marine literature

marine literature. ‘The history of the world’, wrote Thomas Carlyle, ‘is but the biography of great men’, and the same can be said of the history of ships and the sea. It is through the biographies and literature of the men who have lived and fought on the sea, and who have undertaken great voyages of exploration by sea, that we are able to chart the growth of the world as we know it today.

Early Literature.

Although the Phoenicians and the Egyptians were among the earliest known users of the sea, the Greeks were the first to write about it. Homer's heroic epics provide some of the earliest examples of sea literature we possess. The Romans, less romantic and more practical mariners, wrote comparatively little about it. Virgil (70–19 bc), who studied Greek, appears to have borrowed some of Homer's nautical genius for expression when writing about ships and the sea, but the inspiration which led Catullus (c.84–54 bc) to write in such moving terms about the laying up of an old ship is exceptional.

Though doughty seamen, the Norsemen were men of action rather than of literature, and the eddas and sagas which they have left us are more in the nature of mythological stories of war and adventure than historical records, though the adventures of Erik the Red and his son have been proved correct. The Welsh and the Irish had their sagas, too. The voyage of Maelduin, and certainly that of Madoc, are just fiction, but Navigatio Brendani, which describes the voyages of St Brendan, is probably based on fact. That greatest of English writers, Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1342–1400), was familiar with the sea. He translated a treatise on the astrolabe and ‘knew all about English merchant shipping in the 14th century’ ( R. Hope , A New History of British Shipping (1990), 46
), portraying the merchant in his Merchant's Tale as someone anxious to make sure the sea between East Anglia and the Low Countries was cleared of pirates.

Literature in the Age of Exploration.

In 1516 Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) published Utopia which, for all its limited scope, managed to include the drama of seafaring. The early seamen knew little of the art of writing and their accounts of their voyages deal less with the hardships of their passages across the ocean than with the wonders they discovered at their journey's end. The first records of such discoveries come from Portuguese and Spanish sources and these accounts provoked the English seamen to emulate them. Such were De Orbe Novo (c.1511) by Peter Martyr d'Anghiera (1457–1526) and the collection of voyages by Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485–1557) which began to appear in 1550. The doyen of English sea literature is Richard Eden (c.1512–76). In 1553 he translated Munster's Cosmography and in 1555 Peter Martyr's Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India, but he is chiefly remembered for his translation from the Spanish of Martin Cortes's Breve compendio de la sphera y de la arte de navegar (1551), which was published in English in 1561. As the practice of navigation in England at that time was almost non-existent, this book gave a tremendous fillip to English explorers.

Eden has been described as a forerunner of the great Richard Hakluyt to whom we owe an immense debt. Hakluyt rummaged through extant accounts of voyages, examining the papers of shipowners, merchants, and travellers, and was ably assisted in his work by Sir Walter Raleigh. It was characteristic of him to include in his great anthology the first piece of naval propaganda of which we have knowledge, the anonymous 15th-century poem ‘Libelle of Englysshe Policie’. Among the memorable pieces of narrative literature he preserved was the account of the last voyage of Sir Humphrey Gilbert (c.1539–83) in the Squirrel when, on his way home from founding the colony of Newfoundland, the little ship sank in a storm.

Hakluyt's successor, though not so gifted, was the English priest Samuel Purchas (c.1575–1626) who, as a friend of Hakluyt, inherited the vast collection of manuscripts Hakluyt was working on when he died. Some of this great collection was published by Purchas in five folio volumes in 1626 under the title Hakluytus Posthumous, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, but sadly they lack the perfection of editing which Hakluyt brought to his work. Purchas was an indifferent editor and he mutilated and garbled many of the accounts of voyages that Hakluyt had collected. Indeed, some were contracted to a degree which defies understanding, and some were accompanied by foolish editorial comment. Nevertheless, the Pilgrimes do contain the first accounts of voyages and travels that cannot be found elsewhere, and as such have an important place in English maritime literature. In the later part of the 17th century we find greater notice being taken of personnel problems and the manning and working of ships. Typical of these is Captain John Smith's An Accidence or the Path-way to Experience Necessary for All Young Seamen, or Those that are Desirous to go to Sea (1626), reprinted in 1627 as A Sea Grammar and reprinted many times.

