Reading Underwater Wreckage: An Encrusting Ocean 9781350290044, 9781350290037, 9781350290013

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Reading Underwater Wreckage

Environmental Cultures Series Series Editors: Greg Garrard, University of British Columbia, Canada Richard Kerridge, Bath Spa University, UK Editorial Board: Frances Bellarsi, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium Mandy Bloomfield, Plymouth University, UK Lily Chen, Shanghai Normal University, China Christa Grewe-Volpp, University of Mannheim, Germany Stephanie LeMenager, University of Oregon, USA Timothy Morton, Rice University, USA Pablo Mukherjee, University of Warwick, UK Bloomsbury’s Environmental Cultures series makes available to students and scholars at all levels the latest cutting-edge research on the diverse ways in which culture has responded to the age of environmental crisis. Publishing ambitious and innovative literary ecocriticism that crosses disciplines, national boundaries, and media, books in the series explore and test the challenges of ecocriticism to conventional forms of cultural study. Titles available: Bodies of Water, Astrida Neimanis Cities and Wetlands, Rod Giblett Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895–1941, John Claborn Climate Change Scepticism, Greg Garrard, George Handley, Axel Goodbody, Stephanie Posthumus

Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel, Astrid Bracke Cognitive Ecopoetics, Sharon Lattig Colonialism, Culture, Whales, Graham Huggan Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty, Marco Caracciolo ­Digital Vision and Ecological Aesthetic, Lisa FitzGerald Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction, Sarah E. McFarland Ecocriticism and Italy, Serenella Iovino Ecospectrality, Laura A. White Environmental Cultures in Soviet East Europe, Anna Barcz Fuel, Heidi C. M. Scott Imagining the Plains of Latin America, Axel Pérez Trujillo Diniz Literature as Cultural Ecology, Hubert Zapf The Living World, Samantha Walton Nerd Ecology, Anthony Lioi The New Nature Writing, Jos Smith The New Poetics of Climate Change, Matthew Griffiths Radical Animism, Jemma Deer Reclaiming Romanticism, Kate Rigby Teaching Environmental Writing, Isabel Galleymore This Contentious Storm, Jennifer Mae Hamilton The Tree Climbing Cure, Andy Brown Weathering Shakespeare, Evelyn O’Malley Forthcoming Titles: Ecocriticism and Turkey, Meliz Ergin Climate Fiction, John Thieme

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Reading Underwater Wreckage An Encrusting Ocean Killian Quigley

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Killian Quigley, 2023 Killian Quigley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the ­Acknowledgments on pp. xii–xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Burge Agency Cover image: Male scuba diver is viewed through the underwater porthole of the HMS Endymion shipwreck © Stephen Frink Collection / Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Quigley, Killian Colm, author. Title: Reading underwater wreckage : an encrusting ocean / Killian Quigley. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Presenting a novel and needed theoretical model for interpreting shipwrecks and other drowned fragments-the histories they tell, and the futures they presage-as junctures of artefact and ecofact, human remains and emergent ecologies, this book puts the environmental humanities, and particularly multispecies studies, in close conversation with literary studies, history, and aesthetic theory. Earth’s oceans hold the remains of as many as three million shipwrecks, some thousands of years old. Instead of approaching shipwrecks as either artefacts or “ecofacts,” this book presents a third frame for understanding, one inspired by the material dynamism of sea-floor stuff. As they become encrusted by oceanic matter-some of it living, some inanimate-anthropic fragments participate in a distinctively submarine form of material relation. That relation comprises a wide, and sometimes incalculable, array of things, lives, times, and stories. Drawing from several centuries of literary, philosophical, and scientific encounters with encrustations-as well as from some of the innumerable encrusted “art-forms” that inhabit the sea floor- this book serves anyone in search of better ways to perceive, describe, and imagine submarine matters”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022031294 | ISBN 9781350290044 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350290006 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350290013 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350290020 (epub) | ISBN 9781350290037 Subjects: LCSH: Shipwrecks in literature. | Shipwrecks–Historiography. Classification: LCC PN56.S54 Q54 2023 | DDC 809/.9332162–dc23/eng/20220921 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022031294 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-9004-4 ePDF: 978-1-3502-9001-3 eBook: 978-1-3502-9002-0 Series: Environmental Cultures Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

­To the memory of Dr. Fionnuala Quigley, my godmother

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­Contents List of Figures A ­ cknowledgments Preface: Submersions, Wrecks, and Stirrings Introduction 1 2 3 4

Lively Debris: Ontologies of an Encrusting Ocean First Habit: Fouling Second Habit: Concrescing Third Habit: Artmaking

B ­ ibliography Index

x xii xiv 1 33 63 95 127 155 175

Figures 1

Peter Fuller, Popes Eye, Port Phillip Bay, Victoria. November 25, 2011. Copyright Peter Fuller xviii 2 Map of Port Phillip Heads, 1859. CS75; Port Phillips Heads; Ross; Nepean Paywit. Historic Plan Collection. Public Record Office Victoria. Public domain xx 3 The surface of Upper Bay, New York Harbor. September 6, 2019. Author’s photograph xxvii ­4 First “Sea Sculpture,” c. 1725, underglaze of cobalt blue-decorated porcelain pieces fused together by fire encrusted with shell and coral growths. (First angle.) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 3 5 Second “Sea Sculpture,” c. 1725, underglaze cobalt blue-decorated porcelain cups fused together. Shell and coral growths. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 4 6 First “Sea Sculpture,” c. 1725, underglaze of cobalt blue-decorated porcelain pieces fused together by fire encrusted with shell and coral growths. (Second angle.) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 23 7 First “Sea Sculpture,” c. 1725, underglaze of cobalt blue-decorated porcelain pieces fused together by fire encrusted with shell and coral growths. (Third angle.) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 24 8 Bust of Aphrodite from the Mahdia wreckage, Bardo National Museum, Tunisia. E. Leroux, Catalogue du Musée Alaoui, 1897–1922. Public domain 35 9 Nicolas Robert, nine studies of shells, from an album of seventy-nine drawings entitled “Roberts’s Drawings of Plants, Birds, Shells &c. Vol.1,” including a spiral spiny shell at center. Watercolor and bodycolor, on vellum. 1625–84. © The British Museum 45 10 Anonymous, shards of porcelain and red-baked earthenware with crusts from the seabed from V.O.C. ship the “Witte Leeuw,” before 1613. Earthenware, porcelain, and coral. Gift of R. Sténuit, Brussels. Rijksmuseum. Public domain 52

Figures

11 Jason deCaires Taylor, The Unstill Life, Grenada Collection 2007, Depth 8m, Molinere, Grenada. © Jason deCaires Taylor. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2022. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor 12 W. Hooper, Halley’s diving bell, in Rational recreations, 3rd ed., 1787. Open Artstor: Wellcome Collection. Creative Commons 13 Jacob Rowe, diving barrel, c. 1720. One of a series of six illustrations showing the operation of an early diving “machine” or suit, from “A Demonstration of the Diving Engine” by Jacob Rowe, which is the first known treatise on diving in English. Rowe was a sea captain, inventor, engineer, author, and diver. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London 14 A barnacle or goose-mussle encrusted in a rock. Etching. Wellcome Collection. Public domain 15 Dr. Dwayne Meadows, NOAA/NMFS/OPR, engine order telegraph on the Kansho Maru—sunk during the Second World War, September, 2006. Federated States of Micronesia, Chuuk. NOAA Photo Library. Flickr. CC BY 2.0 16 Bolt concretion, hollow iron, from the wreck of the Batavia, 1629. Registration number 395. ID 1762. Western Australian Museum 17 Unidentified wood/iron concretion from the wreck of the HMS Pandora, 1791. Registration number MA4880. Queensland Museum 18 Bernard Picart, Salmacis en Hermaphroditus, 1733. Etching, 253 × 178 mm. Gift of D. H. Cevat, Guernsey. Rijksmuseum. Public domain 19 Nocturnal from the wreck of the La Belle, c. 1684, after conservation. Courtesy of the Texas Historical Commission 20 Concretion of ceramics from the Hoi An shipwreck, approx. 1450–1500. Vietnam. Stoneware, stone, antler, shell, corroding iron, and remains of sea creatures. Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Acquisition made possible by Betty and Bruce Alberts, Will and June Arney Roadman, Annie and Cameron Dorsey, Jean and Lindsay MacDermid, Rhoda Stuart Mesker, and Ann Witter. 2000.31. Photograph © Asian Art Museum of San Francisco 21 Unknown, Chinese, Sea sculpture from the Ca Mau shipwreck, c. 1725. (First angle.) 22 Unknown, Chinese, Sea sculpture from the Ca Mau shipwreck, c. 1725. (Second angle.)

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61 69

74 79

91 96 99 108 115

128 149 149

A ­ cknowledgments I was incited to write this book by Kaori Nagai, who challenged me to think seriously about how shipwrecks interrelate with animal lives. The work of so doing afforded me welcome focus and fulfillment during the first year of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, when I discussed early versions of this research with companions at the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney. For their colleagueship at those and other times, I am particularly indebted to Astrida Neimanis, Sue Reid, Hal Conyngham, Thom van Dooren, David Schlosberg, Sophie Chao, Eloise Fetterplace, Genevieve Wright, Peter Marks, Jody Webster, Anna Sturman, Christine Winter, June Rubis, Blanche Verlie, Hannah Della Bosca, James Bradley, Ann Elias, Lisa Heinze, Catriona Macmillan, Dalia Nassar, Cat Moir, Peter Minter, Jude Philp, Leah LuiChivizhe, Dinesh Wadiwel, Anik Waldow, and Dany Celermajer. Natali Pearson’s enthusiasm for, and expert views upon, multispecies wrecks were and remain particularly animating. Michelle St Anne’s critical imagination has, for the past half-decade, been an influence in many ways that I am able to reckon and many more that I am not. These projects have been pivotally encouraged, moreover, by Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery, Sharad Chari, and Meg Samuelson; by the entire PostImperial Oceanics and Oceanic Humanities for the Global South networks; and by those networks’ configurations at and with the Institute for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. I am deeply grateful, for that matter, for the array of other encounters I have enjoyed in the course of, and in connection to, these writings. For them I thank John White, Christina Riley, Lucy Benjamin, Cameron Allan McKean, Simon Troon, Melanie Ashe, Patrick Morrison, Kevin Edwards, Coll Thrush, Mandy Treagus, Madeleine Seys, and Theodora Galanis, among others. For opportunities to cultivate my view of the inaesthetic ocean I credit Giulia Rispoli, Christoph Rosol, and especially Rachel Murray and Vera Fibisan. Felicity Picken, Emma Waterton, Craig Santos Perez, and Rebecca H. Hogue have spurred me toward subjects of direct consequence for what follows.

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Like any other, this book reflects a network of labors. I offer my sincere gratitude to Freya Levett, V&A; Dan Bailey and Beatrice Okoro, Royal Museums Greenwich; Nicola Bartlett and Ross Anderson, Western Australian Museum; Donna Miller, Queensland Museum; Helen A. Connor, Davis Museum at Wellesley College; Amy Borgens, Texas Historical Commission; Lucia Rinolfi, British Museum Images; David Armstrong, Asian Art Museum; and Donny L. Hamilton, Texas A&M University. Without the support and genial persistence of Ben Doyle and Laura Cope above all, Reading Underwater Wreckage would not exist. To colleagues in Vanderbilt, Paris, Melbourne, and elsewhere I owe multifarious debts. Kate Fullagar, Bridget Orr, Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Emily Potter, Alda Balthrop-Lewis, David Newheiser, Michael Adams, Matthew Champion, Miranda Stanyon, Marc Mierowsky, J’Nese Williams, Nicki Pombier, Tiffane Levick, Claire Labarbe, Maggie Nolan, Kristie Flannery, Alistair Paterson, Sue Broomhall, Clare Davidson, Sarah Bendall, and Joy Damousi are some of them. Margaret Cohen’s extraordinary submersions have marked this book in ways I am not capable of neatly summarizing here. Jonathan Lamb’s readings and writings have been, and remain, models of dazzling care. Steve Mentz’s hospitable oceanities have been variously and profoundly sustaining. For the chance and the courage to carry out these immersions, I acknowledge Iain McCalman. My work, like my life, takes place at distances: some mercifully small, and others painfully great. I have been very lucky to grow together with my noble parents, my sisters, my nieces, and all my Quigley and O’Sullivan kin. The seabeds that separate us may be marvelous, but for their stretching I am sorry. This book is dedicated to my late, brilliant, inspiriting godmother, Fionnuala Quigley, whose absence is a real, terrible loss, not a mythical one. Close by—thank God—is Emma Cullen. She is my partner, underwater and everywhere else.

