Page 9, The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
Going to sea . . .
Joseph Conrad
On 13 October 1874 Tadeusz Bobrowski, the maternal uncle of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, sent his sixteen-year-old nephew to Marseilles, France, for a planned career at sea from his home in Kraków. Kraków had been annexed by Austria under the name the Grand Duchy of Cracow following the Kraków Uprising of February 1846, an attempt to incite an insurgency for Polish national independence. In1866, Austria granted a degree of autonomy to Galicia after its own defeat in the Austro-Prussian War, so by the 1870's the politically freer Kraków had become a Polish national symbol and a centre of culture and art, known frequently as the "Polish Athens" (Polskie Ateny) or "Polish Mecca".
This teenager was later to become known as Joseph Conrad, and now regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language, but like Gauguin, first of all he went to sea, joined the merchant marine.
In 1878, after nearly four years in France and on French ships, Conrad joined the British merchant marine and for the next fifteen years served under the Red Ensign. He worked on a variety of ships as crew member (steward, apprentice, able-bodied seaman) and then as third, second and first mate, until eventually achieving captain's rank. During the 19 years from the time that Conrad had left Kraków in October 1874 until he signed off the Adowa in January 1894, he had worked in ships, including long periods in ports, for 10 years and almost 8 months. He had spent just over 8 years at sea—9 months of this as a passenger.
Most of Conrad's stories and novels, and many of their characters, were drawn from his seafaring career and persons whom he had met or heard about. For his fictional characters he often borrowed the authentic names of actual persons.
The voyages of Conrad necessarily follow the patterns of trade, power, money and empire, and crossing back and forth across the zones between the centres of power and the margins, the peripheries of capitalism's reach. The voyages of Gauguin too reflect the following of routes available and open to someone seeking the kinds of source material necessary in order to fully wake to the meanings of a wide world globalised "avant le mot"!
Paul Gauguin
In 1862, aged fourteen, Paul Gauguin entered the Loriol Institute in Paris, a naval preparatory school, before returning to Orléans to take his final year at the Lycée Jeanne D'Arc. He then signed on as a pilot's assistant in the merchant marine. Three years later, he joined the French navy in which he served for two years. His mother died on 7 July 1867, but he did not learn of it for several months until a letter from his sister Marie caught up with him in India.
Where does Paul Gauguin come from?
Although Paul Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848, one of many European cities rocked by the wave of revolutionary actions that occurred that year, it would not be entirely meaningful to say "Gauguin came from Paris, France". From the age of 18 months until he was six years old, the young Paul grew up in Peru enjoying a privileged upbringing, attended by nursemaids and servants.
Paris 1848 and Peru?
Gauguin's maternal grandmother, Flora Tristan, was the illegitimate daughter of Thérèse Laisnay and Don Mariano de Tristan Moscoso. Her father, Don Mariano, came from an Aristocratic Spanish family from the Peruvian city of Arequipa, that held powerful positions in Peru.
Don Mariano's unexpected death left his mistress and daughter Flora in poverty. When Flora's marriage failed, following her husband's arrest and imprisonment for attempting to murder her, she petitioned for and obtained a small monetary settlement from her father's Peruvian relatives. She sailed to Peru in hopes of enlarging her share of the Tristan Moscoso family fortune. This never materialized; but she successfully published a popular travelogue of her experiences in Peru which launched her literary career in 1838.
Gauguin's maternal grandmother was an active supporter of early socialist societies, helping to lay the foundations for the revolutionary movements that erupted across Europe in 1848, a political phenomenon she never lived to see. Placed under surveillance by French police and suffering from overwork, she died in 1844, but her grandson Paul "idolized his grandmother, and kept copies of her books with him to the end of his life."
It was the connection of Gauguin's mother, Alina, Flora's daughter, to this Peruvian Spanish Aristocratic family, with its colonial inheritance, that provided an opportunity for Paul's parents to leave Paris for Peru in 1850. His father, Clovis, a liberal journalist, was compelled to flee France when the newspaper he worked for was suppressed by the French authorities, choosing to depart for Peru with his wife Alina and young children, in the hopes of continuing his journalistic career under the auspices of his wife's South American relations.
