[In the following essay, Springer surveys the maritime history of the United States and provides an overview of the beginnings of American sea literature.]

I. HISTORY

… In their westward movement, starting before there was even an “America” in human consciousness, Europeans encountered the seas that led to the New World and then later helped to define it. The Atlantic, the world's stormiest ocean, was, very early in modern European history, an economic and cultural focus—as it had long been for the fishing and whaling “Indians” on the other side. Next met, though we tend to forget them, were the freshwater seas of the Great Lakes, each of which, Rudyard Kipling remarked, is a “fully accredited ocean.” This phenomenon, like the salt sea, inspired much legendary and mythological literary expression from Native Americans, as it later astonished and attracted European adventurers, settlers, and their own imaginations. Then (with its own indigenous North American sea cultures) came the immense Pacific, 25 percent larger than all the world's land masses combined—a challenge to trade and exploration, but also the liquid wall against which the westwardly realizing United States found the literal and symbolic end of its land frontier—until Alaska and Hawaii once again added new shores to the American map.

These bodies of water have been powerfully influential on the history of this continent and this country. The literary historian must keep in mind the discovery, exploration, exploitation, and settlement of North America by the English, Spanish, French, and Dutch, among others, and the subsequent experiences of three hundred years of immigration to them (both voluntary and forced) by ship. Comprised in this history are the American industries of the sea such as fishing, whaling, shipbuilding, and transportation; indispensible commerce with other countries and among the states; extensive exploration by sea, both governmental and private; naval actions; and the more lurid smuggling, slaving, and piracy. The following historical overview leans toward seeing that history in terms of its intersections with American literary expression.

The maritime heritage of the United States had its origins in New England. Most of the early settlers apparently had had more than enough of the ocean during their passage to the New World, though some had turned that passage into narratives, sermons, and poems emphasizing the glory, the horror, and the well-nigh eschatological power of the sea as seen from the perspective of those in its “bosom” or conversely its grip. But the difficulties of transplanting English agricultural life in stony New England and the long experience of their culture with maritime endeavor meant that some turned, in one way or another, back to the sea. For many decades thereafter, while settlement hugged the Atlantic shore, the economies of the colonies and the states that succeeded them were heavily, though to varying degrees, dependent on the sea: on the shipbuilders who got from the thick northern forests the materials for an industry that sold its products both domestically and abroad; on the import-export merchants, among whose accomplishments was the clever Triangle Trade (the first of several similarly named patterns), in which the American colonists began to declare their independence by evading British laws; on the whalers who kept the oil lamps fed; on ships and seamen, mostly from New England, who took materials to market and imported goods from Europe; on the fishermen who supplied larger and larger markets for fresh, dried, and salted fish. Fishing, the oldest of New England's maritime enterprises, was particularly important, as testified to by the name of Cape Cod, of course, and by the wooden codfish that has hung in the Massachusetts legislature since 1784. Later, in the nineteenth century, aided by icing and the development of railroad transport, fresh mackerel, haddock, halibut, herring (sardines), and shellfish, brought in by New England boats, joined cod as fundamental products in the region's economy. The many active New England ports of the period, with their web of sea-related enterprises, stood in contrast to the few more southerly ones, testifying to the region's primacy in maritime endeavor. Here developed, along the shores as well as among seafarers themselves, a maritime culture—always predominantly male, but incorporating over time the work and the words of women too.

The end of the colonial era and the beginning of the national period, 1775-1815, has traditionally been called by maritime historians the “heroic age.” For a third of it the United States was at war with Great Britain; for most of the rest of it other wars made the Atlantic unsafe far beyond the risks of its formidable natural hazards and the absence of aids to navigation—a combination that in retrospect seems well summed up in Philip Freneau's formulation: “dread Neptune's wild, unsocial sea.” Thomas Jefferson's Embargo of 1807, which prohibited foreign trade by American ships, though modeled on two previous American trade embargoes and seen by the Jeffersonians as the only feasible alternative to war, created disastrous conditions for the American marine and caused political upheaval in Federalist New England. In the War of 1812 the British navy effectively interfered with most American nautical endeavor, including coasting and fishing. Even John Jacob Astor's attempt to dominate the trade in furs with China by establishing a depot in the Pacific Northwest (the history of which was later written by Washington Irving in Astoria, 1836) failed because of the war.

The difficulties of the period led to Americans' using many ruses, and to their seeking new cargoes, new trading partners in exotic countries. Their efforts to overcome the formidable military and political obstacles, in addition to the hazards of unknown coasts, new languages, and strange cultures, meant that for many the maritime enterprise of the period required heroic effort. The sea novels of James Fenimore Cooper are now our most accessible literary windows into some nautical aspects of this era, but many other narratives, fictional and otherwise, were popular at the time. For example, there was Archibald Duncan's Mariner's Chronicle, Being a Collection of the Most Interesting Narratives of Shipwrecks, Fires, Famines, and Other Calamities Incident to the Life of Maritime Enterprise, a four-volume work originally published in 1804, which one Richard Manning, around 1832, gave his nephew Nathaniel Hawthorne (whose own sea-captain father had died of disease when on a voyage), and Hawthorne then gave his friend Herman Melville.

Within this forty-year heroic age occurred the period of “neutral shipping” (1793-1807), during which the long-lived U.S. role as shipper to the world really began. War between England and France had resulted in a blockaded Continent. American shipowners found ways around the restrictive rules of the time, and as neutrals in the war, made large profits supplying such goods as sugar and coffee. Increasing trade called for more and larger ships, as well as larger quantities of supplies and provisions, so ports and secondary maritime activities all along the eastern seaboard grew and throve.