Preface Submersions, Wrecks, and Stirrings A Situation, Submersed My wife Emma and I moved recently to a small town called, in the language of settler-colonial toponymy, Queenscliff, Victoria, Australia. It sits near the seaward extremity of a large, narrow-mouthed, remarkably shallow inlet named Port Phillip Bay. That appellation is yet another trace of colonialism’s weird definitions, the sign of an homage paid to Arthur Phillip, the Londonborn naval commander and inaugural governor of the penal settlement of New South Wales. In October 1803, the English East Indiaman HMS Calcutta entered Port Phillip’s “spacious harbour” under orders to determine “an eligible situation for establishing [a] colony” in its vicinity. Between the Calcutta and its companion-ship Ocean, the expedition was freighted with a “cargo” of about three hundred transported convicts. The ensuing survey would prove disappointing for its managers, who despite abundant hunting and fair fishing found conditions for settlement “impossible” upon soils that appeared “little better than sand.” An observation like this one, passed down by a third lieutenant named Nicholas Pateshall, rings of irony when contemplated alongside another from the same hand: there was “no doubt” that the shores were “swarming” with “natives,” so “constant” was the sight of their “fires round the bay.” Incapable of imagining their own flourishing along the same coast, the would-be colonists soon sailed back out to sea, frustrated at a place that had seemed at first to offer “everything that could be wished” but that Pateshall had come to regard, instead, as “most deplorable” (1998: 95–9). Queenscliff and its surrounds lie amidst the lands and waters of the Wadawurrung, people whose knowledge of and relationships to their country—including their sea country—have been cultivated over thousands of years. That knowledge and those relationships were both devastated and

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unextirpated by what became, in the decades following the Calcutta’s abortive visit, the “permanent invasion of their lands” (Cahir 2019: 5). Their waters, too: Nerm is the original, Wadawurrung word for present-day Port Phillip Bay, a place bearing traces of human inhabitation that are understood to be at least forty thousand years old. (Nairm and Naarm Naarm are other terms referring to a body of water that has been long and richly known by not only the Wadawurrung but the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri peoples, fellowmembers of the Kulin nation.) As Wadawurrung man Uncle Bryon Powell and Yorta Yorta and Ngarrindjeri man Tandop David Tournier explained, one implication of this timescale is the continuity of Aboriginal life and culture in Nerm and its catchment since even before this place was watery. Between about fifteen thousand and twelve thousand years ago, in the course of the most recent planetary deglaciation and the meltwater pulses occasioned thereby, an area that had been dominated by grassland became flooded by salt water, and the bay was born. Wadawurrung (and more broadly Kulin) witnessing predated and persisted through this “transformation,” and Wadawurrung stories recollect it to this day (Powell et al. 2019: 46–9). Emma and I are not Australian, a fact the federated Commonwealth’s baroque immigration system has rarely let us forget over the course of the five years we have lived here. We are implicated, nonetheless—through our Anglophony, through the institutions that employ us, through the barest facts of our physical presence, and so on—in the “structure” of Australian settler-colonialism as it endures and changes shape over time (Wolfe 2006: 388). Shifting our site of residence from one part of this place to another has not kept our entanglements with said structure from laying hold. If anything, one more move iterates and deepens our sense of being enfolded in empire, as well as in what Paul Carter memorably called its “spatial constitution” (2010: 98). Scrolling, yet again, through advertisements for rental apartments and houses, we participate anew in a hunt for home amidst the invisibilized violences of property. Striking out, at weekends, to walk in forested parklands and swim along public beaches, we orient ourselves among spaces made ostensibly “common” via the actual proscription of certain “cultural practices” and their official replacement by certain others (Porter 2006: 391–2). Thrilling at first encounters with unmet birds, plants, fishes, snakes, and others, we corroborate our impressions with our cherished field guides,

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texts that reaffirm a tradition and a nomenclature hearkening back to the “classificatory mania” exemplified by the likes of Joseph Banks, botanist on James Cook’s Endeavour voyage upon Pacific waters (Robin 2003). Our latest change of scenery was after all motivated, primarily, by our desire to learn from and with an unfamiliar corner of this “island-continent” (Tuan 1991: 687). After living on Gadigal land, in Sydney’s Inner West, for a few years, we made our way to Melbourne in the first weeks of 2021. In spite of the self-quarantine and subsequent lockdowns that confined us, for so much of that year, to a very small sphere of movement, we managed to visit and be dazzled by a wide variety of so-called Victorian places, from the rivers and hills of Dhudhuroa, Taungurung, Waywurru, Gunaikurnai, and Jaithmathang country in the northeast to the extraordinary coastlines of the Gunditjmara people, down west. In January 2022, just as our lease in Melbourne’s inner north was close to running out, we found an affordable old house for rent in Queenscliff, near enough to commuter trains and ferries to manage trips into the state capital for time with close friends and for work, and far enough to throw us well out of our ordinary orbits and routines. The town struck us as friendly and reassuringly uncool, and we heard good things about the local fish and chip shops. (I would like to call the place “daggy,” a common and—to my outsider’s understanding—enduringly elusive term of Australian English that has seemed to me to mean something like “endearingly unrefined.”) A 1980s-vintage maritime museum appeared to hold an intriguing range of things fetched from surrounding waters, and so did one of the antique shops, the owner whereof had a special interest in formerly submersed bottles. There was a nice bookstore, too. And there was diving. I learned SCUBA in 2014 while living in Kinsale, a village located in the southern Irish county of Cork. A sort-of-homeplace for my siblings and me, Cork is where our parents lived before they emigrated, first to the UK and then to the United States, in the 1980s—and it is where they returned when we moved back east across the Atlantic around the turn of the millennium. From that point, the history of our situation becomes too complicated to relate neatly here. But one of the things it definitely entailed, for me—after a long period of thinking the place totally dreary and not much else—was a desire to establish a relationship to Ireland on idiosyncratic terms. I was never going to be mistaken for anything other than a stranger in the nearest thing I had to

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a native land, and this inclined me to cultivate a way of getting to know the island that was meaningfully located but also manifestly eccentric. Diving felt like a start, and not just because it is relatively easy to avoid betraying one’s Nebraskan accent while one’s head is underwater and one’s mouth is full of regulator. Beneath the surface of a geographically tiny stretch of the Celtic Sea, around sites like Cuas Gorm, Black Head, and Tractor (yes, a drowned tractor), I began getting marginally better acquainted with the waters, grounds, and lives of a country I was aware I would only ever “belong” to uncertainly and obliquely. Better still, I was discovering community via paths uncharted for me by biological kinship or family connection—and so finding, at last, a few of my own ways of speaking from this kind-of-home. Irish divers are fond of saying—not least by way of encouraging clumsy novices—that learning SCUBA in the cold, murky, swelly waters of the North Atlantic leaves one prepared to cope with conditions pretty much anywhere. I am not nearly seasoned enough to confirm or deny this, but I can say that the temperate waters off Kinsale’s harbor came to mind when we slipped below recently at Popes Eye, a popular site lying just two and a half kilometers offshore from Queenscliff. There we swam, amidst old wives, leatherjackets, bluethroat wrasse, herring cale, and untold others, around the ruins of an unrealized fortification, the construction whereof began in the late 1880s but was never carried through. Atop its unclosed ring roost, nowadays, a significant population of Australasian gannets, their guano lending our surface intervals a memorable atmosphere. Below, along the submersed bluestone blocks that structure this strange colonial folly, thrives a “rich benthic community of encrusting algae, sedentary organisms, sponges and soft corals” (Port Phillip Heads 2006: 5) (Figure 1). An artificial reef, an emblem of imperial militarism in Kulin waters, a marine reserve, a shipwreck site, an invertebrate garden, a destination for wetsuit-clad blow-ins, a name: Popes Eye is all these things and more, and its involutions of meaning are not less vivid for being largely immersed and mostly out of (human) sight. As anyone who spends time underwater—or spends time hauling things up from underwater—knows, oceans and their inlets are colossal, fluxible jumbles of things “artificial” and “natural,” “cultural” and “environmental.” However frequently it has been invoked as the “last great wilderness,” the sea has long been littered with the detritus of human life and making

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Figure 1  Peter Fuller, Popes Eye, Port Phillip Bay, Victoria. November 25, 2011. Copyright Peter Fuller.

(Joseph 2017: 443). This is by no means to imply that said littering has not lately become more extensive, more noxious, and more enduringly devastating. Nor, for that matter, am I tacitly denying that “anthropogenic pressures” like climate change have brought the history of “human impacts” on marine realms into an unprecedented phase (Ramirez-Llodra et al. 2011: 1). I am making the far more mundane point that if the ocean has historically been construed, in the West, as a “quintessentially wild space,” its supposed antipathy to civilization has always coexisted with its being apparently full of the stuff of civilization— of stuff lost, thrown, built, hidden, or otherwise deposited therein (Brayton 2012: 64). The facts of such “traces,” however materially impermanent or enduring they have happened to be, render glaringly incoherent any idea of the subaqueous as an “ahistoric place” (Rozwadowski 2010: 521). Beneath the waves stir distinctively odd agglomerations of matter, life, and history, weird combinations that throw landed notions of wildness and environment askew. Personally descending underwater, I mean to say, has been a pivotal inspiration for this and my other researches into what I tend to characterize, broadly, as the poetics and aesthetics of the undersea. This book does not largely feature my own diving, preoccupied as it is by texts, salvaged objects,

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and the various ways that oceanic things are brought ashore. Histories of submersions are, however, at the heart of what follows, frequently in otherthan-edifying ways: one of the things I have wanted to better understand, in this work and elsewhere, is how my own being-undersea sits within longer and wider trajectories in descent. I will have a few more things to say about those trajectories in due course. For now, though, I want simply to note that this project has been composed from and toward a position of general curiosity as to what we would like to say about, and feel for, the descriptively and philosophically provocative zones we encounter when we dive—actually or imaginatively, ourselves or at some mediated distance. If these pages help someone ask fresh questions of, relate differently to, or perceive newly amidst water columns and sea beds, they will have performed some little part of a service I have often craved while holding onto the rails of some motorboat or other, searching for the words to describe spaces just visited, and beings just met, while below. Bays, straits, and wider seas, off Queenscliff and elsewhere, have always been inviting us to recognize their tangles with greater rigor and greater care. With what proceeds, I have tried to help us do so.

