Below Decks 3 - Nautical Collections in the 19th Century

NEMO

Hi everyone. This is Nemo. Just a heads-up that due to technical difficulties, some of the audio in this episode isn’t as polished as you’re used to from us. The editors have worked their magic to bring you this episode, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed recording it.

SIVA

Rusty Quill Presents: Below Decks, a Trice Forgotten deep dive.

Episode Three: Nautical Collections in the 19th Century.

NEMO

Hello everyone, welcome to the third episode of Below Decks, where we dig into some of the research questions, stories, and generally tangential interesting things that went into the making of Trice Forgotten. I’m Nemo Martin, my pronouns are they/them, and I am the creator and lead writer of the series.

Today we’re going to be talking about nautical collections in the 19th century, and I’m thrilled to be joined by Sarah Pickman. If you’d like to, introduce yourself with your pronouns, tell us a little bit about what you do, and your relationship with the show!

SARAH

Hi, I’m Sarah Pickman, my pronouns are her/hers. I just finished a PhD in History of Science and Medicine just a couple of months ago, at Yale University. The topic of material culture and expeditions in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Basically, I love geeking out about explorers and the stuff that they brought with them, and also the stuff that they collected. I mostly focus on British and American explorers.

The way I always explain my research is, I say that I unpack packing. So I’m really interested in what things people packed for voyages during this time period, and the stuff they brought back with them. And I’m also a huge fan of audio dramas, and I’m just very excited to be able to geek out with Nemo today about collecting in the 19th century, natural history, cartography, um… some of the things that have shown up below decks on this series so far.

NEMO

Oh, it’s so cool!

[GIGGLING FROM BOTH]

I feel like Below Decks, eventually, every episode gets to – “Oh my God, I’m so glad I’m here,” and so I’m already at the stage of being like, “Oh my God, I’m so glad I’m here.” Because my interest in writing this show was to do with all of the “men on ships” genre of TV shows, and I love Black Sails, I love The Terror, I love all of these kind of shows.

And one thing that I did want to focus on was what was being packed – like, trade routes and who can our characters specifically talk to. I mean, especially a lot of the “men in boats” drama shows – they have ports that they can go to, because they are cis white men, (laughs) and they are part of Empire and stuff like that.

SARAH

Right. Yeah, that just reminded me of a tweet that I saw recently, where someone has – forget who originally tweeted it, but they said, “Moby Dick is a book that asks the tough questions, like, ‘What if a bunch of weird men were on a boat together?’”

NEMO

(laughing) Yes! Yes.

SARAH

I feel like there is this genre, and I feel like it’s also got some cultural traction in a lot of ways in the last few years. You mentioned The Terror and Black Sails, and now there’s Our Flag Means Death.

NEMO

Yeah.

SARAH

And all these shows, I think there’s always been a real interest in – among a certain group of people – in these narratives of these men on boats, but as you said, they’re mostly cis white men. They’re mostly the heroic stories of explorers and navigators and people in the Royal Navy, people in the American Navy, and there’s always been a sort of – from a certain group of readers and also a certain group of historians – there’s always been an interest in these kinds of narratives.

And – I mean, I will out myself, I got into this topic partly because I loved reading those kinds of narratives. I read Alfred Lansing’s book about Shackleton when I was doing my Master’s, and just got completely obsessed. That wasn’t the whole reason but part of the reason that I picked my dissertation topic, ultimately, is that I enjoy reading this stuff so much. Partly because it’s meant to be – well, we can talk about this later, but all these narratives were created with audiences in mind, even in the 19th century. These explorers, famous ships’ captains, were writing memoirs, taking notes, with a public audience in mind.

NEMO

Mmm.

SARAH

So they’re meant to be consumed, they’re meant to be colorful adventure literature. But that’s obviously not the whole story.

And so, one of the things that some of these shows have done recently and that also a lot of historians are doing recently, is trying to pick about: who are these other people who are, as you said in the first episode of Below Decks, who are behind all of these white men? Who are the – you talk a little bit about the “boys” quote-unquote, who are sort of standing off to the side. They’re maybe not completely out of the frame, but they’re not the people who traditionally have been examined by historians or been written about as the main people who are standing in the frame, who are the most visible.

But there’s a lot of work now to make those individuals and their stories more visible, and to say, hey, it wasn’t just 30 cis white men, all living together, singing songs and pounding their fists on the tables.

[NEMO SNORTS]

They drank, of course, that was going on, but there are all these people like Siva, in the show, who are making those kinds of voyages possible.

NEMO

Wow. So many questions, because I have my list of, quote-unquote, “boys” that I like to talk about. Have you come across any people like that in your research that you’re particularly interested in?

SARAH

I started out my research looking mostly at polar explorers. And polar explorers are still the folks that I tend to focus on quite a lot, because I find their stories so fascinating, in a kind of gruesome way. There are a number of Inuit individuals, who not only become guides for Arctic expeditions in the 19th and early 20th century, but in some cases make a career out of guiding and work for repeated expeditions. I’m thinking most specifically of a man named Hans Hendrik, who lived in Greenland in the late 19th century – worked for a number of American and British explorers as a guide and, we might call a knowledge broker, somebody who facilitated communication between different kinds of communities… had a lot of information about weather conditions, but also how to hunt, how to provision these ships so that men wouldn’t die, they wouldn’t get scurvy. And made a career out of working on these kinds of voyages in the same way that these explorers were.