The “golden age” of American maritime activity is the romanticized term generally given to the period from 1815 to 1860. In the years following the War of 1812, all aspects of American maritime activity developed, expanded, and in some cases boomed. For example, packet ships of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s sailed for England and Europe on schedule regardless of weather. Charles Dickens, who crossed on the George Washington in 1842, wrote that “the noble American vessels have made their packet service the finest in the world.” A larger number of packets, steamers, and tramps plied the extensive coastal routes from Bangor to New Orleans, trading such commodities as lumber and cotton. The fishing fleets continued to expand, harvesting the rich resources not only off their coasts but also, in the case of the sealing and whaling industries, at great distances from their home ports. American ships also searched for business virtually all over the world, competing for cargoes of pepper from Sumatra, figs from Smyrna, and trying new enterprises—ginseng to China, furs and sealskins for many markets, ice to South America, India, Asia. In a midcentury story by Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Deacon Pitkin's Farm,” the possibilities of seafaring for young America are imagined this way: A young man without prospects runs off to sea on the Eastern Star, East Indiaman out of Salem. A friend gives him fifty dollars to invest, confessing that he wanted to go himself, but his wife would not hear of it. The sweetheart left behind says, “Oh that horrid, horrid sea! It's like death—wide, dark, stormy, unknown. We cannot speak to or hear from them that are on it.” But after seven years, and the reported loss of the ship, the bronzed and matured adventurer comes back rich to save the family farm and marry the sweetheart. So went the ideology of youthful American enterprise in its maritime form.

Not surprisingly, the reality was rather different, and more complex. Seeking hides to supply the Massachusetts leather goods industry, ships went all the way around the Horn to Mexican California—as did the Boston brig Pilgrim in 1832, with Richard Henry Dana, Jr. among its crew. The profits of the voyage included Dana's improved health and Two Years Before the Mast, which created a virtual literary genre—the “voice from the forecastle” narrative—in which the American history of seafaring intersects with the literature of the United States under the heading of labor and management. The tales told by sailors such as Dana, followed by Melville and many others, have proved to be far more engaging reading than the usually prosaic and self-justifying, little-known accounts by officers in command of ships, military or civilian—and accord with the long story of labor exploitation usually told by the historian. Well into the twentieth century it was a legal maxim, generally agreed with even by civilian seamen, that unquestioning obedience to authority was essential to life and safety at sea. But under several pressures, particularly those for profits during the “golden age” and afterward, that authority was repeatedly abused. The numerous stories told by these authors, of unfair and brutal conditions of employment such as deprivation, bad food, denial of contractual rights, arbitrary authority, and physical punishment (including flogging) for even minor failings, turn out to be essentially true—highlighted by notable exceptions. The merchant seaman, for most of American history, lived in a state somewhere between indentured servitude and outright slavery. A green hand might ship out filled with the romance of seafaring, but the euphoria probably disappeared in almost no time—as it does (fictionalized) in Melville's Redburn:

Yes! yes! give me this glorious ocean life, this salt-sea life, this briny, foamy life, when the sea neighs and snorts, and you breathe the very breath that the great whales respire! Let me roll around the globe, let me rock upon the sea; let me race and pant out my life with an eternal breeze astern and an endless sea before!

Miserable dog's life is this of the sea! commanded like a slave, and set to work like an ass! vulgar and brutal men lording it over me, as if I were an African in Alabama. Yes, yes, blow on, ye breezes, and make a speedy end to this abominable voyage!

(ch. 13)

Legislation to remedy this virtual slavery was late, and weak in effect. It lagged far behind the efforts of seaman-organizers such as James Williams, whose African-American heritage no doubt exacerbated his indignation at the wage-slavery under which working seamen like himself were held. Not until the La Follette Act of 1915 were common sailors given legal freedom. Collective bargaining ultimately benefited many seamen, but even those efforts contributed in their own way to the general decline of the national marine. More recently, the failures of government, industry, and labor, as well as certain obvious developments such as air travel, have perpetuated the problems. Nowadays, as we can see by reading John McPhee's Looking for a Ship, a few seamen can make good money in an apparently moribund industry.

During that so-called golden age, American shippers continued to transport new immigrants, particularly Irish and Germans. But not all of those who arrived in American ports were there by choice. Slavers went on plying the “Middle Passage” as they had been doing since the early seventeenth century, illegally supplying the demand for forced labor, while Frederick Douglass, who later wrote of the galling contrast between the freedom of ships before the wind and his own enslavement, escaped from bondage disguised as a free sailor.

If we can say that the American seaman was for many years a virtual slave at sea, that comparison is made possible by our knowledge of the real thing, and of what made it possible. Slaving—the details of which make a horrifying chapter in American maritime history—was a business in which up to 50 percent of Africans being transported to America died at sea. The first African slaves came to North America in 1619, brought by a Dutch ship to the Jamestown colony. The Desire of Salem, the earliest-known American slave ship, took a cargo of Pequot Indians to the West Indies in 1638 and returned with some Africans. During the remainder of the colonial period, importation steadily increased, primarily to fill the need for labor on tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations, and then for harvesting cotton—until the slave population of the colonies totaled about half a million. For most of its history, slaving was not the specialty or sole business of certain shady American merchants or captains, as one may perhaps imagine today. Rather, large numbers of ships, widely owned, often carried partial cargoes of slaves. Though slavery was concentrated in the South, the deep involvement of New England shippers in buying and transporting cargoes of Africans cuts away any putative Northern moral high ground.

