Abstract
Maritime historians are well aware of the fact that a clear minority – approximately 30 per cent, in fact – of the surface of the planet named Earth is actually covered by earth and other forms of land. They also know that a disproportionate amount of human maritime activity occurs on the islands, archipelagos and continents of the terrestrial 30 per cent that punctuates the broad sweep of the seas and oceans. This imbalance is reflected in the contents of the present volume of the International Journal of Maritime History, which offers a glimpse of the variety and mass of land-based activities that relate to business undertaken at sea.
Endang Susilowati and her colleagues examine the role of the sea in shaping the coastal civilisations of southeast Asia in the pre-modern era, which, in turn, had a defining influence on the diplomatic links that moderated interactions between political centres on the coastal fringes and archipelagos of this essentially maritime region. Although there were rivalries between centres, colonial relationships did not emerge in southeast Asia until the arrival of Europeans from the late fifteenth century onwards. Some of these colonists, as Germán Santana Pérez explains, sailed from Spain round the Cape of Good Hope in contravention of the treaties of Alcaçobas-Toledo (1479) and Tordesillas (1494). Many of these prospective invaders landed in southern Africa, carrying with them plants and other invasive species from the Iberian Peninsula to a new home in the Cape. Juan Manuel Santana Pérez takes a more westerly course in his survey of the place of the mid-Atlantic islands of Madeira, the Canaries, Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe, and the Guinea Islands of Bioko, Corisco and Annobon, in the maritime links forged between Europe, Africa and the Americas from the sixteenth century. He argues that these islands served as ‘maritime doors’ through which goods, people, culture and ideas flowed, rather than ‘bridges’ over which they travelled, as the traditional literature contends. The late Sachin Pendse’s discussion of the Dutch factory at Vengurla, on the Konkan coast of India, shows how Europeans endeavoured to protect their interests, and project their power, once they made landfall on the fringes of the Indian Ocean.
Three further contributions to this volume of IJMH propel us in a northerly direction and forwards in time through the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here, the focus is on seafarers on land. The expertise of this occupational group is evident in Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz’s analysis of the testimonies provided to various legal tribunals in the Baltic states by crew members of seven Dutch ‘Salt Ships’ seized by a Swedish man-of-war during the Northern Seven Years War in the 1560s. Recognition of expertise did not translate into social status, however, as the judges and officials of the courts clearly considered seafarers to be socially inferior to their officers (and themselves). Disparities between occupational expertise, levels of remuneration and social esteem pervaded the practice of impressing labour into the service of the British Royal Navy. This issue was controversial at the time, and is contested now, as J. Ross Dancy’s historiographical essay, stimulated by an article published by Nicholas Rogers in volume 30, no.1, of the IJMH (February 2018), makes abundantly clear. Impressment was challenged on various ethical and political grounds into the nineteenth century, as Mirelle Luecke explains in her insightful case study of the assertive response of seafarers to the well-publicised, nationalistic perception that they were key American citizens in the ‘citizenship discourse’ that spread through early republican New York City.
Assertiveness, New York City and maritime labour will strike a chord with the maritime historians who knew Skip Fischer, this journal’s co-founding editor. Some of the many beneficiaries of his support and wisdom have contributed to the appreciation of Skip’s life and scholarly work that follows this Editorial. One further contribution, which almost missed the tide for this issue of IJMH, has just arrived in the editorial office from British Columbia; it reads as follows:
Skip Fischer
I knew Skip Fischer from the early days of the Maritime History Group at Memorial University. I guess you could say that I was a charter member of the ‘off-shore’ section of the Canadian Nautical Research Society in Ottawa, where a congruence of maritime-minded scholars had inadvertently found themselves. Like a true historian I am vague as to exact dates, and as an ex-archivist I cannot now find any files that prompt my memory. I suspect that the initiative to include me in the learned group came from Alec Douglas, at the then Directorate of History at National Defence. When I moved to Montreal in 1981 and started writing historical items on ‘Maritime St Lawrence Canada’ for a local trade magazine I added a new dimension to the Group’s scope.
Skip had one distinction that set him apart from all other historians, maritime or otherwise, with whom I became involved over the years. My daughter, at the highly-impressionable age of about six, discovered that she and Skip shared a love for the same musical groups of the time. As a result she was in awe, and asked my wife Margaret just how come Dad knew such a cool dude. A cool dude he was, and will always be so remembered in our family.
They were heady times back then, and I have to thank Skip, the Maritime History Group, and members of the Ottawa subset for having given me the opportunity to keep up my work in academic history.
Kenneth S. Mackenzie