Abstract
Kevin Dawson’s masterly synthesis goes beyond filling a gap in maritime history: it reconfirms and expands a discourse on maritime traditions of Africans at home and abroad, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It begins with five chapters on swimming culture, following up with seven chapters on canoe culture. The result is a dense, engaging, and meticulous display of research and analysis that affirms the agency, imagination, and centrality of aquatic culture in the African Diaspora and in the Atlantic world overall. It goes beyond case studies to provide a synthesis of continuity and change in aquatic work and play over four centuries on the African continent and in American waters.
The chapters on swimming show how male and female children at water’s edge, on both sides of the Atlantic, learned to swim as a part of growing up, yielding a natural extension into adult recreational and occupational swimming, in freedom and slavery. Dawson recounts sporting events, performance rituals, maritime war on African lakes and heroic acts in killing hippos, crocodiles and sharks. He describes the work of divers, including their mastery of techniques for staying under water for several minutes and at remarkable depths – especially for pearl diving, but also for fishers of conch, sea urchins and divers who worked on shipwrecks. Dawson confirms repeatedly the skill of swimmers and shows, visually and in text, that virtually all the swimming strokes now known were used by early modern swimmers of the African diaspora. In the more extensive section on canoes, Dawson begins with description of the materials and techniques for making of dugout canoes in Africa, then turns to mapping Africa’s inland and coastal waterways, showing the centrality of canoe transport and documenting the speed of canoes as compared with European vessels, yet also noting African deforestation that resulted from canoe construction. For the Americas, text and illustrations show the work of Amerindians in constructing and piloting dugout canoes in North and South America. Further chapters explore the expansion of African watercraft in American waterways, the importance of canoe transport in systems of slavery, religious significance of dugouts and songs of canoe-borne mariners.
This is certainly not the first book to explore maritime traditions of the African Diaspora: the book’s ample notes reveal the great quantity of relevant contemporary accounts and secondary works. In recent years, Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship (New York: Viking, 2007) describes the free and slave African seamen in the Atlantic slave trade, while Molly Warsh’s study of pearls (American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018) documents the work of Caribbean pearl divers, so that her account and Dawson’s nicely complement each other. Earlier on, Olaudah Equiano’s widely-read 1789 autobiography includes substantial detail on his life at sea, though he sailed in European-built vessels, large and small.
Dawson’s volume, in contrast, presents a comprehensive view of aquatic life that facilitates a conceptualization of the early modern Atlantic as a watery expanse connected not simply by the long-distance sailing ships commanded by Europeans, but also by canoes and swimmers who made the essential local connections. Dawson’s authorial gaze, reaching many corners of Africa and the African Diaspora, leads the reader through sensitive portrayals of social and ecological conditions along the rivers, lakes and coastlines of Africa – and again for North and South America. The reader becomes aware of what might be called the author’s textual archaeology, as he has traced leads throughout the primary and secondary literatures, gathering insights, dissecting them to retrieve their significance for various issues, and assembling them into a mosaic of topical chapters. Dawson’s view extends to the Indian Ocean through his discussion of Erik Gilbert’s studies of dhows – and to European waters through a discussion of the 1548 testimony by Jacques Francis, an African diver, in a court dispute on his work in salvaging the Mary Rose, the battleship of Henry VIII, which had gone down off of Portsmouth.
Dawson is able to correct some errors in contemporary accounts and in academic works. For instance, he shows that the ‘Rose Method’ of lashing canoes together to increase stability and capacity, attributed to invention by an eighteenth-century Virginia planter, was documented centuries earlier in both Amerindian and African traditions. Further he is able to distinguish African from Amerind watercraft, as by noting that, in Brazil, the dugout canoes of African tradition displaced the bark canoes of Amerindian tradition, or by distinguishing the square-ended Amerind dugouts from the pointed African canoes.
The author has been imaginative in facing the difficult issue of giving voice to his aquatic subjects, since most of the source material was produced by people from outside their community. Black-and-white illustrations, 27 in number, add a remarkable level of detail to the text. They convey the material culture of the boats along with the dynamics of a range of social, economic, and military situations. The chapter on ‘The Watermen’s Song’ presents lyrics and even a musical score for the reader to appreciate and investigate. Nevertheless, for much of the book, author and reader must rely on the descriptions and commentaries of white writers – commonly newcomers to the scenes they described. Dawson, in his response to this challenge, has developed two types of narratives. First, he offers localized and short-term narratives in a given region, as for canoes in Jamaican plantation life through the diary of planter Thomas Thistlewood, or a narrative of changes in the work of pearl divers in the Caribbean and the Gulf of California, or the growth in size of trading canoes linking the Gold Coast to regions to the east and west. Second, and over the long term, Dawson emphasizes both continuity and transformation. He emphasizes overall continuity in the cultures of swimming and canoes from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century but distinguishes the period 1500–1640, an era of coexistence of Amerindians and Africans, from the African-dominated period after 1650. In this periodization, Dawson emphasizes poor relations between Africans and Amerindians, even in the early era of their coexistence. I would caution, however, that stories of Caribbean eradication (160–61) may be exaggerated, in that the same wars brought many Amerindian women into heavily-male plantation society, where they could sustain Taino culture among both masters and slaves.
In his Epilogue and Acknowledgments, Dawson refers to the US in recent times, in which black people lost their earlier prominence in swimming. ‘Like the banjo (another African transmission), swimming was abandoned and posthumously deemed a "white” activity’ (256). Dawson speaks of growing up in southern California where, though one of few black people among the many surfers, he excelled. He reminded me of another of the hidden continuities in black aquatic life. I too grew up on the southern California coast: from age 11, I was on the diverse but mostly white swim team of the San Pedro YMCA. We had annual dual meets with other ‘Y’ teams, including the team from the downtown Los Angeles 28th Street YMCA, whose team members and coach were African American. My team won each of those meets but we had to prepare carefully, as we swam against strong competitors.
The author concludes with a call for a ‘sea change’ in the historiography of the Atlantic world – a turn toward social history of the seas and inland waters, especially regarding the centrality in that history of men and women of African birth and ancestry. In a chapter subtitled ‘challenging racial hierarchy from below’, Dawson comments explicitly on the undercurrents portrayed throughout the book and makes clear that his presentation, while remarkably comprehensive, is but a portion of what could be learned about maritime experience of the African Diaspora. Yet the book illustrates memorably, in aquatic context, how gruelling labour, performed with determination and skill, might provide its own satisfactions and even moments of pleasure and relaxation, in a world of otherwise inescapable hierarchy.