Among Wrecks Nerm meets the Bass Strait, the marine channel which separates the state of Tasmania from the Australian mainland, through a passage called “The Rip.” Narrowing to just one and a half kilometers, navigationally speaking, at its mouth, the bay coordinates alarmingly high-pressure tidal exchanges with the strait beyond. While waters race in and out, they contend meanwhile with a subaqueous “chasm” called “The Wall,” a formation which diverts waters upward as they enter. The combination of flows so occasioned takes shape, at and under the surface, through “unpredictable eddies and whirlpools,” as well as eccentric currents (Duncan and Gibbs 2015: 36). So has unfolded a recent interval in the aqueous organization of these parts. The Wall’s contour reflects its past, kept lively through Wadawurrung and otherwise Kulin knowledges, as the “ancestral path” of the river Birrarung, or Yarra (Stone 1990: 45). Along their deeper sections, The Wall and its numerous reefs are now home to a dazzling assemblage, famous among temperate-water divers,

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of “sessile invertebrates,” and above all sponges (Barton et al. 2012: 31). It all amounts, particularly along its westerly side, to what has been called “some of the most spectacular underwater terrain in Australia,” the setting of “an incredible garden of delicate corals, jewel anemones, hydroids and sea whips” (Stone 1990: 45). The Rip and the “treacherous waters” that configure its surface lie just south of Queenscliff, in the waters separating it from the bay’s western and eastern “Heads” at Point Lonsdale and Point Nepean, respectively (Duncan and Gibbs 2015: 85) (Figure 2). These settlements and others like them, along the Rip-ward ends of the peninsulas encircling Nerm from either side, owe a good measure of their existence to the fact that ships have required expert assistance to help them navigate safely. This was true in 1838, when one George Tobin guided vessels from his whaleboat, and it is true today, a time when all but the most “frequent users” of the inlet are still obliged to “carry a pilot” (Patterson 2017: 13–14). Were the “tidal velocities” that characterize

Figure 2  Map of Port Phillip Heads, 1859. CS75; Port Phillips Heads; Ross; Nepean Paywit. Historic Plan Collection. Public Record Office Victoria. Public domain.

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the area not sufficiently daunting, sailors have needed also to negotiate its many sandy shoals, as well as the bay’s generally changeable depths: while its mouth is as profound, in places, as one hundred meters, its bulk covers the bottom by fewer than twenty (Sampson et  al. 2014: 50). A “wild tide-race” was Rudyard Kipling’s poetization of the “harbour-mouth” he encountered en route from New Zealand to Melbourne in 1891, a voyage delivering him to a people he would cast in verse as “loud-voiced and reckless” (1893: 537). The Rip features in Kipling’s “A Song of the English”—a high-imperialist “jingo poem,” in Elleke Boehmer’s incisive reading—as a strenuous passage to an unexceptional sojourn, the prelude not to an interval of stirring edification but of curt ambivalence (2011: 21–2). Between the Heads, write the archaeologists Brad Duncan and Martin Gibbs, issues “one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world.” The involvement thereof in maritime disaster was first etched in colonial records in connection with the wreck of the single-masted Prince Albert in 1840 (Duncan and Gibbs 2015: 42). Since settlers and colonial industries began entering Port Phillip Bay in large numbers in the first half of the nineteenth century, The Rip and its implications for sailing have been famous for making shipwrecks. Victoria’s state heritage organization estimates that the ruins of some fifty vessels lie under The Rip, and that one hundred and thirty molder elsewhere in the bay (Maskell 2008). Some of this crowd were involved in the gold rushes of the 1850s and other periods, phenomena which so intensified demand for sea travel to Victoria that many of the craft brought to task were in marginal condition even before they ventured the tide-race. For Aboriginal people, these new and rickety incursions presaged novel episodes of “racial vilification” and “oppression,” to be sure, but also of “active resistance” to and “engagement” with the mining mania (Cahir 2012: 2). On and beneath the bottom, then, amidst waters shared with sponge gardens and butterfly perch, lay—and in some cases, still lie—the residue of multitudinous relations, as well as the memories that residue has fragmentarily held, and yet holds. In certain cases, wrecky pieces have themselves been made the stuff of Nerm’s subaqueous terrain, so much artificial ground for coralline, algal, and affiliated envelopments. “Even in the temperate seawater of Port Phillip Bay,” write the authors of a study on the corrosion of ferrous wreckage there, “all marine iron structures become fouled by sequences of colonizing marine

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biota.” I am struck by the genericity of a phrase like “marine biota,” so terse— which is not to say inaccurate—a shorthand for the diverse other-than-human worlds that not only surround but take place upon and through maritime “heritage sites” (MacLeod and Taylor 2012: 1, 4). I am intrigued, moreover, by the operations of a word like “colonizing” in waters that express settlercolonial as well as Indigenous pasts, presents, and futures—and that host nonnative creatures like the European fan worm (Sabella spallanzanii), a large tubular organism noted for “rapidly” settling upon “man-made structures, such as wrecks” (Parry et al. 1996: 13). Diving, meanwhile, within the Heads as well as in the so-called “ship graveyard” lying a little way west down the Victorian coast, is advertised as furnishing “an opportunity for people to not only go and experience beautiful flora and fauna, but to see pieces of history as well,” as one area SCUBA operator has it (Coates 2022: 26). What, I have wondered, might it be possible to say across that “but”—across, I mean, the division that appears to separate the floral and the faunal from the historical? When “shipwrecks interact with their local environment,” how do we—how ought we—think about and discuss what happens in the prepositional space between, the with-ness that seems to point toward some other and perhaps more intricated clustering (MacLeod and Harvey 2014: 247)? (Fouling, a fascinating and complex aspect of marinal materiality, happens to be the subject of the second chapter of this book.) For Queenscliff, as for every place with so intimate a relationship to the twinned phenomena of maritime endeavor and wreckage, the vectors of drowned vessels have been defined not only by tragedy and disappearance but by enterprise and recovery. Beachcombing was (and to some degree remains) the deliberate or incidental preoccupation of a range of local people, particularly those whose first-hand knowledge of littoral conditions lent them particular insight into where the tide was most likely to leave wrecky things ashore (Duncan and Gibbs 2015: 95–6). It bears emphasizing that where nautical catastrophes have asserted themselves, materially, along more or less accessible coasts, witnesses to the behavior of an opportunistic “populace” have frequently wound up making implicit or overt claims about the beachcombers and the social sets they (do not) represent. Thus, for instance, the eighteenthcentury landscape theorist and travel writer William Gilpin, for whom the aftermath of the foundering of a “Dutch West-India ship,” in south Wales,

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pitted “large bodies” of persons come “to pillage the wreck” against “the officers of the customs, and gentlemen of the country,” who gathered “to protect” the same (1782: 76–7). For colonists in nineteenth-century Australia, sinkings sometimes conjured specters of European goods and persons becoming the possessions of Aboriginal people, transferences that occasioned diverse forms and degrees of settler-colonial paranoia (Flyn 2016: 194). Thus are a very few signs, fleetingly considered, of the potential for maritime ruins to contribute to the disordering and reordering of matter, and even of power, as they transform structures and goods into unruly versions of themselves—and so render them eligible for unforeseen incorporations. Practices and economies of salvage, in Queenscliff and elsewhere, have also always looked past the tideline to what treasures from the past the waters might be compelled to give up. As long as ships have been going down, people have been attempting where practicable to submerse themselves (or others) after them in hopes of retrieving the cargo they (are imagined to have) held. The first-century Roman historian Livy wrote about salvors, and the Aegean society of Rhodes even formulated a law governing their labor. Roughly speaking, the deeper a Rhodian diver descended, the greater proportion of the recovered goods’ worth they kept for themselves (Hamilton-Paterson 1992: 139). Nearly two thousand years after Livy’s summary, U.S. News & World Report would publish a concerning piece called “Gold Rush: Salvage teams and scientists battle over sunken treasure and priceless artifacts.” What submerged stuff belongs to whom, where, for how long, and on what terms are queries that have never stopped preoccupying speculators, fishers, insurers, and lawyers (Broadwater 2002: 664). If the sea has always been wild, it has also always been an object of commercial dreaming, as well as of literal fishing and diving for possible riches. For a ship’s crew and their backers, eddies and whirlpools may present a direct and existential threat to the continuance of value. For a wouldbe wreck-fisher, meanwhile, a rip and its victims may operate like a sort of unnatural resource, an engine of flotsam, jetsam, and lagan awaiting acts not so much of rescue as of harvest. Through their concern, variously, for collection, conservation, preservation, exhibition, interpretation, memorialization, and narrativization, industries and ideologies of heritage interact complexly with salvage-work. An afternoon at the Queenscliffe Maritime Museum (the name of the local borough asserts a

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supplementary “e”) offers a visitor an encounter with display-cases full of wrecky matter. In their mundaneness, the objects on view—briefcases, condiment jars, teapots, and so on—belie the terrible strength of the forces involved in their having become discombobulated. In one corner, dedicated to the fate of the Nova Scotian cargo vessel Joseph H. Scammell, a placard testifies to the boat having wrecked upon a reef off Torquay, a town only a couple of dozen kilometers west of here, in 1891. Above some rescued stuff—a couple of “gaslight fittings” and a “brass counter-weight,” among others—the curator’s text tells of an “estimated 2000 locals” meeting the “merchandise” where it came ashore and commencing to loot it. “By the time customs officials and police arrived,” the story goes, “most of the $120,000 worth of cargo had disappeared.” Shored up against the salvors’ vanishings, however, are these bits and pieces, as well as the words that make synecdoches of once-trivial things—that make a gaslight fitting embody a ship, and a counter-weight figure a sea-voyage and the persons who made it through (and not). One of the objects in the Scammell cabinet bears a somewhat more ambiguous kind of witness. Having apparently fallen to the seabed, it commenced a phase that the archeologist Stella Randall has called—with real poignancy, as I see it—the “underwater life” of an artifact (2000: 52). Presumably rescued some time after 1966, the year the wreckage is said to have been “discovered,” this originally cylindrical thing had during its subaqueous sojourn acquired (or been acquired by) a gnarled agglomeration of oceanic matter which lends it the look, nowadays, of a sort of semi-excavated fossil. Much of the Scammell’s un-disappeared cargo, it seems, became “concreted into the sandstone/ calcareous reef ” while it resided underwater, a reformation this item did not entirely abandon on its way to the gallery (Rodrigues and Richards 2012: 79). (For more on concretions, see our third chapter.) Not-vanishing, here, are not only an article of merchandise but an undersea and its myriad constituents— an underwater realm “in excess” of the aqueous, to adapt a phrase from the geographers Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg (2019). That presence goes unremarked in the museum’s curatorial account, an omission it would be churlish of me to malign. Less ungracious, I hope, has been my fascination with the manners whereby it might be possible to delineate such an absence— to reckon with the shapes of things like this one, with the pasts and presences they conglomerate, with the categories they attract and ultimately confuse.

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Peering at an encrusted something through the lens of a little glass box, in a regional museum with a settler-colonial name, around the corner from the Southern Ocean, on Wadawurrung Country: what really am I seeing, and what words will suffice to tell?

Being-Stirred With the opening sections of her poem “Whelk,” Grace Schulman addresses her attention to some small gastropod ruins. As if holding a broken mollusk in her hand, the poet relates the trivially macabre experience of having “watched this one ravaged” by a gull who picked it up off a coast road only to let it fall, and smash, on the hard surface below. An act of imaginative recovery ensues, the poem making crushed whelk shells whole as though restoring “the headless statues/of gods.” One of them the poet holds resonating to her ear, hearing as she does the settlers shout at the smell of land and the wreck bell ring for drowned passengers washed ashore.

