The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (102 page)

Edwards’s portrayal of Yanks as gauche arrivistes conforms to a standard stereotype of the tourist, and Americans were no worse than any of their contemporaries. But while travelers may well have been gulled by artistic forgeries, the new aesthetic sensibilities awakened in travelers of all kinds had a transformative effect on art and literature. Modernism made its American debut with the Armory Show of 1913, which was exhibited in New York,
Boston, and (Edwards’s gibe notwithstanding) the Art Institute of Chicago, and the western avant-garde of the early twentieth century owes an enormous debt to the lines of communication laid down by practical shippers in the nineteenth.

In 1876–77, Anna Brassey and her railroad magnate husband circumnavigated the world in their yacht,
Sunbeam,
with calls at
Brazil,
Chile,
Tahiti,
Hawaii, and Japan, before returning home via
Hong Kong,
Macau,
Singapore,
Penang, Ceylon, the
Suez Canal, and Portugal. Built for long-distance cruising on a grand scale, the three-masted topsail schooner carried nine guests and a crew of thirty-two, and Brassey’s book,
A Voyage in the
Sunbeam
; Our Home on the Ocean for Eleven Months,
popularized the idea of the world tour. Two years later, a company advertised a round-the-world cruise aboard the former Peninsular and Orient steamer
Ceylon,
“
a yacht in every sense, carrying no cargo, and … replete with every luxury and comfort … an excellent band on board also a steam launch for landing passengers.” Despite the attractions of the ship, the itinerary, and the company’s promise to preserve “the character of a private yachting party of friends, as distinguished from a compliment [
sic
] of ordinary passengers,” the ship was not full when it sailed. But thanks to the
telegraph, the company could advertise the possibility of joining the ship at one of its many ports of call.

Soon, transatlantic companies faced with excess capacity in the off-season began to experiment with using their ships for cruising. In 1891,
Albert Ballin sent the
Augusta Victoria
on a winter tour of the Mediterranean. This proved a great success, but the battened-down ships designed for the North Atlantic lacked the amenities required of more indolent vacationers in warmer climes, and ten years later
Hapag commissioned the first purpose-built cruise ship, the
Prinzessin Victoria Luise,
with accommodations for two hundred first-class passengers on pleasure trips to the Mediterranean,
Scandinavia, and the
Caribbean. Other ships followed and opened new routes to destinations as varied as continental interiors via the world’s major
rivers and the icy wastes of the
Arctic and
Antarctica. Long-distance passenger liners are a thing of the past; their death knell was sounded by the commercial success of the passenger jet, which made its first commercial transatlantic flight in 1958. Nonetheless, the number of people who take sea cruises every year—
between fourteen and twenty million passengers worldwide in 2010—far exceeds the number of passengers ever carried by ship at the height of the passenger trades. This figure includes passengers on sea voyages of more than sixty hours with at least two ports of call and does not count “cruises to nowhere”—“nowhere” being international waters where
duty-free shopping and gambling are allowed—which had their origins during
Prohibition.

As nineteenth-century industrialization and commercial expansion drew huge numbers of people into cities, steamboats created opportunities for city dwellers with limited funds to escape the squalor and enjoy a few hours on the water. By the 1860s, enterprising steamboat operators were building excursion steamers “
designed especially to secure elegance, speed, comfort, ample accommodation, and even luxuriousness of interior appointments,” as well as a reasonable measure of safety. For the first time, people had the opportunity of a benign on-the-water experience free of backbreaking work, imminent danger, or indefinite separation. For many such day trips were “the only airings, away from the din and sweltering confusion” of the city. So wrote the
New York Times
in an 1880 report on “a vast and growing trade” that in a quarter century had sprung from nothing to transport as many as twenty-five million people every summer on excursions around New York Bay, the
Hudson River,
Long Island Sound, and the nearby Atlantic beaches. Many companies purchased land within ten to thirty miles of their respective cities where they built picnic gardens and miniature resorts for day-trippers and weekenders. In time many of these places grew into suburban villages and towns in their own right, served by year-round ferry service.

Proximity to land was no guarantee of safe passage, however, and the industry lurched from improvement to improvement in the wake of
horrific accidents. More than six hundred passengers drowned when a collier sank the
Princess Alice
on the Thames near
London in 1878, and the burning of the
General Slocum
in New York’s East River in 1904 left around a thousand people dead, mostly women and children on a church-sponsored excursion. Most disquieting was the flooding and capsize of the
Great Lakes excursion vessel
Eastland
in the Chicago River in 1915. Though she was only half submerged and less than twenty feet from shore with three bow lines still fast to the pier, 841 people died. The
Princess Alice
disaster led to the implementation of rules of the road for inland waters, while the
General Slocum
incident sparked an overhaul of the negligent
U.S. Steamboat Inspection Service.