After independence, opposition to the trade in people increased—along with the numbers imported. Responding to the growing revulsion, even the merchants of Rhode Island, who had led the colonies in ownership of vessels engaged in the slave trade, shifted more and more to other enterprises. By 1808 importation was illegal; by 1820 transporting slaves was defined as piracy. But American enforcement of these salutary laws was lax, and some slaving continued up to the Civil War. Only one man was ever executed for violating the antitrafficking laws, while many other ship captains and owners managed to avoid the prohibitions against interstate transport of slaves. Though many African slaves were directly imported, perhaps a larger number came to the American colonies from the West Indies, where they were “seasoned”—beaten or otherwise forced into submission. The voyage from Africa to the Caribbean (frequently the second leg of a triangular trade that began in New England with a cargo of rum for Africa and concluded with a passage from the islands with sugar and molasses destined for New England distilleries) became known as the “Middle Passage,” a term that has more recently been taken to mean the forced trip from Africa to America by whatever route. It is memorialized in some slave narratives, and in Alex Haley's Roots, but brilliantly evoked in Robert Hayden's poem “Middle Passage” and imagined most recently in Charles Johnson's National Book Award-winning novel of the same name.

One reason slavers were able to go about their awful business as long as they did is that they employed fast vessels that, after the belated outlawing of their trade, frequently outran the navy ships pursuing them. Fortunately for national pride, though, the American reputation for speedy ships does not rest on slaving. Beginning with its packet ships, reaching an apogee in the midcentury clipper ship, and concluding with the large Down-Easters of the later nineteenth century, the United States developed and retained a reputation for building and sailing many of the fastest windships in the world—though it lagged behind others in seeing the inevitable triumph of iron and steel over wood, and of steam over sail. Before the Civil War, the development of the admired and imitated American clipper ship, largely for the China and California trades, brought great wealth to canny merchants, reputation to the national merchant marine, fame and fortune to some very skillful builders and ship captains—and a wealth of experience (as many later proudly wrote) in the school of very hard knocks for the deep-water sailor.

The epitome of the search for speed under sail was the full-rigged clipper ship (so named, supposedly, because it traveled at a fast “clip,” or because it “clipped” the waves rather than pushed through them, or simply because the word denoted streamlining), whose racy lines, daringly lofty masts, and astonishing spread of canvas declared its intention. Responding to the economic demands of the China tea trade, and the California and Australia gold rushes, it was at the height of its glory in the 1840s and 1850s—though building primarily for speed did continue up to the 1870s. The clipper, most notably from the Boston yard of Donald McKay, comes down to us in the words and pictures of contemporaries as a model of beauty and elegance (Samuel Eliot Morison called it our Rheims and our Parthenon), and has often been seen—probably romanticized—as the embodiment of “splendid overreaching.” Though steamships had preceded the clippers, they could not carry enough coal to make the longest voyages; nor, until many years after the clipper era, reach the best speeds set by windships such as Champion of the Seas, which maintained a never-equaled twenty-knot average during one twenty-four-hour period, or the other ships that set records on a variety of passages and whose vaunting names included Westward Ho, Flying Cloud, Stag Hound, Comet, and Young America.

The clippers, sailed around the ferocious Capes Horn and Good Hope to the limits of their physical endurance (and that of their crews) by hard-driving skippers, did not last long under such strain. Furthermore, when demand for speed slackened, they could no longer command the high freight rates that justified their costs of construction and operation, and the reduced carrying capacity of their sharp hulls. Finally, the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, definitively ended the clipper domination of the China tea trade. Because of the reputation of those great ships, though, the name “clipper” retained enough potency to make it a seductive appellation of American commercial airliners—meant to connote the beauty and speed of airships.

Not all sailing ships strove for speed, of course. Among those with bluff, rounded bows, and limited spread of canvas, one class was easily distinguishable to a casual eye by the boats hung in davits along their bulwarks. These were whalers. Though fishing probably mattered more to more people than whaling ever did, and though scholars suggest that Banks fishing was more hazardous than whaling, it is the whale hunt that lives in the American imagination as the distinctive national maritime endeavor of the nineteenth century. The fact that whaling is now probably the best-known maritime activity of the past is probably because of Moby-Dick alone, and that book may also be the source of today's inaccurate, romantic picture of whaling, a picture in which men seek out the whaling ports, abandoning the dull and dulling life in the stony fields, behind the shop counters, or in the factories of New England, to strike out for the eternal sea, where they pit themselves, puny human beings, against the leviathan, in an exciting epitome of The Hunt. In fact, most whalers went to sea as untried youths, and if they too had such romantic notions, they probably soon lost them. The life they led was at best monotonous, dirty, brutal, and very low-paid—so much so, that except for the officer class, young white New Englanders tended to make only one voyage before giving up on whaling, leaving the field more and more to a mixture of free blacks, Indians, and the foreign-born. At worst, it was a hellish existence from which an unlucky or improvident seaman could return after three or four years at sea actually owing money to his employers.

What made whaling a large and often hugely profitable industry (for the owners, captains, and merchants, that is) was the importance of whale products, mainly for illumination, but for other widespread uses as well. The best of the refined oil produced a clear, bright lamplight; spermacetti, a component of sperm whale oil, made the very best candles; machinery of all sorts in an industrializing America depended on whale oil for lubrication; “whalebone” from the baleen plates of the right and humpback supplied corset stays, buggy whips, and umbrella ribs; and ambergris from the intestines of certain diseased whales, a large lump of which could be more valuable than a full hold of oil, was the base of fine perfumes.