The search for the North-West Passage produced a literature of its own and during the reign of Charles I, when the British Navy was allowed to run down, attempts were made by writers like Sir Henry Mainwaring (1587–1653) and Captain Nathaniel Boteler (c.1577–c.1643) to remind their countrymen of its abiding importance. Mainwaring compiled the influential The Seaman's Dictionary (1644) and Boteler is best remembered for A Dialogicall Discourse (1634) in which an admiral and a captain discuss a large variety of subjects connected with ships and the sea. These six dialogues provide an interesting insight into the terms and customs of the British Navy at that time, and were reproduced by the Navy Records Society in 1929.

The last two centuries have produced some outstanding writing on life at sea, from war biographies and autobiographies to the adventures of modern cruising and racing circumnavigators. It is somewhat invidious to name names as there are so many but Richard Dana's Two Years before the Mast, Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone around the World, Frederick William Wallace's Under Sail in the Last of the Clippers, Francis Chichester's The Lonely Sea and the Sky, and Eric Newby's The Last Grain Race must be essential reading for anyone interested in the sea.

Drama and Poetry.

A wealth of folklore and superstition connected with the sea had accumulated from time immemorial and this began to appear in literature, and in some of the plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) who seems to have been very well acquainted with them. His most nautical play is, of course, The Tempest, for which he is said to have derived the inspiration from the wrecking of Sir George Somers's ship Sea Venture on the Bermudas in 1609. However, generally speaking there are comparatively few theatrical works with a marine setting until Gilbert and Sullivan's light-hearted naval satire HMS Pinafore, first produced in 1878.

The influence of the sea is also revealed in the poetry of Edmund Spenser (1552–99), John Donne (1572–1631), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) who wrote ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Later, it is most apparent in the sea songs and shanties of the days of the square-rigger and through the patriotic verse of Sir Henry Newbolt (1862–1938) and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). Newbolt is perhaps best known for his famous poems ‘Drake's Drum’ and ‘Fighting Téméraire’, while Kipling's prodigious output included a considerable amount of poetry as well as prose about the sea and seamen. Of a later generation, John Masefield is perhaps the most outstanding.

Less famous poets were equally inspired by the sea. Just one example of their work are the evocative lines that appear in Frederick William Wallace's Under Sail in the Last of the Clippers, published in 1936:Aloft the ship they burn
Down through the cloudless ether
Through blue immensity to us;
From nadir to zenith, a mighty dome.
Of spangled worlds like diamond dust—
Awesome, inspiring, tremendous!
When day has fled
And we stem the wide sea-paths,
We note and mark them well.
Observed, through countless miles of space,
Our place upon the watery waste
These stellar mile-posts tell.
The seaman knows them,
Vega, Sirius, Aldebaran,
Capella, Rigel, Deneb, Mars,
Friends of many a lonely watch
At wheel, lookout, and pacing the deck,
Under the stars.
As in benediction hung,
The Northern Cross above us swings
Across the azure dark.
Castor and Pollux by the tops'l leach shines bright,
And Procyon beams
'Neath the fores'l's swelling arc.
Betelgeuse and Bellatrix
From Orion's lordly constellation
To starboard scintillates.
Dubhe and Merak point the way
To where Polaris marks the magnet point
Which compass indicates.
The black sails swing
Athwart the twinkling lights,
Holding the seaman's soul in thrall.
When winds are soft and South
He meditates, and awed reflects
On him who made them all.
The best-known couplet concerned with the sea was written by Mrs Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) and comes from her ballad ‘Casabianca’, first published in 1829. This immortalizes 10-year-old Jacques Casabianca who refused to leave the side of his father when the Frenchman's ship was set ablaze by the British during the battle of the Nile (1798). It begins:The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled.

Novelists of the Sea.

The earliest English novelist of the sea must surely be Daniel Defoe (c.1660–1731), a political pamphleteer and journalist, and it is as the author of Robinson Crusoe (1719) that he enters the maritime story. He also wrote several other novels connected with the sea: Adventures of Captain Singleton (1720), which relates, in the first person, how Singleton is kidnapped in his infancy, is sent to sea, takes part in a mutiny, engages in piracy, and finally acquires great wealth; A New Voyage round the World (1724), which appeared anonymously and though fiction was at first accepted as true; and The Four Voyages of Capt. George Roberts (1726).

Tobias George Smollett (1721–71) has been described as the first novelist of the British Navy and the literary father of the ‘British tar’. He enlisted as a surgeon's mate and sailed for the West Indies during the War of the Austrian Succession (1739–48). After experiencing the abortive attack on Cartagena in 1741 he returned to London in 1744 where he practised as a surgeon, and began to write novels. His first was The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) in which he drew upon his personal experiences at Cartagena and to which we owe today much of our knowledge about the British naval seaman at that time. It also introduced the well-known naval character of Lieutenant Tom Bowling.

