Program: Session III
Session III
Wed. 30 September
13:45–15:15
Bryggan (Göran, 2nd floor)
Chair: Otso Kortekangas
Farideh Amirfarhangi Bonab (University of Parthenope)
Amid the Water, in Search of Water
Across the vast expanse of the oceans, sailors of past centuries often faced numerous practical challenges that shaped the course of their maritime voyages. This study focuses on the representation of water in the journals of James Cook, seen as a vital yet challenging resource in eighteenth-century maritime navigation. The journals are based on Cook’s firsthand accounts from his voyages, making them original, valuable, and widely recognized sources of maritime experiences. The research question asks how water is linguistically represented in terms of scarcity, management, and human dependence in these journals as a case study. The study adopts Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), examining linguistic features such as modality, agency, and evaluative language. The findings represent water not merely as a natural element, but as a resource that structures human action, dependence, and mobility at sea; and highlight the dynamic relationship between human and water, where survival, decision-making, and movement are closely shaped by maritime conditions.
Maria Cullen (University College Dublin)
Making Sense of the Vietnamese ‘Boat People’ Exodus: An Examination of the Agency of Humans and the Sea in Maritime Refugee Journeys
According to Vinh Nguyen, water ‘has played a central role in the imagining of Vietnamese collective cultural identity’. In the late 1970s, a generation of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ fled their homeland across the South China Sea, adding a distinctly traumatic element to this association. Using oral history archives, this paper engages with Vietnamese refugees’ memories of oceanic flight – their descriptions of the sensory impact of travelling in confined spaces on rough seas, and the social impacts of maritime journeys on dynamics between passengers. The paper reflects on the intersecting agency of the sea with the agency of refugees to alter their destiny through the sea. It analyses the experiences of refugees on small boats, along with large vessels like the Skyluck, which travelled secretly to Vietnam to pick up thousands of refugees to sail to Hong Kong. While the Skyluck made strategic use of invisibility on the high seas (painting over letters on to disguise the ship’s true identity for part of the journey), refugees in small boats often fell victim to attacks by Thai pirates, representing the dangers of visibility in open waters. This paper reflects on the ocean as a site of potential freedom but also deadly risk for refugees, and what this means for the relationship between humans and the sea in the late twentieth century.
Ulrike Gehring (University of Trier)
The Legibility of the Sea. Seventeenth-Century Marine Paintings as Laboratories of Early Hydrography
In 17th century, seafarers were among the most skilled experts on the maritime environment. Their knowledge of currents and tides, maritime weather, and color-coded seabed sediments was crucial to the rise of early modern maritime powers. In different research projects, I have been comparing Dutch pilot books with illustrated logs and marine paintings. The aim was to demonstrate how empirical knowledge acquired on board was transmitted into meteorological discourse on land and disseminated through the aesthetic medium of marine painting. By around 1610, marine painters like Hendrick Vroom or Jan Porcellis were already systematically exploring the causal relationships between sky coloration, water transparency, and sea spray intensity. Many shipwrecks, depicted in the foreground of stormy scenes, appear as collateral damage wrought by elemental forces, which cannot be represented by other means.
The proposed paper wants to interpret the sea not merely symbolically or emblematically, but epistemologically. The maritime environment is more than a backdrop for naval engagements; it constitutes an early modern space of knowledge, to be investigated through the dynamics of elemental forces ‘above’ and ‘below’ the waterline.
Within this framework of knowledge transfer, the images themselves are ascribed an explanatory role that corresponds to the scientific models developed concurrently within natural philosophy. By visualizing atmospheric phenomena for which no scientific explanation or terminology existed around 1610, artists posed questions that contemporary scientists in the Netherlands were simultaneously attempting to address empirically: C. Drebbel (1608), F. Bacon (1622/48), and R. Descartes (1637). The woodcuts Descartes used to visualize his models of wind and water circulation, drawing on painted coastal scenes, demonstrate that pre-scientific discourse on the sea was already interdisciplinary by the early 17th century.
Reetta Sippola (University of Turku)
Material Agency of Environment in the Sea Charts of Cook´s Third Voyage
In this presentation, sea charts are interpreted as a visual narrative of continuous interaction between the environment, supplies, equipment, and the navigators. Early modern nautical charts did not only show the geographical formations of the shoreline; the ship´s track was also marked on paper. Vieving through the lens of material agency, my analyses suggests that in this track line it is also possible to trace the daily work onboard the wooden world and the forces of nature. Revisiting the textual and visual record of captain James Cook’s third voyage (1776–80) during their search of the North-West passage, my focus is in how environment compelled decisions on navigation, survival, resupplying and narrating.
The Arctic forces of ice, wind, currents, temperature, and light shaped the voyage drastically. How did nautical charts show these inter-acting entities and things? Jane Bennett’s concept of ‘vibrant matter’ is particularly useful for highlighting how materialities possess capacities that shape human action. Her concept refers to the capacity of nonhuman matter to act, affect, and participate in events. Nautical charts translated material things into lines, blanks, and measurements that could guide human navigation.
By re-reading Cook’s charts this way, the study aims to move beyond narratives of mastery and ‘discovery’ by focusing on a story of negotiation and entanglement. The charts reveal that the environment and geography was both a barrier and a valuable resource. They also give substance to analytically discuss how the sea charts can be used as a source that discuss the agency of environment.