Having reconstructed this whelk’s shelly integrity in the mind, and having pretended to access some conventional littoral sound and scenery thereby, the poem turns abruptly back to the real thing and finds it still “split open,” “mute.” This “keeper of what is not said”—of what will not submit entirely to memorialization or narrativization, however ardently the poet so desires— fascinates the poetic gaze at the same time that it interferes with the satisfaction thereof, an arrangement of matter that draws eye and ear toward it while resisting sublimation into a device for telling stories (Schulman 2013: 60–2). Walking to the end of the South Pier, taking care not to make a nuisance of myself for any of the fishers, I note a placard dedicated to the history of Queenscliff ’s own wreck bell. Its alarm, I read, would summon the town’s crew— volunteers all—to the lifeboat shed, where they would prepare the vessel for launching in as little as twelve minutes. Decommissioned in 1976, the historic

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rescue craft sits drily nowadays in the middle of the Maritime Museum. The wreck bell still stands, quietly but evocatively, nearer the town center, within eyeshot of the brewery and adjacent to the market green. A lightly faded sign affixed beneath its bowl warns that anyone ringing it other than “in the case of shipwreck or marine disaster” will face prosecution. From where I stand in the old boatshed, restored recently in the name of local heritage, I wonder how the wrecky call would have sounded, how feelings would have responded to its ringing. I meditate, moreover, upon the ethics of such wondering—upon the readiness whereby human tragedy can be distilled, in the recollecting of it, into speculation and metaphorics, and even dread romance. To work among ruins is to venture into realms that are imbued with loss and trauma, and plurally so—in a place like Nerm, the fragments of (for instance) a settler-colonial ship may generate vexing encounters not only with some disastrous nautical event but with the broader structures of violence that precipitated its happening. Putting shells to one’s ear is a hollow sort of exercise if not accompanied by a commitment to listen earnestly to what resonates therein. Then again, what Schulman’s “Whelk” prompts me to consider are the perceptual, interpretive, and ethical demands of the ruined shell itself— its resistance to ready audition and legibility, its paradoxically “keeping” a privation, a not-said. If the book you are presently reading makes one fundamental claim, it is by that looking slowly and carefully at a wrecked thing—by lingering with its novel relations as well as its incompletenesses— we might afford ourselves more and fuller opportunities for characterizing the ocean worlds we unevenly inhabit (as well as the ones we do not). Far from affirming that the shattered whelk is irredeemably unhearable, I propose that scrupulous engagement with such apparently retiring forms can furnish wider, which is never to say complete, senses for them and for the oceanities they body forth. In the modest, limited act of striving to elaborate a submerged thing in some of its formal and material multiplicities, what problems for description, identification, and narrativization become palpable? What “more extensive conceptual vocabulary” might begin taking imperfect, tentative shape along edges such as these (Rose et al. 2012: 2)? Toward what other queries, concepts, and meanings might the following very preliminary efforts incline? Several years ago, I spent a hot September working in New York, among the ancestral lands and waters of the Lenape people. I slept in a sweaty room in

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Figure 3  The surface of Upper Bay, New York Harbor. September 6, 2019. Author’s photograph.

Borough Park, South Brooklyn, and researched and wrote from a yellow house (an officer’s residence, once upon a time) on Governors Island (Pagganck), a heavily fortified park in Upper Bay, New York Harbor (Figure 3). A “transition zone,” an “interchange,” an “accumulation of organismic wealth”: I had known the harbor previously from the many trips I took to and from (and over) New York as an undergraduate upstate, but I had never contemplated it seriously as a network of “aquatic highways and culs-de-sac of divergent ecologies and temperaments” (Waldman 2013: 17). As someone who had been spending a lot of time, latterly, thinking about poetic and aesthetic relationships with subaqueous spaces, I was interested in learning what it might mean to know New York from its many brackish waterways. I had the good fortune to be invited to Governors Island by a couple of small but scrappy nonprofits, Works on Water and Underwater New York, to conduct a research residency there, a research residency that involved occupying—and sharing, in my case—an artist’s studio, and opening the space on weekends to the Island’s many visitors. Governors Island is bulwarked from the water up, having been a center of strategic military importance for colonial powers from the days of

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Dutch settlement until 2003, when it was sold by the United States’ federal government to the city of New York for one dollar (Sullivan and Liao 2019). Despite having been extensively reimagined, ever since, as a location for teaching and learning, for artmaking, and for ecological study, it retains the aura of a piece of dryness claimed from and buttressed against the wet that surrounds it. During my own time in Upper Bay, I undertook two discrete and linked doings: one was an archival dive into a poetics of and for New York Harbor—a study and a very preliminary synthesis of writerly attempts to activate that liquid place through literary language. Doing number two was a working with my and my fellow-residents’ many weekend visitors to collaborate in the makings of harbor memory, imagery, feeling, and poetry. My wonderful studio-mate Leah Harper and I spent the month working independently, and sometimes collaboratively, on the question of how to encourage harbor orientations among the people who came to talk with us, and how to hear those orientations when expressed. I experimented, for example, with questions that I hoped might provoke a searching harbor poetics, as well as a conjuring of harbor subjects as alternatives to harbor objects. What is the harbor doing? I asked. What does the harbor remember? How does the harbor feel? Who are you to the harbor? Of all the inlet-writings I encountered, several set up tenacious forms of residency in me and have not left. Of those, two jointly suggest several of the themes that have inspired this book. First is Joseph Mitchell’s extraordinary essay on “The Bottom of the Harbor,” published by The New Yorker magazine in 1951. Drawing on knowledge gleaned from folks who worked the Upper and Lower Bays, Mitchell paid particular attention to “the New Ground, or Doorknob Grounds, a stretch of bottom … that is used as a dump for slum clearance projects.” This is the harbor floor as the site of scattered wrecks and ruins. “There are bricks,” wrote Mitchell, and brownstone blocks and plaster and broken glass from hundreds upon hundreds of condemned tenements in the New Grounds. The ruins of the sombre old red-brick houses in the Lung Block, which were torn down to make way for Knickerbocker Village, lie there. In the first half of the nineteenth century, these houses were occupied by well-to-do families; from around 1890 until around 1905, most of them were brothels for sailors; from around 1905 until they were torn down, in 1933, they were

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rented to the poorest of the poor, and the tuberculosis rate was higher in that block than in any other block in the city. All the organisms that grow on wrecks grow on the hills of rubble and rubbish in the Subway Rocks and the New Grounds. (Mitchell 1951: 47)

The stuff Mitchell describes is simultaneously relic and refurbishment, knobby and new. It is a haunting, a witness to processes of enrichment and impoverishment, of enthusiasm and neglect, of privilege and its others. It is, at the same time, a habitat, a site of life. It is confirmation—if we needed it—that ecologies are always composed of more than mere matter, because matter is always more than mere—always recalls the situations, and relations, that helped give it shape. Conversely, these ecologies of memory—to borrow Caitlin DeSilvey’s term—are not only aggregates of bygone times: they are pivotally formed and reformed by the subaqueous element they now make home (2006: 336). Mitchell’s harbor-bottom struck and has stuck with me, and so have some harborous things written by the novelist Colson Whitehead. In 2003, Whitehead published a collection of short pieces—“essays” as if written by a group of chatty impressionist ghosts—called The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts. The ninth of these observes a person walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, and so over the tidal estuary known as the East River, toward Manhattan. It is a piece, then, about motion, about spanning points A and B, and about all that such a traverse might represent and entail. At the same time, it is about the false, or tricksome, promise of such motion, and perhaps the incapacity of such motion to relieve the weights of stress, segregation, and inequality. “On the other side,” a spectral voice remarks, there is no more dreaming. Just solid ground … Remembering that disappointed feeling she [the walker] gets each time she reaches the other side, then feeling that disappointed feeling. Check yourself for damage. Everything is where it should be. No miracle. The key to the city fell out of her pocket somewhere along the way and she’s level again. Bereft again. (Whitehead 2003: 108)

The key is metaphorical, but Whitehead’s speaker mused, a few pages earlier, on the place it might have fallen, and the movements it might be making (and

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not making), were it real. Halfway across the bridge, and turning toward the water below, the essay reads: Tourists with cameras speak in the native tongues of the men who built this thing. The bones of their ancestors lie at the bottom among refrigerator doors and license plates. They cannot wave but currents stir their bones and perhaps that is a gesture toward kin. Can’t see anything in this murk. (Whitehead 2003: 105)

The bones are making no progressive movement. They are neither ambulatory nor straightforwardly expressive. They seem not to be natatory, a term for that which is “adapted for or used in swimming or floating.” The bones and their neighbors—parts of refrigerators, parts of cars—have been rendered incoherent by being submerged. They have been made, we might say, bare things. And yet they also offer a form of movement that, unlike a progression or a moving along, might conduce to a distinctive kind of historical feeling, and even to a weird kind of kinship. The East River operates, here, rather like Marianne Moore’s ocean does, in her poem “A Grave” (originally “A Graveyard”), from 1921. The latter features waters “in which dropped things are bound to sink—/in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness” (Moore 2017: 52). Whitehead’s bones and their neighbors are, like Moore’s things, being stirred, turned, and twisted without locomotory or directional intent. And yet unlike Moore’s things, the bones that built Whitehead’s Brooklyn Bridge do in fact generate, or at least hold forth the possibility of, a kind of multisited consciousness. The point is not that Whitehead adopts a utopian attitude toward the scene his essay imagines unfurling, unendingly, upon the estuary floor. Neither those tourists nor their cameras appear poised to see past liquid surfaces, let  alone through the murk, to recognize what might be a gesturing toward them. Nonetheless I read the bones, the refrigerator doors, the license plates, and the currents as collectively opening spaces for form and feeling, spaces that it will be necessary to attend to if our poetic sense is to operate alongside water’s other matters and movables, past locomotion, conventionally conceived, and with unsettling histories. These bones in their lying, their being stirred, their maybegesturing, and their could-be-kin are composing a very different kind of poetry, one that we might struggle to name but should, I am sure, exert ourselves to hear.

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What follows will range, widely and exuberantly, across domains of knowledge. Its movements reflect a collective conviction that an oceanic— and more broadly environmental—humanities worthy of their names must be courageous (and modest) enough to “speak” not only “to” our disciplines but “from” them to effect unanticipated stirrings (LeMenager 2018: 159; emphasis mine). But as Mitchell’s, Whitehead’s, and my other harbor-writers’ (and readers’) presences may imply, literature and language are at the heart of my practice, and of this book. From the wrecks that contour the Subway Rocks and New Grounds to bones, refrigerator doors, and license plates gesturing together, the imageries we render through our writing are some—not all, but some—sites for getting critical, for being inspired, and for better sensing the wrecks we live among. I hope my words suggest and make way for more unexpected kin, and for further maybe-gestures. Queenscliff, Victoria, Australia, May 2022

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Introduction “Sea Sculptures” The Victoria and Albert Museum, or V&A, stands about a mile north of the River Thames, in London. It arose in the wake of the Great Exhibition of 1851, when more than six million spectators visited nearby Hyde Park to bear witness to some one hundred thousand examples of “the Industry of all Nations.” Those multitudes were displayed in the so-called Crystal Palace, an enormous conservatory-like structure, built all of iron and glass, that encouraged the “consumer” gaze like nothing before (Olalquiaga 2002: 31). So profitable was this show, which the historian Thomas Richards once called “the first outburst of the phantasmagoria of commodity culture” (1990: 18), that its income enabled the purchase of a large piece of urban land. The property thus established would come to house not only the V&A but the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Imperial College of Science and Technology, the Royal College of Art, and the Royal College of Music. The things that comprised the V&A’s original collections came from the Exhibition, though they sojourned at Marlborough House, Westminster, for a time—first as the constituents of a “Museum of Manufactures,” subsequently a “Museum of Ornamental Art”—while their permanent domicile in South Kensington was being built. They would form the basis of an institution that remains renowned, to this day, for its holdings of so-called “applied art,” a rich but sometimes ill-defined domain of artifacts and practices that test the boundaries between aesthetics and functionality. The V&A’s ceramics galleries, which dominate the fourth floor of the museum, claim to survey a greater than four-and-a-half-thousand-year span in the history of the potter’s art and its importance for human culture. In room