When Herman Melville sailed aboard the Acushnet of Fairhaven in 1841, the United States was the world's foremost whaling nation. It remained so up to the Civil War. One measure of that preeminence is the fact that American whale ships found and put down on the charts more places than did the Great U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838-42. In midcentury, New Bedford, with more than three hundred ships, became the world's most active whaling port, eclipsing Nantucket (the Pequod's home), which had, more than a century earlier, learned how to make a profitable business of sperm whaling, and which, as early as 1775, had a fleet of 150 whale ships—though during the Revolution and then the War of 1812 the independent Quaker whalers of the island saw most of their ships destroyed. Despite such depredations, the fishery boomed from 1830 to 1860, but by the time of the Civil War, overfishing had caused a strong decline. The industry was really doomed by the combined effects of the war, disasters (such as the destruction of thirty-two ships of the Arctic fleet by ice in 1871), and, mainly, the commercially successful extraction and refining of petroleum beginning in 1859—though the last whaling voyage in a wooden ship, the schooner John R. Manta, began, from New Bedford, in 1925. The last modern American factory-ship whaler did not go out of operation until after World War II. In the decades since then, the United States has played a rather inconsistent role in the world as both a defender of the great cetaceans against extinction and a politically cautious defender of the harvesting rights of whaling countries.

Throughout the nineteenth century, and even after the end of the age of sail, many published narratives of whaling and commercial voyages and other records of personal maritime experience (large numbers still in manuscript) enriched the American historical and literary record. For one thing, inspired by the extraordinary accomplishments of Captain Cook's three voyages (1768-79), by national pride, and by economic hopes, the United States sent out several notable exploring ventures, public and private, published accounts of which were very popular. (Edgar Allan Poe attempted to capitalize on that popularity with his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.) Not only did unprecedented numbers of educated men go to sea and then seek to tell their tales to a large audience apparently much interested in them, and not only did even the minimally educated attempt to speak from the quarterdeck as well as from before the mast, but women too left us their visions of sea and self. Usually the wives of sea captains, they accompanied their husbands on uncounted whaling voyages and many commercial ones as well, writing accounts in which we can read variant versions of nautical experience and in which we can see the social and literary construction of gender under circumstances seldom found ashore.

While sail was supreme, the ports of Boston and New York, aided by river and canal networks, produced those great cities (not coincidentally the nation's literary centers). The well-known maritime foundations of their growth are evident in the metaphorical language of writers such as Thoreau, Emerson, James, Wharton. In the Deep South were Savannah, Charleston, and New Orleans, cultural centers in their own right, largely shipping cotton. In tonnage owned, though, right after Boston and New York came Philadelphia and Baltimore. But mere rank does not give an accurate picture of relative commercial importance: cargoes between New York and Liverpool alone exceeded all others. Washington Irving sailed early in the century as a cabin passenger on that route, embroidering the experience in his essay “The Voyage.” Melville sailed it before the mast, and Redburn was the result.

Ports, and the fortunes of their cities, waxed and waned during the period. Samuel Eliot Morison notes that Salem, long active in the China and Africa trade (though not slaving), left the roster of important seaports only in 1845, the year Nathaniel Hawthorne was appointed to his custom house post there. Under the conditions of declining commerce, Hawthorne, having little official work to do, made good use of his time in conceiving The Scarlet Letter. West Coast shipping, fishing, sealing, and whaling did develop during the period, though some of those activities matured only later in the century. The importance of the maritime in national thinking was demonstrated by the acquisition of the Oregon territory, sought in part because of access to the Pacific and trade with the Orient. San Francisco, though, with its huge natural advantages as a harbor and its soon-developed port facilities, dominated on the West Coast. Its growth from such activities explains its ability to support the work of journalists such as Bret Harte and Mark Twain, as well as pointing to the subject matter repeatedly chosen by its native Jack London.

As the long, long age of sail waned, the era of the windjammers succeeded that of the packets and clippers. Much larger square-rigged ships, usually of iron and steel and foreign-built (except for the wooden, Maine-built Down-Easters), generally limited in routes to the very longest and cargoes whose value would not permit the expense of coal for steam shipping, they were the last of the great windships, and shared the seas with steamers well into the twentieth century (a fact reflected, for example, in the plays of Eugene O'Neill and in Mark Helprin's “Letters from the Samantha”), though steam became the mode of virtually all shipping late in the nineteenth. Apparently originating as a term of denigration suggesting that these ships could not effectively trim to the wind but had to “jam” themselves into it, “windjammer” became a designation of pride for ships whose size and strong construction produced many impressive passages.

The inevitable end of windships for military and commercial purposes had been signaled long before the windjammer era: regular Atlantic crossings under continuous steam power had been available in the 1840s. Economics, aided by traditional thinking, however, kept sailships in the van until the weight of technological advances guaranteed first the ubiquity of steamships, and later their replacement by diesel-powered vessels. The Panama Railway (1855), the effects of the Civil War, the Suez Canal (1869), the Transcontinental Railway (1869), and the opening of the Panama Canal (1914), accompanied great improvements in marine power plants and, ultimately, worldwide availability of fuel for them. These factors definitively changed American maritime experience. For one thing, the huge waves of immigration from southern and eastern Europe came by steamship. Those immigrants had a shorter, safer voyage than their Irish, German, and Scandinavian predecessors. They were probably not aware of the difference or thankful for it, but the merchant seaman was aware, and, if we can believe those who have written most convincingly on it, not thankful at all. One view of that change appears in O'Neill's “The Hairy Ape,” where Paddy says, “'Twas them days men belonged to ships, not now. 'Twas them days a ship was part of the sea, and a man was part of the ship, and the sea joined all together and made it one.”

