Maritime and Oceanic History

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

"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."

NEW BOOK SERIES: Maritime Literature and Culture offers alternative rubrics for literary and cultural studies to those of nation, continent and area, which inter-articulate with current debates on comparative and world literatures, globalization and planetary or Anthropocene thought in illuminating ways. The humanities have paid increasing attention to oceans, islands and shores as sites of cultural production, while the maritime imagination in contemporary literatures and other cultural forms has presented ways of responding to human migration, global neoliberalism and climate change. This series provides a forum for discussion of these and other maritime expressions, including enquiries that engage maritime and coastal zones as spaces that enable reflection on labour and leisure; racial terror and performances of freedom; environmental wonder and degradation; metaphor and materiality; and the various implications of globe, world and planet.

"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."

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."

''Red tide'' has become a familiar shorthand for unusual changes in the color of ocean waters. It is intimately related both to blooms of creatures like dinoflagellates and to the devastating effects they pose to coastal fisheries. This essay tracks the early twentieth century emergence of discolored water as an aquacultural problem, known in Japan as akashio, and its trans-oceanic transformation into the terms and practices of ''red tide'' in the post-World War II United States. For Japan's ''Pearl King'' Mikimoto Kokichi and his contacts in diverse marine scientific communities, the years-long cycle of guarding and cultivating a pearl oyster went together with the ascription of moral qualities to tiny creatures that posed a threat to farmed bayscapes of pearl monoculture. As akashio, discolored water went from curiosity to marine livestock pest, one that at times left dead pearl oysters in its wake. Red tide arose from the sustained study of the mechanisms by which changes in the biological and chemical composition of seawater might become deadly to exclusively-claimed shellfish along Japanese coastlines, but came to be seen as a way to understand aquatic manifestations of harm in other parts of the littoral world.

"Crime, as Michael Ignatieff suggests, was one means by which the poor rebelled against the constraints of the existing social order. In recent years histroians have extensively examined crime and punishment which has proved to be a rich subject area in which to conduct analysis which reflects on modern European society's experimentation with methods of social control. One approach believed that incarceration was insufficient and that British society needed to be permanently rid of the criminal element, preferably as far away as was geographically possible.

This paper will examine aspects of the living conditions experienced by female convicts during their voyages to Van Diemen's Land(VDL) in the period 1818 to 1853 and will discuss the qualifications and experience of the male surgeon-superintendents who were responsible for both the care, as well as the control, of these women."

This essay explores the oeuvre of Rockwell Kent, focusing on his wood engravings and the black-and-white woodblock-style ink drawings he made for book illustrations and advertising campaigns. I categorize those woodblock-style drawings as “skeuomorphs”: objects that retain as aesthetic decorations features that were once characteristic marks of their production or function. Kent’s ink drawings are skeuomorphic in that they retain the appearance of wood engraving, although they were created during a time in which wood engraving was not a necessary or current technology for reproducing images in print. The essay places wood engraving and the woodblock style in historical context, locating Kent’s work in a wider movement of early twentieth-century artists who made recourse to strenuous labor, authentic experience, and the “usable past” of American history. Kent’s woodblock prints and the woodblock-style drawings reveal his longing for unalienated preindustrial labor, his political discomfort with his own social and professional privileges, and, at the same time, his complicity with the commercialism of the art world in the early twentieth century. These discrepancies are thrown into relief especially in Kent’s illustrations for the reprint of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in 1930. Kent’s illustrations and Melville’s text engage in different politics, even as both valorize maritime labor. In Melville’s original presentation of Moby-Dick in 1851, nostalgia operates as a radical critique of capitalism, but in 1930, the skeuomorphic quality of Kent’s illustrations signals the artist’s participation in the market.

