SAILING THROUGH THE SEVEN SEAS
NEVERLAND
I started early, took my dog,
And visited the sea;
The mermaids in the basement
Came out to look at me.
Water has always enchanted humanity. All the ancient cultures, such as the Persian, have considered water something sacred or have given it a proper deity: In the grecian culture, in fact, Poseidon is considered the God of the oceans. The ocean, the waves, the way it flows, are various facets of such a fascinating natural element, “there is magic in it”.
Water is the essential element of life but at the same time a powerful instrument of death. All writers have had the possibility, in one way or another, to make his own reflections looking at the sea.
Among the native populations of North America, water was considered a valuable commodity, particularly in the more arid plains and western regions; the Native Americans, instead, considered water a symbol of life.
The “Age of Discovery” is a period started in the early years of XV century in which the European governments decided to travel and explore unknown places in order to discover new lands and new treasure. The first pioneers and captains have seen the ocean as a route towards wealth and the power; in fact, they have a kind of “exaltation relationship” towards the sea; they wanted to reach the stated goal with the only possible way: through the ocean.
Many Americans, subsequently, such as whalers and fishermen made their living directly from it. Most of others depended indirectly on the transatlantic trade to carry their goods and crops to distant markets.
As a result water in its many manifestations - the sea, lakes, rivers - is a recurring symbol in American literature, though it symbolized different things.
It was used by Ralph Waldo Emerson in a sentence of Nature, an essay that underlined the fact that something existed over God which the author referred to as nature (“From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea”) to express the immensity and magnitude of the Creation.
Herman Melville, reviving the classical mythology, argued that the image Narcissus saw in the fountain tormented him, plunged into it and then drowned. Ishmael hinted that the image of the ungraspable phantom of life which attracts Narcissus’s intentions, is “the key to it all.”, apparently referring not only to events but to the same image we all see in rivers, oceans and lakes.
Therefore, in almost all literary texts we can find the element of water with different purposes: it may have a purely descriptive function such as in John Smith’s Captivity where he was captured near Chickahomity river or it may have an informative function as in the third chapter of The Last of the Mohicans where a white man explained to an indian the meaning of the tide:
“They call this up-stream current the tide, which is a thing soon explained, and clear enough. Six hours the waters run in, and six hours they run out, and the reason is this: when there is higher water in the sea than in the river, they run in until the river gets to be highest, and then it runs out again."
After the discovery of America, some people used the term “Seven Seas” to refer to seven of the largest bodies of water in the world. Through the history of America, from the Puritan Age to the Renaissance, I have focused my attention on seven authors, both in prose and poetry, which are closely connected to the sea: Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
Benjamin Franklin, when he was a child, had what he called "a strong inclination for the sea". What Benjamin really wanted was to go to sea. He was an excellent swimmer, he loved the ocean, dreamed of working on a ship and that is not something that surprises us. In fact, the world into which Franklin was born in 1706, the colonial american period, was dependent on the sea to an extent that is difficult to imagine in our modern society of railroads, and intercontinental flight. In the XVIII century the sea and the ocean were seen in a completely different way compared to the Period of the Discoveries: well-learned Americans associated the sea to a passage for going to the “Old World”. The attitude of Americans towards Europe will have a significant role in American literature. Europe, in fact, holds the culture and the charms of antiquity and for these reasons many Americans have decided to leave their own world in order to improve themselves.
Benjamin Franklin, for example, disliked his trade (candles' trade) and if his father did not find one more agreeable job he “should break away and get to sea, as his son Josiah had done, to his great vexation”. The possibility that Benjamin might follow his brother’s example and run off to sea finally convinced his father that he should find a trade for Ben on land and so, at the age of twelve, Ben was apprenticed to his brother James, a Boston printer. Although James proved to be a better teacher, and Ben soon learned the rudiments of the craft and business of printing, the two could not get along. At the age of seventeen, in fact, Benjamin abandoned his apprenticeship and left Boston for Philadelphia. His “inclinations for the sea were by this time worne out (...) but, having a trade, and supposing (him)self a pretty good workman” he offered his service to the printer in the place.
After a few years working in Philadelphia as a printer, he took his first transatlantic voyage, sailing to London, where he found work in a print shop and perfected his craft. Benjamin Franklin crossed the Atlantic Ocean eight times in his lifetime and he discovered early that he didn’t suffer from seasickness, which was a good thing. He used much of his time at sea for writing and conducting experiments. On a number of voyages, Franklin took daily measurements of water temperature and performed other experiments that led him to create the first chart of the Gulf Stream.
Washington Irving was one of the first American writers to prove that American works could fascinate the European public. During his life he travelled in Europe and stayed in the old world for several years because he was attracted by its ancient culture. In fact, in his sketch book: The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. he introduces himself to the reader by saying that he has been fond of travelling and observing people since he was a child and that Europe is the cradle of the culture and he wanted to visit his ruined castle and falling tower.
