Abstract
Ports and their oceanic hinterlands are distinctively malleable, permeable places. They are defined by morphologies that articulate shifting perspectives on the meanings of coastal settlements and their relationship to the term landscape. This essay introduces the co-editors’ perspectives on port cities and the sea as distinctive modes of landscape, situating them, and the essays within the special issue, within a broader field of landscape studies.
Ports and their oceanic hinterlands are distinctively malleable, permeable places. They are defined by morphologies that articulate shifting perspectives on the meanings of coastal settlements and their relationship to the term landscape: center and periphery, endurance and transformation, safety and upheaval, cultural affirmation and social critique, knowledge and memory, fact and fiction. Historically and across the world, ports have served as outposts of culture, meccas of trade and wealth, cultural crossroads, and sites of arrival and exile defined as much by human and maritime transience as by the relative permanence of their architecture. Despite their vulnerability to the ravages of cultural conquest, economic hegemony, and, more recently, anthropogenic climate disruption, ports can, in their openness, represent physical, economic, and social shelters from these crises.
In their fluid ability to bear ships, people, objects, and ideas across vast distances while also possessing a similar capacity for placeness as solid ground, seas embody a similar range of oppositional potential. Our experience of the sea, for example, is shaped by the same environmental stimuli that we experience on land—plays of light, the feeling of wind, the smells of our surroundings—but these dynamics are utterly transformed by interaction with water, waves, and salt spray, rather than earth, plants, pavement, and buildings. The language used to describe the sea alternatively refers to it as a vast, undifferentiated, indifferent, and implacable entity that mystifies seafarers, as well as a knowable, charted terrain of ocean currents and sea winds, dotted with roads and crisscrossed by trade routes. The sea’s greater-than-human actions are beneficent and provisioning, as well as malevolent and destroying. And seas, like ports, are places of real and imagined departures and arrivals that can materially alter the landscape, or conversely, evoke reveries of forgotten pasts and dreams of possible futures.
How do we understand the landscapes of ports and their oceanic hinterlands? What questions do they raise about isolation, exile, insularity, identity, conquest, survival, entrapment, and control? How do they serve as terrains of social and cultural criticism? How do their boundaries, imagined and real, shape and contain the narratives they protect? How do they fold time and space together to create a sense of mystery and wonder? What role do they play as places of mediation and connectivity in an increasingly diversified world? How deeply can we peer into these landscapes, and what will we discover?
This volume of Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes collects four papers that address these questions across a range of materials, contexts, and periods. Stretching from early seventeenth-century Newfoundland to the postwar coast of France, they look at the wealth of the sea and the human imagination of it. Through the evocation of harbours, ships, bulkheads, ropewalks, waves, water, littoral zones, marine animals, fisherman, seabeds, rocky outcroppings, and buried treasures, the papers conceive of ports, ships, and the ocean—the landscapes of the sea—as places of retreat and isolation, terrains of ecological connectivity, domains of shared technological prowess, spectral traces of community, and geographies of romantic adventure.
This special issue emerged from a session organized by the co-editors on behalf of the Landscape History Chapter at the 2021 Society of Architectural Historians annual meeting, titled ‘Port Cities and Landscapes of the Sea’. The original call attracted a great number of proposals that spread across a wide range of geographical and temporal contexts, attesting to the significance of the ‘oceanic turn’ in architectural and landscape history, as in other branches of the humanities. In selecting abstracts for the panel, we became interested in papers that explored the sea’s imaginative and sensory potential, and authors whose conception and writing echoed what felt like the poetics of the ocean. During and following the panel, the papers were advanced and sustained through discussion in preparation for this publication. In the course of their development, it soon became apparent that these papers are all highly synthetic: each favors nuanced and complex historiographies of the physical forms, spatial patterns, social interactions, economic imperatives, and ecological relationships—both human and nonhuman—that shape the landscapes we inhabit and imagine.