Abstract:  The Pacific Ocean as site of global-capitalist dynamism remains riddled with antagonisms of political, territorial, and commercial conflict any contemporary version of the “Pacific Rim” needs to conjure with and contest.  In an environmental sense all the more so, we can all but forget this Pacific Ocean while most citizens are dwelling in an urban life-world that depends for its material well-being on, from, and across this ocean.  As in long-standing Romantic affects, this ocean becomes troped as alien presence of elemental sublimity, at once a threat and source of curative powers, as in deep-sea microbes that eat up the potent greenhouse gas, methane. This ocean of alien obliviousness can also flip into site of waste and remainder, from oil spills to radioactive contaminants, as the waters become filled with the heaviness of our military history and technological blunder.  From the Bikini atoll atomic testing to the latest nuclear disaster in Fukushima Japan in 2011, humans of late-capitalist modernity threaten not just the water and air of locality but the Pacific as planetary bioregion.  The tsunami reminded Pacific dwellers from Sendai in coastal Eastern Japan to Santa Cruz in Northern California that the Pacific Rim is not just a discourse, it is also an unstable, interconnected, and geologically interactive bioregion.  Figurations of oceanic interconnection could thus move us towards a vision of “Becoming Oceania,” here projected in this essay as a site of transpacific, cross-border, and transnational solidarity. The forging of a transpacific ecopoetics (in Pacific-based writers like Epeli Hau’ofa, Brandy Nalani McDougall, Craig Santos-Perez, Juliana Spahr, as well as the earlier American writer Jack Kerouac) can push urban-ocean citizens towards figurations and affects of a “Pacific becoming Oceania” connected to planetary belonging, ecological confederation, peace, and trans-racial solidarity.

This article presents an overview of the long term trends in the trading patterns for salted herring in the area of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea and their hinterlands in the period of c. 1600-1850. The market is defined as ‘the interaction between supply and demand to determine the market price and corresponding quantity bought and sold.’  In this period the north European herring market underwent several changes. This is analysed from four different points of view:
The first main section examines the main trading routes for herring in Northern Europe by use of records from the Sound toll registers as well as from accounts of herring imports in the German North Sea and Baltic cities. Then a number of price series for various parts of northern Europe give indications for the long term development of prices of herring. Following this an analysis of the consumption patterns of salted herring is carried out, and finally the influence of mercantilist policies is evaluated.

Calvin Schermerhorn’s provocative study views the development of modern American capitalism through the window of the nineteenth-century interstate slave trade. This eye-opening history follows money and ships as well as enslaved human beings to demonstrate how slavery was a national business supported by far-flung monetary and credit systems. The author details the anatomy of slave supply chains and the chains of credit and commodities that intersected with them in virtually every corner of the pre–Civil War United States, and explores how an institution that destroyed lives and families contributed greatly to the growth of the expanding republic’s capitalist economy.

Historians of colonial British North America have largely relegated piracy to the marginalia of the broad historical narrative from settlement to revolution. However, piracy and unregulated privateering played a pivotal role in the development of every English community along the eastern seaboard from the Carolinas to New England. Although many pirates originated in the British North American colonies and represented a diverse social spectrum, they were not supported and protected in these port communities by some underclass or proto-proletariat but by the highest echelons of colonial society, especially by colonial governors, merchants, and even ministers.

Beginning during the colonial period, and greatly accelerating following independence in 1965, Singapore has used land reclamation to increase its national domain by nearly 25 per cent. The construction of new land was a key component of the nation’s celebrated rise from ‘third world’ to ‘first world’ in the postcolonial period. But the economic benefits of remaking Singapore’s coastline came at significant ecological and social costs. Nearly all of the original shore, and its attendant mangrove forests and natural beaches, were lost. So too were two-thirds of Singapore’s coral reefs. While carrying out this reclamation, the state also erased a number of sites at which people made a living from the sea, including indigenous communities on the outer islands, age-old fishing villages, kelongs (large, traditional offshore fishing platforms) and prawn farms.