NEMO

Mmm.

SARAH

But he’s not often mentioned in the same breath as being an explorer, because he wasn’t the person necessarily designing the voyage or leading a voyage or coming up with the idea of a particular expedition back in New York or London. But certainly went to many places that Inuit communities had never been in the Arctic, went to many places in the high Arctic and the high latitudes, worked on repeated expeditions. So had the contours of an exploratory career, but until recently hasn’t really been discussed with the word “explorer” attached to his name. So. Hans Hendrik is somebody who I find to be absolutely fascinating.

And there’s so many. You mentioned Ali Wallace – or, (laughing) Ali Wallace is the name that Alfred Russell Wallace gave him.

NEMO

(laughing) Yeah.

SARAH

In the first episode of Below Decks.

NEMO

Yeah. It’s interesting – I have just been reading a book called Waves Across the South by Sujit Sivasundaram, actually, and it’s really interesting, this idea of the word “explorer.”

SARAH

Mmm.

NEMO

I think that is something that I’ve been wanting to unpack and to think about, and the idea that through the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, who is being allowed to be called an “explorer”?

Because often I think whenever we think of explorers, we think of the historical dramas from white perspectives, talking about the quote-unquote “natives” and “savages” and the people in the “global south” in a very, like, “Oh, you know, we went there and found these people.” But I’ve been reading things that are being researched now, where people from the other side of the world were coming to London, or meeting white people for the first time, meeting European cultures, and describing them in (laughing) very funny ways! In the same kind of language that white people were using for them. And being like, “Wow, these European women, they bind themselves so tightly in their culture’s practice! That’s so strange and weird!”

And the “explorer” as a figure that can be seen as a natural history curiosity in itself. Like, we often think of the naturalist as the white man with the ability to write down what he sees. But how can we turn that on its head?

SARAH

Right, yeah. I was thinking of this term that David Chang – he’s this historian who’s written about Native Hawaiian, in his case, Native Hawaiian geographies and Kanaka Maoli navigators and travelers. And the term that he uses is “turning the telescope around.” So people who for so long were the objects of the gaze through a European telescope that was pointing at them… And then what happens when you start to look at people who, obviously, had their own opinions about these people who were peering at them and furiously scribbling down notes? And what happens if we try to figure out what their perspective was in the 18th or 19th centuries? What were they saying at the time, about these people who were coming to their lands, who were training their gazes on them, who in some cases were employing them as guides on ships, but in all cases were making their own sets of knowledge and trying to fit these people into their own hierarchy? So what if we flip that on its head?

So I like that that image of turning the telescope around, because it’s very, very visceral.

NEMO

Yeah, it’s such a good visual tool. Because just how we have been conditioned, I guess – there was a quote which, because I can’t find out we’ll put it in the show notes, but basically about Hollywood being a teaching tool. And through repetition, we see stereotypes over and over again, and even those of us who – I mean, I see myself as being fairly liberal and educated and “read” in a certain way. Even I fall into the trap of believing stereotypes. Because that is what they are used for – they are used to be believable and easy to accept.

Yeah, it has been both The Terror and Our Flag Means Death, I mean – just a caveat, we had finished writing this show before Our Flag Means Death came out and I was like, “Oh, no, people are going to think that I stole all of my plots from it!” But with Our Flag Means Death and The Terror, I thought that they were both quite interesting that they did slightly turn the telescope around, and we got perspectives of Black and Indigenous peoples. And the joke was not on them. The joke was always on the white explorer figure. And I was like, “Oh, I’m appreciating that.” Even in The Terror, which is very white and male, like, you know, you have to watch it two or three times to start differentiating between – (mock-panicked) “‘White man with brown hair,’ oh God, which one are you?!”

[SARAH AND NEMO CACKLE]

But there is power in the Indigenous people there, and that felt quite new and interesting to me.

SARAH

Yeah. One of the things that I think is also really interesting is that people often forget – again, because we have certain images that have come down to us from Hollywood and from popular books. Most people, even if they really love historical narratives, don’t, you know, they’re not reading scholarly work or they’re not doing art stuff in the archives every day. Because that’s not their job!

NEMO

Yeah.

SARAH

You don’t often see portrayals of sea crews especially in the 19th and early 20th century and realize that they were incredibly diverse in most cases and also even earlier, in the Golden Age of Piracy, Caribbean Piracy or Indian Ocean Piracy. A lot of these crews were – pirate crews especially, because they picked up people from all over, and they were often picking up people who were running from something – you had all walks of life, people from all geographic regions, people of different religious backgrounds. Or whalers in the United States, in the 19th century: a lot of whaling crews had Indigenous folks on them. Indigenous folks from New England had their own whaling traditions, so they got hired onto these ships fairly early on. There were a lot of folks of African descent, including runaway slaves.

There’s actually an exhibit – I don’t know if it’s still up, or maybe it just closed, at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts about the maritime dimensions of the Underground Railroad?

NEMO

Mmm.

SARAH

And how there was this whole maritime component of the system that helped slaves escape from the American South, and part of the reason that you ended up having a lot of Black individuals on these whalers and other ships is that you could just jump onto a ship in a New England port and get out to sea and be hundreds of miles away from your pursuers. Which again is – it makes sense when you think about it, and when you start to read into these log books or some of these deeper accounts of these ships, you find that the crew’s usually all men, but still really diverse. But you never really see that portrayed in a lot of Hollywood films or, until recently, a lot of television shows.