Like many other European intellectuals, Clovis was forced by the failure of the 1848 revolutions to look to the new world [Western Hemisphere]. There was no future for a liberal journalist in the France of Napoleon III..Bowness (1971) pages 3-4
Tragically, he died of a heart attack en route, and Alina arrived in Peru a widow with the 18-month-old Paul and his 2 ½ year-old sister, Marie. However, Gauguin's mother was welcomed by her paternal granduncle, whose prominent position in Peruvian society was to be enhanced when his son-in-law assumed the presidency of Peru.
Alina and her two small children consequently found themselves in a tropical paradise where every material need was met and every sense was indulged…Aline and her two children were looked after by a Negro nursemaid and a Chinese manservant; and the racial diversity of Peru was matched by a rich extravagance of dress and by the brightly painted buildings everywhere in the city.Bowness (1971) Page 4
He retained a vivid memory of that period of his childhood which instilled "indelible impressions of Peru that haunted him the rest of his life."
Bowness, A. Gauguin. Phaidon Press Limited, London 1971
Gauguin's idyllic childhood ended abruptly when his family mentors fell from political power during Peruvian civil conflicts in 1854. Aline returned to France with her children, leaving Paul with his paternal grandfather, Guillaume Gauguin, in Orleans. Deprived by the Peruvian Tristan Moscoso clan of a generous annuity arranged by her granduncle, Alina settled in Paris to work as a dressmaker.
Where does Conrad come from?
Conrad comes from a Poland that exists in the social and mental life of a Polish people, and yet geographically partitioned among the competing empires of Germany, Russia and Austria.
"Send a letter to Berdychiv"
There is an old Polish expression about the town where Konrad Korzeniowski was born on December 3, 1857. When you tell someone to "send a letter to Berdychiv," you mean "send a letter to nowhere" - you'll never reach me. The saying plays on Berdychiv's nineteenth-century position as a "somewhere," particularly for the town's then majority of Jews. Berdychiv hosted numerous trade fairs every year, making it a routine stop for peddlars with no permanent address. If they said "send a letter to Berdychiv," they meant send a letter to a place I'm going - you'll definitely reach me.
Page 19, The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
The world is made up of "nowheres" and "somewheres" - but which counts as which depends on what "where" you look from. The story of Konrad's life, and the world in which he lived, was a story of nowheres colliding with somewheres. At the time of his birth, the failure of a bank in Ohio touched off a financial panic that toppled firms in Hamburg. British troops struggled to suppress a rebellion in India. Indian troops sailed to Canton to threaten Chinese imperial officials. Chinese settlers rebelled on a river in Borneo, in a Malay state ruled by a European. European cloth and guns were traded up the Congo basin for ivory by villagers who'd never seen a white person. An American filibuster was booted out of Nicaragua. American-made steamboats plowed up the rivers of South America, and a locomotive built in Leeds pulled the first train out of Buenos Aires.
Maya Jasanoff's book is divided into four sections:
PART ONE: NATIONThe first chapter in Part One: Nation, is called NO HOME, NO COUNTRY and where she begins to tell the story of Conrad and his birth in the town of Berdychiv, that is now in a part of Ukraine, that was in its day, once a part of the independent Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania.
PART TWO: OCEAN
PART THREE: CIVILIZATION
PART FOUR: EMPIRE
Jasanoff begins writing about Conrad's birth, and the social, cultural and psychological environment that he was born into, and a family that reveals so much about the passion, and aspiration that is part of "being Polish" and the pain of not having a "nation", as well as the gentle pragmatism of acceptance that "that's just the way it is".
The baby's father, Apollo Korzeniowski, swelled with a sense of occasion. The birth of a first child makes history for any parent, and Apollo experienced it as profoundly political too: a moment to reflect on the destiny of his nation, Poland, which had ceased to exist as a state. Berdychiv had once been part of the independent Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but at the end of the eighteenth century the Commonwealth had been swallowed up by its neighbors in three giant gulps. Now Austria ruled the southern province of Galicia; Prussia governed the northwest; and Russia had snatched everything else, a huge tranche of land encompassing nearly all Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine - recovered lands of the Russians, said Catherine the Great; "stolen lands," said the Poles. Almost overnight, Ukraine's Poles became a pebble in the boot of Europe's most autocratic empire.
Apollo was a writer by vocation; he made the political into the poetical. He composed a song for the christening day. "To my son," he began, "born in the 85th year of Muscovite oppression":
Page 17-18 The Dawn Watch by Maya JasanoffBaby son, sleep without fear.
Lullaby, the world is dark,
You have no home, no country . . .
Baby son, tell yourself,
You are without land, without love,
Without country, without people,
While Poland - your Mother is in her grave.