The history of land construction in Singapore offers a number of important insights concerning the relationship between humans and our environments. First, it reveals how the tensions between an ideal situation (a city or state’s relationship to other places) and a less than optimum site (its physical environment), when combined with a forceful, proactive government, can bring about immense environmental transformations. Related to that, this case sheds light on the ways in which governments – especially in developing nations – can use transformation of terrestrial and marine environments, in the name of progress, as a means of expanding and legitimating their authority. This history also reveals a perhaps unforeseen consequence of bulldozing and burying sites at which humans derived their livelihood from living oceanic resources: the loss of a cultural connection to the sea, based on knowing nature through work. Finally, this history raises the question of how environmental advocates can pursue conservation in a setting like Singapore’s shores, which we can no longer consider pristine or natural. That is to say, the ongoing efforts of environmentalists to protect flora and fauna in Singapore’s waters speak to the necessity of, and challenges presented by, preserving hybrid (neither entirely natural nor entirely artificial) marine environments.

From 1880 to 1882, two impresarios toured the decaying
body of a dead whale throughout the United States as sideshow exhibition called the “Prince of Whales.” The dead whale show lay at the
intersection of two important vectors in environmental humanities
research: oceans and energy. This essay explores some of the epistemological and ontological problems posed by the whale show, demonstrating that methods and theories drawn from the history of the
senses, media studies, and infrastructure studies can enrich the environmental humanities by offering new approaches to materiality and
putrefaction.

It is unusual to share an ERC Grant B1, but it might be useful, particularly for those now trying. That it was chosen does of course not mean that it is a model to follow, since luck is a hugely important factor. Also, comments and suggestions are welcome. For those interested in the topic of this project, here is the abstract:

Few geographical spaces have been more relevant to human life and more intensively theorized than the Mediterranean Sea. Today, this sea poses some of the most pressing challenges and opportunities for European economic, security, and environmental policies. Answers to how to manage the region depend on ideas and perceptions of integration and division of the basin and its peoples. But the Mediterranean as a spatial concept has radically changed in the last 160 years as humans have gained access to its depths, unveiling an underwater world to discover, exploit, and navigate.
The Mediterranean has become a volume. DEEPMED is the first historical account of the discovery of the deep Mediterranean environment. Its main
hypothesis is that science and strategy jointly made the Mediterranean depths into an object of analysis and a political space, which in turn shaped science and strategy in the region. DEEPMED pursues three specific
objectives: 1) identifying the actors and contexts that enabled perceptions and practices of depth in the Med; 2) describing how natural and human time-scales interact in this body of water, and 3) tracking key
conceptual landmarks defining the uniqueness and representativeness of the Mediterranean volume vis à vis the global ocean.
DEEPMED is the first basin-scale step in a novel approach to oceanic history that incorporates analyses of deep and bottom layers of the Sea to gauge the causes and effects of the historical emergence of depth. This
requires an innovative interdisciplinary, transnational and digital methodology. The project identifies overarching trajectories of human engagement with depths from the mid-19th century to the present,
including contrasting timelines and perspectives. The availability of digital tools for creating a database that facilitates geospatial and visual analyses make the project timely. The current security and environmental
Mediterranean crises make it essential.

This article demonstrates historically and statistically that conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world. It argues that CPs were a crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, and colonial reforms, thereby creating the conditions that made stable democracy more likely. Statistically, the historic prevalence of Protestant missionaries explains about half the variation in democracy in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania and removes the impact of most variables that dominate current statistical research about democracy. The association between Protestant missions and democracy is consistent in different continents and subsamples, and it is robust to more than 50 controls and to instrumental variable analyses.

The first essential for a whaling voyage was a good captain. The success of the cruise and the safety of the ship and crew relied on his skill. He had to be an experienced mariner with a good knowledge of navigation, ship management, and an understanding of the sea, as well as the location of the various whaling grounds and the best time of the year to visit. He also had to be a good leader. Large crews of more than thirty men were necessary to man the whaleboats. Some would be apprentices and ordinary seamen and need considerable instruction before they became an asset to the ship. An appendix lists the names of all Sydney whaling captains, their ships and period in command.

