In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

230 eight Skerries, Haffs, and Icefloes: Small Seas and Maritime Histories David Kirby Writing in the North American Review at the end of the nineteenth century , Charles Minor Blackford triumphantly declared that “the progress of thalassography has been so rapid and so great during this century, that it can be sketched only in bare outline.” What Blackford and his contemporaries understood by “thalassography” was, essentially, the exploration of the world’s oceans.1 The “new” thalassography (or thalassology ) proclaimed a little over a hundred years later has a rather different meaning. An outgrowth of historical geography and area studies, it proposes a different kind of approach to world history by analysis of the whole by way of its components, and how they fit together.2 Marine life is replaced by human life, and the methodology owes more to cultural anthropology than to the natural sciences. And whereas the locus operandi of pioneering oceanographic expeditions such as that of the Challenger in the 1870s was emphatically the big oceans of the world, the new thalassographers show a distinct preference for inland seas, and particularly, the interface between land and sea. It is with that interface—the littoral—that this chapter is mainly concerned . After a few general remarks, I propose to look at one of the smaller “inland seas”—the Baltic, paying particular attention to a time of technological, political, and socioeconomic transition—the hundred years from around 1850. I have chosen this period partly to challenge some of the underlying assumptions of the Braudelian approach, but also to caution against relying too heavily on an excessively water-linked view of global history: states and their governments, big business, and the Skerries, Haffs, and Icefloes 231 vast majority of the world’s population that do not live by the shore but visit it and have views about it, cannot be left out of the equation. I shall conclude with a few remarks on the whole idea of “inland seas,” and on an alternative approach to the history of the seas. It is perhaps stating the obvious that perceptions of the sea differ widely. There is for instance a very sharp difference between those who go down to the sea in ships and those who do not. Until recent times, seafaring communities marked themselves out not only by their dress, customs, and language, but also by the very distinctive rhythms of their everyday life. Their way of life gave them the ability to read their environment in ways which non-mariners were unable to understand. For one experienced North Sea fisherman, writing his memoirs at the end of the nineteenth century, “there’s nothin’ in the world can be easier, when you’ve once learned your lesson, than to pick yer way about in the North Sea just with nothin’ else to guide yer than the depth o’ water an’ the natur’ o’ the bottom.”3 Sailors not only need to have an intimate knowledge with the sea bed, they have to be able to read the margins between land and water. Before modern sonar technology, recognition of landmarks was a vital aspect of navigation. Church towers, prominent rocks, and headlands, and even tall trees, all formed part of an intimate knowledge of the contours of the coastline. In the Baltic, as in the far larger southern European sea, “an essentially visually ordering of geography was one of the earliest ways by which an individual might understand the relationship between his own sphere of movements and far broader horizons.”4 It is this knowledge, and the sustenance the sea can provide, that explains why people have chosen to live in otherwise remote and inhospitable places, like the fisherman in northern Norway who sat in the kitchen with his back to the land, looking out to sea to the horizon of the open sea. Since ancient times he has seen the life of the sea, not a flat, grey surface with waves, but underneath, a landscape with shallows and depths, with clay, sand, stone and vegetation, with currents and eddies and with creatures of the sea. He fished for them and especially the cod, for these riches were the reason why people chose to live on this jagged edge, bordering on the Arctic Ocean.5 There is another sharp contrast between our twenty-first-century view of the sea and that of our pre-eighteenth-century ancestors, for whom the sea was in many senses more immediate, and more frightening. It was [3...

Share