Maritime History

From the foundation of the Order of St John in 11th century Syria as a community of lay brethren intent on providing shelter, care and assistance to pilgrims visiting the Holy Land, the destiny of the Hospitaller Knights was irremediably moulded for most of the next millennium. Geography, circumstance, religious ideology, and the pursuit of wealth all conspired to transform the future of the Hospitallers into a violent one, in keeping with the surrounding environment of the Middle East and the rest of the Mediterranean. The Order’s attitude to conflict changed, however, when the theatre of war shifted from the Mediterranean to mainland Europe. The acquisition of property in Latin Syria helped chart the course of the Order’s history, rendering the Hospitallers sensitive to events on the continent. Any land property in Europe was at risk of intrusion, occupation or exploitation by armies on the move, and the Hospital’s property was no exception. This study is an analysis of the Order of St John’s contrasting attitudes to violence, and the geographical, political, religious and historical situations that generated such an approach.

Als Berufsoffizier, der zusätzlich zu seinen dienstlichen Aufgaben 2012 das Diplomstudium der Geschichte absolviert hat, durfte ich im Rahmen des Grundausbildungslehrgangs für MBO1 (GALG) dieses Thema auswählen. Dieses hat auch zu meinem heutigen Wirkungsgebiet als österreichischer Verteidigungsattachè (Land, Luft, Marine) in Kroatien einen besonderen Bezug, da ich einerseits seit etwa 15 Jahren der Obmann der ‚Marinekameradschaft Tegetthoff‘, die bereits selbst wiederum eine etwa 60-jährige Geschichte aufzuweisen hat, bin; und andererseits wurde ich vor etwa vier Jahren zum Vizepräsident in das Präsidium des ‚Österreichischen Marine Verbands‘ gewählt, ein Amt, das ich immer noch inne habe.
Diese Hausarbeit wurde mit sehr zeitintensiver Vor- und Aufbereitung sowie in kritisch freier, aber logischer Art und Weise durchgeführt. Es konnten ausreichend Erfahrungen, Recherchen – persönlich und digital – zu Hilfe genommen werden. Zusätzlich wurden aktuelle Beiträge aus Büchern und Fachzeitschriften in die Bearbeitung miteinbezogen. Es wurde eine Methode gewählt, die eine Erklärung der jeweiligen Dinge, die einer Beurteilung zu unterziehen waren, leicht und verständlich ermöglichte.
Es ist mir eine besondere Freude gewesen diese Hausarbeit zu schreiben und hoffe, dass dadurch ein besserer Zugang zur k.u.k. Kriegsmarine und zur heute gelebten, österreichischen Marinetradition - obwohl es heute gar keine österreichische Marine mehr gibt - zustande kommen wird.

Review of Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, Kären Wigen, eds., Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007). Journal of History and Anthropology 8.1 (2010): 183-188.
http://schina.ust.hk/publications/Jour-E.html

"Early colonial economies in North America and Australia were commonly based on a combination of the importation of goods and a system of local production which included subsistence agriculture and hunting. Before 1850 the Australian settlements had a very limited and only slowly developing capacity to create or harvest, local supplies of food and alcohol. Furthermore in the nineteenth century the Australian colonies never developed the capacity to produce certain kinds of consumer goods. In the Australian contact the period and degree of "dependency" on external sources of supply varied according to well recognised factors like the growth of population and establishing or importing the means of production to the colony.

This book chapter considers trade between Canada and Australia through an examination of the voyage of the William Salthouse in what was the earliest attempt to establish trade relations between Canada and Australia."

This article investigates the growth of cross-border movement and migration in the northern portion of the Yellow Sea during the sixteenth century, which generated ongoing interactions and tensions with the coastal governance of Chosŏn Korea and Ming China. The fluid flow of private seafarers reconnected the northern Yellow Sea and revitalised its maritime economy, making this space an integral part of wider trade networks. Meanwhile, the Chosŏn and Ming authorities also attempted to discern, categorise, and institutionalise this transmarine mobility in their discursive, administrative, and geographic spaces. Instead of considering the two polities as land based and inward looking, this article foregrounds the dynamics of their coastal control mechanisms, while at the same time paying close attention to their constraints on filtering and scrutinising maritime violence.

