The view from the mast-head: Antebellum American sea narratives and the maritime imagination

“The View from the Mast-Head: Antebellum American Sea Narratives and the Maritime Imagination” examines the first-person sea narratives of the federal and antebellum periods. Popular American sea narratives, both fictional and non-fictional, include for their readers details such as latitude and longitude notation, maps, and descriptions of ship labor. This narrative quantification provides a way for the texts to chart an American physical and imaginative presence on a landscape that, unlike most natural environments, cannot be marked or stabilized. A genre whose popularity with a landed readership continually increased between 1783–1860, sea writing has been marginalized in current critical discourse as “low” or rough, much as sailors themselves were typed. Yet sea narratives—which are continually engaged with contemporary crises of nation- and self-hood—describe a process of coming to imaginative mastery from a state of physical incompetence that productively speaks to larger issues in antebellum American literature and culture. In maritime literature, this process can find expression, for example, in the experience of shipwreck, which is incomprehensible to those lacking fluency in the mundane details of maritime life. Barbary captive Archibald Robbins explains, “To a seaman, the description of a shipwreck is familiar from his knowledge of a vessel, the tackle, and the nautical terms of sea-faring men; but by that portion of readers who are not thus acquainted, no adequate conception can be formed of the appalling horrors of such a scene.” This methodology, by which the facts of nautical labor can anchor the subject in the face of what is not conceptually “familiar,” is used by sea narratives to articulate a vision of the world predicated on fluency with the material and the imaginative.; In stressing the value of experiential knowledge, sea narratives invest in another kind of materiality as well: the materiality of the printed text. Sailors were attentive to the conditions and requirements of textual publication. Even as sailor authors retained the professional status of seamen, they demonstrated a keen interest in the book trades, and negotiated their writerly position in a publication industry whose codes and expectations sailors both adopted and defied.