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145, however, there lie a couple of items which issue some obvious challenges to classification, chronology, and attribution. Their labels call them “Sea Sculptures” and note that they come from the wreck of a Chinese merchant ship which sank off the coast of Cà Mau, in far southern Vietnam, around 1725. To look at them is to recognize at once that they are partly made of porcelain, and so partly the work of some craftsperson’s hands. But to see them is to experience, as well, an uncanny sense of matter out of place, because what is ceramic about this stuff has been broken into pieces, and—what is stranger— recomposed into new and unintended unities. Unintended, that is, in the sense of having been unforeseen, undirected, and presumably undesired by the human manufacturers of their ceramic aspects. Under “Artist/Maker,” the sculptures’ catalogue entries read “Unknown.” Something other-than-human has taken these busted bits and covered them, joined them, inhabited them— has carried them sustainingly along while making them something new. “Sea Sculpture” number one is made up, its catalogue entry tells us, of “several pieces of underglaze blue decorated porcelain,” among them “a spittoon and the neck section of a vase.” The spittoon and vase were created in China’s foremost porcelain manufactory, in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, for sale to international eighteenth-century markets. Such were their genesis and telos, that is, before they became fragmented, weirdly rejointed, drowned, and adorned: first “fused together,” we read, by the fire that likely wrecked the ship that bore them, and subsequently “encrusted with shells and coral” as they “lay on the seabed” (“Sea Sculpture” a) (Figure 4). The museum accounts for the second “Sea Sculpture” similarly. Here, two short stacks of porcelain cups, some of them broken, appear to lie prostrate, forming a kind of ground whereupon are “encrusted” some “small fragments of coral” as well as a reddish coral stalk which rears tall from the center of the piece. This sculpture’s “Artist/Maker” is, like its companion’s, designated “Unknown.” This obscurity notwithstanding, the “object provides useful information,” a note tells us, “about trade, trade routes, design and markets for Chinese porcelain” (“Sea Sculpture” b) (Figure 5). Each of these things “as it exists now,” explains the V&A, was “created through accident and nature.” The sea sculptures’ supposed informational content, then, strains for stability amidst a broader atmosphere of contingency, not to mention a kind of wildness. Their usefulness as traces of

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­F igure 4  First “Sea Sculpture,” c. 1725, underglaze of cobalt blue-decorated porcelain pieces fused together by fire encrusted with shell and coral growths. (First angle.) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

the Chinese porcelain trade is not in doubt: as the art historian John White saliently observes, a damaged stack of teacups actually preserves the “physical situation of porcelain packaged as cargo” with an expressiveness that an “individual teabowl and saucer” would not (forthcoming). Additionally, these fusions index the fiery event that is understood to have brought the ship’s voyage to a violent end. Like fragments left by wartime explosions or natural disasters, they mark a spot of time that takes part in abstract histories of “trade routes, design and markets” but also irrupts into them. Above all, though, these objects allure us because their makers, materials, and histories are strangely multiple. They are anthropogenic and natural, preordained and

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Figure 5  Second “Sea Sculpture,” c. 1725, underglaze cobalt blue-decorated porcelain cups fused together. Shell and coral growths. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

accidental, and selecting one of these identities over another would deny the sea sculptures the uncertainties they claim upon us. Were the sculptures “made,” as the V&A website advises, around 1725, in Jingdezhen? Or were they formed during the conflagration that heated them to melting, and that may have occasioned the sinking of the junk and the deaths of its crew? Or are they really the products of coralline and shelly

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décor, of sea-floor processes borne out over the two and a half centuries that intervened between 1725 and 1998, the year of the wreck’s “discovery”? What of those fishers in Vietnamese waters whose nets caught on the wreck and thereby set in motion the process of retrieval that brought these things within reach of a British museum of applied arts? By removing them from the element they had inhabited for the overwhelming majority of their existence, did the fishers—and the professional salvors that followed them—play creditable roles in their formations? Did they become “sea sculptures” at their earliest interval of encrustation, or did this identity come later, and on dry land, as they were mustered, named, and sold off by the Amsterdam branch of Sotheby’s auction firm? And what about the museum that houses them, the workers who care for them, the spectators who visit them in person or online? Would these sea sculptures be sea sculptures in lieu of these locations and relations? These are just several of the questions we are driven to ask by these unruly things, and by what the curator and museum scholar Marion Endt-Jones calls their “contentious nature” (2017: 177). This book departs from the premise that such contentiousness is worth exploring, and worth better understanding, in order that we might more integrally recognize, reckon, and describe the oceanic phenomena that the sea sculptures bring to view, and to mind. As my attention to curatorial language in the last few paragraphs has perhaps suggested, I am particularly interested in the words we use, the sentences we write, and the narratives we compose about objects like these. Indeed, I hope that this book might prove useful to curators, art critics, and heritage workers who find themselves searching for unconventional ways to talk and think about unconventional matters. But more than implying a critique of identificatory practices, at the V&A or elsewhere, these pages are committed to lingering with the distinctive, and in many cases distinctly weird, compositional behaviors of oceanic places, materials, processes, and lives. In addition to recognizing the sea sculptures’ institutional circumstances as difficulties in need of addressing, in other words, I am choosing to interpret those circumstances as pointing toward richer and stranger descriptive, narrative, and aesthetic—and indeed ethical—horizons. The word “sculpture” in English derives from the Latin sculpĕre, meaning to carve or engrave. By asserting that its works of encrusted porcelain were “created through accident and nature,” the V&A may seem to render responsibility

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for them unsatisfyingly vague. But to call them “sea sculptures” is also to call them works of art, which is in turn to ascribe significant—if indeterminate— creative power to a body of salt water and its particular behaviors. For White, the sea sculptures “subvert museological and epistemological paradigms in which design is conceived as preeminently human” (forthcoming). Around these objects, terms like “sculpture” and “sculptor” swell, refreshingly and unexpectedly, to become capacious tools for imagining and crediting inhuman actors, styles, and situations. The sea, write the geographers Jon Anderson and Kimberley Peters, is manifestly “alive,” and not only with “embodied human experiences” but with “more-than-human agencies,” as well as with distinctively oceanic “material character, shape and form” (2014: 4). Such a realm as this would seem full of sculptural potentialities, if also of a pronounced degree of subjective complexity: does the South China Sea act? Does it make art? It is with these marinal powers, simultaneously mighty and hard to characterize, that I want to dwell. I will suggest, ultimately, that “sculpture” is not necessarily the most felicitous epithet for the things on display at the V&A, or for others comparable to them. I will argue, too, that by rejigging some of the language we bring to bear on these materials, it may be possible to more carefully account for their complicated identities, histories, and meanings. (For her part, Endt-Jones ventures “collage” and “assemblage” as viable alternatives, and wonders, too, whether the “sculptures” would be more at home in the Natural History Museum (2017: 178).) I am grateful for “sea sculpture,” nonetheless, for the ways it confronts its audience with the paradoxes I have been sketching thus far. How can an entity as colossal and literally diffuse as the ocean be characterized as an artmaker? In according to the sea a faculty traditionally reserved for human beings, does the phrase commit the sin of anthropocentrism, or a species of what the nineteenth-century critic John Ruskin might have called the pathetic fallacy (1872: 160)? How, moreover, are we supposed to understand the timescales of sea-sculpting? If some humans had never pulled the V&A’s sculptures from the sea-bottom—if, for that matter, they had never been installed in a museum—would they be sea sculptures nonetheless, immersed in an artful element and indefinitely in studio? From the midst (or muddle) of these interpretive and descriptive eccentricities spring the difficulties, as well as the marvels, that motivate this study. In what follows, I hope to add depth and texture to our common sense

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of how the ocean operates on and with things, and how submerged things—as well as things weighed up from undersea—express oceanic forms. My primary training is in literary criticism, theory, and history, and my senses are most acutely tuned to how marine matters become known through language, and especially through written texts. I aim to show that the sea floor’s strange somethings have presented unusually exciting provocations, and posed unusually challenging problems, for the practices of poets, novelists, nature writers, scientists, and others. But as these opening pages have indicated, I am concerned not only with linguistic and literary figures but with tangible objects, and with the host of physical processes that those objects can be understood to represent. At the nexus of “word” and “world,” in the environmental critic Lawrence Buell’s parlance (2005: 31), sea-stuff works with special force. It so often appears to draw language out, inspiring exuberant, and occasionally virtuosic, feats of description and imagination. At least as frequently, however, it leaves words high and dry, revealing the incapacity of “terracentric” sensibilities for working in submarine space (Farquharson 2013: 6). It is my good fortune to be writing this book at a time when a disciplinarily diverse cast of theorists are engaged in refreshing our sense of the connections that twist among human subjects, linguistic practices, and material environments. This book owes debts to researchers in departments of literature, history, philosophy, cultural studies, geography, anthropology, art history, and elsewhere. What brings them together are the parts they play in the environmental humanities, a heterogeneous constellation of scholars working within and outside of academia. This “matrix,” to borrow the literary scholar Ursula Heise’s word, is not so much a new discipline or subfield as it is a vector of conversation and exchange, a way of doing research that understands interdisciplinarity as an ethical as well as intellectual requirement of responding to the layered ecological crises embroiling our planet (2017: 294). This demand may ring loudest with regard to oceans, the “material and phenomenological distinctiveness” whereof is inspiring special reevaluations and reconfigurations of method and knowledge (Steinberg and Peters 2015: 248). Blue cultural studies, the blue humanities, critical ocean studies, and thalassology are several related—which is not to say interchangeable— structures in scholarly practice that have emerged recently to address the sea’s distinctions (DeLoughrey 2019; Mentz 2009; Mentz 2018; Steinberg 2014).

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What brings this book into close contact with what I’ll simply call ocean studies, as well as with the environmental humanities more broadly, are those matrices’ commitments to dwelling with the fascinating, and frequently vexing, entanglements of word and world, thought and matter, artifice and ecology. “Natureculture” is the feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway’s influential concept of—and existential claim for—the ineluctable interpenetration of “flesh and signifier,” “bodies and words,” “stories and worlds,” and so forth (2016b: 112). As words and as the things those words imperfectly name, sea sculptures enact the intertwisting of the natural and the cultural in especially tantalizing and befuddling ways. This is so because the ideas of “nature” and “culture”—which I invoke against the backdrop of the Western, and primarily Anglophone, contexts where I have worked and lived—have never had settled relations with seas. Returned from an abyssal dive aboard the submersible MIR  1, the writer James Hamilton-Paterson pondered the experience of having come back from “another universe,” a space “without real co-ordinates” that “our recent forebears thought of as terrifyingly inchoate, godless, too primeval for any human connection, beyond morality, a leftover from Chaos” (1998: 135). As Hamilton-Paterson’s invocation of “our” ancestors suggests, a sense for the ocean as beyond the natural order is both historically and culturally contingent. That said, and the irreducible diversity of Earth’s maritime societies notwithstanding, we humans share an inability to live in the sea, for we are, in the ecofeminist theorist Astrida Neimanis’s words, “flightless, finless, mostly bipedal and oxygen-breathing” (2019: 491). Addressing ourselves to submersed stuff, therefore, may entail extending, adapting, and even suspending our senses of the who, what, and where of marine naturecultures. Since the V&A’s sea sculptures first landed on the floor of the South China Sea, the impacts of human—and more specifically imperial, colonial, and capitalist—habits on oceanic waters, places, processes, and lives have intensified dramatically. Not for nothing has the chemist and Nobel laureate Paul J. Crutzen associated the late eighteenth century with the incipience of the “Anthropocene,” a “human-dominated” epoch characterized above all by runaway carbon dioxide buildup and resulting climate change (2002: 23). But while anthropic incursions into marinal realms, whether through commercial fishing, pollution, deep-sea mining, acidification, or otherwise have grown terribly, increasingly pronounced, the sea has never

Introduction

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fully relinquished its power to defamiliarize. The task of the “maritime humanities,” explains the literary critic Pieter Vermeulen, is to linger with the paradox of seas that are indisputably intertwisted with the Anthropos but that “remain stubbornly alien” nonetheless—that express “an otherness that yet affects human life” (2017: 182). Oceans may, in other words, bear the marks of human making throughout their vast expanses and hold, obscure, or revise those marks in manners we cannot expect to fully anticipate. Sea sculptures, or whatever we want to call them—what will we want to call them?—are the issue of these material, historical, and interpretive perplexities. This book sets out to know them.