Interracial sex mattered to the British colonial state in West Africa. In Crossing the Color Line, Carina E. Ray goes beyond this fact to reveal how Gold Coasters—their social practices, interests, and anxieties—shaped and defined these powerfully charged relations across racial lines. The interplay between African and European perspectives and practices, argues Ray, transformed these relationships into key sites for consolidating colonial rule and for contesting its racial and gendered hierarchies of power.

With rigorous methodology and innovative analyses, Ray brings Ghana and Britain into a single analytic frame by examining cases in both locales. Intimate relations between black men and white women in Britain’s port cities emerge as an influential part of the history of interracial sex and empire in ways that are connected to rather than eclipsed by relations between European men and African women in the colony.

Based on rich archival evidence and original interviews, the book moves across different registers, shifting from the micropolitics of individual disciplinary cases against colonial officers who “kept” local women to transatlantic networks of family, empire, and anticolonial resistance. In this way, Ray cuts to the heart of how interracial sex became a source of colonial anxiety and nationalist agitation during the first half of the twentieth century.

« L'esprit humain a toujours été fasciné par les baleines. Le sujet n'a toutefois guère captivé les historiens canadiens, sans doute parce qu'au Canada la pêche à la baleine a presque toujours été pratiquée par des étrangers », Mario Lalancette en 1988.

Cet essai est un état de la question résumant cinquante années de travaux sur la question de la pêche à la baleine sur les territoires de la Nouvelle-France au 16ème et 17ème siècle. Nous verrons que les études dans ce domaine sont pratiquement inexistantes jusque dans les années 1970, contrairement aux recherches sur les pêcheries en Nouvelle-Angleterre, elles, très foisonnantes. Nous remarquerons également que les sources à exploiter seront tout autant archivistiques (et européennes) qu’archéologiques (et canadiennes), regroupant des efforts de part en part de l’Atlantique. Enfin, nous noterons que cette branche encore si peu étudiée bénéficierait certainement de plus d’attention, car trop de questions demeurent encore à ce jour.

"Scurvy is a deficiency disorder caused by a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in the diet and specifically by insufficient vitamin C (ascorbic acid). It is not infectious and results from a combination of psycho-social and environmental stress. The symptoms of scurvy include bleeding gums, loose teeth, bad breath, diarrhoea, dysentery, stiffening of the joints and blackening of the skin. Scurvy is of interest for what it reveals about the intersection of medical knowledge and the development of systems of ensuring the supply of an adequate quantity and quality of food for the population.

This paper considers the evidence for the occurrence of scurvy on convict and emigrant ships to Australia during the period 1837-1839."

The Turkish island of Bozcaada, widely known by its ancient Greek name of Tenedos, is located in the northeastern part of the Aegean Sea. Due to military conflicts during World War I and World War II, and because of the startegic importance of the Daradanelles, this area is full of historical wrecks, many of which remaine undocumented or not located yet. This article deals with some of the World War II wrecks of Tenedos.

Cette communication a eu lieu le 31 mars 2017, dans le cadre du séminaire doctoral d'Alexandre Gady. Elle fut l'occasion de révéler une documentation inédite permettant de porter un nouveau regard sur le projet de place Louis XVI destiné à la cité du Ponant en 1786.

"It has been estimated that more than 1.6 million immigrants travelled to Australia by ship between 1788 and 1900. Nearly half were government-assisted and came primarily from Britain, albeit with smaller numbers from Europe and elsewhere. Yet in the first half of the nineteenth century the vast majority of the more than two and a half million souls who left the UK were destined for North America; only about 82,000 convicts and 75,000 immigrants, most assisted, made the long voyage to Australia between 1821 and 1840. This was exteremely significant, howevere, in that before 1840 approximately three-quarters of Australia's non-Aboriginal population at some time in their lives made the long and tedious voyage from Europe.

The principal focus of this paper is the general health of the convicts and immigrants, and particularly levels of morbidity (illness) and mortality (death) on the ships. Specifically, it addresses the interaction between convicts, immigrants and passengers on the one hand and the social and administrative structures on board on the other by examining the diseases, medical conditions, food and water supplies that prevailed among those who made the long sea voyage to Australia during the years 1837 to 1839."