While O'Neill could still write of the “beauty and singing rhythm of the sea,” to him and to others the ship propelled by mechanical force controlled the sailor, rather than vice versa, and they saw in that a representation of industrial America. In the minds of many who knew the sea, the possibilities for self-realization, for the enactment of voyages of self-discovery and maturation were terribly diminished. But these historical changes also motivated a resurgence of sea fiction by working seamen.

Meanwhile, as the twentieth century approached and fewer and fewer Americans made their livings by the sea, another sort of sea-focused literature was being written—along the Atlantic shores for the most part—as resorts and vacation communities drew many urban business people and intellectuals, most notably women of letters, to the economically depressed seaside. There is where we find, in fact and in many of their writings, Kate Chopin, Elizabeth Stoddard, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others. Of course, as the twentieth century progressed (though interrupted by two wars and a severe economic depression) the shift of the sea context from business to pleasure only increased, until now the phrase “the sea” evokes for many Americans the beach, the marina, the yacht club, the cruise ship, and sport fishing. These too have had their own literary expression, which continues to reach a popular audience.

Until the Civil War, then, the American maritime enterprise had grown and prospered for several reasons, including favorable conditions for shipbuilding, certain natural advantages, entrepreneurial boldness, immigration, national expansion to the West Coast, boom times such as the gold rush, and general growth of worldwide shipping in the mid-nineteenth century. In the years just before the war, American-owned ships carried close to 75 percent of the country's foreign trade. But by the end of that war, the figure had dropped to 25 percent. The merchant marine story since then has been seen by historians as rather dismal: some call the period from the Civil War to World War I the “dark age,” and except under the impetus of war, the peaceful American marine has diminished ever since. The largest reason for the decline was probably economic self-sufficiency: plenty of native raw materials, steadily increasing domestic manufacture of goods formerly imported, domestic consumption (by a rapidly growing population) of most farm products. Then, too, favorable opportunities for landward investment, especially in industry, drew capital away from shipping. So the country “focused inward,” as one maritime historian says, relying more and more on foreign vessels for its foreign trade. The United States, though still heavily dependent on the ship (oil imports come readily to mind), is now, in ownership of vessels, one of the lesser maritime nations in the world—except for its redoubtable navy, of course.

In all the periods of American maritime history, the strength or weakness of the country as a naval power has not only been significant to its general history, but also has found its way into the national literature. The exploits of John Paul Jones, the defeat of pirates (Barbary and others), the long history of Old Ironsides, the “opening” of Japan, the exploring expeditions commanded by naval officers, the destruction of the Maine, the Great White Fleet, Pearl Harbor, the Normandy invasion. … From Cooper's naval novels and Melville's White-Jacket and Israel Potter, through Richard McKenna's Sand Pebbles, Edward L. Beach's Run Silent, Run Deep, Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny, Marcus Goodrich's Delilah, to William Brinkley's Last Ship and Thomas Clancy's Hunt for Red October, a naval story, often based on the author's experience, has frequently had well-received (or belatedly praised) literary treatment. In presenting their military subject matter, these works frequently engage troubling questions of rank, privilege, and competence as seen in the context of a democratic nation. Looking at history nonfictionally, an entirely different sort of book, Alfred Thayer Mahan's Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), had a powerful influence of its own on American policy, justifying the imperialistic extension of our hegemony to Cuba, the Philippines, and further.

Boom or bust, war or peace, to remember the role of the sea in the economic and cultural life of the United States is fundamental to examining literary seafaring. …

II. HOLISTICALLY SPEAKING

When did American sea literature itself begin? The oral literature of Native Americans preceded any European expression, of course. Widespread among the tribes, from east to west, were myths of creation out of the great waters—often the myth of the earth-diver who brought up from the bottom of the deep and ubiquitous sea the tiny bit of earth or sand from which the dry land was formed. In addition, among the coastal peoples (as might be expected) tales tended to reflect their environment, their location by “the river with one bank”; so allusions to sea creatures, as to whaling and fishing, were apparently common.

The exploits of Koluscap (or Gluscap), culture-hero of the Micmacs, Passamaquoddies, and other eastern tribes, include supplying the pipe the whale smokes, and tricking a particular whale into bringing him ashore, though she strands herself. On the Oregon coast the trickster Coyote is the subject of many stories, including those about his establishing the salmon-fishing rituals. There is the Tillamook tale of South Wind marrying the daughter of Ocean, “the chief of chiefs”; the Chinook story of the monster that causes the roaring out beyond the surf; the Coos tale of the woman who married a merman … (Coyote Was Going There).

Not all Native American oral literature (no matter how local its subject) is completely indigenous, while some stories, east and west, explicitly tell of contact with others from across the sea. Showing possible Scandinavian influence, for example, is a Passamaquoddy tale of two sisters who became mermaids (Leland, Algonquin Legends). A particularly interesting contact account is the Tillamook tale of “The Journey Across the Ocean,” suggesting visitors from Asia in a sailing ship, possible return visits by Native Americans, and an intermarriage. And another story from the Oregon coast records, from the perspective of the inhabitants, the visit of the first ship to the land of the Clatsop people. They destroyed it (Coyote Was Going There).