Notwithstanding such tragedies, for the better off and more adventurous in spirit,
yachting was growing in popularity.
Cruising and racing for pleasure is generally thought to have had its origins in the
Netherlands in the seventeenth century, from where Charles II introduced the sport to England after being presented with the ninety-two-ton yacht
Mary
by the city of
Amsterdam. More than twenty yachts were commissioned over the next two decades and the weakness for ridiculous and diminutive yacht names was apparent from the start: Charles’s
The Folly
,
Prince Rupert’s
Fanfan,
and the
Jamie,
named for the future James II. The Royal Cork Yacht Club, the world’s oldest, traces its origins to 1710, and the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes and the New York Yacht Club followed in 1815 and 1844, respectively. Although yachting was the preserve of the very wealthy on a par with the Brasseys—Morgans and Vanderbilts in the
United States, the British tea baron
Sir Thomas Lipton, and Germany’s Kaiser
Wilhelm II—races generated as much popular enthusiasm as thoroughbred horse racing does today.

Gradually, however, yachting spread to the members of the growing middle class. Extolled as “
the most difficult, complicated, and comprehensive” of all sports, as
Edwin Brett wrote in 1869, it was followed “by men of adventurous temperament; by men who like life in the open air, particularly in wild weather … who delight in testing their skill, daring, and perseverance against those of their brother sportsmen in the most refined and scientific of all forms of racing.” Brett believed “the number of born yachtsmen … very considerable,” and his survey offered something for a range of tastes and pockets, from five-ton, single-handed yachts to three-hundred-ton steamers. The popularity of ocean cruising was excited by the exploits of such sailors as
Joshua Slocum, who sailed around the world single-handed between 1895 and 1898, and whose account of his travels has never gone out of print. Many have followed in his wake, but a new era dawned in 1969, when six men set out to compete in the
first nonstop solo circumnavigation under sail. Only Robin Knox-Johnston finished within the rules, sailing 30,123 miles in 313 days; after rounding Cape Horn, challenger
Bernard Moitessier decided to keep sailing east and after 37,455 miles in 301 days put into
Tahiti. The solo, nonstop circumnavigation remains the highest accomplishment of the ocean sailor, men and women alike. In 2005,
Ellen MacArthur held the world record for sailing a trimaran around the world in under 72 days; the youngest person to achieve the feat,
Jessica Watson, sailed a ten-meter sloop nearly twenty thousand miles in 210 days before she was seventeen.

Extreme cruising, whether alone around the world or aboard ship in polar seas, takes its inspiration from sentiments like Brett’s summons to people “of adventurous temperament,” but polar destinations were only opened by explorers of the nineteenth century. The Pacific remained the region of greatest interest to the British, French,
Russians, and, from the 1830s, Americans, but after 1815 there was a burst of comparatively quixotic
Arctic and Antarctic ventures motivated as much by national pride and personal vanity as by rational economic or political calculation. If the benefits were not immediately apparent, however, these voyages helped lay the foundations for the sorts of oceanographic research that remain the primary focus of maritime exploration today. The English had abandoned the search for a
Northwest Passage after a 1616 expedition by
William Baffin and
Robert Bylot (one of
Henry Hudson’s mutineers) to Lancaster Sound, north of Baffin Island, and
Hudson Bay. Inspired by favorable reports from whalers operating west of
Greenland, in 1818
John Ross renewed the quest from the Atlantic in the first of a series of expeditions that gradually penetrated the Canadian Arctic. Seven years later,
Frederick William Beechey sailed through the
Bering Strait to attempt the passage from west to east. But Arctic exploration reached its greatest intensity in the decade after the disappearance of Sir
John Franklin’s
Erebus
and
Terror,
when more than a dozen British and American ships searched for signs of the expedition, remains of which were found in 1854. The Northwest Passage remained impassable by boat until the Norwegian
Roald Amundsen pioneered the route in the twenty-one-meter sloop
Gjøa
in 1903–1906, a quarter century after
Adolf Nordenskiöld, a Swede, made the first transit of the
Northeast Passage from the
Barents Sea to the North Pacific.

The Antarctic continent was first spotted in 1820 by the Russian explorer
Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, followed the same year by the British
sealer
William Smith, sailing as pilot of a
Royal Navy ship, and the Connecticut sealer
Nathaniel Palmer. Sealers and whalers continued to visit Antarctica through the century, but no one stepped foot on the continent until 1895, when the Sixth
International Geographical Congress pronounced Antarctica “
the greatest piece of geographical exploration still to be undertaken.” Unlike the Arctic, which is an
ice-covered sea, Antarctica is an icebound continent, but navigating the coast required seamanship of an extraordinarily high caliber, epitomized in the unexampled small boat passages of Sir
Ernest Henry Shackleton after his ship,
Endurance,
was crushed by ice in the Weddell Sea in 1915.