Asia Pacific Perspectives, Volume XIII Number 1, Spring/Summer 2015

https://web.usfca.edu/uploadedFiles/Destinations/Institutes_and_Centers/center-asia-pacific/perspectives/v13n1/APP%20XIII1%2002%20French%2008-17-15.pdf

This paper, based on archival research undertaken in the General Headquarters (GHQ)/ Supreme Command of Allied Powers (SCAP) archives and employing geospatial data, examines the origins of a number North East Asia's territorial disputes through looking at the seizures of Japanese fishing boats during the initial postwar years. Through the hitherto unexploited medium of geospatial analysis, the paper looks at the mass seizures of Japanese fishing vessels by the maritime arms of the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Korea (and US Military Government of Korea), the USSR, the Republic of China, and the UN naval forces in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The paper examines and maps the incidence of the capture of these vessels as well as contextualizes the captures within the importance of the fishing industry to Japan, and Japan's neighbors' differing positions on their maritime boundaries with Japan. The policies of GHQ/SCAP and the Japanese government towards the seizures are also examined, as is the role the fishermen themselves played. The paper concludes by employing a geospatial dataset to test assumptions about the nature of the seizures of fishing vessels during the period and their significance in relation to today's territorial disputes in the region.

Análise do contributo das instituições e dos historiadores da Marinha para a História Marítima em Portugal ao longo dos últimos dois séculos, quer numa perspectiva integrada, quer na óptica individualizada dos vários intervenientes.
***
An overview on the contribution of the naval institutions and naval historians to Portuguese Maritime History in the last two centuries, under both an integrated view and an individualized perspective of the several actors involved.

Though Odysseus’ tales to Eumaios and Aninoos in Odyssey 14.199–359 and 17.417–44, respectively, are presented as fictional tales within Homer’s larger myth, some elements have striking analogs in Late Bronze–Early Iron Age reality.

This article examines these portions of the hero’s false ainoi within their fictive context for the purpose of identifying and evaluating those elements. Particular focus is given to Odysseus’ declaration that he led nine successful maritime raids prior to the Trojan War; to his twice–described ill–fated assault on Egypt; and to his claim not only to have been spared in the wake of that Egyptian raid, but to have spent a subsequent seven years in the land of the pharaohs, during which he gathered great wealth.

Through a comparative examination of literary and archaeological evidence from the Late Bronze–Early Iron transition in the Eastern Mediterranean, it is shown that these aspects of Odysseus’ stories are not only reflective of the historical reality surrounding the time in which the epic is set, but that Odysseus’ fictive experience is remarkably similar to that of one specific member of the ‘Sea Peoples’ groups best known from 19th and 20th dynasty Egyptian records: the ‘Sherden of the Sea.’

Stella Ghervas (2018). "The Black Sea", in Oceanic Histories, ed. David Armitage, Alison Bashford and Sujit Sivasundaram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 234-266.

Abstract of the volume:
"Oceanic Histories is the first comprehensive account of world history focused not on the land but viewed through the 70% of the Earth's surface covered by water. Leading historians trace the history of the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and the world's seas from the Arctic and the Baltic to the South China Sea and the Sea of Japan/Korea's East Sea, over the longue durée. Individual chapters trace the histories and the historiographies of the various oceanic regions with special attention to the histories of circulation and particularity, the links between human and non-human history and the connections and comparisons between parts of the World Ocean. Showcasing oceanic history as a field with a long past and a vibrant future, these authoritative surveys, original arguments and guides to research make this volume an indispensable resource for students and scholars alike."

The maritime interstate trade in bondspersons illustrates the contours of United States capitalism of the early nineteenth century as it developed between 1807 and midcentury. The saltwater trade between the Chesapeake and New Orleans comprised four stages corresponding to larger economic developments. An incidental slave trade rose in the context of the US ban on imported slaves, embargoes, and the growth of domestic commerce. An essential trade followed, growing in the post-War of 1812 transatlantic market for agricultural staples. It was carried on aboard vessels plying the so-called cotton triangle and also ships carrying regionally-specific
goods and commodities between domestic ports. The 1830s witnessed a vertical trade exemplified by one slaving firm that responded to the swift expansion of credit and surging demand. Following the panic of 1837, market fragmentation led to a mechanical trade, which was also dependent on robust exports of slave-produced crops. Financial technologies propelled that development, and the maritime slave trade was nearly seamlessly integrated into the broader coastal trade.

