybeard sat and another man stood. “Those who walk in the way of the Lord will receive His blessings ,” he shouted, and with those words—and that marshal’s voice— I was seized. My drunkenness lifted from me. My eyes steadied, my mind ceased to yaw, my limbs stiffened with sober life. I recognized Kershaw from the newspaper illustrations. He was tall and spare, with a trimmed auburn beard and a high forehead seemingly shaped for the guarding of truths. His eyes glittered as if catching the wonders of his heavenly Guide. He paced before us, and something in him called to me. Without knowing why, I hungered for his blessing. Five years earlier, he told us, he had beenacoalshoveler in Chautauqua County. It was then that angels, and at last the Lord, had first shown themselves to him and revealed a golden scroll hidden in a cave. On this scroll he found descriptions of Peaine Island. It was the Lord’s chosen site for a holy city, a place where men would live in...

Landscapes of Power: Middle Class and Lower Class Power Dynamics in a New York Charitable Institution

Archaeological and historical research at Sailors’ Snug Harbor uncovered material on this landscape of power. Sailors’ Snug Harbor, located in New York City, was established in 1831 as a private institution for retired and injured seamen who were economically impoverished. In the nineteenth century, between 400 and 800 seamen lived at Snug Harbor, supported by a director (called the governor), an assistant director (the steward), a doctor, a chaplain, and a large support staff. There were rivalries between the middle class administrators of institution especially during the reign of Thomas Melville (1867–84). Because over twenty percent of the retired seamen were former ship captains, in addition to numerous officers such as first mates, there were intense power dynamics between Melville (a former clipper ship captain) and the retired seamen (inmates). The design of the buildings and grounds, the archaeological material, and the primary source documents reveal middle class and lower class power dynamics that existed in this closed community.

Weather routing in long-distance Mediterranean routes

The selection of ship routes based on modern weather forecasting is a mean of computing optimum shipping routes thereby increasing safety and comfort at sea, cutting down on transit time, and reducing fuel consumption. Further empirical research in the effectiveness of modern weather routing applications is required especially in applications concerning shorter routes in enclosed seas of limited geographical extent such as the Mediterranean Sea. The present study used two climatological simulations to test this state-of-the-art approach to ship routing. Simulations represented two theoretical routes: (1) a route between Italy and Greece and (2) a route between Cyprus and Italy. Both routes were analyzed across varying simulated climatic conditions and the results were compared with those of control routes. Furthermore, results were analyzed in terms of passenger and crew comfort, bunker consumption by ships, and time of crossing. The first simulation showed that weather routing would improve ship performance on 37% of days while the second simulation revealed that weather routing would support ship captains virtually all the time.

The Binds of the Anxious Mariner: Patriarchy, Paternalism, and the Maritime Culture of Eighteenth-Century Bermuda

AbstractThis essay examines the roles and social responsibilities of mariners (ship captains and mates) through a close study of eighteenth-century Bermuda’s merchant marine. Challenging studies focused on ordinary seamen which mainly portray ship captains in negative, oppositional ways, this article instead explores links between the crews of typical small intercolonial trading vessels. Bermudian mariners had complex, reciprocal relationships with both the free and enslaved men who worked under them and with the broader maritime community that they served. Because Bermuda’s merchant marine resembled that of many other Anglo-American seaports, the portrait of the mariner that emerges for this island helps us better understand American seafaring culture and communities generally.

