The Sea and Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture ed. by Steve Mentz and Martha Elena Rojas (review)

With rising sea levels, global warming, sovereignty issues around the opening of the Northwest Passage, and the probable disappearance of an entire nation, the Maldives, the field of Maritime Studies has new urgency. The 2011 conference at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, organized by Steve Mentz, that gave rise to this book is but one example of the spate of seminars, articles, print and online journals, Maritime Studies programs, Marine Science departments, and scholarly works attesting to scholars' increasing attentiveness to the importance of the oceans.

Mentz and Rojas note in their introduction that this collection brings together ten essays "that treat the ocean as invitation, not barrier" (1). True to that spirit, the collection is highly interdisciplinary in its discussions of seaweed, scientific writing, Arctic exploration narratives, underwater paintings, the tools of navigation, and a "life-sized sex doll" dredged up from the bottom of the sea (166). The essays cross genres, periods, and nationalities. Mentz and Rojas, both literary scholars, keep their discipline's claims modest: "Literary studies cannot claim any special privilege in knowing the 'real' ocean, and it does not assert any 'essential truths.' Instead, it offers a variable record of how human beings have imagined themselves interacting with our watery planet" (4).

The ten essays are divided into three categories: "wet globalization," "salt aesthetics," and "blue ecocriticism," terms Mentz introduced in his monograph, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (2015). "Wet globalization" emphasizes the role of the ocean in global trade, what Mentz and Rojas call "a wetter, saltier globalism [that] requires a sharper focus on the disorientation of the sea" (6). This section begins with Siobhan Carroll's investigation of William Falconer's 1762 poem The Shipwreck, "his critically acclaimed hybridization of the georgic with the nautical manual" (15). I teach this poem every semester and have always been intrigued by Falconer's juxtaposition of poetic diction and nautical terminology. Carroll writes that the "overt mission" of the 1762 version was indeed "a linguistic one" (15): to educate the British in the language of the sea. She goes on to examine the political resonance of Falconer's 1764 and 1769 revisions, namely how the ocean's capacity to challenge sovereign power also challenged British imperialism.

The collection's second essay, by historian of science Helen Rozwadowski, takes up the writing of voyagers: naturalists, whalemen, yachtsmen, passengers, officers' wives, and especially scientists. She explains that the term "scientist" was coined in 1833 by British physicist William Whewell, who "spent his career articulating what it was to do science and who could practice science—and he did so especially through his studies of tides" (33). Thus the term science was from its inception associated with the maritime world and its writing. She notes that ocean scientists reported their work not only in research journals but also through popular voyage narratives. She gives the example of Lt. Samuel P. Lee, who commanded the USS Dolphin during the first transatlantic deep-sea sounding survey: one-third of his 300-page report is a narrative of the voyage.

Hester Blum has long been interested in the Arctic, as evident in her keynote, "Melville in the Arctic," delivered at the Eleventh International Melville Conference in London and printed in Leviathan 20.1. In her essay for this volume, she concentrates on a curious figure, Charles Francis Hall, who went to the Arctic to search for relics of the lost John Franklin Expedition. Hall lived with the Inuit for more than seven years, "an extraordinary act for a white, Western explorer in the mid-nineteenth century" (47). Hall's story is so lively and engaging that the reader is immediately drawn in, but Blum writes with the larger purpose of showing "how knowledge circulated in the oceanic spaces of the polar regions, whether through autodidactic, empirical, professional, or intercultural channels" (49). Blum examines the narratives Hall produced...