The Call of Submarine Forms The Cà Mau sea sculptures are (or were) not only oceanic but specifically submarine. Not just unterrestrial, they embody the protocols of another element, of other materials, dimensions, rhythms, and ways of life. They make manifest what the postcolonial critic Elizabeth DeLoughrey calls “sea ontologies,” states of immersed being defined by “more-than-human temporalities” that disrupt terrestrial senses of time, memory, place, experience, and narrative (2017: 33). Reckoning such disruptions takes more than rotating one’s view across the tideline to exchange a watery for a landed view. It requires going underwater, in fact and in theory, and as everyone who has submerged themselves knows, this inevitably entails a suspension of topside mobility and sensation, not to mention respiration. Without (and even with) the aid of prostheses— from wetsuits to dive regulators to deep-sea submersibles—human bodies are acutely, and often hazardously, out of place in subaqueous zones. In salt water, where sunlight attenuates about one thousand times faster than in air, even goggle-clad eyes struggle to see or to structure their fields of view (Luria and Kinney 1970: 1455). The undersea has the potential to disorient affect, subjectivity, vocabulary, and convention so radically as to leave the august pillars of environmental aesthetics in the West bobbing at the surface, floating inexorably toward dry earth (Cohen and Quigley 2019). This book does not attempt, let alone claim, to resolve the myriad challenges submarine scenes pose for apprehension, description, or interpretation. It is

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couched, throughout, in the understanding, as well as the political position, that no single subaqueous sensibility is normatively superior to all others, let  alone essential to every human disposition. Its rather more modest ambition is to ask how a sense for the submarine may be enriched by thinking from submersed things, sculptural and otherwise. What forms, I want to ask, do lives and matters take under the surface of earth’s oceans? Might an interpretive attitude toward undersea regions that focuses on a few of their formal provocations—on a sample of the distinctive formal relationships that obtain there—have the potential to refresh our regard for the drowned world? My hypothesis is that the answer to the second question is “yes,” or better yet, “yes and”—that sounding along these lines, and tarrying with the strange stuff we encounter, may furnish us with better ways of delineating, naming, and feeling for such things, but will inevitably leave other, vital ways unexamined, if not unacknowledged. It bears saying, too, that by “better ways” I do not necessarily mean new ones. My practice, as the last several pages may have suggested, is substantially concerned with putting extant discourses in conversation, that they might fertilize one another with unanticipated and interinvolved arrangements of meaning. Ultimately, this is about an ethical call to respond to apparently unfamiliar things with rigor and respect, in hopes that we might grow more intimate with them. The relational forms that will most often detain me here are those that emerge from the immersion of ostensibly terrestrial matter—such as porcelain ware—in seawater. Frequently, my examples will be or have been in touch with some ocean floor. As often, they will themselves have become new beds for submarine settlements. Thus, indeed, one of the many sea-changes this book observes and ponders: the manner in which certain things, after slipping beneath the waves, soon become grounds for accretion and growth. “The deep,” wrote the philosopher Alphonso Lingis, “is all in surface effects” (1983: 7). One of the effects that drives this study is the tendency for a submerged surface to become a substrate, and therefore for an exterior to become a kind of foundation, for an outside to turn into a home. These shifts in a thing’s state of being—from teacup to habitat, decoration to foundation—are changes in its ontology, and as I will try to show, they are more than intellectually or aesthetically interesting (though those they certainly are). When submersed stuff undergoes a formal transition, as from mass-produced ceramic to sea

Introduction

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sculpture, it may represent both the “uncanny survival” of a prior, more or less identifiable state of being and the succession of a novel, and quite possibly alienating, configuration (Pensky 2011: 81). An explicit and sustained emphasis on form in interpreting submarine situations cuts across some prominent strains in the philosophy of environmental aesthetics. Allen Carlson states one view plainly when he writes that “when appreciated in the appropriate mode,” which is to say an “active, involved one,” the “natural environment as such does not possess formal qualities.” This is so, for Carlson, because such qualities only emerge to perception through practices of “framing.” Following this line, the appearance of a frame necessarily entails the emergence of an aesthetic subject who relates to the environment from an “external,” “separate,” and “static” position. It is not possible, Carlson argues, to “both be in the environment that one appreciates and frame that environment” (2000: 37). While I follow Carlson’s call to remain constantly alert to the framings of language, literature, art, and so forth, I am also interested in lingering with the weird pressures the subaqueous brings to bear on any sense of being “in the environment.” As the media theorist Melody Jue has argued recently, the ocean is a “milieu” that presents human subjects with irreducibly distinctive, frequently estranging “conditions for perception, sensation, and life” (2020: 10). Acknowledging such conditions, and such strangeness, is not simply proof of the fraudulence of pretensions to what the philosopher Timothy Morton calls “ecomimesis,” or the aspiration to furnish unmediated access to “nature” through representation (2007: 67). It is instead a conduit, as Jue suggests, to renewing our attention to mediation, and to revitalizing our regard for forms and other aesthetic energies. As the V&A’s choice of words has indicated, the development of submarine form is frequently characterized through the language of encrustation. The encrusting ocean is, as I will show, sufficiently common and widespread in discourse (and other representations) as to constitute a species of trope, a habit of figuration with the power to, in the ecocritic Greg Garrard’s words, shape “constructions of nature” (2004: 33). This book is devoted, to a significant extent, to reckoning with this language—to asking where it comes from, what impact it has on understanding and imagination, and whether it is fit for purpose. In numerous ways, I will argue that the figure of the encrusting ocean commonly lacks nuance, appearing as a readymade cliché employed by writers

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with little interest in taking submarine forms seriously. As the last section of this introduction foreshadows, a good deal of this text’s intended purpose is to thicken and variegate the language we use to describe subaqueous matter— to push us beyond or (to use a nigh-unavoidable pun) deeper than extant discursive frameworks. It has long been a tenet of ecocritical scholarship that, as Buell wrote, “environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination,” and therefore the “amelioration” of that crisis “depends on finding better ways of imaging nature and humanity’s relation to it” (1995: 2). One of my tasks, then, is to describe and investigate the encrusting imaginary, and comprehend the ways it may impinge on marinal consciousness, politics, and care. All that said, and as my title suggests, I am invoking the encrusting ocean as a complex, contingent, and problematic, but far from altogether unuseful, figure. As Chapter  1 will consider at greater length, a rhetoric and imagery of encrusted and encrusting things partakes of wider and heterogeneous representational patterns, patterns that also involve the ornamental, the exterior, the superficial, the secondary, and even the bejeweled. And so on, and so forth. The terms and images we use to render environments, for ourselves and for others, are always networked with other terms and images—and with the incalculable forms and degrees of action those terms and images do and have done in the world. Networked with that world, too: I join an estimable and growing cast of environment-oriented humanities scholars who seek to understand the consequences of anthropic figuration for the world while crediting the world with formative influence upon that figuration. “Material narratives” is the environmental humanities theorists Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann’s concept for such vital and irreducible natural-cultural mutuality (2014: 6). Undersea, I want to recognize and understand the constructed nature of the encrusted view while also crediting the ocean with real encrusting behavior, and with real power to make that behavior resonate within human culture. The subaqueous is, as the architectural theorist William Firebrace has written, “a world with its own aesthetics” (2016: 65). Encrustation is one figure for some submersed relationships; it bears and will bear repeating that it is not a unitary theory of submarine aesthetics. But among the important, and perhaps transferable, benefits of thinking through immersed forms is the capacity of such an approach for working among anthropic impressions,

Introduction

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nonhuman organisms, and inanimate matter. In The Silent World (1953), the oceanographer, filmmaker, and inventor Jacques Cousteau described the fates of those sunken ships that fall deep enough that “tide and current” do not rapidly break them apart. On the “calm museum of the floor,” such vessels as are not “wholly swallowed” by sand and sediment are “overcome by the intense life of the sea,” “enveloped” by “algae, sponges, hydrozoa, and gorgoniae” (1953: 70). From this intermixture—of a drowned boat, the specific conditions obtaining in a particular sea and along a specific stretch of seabed, the actions of marinal organisms, and one writer’s testimony—emerges a sense of encrustation as an active becoming, or an instance of what the political theorist Jane Bennett might call an “assemblage.” Drawing inspiration from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Bennett understands an assemblage as an entity that gives rise to “emergent properties” that exceed “the sum of the vital force of each materiality” embroiled in a scene “considered alone” (2010: 24). Like an assemblage, an encrustation both holds together formerly discrete objects and is something more than additive, generating meanings that cannot be accounted for by counting up their parts. Those “intense” algae, sponges, hydrozoa, and gorgoniæ play pivotal roles in these emergences. This book contributes to widespread and widening efforts to animate the lives, relations, and places of “more than human” organisms (Yaeger 2010: 537). It also follows many others in asserting that such an animative task operates with special interest, and encounters unusual difficulties, among seas. Marine creatures, write one interdisciplinary group of cultural and science studies theorists, express a distinctive “capacity to trouble anthropocentric spatial and temporal frames” (Giraud et al. 2018: 69). If this is so, then it would seem to follow that telling stories about and with submarine ecologies, in order that such ecologies might become “fleshy and thick on the page,” is a task that faces special challenges in submarine zones (van Dooren and Rose 2016: 89). I say as much not to compound the exoticizations that so often accrue to marinal lives and settings, let alone to propose that humanities scholars and others who work through stories have no business engaging seas. Rather, I foreground these idiosyncrasies—expressions of what the eco-scholar Una Chaudhuri calls oceans’ “alien ontology” (2017: 149)—to hold open the question of whether and to what extent our theories of material and other narratives are adequate to undersea contexts. This question has implications

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Reading Underwater Wreckage

for not only the ways we write marine matters but for the extent to which, as Eva Giraud, Greg Hollin, Tracey Potts, and Isla Forsyth have claimed, sea life unsettles “situated, relational ethics itself ” (2018: 72). A formal, and specifically encrusted, method may offer some viable alternatives that approach, if never entirely attain, a sensibility commensurate with the subjects they envelop. Of course, a theory of the encrusting ocean worthy of its subject must ultimately incorporate not only other-than-human organisms but hosts of inanimate entities, from ceramics to seawater. Thus, I hope, another virtue of my formal practice, which is attentive not only to other lives, biologically construed, but to what the environmental humanities theorist Stacy Alaimo calls the “strange agencies” of marine matter, from deep-sea hydrothermal plumes to anthropogenic plastic debris (2016: 113). As the infrastructures of transoceanic shipping, neo-colonial militarism, and mining exploration proliferate across and under the world’s seas, more and more matters are taking strange shape along what the writer Rebecca Giggs calls the “hardscape” of the submarine (2020: 189). An encrusted sense is one that does not disarticulate the anthropic from the natural or the biological from the material. Instead, it regards encrustation as an unstable but inherently meaningful state of becoming that blurs the boundaries between “artefact” and “ecofact”—a “dynamic entity,” borrowing from the geographer Caitlin DeSilvey, “that is entangled in both cultural and natural processes” at once, and that entangles multiple states and categories of being (2006: 324). (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology defines “ecofact” in a general sense as “material recovered from archaeological sites, or other sealed deposits, which is relevant to the study of ancient environments and ecology,” such as “animal bones, seeds, snail shells, waterlogged wood, and pollen.”) “In a world of flow, change, and hybridity,” write Anderson and Peters, oceanic “products are rather seen as processes that have only temporarily stabilized” (2014: 11). Submerged stuff embodies processual encounters among the natural and the cultural, the biological and the non-biological, the animate and the inanimate, and so on. When an anthropic something, such as a porcelain spittoon, loses its primary anthropic significance by being made to lie, broken and becoming encrusted, on the floor of the sea, it undergoes something DeSilvey calls “disarticulation” (2006: 324). If and when a sea sculpture becomes newly articulated as an artifact in a museum, a secondary form of loss may occur,