Just at the beginning of the Sketch-Book, in “The Voyage”, Washington Irving has narrated his experience sailing from his home to Europe.
We can read in the first pages of it that “from the moment you lose sight of the land you have left, all is vacancy, until you step on the opposite shore…” and then the author continued the story underlining the difference beetween a land and a sea voyage.
A sea voyage, differently from the land, creates an immediate abyss between our family and us and gives just uncertainty and fear:
In travelling by land there is a continuity of scene, and connected succession of person and incidents that carry on the story of life, and lessen the effect of absence and separation”.
Irving takes the figure of the painter who draws the outline of reality oscillating in this transatlantic world. Travelling by sea gives you the sensation ad if ”I had closed one volume of the world and its concerns and, I opened another”.
The voyage throughout the sea is considered a “gap” beetween America and Europe, a sharp division that separated two different worlds. Irving emphasizes this gap through the sea, which is the physical barrier separating America from Europe.
On board there is no communication and the people were blocked in a kind of microcosm. There is only the imagination that led to travel far and in unknown lands. Here, the water is a portal to the "reverie" . On the journey to the sea “the temporary absence of worldly scenes and employments produces a state of mind peculiarly fitted to receive new and vivid impressions”, and for this reason it triggers the reverie.
James Fenimore Cooper is mostly remembered as the creator of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, the frontier scout and his Indian friend in the five Leather-Stocking Tales. But Cooper has created in the XIX century, besides writing about the frontier, a whole new category of exciting adventure: he wrote The Pilot: the sea novel. Herman Melville , Ernest Hemingway continued that kind of novels known as “sea-tale”. Cooper drew on his direct knowledge of ships and sailors to present a true picture of life on the sea, the best picture had ever before achieved in literature. At the age of 13, young Cooper was sent away to be educated at Yale College in New Haven. But in his third year there he was expelled after a fight with a fellow-classman. As his plans for the future were destroyed, Cooper did what many young men in trouble have always done: he ran away to sea. He signed aboard the American merchant ship Stirling, as an ordinary seaman, for a trading voyage to England and Spain. He loved it, and when he returned to America a year later he thought he had found his vocation. Cooper's sea novels cover the world, and much of its history. They deal with naval warfare, piracy and privateering, and with the adventures of merchant ships. He wrote more than ten novels of sea adventure including: The Red Rover (a story of an American driven to piracy by British colonial oppression), The Water-Witch and The Sea Lions. As developed by Cooper, and later by Melville, the “sea novel“ became a powerful vehicle for spiritual as well as moral exploration.
Hermann Melville was one of the American writers who wrote many of his works after some direct experience on board. In the absence of a stable employment, Melville in 1839 boarded a ship bound for Liverpool, England, as a sailor. He returned to America and wrote Redburn: which was published in 1849, and which was inspired by his own travel experience.
I consider him the best “sea-writer” because from the fictional story Typee A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), to the last work Billy Budd, Sailor: an inside narritive (1891), he costantly had the sea as the background of his works. He also has argued the universal attraction that the seas have towards men in his masterpiece Moby Dick: “almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me”.
For the narrator, Ismael, watching the watery horizon is a way of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation:
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.
Even in this case the water becomes an opposite binomial. On one hand it is a power that can calm down: in the chapter “The Pacific” Ishmael ponders the meditative, serene Pacific Ocean. The sea promotes dreaminess and seems like heaven to him. On the other hand, it may conceal the most terrifying mysteries: the white whale. Trough the narrator, moreover, Melville showed us the limits of observation of humanity that can not see the depths of the ocean. For Melville, in fact, human knowledge is always limited and insufficient:
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seems to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer. The rural life didn't sit too well with him, however, who favored being close to the sea as often as he could, even longed to go to sea as a youth and enjoyed trips to coastal areas. “As a young writer Hawthorne projected a collection of sea stories, which however didn't materialize, although the sketch "The Wives of the Dead" is surely a representative survival of that plan”.
He also wrote "The Ocean", a poem which is referring to the deep, quiet ocean, but has a double meaning in which it takes about life, it's hardships, and the people who are no longer here with us.
Hawthorne symbolized water in a different way. He was born and raised as a puritan and the use of water as a symbol for God or religion is usually a universal choice; in The Scarlet Letter this symbolism is evident. Going along with the assumption that water means God, one can assume a lot by Hester's choice to live in a house "looking across a basin of the sea." Does Hester, consciously or subconsciously, want to get closer to God? The soil too sterile for cultivation and the remoteness of the location caused the previous owner to abandon it. This abandonment could serve as a symbol of the true lack of God in the Puritan community, as no one else chose to live there or build close to the water.