NEMO

Yeah. This idea that whaling crews, especially, was where I first was learning about, oh, it’s not just white men on ships going around! These crews are built of people who needed to have coin, and so use their labor to do that.

And – I don’t know. The complexities of all of these things as well were things that I wanted to think about in this podcast, where it’s like: Okay, now we have the idea that it’s not just white people on these ships. So how did race operate within these ships? Outside of the white gaze that we have written down, what relationships were being formed? What skills were being intermingled?

SARAH

It’s an open question, right?

NEMO

Mm. Mm.

To turn away from this slightly – so you said that you liked the history of packing, basically.

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

And I find that really fascinating. Are there items that you think in nautical fiction that aren’t seen, or is there anything that you’re like, “Oh, they should be packing these things, but they haven’t!” Or…

SARAH

Oh, that’s a great question, in terms of thinking about the accuracy of some of these fictional portrayals. This is maybe kind of a small point, but if you watch a lot of the swashbuckling movies, especially, everyone’s really clean for having been on a ship for – (laughing) for a year, two years, three years. Not just because of…

This kind of blew my mind when I first thought about it, but a lot of common sailors – maybe less so in the 19th century, but especially in the 18th century and earlier – people who came from very poor backgrounds, some cases were pressed into or coerced into military service, let’s say in the Royal Navy. Would have only had… one, maybe two sets of clothes?

NEMO

(laughing) Mmm.

SARAH

And even on whalers, this became a huge problem, because if you were a rookie, let’s say, and this was your first time in the era when people actually processed whales on ships. If you were trying to do that process and you were covered in whale grease and guts and blood, you actually did not want to change your clothes during that process. You didn’t want to swap out your other set of clothes, because then you would have two bloody sets of clothes.

NEMO

(snorts) Right.

SARAH

And what were you going to sleep in? So going back to the idea of the glamorous Hollywood portrayal, is so – like, clean and adventurous. But actually, so much of shipboard life before the 20th century was so… gross?

[NEMO LAUGHS]

In a way that I think is hard for us in the 21st century, who are used to showers, to really wrap our heads around. But people did that! Because they needed – as you said, they needed to make a living, they needed to survive somehow. They needed to eat.

NEMO

It’s interesting. So Raf and I – the director and I – we actually just went to… there’s a ship called the Goth-bert? Goth-berg? [Götheborg.] I’m not sure how to pronounce it. It’s a Swedish ship, I think, and it’s a tall ship, a three-mast-tall ship, which was built in the 18th century. And so it’s just docked in London. And it’s really interesting because it’s still a working ship, they still sail it around the world. So it’s not like some of the replica ships that have been built and then stay in port, in that there were still crew in the riggings, they were provisioning in London and so they were retarring their ropes, they were retarring the ship.

And it was just so fascinating, because obviously, intellectually, it’s easy to read, “oh, tar or pitch would smell like carbon, would smell like burning, would smell like smoke.” But stepping onto that ship and smelling it – and actually afterwards we went to a restaurant and I was like, “Oh, mate, we were only on that ship for an hour and my clothes smell of burning wood.” And we didn’t climb any riggings, we only walked up and down the deck for an hour. But my hands were covered in tar and it was under my fingernails, Raf got it on her face, and it was such a like – (laughing) “Oh, these ships are dirty!”

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

They smell, they’re dirty, they’re very physical places. And unfortunately we’d already written Season 1 but I think, like, in the future of this show, that all-consuming presence of a ship is so… is something you just can’t think about when you don’t know what the reality is.

SARAH

Yeah, yeah. I was thinking about the… what you said, “What is the item that these crews seem not to have?” I was thinking about pitch, because it comes up, and so I’ve done some research on the history of waterproof garments?

NEMO

Mmm.

SARAH

And there is a sort of older tradition – and this maybe gets back to a bigger discussion about how do you recover some of the sources, how do you recover some of these voices that you know are there but maybe don’t survive in textual references – is that there seems to have been an earlier tradition of sailors improvising waterproofing with pitch, because it’s impermeable. As you said, it’s really… (laughing) it’s smelly and it gets everywhere, but if you have pitch on your clothes, even though it’s very heavy and smells bad, it provides some kind of waterproof layer. So, if you’re out day after day on a ship, often in very rough weather, that’s something that you want, because if you were walking around all the time wearing damp clothes that can cause all kinds of health issues as well.

NEMO

Yeah.

SARAH

And so that’s a very early, but it’s a sort of – I don’t like to use the term “folk tradition,” but like a… people say “vernacular” as a fancy academic term. Vernacular…

NEMO

(laughing) Right.

SARAH

…waterproofing tradition, before you have Mackintosh, which is made out of rubber, and then of course, before you have nylon and Gore-Tex and oil cloth and things that come later, that are mass-manufactured.

NEMO

So easy to take it for granted! Soap and waterproof clothing. Because yeah, it would be so – I mean as you said, health issues. Also just being soggy all the time…

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

(laughing) …just make you so upset, like I know… (snorts) Oh my God, this is such a “wow, first world problem,” but going to the theme park, going on a water ride, and then spending the rest of your day just annoyed because your jeans are stuck to your legs.

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

But that and doing hard physical labour.