In looking for the beginnings of American sea literature from the dominant European perspective, we can point to the journals, sermons, narratives, and poems of the earliest settlers and would-be settlers of the new western world, often written at sea, and powerfully marked by their experience of water without end and tempests of apparently eschatological strength. But in some ways more appropriate is an earlier story. Homeward bound after 160 days at sea, including those spent in the unwitting discovery of a new world, Christopher Columbus ran into a full gale south of Flores, westernmost of the Azores, and very nearly foundered. Fearing less for his personal safety than for his reputation, the admiral wrote an account of his voyage on parchment, begging the finder to deliver his narrative to the king and queen of Spain. Rolling the parchment in a waxed cloth, he ordered up a large wooden cask, sealed the manuscript in it, and hove it overboard. Columbus's parchment narrative may be the first item in American sea literature—lost, appropriately, at sea.

More important than any claim to precedence is the figurative power of his action. As it happens, Columbus's compulsion to tell his tale is one of the paradigms of sea voyage literature. Though the example that springs most readily to mind is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, many men and women have told their own stories of the sea because the experience is often terrible and almost always altering. In nearly all such sea literature the narrators have been transformed by their trials and are driven to repeat the story. From Odysseus's voyage, to Ishmael's “‘I only am escaped alone to tell thee,’” through innumerable personal and fictional accounts to Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, many works conform to the myth of the protagonist returned from trial at sea enlightened with transforming knowledge.

Our receptiveness to sea literature rests in part on our sympathetic response to this archetypal journey, speaking as it does to truths that often transcend differences of culture and of gender. In this voyage-centered literature the sea assumes a double role: it is the field of action on which the separation and transformation are played out, and it is the thing itself, the heart of mysterious knowledge to which the protagonists aspire and with which they return. The vastness, loneliness, and power of the ocean change them forever and drive them to write about it, but always with the metaphorical understandings particular to the times in which they experience it: the expanding cosmos of the Renaissance, the eighteenth-century Sublime, the symbolic disorder of the Romantic era, the Darwinian naturalism of the fin de siècle. … The experience may be elemental; the telling is shaped by language and culture, which are always changing. T. S. Eliot appropriately reminds us that “The sea has many voices, / Many gods and many voices” (“The Dry Salvages,” I).

To most minds, as to Eliot himself, those voices are heard from the sea's verge and even from far inland rather than from the deck of a ship. Therefore, this book [America and the Sea], recognizing the metaphorical implications of water-gazing from the shore, takes as its province more than what is popularly thought of as sea literature (Two Years Before the Mast, Moby-Dick, The Sea-Wolf, The Old Man and the Sea); it includes the sea's appearance in American literary discourse as symbol, concept, and figure of speech as well. So we note the justice of James Russell Lowell's rhetoric in 1871, when, looking back thirty years to “The American Scholar,” he says, “We were socially and intellectually moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and glories of blue water.” We also ponder the implications of a common store of surviving analogy in a perception of the Nebraska prairie in book 1, chapter 2 of Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918): “the grass was the country, as the water is the sea,” as we do in Conrad Richter's Sea of Grass (1937), set in Texas: “I saw a wave of antelope flowing inquisitively toward the buggy far ahead, a wave rusty as with kelp, rising and falling over the grassy swells and eventually turning in alarm, so that a thousand white rumps, whirled suddenly into view, were the breaking of the wide prairie wave on some unseen reef of this tossing upland sea” (ch. 5, echoed in ch. 15). This “sea of grass” trope is well-nigh ubiquitous in writings about the Great Plains, say scholars of that subject—pointing in addition to prairie “schooners” and towns with names such as “Westport.” Meant at first to convey, to an audience familiar with the sea, the strangeness of a land that seemed, at times, hardly land at all, it became and remained an expected metaphor implying horizontal immensity.

In addition, the domestication of sea tropes, for example by Louisa May Alcott in Work (1873), as well as the focus on the sea's symbolic, social, and psychological import in a domestic novel as powerful as Elizabeth Stoddard's Morgesons (1862), or in Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), points to more ways, gendered ways, in which “the water comes ashore” in American literature, well beyond the context of what those words suggest in Frost's “Neither Out Far Nor in Deep.” Literary engagements with the sea by the shorebound, men and women, can be variously understood in terms of psychological, cultural, and historical factors that may differ greatly from those pertinent to the literature of seafaring, or may prove to be congruent with them. In any case … taking Emily Dickinson's poetry for its example, “a powerful literature of the sea does not depend upon direct experience on the high seas, but upon consciousness.”

The consciousness reflected in the writings of shore-based watergazers and those of seafarers may be of different sorts, but thematic and conceptual similarities abound. From Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman, for example, through London, Hemingway, Matthiessen, and others, biology has often supplied the context for American literary probes into the meanings of life on Earth—probes, at once literal and metaphorical, which turn to the great waters for fact and symbol. That context, biological fact and interpretation, with their inevitable philosophical consequences, gives immense substance to my epigraph from Rachel Carson.

