Sea literature: from sail to steam

It is often thought that the whole maritime tradition in literature ends with Conrad and Melville, and I realized while doing research that I do not think it is an end. It is the beginning of a very different kind of tradition, which is inaugurated by Melville and Conrad. 

In "The Mirror of the Sea", Conrad says that, to a man of the sails, the sea is something that is not just a navigable element but an intimate companion. The whole change or transition from sail to steam that we see across the 19th century completely changed or reconfigured this intimacy between the sea, the ship and the sailor. Because, on one hand, there was this technological shift, but that intersected with certain meteorological changes, as well as changes in the composition of the sailors. Because of the Navigation Act of 1849, it becomes much more diverse, much more multiracial. Then, later on in the 19th century, we also had the unionization of labor, where sailors became much more aware of their rights.

That is the first stage. Their work is full of these tensions between the old and the new, between the distinctions between industrial workers and sailors, and then we move on to the next stage – maybe, for want of a better word, the modernist stage.

In conventional literature around the sea voyages, we often have this romance of navigation, but as we move into the 20th century, shipboard communities become almost little signposts or communities where many of the landlocked debates around gender, sexuality, race, class get articulated most powerfully.

There is an absolutely extraordinary diary of this American man who was a musician, Philip Van Buskirk. He has these multi-volume, almost erotic diaries of what is happening on the ship that he is sailing. He is sailing exactly at the same time as Melville in the mid-19th century, and, for him, all the different boys engage in a variety of erotic activities on ship. What we realize is that there is almost a lost world of linguistic richness and diversity, of erotic experiences which are queerer than queer, but are never organized under the sign of queerness. I think it is very important to excavate this lost world in order to understand these erotic communities among the sailors.

How do you excavate this lost world of linguistic richness and diversity of erotic experiences? Again, we have to look at very different kinds of sources. I have been looking at descriptions of tattoos, medical records that often record particular diseases. A sailor's condition may come up as a footnote in a medical treatise, but some of the most revealing records are these court-martial and sodomy trials. We have a lot of that in the national archives in both America and in Britain. They read like novellas, and they are full of narrative jouissance, because these trials run into 30 pages, 40 pages, with the most extraordinary detail. I will just read out one bit.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, we have Herman Melville's extraordinary novella "Billy Budd", written in the late 19th century, not finished and discovered only after his death in a bread tin. It was published in 1924, the same year as A Passage to India. It is a very complex story. You have Billy Budd, this extremely handsome and very innocent sailor; then this very wise, tolerant and supposedly enlightened captain, Captain Vere; then this evil figure Claggart, who has a vendetta against Billy and brings in a false accusation of insubordination.

James Hanley, like D.H. Lawrence, is one of the most important working class voices in British literature. We have the whole tradition of maritime literature, often represented by Joseph Conrad, but that is always from an officer's perspective. For the first time in James Hanley, we have the perspective of a common sailor – he himself was one – and in Boy, a remarkable novel that was actually banned because of its depiction of male rape. It is the story of this young boy, Fearon, who gets repeatedly raped, and then he contracts syphilis, possibly from the sexual encounter he has in Alexandria with an Egyptian female sex worker. Then the captain does an act of mercy killing and basically smothers him with his coat, and he is thrown overboard. I think it is extraordinary, because of its explicitness on different fronts: male rape, syphilis and this mercy killing by the captain. This is where I think modernism strikes, and this is how modernist literature of the sea is so starkly different from what we had in Melville or Conrad. We have all these testimonies from working class voices in the 18th and 19th centuries, who had been sexually abused repeatedly by older men on the ships. This is the first time we have its parallel, its articulation in the world of fiction in the 20th century. I have often juxtaposed these trials from court-martial cases, these elaborate testimonies given by these young, underage boys who had been raped, along with the experience of Fearon, and the similarities are quite startling.

As we move from the genre of stories about sailing boats – and often it is this lone man or group of men on the sailing boats – to this world of steam engines with its army of industrial workers, we also enter a much more diverse world. On the one hand, we do not have just this journey from Europe to the rest of the world, but we have the colonial intellectuals like Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and the South African intellectual Sol Plaatjie all coming to Europe, often to be trained and then take radical ideas back home and beyond the upper decks.

What the transition from sail to steam resulted in are quite different ideas of space and time. For example, people were dependent on the wind and would not know how long it would take. Travel becomes far more regimented; we soon move into this world of cruise liners, and then we move on to the world of the airplane, air travel. Only in recent years are we recognizing once more how ubiquitous the sea was at that time, in the late 19th and early 20th century, in the time of transition from sail to steam.

The sea from Homer's Odyssey, or the Anglo-Saxon lyrics to the Romantic times, had been a source of wonder as well as of fear. It was a source of the sublime, whereas we have almost reached the end point now, where the sea may be to many no longer just a sense of wonder, but one of precarity: how do we save the sea?