SARAH

Yeah, yeah, and no, imagine it’s sea water but it’s in your socks and you only have one pair of shoes, technically…

NEMO

Yeah.

SARAH

…your skin is slowly peeling off inside your boots.

NEMO

Oh God. Yeah, it’s like, because it will be abrasive, right –

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

– because of that saltiness… Ugh. Ugh.

I mean, yeah, the ship, the Götheborg, that we went on – they do offer – you can pay to do small legs of the trip and I was considering it and then being like, “I will be so miserable. I” – (laughs) “I could not do that.”

SARAH

I think there was this real shift, and I hadn’t really thought about it until I read a book called Fathoming the Ocean by Helen Rozwadowski. And it’s mostly about the development of oceanography as a science, but it’s also about how people, especially – she focuses on the United States – people came to see the ocean in a different way in the 19th and sort of more “modern” period than they had before.

Waterfronts used to be really often very dirty and polluted places – they were places of heavy occupation, right: they were places where there were ports, there were things being loaded and unloaded, there were all the industries associated with outfitting ships. So you’d have provision and contractors, but also all the folks making sales, selling tar and pitch, making rope, ship chandlers… all the related industry that’s near a port. And in many cases there were also other industrial sites, things near waterways, that were dumping all of their waste into the ocean.

So it used to be that these waterfronts were very busy, congested, often dirty places that you, say, wouldn’t want if you were a wealthy person. You wouldn’t want a mansion right on the beach, because the beach is probably where all of the actual industrial activity was taking place, or pre-industry activity. And that’s been a real shift that happened for a number of different reasons, but – to having beaches be a place that you want to hang out…

NEMO

Yeah.

SARAH

…or that you want to go on vacation and then being, you know, thinking about beaches as pristine places where you can put your towel out and lay in the sun, as opposed to a place where there would be real signs of occupational activity.

NEMO

I was having this very similar realisation in that the Götheborg is currently docked in Canary Wharf, which is like the business centre, and it used to be the docks – it’s the docklands. So, all of those areas that there’s a bit of the Thames which kind of goes, like, (laughs) squiggly?

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

It’s like – and all of those places had docks in it, because that – you know, the trading port. That’s where London was, the commercial capital. And if you are on this tall ship now, and I was looking around, and all around you are sparkling, beautiful buildings and residential buildings for rich people. And so everything is metal, everything is glass, the water… I mean, it’s the Thames so it’s not exactly crystal clear –

[THEY BOTH LAUGH]

But it was clean, it wasn’t – it didn’t smell of sewer water. And we were walking down the docklands and just being like, it’s unrecognisable. But also the irony of the fact that Canary Wharf was able to become this huge commercial capital because of the money that was brought in through the docklands…

SARAH

Right.

NEMO

…and slavery and colonisation and all those things that operated out of Canary Wharf or these docklands. It’s – yeah, it was just so, like, (dawning horror) “Oh God…” (laughs) “The money was here, and then it was here, and oh, God!” Yeah.

SARAH

Yeah, I was thinking about that, actually, with some of the things that show up on the show. So I was listening to the first two episodes and reading the scripts for some of the later ones, and all the different objects that show up – like the ray-skin gloves – and thinking about all these things, that are traded in and out, that create wealth for a certain group of people…

NEMO

Yeah.

SARAH

And also, that have become so much a part of how we think about the history of Europe, or the history of the United States. We think about the ways in which goods like cotton and tea, and the more exotic things like ray skin and feathers, are so much a part of how we visualise the European or the settler past. But all those things came from somewhere else.

NEMO

(laughs) Yeah, I really like bubble tea… (laughs) and you know, the history of bubble tea being like – England goes and takes tea from China, makes plantations in South Asia, then brings tea to the UK, adds milk and sugar to it. Then places like Taiwan and Hong Kong go, “Hmm, milk and sugar in tea! Sure, let’s also add tapioca.” And then if you go around Chinatown now, in London, it’s like maybe 75% bubble tea shops? And it’s like, “Wow, this is so…” (laughs)

Again, that thing we were talking in the first episode about “authenticity.” Like, what is authentic bubble tea? You wouldn’t have that without colonisation, but also trade, building on top of each other and bringing ideas and then taking ideas and then adding to ideas. And now we have, quote-unquote, “authentic Taiwanese” or “authentic Hong Kong” bubble tea.

SARAH

Right, yeah, no, that’s… yeah, this question of authenticity is so thorny. Because it’s like, what even is authentic anymore?

So, thinking about the ways that people feed each other, but as part of that thinking about things like tea and chocolate and coffee, that become de rigueur on packing lists, especially by the late 19th century. Every ship is bringing these things. And they’re these luxuries but also seen very much as essentials – people really start to rely on the caffeine and the sugar in order to do all this work.

But again, these are all raw ingredients that were not native to Europe, and in fact would have represented the end product of a lot of processes of… all these chains of colonialism and slavery, in most cases, in terms of who was actually harvesting the raw ingredients. A lot of times it was enslaved people. These small food items in fact are the end of a very, very long chain or very, very long network, but they were being brought on these ships that are then also going out and going on these further voyages of conquest. Or “discovery,” quote-unquote.

NEMO

Yeah. One thing that was fairly interesting, again in Waves Across the South, I think we also underestimate in the modern era of being able to travel to places on one voyage, like…

SARAH

Yeah!