Prostitution has been a staple of dockside social life for centuries. In South Africa, it dates from the Dutch East India Company's establishment of a refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope. But unlike other prostitution sectors—streets, brothels, agencies—the women of the dockside sex trade in Cape Town and Durban participate in a global traffic of ideas, diseases, DNA, contraband, and currency through their ceaseless interactions with foreign sailors. They exploit their knowledge of the seamen's languages and cultures so as to more effectively solicit their marks in a competitive and cosmopolitan environment.

Social historians provide passing glimpses of dockside prostitution in their consideration of larger historical themes—Company rule, slavery, British colonial governance, the Mineral Revolution, the Anglo-Boer War, and apartheid—but they have yet to treat it as a distinct analytical category through which to view the past. Yet popular intellectual trends suggest that research into the dockside sex trade would add new dimensions to the histories of cosmopolitanism, gender, globalization, maritime recreation, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

This article provides a quick and accessible introduction to the historiography of dockside prostitution in South Africa.

"The article re-evaluates maritime routes from Venice to the Levant and back from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth centuries, casting doubt on the conclusions arrived at by historians working within the primarily geographic approach. The paper examines records from over 150 voyages, such as diaries and travelogues of travelers and pilgrims, as well as taking into consideration geographic studies and various navigational aids used today. The study concludes that during this period, Venetian vessels sailed greater distances and much farther from the coast than had previously been thought, and that crossing open water was an integral part of any long distance voyage.

The study was undertaken for the MA dissertation at Tel Aviv University's Department of History under the supervision of Prof. Benjamin Arbel, and accepted by Prof. David Jacoby.

Online access follow the link below. If you are having hard time finding it, please write me.

Renard Gluzman, "Between Venice and the Levant: Re-evaluating Maritime Routes from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century," The Mariner's Mirror, v. 96, n. 3 (August 2010), 262–292.

This chapter will first consider the obvious, i.e., changes that have been recognized and given rise to management concerns in recent decades. I shall then look at the long history of poorly understood human impact on and management of marine life through millennia. The major historical impact by humans on marine life have been extractions (fisheries, hunting) followed by habitat change of nearshore waters.1 Despite much attention in recent decades to pollution, introduction of alien species, and climate change, these factors have played relatively minor roles up to the present. Finally, I consider the development of scientific understanding and evidence-based management developing in the last century and a half.

This year marks the quadricentenary of the first confirmed European arrival in Western Australia. On 25 October 1616, Dutch skipper Dirk Hartog and his crew landed at the northern tip of the island now named Dirk Hartog, in Shark Bay. Many have written about Hartog’s ‘accidental’ landfall and the inscribed pewter plate that he erected to mark his landing. This seemingly mundane event on the Western Australian coast earned Hartog a, then unforeseen, prominence in the legacy of seafaring history and in the early European history of Australia. It established him as a notable figure in the Age of Exploration. Today, the historical events and the physical remains of Hartog’s landing in Western Australia are firmly embedded within the context of European activity in the Indian Ocean region and, more specifically, Dutch exploration of the Australian coastline in the 17th century. This article sets out to provide a critical assessment of the life and seafaring activities of the first known European to set foot on Western Australian soil; and the history of Eendracht, the earliest known Dutch ship to explore the Western Australian coast.

Although much has been written on the subject of ancient Mediterranean harbours, the relatively new area of harbour
geoarchaeology remains dispersed in the geoscience and archaeological literature. Over a decade of research has amassed rich and varied datasets of anthropogenically forced coastal evolution, with a remarkable number of between-site analogies. This new research field also shows the rich potential of geoscience to reconcile important archaeological questions. No single publication, however, has yet drawn on these geological patterns to yield a detailed overview suitable for geoscientists and environmental archaeologists. The aim of this review article is to
(1) discuss how ancient harbours have come to be preserved in the geological record;

(2) expound the basic principles and palaeoenvironmental tools underpinning ancient harbour geoarchaeology;

(3) outline some of the most significant research advances made; and

(4) discuss a new chrono-stratigraphic model applicable to harbour.
sequences.