Introduction

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whereby certain identities and histories are treated as recoverable, and as primary. As I mentioned earlier, the V&A declares, vis-à-vis each sea sculpture’s “historical significance,” that it “provides useful information about trade, trade routes, design and markets for Chinese porcelain.” As Endt-Jones explains, the implication here is that by ridding a thing of its “layers of encrusted organic materials,” it will become possible to fix that thing’s essential meaning with certainty. This belies a sea sculpture’s true nature, Endt-Jones continues, as a material “accretion of time, history, and memory,” one that does not offer itself up to be “unlocked” by conventional methods but that demands, instead, that those methods be adapted or foregone. An integral curatorial treatment of such accretions, then, would take for granted that history consists in “a process of crystallization, sedimentation and encrustation taking place in the depth of the sea” (2017: 188). Encrustation literally brings together, and mutually transforms, structures, materials, and histories. An encrusting theory assumes that drowned artifactualecofactual matter holds and conveys human meaning and memory while supplementing them, and sometimes rearranging them, through temporally, narratively, and ecologically unruly multispecies, animate-inanimate relations. The “disarticulation of a cultural artefact,” writes DeSilvey, “leads to the articulation of other histories”—algal histories, hydrozoan histories, and so forth (2006: 329). As sites of ontological and historical multiplicity, encrustations can seem both interpretively tantalizing and interpretively staggering: what does, or should, it mean to describe and narrate a thing as pertaining to numerous states of being at once? This book assays several answers to this knotty question, none of which set out, let alone pretend, to capture the fullness of encrusting becomings. Having admitted as much, I also want to claim for this book the potential to imagine submarine process in ways that do not “necessarily,” as one critic has it, “lead us back to terrestrial human culture and experience” (Abberley 2018: 2). Drawing inspiration from the ecocritic Kate Rigby’s idea of a “negative ecopoetics” (2004: 437), as well as the literary scholar David Herman’s theories of narratology beyond the human, I am interested in mindfully occupying a paradox of poetic and aesthetic prosthesis, one which simultaneously “denies” and “enacts the possibility of ” thinking, writing, and imagining through forms across the boundaries of element, species, animacy, and so on (2016: 53). Instead of—or more than—

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an expression of anthropocentrism, the encrusting ocean is an imperfect and contingent, but not unpromising, accounting for how seas make themselves heard, felt, and seen.

This Earth’s Encrusted Wreckage Conglomerated materials, histories, and ontologies are put on display under the sign of “Sea Sculptures” in room 145 at the V&A. Among many other things, times, and places, these combinations encompass a ship, its crew and cargo, and its having become drowned. Reading Underwater Wreckage persistently situates encrustation amidst encounters with wreckage—amidst the relations that emerge from ruined vessels, as well as from the objects those vessels carried down with them. Thanks in large part to the works of maritime archeologists throughout the world’s oceans, wrecks have become increasingly well-recognized as privileged sites for accessing not only the material evidence of past shipbuilding practices and maritime routes but a vast range of associated technological and cultural information (Adams 2001). Contemporary researchers are quick to emphasize, furthermore, that such access always takes place from a particular, situated vantage, and in touch with a particular and dynamic set of remains. It is not surprising, therefore, that encountering a ruined vessel in situ on the seabed may entail entering what the archeologist Chryssanthi Papadopoulou describes as a “confusion of past and present places,” where the “bygone present” of an unwrecked ship haunts an excavation in the manner of a “phantom” (2016: 370–3). This temporally entangled atmosphere is complicated further still by the constant, heterogeneous action of water and weather, which often leave remains too fragmented, and too dispersed, ever to be certainly articulated as historical testimony (Lavery 2020: 271). Wrecky leavings are at once generous, vital, and disorderly contributors to the stories seas are heard to tell. It has been frequently remarked, of late, that Earth’s oceans are reckoned to contain the traces of about three million shipwrecks (“Wrecks” 2017). Deeply and prolifically held by the waters that “cover three-fourths of the earth’s surface with an enveloping mantle,” as the path-breaking scientist, author, and activist Rachel Carson had it, maritime ruins are strangely

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omnipresent and out of sight, everywhere and nowhere at once (1956: 171). Because they are mostly located beyond the scope of ready and regular human contact, wrecks appear to be distinguished examples of what geographers have called “open” ruins, sites that remain “caught up in dynamic processes of decay and unmaking” and so offer themselves up more readily than most to “unstructured exploration of possible pasts” and “encounter with involuntary memories” (DeSilvey and Edensor 2012: 472). This simultaneity—of openness to encounter and difficulty of actual access—has helped endow wrecks with exceptional symbolic power. In the context of theories of the modern self, they have repeatedly served as icons of hidden and significant presences, of the obscure, fragmentary psychological residue of the suppressed or otherwise lost. “The bed of the sea,” writes the cultural historian Celeste Olalquiaga, “is littered with the remains of adventurous boats, much as the human mind is often but a cemetery of fearless thoughts gone astray” (2002: 7). Plumbing and recovering such thoughts resemble a kind of salvage operation, whereby longed-for memories are recovered, lent shape and substance, and assimilated. The psychological frame is just one recent instance of a long-standing and startlingly fruitful tradition of wrecky philosophizing in the West. According to Hans Blumenberg’s influential history of shipwreck “metaphorics,” European habits of intellection have been fundamentally shaped by the sort of catastrophe that sent the sea sculptures to Davy Jones’s locker. This is so because wreck events generate a mode of spectatorship whereby an onlooker becomes conscious of witnessing the unfurling of a disaster from a critical distance (1997: 67). Working from the Epicurean poet and scholar Lucretius’s De rerum natura (On nature), Blumenberg locates something like the birth of philosophy through the subjectivity of one who views a shipwreck from the “safety of the shore” and thus enacts, consciously or otherwise, the aesthetic and analytic habit of comprehending the self as distinct from, and in some sense of a higher order than, external “reality” (1997: 26). In this calculus, dry land is the place one situates oneself in order to gaze, perceive, and interpret, and so develop a billowing seascape—“this perpetuum mobile, this vanishing sign” (Goodrich 2018: 207)—into something semiotically legible. With the cult of the Romantic sublime, this sort of edification would develop into a special, paradoxical kind of pleasure, as shipwreck and the myriad sea became double emblems of overawing natural power and its constant companion,

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the inevitability of human mortality (Cusack 2014: 10). As features of even larger symbolic economies, drowned boats have been understood to record or foretell the precarity of national ambition, cultural imperialism, and even the entire protocols of Enlightenment epistemology (Carroll 2015: 91; Heartz 2001; O’Hanlan 2019: 139). In various important ways, submersed ruins have been regarded as not so much scars on the face of marine nature but as representative of the ocean’s more general identity. From the Book of Ezekiel to the natural philosopher Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681) to the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Christian cosmogonies have frequently imagined the undersea as not only a wrecker of fortunes and a holder of wrecks but an entity that is itself fundamentally wrecked. The historian Alain Corbin summarized this tradition in Le territoire du vide (The Lure of the Sea), which tracks an early modern European sense for the ocean as not just frightfully hazardous but chaotic, malformed, and consigned to the accursed fate of receiving, containing, and occasionally vomiting up creation’s leavings (1988: 14). Intriguingly, the idea of the wrecked ocean has also been a recurring trope of some very recent, ostensibly non-religious testimonies which emphasize the deleterious impacts of human behavior upon underwater zones. “We act,” complained the ecologist Carl Safina, as if the sea were “a waste sink” (2002–2003: 3). “We are grappling,” wrote the religious studies scholar Kimberley Christine Patton in a study of marine pollution, “with the sea’s conversion from paradise to hell” (2007: 11). Far from the last untouched realm of nature, salt waters, subaqueous zones, and sea beds emerge from these accounts as basically ruined (Quigley 2022). How actual shipwrecks fit into these visions is complex and ambiguous. Petroleous disasters like the Exxon Valdez in 1989 and the Sanchi in 2018 have exemplified the power of wrecks to pose deadly hazards for marine life, not to mention human crews. Sinkings do not always damage their surroundings as suddenly or spectacularly: at Chuuk Lagoon, in the Federated States of Micronesia, a large number of Second World War-vintage naval wrecks are only now raising alarm as sources of ecologically significant oil leakage (Cundall 2020). On the other hand, and sometimes at just the same time, drowned vessels have become increasingly celebrated for their potentialities as colonizable substrates which may actually aid the creation of better marine

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futures, and which also serve certain fashions for and economies of nature appreciation. The latter phenomenon is illustrated by, among countless other examples, the “Shipwreck Trail” within the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (Broadwater 2002: 654). As the marine ecologists Martin Speight and Peter Henderson have argued, “artificial reefs” are recent phenomena in name only; human beings have long been submerging structures, “accidentally”—as in the case of shipwrecks—or otherwise. “Almost anything solid and substantial, placed in the sea,” claim Speight and Henderson, “cannot avoid becoming an artificial reef ” (2010: 208). Through accident or intention, immersed wreckage exerts distinctive pressures upon its surroundings while becoming subject to sea-wrought metamorphoses. These complexities illustrate wrecks’ identities as loci of shifting and indeterminate meanings and histories. Shipwrecks vividly actualize dynamic traffic between states, or phases, of being: between life and death, between the anthropically intended, the natural, and the accidental, between artifact and ecofact, and between pasts, presents, and other historical coordinates (Quigley forthcoming). Wrecky dynamism is frequently represented in terms of a kind of limbo, a state of being “neither in our world nor completely gone from it,” to quote the filmmaker and submarine explorer James Cameron (quoted in Cohen 2019: 163). “Situationally transgressive” is the geographer and diver Stephanie Merchant’s term for the “objects and beings” wrecks generate and gather, things that relate to one another through “competing material signification.” At the remains of the SS Thistlegorm, an English re-supply boat destroyed in 1941 by German bombing at Sha’ab Ali, in the Red Sea, Merchant observes a scene defined by incompleteness: “semi-natural,” “semi-manmade,” lingering in a state of “partial destruction and disarray.” As the sunken ship’s “form” becomes subject to “erosion, demise, and colonization,” it does not so much disappear as become “ambiguous.” Firm distinctions between artifact and ecofact have broken down as a “patchwork of algae and coral” enveloped and encrusted the Thistlegorm’s propeller and so “camouflaged its surface merging with the sandy bottom,” posing a challenge for attempts to distinguish debris from seabed (2014: 119–26). Lurking ambiguously on the ocean’s floor, a shipwreck is a habitation and a grave, a donor and recipient of new life and “debris,” of the “organic” and the “manufactured.” Like “underwater jungles,” writes Olalquiaga, marine

