Maritime history has been the history of the Vikings, Columbus, and other such ‘heroic’ European ventures. The slave voyages twist that narrative, and throw up, literally, the substantive narrative, writ in bones and metal
By Pramod K Nayar
“Our future and the state of the oceans are one.”
The 1945 Truman Proclamation extended US territory to include a 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea remapped 70% of the earth. Together, these set up the new wave of colonisation-exploration: of the ocean.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau is a household name, for revealing the glories of the underwater world through his books about the ocean, the films made around the dives he and his team made and the books, with The Silent World being his most famous. The underwater explorations that Cousteau undertook was the equivalent of the celebrated fictional accounts of Star Trek, or the outer-space journeys of the Voyager. Cousteau made the underwater world a familiar space. He explored the waterworlds for a purpose, and gave us a history.
A different kind of history has also been made, or discovered, underwater, by shipwreck divers and salvagers searched for buried treasures in old ships at the bottom of the world’s oceans, as they unravelled the stories behind the Kublai Khan armada wreck (13th century) or the Titanic (20th century). The remains of many soldiers, traders and explorers who travelled on these ships have been excavated in the process, constituting a material history of unimaginable causes and effects, of human endeavour and human tragedy.
The sea carries a material history of unimaginable causes and effects, of human endeavour and human tragedy
Cousteau called attention to the link of water and life:
“our flesh is composed of myriads of cells, each one of which contains a miniature ocean . . . comprising all the salts of the sea, probably the built-in heritage of our distant ancestry.”
Marine biologist Sylvia Earle wrote in Sea Change:
“The living ocean drives planetary chemistry, governs climate and weather, and otherwise provides the cornerstone of the life-support system for all creatures on our planet. . . . If the sea is sick, we’ll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one. “
This link of water with life and the history of life as the history of the blue liquid has now become the subject of the critical field of the ‘Blue Humanities’. Others note how the navigations and travels by Europeans — and humans in general — across the waters of the earth resulted not just in population dispersion but also colonisation of other forms of life. Indeed, the colonisation of the ocean resources has been so thorough in the past few decades that commentators have begun to speak of a ‘blue-green capitalism’.
The ‘Distant’ Sea?
Places located in the Pacific were deemed ‘distant’. And yet, even these so-called ‘distant’ islands (distant from Euro-Americana, presumably) were not spared. The last frontier, supposedly outer space, had been modified when it was discovered that beyond the boundaries of the ‘civilised’ world – read Euro-Americana – out in the oceans, were islands with ‘disposable’ people. Like the European concept of terra nullius, which pretended that the lands the Europeans wanted to conquer were ‘empty’, we now create an Aqua nullius: the ocean as empty for us to carry out our hideous experiments.
This link of water with life and the history of life as the history of the blue liquid has now become the subject of the critical field of the ‘Blue Humanities’
Between 1946 and 1958, the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean saw the testing of 23 atomic bombs by the USA. Since these were far away from the USA, the islands became testing grounds for the bombs, and the native inhabitants, some of whom were shunted out of their resident islands, suffered severe radiation sickness. Jane Dibblin’s Day of Two Suns: U.S. Nuclear Testing and the Pacific Islanders captures the history of this testing through interviews of the residents.
“One cousin climbed the coconut tree and got something in her eyes, so we sent another one up. The same thing happened to her. When we went home — ours was the main village on Rongelap — it was raining. We saw something on the leaves, something yellow. Our parents asked, ‘What’s happened to your hair?’ It looked like we’d rubbed soap powder in it.
That night we couldn’t sleep, our skin itched so much. On our feet were burns, as if from hot water. Our hair fell out. We’d look at each other and laugh — you’re bald, you look like an old man. But really we were frightened and sad.”
Dibblin notes: “The exact dose of radiation received by the islanders was never measured, but it was estimated that people on Utrik received 14 rem (140 msv) and those on Rongelap 175 rem (1,750 msv). The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) now recommends that a maximum permissible total body dose to a member of the general public be 0.5 rem a year.”
In the 1954 Bikini Atoll tests, the Japanese fishing boat, Lucky Dragon, was in the area when the bomb went off. The fisherman received huge radiation doses. An account by one of the scientists involved in the testing, John C Clark, records: “The twenty-three Japanese fishermen in the Fortunate Dragon, which was seventy miles further away from the shot than we were, received burns. Twenty-eight American personnel manning weather stations, and 236 natives on Rongelap, Rongerik and Utirik also received radiation during the unforeseen fallout.”
As early as 1953, the Rand Corporation published a document, Worldwide Effects of Atomic Weapons: Project Sunshine, which noted the horrific amounts of radiation absorbed by people ‘across the seas’ and therefore distant and disposable.
The US had crossed the ocean to irradiate the natives.
Other commentators have noted the role of the sea in human exploitation. The scholar Paul Gilroy in his The Black Atlantic, argued how the ocean was instrumental in setting up a cultural hybrid in the Americas, but was also the site of long-term exploitation of one race (the Africans) by another (the Europeans). Gilroy recast the ocean with this interpretation: it was not the space of adventure and thrills alone, it was the place of mass deaths and the route to suffering for the black people who made the journey. Clearly, the ocean has constituted human history, even as it has been constituted time and again by the humans.