<i>Star Trek</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Star Trek Sherryl Vint (bio) Star Trek (J. J. Abrams US/Germany 2009). Single disc edition. Paramount. NTSC region 1. 2.35:1. CDN$29.99. The reboot of a media franchise is a tricky endeavour made all the more precarious when the original has a fan base characterised by longevity and tenacity. Add to this mix a director better known as the 'creator' of flashy, gimmicky products such as Alias (US 2001–6) and Cloverfield (Reeves US 2007) – worse, one who has no history with the franchise and is not even particularly a fan – and there are many reasons why J. J. Abram's Star Trek was both an ambitious and foolhardy venture. That the film was not only successful but also won the approval of much of the Trekker community is nothing short of astonishing. And there are good reasons for this success. First, the film returns us, in a way, to the early days of Star Trek (US 1966–9) and the characters that inspired such a dedicated fan following that a cancelled television series was able to spawn ten feature films between 1979 and 2002 and four spin-off series. One might blame the eventual faltering of the Star Trek universe on this proliferation of texts: they were just running out of stories to tell, as the marginally successful Voyager (US 1995–2001) and the misguided [End Page 164] Enterprise (US 2001–5) attest. There seemed no further corners to explore and the innovative attempt to set Enterprise in the future's past led only to the sort of complicated paradoxes and inconsistencies that dedicated fans were sure to point out, but which inevitably went unnoticed by the teams of writers typical of contemporary television production. Abrams' Star Trek not only takes us back to the original crew and the energy that made Star Trek fun, but it also opens up this universe to imagine it otherwise, creating the possibility of a Star Trek for the twenty-first century. Freed from the weight of history, the new Star Trek can once more take us somewhere unexpected. At the centre of the film – whose plot, in many ways, is unimportant to its achievement – is an experience of time travel which creates an alternate universes, making this Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), McCoy (Karl Urban), Sulu (John Cho), Chekov (Anton Yelchin), Scotty (Simon Pegg) and Uhura (Zoë Saldana) both like and unlike the characters we know. The story, about a rogue Romulan mining ship captain, Nero (Eric Bana), unexpectedly propelled into the past by a combination of a black hole and an exploding star, has all the usual problems one expects from time travel and miraculous technology. Consider, for example, the unexplained 'red matter', capable of creating micro-singularities, which is nonetheless mysteriously contained on a Vulcan science vessel. Since this ship is from the 'old' Star Trek's future, and since Vulcan is destroyed in the 'new' one, presumably this technology will now never have been invented, and hence we will not have to worry about further timetravelling paradoxes and tedious attempts to 'fix' the timeline to what it 'should' have been. Such logical problems aside, the real purpose of the plot is to create both a plausible explanation for this alternate Star Trek and an adventure which compels our main characters to become acquainted and work together to save Earth. This introduction of the crewmembers and the forging of a bond among them – particularly Kirk and Spock – is what this film is truly about. Indeed, the chemistry between Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto suggests that, like the original series, this franchise will inspire K/S slash among its fan fictions. Abrams includes much in the film to reassure and appeal to dedicated fans, from the delightful insouciance with which Kirk defeats the Kobayashi Maru simulation, to casual drops of series minutiae relevant only to an insider (Scotty is exiled for a transporter accident involving Admiral Archer's beagle), to the implausible but nonetheless entertaining battle aboard a mining-drill platform that begins with a parachute jump from space into the atmosphere, during which the non-central character wearing the only red jumpsuit crashes...

The Other Half of Life: A Novel Based on the True Story of the MS St. Louis (review)

Reviewed by: The Other Half of Life: A Novel Based on the True Story of the MS St. Louis Elizabeth Bush Whitney, Kim Ablon . The Other Half of Life: A Novel Based on the True Story of the MS St. Louis. Knopf, 2009238 p. Library ed. ISBN 978-0-375-95219-7$19.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-375-85219-0$16.99 R Gr. 5-8 When Thomas Werkmann's father, a Jew, is arrested by the Nazis, his gentile mother knows that the only safety for her son lies outside Germany. She secures Thomas a ticket and landing permit and sends him off on the MS St. Francis, bound for Cuba, where he will meet up with his older half-brother. Thomas, who generally keeps to himself, is attracted to another teenage passenger, Priska Affeldt, and he is welcomed into the company of her family as they all enjoy the luxury and unaccustomed respect afforded them under the directions of the ship's captain. But not all the crew are as cordial to the Jewish emigrants as the captain orders, and Thomas strongly suspects that one member of the staff, who oversees the passengers, may be involved in smuggling military secrets. While Thomas struggles with anti-Semitism and with his growing affection for Priska (who is more than a bit of a tease), a larger and more threatening problem develops in Havana harbor, as the Cuban government refuses to allow the passengers to land, negotiations with [End Page 46] other countries fall apart, and the ship is forced to return to Europe. Although Thomas and Affeldts are fictional, it's clear from both events and the book's subtitle that the St. Francis is based on the St. Louis, many of whose passengers, refugees turned away from the U.S. in 1939, eventually found havens in several European countries, only to be apprehended later as Germany marched westward. Readers familiar with that historical background already know that the heartbreaking interest of this story lies in what happens after the voyage's end, while those unfamiliar with this episode will find much to ponder over America's decision to throw the deadbolt on her Golden Door. Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Listening to Leoiki: Engaging Sources in Hawaiian History