What is Gauguin?
David Sweetman's book Paul Gauguin a complete life, is "complete" only to the extent that it devotes just "two lines to The Paris Commune while writing page after page describing the intricate workings of the Paris Bourse . . " according to Kayla on Amazon who also says that she was saddened by this scurrilous omission.
Why the Paris Commune? Why the Paris Bourse?
The débâcle of the Siege of Paris of 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War and in 1871 the proud refusal to surrender to either Germany or the French government by the Paris Commune, hangs like a curse, never to be acknowledged, over and above the re-shaping of Haussman's Paris. This was an inspired attempt to erase the street plan of the city along with all those vital memories, and, in so doing, produced the modern Paris, Boulevards et al.
Debacle comes from the French noun débâcle, which comes from the verb débâcler, meaning "to clear," "to unbolt," or "to unbar." In its original uses, "debacle" meant a breaking up of ice, or the rush of ice or water that follows such an occurrence. Eventually, "debacle" was used also to mean "a violent, destructive flood." Naturally, such uses led to meanings such as "a breaking up," "collapse," and finally "disaster" or "fiasco."La Débâcle, the novel by Émile Zola that processes the psychological trauma and denial of this "breaking up" was published in 1892, more than twenty years after the political and military events set out in the narrative had taken place. These historical events that ended the reign of Napoléon III and the Second Empire, in particular the Franco-Prussian War, the Battle of Sedan and the Paris Commune, divide the nation. The novel has been translated as The Debacle and The Downfall.
In 1871, Gauguin returned to Paris where he secured a job as a stockbroker. A close family friend, Gustave Arosa, got him a job at the Paris Bourse; Gauguin was 23. He became a successful Parisian businessman and remained one for the next 11 years.
In 1873, around the same time as he became a stockbroker, Gauguin began painting in his free time. His Parisian life centred on the 9th arrondissement of Paris, where the cafés were frequented by the Impressionists. Gauguin also began purchasing work by emerging artists. In 1879 he was earning 30,000 francs a year as a stockbroker, and as much again in his dealings in the art market. He formed a friendship with Camille Pissarro and visited him on Sundays to paint in his garden. Gauguin showed paintings in Impressionist exhibitions held in 1881 and 1882. His paintings received dismissive reviews. In 1882 the Paris stock market crashed and the art market contracted. Gauguin's earnings deteriorated sharply and he eventually decided to pursue painting full-time.
What is Conrad?
Captain Korzeniowski meant to stay three years in the Congo, but after just five months of navigating the great waterways between Kinshasha and Kisangani, he resigned, chronically ill and an emotional wreck. He retired to Switzerland “in a state of psychological and moral despair” convinced of “the universal potential for savagery, and the hollowness of civilisation”.
He only narrowly avoided a nervous breakdown. But he brought back more from the expedition than dysentery and depression. The notes and jottings the captain had made on his journey infiltrated their way first into the manuscript of a novel named Almayer’s Folly that he worked on upriver to keep himself from boredom and madness; then into a short story called An Outpost of Progress; and finally, in 1899, into what would become his most famous novel, Heart of Darkness.
Joseph Conrad – the name the captain assumed when he took British citizenship – has been well served by biographers and critics; but it is hard to imagine any student of his work will produce a more strikingly original book than Maya Jasanoff’s magnificent The Dawn Watch. It is not quite a biography or a work of criticism, though it contains elements of both, and fragments of travel writing too. It is instead both a circumnavigation of Conrad’s world and a profound meditation on globalisation and colonialism, and of Conrad’s place in forming our perceptions of both. It takes us from Poland, through Marseille and London then around south-east Asia until the book’s climax, when we travel up the Congo in Conrad’s footsteps, and Captain Korzeniowski turns his hand to writing – initially, somewhat surprisingly, “when he saw that the magazine Tit-Bits ran a competition for stories by sailors”.
Where was Gauguin going?
Gauguin was a traveler. In 1887, after having visited Panama, Gauguin spent the time from June to November near Saint Pierre on the Caribbean island of Martinique, accompanied by his friend the artist Charles Laval. He arrived in Martinique by way of Panama where he had found himself broke and without a job. At the time France had a policy of repatriation where if a citizen became broke or stranded on a French colony, the state would pay for the boat ride back. Upon leaving Panama protected by the repatriation policy, Gauguin and Laval decided to get off the boat at the Martinique port of St. Pierre.