To be lost and found at sea: What kinds of thinking does the shipwreck prompt? This essay pursues this question by centering fragmented remains—large beeswax blocks and Chinese porcelain ware—from the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Spanish galleon lost while traveling from Manila to Acapulco at the end of the seventeenth century. By considering how durable commodities were recovered and reimagined, primarily by Indigenous inhabi- tants of the Oregon coast, this essay reflects upon the kinds of histories that can be written around and because of wrecked ships. Tacking between past and present, we use the Santo Cristo de Burgos to draw out the lineaments of a shipwreck’s art history, bringing into  focus three interrelated themes, each critical to the material histories of wrecks: the interpretive recalcitrance of cargo, the reframing of value through recovery, and the production of material surplus in the watery depths.

The story of deepwater Gulf of Mexico can be told through the story of Shell Oil's Mars Project.  Mars was one of the earliest prospects to be drilled and developed on some of the first federal deepwater leases offered in the early 1980s.  In the late 2010s, thirty-five years later, it remains one of the most productive basins in the Gulf at the cutting edge of technology.  More than any other project in the Gulf of Mexico, Mars documents the wide-ranging innovations that have propelled the industry into ever-deeper waters and new geological frontiers.  It provides a window into the evolution of geophysical technology and interpretation, drilling and well completion, platform and facilities design, workforce organization and culture, process engineering, subsea engineering, reservoir engineering, pipelining, project management, disaster management, and safety management.  Mars marks the transition from fixed to floating production platforms in deepwater, and from “conventional” deepwater to subsalt deepwater.  It also had a starring role in the industry’s recovery from two traumatic disasters, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo blowout and spill in 2010.  Finally, the 2014 installation of a second, state-of-the-art production facility in the same field once again placed Mars in the forefront of offshore development.

This essay is part of a multi-media website,  https://dsps.lib.uiowa.edu/mars-deepwater-gulf/, devoted to documenting, analyzing, and displaying the history of this American energy asset and others in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. 

The website features the following resources:

• Two historical essays:  “Shell Oil’s Deepwater Mission to Mars,” by Tyler Priest; and “The Shape of These Monsters: From Fixed to Floating Offshore Oil and Gas Production, 1976-2006,” by Joel Hewett.
• A 30-year timeline of significant moments in the history of Shell’s greater Mars development.
• A photo gallery of the Mars TLP and its people, equipment, and projects.
• A video collection featuring the Mars, Ursa, and Olympus tension-leg platforms, along with many others in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico (more than 80 total).
• A series of graphs that illustrate the evolution of deepwater projects and production in the Gulf of Mexico.
• A series of Gulf of Mexico maps, including:  an interactive ArcGIS Gulf of Mexico Map that displays Gulf of Mexico leases, platforms, pipelines, and boundaries; an interactive ArcGIS Deepwater Gulf of Mexico Story Map that highlights 17 major deepwater facilities; and an interactive ArcGIS Onshore Oil and Gas Infrastructure Map that displays onshore, lower-48 U.S. oil and gas infrastructure and its offshore connections.
• A “Martian Stories” site for oral histories and personal recollections.

This book explores the evolution of the European shipping firm through the study of two Greek shipping firms, which provide a prime example of the regional European maritime businesses that evolved to serve Europe's international trade and eventually the global economy. The Vagliano Brothers indicate how Greek shipping underwent transformation from local shipping and trading to international shipping and ship management, and the Onassis case how international shipping was transfromed to global shipping business.
It is a contribution to the understanding of shipping business during the two globalization waves. The Vaglianos developed during the first massive wave of globalization which started in the second half of the nineteenth century to shrink during  the interwar period,  and the Onassis business depicts the explosion of the second globalization wave in the second half of the twentieth century. These two firms contributed to the process of global economic integration by inventing and re-inventing Greek and ultimately European southern and northern maritime tradition. Because this is not only the story of the Greeks. It can also be read as the history of the evolution of the European maritime tradition involved in tramp/bulk shipping.  The outcome of this book therefore builds on the field of maritime business history developed in the past few decades by maritime, economic and business historians, and has benefited from the discussions in the international fora provided by the European Business History Association and the International Maritime Economic History Association.
 

