Program: Session III
Session III
Ons. 30 september
13.45–15.15
Bryggan (Göran, 2:a våningen)
Ordförande: 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
Seventeenth-century seafarers were among the foremost experts on the maritime environment. Their knowledge of currents, tides, weather, and seabed sediments was crucial to the rise of early modern maritime powers. Bringing Dutch pilot books, paintings, and natural-philosophical treatises into dialogue, this lecture argues that conceptions of the relationship between water and atmosphere underwent a fundamental shift from the 1630s onwards.
Marine painters such as Jan Porcellis (1582–1632) or Claes Claesz. Wou (1592-1665) did not record what they saw: they interpreted signs in the sky, related winds to currents, and made the colour of the water respond to that of the clouds. Rather than an iconographic-symbolic interpretation, this lecture proposes an epistemological reading in which many shipwrecks depicted on canvas appear not as the primary subject, but as collateral effects of severe weather that could not otherwise be represented. Visual records served to document maritime phenomena at a time when meteorology and hydrology still lacked standardised methods of measurement and a unified terminology. The seventeenth-century discourse on the sea was therefore highly interdisciplinary, shaped in particular by seafarers, artists, and natural philosophers.
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.