Much of sea literature also says (with T. S. Eliot) that the sea has a voice—and speaks to those prepared to hear it. The restless, dangerous, awe-full, beautiful, destructive, creative, deceptive, alluring, forbidding, infinite, profound sea is common to both groups of writers: its variety and paradoxicality is itself a frequent subject, as is the human response to those qualities separately and together. Until recently, however, only those who had lived the experience wrote powerfully of the special character and complexities of life at sea—physical, meteorological, linguistic, sartorial, social, occupational, psychological; class-defined, tradition-ruled, in rhythm and method distinct from life ashore. The special structures of the shipboard community, the diurnal consequences of watery isolation, the leaving and the returning—these were largely the literary province of the seafarer, almost always male. What is not found, though, even in such reports (before this century) is the sexual component of life aboard ship. Melville hinted at it in White-Jacket and Moby-Dick, and came closest to embodying it in plot in Billy Budd, Sailor; others steered clear. Now, though, both men and women, seafarers and lubbers alike, plunge into even that culturally complex subject.

Beyond divergences and similarities such as these in the literature, a reader finds overarching them a greater commonality—an engagement, often in fascination, with the ocean's perceived differences from the land. Those contrasts are contained in or implied by several primary, overlapping features of the sea itself. Chief among them are eternal motion, boundlessness, and obscuring depth—the sources of its power to image or embody, in imaginative writing based on whatever sort of encounter, physical or intangible, a range of human, earthly, and cosmic truths.

First of all, the ocean water, never completely without motion (though it may sometimes appear to be), is defined by that motion. Its calmer movement often suggests anthropomorphic connections, as in the rather frequent mention of a “heaving bosom.” That association, in relation to others such as its tides, its teeming life, and its apparent “moods,” usually gender it female and feminine to seamen and, sometimes, to male writers. Women are apparently less agreed about its gender, some exalting or identifying with the sea's generativeness, others, such as Kate Chopin or the diarist Dorothea Balano, evoking its apparently masculine seductiveness, and still others seeing its threatening dangers as masculine aggression. Recognizing and denying the traditional gendering of the sea by men, for example, Mary Mackey's 1976 poem cries, “Don't Tell Me the Sea Is a Woman.”

In any case, the sea's femininity is different from that so often seen in the “virgin” (or the “raped”) land by American writers. The sea can be lover, mistress, mother, spouse, but not also virgin unless the scene somehow strongly evokes the land: “These are the times, when in his whale boat the rover softly feels a … land like feeling toward the sea; that he regards it as so much flowery earth. … The long drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill sides …” (Moby-Dick, ch. 114).

Walt Whitman, alone among the canonical “major” American writers, makes much of the sea as sexual female, as he does in “Song of Myself,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and other poems. This general absence of a feminine sea in our well-known literature, at least to the early twentieth century, is consistent with the paucity of writing on mature sexuality, especially by those in the traditional canon. The sexual avoidances in Irving, Cooper, Thoreau, Twain, and lesser authors, the evident neuroses in Poe, the male fears apparent in a story such as Hawthorne's “Rappaccini's Daughter” or Melville's Pierre illustrate the point. The danger or dangerous mystery of women to so many male writers and protagonists is concomitant with the threat of the sexual sea. We may reasonably speculate that the complex sexual symbolism of the sea, unlike the simpler virgin-and-mother nexus of the land, was psychologically forbidding to these men. And a further sexual threat, considering the mixed homophilia and homophobia in the literature written by many American men, is the ever-present possibility, at sea, of a metamorphosis from a perceived “feminine” calm to an aggressive “masculine” turbulence.

Actually, in our literature the sea is seldom beneficently calm. There are, so to speak, no Indian summers on the waves, no sea pastorals. And the absence is not merely a reflection of natural fact: Just as the seascape, the starkest of all scenes, leads the mind to ponder essentials, so the sea's threatening motion images the condition of human life, stripped of illusion. Faced with the puissance of the sea, men—particularly men—realize that their own force, which on land can make such changes, is negligible. Their minds, as many writings testify, focus on its power, rather than their own. In “The Open Boat,” Stephen Crane, with terse, ironic humor, describes the general ocean situation:

A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave, you discover that there is another behind it, just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats.

(pt. 1)

Even from the apparent security of the land one feels the threat of the sea. When it “comes ashore” (in deceptive Frostian truism), it has astonishing power. In another Frost poem, “Sand Dunes,” the dunes

… are the sea made land
To come at the fisher town
And bury in solid sand
The men she could not drown.

Similarly, Melville's poem “Misgivings,” whose subject is the coming Civil War, begins, “When ocean clouds over inland hills / Sweep storming …,” suggesting the irresistible, destructive power of anticipated events by comparing them to a sea storm come ashore. And Thoreau's Cape Cod shares the watergazer's feeling of awesome power in the sea, memorably describing and evoking its irresistibility while pointing out that the dead emigrants of the wrecked St. John had been seeking the New World, but had been carried by the sea, with supra-geographical force, to a newer yet. Emily Dickinson, who wrote scores of sea-conscious poems, also expressed this power in one of her riddles: “An everywhere of Silver / With Ropes of Sand / To keep it from effacing / The Track called Land” (#884).

Melville contended that “however baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make. … No power but its own controls it” (ch. 58). This perpetual, threatening power, much less diminished by technological advances than most think, has permitted many authors visions, usually denied by the acquiescent land, of human possibility larger than life. The personalities and accomplishments of Captain Ahab, Wolf Larsen (The Sea-Wolf), Santiago (The Old Man and the Sea), Raib Avers (Far Tortuga), are all what they are in large part because of their conjunction with the always-moving, always-dangerous sea.

