Despite a concerted effort by the establishment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to create an image of professional, respectable men, Jack’s licentious proclivities ashore have continued to form a key part of his popular image.[1] Yet what did sailors themselves record on the subject of sex? Christopher McKee has argued that ‘most […]
So reads a famous signpost at the port town of Bluff, which is located on the south coast of New Zealand’s South Island. With little between it and the Roaring Forties, Bluff was indeed “one of the farthest corners of the British Empire.” A key inlet for British migrants from the 1860s and a key […]
Most people wouldn’t associate northern Indiana with shipwrecks, but Lake Michigan has its share of them. The J.D. Marshall sank in 1911, where it remains, just a stone’s throw offshore from the Indiana Dunes State Park. It was a “sand sucker,” employed in pulling up sand from the lake bed for industrial use. The J.D. […]
Cloistered subfields predictably produce cloistered scholarship. Cloistered scholarship is, as a rule, quite dull. Why, then, does cloistering exercise such a fatal attraction for so many academics? A new article in the Journal of Transport Geography confronts this dilemma in an unusually honest way. “Port Geography at the Crossroads”—co-authored by nine academics based variously in […]
Department of Historical Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden, 9th September 2014 A recent workshop by the Universities of Gothenburg and Portsmouth brought together academics, archivists and heritage professionals to discuss the methodologies, data and potential beneficiaries of mapping port towns. Dr Tomas Nilson and Dr Brad Beaven opened proceedings and explained that the history of port […]
The first time I considered sailors in port as an academic subject was back in 1993, when—as a graduate student in search of a dissertation topic—I read the first chapter of Marcus Rediker’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Reactions to Devil varied, to be sure, but few have offered a coherent alternative […]