NEMO

…ports are so necessary. And ports that are friendly to you are very necessary. And during this period, even white Europeans – especially white Europeans – they were fighting each other all the time. The English, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, they were all making allyships of each other, trying to make sure that they were allying with one so that the third one wouldn’t be too strong, and be completely defeating each other and having wars.

And by the time some vessels had sailed out from Europe to another port, that port would report that they were no longer friendly, because a war had already started in Europe again! And so they were left basically provision-less, with soldiers and sailors who had nothing left to eat, and so would just… desire giving in – (laughs)

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

– because where else do you go?

SARAH

Yeah, yeah. Another book that I really love, called How to Hide an Empire, which is about the history of the US as an imperial power. Which in the US we’re not often taught, in grade school or in Hollywood, that the US was an imperial power. Part of the book is about, how did the US acquire all these overseas territories that it has now in the Pacific – the Pacific especially, but also thinking about some of the other islands that the US has taken over. And in many cases these really small islands would have been coaling stations, and Hawai’i kind of fits that bill as well, as a place to stop over and refuel your ship. But also provisioning and watering stations. And also, some of these islands were conquered because they were natural sources of nitrate, which is an agricultural fertiliser which comes from bird poop, so… The Gross 19th Century.

NEMO

Yeah, so I was talking to this writer called Caro Black Tam. And they were talking about their family’s history as Chinese diaspora in Peru, and they called them “infernos flutuantes,” floating hells, about Chinese diaspora workers in Peru, who would be shovelling bird poo for the nitrates. And that – Chinese people, because there was loads of poverty and land, would be taken on ships through Liverpool to Peru in order to shovel bird shit for nitrates in order to make good fertiliser for crops in other places.

Like, it…

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

It’s not just picking cotton, that we were making people do.

SARAH

Right.

NEMO

There were all of these industries that we were creating in different countries.

SARAH

Yeah, yeah. And the ways in which there are all these chains that rely on other industries, and I think this is – this is a thing about having an empire, it is that you have industries that need different components that you can draw from other places, you can set up in other places, and make them interdependent.

I think about this sometimes, with reading about British explorers, or even American explorers. Because the American, there’s a close relationship between a lot of the Anglophone explorers and they were reading each other’s media, and a lot of people who were members of, say, the American Geographical Society would have social ties to the Royal Geographical Society, and they were very much in touch. They’d take advantage of each other’s networks and connections.

And a lot of these explorers would, even if they were going into a place that was quote-unquote “unknown,” they were relying on a lot of different colonial stopovers to get there. So folks who were going into central Africa were reliant on networks of trading ports, places where you could outfit yourself with supplies. In some cases, if you needed permission of particular colonial officials in order to enter certain regions, there was all this framework that colonialism provided for a lot of these folks, especially in the kind of… as you get towards the late 19th century, that before they could go do the “discovering,” quote-unquote, they actually were reliant on a lot of these structures or frameworks or – infrastructures, that was already in place because of empires. And even in terms of fundraising, a lot of the Antarctic explorers going from Britain made stopovers in places like South Africa or Australia, Tasmania…

NEMO

Yeah.

SARAH

That were settler colonies to do extra rounds of fundraising and to give lectures about upcoming expeditions. Because you know that there’s an audience there of settler colonists who feel a kind of emotional connection back to Britain and are going to be a willing audience and, hopefully, will open their purse to fund your expedition.

So, thinking about – yeah, it’s like before you can jump off into the unknown, you need all this sometimes literal stuff, but also figurative stuff that you get from being part of an empire. And having the right, you know, the skin colour or the background that is the people in the empire who are in power.

NEMO

Yeah, the – South Africa is definitely one where I’ve… ‘cause again, I feel like we’re not really taught about the history of South Africa in the UK, I’m not sure whether you are in the US, but…

SARAH

No, we’re definitely not.

[THEY BOTH LAUGH]

NEMO

Yeah, and… but it’s not – again, not just white versus black, but class comes in very heavily there. Within Dutch people there were poor Dutch workers who were trying to start rebellions against the VOC, the Dutch imperial kind of group. And the way that they were going about that was being like, “We should be classed with white people, because we are better than the black indigenous people and tribes –”

SARAH

Right, yeah.

NEMO

And the Dutch VOC were bringing imprisoned Chinese workers from Batavia because they were saying, “Actually, these Chinese indentured servants work better than the poor Dutch people because they’re getting too uppity.”

And so it’s like, yeah, all of these communities of people trying to find a hierarchy between themselves. And it not just being like, “white versus people of colour,” it also happened with Japanese imperialism. I know that Okinawa is a place that both Japan and the USA in particular have fought over quite a lot for sugar and military space, and is one of these islands that is now…

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

…just a commercial tourist place!

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

But was like, that exists mostly as a place to provision other countries, and it’s still happening. “Islands as items,” I think, is an interesting way of seeing this, maybe. I think we tend to forget that obviously colonisation happened on a big scale in big places and took whole countries, whole peoples, but these small islands or relatively small islands are still acting as colonial outposts, essentially…

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

…in order to exchange items for cheap rates! (laughs)

SARAH

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely yeah. The small… I was just thinking about, you know, in that Arctic and Antarctic context. The Falklands –

NEMO

Mm, yeah.

SARAH

And Denmark and Canada fighting over Hans Island off the coast of Greenland, which is named after Hans Hendrik –

NEMO

Mm.