At first, the 'negro hut' in which they lived suited him, and he enjoyed watching people in their daily activities. However, the weather in the summer was hot and the hut leaked in the rain. Gauguin finished 11 known paintings during his stay in Martinique, many of which seem to be derived from his hut.
His letters to Schuffenecker express an excitement about the exotic location and natives represented in his paintings.
Even though his time on the island was short, it surely was influential. He recycled some of his figures and sketches in later paintings, like the motif in Among the Mangoes which is replicated on his fans. Rural and indigenous populations remained a popular subject in Gauguin's work after he left the island.
By 1890, Gauguin had conceived the project of making Tahiti his next artistic destination. A successful auction of paintings in Paris at the Hôtel Drouot in February 1891, along with other events such as a banquet and a benefit concert, provided the necessary funds. Gauguin set sail for Tahiti on 1 April 1891, promising to return a rich man and make a fresh start.
Gauguin's erotic Tahiti idyll exposed as a sham
Amelia Hill
@byameliahill
Sun 7 Oct 2001 14.16 BST
First published on Sun 7 Oct 2001 14.16 BST
Paul Gauguin, renowned for his paintings of exotic idylls and Polynesian beauties, was a sadist who battered his wife, exploited his friends and lied to the world about the erotic Eden he claimed to have discovered on the South Sea island of Tahiti.
The most exhaustive study ever of Gauguin's life has revealed a brutal man who falsely cast himself as a creature of exotic sexuality, a defender of women's rights and a bastion of socialist ideals.
'No one has ever questioned Gauguin's own version of the man he was and the life he lived,' said Nancy Mowll Mathews, author of Paul Gauguin, An Erotic Life, to be published this week. 'But the reality couldn't be more different.'
Until now, the received opinion has been that Gauguin's wife was a bullying harridan who chased her husband from the family home. But Mathews has discovered letters that prove that Matte Gad was in fact a kind, clever woman who was victimised physically, verbally and emotionally by her husband.
'When I was 10 years old,' the couple's son, Emil, wrote in a previously unpublished letter, 'I saw my father bloody my mother's face with his fist.'
By 1890, Gauguin's career was in crisis: Matte had forced him from the family home, his paintings were out of favour and he had been dropped by the city's best art dealers. 'By the end of the year, Gauguin was like a cornered dog,' said Mathews. 'He was harrying friends for cash and desperately proposing one new money-making scheme after another.'
Eventually, in 1891, he hit on the idea of travelling to Tahiti to paint illustrations for the most popular novel of the day, Pierre Loti's The Marriage of Loti . He held a banquet for the cream of the literary and artistic world and explained how the primitive, erotic living conditions on Tahiti would revive his muse.
'He portrayed the natives as living only to sing and to make love,' said Mathews. That's how he got the money from his friends and raised the public's interest in his adventure. But, of course, he knew the truth, which was that Tahiti was an unremarkable island with an international, Westernised community.'
'I stand at the edge of the abyss, yet I do not fall in,' Gauguin wrote to a friend on the eve of his departure.
Tahiti was more sexually liberated than turn-of-the-century Paris and there is no doubt that Gauguin revelled in the opportunities it offered, but his time there was not nearly as extreme as he claimed. Unfazed, Gauguin transformed his prosaic experiences into titillating erotic adventures.
'The island [and the realities of Gauguin's life there] are virtually unrecognisable in his representations, carefully calculated to intrigue the French audience,' said Mathews.
After two years, Gauguin returned to France, expecting a hero's welcome. But what should have been a triumphant return turned into a morass of misunderstanding and disappointment as his paintings remained unsold.
In a final attempt to spark the public's interest, Gauguin wrote Noa Noa, his autobiographical account of his life in Tahiti. 'Writing the book was the beginning of Gauguin's writing of an erotic life for himself,' said Mathews. 'He created a life for public consumption as part of his campaign to make his exhibitions - and therefore his future - a success.
Gauguin's efforts failed, however, and less than a year later, he was making plans to return to Tahiti. 'Gauguin seems to have fallen for the myth of Tahiti he created,' said Mathews. 'He returned expecting the erotic idyll that was only ever a figment of his imagination. Of course, he didn't find it and the disappointment was profound: he died a twisted and bitter man, having alienated everyone both at home and in Tahiti. It's a sad story of a man who believed his own fiction.'
