The Sea: A Cultural History

274 Pages·2013·1.729 MB·English

by  John Mack

SEA
the

the sea

SEA
the
reaktion books
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2011
Copyright © John Mack 2011
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by cpi/Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Mack, John, 1949–
The sea : a cultural history.
1. Ocean. 2. Ocean and civilization. 3. Seafaring life.
I. Title
551.4'6-dc22
isbn978 1 86189 809 8
Contents
Preface 7
Introduction 13
1 Different Seas? 36
2 Concepts of the Sea 72
3 Navigation and the Arts of Performance 105
4 Ships as Societies 136
5 Beaches 165
6 The Sea on the Land 188
References 219
Bibliography 242
Acknowledgements 258
Photo Acknowledgements 260
Index 261

Preface
There are two separate strands which have come together in the plan-
ning of this book – or rather two separate, but in the end related
questions. The first is a negative one: why did no one apparently think
it worth settling on the large island of Madagascar in the western
Indian Ocean until late in human history? It is an island well-endowed
by nature and, other than being inhabited by ferocious mosquitoes
along its coasts, not inconvenienced by the lions, leopards or other
predators that stalk the hinterlands of the nearby African continent.
Its famous lemurs are benign residents posing no physical threat to
human settlement. A second question is why – coincidentally at about
the same time as Madagascar was finally being colonized – did the
people of East Anglia take to burying a leader in a huge ship on the
top of a hill? Sutton Hoo is a pleasant place above a sheltered inlet, a
good place to bury a prominent person who would have been familiar
with the maritime world along this part of the English coastline. But
why drag a huge ship all the way up there to do it?
The questions occurred in this sequence but at different moments
several decades apart. The first obliges a reconsideration of what it
means to be at sea and how the maritime world is constituted; the
second implies bringing the subject back onto land to think about
how the maritime and terrestrial worlds interact. The movement of
the book that follows reproduces that sequence: it starts by thinking
about human engagement with the sea in maritime terms, rather
than merely as an extension of the activities of the land; and it ends
by seeking to bring together the argument round a consideration of
the grand ritual gesture of ship-burial. In between it ranges widely
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The Sea
across the literature on the human experience of the different oceans
and seas.
After working in various inland parts of eastern Africa – and
having had the opportunity to spend time along the Swahili coast of
Kenya and latterly Tanzania – the outbreak of civil war in southern
Sudan in the early 1980s made it inadvisable to continue working with
pastoralist communities in what was to become a war-torn area. The
opportunity arose to begin an ethnographic survey on the island of
Madagascar, which in those days was mostly approached by plane from
Nairobi. The route lay over the north-west coast of the island with a
clear sight of the soils leeching off the central highlands and turning
the rivers and a wide semi-circle of the waters of the Mozambique
Channel a distinctive brownish-red colour. Flying in to land in the
highlands near the capital of Antananarivo has become the usual way
of getting there. However, on subsequent visits I have been able follow
an older practice and approached by sea from Zanzibar entering the
ports at Mahajanga, Antsiranana (previously Diego Suárez) and, on
the east coast, at Toamasina (Tamatave). What this experience makes
entirely evident is both the proximity of ‘la grande île’ to inhabited
lands and islands in the vicinity and also the availability of a number
of sheltered harbours. So the island is vast, neither remote, lacking
appropriate harbours (albeit dispersed ones) nor short of resources.
True, it lies at the extremities of the monsoonal system which linked
together the trading practices of the wider Indian Ocean world. Being
off the beaten track, however, was not a criterion which limited the
exploration and settlement of the Pacific, the North Atlantic or other
areas which were colonized much earlier than Madagascar. Madagascar
was not occupied until very late in human history – probably only
within the last 1,200 to 1,500 years.
The big question which has preoccupied those concerned with the
antiquity of human activity in this part of the Indian Ocean concerns
the question of whofirst colonized the island in the context of increased
precision about whenthe event might have happened. Even if we set aside
the questionable assumption that it was a single event, the whole detec-
tive cast to this search is hard to avoid. There are a limited number of
candidates who might have committed the deed, and, while the scenarios
are conflicting, all have persuasive aspects. Much is down to the imagi-
native powers of reconstruction of the researcher and the assessment of
new pieces of information as they arise. However, as in the standard
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