This paper challenges the perception of "silence" of Hawaiian women in the sex trade in 1820s Hawai'i by focusing on the sale of a Hawaiian woman, Leoiki—whose name means "little voice"—by a chiefess to a British whale ship captain in 1825. Working with family genealogies, depositions, American missionary correspondence, and other sources written in Hawaiian, this paper explores how the important principles of kuleana and kapu function within Leoiki's story as well as essential focal points for a Hawaiian historian's gathering and interpretation of sources. In writing this kind of history, this paper also sets out a new methodology that is interpretively consistent with traditional Hawaiian modes of remembering and perpetuating history.

Where is the "captain of the ship"?

Where is the "captain of the ship"?

Betrayed: Scandal, Politics, and Canadian Naval Leadership (review)

Reviewed by: Betrayed: Scandal, Politics, and Canadian Naval Leadership William Schleihauf Betrayed: Scandal, Politics, and Canadian Naval Leadership. By Richard O. Mayne. Vancouver, Canada: UBC Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-7748-1296-2. Photographs. Illustrations. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xii, 279. CAN$29.95. Politics. They beset any organization; occasionally for the greater good, all too often to the detriment of the whole. Navies are no exception. The history of the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) is very much one of politics, both internal and external – indeed, its very survival has always been mired in political controversy. In Betrayed, Richard Mayne takes up the story of one political tempest that culminated in the ousting of the professional head of the RCN – all of this at the height of the Second World War. When Canada declared war on the 10th of September, 1939, the Canadian Navy was a tiny force of six destroyers and a handful of trawlers. By war's end, this flotilla-sized fleet had turned into a truly blue-water navy: two light fleet carriers; a pair of powerful light cruisers; modern fleet destroyers; myriad landing craft and supporting vessels; and above all, an immense anti-submarine force. HMC ships had seen action around the globe, and forces were being deployed for the culminating stages of the fight against Imperial Japan. No organization can be expected to undergo a fifty-fold expansion (from fewer than 2,000 regular force officers and men to some 110,000 serving personnel, all volunteers) without growing pains, and those the RCN had aplenty. Getting that vast influx of men properly trained, and keeping them upto date with the latest techniques and tactics was a huge challenge in and of itself. Combined with the rapid pace of technological development (radar, new anti-submarine warfare weaponry and associated electronics), and the need to repair and upgrade existing vessels – with insufficient shipyard capacity and in [End Page 676] competition with other industries and the other services for skilled and semi-skilled labour – the existing naval infrastructure had difficulty coping. It is very much to the credit of the Chief of the Naval Staff Vice-Admiral Percy Nelles, and Naval Staff Headquarters (NSHQ), that the Navy did as well as it did. Nevertheless, several disastrous convoys highlighted serious shortcomings in the RCN's capabilities. The focus of Canada's naval war was the fight against the German U-boat, and to accomplish this, the Naval Staff was forced to juggle a number of competing issues. The maximum number of escorts and escort groups had to be kept at sea at all times, but those ships needed maintenance and had to be upgraded with the latest technology – by a shipbuilding industry working at capacity. Trained manpower was in short supply, and needed to be spread as widely as possible; while ship captains did their best to keep their crews together. There was, of course, the normal disconnect between those at sea, unaware of the overall picture, and the shore-based administrators, seemingly disinterested in the concerns of those bouncing about the North Atlantic. Moreover, there was tension felt by many "Wavy Navy" (Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve, i.e. RCNVR) officers unaccustomed to a stricter discipline and more rigid hierarchy than experienced in private life: some felt that the regular RCN was biased against them. This is the situation described in Betrayed. Interlocking networks of RCNVR officers (ofttimes lawyers) were able to use connections from their prewar careers to pass sometimes faulty, often incomplete, information about the problems in the "Corvette Navy" up to the highest levels, outside of proper channels. Very dangerous politically. Mayne untangles the various threads that connected all the players, and explores the roles played by men ranging from the Naval Minister Angus Macdonald and his executive assistant John Joseph Connolly down through the members of the Naval Staff, and senior British officers in Liverpool. Ultimately, Percy Nelles would pay the price. Not neglected is the cut-throat and competitive world of the prewar RCN officers, each trying to gain every inch in the all-important promotion game. Unfortunately, those shenanigans were not put aside by all senior officers, even during the war...

Coleridge's Captain Derkheim

Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworth-Coleridge Association 2008: Romantic Lives and LettersColeridge's Captain DerkheimMorton D. PaleyMorton D. Paley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 40, Number 2-3Spring-Summer 2009 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043448 Views: 5Total views on this site © 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

At the Far Reaches of Empire: The Life of Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra (review)

Reviewed by: At the Far Reaches of Empire: The Life of Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra Christopher Storrs At the Far Reaches of Empire: The Life of Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra. By Freeman M. Tovell. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-7748-1367-9. Maps. Illustrations. Appendixes. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xv, 435. CAN $85.00. In the second half of the eighteenth century the Spanish Bourbons, alarmed at Russian and British expansion into and interest in the Pacific coast of what is now the United States and Canada, initiated a series of expeditions of exploration, discovery and delimitation – or extension - of imperial frontiers, launched from the naval department of San Blas in the viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico) to [End Page 269] claim that coast for Spain, and so protect the still enormous Spanish imperial presence in the Americas. These activities culminated in the Nootka Sound incident of 1790, when war looked almost certain between Spain and Britain following the seizure of British ships and destruction of a British trading post there (on what is now Vancouver Island) by one of those many Spanish expeditions. One of those who settled the crisis for Spain was the naval officer, Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, who played a leading part in this cycle of Spanish imperial expansion in North America. Born in 1744 in Lima, the capital of the viceroyalty of Peru, the younger son of a merchant father who had emigrated from the Spanish Basque Country, Juan Francisco studied first in Peru before crossing the Atlantic to enter the Academy for Naval Officers (Escuela de Guardiamarinas) at Cadiz. Having graduated, he joined the navy as an officer cadet, or guardiamarina, in 1762, gradually rising through the naval hierarchy, and receiving his final promotion, as ship's captain in 1784. Bodega y Quadra's promotions – which also included an habito in the prestigious Military Order of Santiago – were due very largely to his part in the expeditions referred to above. His participation in these adventures was almost entirely fortuitous. He was not a first choice candidate for men to go on the expedition which set out from the naval department of San Blas in 1775, and on which – as commander of an inferior vessel – he took possession in the name of king Charles III of Spain of the ports of los Remedios and Bodega. This success brought various rewards, including another expedition, that of 1779. Further voyages of this sort were rendered less easy by the outbreak of war between Spain and Britain (1779-83), Bodega y Quadra passing to Havana and to Spain, but in 1789 Charles III ordered him back to the Pacific coast of New Spain, as commanding officer of San Blas naval department. There, as Spanish commissary, working with the British representative, George Vancouver, he was responsible for the implementation of the Nootka Sound convention agreed at the Escorial by the British and Spanish governments in October 1790, on his third and final expedition, that so-called " of the Limits" (1792). Bodega y Quadra died in 1794, aged 50. Clearly an important figure, unfortunately Bodega y Quadra did not leave much by way of private papers with which the historian can reconstruct his private life, such that much of the latter must remain obscure. Fortunately, however, the remarkable administrative machine that was Imperial Spain provides sufficient material to piece together his career and the expeditions he played such an important part in; so too do Bodega y Quadra's own diaries or journals of the voyages of 1775, 1779, and 1792. Freeman Tovell has drawn on these latter and the correspondence between Bodega y Quadra and his superiors in Spanish America and Spain, now housed in various repositories – including the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, the Archivo Historico Nacional in Madrid, the Archivo General at Simancas, the Huntington Library and the Bancroft Library - to good effect. In doing so, Tovell outlines for an English-reading audience the biography, career and achievement of an ambitious and energetic Spanish creole naval officer who played an important [End Page 270] part in the exploration by the European states in the...

Whalesong and Chants Democratic

Whalesong and Chants Democratic Joyce E. Chaplin (bio) Once upon a time, historians of science regarded the decades that stretched from Isaac Newton to Charles Darwin as a vast historical Sahara, a blank temporal expanse during which nothing much happened. But as it turns out, a lot did happen. As Graham Burnett has beautifully observed, for example, a New York court case over the natural, social, and commercial statuses of whales reveals a lively debate about the living world that took place in an era of supposed inconsequence. Rather than an arid Sahara, we have the teeming seven seas. Out of that salty cradle of life, I want to haul in yet another interesting marine specimen, this one from a slightly earlier period, the late 18th century, in order to clarify what science in early America signified before and after the American Revolution.1 I present to you not a whale, but a whaleman. Timothy Folger was a native of Nantucket, who, like many from that small island, took to the sea for his livelihood, eventually becoming a ship's captain. Posterity might have forgotten him were it not for his famous cousin, Benjamin Franklin, whose mother was from Nantucket. If Franklin's rise to fame and fortune is a matter of public history, it was also a matter of family pride—his relatives rejoiced in their kinsman's achievement in becoming the first scientific American, the first person born in the New World who was regarded as the equal of European men of science, and the first to enjoy cultural visibility and political power because of his scientific achievements. Wherever the eminent Franklin went, his waterborne Nantucket kin followed; they would call on him in Philadelphia, London, and even Paris.2 In 1768, while Franklin was living in London, he enjoyed a well-timed visit from Timothy Folger. The year 1768 marked the first stage of the troubled relations between American colonists and British administrators. Franklin himself felt stung by British criticism, both because he was a spokesman and lobbyist for American interests in London and because of his absenteeism from America, where he was supposed to be serving as Deputy Postmaster General. Serendipitously, as it would turn out, it was at this moment that British officials put a question to him: Why did it take longer to get a postal packet ship to New York than to Boston? Franklin in turn put the question to Timothy Folger, who was evidently amused at this evidence that British packet boat captains were perfect idiots. Little did they know that their travel to New York was delayed because they were navigating against the current of the Gulf Stream, which they avoided in the more northerly passage to Boston, hence the differential in travel time. To this explanation, Folger added an interesting fact: Nantucket mariners knew the Gulf Stream best because they sought it out—along its warm edges, whales went to catch fish, so that was where whalers went to catch whales. Click for larger view View full resolution Plotting the sea: Maury's "preliminary" whale chart of 1851 (mentioned by Melville in a footnote to Moby-Dick). Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Franklin now had a bit of maritime knowledge with which he could champion American know-how and defend himself against criticisms that, by living in London, he neglected his postal duties. He wrote up his cousin's testimony, sent it to his superior at the post office, and also asked Folger to mark on a chart of the Atlantic Ocean the extent and course of the Gulf Stream. Franklin forwarded this now-lost manuscript to the post office so that the chart of the Gulf Stream could be printed and distributed to all those clueless British packet boat captains. This was done and the result was the first map of the Gulf Stream, the joint handiwork of a landsman, Benjamin Franklin, eminent man of science, and his cousin, whom Franklin described as "an intelligent whaleman of Nantucket." Thus had some key knowledge about the fluid, whale-filled seas been captured and displayed on dry land. The charting of the open ocean was in fact just becoming a...

Paul Christopher Johnson, Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa

Paul Christopher Johnson, Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. 330. Cloth $50.00. Paper $24.95. Paul Christopher Johnson offers a rich articulation of the complexity of the African Diaspora in Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa. In his previous works Johnson focused on Brazilian Candomble; here he explores the little-studied Black Carib religion of the Garifuna and explains how it challenges some preexisting conceptions of the African Diaspora. He argues not only that diasporic religious rituals and culture from the homeland are transferred to a different space, but also that they change and evolve as these practices move into different time periods and locations. He also explains the effects of a diaspora, or the movement of a diasporic religion from one homeland to a second--both outside of Africa. Finally, he shows that African diasporic religions vary in their emphasis on the influence of Africa as the homeland. Johnson compares groups of Garifuna practitioners in both Honduras and the Bronx, New York, to explain how diasporic connections to Africa were formed. While the island of St. Vincent serves as a homeland for both groups of Black Caribs, Johnson shows that the racial and cultural politics of New York City have drawn Garifuna practitioners into a close relationship with their African roots. Whereas homeland Garifuna practitioners in Honduras regard St. Vincent as their place of origin, whence the spirits return, U.S.-based Garifuna view three places--Honduras, St. Vincent, and, increasingly, Africa itself--as territorial sites of religious power. In this way Johnson explains that second diasporic religions bear the effects not only of migration within the Caribbean, but also their subsequent movement to the United States. Johnson extensively reviews existing scholarship on diasporas and religion, as well as the African Diaspora specifically. His definition of diasporas revolves around gaps in space, time, and memory, and thus broadens the relationship between geographic homelands and hostlands. African diasporic religions are those sets of religious discourses and practices that invoke Africa as a horizon of memory, authenticity, and sacred authority--whether Africa is physically known, imagined, or ritually created--and which consider the distance from that idealized place as a problem that is remedied by rendering the place as present in ritual. Thus, he explores important links among ritual spaces--St. Vincent, Honduras, and Africa--as well as the role of memory in the ritual practices of the Garifuna. Johnson then presents a brief history of the Black Carib people on St. Vincent and in Central America. He relies on European ship captains' personal letters to sketch these historical details and provides an insightful analysis of their perspectives. …