The arguments presented in these four essays are deeply rooted in ways of seeing, which, like the terrain in question, are fluidly mobile and incorporate both objective and subjective ways of knowing in order to capture the particulars of a landscape that is spatially and temporally unstable, and thus difficult to picture and fix in historical memory. Yet the fluid quality of this landscape and its slippery resistance to any type of established order lend itself to the telling of stories that depict fundamental and enduring ways to understand our place in the world. These stories form identities for places and people. They delineate territories, boundaries, and values. They launch adventures and provide space for reflection. They ascribe meanings to things. We tell these stories through novels and poetry. We map their coordinates. We picture them in paintings and photographs, and we dissect them to discern scientific facts and define economic imperatives. Many are quickly forgotten, but others gain traction and become central to our perceptions and actions toward others. The best landscape stories illustrate that our thoughts, feelings, and actions toward our surroundings—how we imagine, live in, try to control, or long to escape from them—are inextricably tied to how we choose to see them, the ways we choose to describe them, and to what we choose to connect them.
Our prompt for these papers invited each author to stand on the shore, gaze at the waves, and search for the fleeting details of land, water, light, and atmosphere that open an entryway into a landscape that is, by its very nature, too powerful, too insistent, too uncertain, too implacable, too expansive, too mythic to be easily perceived or described from the critical prospect of a singular vantage point. Captivated by what they saw, they cast off from the shore and journeyed through a terrain ripe for historical exploration. For some, the physical reality of the landscape is of less importance than its imaginative qualities. For others, technology prompts new forms of colonization and habitation that alter the meanings we ascribe to these actions. When assembled and juxtaposed, the papers join together hitherto unrelated objects, actions, ideas, and images. Seeing, revealing, and connecting these perceptions is the unifying thread—the conceptual rigging—that ties these narratives into delightfully entangled knots of factual, metaphorical, pictorial, poetical, and apocryphal discoveries.
In the opening paper of the issue, ‘Hybrid Creatures in the North Atlantic: Abundant Seascapes and Marine Ecology in Early Modern Canada’, Jason Nguyen takes us to the Grand Banks in the early days of the European cod fishery by means of Richard Whitbourne’s Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land (1620), in which the English mariner recounted a horrifying encounter with a mermaid in St. John Bay, Newfoundland. The creature, which Whitbourne describes as beautiful, with the composite body of a woman and a fish, approached him from the harbor. Stunned, he retreated, after which it terrorized his crewmen. So remarkable was the tale that it was engraved and incorporated as part of Theodor de Bry’s America (1628), thereafter granting Europeans a fantastical (if perilous) image of the cod-rich Canadian waters.
Jason Nguyen’s paper considers the port settlements and seascapes of the Canadian Atlantic during the early modern period. It takes the images from de Bry’s America as provocative counterpoints to literary, artistic, and scientific depictions celebrating the marine ecology of colonial Canada, claimed for England by John Cabot in 1497. The Grand Banks, underwater plateaus that provided shallow feeding conditions for underwater life, make Newfoundland one of the richest fishing regions in the world. Mariners charted its coast in search of the Northwest Passage, the icy shipping route across the Arctic. The engraving of Whitcombe, which illustrates sailors fleeing in terror, functions as a hybridized and sexualized rejoinder to colonialist assumptions regarding New World bounty and the ocean’s fertility. Nguyen draws from visual and material culture, ecocriticism, and indigenous studies to examine how settler-colonialists penetrated the coastal and marine ecology, leading to the extinction of the indigenous Beothuk and, eventually, the collapse of the cod industry. Whitbourne’s mermaid, like the fog produced by the Gulf Stream and Labrador Current, suggested wonder as well as danger.
When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published his poem ‘The Ropewalk’ in 1859, he evoked a building that would have been common in any port city. The ‘long and low’ buildings were where hemp was twined and twisted into the miles of rope needed for ships in the age of sail. Longfellow conflates ship and building type, and sees an equivalency between the land-based ropewalk and the ship that allows the imagination to run free, not bound by the very lines that connect the two.
