Sub-Atlantic History

Sub-Atlantic history is history from below - not in the traditional, social- historical, meaning of that phrase as the history of those beneath the elites, but rather as history that took place ‘below the water line’ or ‘below the waves’.⁶⁶ The term ‘sub-Atlantic’ seems to have emerged at that pivotal moment in the middle of the nineteenth century when the two Atlantics were increasingly united by the advent of steam navigation and when the telegraph joined both sides of the Atlantic for the first time: for example, the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest instances of ‘subatlantic’ come from 1854 and 1875, respectively: ‘subatlantic telegraphy’ and the ‘sub­atlantic cable enterprise’.⁶⁷ More recently, the word has been invoked, with reference to Caribbean thinkers such as Edouard Glissant and the late Derek Walcott, to cover the realm of ‘the sub-Atlantic as a repository of historical memory’.⁶⁸ Sub-Atlantic history can cover all these senses and more, to denote the world beneath the waves of the Atlantic, its cur­rents, sea-floor and waters, as well as the denizens of marine ecosystems, human interactions with the natural world of the Atlantic, and the his­tory that took place within the ocean itself.⁶⁹

Benton and Mulich, ‘The space between empires: Coastal and insular microregions in the early nineteenth-century world’, in Paul Stock, ed., The uses of space in early modern history (Basingstoke, 2015), p.

⁶⁶ Marcus Rediker, ‘History from below the water line: Sharks and the Atlantic slave trade’, Atlantic Studies, 5 (2008): 285-97; Ryan Tucker Jones, ‘Running into whales: The history of the North Pacific from below the waves’, American Historical Review, 118 (2013):349-77.

⁶⁷ OED, s.v., ‘sub-Atlantic’.

⁶⁸ James Delbourgo, ‘Divers things: Collecting the world under water’, History of Science, 49 (2011): 162; see ibid., 167, on ‘a sub-Atlantic unity made by the deaths of Africans’ in the poetry of Derek Walcott.

⁶⁹ More generally, see John Gillis and Franziska Torma, eds., Fluid frontiers: New currents in marine environmental history (Cambridge, 2015).

Sub-Atlantic history remedies the striking absence of ‘one area of inquiry... from Atlantic history: the ocean itself’, considered as ‘a sin­gle oceanic unit, a huge bioregion differentiated by human activities at different rates in specific subregions’.^[336] It can be an adjunct to infra­Atlantic history, as the examination of a particular segment of the ocean and its interactions with animals, land and humans, an approach exem­plified in Jeffrey Bolster’s richly illuminating history of the fishing banks of the Northwestern Atlantic.^[337] Oceans may appear to be timeless, the profound and unchanging stage for what, in Braudelian terms, might appears to be the spume of events on the crest of its waves. By contrast, sub-Atlantic history reveals the history of the sea as a variable and shift­ing entity transformed by human activity (for example, through overfish­ing or by polluting) as well as by more overarching processes like climate change. Sub-Atlantic history accordingly brings Atlantic history more fully into alignment with environmental history as a whole.^[338]

Sub-Atlantic history should also encompass the histories of activities beneath the ocean. The Atlantic does not have the same large migra­tory populations of aquatic animals on the scale of the Pacific, with its whales, fish and pinnipeds, for example; human migration and settle­ment in pursuit of those creatures has not shaped Atlantic history to the same degree as it has the human history of the Pacific.^[339] However, humans have long hunted whales up into the high Arctic reaches of the Atlantic and demands for protein from dried fish determined sailing and settlement patterns in the North Atlantic and colonial linkages between New England and the Caribbean (for provisioning the enslaved popula­tion) in the eighteenth century.^[340] Access to the products of mammals and fish thereby shaped forms of Atlantic integration for centuries, as did the winds and currents of the basin until the advent of steam. Much Atlantic history has taken for granted the ocean and its inhabitants that drove these developments.

Consciousness of the ocean qua ocean also forms part of sub-Atlantic history. Because most white inhabitants of the Atlantic world until the early nineteenth century shared a post-Roman prejudice against swim­ming, ‘it is most certain that the Indians, and the Negroes excel[led] all others in [the] Arts of Swimming and Diving’. For this reason, Africans, African Americans and Native Americans were on the leading edge of submarine knowledge-gathering in the Atlantic, for example working to recover specimens for Sir Hans Sloane in Jamaica, diving for pearls or salvaging materials from wrecks.^[341] They were also more likely to fall vic­tim to ferocious fauna like sharks: ‘the shark and the slave trade had gone together from the beginning’.^[342] More generally, while the geography of the Atlantic was reasonably well known by the late sixteenth century, its oceanography and hydrography only began to explored in the late eight­eenth century. Before then, although fishermen and sailors possessed vernacular understandings of the winds and waters of the Atlantic and its animal populations, exploration of the ocean was confined to coastal waters. The first deep-sea sounding of the Atlantic took place from HMS Racehorse in the Norwegian Sea in 1773 but major scientific work on the deep ocean did not take off until the late nineteenth century, with the Challenger expedition of 1872-76.^[343] The invention of sonar allowed much deeper investigation and led, in the 1950s, to the great achieve­ment of Marie Tharp and Bruce Heezen in mapping the mid-Atlantic ridge - a breakthrough not just for sub-Atlantic history but also for the emergent theory of plate tectonics.^[344] More than half a century later, the Atlantic, like much of the rest of the world’s deep oceans, still remains largely uncharted territory - an inner space awaiting scientific explora­tion, but also ripe for historical investigation as well.

The world beneath the waves of the Atlantic may be the least devel­oped form of Atlantic history for the moment. However, it is likely to burgeon as oceanic history becomes more deeply shaped by environ­mental history. The non-human history of the Atlantic - the historical study not only of its other creatures, but of its waters and winds and how they have in turn interacted with human activity - is only likely to expand, as we can already see from recent work on Caribbean hur­ricanes, for instance.^[345] Meanwhile, the world beneath the waves - ship­wrecks, drowning, the imagining of the depths - is already attracting literary attention.^[346] The submarine realm may be the final frontier for Atlantic history but advances in history from below the waves in other oceanic historiographies suggest its time will soon come, especially as it combines with emerging work on the exploitation, management and gov­ernance of the oceans in other fields.^[347] When it does, it will be one more means to join Atlantic history with adjacent oceanic histories. To see the promise of that conjunctive turn, we now turn finally to my third and last additional concept, extra-Atlantic history.