Basque Ship Captains as Mariners and Traders in the Eighteenth Century

Basque Ship Captains as Mariners and Traders in the Eighteenth Century

The Slaving Brig Henriqueta and Her Evil Sisters: A Case Study in the 19th-Century Illegal Slave Trade to Brazil

The Middle Passage, the forced migration of millions of African captives across the Atlantic Ocean to enslavement in the Western Hemisphere, is arguably the most defining factor of the modern world. Yet, for all of its magnitude and its indisputably profound importance in altering human history, the tangible realities of the Middle Passage, particularly the experiences and perspectives of those most directly affected--the African captives, their communities, and their descendants--remain relatively unknown and unrecognized in academic and popular discourse. Most of what is available from historical records comes from non-African sources: ship captains, government officials, occasionally abolitionists, but all outside observers. The two notable exceptions were the narratives written by Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano, which have stirred some controversy in their own right as to their authenticity. (1) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Given these circumstances, clearly one valuable source of better understanding of the realities of the Middle Passage and its repercussions, particularly from the perspective of those silent and nameless souls whose lives were most affected and altered, is the surviving evidence and data pertaining to individual ships and voyages, and what might be reasonably extrapolated from them. These data, which often include the names of actual persons, places, and events, also have the advantage of reducing a story of such vast and abstract proportions to a more intelligible human scale. Such is the case with one of the most significant vessels during the illegal slave era, the Henriqueta, a 19th -century Baltimore-built two-masted brig from Bahia, Brazil. (2) The history of the Henriqueta offers numerous detailed insights into the illicit traffic to that country, its impact on the Africans, the wealth it built, and the attempts by Great Britain to suppress its activities. Gathering the data for such a study of the illegal era, however, poses additional challenges since so many records of ships and voyages are non-existent, inaccurate, or deliberately falsified. Yet, paradoxically, as will be shown, the ruses and subterfuges to which ship owners and slaving captains resorted in order to circumvent the law often followed such predictable patterns as to become more revealing of the very facts that they were designed to camouflage. Reconstructing the story of a single ship in this circumstance might aptly be compared to the archaeological task of recovering and reassembling the scattered remaining fragments of an ancient vase, whose pictorial decorations once had an important story to tell. But because each such vase was not only unique, but also typical of its time and culture, these fragments prove to be valuable for a more general understanding, in this case, not only of the illegal to Brazil, but also of the overall history of the Middle Passage. The fragmented story of the Henriqueta and her evil sisters--other slaving vessels linked to her in any number of ways--depends in large part upon primary archival sources in Brazil, as well as secondary sources such as historical accounts, and most notably, the comprehensive work of Pierre Verger and Howard I. Chapelle, the eminent historian and former maritime curator of the Smithsonian Institution. The history of this single slaving vessel of the 1820s might be viewed as a main stem with many roots and branches, each leading potentially to other case studies. (3) FROM LEGAL TO ILLEGAL SLAVE TRADING On 25 March 1807, the British Parliament, after more than a decade of debate, finally enacted legislation for the abolition of the trade (but not slavery itself) throughout its dominions and outlawed any further involvement in it by British citizens. (4) This prohibition was rooted in a growing sense of moral outrage vis-a-vis the ignominious centuries-old commerce in human lives, in which Britain was the largest participant. …