Its unrestrained might gives the sea its ability to do away with limits, and is therefore deeply involved in the implications of its second major characteristic, boundlessness. Through much of American history, a perception of limitless space invested both the sea and the land. However, though the sea's “limber margin” (Yvor Winters) forms an undeniable end to the land, the reverse is not true: the sea stretches, uninterruptedly, around our world. And so while, under the force of western settlement, that image of the land, with its inspiration of expansion and of national and personal grandeur gradually lessened in the course of the nineteenth century, the sea's various appeals of boundlessness remained fully potent—as we can see in the actions of Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier or earlier in Dickinson's lyric of pleading and demand: “My River runs to thee—/ Blue Sea! Wilt welcome me? / … / Say—Sea—Take Me!” (#162).

Pip, the cabin boy of the Pequod, discovers that one danger of the “shoreless ocean” is an intolerable, maddening lonesomeness. Bulkington, of the same ship, returns to the “howling infinite” of the sea of thought, ultimately to perish there. In Poe's “MS. Found in a Bottle,” the protagonist sails, perhaps, beyond time. The physical and psychological dangers of infiniteness are plentiful and real; human beings, to survive whole, need certain boundaries to time, to human relations—and to the salt sea of their own blood. So humanity shrinks from pure boundlessness; but at the same time it is intrigued and stimulated by the opportunities of that limitlessness because, as William Blake said, “the bounded is loathed by its possessor.” Therefore, when America, which should have itself been boundless in reflection of its ideology, stretched from sea to shining sea, Walt Whitman still invoked his soul in “Passage to India” to “farther, farther, farther sail” on an endless and finally metaphysical sea. Whitman, like some others, was doing the work of a culture that, ideologically, refused to recognize limits.

Thoreau too, for all his exalting the properties of the land rightly regarded, invokes the sea for his comments on human potential. In Walden it is the source and context of his metaphorical treatment of such possibility; in the “Conclusion” he exhorts his reader to leave the stranded ship of obsolescence, skirt the reef of reality, and “explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.” Everyone lives on the shores of this private sea, he says, but no one “has ventured out of sight of land, thought it is without doubt the direct way to India.” The metaphorical state of exploring at sea is for Thoreau what Whitman calls “more than India.” In the boundless sea Thoreau found the right analogy; its infinity floods his belief and floats it.

Its liberating infinitude, then, as well as its motion, helps explain the sea's attraction to American writers—in further part because the limited and bounded is, conceptually speaking, potentially tame and trivial. As such, it can also be repressive because of its conventionality. Huck Finn decided to escape that repression by lighting out for the Indian territory, but the later absence of a West of personal liberation left only the sea—to which, in fact, Ken Kesey takes his crew of West Coast mental hospital inmates in part 3 of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) on their Pacific fishing-trip escape from momism and “the Combine.” Not surprisingly, Kesey's free and dangerous sea does its job, temporarily restoring to the men their long-lost feelings of confidence, joy, and independence. Making explicit the potent sea/lost land context of the scene, Chief Bromden says, “I was feeling better than I'd remembered feeling since I was a kid, when everything was good and the land was still singing kid's poetry to me.” More recently Rachel Ingalls, setting her Mrs. Caliban (1983) in a coastal California wasteland, reintroduces meaning into the life of her depressed housewife protagonist in the form of a manlike creature from the depths of the mysterious sea.

Finally, the sea's horizontal limitlessness is augmented by a vertical one: the unknown and untold possibilities of its obscuring depth. The very word “deep” has been a common literary synonym for sea at least from the King James translation of Genesis, and is still evocative enough in our era to function well as a Peter Benchley title suggesting hidden threat, mystery, awe.

One of the most common uses of “deep”—to mean “mentally profound”—probably owes the terms of its expression to a recognized analogy to the sea. And because much of what the deep thinker is contemplating is commonly thought incomprehensible, such a person is often feared or at least distrusted—as is the profound and alien sea. But to those for whom depth of mind is exciting, the sea metaphor is enriching. To some minds, unsolved mysteries are more valuable than those that can be resolved. For many writers that is precisely the case with the inscrutable ocean. Like some others, however, Emily Dickinson, contemplating the analogy between human and oceanic profundity, at least once denied that the mysteries of the world exceed our ability to penetrate them by asserting that the brain “is deeper than the sea—” (#632). In spite of their similitude, the brain has the God-like power to take the external into itself: “For—hold them—Blue to Blue—/ The one the other will absorb—/ As sponges—Buckets—do—.” That's a brave assertion, from a brave poet, but it may also strike a less inland soul as naive.

The unseen and mysterious underwater world, in its obvious analogy to the human psyche, is also a powerful lure of seemingly infinite potential. On that fishing trip in Cuckoo's Nest, the psychologist (appropriately enough) hooks a huge fish on the ocean floor, and though unable to tell what it is, fights for hours to bring his “monster from the deep” to the surface. Similarly, hunting for the “ungraspable phantom of life” in the deep waters of the sea more than one hundred years earlier, Ishmael went whaling.

One need not be an Ishmael, though, or his driven shipmate, Bulkington, either, to respond to the eternal lure of the mysterious sea's dark depths: in “The Slow Pacific Swell” Yvor Winters speaks as an enthralled “landsman” watergazer; Robert Frost sees (though perhaps with jaundiced eye) that people “cannot look out far. / They cannot look in deep. / But when was that ever a bar / To any watch they keep?” For Denise Levertov, in The Jacob's Ladder, the sea is always “turning its dark pages.”

In all cases, that is, the ocean suggests the portentously unknown. Melville, probably the deepest-diving of all writers about the sea, realized that its obscuring depth, like its continuous motion and boundlessness, lure the mind in part by imaging that dark mind—and the even darker mind of God. In doing so it embodies a compelling mystery, human and cosmic. …