Oceans

We had a great discussion of Oceans. This is a huge topic, obviously, and one that can be approached from many directions. Oceans have scientific characteristics. They are often trade routes. Some are believed to have sea monsters. People often depend on the oceans for survival. How dependent are they?

The Vikings living in Greenland had no roads over land, and exclusively used the oceans to travel. They hunted walrus and used their tusks for ivory to trade.

It's important to have respect for the dangers of the ocean. We talked about whether people who fish would have more or less respect for those dangers. Intimate knowledge leads to less fear. Kat told us she lived on a boat for five years. In her experience, coastal people were more antagonistic toward the ocean, while people who live on the water fear it less. If you go out for long voyages, how normalized do you make the ocean versus the land? If you are on water for a long time, your brain adapts to the constant motion. Kat told us that after she had lived on the water for a long time, she thought of it as home, and being on land seemed weird.

There are also historical instances of sailors who don't swim. This came from the idea that you should fear getting off the boat to increase your loyalty to it.

I mentioned how we had visited friends on the island of Ama, 3.5 hours ferry ride north of the island of Honshu in Japan. Our friends' home is right beside the ocean, with no beach but a stone retaining wall separating them from the water. The kids would go out to play and jump into the water very casually.

Depending on the conditions surrounding where you live, you may be able to wade very far out into the water at low tide, or not. The continental shelf is very close to the shore in California, but farther away in Japan. There may be a lot of rip tides in your area, and that can create a greater fear of going into the water.

Land travel is gradual. Sea travel is interrupted. The cultures of the two are very different.

How you anchor a ship differs depending on where you are. Methods are different in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the North Atlantic. The type of anchor differs, as does the number and strength of the boat crew and the amount of cooperation.

The boat Kat lived on in northeast Florida was a 34-foot Ketch sailboat, with 31 feet of room on deck from fore to aft and 14 feet in the beam (across). She once sailed through a tropical storm "with lots of anchors." She says the boat was "seakindly," which means it's really responsive to wind and waves. She nicknamed it "weeble." She saw dolphins swimming around the boat, and developed an awareness of weather that she hadn't had as a resident of southern California.

If you will be using boats in your writing, Do Your Research. This is a topic that has a very long history and varies widely across cultures. There is a lot of specialized language associated with it.

When you personify the sea, what happens? The Norse have male and female sea gods. Is the sea male? Is it female? Is it both? You can apply any set of gender stereotypes to it if you really want to. Kat said that in Japanese folk tales, the sea is typically not gendered. Ocean things are generally associated with the Shinto religion. Susanoo-no-mikoto is the god of storms and the sea.

I mentioned the book Ship of Dreams by Elaine LeClaire, written by our own discussant Lillian Csernica. Because she has a deep interest in ships through her family, she was very exact in her descriptions of the ships, and in fact, she completely and carefully redesigned the pirate ship in the book so that it would fit a captain who was 6'4" (as the romance genre required) and who had a private cabin.

We wondered what it would be like to have a waterborne TARDIS in Doctor Who. You would want to be careful to keep the entryway above the water!

Our discussants recommended Aria of the Sea by Dia Calhoun, and The Scar by China Mieville.

Kat told us that most watercourses are shallower than they claim to be because of silt. She also said you can rent a boat and navigate the canalways of Europe to the Mediterranean.

There is an enormous body of mythology related to the sea - sea creatures, sirens, kelpies, naiads, etc. We were scarcely able to touch on it in the hour we had for this discussion, and should probably return to the topic soon!

The Netherlands have a National Maritime Museum, the Scheepvaartmuseum.

Aphrodite was born out of the sea, and Heimdall had nine mothers who were all waves of the sea.

There are also sea burials, and Viking burials. Apparently, cruise ships have a small morgue on board in case people die during a cruise (the average is two because of the typical age of cruisegoers), because people expect to get the bodies back. Brian told us that Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson died at the battle of Trafalgar, and his body was brought back in a barrel of brandy with camphor and myrrh, then placed in a lead-lined coffin filled with spirits of wine to travel from Gibraltar to England. Other sea captains might have been preserved in rum, but dead bodies are hard to preserve and space on a ship is at a premium, so bodies of less important people could be tossed overboard.

When Australia was sending convicts to populate its territories, they would not put murderers on the ships because no one wanted murderers to be trapped on a boat for six months. They would usually send burglars and thieves. Brian explained how it was a sort of prison pipeline, deliberately offering disproportionate punishment in the interest of helping Britain keep territory against the Dutch and others. It's always important to ask "who is profiting from this?" Once slavery had been banned, it was an alternative way of forcing people to go and do necessary work in the territory. We compared the way that Sydney was populated with the Mission era in California.

Thanks to everyone who attended! I really hope we can get back to the topic of Oceans soon, because we barely scratched the surface.

#SFWApro