Ang mga taong 1571-1600 ay ang mahalagang panahon sa paglalatag ng pundasyong kolonyal ng kapangyarihang Espanyol sa Pilipinas. Ito ang magbabalangkas at magtatakda ng hubog at pangkalahatang kalakaran ng kolonyalismong Espanyol sa kapuluan sa buong panahon ng kanilang pananatili. Mula sa perspektibang maritimo, lumitaw ang isang alternatibong pagtingin sa proseso ng kolonyalismong Espanyol. Naitakda ng pag-aaral na ang patakaran ng repartimiento at sistemang encomienda ay ang espasyal na pagpapahayag ng konseptong partisoni-de-fondo; ang pagtatatag ng mga astillero, mula Luzon hanggang Zamboanga, ay sumisimbolo sa maistre ng bagong bangkang-bayan (bayang-kolonyal) ; ang pueblo bilang sosyo-espasyal na pagpapahayag ng kaayusan sa bangkang galera kung saan itinakda ang lugar ng mga Indios sa banchi bilang tagagaod o alipin ; at, ang pangkalahatang sanhi at tendensiya ng opresyong kolonyal bilang likas na konsekwensiya ng kalikasan at layunin ng digmang-galera sa pag-aangkin ng teritoryo, pagsasamsam ng mga ari-arian at pang-aalipin sa mga sakop. Ang kabuuan ng tradisyong ito ang nagbigay ng konteksto sa naging kondukta ng pananakop at proseso ng kolonisasyong Espanyol tungo sa transpormasyong kolonyal. The period 1571-1600 was the foundational phase in the process of Spanish colonization in the Philippines. It was in this period that the general outline and character of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines were established which defined and guided trends and tendencies of its policies for the entire duration of the colonial period. Viewed from a maritime perspective, the study offers an alternative interpretation in the process of Spanish colonization. The study presented the policy of repartimiento and the encomienda system as spatial expression of the concept of partisoni-de-fondo; the astilleros dotting the archipelago from Luzon to Zamboanga, symbolically represents the maistre of the newly established shipshape (galley) colonial society; the pueblo system serves as the socio-spatial expression of the new socio-spatial order wherein the Indios were clearly established in the benches as rowers or slaves; and, the general causes and tendencies of colonial oppression were natural consequences of the objectives and nature of galley-warfare towards conquest of territories, looting and slavery. The entire gamut of this tradition of maritime warfare places in context how Spanish colonization proceeded and the general conduct in the process of colonial transformation.

The double canoe which was brought by ancestors of present-day Negritos to Southeast China and Taiwan served as original watercraft of the Malayo-Polynesian dispersal, the first waves of which were carried out by people with equatorial (dark) complexion. A tradition of maritime communication and trade seems to have developed in the South China Sea, with exchange of material culture between indochina and the Philippines, leading up to a metal-age Sahuynh-Kulanay complex. A boat-burial rite seems to likewise have developed, transmitted as far east as Hawaii, bt also into the mainland up the Mekong as mell as Salween, Irrawady, and Brahmaoutra. A further development, already in the metal age, was apparently the ship-of-the-dead cult. Meanwhile Negrito (and Papuan) westward shipping, already since before the Malayo-Polynesian dispersal, apparently brought the banana and the coconut to India. Negrito seafarers who, like also subsequently arrived Malayo-Polynesians, settled on the Bay of Bengal coast, may have been referred to in early Indian literature as Nagas.

The War of the Spanish Succession had left the Spanish naval power weakened. So the governments had to create a unified and modern navy: the Royal Navy. Within a century, the revaluation of the Atlantic space needed more than ever a naval force, able to protect the overseas empire and play a dissuassive role. These circumstances implied that the Navy transmitted a modern science which had not been established in Spain up to then.