Gauguin's first period settling in Tahiti
He spent the first three months in Papeete, the capital of the colony and already much influenced by French and European culture. Unable to afford the pleasure-seeking life-style in Papeete, he decided to set up his studio in Mataiea, Papeari, some forty-five kilometres from Papeete, installing himself in a native-style bamboo hut.
It was here that he completed paintings depicting Tahitian life such La Orana Maria (Ave Maria). In August 1893, Gauguin returned to France, where he continued to execute paintings on Tahitian subjects.
Gauguin set out for Tahiti again on 28 June 1895. His return is characterised by Thomson as an essentially negative one, his disillusionment with the Paris art scene compounded by two attacks on him in the same issue of Mercure de France; one by Emile Bernard, the other by Camille Mauclair.
Thomson, Belinda (1987). Gauguin. London: Thames and Hudson.
Mathews remarks that his isolation in Paris had become so bitter that he had no choice but to try to reclaim his place in Tahiti society.
Mathews, Nancy Mowll (2001). Paul Gauguin, an Erotic Life. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
Gauguin's second period settling in Tahiti
He arrived in September 1895 and was to spend the next six years living, for the most part, an apparently comfortable life as an artist-colon near, or at times in, Papeete. During this time he was able to support himself with an increasingly steady stream of sales and the support of friends and well-wishers, though there was a period of time 1898–1899 when he felt compelled to take a desk job in Papeete, of which there is not much record. He built a spacious reed and thatch house at Punaauia in an affluent area ten miles east of Papeete, settled by wealthy families, in which he installed a large studio, sparing no expense.
For the first year at least he produced no paintings, informing Monfreid that he proposed henceforth to concentrate on sculpture. Few of his wooden carvings from this period survive, most of them collected by Monfreid.
When he resumed painting, it was to continue his long-standing series of sexually charged nudes in paintings such as O Taiti (Nevermore). Mathews notes a return to Christian symbolism that would have endeared him to the colonists of the time, now anxious to preserve what was left of native culture by stressing the universality of religious principles. In these paintings, Gauguin was addressing an audience amongst his fellow colonists in Papeete, not his former avant-garde audience in Paris.
The Marquesas
Gauguin had nurtured a plan of settling in the Marquesas ever since seeing a collection of intricately carved Marquesan bowls and weapons in Papeete during his first months in Tahiti. However, he found a society that, as in Tahiti, had lost its cultural identity. Of all the Pacific island groups, the Marquesas were the most affected by the import of Western diseases (especially tuberculosis). An eighteenth century population of some 80,000 had declined to just 4,000. Catholic missionaries held sway and, in their effort to control drunkenness and promiscuity, obliged all native children to attend missionary schools into their teens. French colonial rule was enforced by a gendarmerie noted for its malevolence and stupidity, while traders, both western and Chinese, exploited the natives appallingly.
Gauguin's Marquesas work for the most part can only be distinguished from his Tahiti work by experts or by their dates. He chose to paint landscapes, still lifes, and figure studies at this time, with an eye to Vollard's clientele, avoiding the primitive and lost paradise themes of his Tahiti paintings.
At the beginning of 1903, Gauguin engaged in a campaign designed to expose the incompetence of the island's gendarmes, in particular Jean-Paul Claverie, for taking the side of the natives directly in a case involving the alleged drunkenness of a group of them. Claverie, however, escaped censure. At the beginning of February, Gauguin wrote to the administrator, François Picquenot, alleging corruption by one of Claverie's subordinates. Picquenot investigated the allegations but could not substantiate them. Claverie responded by filing a charge of libeling a gendarme against Gauguin, who was subsequently fined 500 francs and sentenced to three months' imprisonment by the local magistrate on 27 March 1903. Gauguin immediately filed an appeal in Papeete and set about raising the funds to travel to Papeete to hear his appeal.
At this time he was very weak and in great pain. He resorted once again to using morphine. Gauguin, the settler, died suddenly on the morning of 8 May 1903 in the Marquesas, but a future destination of "Gauguin the artist" was the Oceania Pavilion of The Paris Colonial Exhibition (or "Exposition coloniale internationale", International Colonial Exhibition), a six-month colonial exhibition held in Paris, France in 1931 that attempted to display the diverse cultures and immense resources of France's colonial possessions.
Primitivism and Gauguin
The invention of primitivism at the beginning of the 20th century arises from a new relationship with the Other, at least in the field of history of art. As this Other is situated in an Elsewhere, primitivism raises spatial issues. It resonates with political geography, in particular that of colonialism and of decolonization, but also with that of tourism. It allows for head-on tackling of the question of relationship of the West and the Other, which is central for postmodern and postcolonial geography.
