Abstract
This essay has as its focus Horatio Clare’s remarkable book Down to the Sea in Ships, which recounts two voyages the author made on container ships. It also contains some thoughts on David Foster Wallace’s long essay ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’, and a brief reflection on the author’s own researches in the archives of the SS Great Britain. Along the way, it also alludes to Psalm 107, to Richard Hakluyt, and to some of Clare’s own reference points: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, John Masefield, Nicholas Monsarrat, and Jack Kerouac among others. Themes include the nature and structure of ships’ crews; the inequities of mariners’ wages; the danger, excitement, and boredom of sea voyages; questions about shipboard reading; and, above all, how we ‘read the sea’, and especially its shapes and colours, and the ships, with their tiny enclosed communities, which sail on them.
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Notes
- 1.
Richard Hakluyt, ‘Epistle Dedicatory to Sir Francis Walsingham’, in The Principall Nauigations, Voiages and Discoueries of the English Nation (London, 1589), 2.
- 2.
Horatio Clare, Down to the Sea in Ships: Of Ageless Oceans and Modern Men (London: Vintage, 2015), 23.
- 3.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2015), 2.2.62–4.
- 4.
David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (New York: Little, Brown, 1997), 261.
- 5.
Quotation from a diary held at Brunel Institute, Bristol, UK, Voyage Box 14 (Cork to Bombay, 1857), Item 10, 2.
Bibliography
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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004)
Richard Hakluyt, ‘Epistle Dedicatory to Sir Francis Walsingham’, in The Principall Nauigations, Voiages and Discoueries of the English Nation (London, 1589)
Kerouac, Jack, Lonesome Traveller (New York: McGraw Hill, 1960)
Monsarrat, Nicholas, The Cruel Sea (London: Penguin, 2011)
Perez-Reverte, Arturo, The Painter of Battles (London: W&N., 2008)
Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2015)
Wallace, David Foster, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (New York: Little, Brown, 1997)
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Punter, D. (2021). Afterword: Down to the Sea in Ships. In: Liebich, S., Publicover, L. (eds) Shipboard Literary Cultures. Maritime Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85339-6_11
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