SARAH

The Inuit guide who I mentioned at the beginning. But I was thinking, going back to South Africa, maybe this is a bit of a tangent, but… thinking about collections. One of my favourite – have you ever seen the painting The Inside of my Wagon by William Burchell? I had a friend tipped me off to this – he was a British naturalist, going out looking for specimens and collecting for museums back in Britain, and he was on a collecting expedition in South Africa in the 1820s and he was also an artist, as a lot of these naturalists were. And he painted the inside of his collecting wagon, so you can see all the tools of his trade in there. So there are drawing supplies, there are nets for catching insects, there are jars of alcohol for preserving specimens, paper – including not just for writing but for pressing dry specimens in between – but there’s also a British flag, and there’s more domestic items.

These are things that would have been in the back of his wagon. And we know from his memoirs that he had a caravan of several wagons, one of which was the living space, and then one of which carried all of his stuff. He talks in his memoirs about having to buy a second wagon, in the style of the Dutch settlers – of the upland or interior Dutch settlers – that was more suited to the terrain, to the unpaved roads going into the South African interior.

So it’s a really nice little snapshot of, like, if you are going out on one of these collecting expeditions, one of the things that you’re actually bringing with you. And also he exhibited this painting when he got back to Britain, so what does he want people to understand about his gentleman collector’s life in the field?

NEMO

Yeah. I love those kind of paintings, because it is so fascinating to see what they thought was important for you to know –

SARAH

Yes!

NEMO

That they’d brought with them. And we’re going to be talking to more people from the Natural History Museum in a couple of future Below Decks, because I worked there. Quite a lot of inspiration came from people who do current-day expeditions to natural history expeditions, and sometimes it’s really funny that pretty much nothing has changed. (laughs) Like, what you’re bringing on an expedition –

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

– the problems that you’re coming across, the tools, the fact that things rot…

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

…if you don’t take care of them properly, the things like, “We were on the road and so this accident happened, because our wheels weren’t good enough!” You know? The same kind of problems that were happening before. But then also new problems that are coming with Age of Technology and stuff and – (inhales) it’s really cool to see snapshots like that. It’s interesting, I’ll definitely go and look at that painting, and yeah.

SARAH

Yeah, it’s cool. And the thing that I’m also fascinated by: by the kind of the end of the 19th century – so it’s a little bit past the time period of the podcast, but – end of the 19th/turn of the 20th century, you start to see this knowledge being codified?

I mean, I think that there had always been informal networks of people, especially facilitated by groups like the Royal Geographical Society…

NEMO

Yeah.

SARAH

…who were sharing information about how to outfit an expedition, especially what scientific instruments to bring, but also who would you buy the tents from, who would you buy your tinned food from or the salt pork, or things like that. Who in many cases were actually military contractors before they also started outfitting expeditions.

But then by the end of the 19th century you see people writing this knowledge down in books. So I’ve looked a lot at Francis Galton’s Art of Travel, which – the first edition came out in 1855, but he keeps revising it for the next couple of decades, and it stays in print for a really, really long time. I think it might have even been re-issued in the 21st century in a new printing, but you can find it online in all the different editions.

And so it’s like a compilation of all of this knowledge if you’re designing an expedition. He’s mostly concerned with land-based expeditions, what are the things that you need to bring? And so here’s the chapter about, like, “here’s how to find water,” “here’s how to find a good space to camp.” But also, “here’s how to order your porters around,” “here’s how to select the best porters,” “here’s what you need to bring to trade with local Indigenous people so they will let you through,” “here’s the kind of food to bring,” “here’s the kind of clothing to bring based on the climate,” “here’s the medical supplies that you need to bring.”

And you start to see other guidebooks that are like this. Some of them, interestingly, are really specifically geared towards soldiers in the British army or civil servants who are working in the colonial bureaucracy, especially who are going to tropical places. And sort of their – you know, here’s what you need to bring in order to stay healthy, but also keep yourselves composed as a white person, and a white person in a position of authority.

NEMO

Mmm! (laughs)

SARAH

In these tropical, colonial spaces. And a lot of that is about, what do you bring, how do you dress, how do you comport yourself during the day. So you stick to a routine that would have been familiar to somebody back in Britain. And people are – obviously on the ground they’re making all kinds of different changes to their wardrobe and they’ll be doing things in different ways, interacting with local people to a greater or lesser extent. But at least there’s a sort of expectation that part of what it means to go and travel to these places is to bring these real, material things from the home country with you.

NEMO

Yeah, it was making me think of kedgeree, which is a very British… I don’t know if you in America have kedgeree, but it’s seen as something, like – the Queen’s Jubilee just happened in the UK. And it’s one of those foods that is brought out during very British events? Kedgeree and coronation chicken. And coronation chicken is like chicken with mayonnaise and curry powder.

[SARAH LAUGHS]

And kedgeree is a dish which is like a… it’s kind of a fried rice, but it’s rice with smoked mackerel and peas and an egg on top. And with, yeah, curry powder in it.

And it’s one of those things where – I guess as a kid I didn’t really think about it. I was like, “Yeah, this is British food.” But in the Queen’s Jubilee I was looking at all these recipes coming out, being like, “Here’s how to cook the best kedgeree for your Jubilee celebration!” And it’s like, oh, this item of food that we are cooking here is like, and I believe – and this might just be one of those histories that’s passed along by people and isn’t actually true, but I believe it’s something that was made in British hotels in India as a way of combining Indian food and British food in a way that would be palatable to white people.