Las acciones humanitarias llevadas a cabo por el Capitán de
Navío Miguel Grau Seminario se adelantaron a la codificación
de las mismas por parte del derecho internacional. Si bien
no fueron una exclusividad en la historia naval del mundo,
sí representan una peculiaridad peruana de hacer la guerra,
lo que ubica al Caballero de los Mares en el pedestal del
reconocimiento legítimo y legal como uno de los que
ejercieron conscientemente parte del derecho internacional
Humanitario de la guerra en el mar.
Para difundir este aspecto de la vida del comandante del
Huáscar, se llevó a cabo una muestra temporal dentro de
las instalaciones del Instituto Riva-Agüero de la Pontificia
Universidad Católica del Perú.

The humanitarian actions carried out by Captain Miguel
Grau Seminario came ahead of time to their codification
on the part of International Law. Although they were
not an exclusivity in the world’s naval history, it does
represent a Peruvian characteristic while making war,
which positions the Knight of the Seas in the pedestal
of legitimate and legal recognition as one of those
who applied consciously part of the International
Humanitarian Law in War at Sea.
In order to spread this aspect of the life of the Huascar’s
Commander, a temporary exhibition was set up inside
the facilities of Instituto Riva-Agüero of Pontificia
Universidad Catolica del Perú.

This article uses prize to examine the end of war in the twentieth century. By enshrining the victor’s right to seize enemy merchant ships after the cessation of military hostilities, the 1918 Armistice changed how war ended. This disconnection turned prize into a strategic tool for victors to use over belligerents. This appeared again in World War II, when prize courts condoned the taking of prize after Germany’s surrender. Egypt then used prize as a strategic tool in their opposition to Israel. The article concludes prize was not just a historical curiosity, but also a strategic imperative for victors.

This is a poignant moment to contemplate the sea, and mankind's relationship to it. The pressures of climate change and human activity—from large-­scale aquaculture to container shipping, from mineral extraction to deep-­sea exploration—have affected the oceans and the marine life on which we depend, usually not for the better. As Lincoln Paine conclusively demonstrates in this magisterial work, the seas are also a crucial, perhaps even central, point of focus in the story of human civilization. Paine opens the book by declaring that he wants to change the way we see the world--by re-orienting our attention to the three-quarters of the planet that is blue, and composing a longue durée history that places water, not land, at the center of global development and transformation. ...

This paper reviews the earliest empirical evidence for seafaring, leading to the exploits of Homo erectus in two world regions. This leads to the explanation of the rationale of replication experiments intended to establish the minimum conditions under which demonstrated maritime colonisations in the Lower Palaeolithic could have succeeded.

"Few landscapes change more rapid than the marine. Sandbanks, channels and even complete coastlines can change dramatically overnight. This is a threat not only for modern mariners, our seafaring forefathers knew this problem also all too well. With modern techniques we can monitor these changes and adapt our maps on a regular basis. These techniques not only provide saver shipping, they can also be used to find the wreck of unfortunate former mariners. How can this method be used to predict where wrecks can be found. And, if a wreck is found, is it possible to preserve it?
In order to get a full picture of possible wreck sites, we need to know what the underwater landscape was in various periods, and how it has changed over time.
Historic Cartographical analysis can give and insight in the use and sometimes in the morphology of former landscapes. The problem with this is that it only provides qualitative information; i.e. descriptive data (map legends, interpretations, names or remarks). Modern remote-sensing devices give purely quantitative data. In order to model changes in landscape overtime, the historical qualitative data should be in some way ‘quantified’ to make calculations possible. If the historical records provide quantitative data as well, they should somehow be extrapolated to be comparable with modern high resolution data. This ‘quantifying’ of data can also be used for modern qualitative maps, such as soil type maps or land use maps.
This way historical data can be integrated with modern remote-sensing and survey techniques."

Japanese whaling regularly appears in the news today, but there has been surprisingly little written in English about the subject from a historical perspective. Jakobina Arch's Bringing Whales Ashore takes a giant stride toward remedying that gap. Perhaps even more importantly from an environmental history standpoint, she sets out a template for reconceptualizing the history of Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868) through the lens of the

A partial analysis of Dr. James T. White's 1901 ethnographic survey about Alaska Natives living along the Yukon River and the missionary responses to that survey. Presented at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Western History Association, October 17, 2020.