It would be impossible to deal with the whole of the primitivist movement, therefore the work and itinerary (Re:LODE emphasis) of Gauguin were chosen as exemplary. A major influence on Western art, his universally popular work functions as a matrix of social representations. As a major figure, maybe even the inventor of primitivism, Gauguin is responsible for the changes in Western culture brought about by the movement, particularly in its geographical dimensions.
The interpretation of this movement, and especially Gauguin’s primitivism, is controversial. Primitivism does not imply an inspiration directly drawn from the primitive arts. Manao Tupapau owes more to the ghosts of Manet and of Ingres than to Tahitian mythology.Primitivism and the other. History of art and cultural geography
Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going recalls the frescos of Puvis de Chavanne more than Polynesian art. It is possible to draw a parallel between the taste for exotic and undressed scenes characteristic of orientalist painters and the search for a picturesque eroticism that is not foreign to Gauguin: Manao Tupapau reminds of the harems of Jérome or of Fromentin. Gauguin’s aspiration to the savage owes more to Rousseau’s ‘good savage’ than to the Maori people. Gauguin’s debts to primitive arts are few and he more often refers to the arts of the great Eastern civilisations (Japan, Java, Cambodia, Egypt, Persia) than to tribal arts themselves (essentially from the Marquesas Islands). Thus the blue idol that appears in Where do we come from is much more Asian than Polynesian.
Jean-François Staszak University of Paris Pantheon-Sorbonne, Paris, France
Where was Conrad going?
History is like therapy for the present: it makes us talk about its parents. Because the term "globalization" was popularized in the 1980's, it's easy to assume that most of the things associated with it date from then or later: an interdependent economy, open borders,ethnically diverse and networked populations, international institutions and standards, shared cultural reference points. But it was in Conrad's youth, not mine, that "three great achievements of the present," as Walt Whitman called them, transformed the speed and range of global connections: "In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal,/The New by its mighty railroad spann'd,/The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires." Conrad docked alongside the oceangoing steamers that transported emigrants from Europe and Asia on a scale never seen before or since. He cruised over the transoceanic telegraph cables that zapped news, for the frst time in history, faster than people. Between voyages he made his home in London, the center of a global financial market that was more integrated during his lifetime than it would be again until the 1980's.Pages 6-7, The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
Conrad wouldn't have known the word "globalization", but with his journey from the provinces of imperial Russia across the high seas to the British home counties, he embodied it. He channeled his global perspective into fiction based overwhelmingly on personal experience and real incidents. Henry James perfectly described Conrad's gift: "No-one has known - for intellectual use - the things you know, and you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached." That's why a map of Conrad's written world looks so different from that of his contemporaries. Conrad has often been compared to Rudyard Kipling, the informal poet laureate of the British Empire, whose fiction took place in the parts of the world that were colored red on maps, to show British rule. But Conrad didn't set a single novel in a British colony, and even the fiction he placed in Britain or on British ships generally featured non-British characters. Conrad cast his net across Europe, Africa, South America and the Indian Ocean. Then he wandered through the holes. He took his readers to the places "beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines," onto the sailing ships that crept alongside the swift steamers, and among the "human outcasts such as one finds in the lost corners of the world."Page 7, The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
These lines of communication, these networks, are part of what it takes to "stitch the world together". Perhaps it is in these flows of things and information that the essence of "modernity" emerges. And as Rudyard Kipling said:
Transportation is civilisation!The shipping records of the past can now be used to produce a moving image of the flows of goods, people and information, as well as monitoring the patterns of trade in our age of containerisation.
The British Empire vanished long ago, and not many people read Kipling anymore. But Conrad's world shimmers beneath the surface of our own. Today Internet cables run along the seafloor beside the old telegraph wires. Conrad's characters whisper in the ears of new generations of antiglobalization protesters and champions of free trade, liberal interventionists and radical terrorists, social justice activists and xenophobic nativists. And there is no better emblem of globalization today than the containership, which has made transport so cheap that it's more efficient to catch a fish in Scotland, send it to China to be filleted, then send it back to Europe for sale, than it is to hire laborers in situ. Ninety percent of world trade travels by sea, which makes ships and sailors more central to the world economy than ever before.Pages 7-9, The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