However, it was not until the first half of the 19th century that the sea novelist proper appeared in the persons of Captain Frederick Marryat and the Frenchman Eugène Sue (1804–57), the latter's novel Kernok the Pirate being considered by many to be the prototype for maritime fiction. It is necessary to distinguish between authors whose books deal with adventures of the sea and those who treat of the sea itself, as does Herman Melville in his famous novel Moby-Dick. Joseph Conrad followed along the course set by these pioneers in the realm of sea fiction, though he preferred to think of himself as a writer and not merely a novelist of the sea. His contemporary W. W. Jacobs (1863–1943), whose first book, a collection of short stories, Many Cargoes, was published in 1896, created for his readers a world peopled with sailors of a markedly humorous type.

Amongst 20th-century maritime novelists of note were C. S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian, who both wrote series of novels set during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815); Arthur Ransome; and Richard Hughes (1900–76), whose In Hazard (1938) rivals Conrad's Typhoon in portraying a ship's struggle to survive a tropical storm. The Second World War (1939–45) produced some exceptional novels of warfare at sea, The Cruel Sea (1951) by Nicholas Monsarrat (1910–79) and The Caine Mutiny (1952) by Herman Wouk (b. 1915) being two of the most popular. Nor must The Riddle of the Sands be overlooked, for it is as widely read today as it was when it was first published over a century ago.

Naval History.

The naval historian is of comparatively recent origin, though Herodotus (484–424 bc) includes in the wide sweep of his histories descriptions of warfare at sea such as the battle of Salamis. The great diarist Samuel Pepys, whose record of naval administration during his period of office is unique, does not fall into this category either. In fact, no attempt seems to have been made to separate naval history from the general chronicle of events until the French writers the Comte de Gueydon (1809–86) and Eugène Sue attempted to do so. De Gueydon, a student of naval warfare, wrote several penetrating analyses on the subject, including The Truth about the Navy (1849) and Naval Tactics (1868) while Sue wrote a history of the French Navy in five volumes.

It was the American naval officer Rear Admiral Mahan and his English contemporary Sir John Laughton (1830–1915) who set the pattern for writing naval history which others were to follow, in not only chronicling it but expounding the lessons to be learned from a study of it. Their successors included such well-known historians as Arthur Marder and Sir Herbert Richmond (1871–1946). Mention must also be made of the official historians Samuel Eliot Morison (1887–1976) and Stephen Roskill (1903–83). The former chronicled the operations of the US Navy during the Second World War (1939–45) in fifteen volumes; the latter those of the Royal Navy in three volumes.

Technical Literature.

Ships have always attracted writers who liked to describe the way in which ships were built, and detail their rigging and armament, and how they fought. The earliest of these date from the first half of the 17th century and they had numerous followers during later years. One of the most remarkable of them was the English-born Frederik Hendrik af Chapman (1721–1808), who emigrated to Sweden in 1715 and eventually became chief constructor of the Swedish Navy. His books, which include Architectura Navalis Mercatoria (1768), A Treatise on Ship Building (1775), On Ships' Sails (1793), On Handling Ships (1794), and On War Ships (1804), made a long-lasting impact on the future of naval architecture and dockyard practice. Also worthy of mention are John Charnock (1756–1807), whose beautifully illustrated three-volume History of Marine Architecture (1801) also had considerable influence on contemporary ship design, and the Frenchman Auguste Jal (1795–1875), whose great dictionary Glossaire nautique (1848) is still considered one of the main authorities on the seamanship of the period, as is the earlier An Universal Dictionary of the Marine (1768) by William Falconer (1732–69). Nor must be forgotten the internationally recognized German marine architect Henry Paasch (c.1840–c.1900), whose Illustrated Marine Dictionary (1885) and From Keel to the Masthead (1890) proved so popular that a facsimile edition in English of the former was published as late as 1977, while the latter went into four editions and was translated into five languages. The Naval and Shipping Annual founded by Earl Brassey (1836–1918) in 1889 carried technical information of this kind into the 20th century before being succeeded by a host of other technical books. The best known of these is probably the annual All the World's Fighting Ships by F. T. Jane (1865–1916). It is still published today and has its rivals in France, Germany, Italy, and the USA.

Bibliography

Obin, A. , The Bibliography of Nautical Books (1996).