SARAH

Mhm.

NEMO

So they had lots of rice, they had smoked fish, and they had curry powder. But it’s not super fragrant, it’s not super hot, it’s not super outside of your wheelhouse. And – (putting on stuffy British voice) it makes a nice touch of foreignness without being, er, too different for our palate!

SARAH

Yeah, as soon as you started saying that I was like, where did the curry powder come from?! (laughs)

NEMO

(laughs) Yeah, exactly, yeah. So, food is a colonial object – yeah, basically objects is – ahhhh.

SARAH

Yeah, food is, er… yeah, there’s so many fascinating avenues in which food becomes a sort of cultural marker, but also a way in which you see these colonial processes happening. Things being moved from place to place, being taken up in places, raw ingredients being cultivated in one place or another for certain audiences.

There’s a scholar named Hi’ilei Hobart who’s looked at this in terms of, we’re talking about islands and tropical environments. She’s looked at this in the case of Hawai’i and what she calls “thermal colonialism,” which I think is really interesting, thinking about the experience of – the ways in which colonialism permeates all aspects of people’s lives in the past, and today, arguably. And thinking about the ways in which temperature works in Hawai’i. So she looks at the importation of ice into Hawai’i, and –

NEMO

Ohhh.

SARAH

– the ways in which “ice in drinks” didn’t use to be a thing before the 19th century, before you had ships that were kitted out to take ice from places where it was harvested. Usually in the American context this was Northern New England, sawn out of lakes in the middle of winter, packed in sawdust and brought on these ships to different parts of the world. Including Hawai’i, where then for the planter class, having a cold drink in a very hot humid environment –

NEMO

Oh my gosh. Yeah.

SARAH

– putting ice cubes in your drink became a marker of wealth, of power. And then now we associate cold drinks, cocktails, with tropical vacations!

NEMO

Yeah.

SARAH

Like we were saying earlier, these island beach vacations. But we don’t really think about where that comes from and in fact there’s a deliberate process by which people were trying to say, “Even though we’re in a different environment, we’re only going to adapt to that environment so much. We want some of the things that we’re used to from back home, and some of these markers of the culture that we’re used to, and we’re going to use these physical things to set ourselves apart from other people.”

She contrasts that with – more recently there have been these Indigenous Hawaiian communities protesting the observatory site on Mount Aloha, and there’s snow on the top of these very high volcanic mountains. And the way that some of the media portrayals of these Indigenous-led protests have been like, “But it’s cold at the top of these mountains! How are the Hawaiian people going to deal with the cold?!”

[NEMO STARTS LAUGHING]

“They don’t know how to deal with the snow and the ice up there.” It’s like, dude, it’s their space!

NEMO

Yeah.

SARAH

But yeah, the ways in which even something like temperature, how do you expect your drinks to be, can be the result of these colonial processes, and also then becomes a marker for people that try to differentiate themselves from other people.

NEMO

That whole idea of a tiki drink is like pineapples –

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

– plantations.

SARAH

You’re right.

NEMO

Sugarcane… plantations. Ice – oh my God, yeah, wow! And coconut as well.

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

Yeah, I feel like everyone’s (uneasily) “oooooh” a bit about them now. But even the ice is such a powerful thing to think about.

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

So we were talking a bit, right at the beginning, about not just “white versus person of colour.” One thing that I’ve always really wanted to talk about is that, in another project I’m working on, it’s about this – Zheng He, who is a navigator in the 14th century. And he has an Islamic background in that. I just think it’s something that we don’t ever see in media – in China, they were importing people from the Middle East because that’s where all of the universities were, that’s where all the thinkers were.

SARAH

Right.

NEMO

That’s where everyone who was navi– studying navigation, the stars, philosophy, poetry. And you can find all of these compasses from the 14th century in China that are written in Arabic. And I just find that so… we think – well, I personally think – of the compass as being something very “British naval institution,” you know. “Get my compass, get my pipe – (laughing) get my little navy hat, ooooh, I’m British –”

SARAH

(laughing) Yeah.

NEMO

”– and I’m doing imperialism!” But there are these time pieces and huge star machines to calculate constellations, all of these beautiful instruments that were a combination of Middle Eastern thinking and Chinese thinking. In the 13th–14th centuries and beyond. And that was way before… (laughs) British people were doing their imperialism and –

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

– you know, these trade routes have always existed outside of just Europeans coming –

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

– and making ports. So, that’s my final thought done.

SARAH

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that you’re starting to see this a little bit – like the last time I was at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. They have the Pacific Worlds exhibit now, which talks all about Polynesian traditions of not just astronomical navigation, but navigation based on wind patterns, currents, very intimate knowledge of an environment that you really only get from having a deep connection to it, not from being a kind of interloper from the outside.

And so seeing the discussion more and more in these public spaces and exhibits and in books, about other traditions of way-finding that have existed for thousands of years, as you said, outside of – you know, it wasn’t… nobody was waiting for Europeans or –

NEMO

(laughs) Yeah.

SARAH

– settler folks to just show up and give them a telescope, give them a compass, teach them how to take a sextant reading. There were these traditions of navigation and also just deep knowledge of environment, that – you have people who then come in who want to take advantage of that, without always giving proper credit to people who have that knowledge and are giving it to Europeans in the first place.