The ocean has constituted human history, even as it has been constituted time and again by the humans
In contemporary studies, this shift in thinking about the ocean has been validated by artists like Jason deCaires Taylor (whose sculptures are installed under water) and anthropologists such as Stefan Helmreich. Helmreich writes: “But water — like life, an amalgam of the conceptual and actual — is also becoming newly readable as a substance-concept”. In his brilliant Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, he writes:
“The ocean as a site in which the object of biology — life — materializes as a networked phenomenon linking the microscopic to the macrocosmic, bacteria to the biosphere, genes to globe. Microbes are key figures in this new scientific ocean, pointers to the origin of life, climate change, and promising biotechnologies.”
Entire hydropoetics and hydrohistories are now available through the work of Isabel Hofmeyr and others. Such studies are accompanied by ‘on the ground’ work, under water.
A Different Sea?
Scuba diving professional and founder of the National Association of Black Scuba Divers (NABS), Ken Stewart received a call in 2003 to help with a documentary about the slave ship, The Guerrero. Collaborating with the filmmakers, Stewart understood something: that under water lay some of the most fascinating, if tragic, histories of the African people. For, in the wrecks of the slave ships, could be found artifacts of the most sustained efforts of human trafficking in history: the slave voyages, starting in the early 17th century.
Thus, Stewart founded ‘Diving with a Purpose’, an organisation that specialises in hunting for wrecks of slave ships. 500 divers, mostly black, in ‘Diving with a Purpose’, dive off Mozambique, from Senegal to Costa Rica, and around the USA. The organisation’s stated aim is the ‘protection, documentation and interpretation of African slave trade shipwrecks and the maritime history and culture of African Americans’.
In the place of the narrative and the photograph, ‘Diving with a Purpose’ proffers an artifactual history. Melancholy objects and objects of mourning, such as the ones dredged up through the dives, are mute witnesses to the tragic history – and yet they are being made to speak. Now absorbed into the regimes of memory in museums, documentaries and podcasts, the objects not only bring up a marine history, they mediate this for us. Material artifacts demonstrate their sociohistorical affiliations and thereby hangs the tale.
The slave ships went from Europe to Africa, picked up Africans — many sold by fellow-Africans in intra-racial conflicts — and sailed to the Americas to be made to work on slave plantations. Approximately 1.8 million Africans died in the transatlantic voyages. The figures, we assume, include those who died when their ships went down.
Wreckage revealed their remains, many still shackled in the ships’ hold and unable, therefore, to swim out of the sinking (although how they would have swum to safety from the middle of the Atlantic is a moot point). It is believed at least 1,000 slave ships sank, with their unhappy inmates, through the three centuries of slaving.
An Alter-Geography
In 2010, an astonishing, nearly 400-page volume was published from Yale University Press. David Eltis and David Richardson’s Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade provided a different geography of, first, the Atlantic, and then of the world itself. It showed the routes of the slave ships, the ‘source’ of their human raw materials and their marketplace of horrors (the New World).
This Atlas is unlike any other. It gives suffering, mass suffering, a topos, a point of departure and destination (although many slaves, like letters, never arrived at a destination). Just as the slaving voyages changed the world and its racialised demographics — note that the voyages were a part of the Enlightenment and industrial modernity in Europe — the Atlas shows us a different world itself: not of discoveries and heroic journeys, but of genocidal intent.
True, the Africans were not sent to camps, as the Nazis did to the Jews, but the plantation was no less a camp in terms of what it achieved (commentators like Donna Haraway, therefore, propose a plantationocene – which is at once about the environment and the slavery within the plantation). ‘Diving with a Purpose’ makes use of this Atlas as it quests for material evidence that instantiates the Atlas and any recorded history.
The material evidence for mass suffering also lies under water
‘Diving with a Purpose’ is an extraordinary attempt to seek history under water. If, as the speaker in Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott’s classic poem, ‘The Sea is History’ says, the Africans’ history is ‘all subtle and submarine’, the project retrieves this sordid saga. The Atlantic is never to be viewed in the same way again. Stewart’s project, now presented also as a podcast from NatGeo, is an astonishing adventure that recreates from barnacle-encrusted, rotten and broken fragments of bones and metal, this history of the Atlantic. Buried treasure it may not be in the terms we generally associate with the divers, but it is the treasured history of many people. It serves, then, as the marine equivalent of the “1619 Project”.
For centuries, maritime history has been the history of the Vikings, Columbus, the search for the North-West Passage, and other such ‘heroic’ European ventures. The slave voyages twist that narrative of maritime history, and what ‘Diving with a Purpose’ does is to throw up, literally, the substantive narrative, writ in bones and metal, as phrased above, of the twist.
As the podcast of ‘Diving with a Purpose’ puts it, ‘the last frontier is under water’.
(The author is Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad)