Repository–Mirror

In 1969 a blow-out of an oil rig off Santa Barbara, California, outraged the public with its visible effects on shorelines up and down the coast and on seabirds and marine mammals. Coming just two years after the oil tanker SS Torrey Canyon wrecked off the western coast of England, the spill helped promote environmental concern in the US and Europe. Despite continuing worry about coastal oil spills and fear over radioactive waste disposal at sea, most marine scientists for decades after the spill adhered to the traditional dictum that the solution to pollution is dilution, continuing to view the open ocean as an appropriate repository for waste. Unknown photographer, n.d.

In 1969 a blow-out of an oil rig off Santa Barbara, California, outraged the public with its visible effects on shorelines up and down the coast and on seabirds and marine mammals. Coming just two years after the oil tanker SS Torrey Canyon wrecked off the western coast of England, the spill helped promote environmental concern in the US and Europe. Despite continuing worry about coastal oil spills and fear over radioactive waste disposal at sea, most marine scientists for decades after the spill adhered to the traditional dictum that the solution to pollution is dilution, continuing to view the open ocean as an appropriate repository for waste. Unknown photographer, n.d.

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Seascape showing female Ama divers from the Japanese coastal city of Ise harvesting abalone, a culturally and economically important fishery developed between the eighth and twelfth centuries. Before that, both men and women practiced breath-hold diving for subsistence gathering, and in the late nineteenth century the cultured pearl industry continued to employ Ama divers for an emerging tourist market. Woodblock print by Utagawa Kunisada 歌川 国貞, c. 1830.

Seascape showing female Ama divers from the Japanese coastal city of Ise harvesting abalone, a culturally and economically important fishery developed between the eighth and twelfth centuries. Before that, both men and women practiced breath-hold diving for subsistence gathering, and in the late nineteenth century the cultured pearl industry continued to employ Ama divers for an emerging tourist market. Woodblock print by Utagawa Kunisada 歌川 国貞, c. 1830.

Courtesy of Cleveland Art Museum. Click here to view source.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 License.

Evidence in shell middens and elsewhere tells archaeologists that early Homo sapiens and their hominid ancestors used aquatic resources whenever they were available. Commercial fisheries for herring, tuna, cod, and whales date back centuries or more. Many fisheries exerted profound effects on fish populations even before industrialization and mechanization. Fisheries sparked exploration of near and distant waters and contributed to the development of regional, then global economies. Yet subsistence fishing continued, and remains important today, in many places around the globe. People have not only viewed the ocean as a storehouse of raw materials and commodities but equally as a sink for waste. Despite this, many people through the twentieth century continued to see the ocean as a source of virtually limitless resources as well as a dumpsite of endless capacity. For some, this perception remains unchanged in the present, as reflected in oil and natural gas drilling, bioprospecting for pharmaceuticals, plans for seafloor mining, and the continued introduction of plastic and carbon into the oceans. Regardless of its use as storehouse or dump, the ocean as repository is experienced by users as volumetric space rather than a flat surface. 

This strikingly unusual example of the Hudson River style of American landscape art, Edward Moran’s Valley in the Sea (1862), depicts an imagined panoramic view of the Atlantic seafloor. Probably commissioned in honor of the first successful transatlantic cable laying of 1858, this painting reflects the mid-century cultural discovery of the deep ocean that was also manifested by the popularity of marine natural history, beach holidays, yachting, maritime novels, and other ways that ordinary people engaged experientially and imaginatively with the sea.

This strikingly unusual example of the Hudson River style of American landscape art, Edward Moran’s Valley in the Sea (1862), depicts an imagined panoramic view of the Atlantic seafloor. Probably commissioned in honor of the first successful transatlantic cable laying of 1858, this painting reflects the mid-century cultural discovery of the deep ocean that was also manifested by the popularity of marine natural history, beach holidays, yachting, maritime novels, and other ways that ordinary people engaged experientially and imaginatively with the sea.

Edward Moran, The Valley in the Sea, 1862. Oil on canvas.

Courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Click here to view source.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 License.

The Hawaiian double-hulled voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa, launched in 1975, is shown here arriving in Tahiti the following year after a transit using Polynesian navigation techniques. Subsequent voyages around the Pacific have contributed to cultural revival in Hawaii and in islands throughout Polynesia. Traditional voyaging reflects islanders’ identification of home as “seas of islands” in which the ocean forms part of their cultural and social space. In 2017, Hōkūleʻa completed a three-year circumnavigation blending traditional and modern technologies to promote Mālama Honua, which translates to “caring for our island Earth.” Photograph by Phil Uhl, 1976.

The Hawaiian double-hulled voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa, launched in 1975, is shown here arriving in Tahiti the following year after a transit using Polynesian navigation techniques. Subsequent voyages around the Pacific have contributed to cultural revival in Hawaii and in islands throughout Polynesia. Traditional voyaging reflects islanders’ identification of home as “seas of islands” in which the ocean forms part of their cultural and social space. In 2017, Hōkūleʻa completed a three-year circumnavigation blending traditional and modern technologies to promote Mālama Honua, which translates to “caring for our island Earth.” Photograph by Phil Uhl, 1976.

Accessed via Wikimedia on 7 April 2021. Click here to view source.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Whether we view the ocean optimistically as full of resources or fearfully as full of pollution, its opacity guarantees that we see reflected back from its surface in part what we bring to it: our fears, desires, ambitions, and preconceptions. Perceptions of the ocean depend on human assumptions, beliefs, and ideas as much as they derive from experiences with salt water and things that live in it. Different cultures with unique relationships to the sea generate distinctive notions of it. European immigrants to the New World viewed the ocean as a frightening wilderness. In contrast, the anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa explains that people in Oceania view the same element as “seas of islands.” For them, the ocean forms part of their social and cultural space. Post–World War II embrace of the ocean as a “frontier” akin to the nineteenth-century United States West contributed to the tenaciously held view of the ocean as endlessly resilient in the face of human use. More recent media images of plastics in the sea or whales stranded, perhaps due to noise or other pollution, are reshaping perceptions of the human relationship with the ocean. The ocean as mirror helps explain how apparently contrasting uses, such as bridge or moat, can exist simultaneously. The repository–mirror pairing functions as a microcosm reflecting the cultural complexity of multiple, coexisting views of the world’s oceans. 

Illustration of the Persian Gulf pearl fishery, carried out by descendants of enslaved East Africans whom British salvagers purchased because of their diving skills. In the sixteenth century Spanish colonists on the so-called “Pearl Coast” of northern Venezuela and nearby islands began the practice of using African diving expertise when they brought enslaved Senegambian and Gold Coast divers to replace indigenous Guaiquerí Indians whose numbers were declining drastically. The undersea appeared to European enslavers and colonists an inaccessible source of wealth, yet indigenous and transplanted African divers who swam and dove regularly viewed the undersea realm as familiar.

Originally published in The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, 1 October 1881: 356. Public domain.

Cartoon by British naturalist Edward Forbes playfully suggesting that sea floor creatures, not scientists, might control what entered the dredges of the first generation of zoologists who studied marine fauna. Appearing as the frontispiece of his 1859 book, The Natural History of the European Seas, this sketch reflects the new mid-century understanding of the ocean as a site for science and the object of scientific scrutiny.

Frontispiece to Edward Forbes, The Natural History of the European Seas (London: John van Voorst, 1859). Public domain.

John Williamson, the first person to take photographs underwater, captured this image of an underwater actress from a submarine device called a Photosphere that extended beneath a ship down to the seafloor. His first film, Thirty Leagues Under the Sea, appeared in 1914 and featured Williamson himself fighting a shark. More successful at the box office was his 1916 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, popular with audiences who followed news of submarine warfare. In addition to a career of making films about pirates, sunken treasure, mermaids, and sea monsters, Williamson also helped natural history museums collect specimens and create dioramas of undersea scenes in New York and Chicago. His work began a robust tradition of cinematographic representation of the undersea that would introduce the depths to a wide public.

Photograph by John Williamson, n.d. Public domain.
Originally published in J. E. Williamson, Twenty Years Under the Sea (Boston and New York: Hale, Cushman & Flint, 1936).

Cod drying onshore in Lofoten, Norway, in 1913 in a fishery using traditional methods that dated back centuries, including harvesting the fish with hook and line, then splitting, gutting, and drying them on wooden racks. Long before the mechanization of fisheries, fleets were able to decimate fish stocks. Between 1852 and 1859, for instance, schooners from Massachusetts fishing off Nova Scotia experienced a 50 percent decline in seasonal landings. A fishery prosecuted using dories launched from schooners to enable fishers to lay long lines with hooks attached to them over the ocean floor rendered the northwest Atlantic halibut population, first intentionally fished for market in the 1840s, commercially extinct in just fifty years.

Photograph by Cl. Boulanger, 1913. Public domain.
Courtesy of the Freshwater and Marine Image Bank and the Washington Unversity Libraries. Click here to view source.