In ‘Ropewalks and the Linear City’, Christy Anderson looks at this building type, now mostly gone from port cities, in both its historical importance in shaping cities since the seventeenth century as well as in its more evocative role as maker of the ropes and knots that tied the ship to itself and to the land. The unique quality of these buildings, however, was in the way they created a linear demarcation into cities that were, by their very nature as boundaries between land and water, less regular and more open to change. Without interventions that radically changed the shoreline, pre-modern ports were constantly evolving through new docks as well as the effect of the water itself. Against this fluidity, ropewalks were the datum that linked ship to shore and shaped even the plans of the expanding port city.
In the volume’s third essay, Edward Eigen turns to a familiar figure among those interested in landscape, Frederick Law Olmsted. Regarded as a founder of the modern practice of landscape architecture in the USA, Olmsted and his career were bracketed by restless visions of the sea. When Melville’s Ishmael asks, ‘Are the green fields gone?’, the author invoked a lament indicative of the pastoral impulse of nineteenth-century America and its changing ties to the sea, of which Olmsted’s own life is an example. Andrew Delbanco writes that in Melville’s world—one that Olmsted occupied professionally (as an editor of Melville’s work) and imaginatively—‘men ashore gaze to sea and men at sea gaze to shore. The deck, as much as the ground, burns beneath their feet’. In his essay, Eigen explores Olmsted’s real and supposed episodes of sea-going in order to understand the proper interpretive footing for those special (non-)places where sea meets land. He focuses on an episode from Olmsted’s final and failing days, in the 1890s, spent at a family retreat on Deer Island, Maine. Drawing on a never-before-examined (semi-)fictional account found among the Olmsted papers, Eigen’s essay links Olmsted’s early travels to China with a remote New England setting, its tidal caves and connections to a global network of piratical plunder, providing hidden clues to America’s lost, self-insulating dreams of pastoral innocence.
Finally, in ‘Photography, Marine Light, & the “Placing of the Nation” on the Ile de Sein’, Jeremy Foster explores a series of black and white photographs taken in 1960 on the île de Sein, a one-kilometer-long island off the west coast of France, by the Chinese American architect-photographer John Yang. Indexically ‘recording … a way of life before it is gone’ and inserting a few ‘decisive moments’ into bigger time frames of natural and human history, these photographs have developed an auratic ‘life of their own’. Foster’s paper explores how photography shapes affective understandings of places through the multiplicity of geographical ‘present absences’ they awaken, which thicken through the image’s (and place’s) continued existence in time. In Foster’s reading, this spectral potential of photography develops a synergy with the tendency for islands to become discursive catalysts for counter-modernities, either as sites of loss and/or as sites of dystopian futures. His paper adopts a more-than-representational analysis of these photographs, arguing that their affects can only be fully understood through an expanded, more-than-human concept of ‘environment’, in which material-ecological processes and interactions shape politics, society, and culture. Foster explores how the play between ‘figural’ and ‘metonymical’ presences in Yang’s photos mediates a lifeworld of ‘islandness’. Simultaneously, a place-imaginary emerges from Yang’s work that intersects with broader instrumental and discursive engagements through which the Finistère littoral has historically shaped the imagination, narration and definition of the French nation. The common agent in this multiscalar, non-terrecentric intertextuality is ‘marine light’, a phenomenon at once extra-discursive, ‘atmospheric’, place-specific and uniquely captured by Yang’s monochrome photography.
Together, these four essays offer a multifaceted sense of the landscape of the sea in four distinct, but at some level interconnected spatial and temporal moments in the North Atlantic over the last four centuries. The present volume naturally captures only the thinnest ray of late afternoon light that falls on the shores and waters of the world, and as such seeks to expand current discussions of how ideas of landscape and the sea, placeness and transience, and sight and knowing may tie together.