One of the things that I was thinking about was talking about life onboard a ship, and thinking about things that people would bring with them. It’s true that a lot of the portrayals of shipboard life have been – especially the Hollywood TV heroic account travels – have been about heroic men going out and just constantly battling storms or doing whatever. But there’s also a lot of boredom on ship life that we don’t really –

NEMO

Yeah.

SARAH

– talk about a lot. And also a lot of really mundane daily tasks. So even in an environment that we think about as being very male, very cis, and in a time period when we think about people having rigid gender roles and doing work based on gender identification in a very rigid hierarchical way… On ships you have, you know, there’s no women. Maybe sewing is a woman’s task, but who’s going to do the sewing when you’re out at sea for a couple of years?

NEMO

Yeah.

SARAH

So you have all these traditions of sailors cooking for each other, repairing clothing, repairing each other’s clothing, crafting, doing these kinds of very intimate – and! And caretaking also, taking care of other people who are ill. And so you have all these very intimate – if you want to call it – domestic tasks, caretaking tasks, things that would be creating a home, that maybe would have been traditionally associated with women but that male sailors are doing as well.

And there’s two really wonderful photos from Antarctic expeditions that always make me think of this, from Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen. Both of their crews sitting around. In Amundsen’s case, it’s the whole crew that is sitting and repairing gear, and they’ve all got needles and they’re all sewing. And in the photo I’m thinking of in the Scott expedition, I think is just two folks who are repairing sleeping bags. But still, it’s like, you don’t often see in the portrayals of heroic masculinity from the past today – you don’t often see the more intimate moments where people are doing that kind of caretaking labour, the domestic labour.

And I think that’s a thing to always keep in mind, is that there’s the master heroic narrative, the normative narrative, but there’s always ways – whether it’s thinking about gender roles, whether it’s thinking about people of colour who are very intimate parts of these expeditions, to whom a lot of explorers actually owed their lives, to the knowledge and labour of people of colour who never get acknowledged…

There’s always more going on than first blush. And I think that that’s really important, because you hear a lot of critiques from people who are like, “Today everybody’s trying to insert women, or they’re trying to insert people of colour, they’re trying to insert queer folks, into” – They don’t use the word queer usually –

NEMO

Yeah. (laughs)

SARAH

– “into these stories, and that’s not accurate.” That’s like – uh, no, actually…

NEMO

It’s not accurate because you are basing your entire history on Pirates of the Caribbean or on autobiographies by captains who only talk about their own heroic deeds…

SARAH

Right.

NEMO

…or their lieutenants and stuff like that.

SARAH

Right, yeah. I guess this goes back to the beginning of our conversation. A lot of these heroic narratives, they were written for the public, because a lot of – explorers especially, but Royal Navy captains as well, would make… in some cases they were making money by selling the publishing rights, so they knew that they had to turn a book out if they got home, if they survived. They had to turn a book out, go on a lecture tour…

NEMO

Right.

SARAH

…especially in the late 19th century. But also in the case of the Royal Navy, the Royal Navy had ownership over captain’s logs and diaries. That documentation had to be handed over to the Admiralty at the conclusion of different voyages. And so they exercised a very heavy editorial hand in a lot of these publications. And so they were meant for a certain audience, they were meant to be bestsellers – but that meant playing up the heroism and the accomplishments of the captain, the expedition leader, and the officers, and downplaying the labour of everyone else. Downplaying the dependencies of these expedition leaders. So people were written out of the narratives on purpose –

NEMO

Yeah.

SARAH

– it wasn’t just that “oh, they weren’t there,” or “they didn’t do that much.” They were written out on purpose.

NEMO

They were made forgotten. Hence the title of this show!

SARAH

Yes.

NEMO

Being Trice Forgotten.

SARAH

Oh my God, I just put that together!

NEMO

(laughs) Yeah, I cannot claim that, that was the marketing team doing a great job, producers having more naming sense than me. But yes, the idea of who is forgotten and that forgetting being an active job.

I feel like we could talk about this for so many more hours, but unfortunately, we do have to wrap up for this episode of Below Deck. Sarah, where can people find you if they want to find you online?

SARAH

Yeah, I am extremely on Twitter, my handle is (spelling out carefully) @sarahmpicks. And I also have a website sarahmpickman.com, you can shoot me an email through there. Always happy to hear from folks, always happy to geek out about expeditions, geek out about expedition stuff. And Nemo, this has been such a pleasure, it’s been so much fun.

NEMO

This is an audio medium, so people can’t see, but I have been just very excitedly shaking the entire conversation, like, “Yes! Yeah!”

SARAH

Yeah.

NEMO

Thank you so much for joining us. That’s it from me, Nemo, and goodbye from Sarah…

SARAH

Goodbye!

NEMO

And we will see you next time on Below Decks.

[Show Theme - Outro]

SIVA

Trice Forgotten is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International License. The series is created by Nemo Martin and directed by Rafaella Marcus. Today’s episode featured Nemo Martin and Sarah Pickman, and was edited by James Austin, Lowri Ann Davies, and Catherine Rinella.

Trice Forgotten is produced by Ian Geers, Lowri Ann Davies and production manager Natasha Johnston, with executive producers Alexander J Newall and April Sumner.

To subscribe, view associated materials or join our Patreon, visit rustyquill.com. Rate and review us online, tweet us @therustyquill, visit us on Facebook, or email us at mail@rustyquill.com. Thanks for listening.