Water is mentioned again when Hester and Pearl go on an outing together. When Pearl goes off to play away from Hester, she is told by her mother to "not stray far. Keep where thou canst hear the babble of the brook." in the XVI chapter. This is another want of Hester, whether she is aware of it directly or not, to have her daughter know her Heavenly Father and be closer to God. Also, it shows that Hester still, on some level, trusts that God will look over her daughter when she cannot.
Furthermore, in chapter XXI of The Scarlet Letter, “The New England Holiday”, the sailor and the Native Americans are meaningful symbols of disorder. Because the sailors are perceived as facing grave terrors on the open sea, society tends to overlook their eccentric behavior, and they can carry on in active defiance of convention. The presence of the Native Americans, who are positioned at an even greater distance from mainstream colonist society, adds more weight to the novel’s social critique. Unaware of the story behind the scarlet letter, they think its wearer is a person of great importance. Their reaction highlights the arbitrary nature of this important sign. But the sea in those old times heaved, swelled, and foamed very much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with hardly any attempts at regulation by human law.
Walt Whitman, is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in his time, particularly Leaves of Grass, his poetry collection, which was described as obscene for its evident sexuality.
In the “ Sea Drift” chronicles there is a kind of mystical evolution that Whitman saw occurring in the world around him. The passage of time is an important theme and the lead poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” is a recollection by the poet of his childhood and of the critical moments which inspired his own art. Whitman’s boyhood is forever tied to his Paumanok (Long Island) and the sea culture that is found there. Thus, Whitman’s childhood is tied up within the sea and the endlessly rocking cradle is a metaphor for the ocean. This is not only a reference to Whitman’s own beginnings, but also to the beginnings of creation. In this poem, past and the present are always related. One always influences the other. The sea is the “old mother” which rocked him and nurtured him, yet it is also a reality of the end of life.
In section XXII of “Song of Myself” (the most famous poem of Leaves of Grass) Whitman revealed that he also loved the sea. He felt at one with it ("I am integral with you”) for it has as many aspects and moods as he has. He is the poet of both good and evil: "I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also"; the two qualities complement each other. Whitman describes the sea:
You sea! I resign myself to you also—I guess what you mean,
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,
We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of the land,
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.
Sea of stretch’d ground-swells,
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,
Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,
Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,
I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.
Moreover, Walt Whitman’s elegy O Captain! My Captain was written for the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln and the author carried all its mourning in metaphors of seamen and sailing ships. Lincoln is the captain, the United States of America his ship, and its fearful trip the just-ended Civil War. The call of the sea, the contrast between life on land and at sea, between home and the unknown, are notes rung often in the melodies of sea poetry.
Emily Dickinson, together with Walt Whitman, is one the most eminent figures in American poetry. The two poets have numerous differences to Whitman’s ones. Compared to Dickinson's short and seemingly simple poems, Whitman's are long and often complex. Though their approaches differ, they often dealt with the same themes (in this case the fascination for the sea), and both pioneered their own unique style of writing.
Emily Dickinson considered the sea a multivalent symbol even if it was used as a frequent metaphor for eternity that (“I cannot tell how Eternity seems. It sweeps around me like a sea”). Perhaps the Sea represents the speaker’s unconscious or the unknown.
In the poem “The Moon is distant from the Sea”, for example, Emily Dickinson reflected on his beliefs about love. She was very independent and she described the moon as a feminine object which directs the male (the sea). In this poem, the moon and the sea are lovers. In the following lines, Emily is the "Signor" as being lovers and it is concluded that she is metaphorically comparing her relationship with a man, to the relationship of the moon and sea. She uses the theme of love connected to the sea in “I envy Sea, whereon He rides”. Dickinson discusses her love for a man. She is jealous of everything around him, jealous of the water "He rides", the Chariots, the hills that watch him going by, the sparrows, the fly, even the leaves. This poem can be seen as a love poem for a man, but it can also be seen as a religious poem. The mention of Heaven and Gabriel can easily make this connection. The love of God and the love of everything he created.
And “My Rivers runs to thee” is another poem which deals with the water. The river is running towards the sea bearing gifts. She asked if the sea will welcome her (Blue sea, wilt thou welcome me) and she waits its reply (My rivers awaits reply). She's practically begging the sea to take her with, in fact at the end she says " Say, sea, Take me!".
Water will remain a recurring symbol in all the American literature; the sea never ceases to amaze the authors, which continues to fascinate even in the modern age. It will be used by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckeberry Finn (1884); The Mississippi River, which is the primary symbol of the story represents for Huckleberry Finn an escape route from life with his abusive father or Jim, the slave whom Huck helps run away, the river is a means of traveling to the free states. Despite their original supposition that the river, as a conduit to freedom, must be inherently good and safe, Huck and Jim learn slowly and painfully that it is ultimately not as much a means of escape as a temporary buffer against reality.
And so in the XX century, in 1954 a sea-tale received The Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to Ernest Hemingway for his mastery of the art of narrative demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.