Navigation around Antarctica and other newly discovered coasts proceeded hand-in-hand with painstaking and time-consuming coastal surveys. During his quarter century as
hydrographer of the navy (1826–51), Admiral Beaufort oversaw a complete resurvey of the
British Isles, as well as partial surveys of the Mediterranean and Arctic. Observations were not limited to oceanographic matters, and since the time of Cook and Bougainville, ethnography and the investigation of terrestrial flora and fauna had been routine if ancillary features of expeditions engaged in maritime exploration and coastal surveys. It was for just such work that the twenty-one-year-old botanist
Charles Darwin joined
HMS
Beagle
on the ship’s five-year survey of South American waters in the 1830s. Darwin’s close friend
Joseph D. Hooker, later director of the
Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, accompanied an expedition commanded by
James Clark
Ross, John Ross’s nephew, to locate the
South Magnetic Pole and undertake oceanographic, botanical, and zoological observations in and around
Tasmania,
New Zealand, and Antarctica.

In the early 1870s, the
Royal Society began pushing for a large-scale expedition to combine the various lines of inquiry that were coming to define the discipline of oceanography, a term coined by Maury in 1859. Commanded by Captain
George Strong Nares, the Royal Navy screw corvette
Challenger
was fitted with a wide array of equipment for measuring currents and the temperature of air and water, collecting bottom samples from depths of up to thirty-seven hundred meters, and taking soundings in depths up to eleven thousand meters. Over the course of three and a half years, the
Challenger
’s team of six civilian scientists discovered more than four thousand previously unknown specimens of marine animals and plants. In the twentieth century, the horizons of maritime exploration widened to embrace disciplines as diverse as physical, chemical, and biological oceanography, climatology, fisheries science, and commercial endeavors from oil exploration to undersea mining.

Although governments had stopped sponsoring voyages to the Arctic in the seventeenth century, Basque, Dutch, and English whalers had long been active in the waters of Newfoundland and the Arctic. Originally whaling was tied closely to shore stations where whale blubber was rendered into oil. Around 1750, the adoption of tryworks—iron cauldrons erected over fire pits for boiling blubber aboard ship—enabled whalers to remain at sea for months. This coincided with the start of the hunt for sperm whales, whose spermaceti produced a superior candle, and had considerable repercussions for the growth of the
Nantucket
whaling industry, which by 1775 boasted about three hundred ships that sailed as far as
Brazil and the
Falkland Islands.

The Nantucket whale fishery contracted severely during and after the American Revolution, while the British government began subsidizing whalers venturing to the South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. The start of the Pacific whale fishery started in 1787 when a British ship under a Nantucket captain began catching sperm whales off the coast of
Chile. Lacking opportunities at home, American captains commanded two-thirds of the British whalers in the southern fishery between 1788 and 1812, but the unsubsidized American whaling industry languished until after 1815. Within six years there were 120 U.S.-flag whaleships in the Pacific, most hailing from Nantucket, New Bedford, and other ports from southern New England and
Long Island. At the industry’s peak in the 1840s, the American whaling fleet numbered more than six hundred ships that routinely spent up to four years away from home, though they made periodic stops at
Hawaii,
Tahiti, and other ports to off-load their oil and obtain fresh provisions. By the 1840s, sperm whales were overfished but there was a flourishing market for the pliant whalebone—as a stiffener for corsets, in umbrellas, and for industrial brushes—from baleen whales, which filter food from the water with baleen plates, and the industry was rejuvenated by
Thomas Roys’s 1848 report of bowhead and right whales (both of which are baleen whales) in the
Bering Strait. Up to this point, whale oil had been widely used for lighting, although there were many cheaper fuels available, especially kerosene, which became widespread in the United States and Europe in the 1850s. But whale oil remained a constituent in lubricants, soaps, perfumes, and margarine, and by the twentieth century whales were threatened with extinction thanks to the development of ever more efficient means of hunting them. In 1937 nine nations “
desiring to secure the prosperity of the whaling industry and, for that purpose, to maintain the stock of whales” signed the
International Agreement for the Regulation of Whaling
and established an Antarctic whale sanctuary. Four decades later the
International Whaling Commission imposed a ban on commercial whaling, and vast whale sanctuaries now encompass the entire Indian Ocean and the waters surrounding
Antarctica.