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

 Introduction Familiar with the Sea “The ocean,” declares Thomas Churchill at the outset of his 808 Life of Lord Viscount Nelson, “affords not only the most ready and convenient medium of intercourse between remote parts of the globe, but the means of annoying an enemy with most facility, and at the same time the securest protection.” Yet while the ocean’s importance “is now obvious to every one,” Churchill remarks, “it was long before men were sensible of its value, which even now is but beginning to be justly appreciated.”1 While Britain had been a maritime power for centuries, its command of the sea had taken on heightened significance during the war with Napoleon, in which its most salient successes were naval ones: the discouragement of various threatened French invasions, and then of course Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar. More than ever, a maritime dynamic of expansion and insularity informed the idea of British nationhood. Romantic-period writers, whether obscure like Churchill, politically suspect like the Lake poets, or celebrated (and then condemned) like Lord Byron, shared and were understood to share a renewed appreciation of the ocean as a geopolitical domain ruled by British naval heroism. In 80, Robert Southey reviewed Churchill’s Nelson biography and several others for the Quarterly Review, sketching a portrait of the admiral that he would develop into his own 83 Life of Nelson, which became a paradigmatic work of nineteenthcentury moral didacticism.2 Byron, for his part, even while excoriating Southey in his initial installment of Don Juan, allowed that Nelson stood for him too as a type of the contemporary hero. Yet as suggested by Byron’s preferment of the feckless and generic Don Juan over Nelson for the position of seafaring protagonist, period writers also appreciated the ocean as an arena where individual stories easily become subordinated to collective dramas. One such collective drama was the drama of culture. The same Thomas Churchill who penned the Nelson biography that Southey reviewed had nine years previously brought to a British readership a work that envisioned the ocean as the ultimate domain for communal human “cultivation.” This work was Johann Gottfried von  Written on the Water Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte de Menschheit, which Churchill translated, rendering as “cultivation” Herder’s signature term Kultur.3 Herder describes this work as a journey on “the wide ocean of free inquiry” (4), and his description is not simply metaphorical. In Herder’s account, ocean travel constitutes the modern event that has brought Europe face to face with what a modern critic calls his “vision of a deterministically pluralist universe” and also with (however paradoxically) the broader historical development of a unitary world culture.4 So, for Herder, “had the east of Asia possessed an earlier commerce, and a Mediterranean sea, which its present situation has denied, the whole current of cultivation [Kultur] would have been altered.” Culture “flowed westwards” because, hydrographically and historically, “eastwards it was unable to flow, or to spread” (355). This text of Herder’s was widely known: Coleridge, for instance , wrote to Southey inquiring about the Ideen at the time when Joseph Johnson was publishing Churchill’s translation of it.5 And whether or not Southey ever looked into Churchill’s Herder, such themes of maritime cultural transmission preoccupied him during the first years of the nineteenth century as he slowly composed Madoc, his epic about a Medieval Welsh expedition to America. This preoccupation helped make Southey an apt target for Byron to take on in his own seafaring epic decades later. Although in 808 Churchill thought the British appreciation of the ocean was only beginning to wax, in retrospect it may already have been on the wane, having reached its height in Trafalgar’s immediate aftermath . At first, the ocean became less of a British preoccupation because of Britain’s very success at establishing unquestioned maritime hegemony. In 8 William Wordsworth admitted as much, in a cover letter accompanying a missive sent to William Pasley praising his Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire. Excoriating a Whig grandee for counseling a defensive posture toward Napoleon, Wordsworth complained “that it is pitiable to hear Lord Grenville talking as he did in the late debate of the inability of Great Britain to take a commanding Station as a military Power, and maintaining that our efforts must be essentially, he means exclusively, naval. We have destroyed our enemies upon the Sea, and are equally...

Share