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organisms “cover the carcasses of sunken ships” until the vestiges of maritime endeavor are integrated into the “submarine scenario” (2002: 168). Wrecks’ multiple and ever-shifting identities have presented their witnesses with scenes of unusual descriptive, interpretive, and epistemological complexity. Of a Second World War tank lying amidst the rubble of the Thistlegorm, Merchant writes that it has become so far covered by bryozoans as to have “almost lost all contours” (2014: 128). The depredation of recognizable form is undeniably aesthetically alluring, but it is also an urgent invitation to redevelop our facility for interpretation—for environmental hermeneutics, as I will explain in the next chapter—into a more integrated, responsive, and ongoing practice. Regarding Cousteau’s evocation of an “undersea gothic” in the film version of The Silent World (1956), Margaret Cohen has remarked upon the ways wrecks’ “windows and portholes become meaningless in an environment where the distinction between the protective inside and the outside has been destroyed” (2019: 161). In the wake of such destruction, there emerges a need for modes of apprehension and narration commensurate with sea-floor stuff, the histories it marks, and the futures it portends. This book experiments with such a mode. By theorizing the encrusted wreck, it may become possible to more thoroughly reckon these scenes’ heterogeneous ontologies. A shipwreck is a historical site and an emergent ecology, and it is more than these, too—and thinking at and through the formal relations in process among its constituents offers alternatives to the kind of disarticulating procedure that elevates one kind of wrecky meaning above all others. Encrustations attend to the material histories of seabed things from and with the marine-ecological situations those things have come to inhabit. “Shipwreck,” observes the poet A. E. Stallings, “tends to refract time as water refracts the image of sunken things” (2017). The sea, mused HamiltonPaterson during a visit to the National War Grave at Pearl Harbor, washes over what it receives “less with water than with time” (1992: 130). These are not only abstract or intellectual but biological and material phenomena, arising as a diverse coalition of seawater, colonizing organism, inanimate matter and other, unanticipated entities complement a “bygone present” with an imminent one. For Cohen, wrecky films like Cousteau’s have a tendency to “bring present and past into contact” at the sea floor (2019: 162). The encrusting ocean takes things further still, layering and infusing synchronic temporalities

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atop and within diachronic rhythms. Product and agent of these multiplicities, the encrusted wreck expresses an historicity that requires a commensurately multifaceted frame for thought. One such facet reflects the characters, labors, and histories of spineless, and predominantly sessile, marinal organisms. A submerged wreck has the potential to become the location of, borrowing from Cohen, “crossspecies assemblage,” not to say some “new form of life” (2019: 157, 162). This book characterizes wrecky assemblages in terms of formal relations among anthropic substrates and other-than-human lives—but not only. At the wreck, I argue, it is possible to observe meaning being made, and meaning changing, in the throes of the distinct ornamental operations of marine life and matter. Encrustations are not compliant participants in taxonomic science or environmental aesthetics, conventionally conceived, but they are essential contributors to the literal enveloping of undersea matter with sensibility, structure, and relation. The encrusting ocean inflects the memories, desires, narratives, and other energies that emanate from, and orient toward, shipwreck. I will argue that encrusted wrecks have long inflected, and continue to inflect, histories through other-than-human logics. Those logics frequently derive from animate life, and especially from marine invertebrate animals, the distinctive forms and characters whereof I will examine at length. But I interpret Cohen’s “new form of life” as morethan-biological, too—as the herald of a wrecky animacy that incorporates the living and the dead, the motile and the sessile, the manufactured and the “natural,” and so on. My ambition, in writing this book, is to gather and develop a group of words, images, methods, and problematics that will be suggestive, and may be directly productive, for scholars, writers, and artists working with wrecky encrustations and their intertwisted histories, times, ecologies, and lives. In working across historical periods, oceanic regions, and—to a lesser extent— cultural traditions, I am mindful that this study may appear to sacrifice specificity and thick context for theoretical sweep. This is an arguable flaw that I am partly inclined to simply accept, and partly inclined to justify via reference to the drowned ruins and oceanic processes that are my subject, and that themselves are well known for flouting territorial and temporal norms. This is not simply a neat justification. As literal versions of what the

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anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler has called “imperial debris,” numerous of the ships and stuffs that appear in these pages represent the “vital refiguration” of maritime empire’s leavings as opposed to its “inert remains” (2008: 194). An encrusted methodology apprehends the ontological shiftiness of wreckage— from imperial disaster to “underwater cultural heritage” (Perez-Alvaro 2019: 3) or biological “model system,” say (Walker et al. 2007: 436)—while working to hold pasts and presents, meanings and potentialities, in dynamic suspension. For the substantial and growing group of researchers, students, activists, and others engaged in acknowledging and reinterpreting the immersed traces of (frequently interlinked) military, imperial, and extractive practices, encrustations may hold particular hermeneutic and epistemological as well as poetic promise. As the V&A sea sculptures quietly imply, and as other portions of this text will consider at significant length, encrusted wrecks and the ways we access them are centrally involved in traditions of marine salvage, and in the forms of value recognized and prioritized by salvage economies and cultures. Such involutions were integral, not incidental, to the period in the development of European natural philosophy retrospectively named the scientific revolution, a fact which suggests that the history of submarine science must be theorized in close relation to the history of “wreck-fishing” (Hellawell 2020: 78). Moreover, in the West, fishing for wrecks has long been a privileged method for not only scientific exploration but financial speculation and frontierism, actual and imaginative. As the film and media studies scholar Lisa Han has written, histories of salvage campaigns are histories of politics, in that they are histories of deep connections between “oceanic mastery” and “colonization” (2019: 468). Reckoning the encrusting ocean compels acknowledgment of the many, diverse, and occasionally overlapping legacies of submarine extraction, exploitation, and injustice that suffuse sea beds and can only be disarticulated from them through feats of opportunistic interpretation. This book does not pretend to achieve analytic impartiality, but it proceeds in a spirit of awareness that plumbing the ocean is neither an innocent nor a neutral practice, whether carried out from the surfaces of a mining support ship, a scientific research vessel, or a book. An  encrusted theory must be ethical as well as effectual if it is to be worthy of the element and the conglomerated matters it addresses.

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­Three Habits of an Encrusting Ocean What sort of interpretive method—what sort of hermeneutics—is adequate to the multispecies, animate-inanimate, human and more-than-human encrusting forms that give shape to ocean objects, and to ocean floors? The V&A presents several images of its sea sculptures, and their diverse orientations metaphorize the multiplicity of interpretations they make available, not to say demand. In a second photograph of the first assemblage, the cracked porcelain spittoon appears to hold the short stack of teabowls, atop which rests the piece of the vase and around which are “encrusted” that quantity of “shells and coral” (Figure 6). But in yet another image of the same piece, the semispittoon lies on its side, and its observer receives the impression that it is not

Figure 6  First “Sea Sculpture,” c. 1725, underglaze of cobalt blue-decorated porcelain pieces fused together by fire encrusted with shell and coral growths. (Second angle.) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Figure 7  First “Sea Sculpture,” c. 1725, underglaze of cobalt blue-decorated porcelain pieces fused together by fire encrusted with shell and coral growths. (Third angle.) © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

so much holding as being held, with the vase- and teabowl-bits, in the grip of encrusting growths (Figure 7). Describing the relations that obtain amidst these structurally messy, strangely alluring things is no straightforward task, and this is true not only because their constituent parts may not adhere to the behaviors we expect of them, but because it is not even obvious how we should understand the sculptures to be oriented in space. What (or who) contains, and is contained, among these rearticulated somethings? What (or who) counts as substratum, and as surface feature? What (or who) adorns, and is adorned?

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Which bits of the sculptures’ stories are “accidental,” and which “natural”? Are these distinctions at all useful in encrustation’s ambience? To get a sense for how these and other problems have been apprehended, ignored, and wrangled with, this book sets out to describe some of the interpretive tendencies that have characterized (primarily) Western responses to submarine stuff over the past several hundred years. Through the pages that follow are threaded the testimonies of sailors, poets, memoirists, divers, scientists, philosophers, salvors, and others. Some are affiliated through ties of culture, contemporaneity, and indeed citation. Taken as a whole, however, they are a heterogeneous bunch, and what makes them comprehensible as a set, in this instance, is their participation in the rich and uncertain verbal and imaginative fields that issue from encrusted remains. In other words, it has been my intention to place the encrusting ocean, and the things it helps create, at the methodological center of this study, and so to permit its more-thanhuman logics to disrupt conventional analytic and chronological proceedings. This, it seems to me, is one way to do interpretive justice to objects like the V&A sea sculptures, which concatenate places, times, elements, materials, institutions, and lives into disordered and disordering wholes. So saying, I do not mean to excuse myself from pretensions to rigor or coherence. On the contrary, this book makes sense of a culturally and historically specific interpretive nexus that emerges from and surrounds encrusted remnants. Said nexus, I argue, has operated in a modern sense since the late seventeenth century, if not earlier, when the hermeneutic provocations of the encrusting ocean for European scholars first became the object of sustained debate. In the several centuries that have elapsed since, such provocations have of course been received in contingent circumstances, and therefore to disparate and shifting effects. What their reception has consistently expressed, however, is a concern for, and occasionally a fascination with, encrustations’ tendencies to interfere in standard structures of mobility, identity, epistemology, value, and form. Diverse ways of interpreting encrusted remains—as hindrances to salvage efforts, as preservers of material heritage, as artificial reefs, as underwater museums, as artworks, and so on—reflect diverse trajectories in the articulation and disarticulation of submarine ontology. I show how these trajectories, while importantly divergent and occasionally incommensurable, are also sometimes intertwisted in ways we would do well to understand. A

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more ambitiously encrusted approach to theorizing submerged stuff, I claim, does not insist on separating such trajectories from one another: rather, such an approach works toward some more integrated, responsive, and ongoing hermeneutics. We need better ways of observing submersed fragments, and of narrating their meanings, so that the histories and futures of such fragments are rendered with fuller regard for their perplexities. Ultimately, this text goes beyond surveying past and extant interpretive tendencies to propose some paths forward for encrusted thinking. An encrustation is, borrowing from the anthropologist Joseph Dumit, “a process in the form of a thing” (2014: 350). I foreground this processual, even agentic character by organizing the following through what I am calling three encrusting “habits.” These are fouling, concrescing, and artmaking. By thinking and writing through habits, I am attempting to avoid treating encrusted somethings as inert objects or as mere aggregations of discernible—and alienable—parts. Encrustations are, as this introduction has attempted to indicate, more than the sum of their constituents, holding and transmitting history, story, and ecology in the forms of dynamic and unruly wholes. They are, it bears re-emphasizing, distinctly marinal, in the particular sense that Peters and the geographer Philip Steinberg invoke when they write that the ocean “carries with it and in turn transforms and leaks into artificial matter.” Anthropic remains, write Peters and Steinberg, “carry with them the oceans through which and with which they have journeyed.” In this way, marine “detritus” might be “reconfigured as the ocean—an ocean articulated differently—beyond its chemical materiality to a more-than-planetary, artificial materiality” (2019: 302–3; emphasis in original). By playing amidst the language and the imagery of submarine things, this book aims to plumb, and perhaps contribute to, a poetics and aesthetics of encrustation, and particularly of encrusted wreckage. This amounts, I hope, to a small but meaningful way of enacting encrusted theory rhetorically: not only diagnosing the interpretive complexities and grotesqueries that sometimes crop up around seabed stuff, but taking such strangeness seriously as generative of unanticipated feelings, atmospheres, and meanings. Proceeding in a spirit of what Bennett calls “aesthetic-affective openness to material vitality” (2010: x), Reading Underwater Wreckage does not simply critique the terminological,

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imaginative, or epistemological shortcomings of others, but recognizes those shortcomings as invitations to some fuller and thicker, if never totally adequate, reckoning. Lingering with encrustations can be a practice, I argue, of working “beyond a traditional terrestrial vocabulary” and the “sedentary metaphysics” adhering thereto (Anderson and Peters 2014: 11). In this way, it is affined with the curator Stefanie Hessler’s sense for the sort of “tidalectic” paradigm originally proposed by the poet and scholar Kamau Brathwaite, one that invites the ocean and the oceanic to direct not only the subjects of art display—or of an academic book—but the arrangement of, and access to, those subjects (2020: 250). Chapter 1, “Lively Debris: Ontologies of an Encrusting Ocean,” takes my introduction’s broad theoretical premises and historical coordinates and gives them flesh. It begins by showing how the undersea has been diversely but consistently represented in Western literatures as exceptionally strange and estranging, and as fundamentally inimical to standard interpretive modalities. Put another way, submarine zones have posed particular difficulties for “environmental hermeneutics,” a term which designates the “interpretive techniques,” as well as the broad “ontological framework,” individuals bring to bear on the spaces and places they encounter (Utsler et al. 2014: 4). The history I am telling of a modern European hermeneutics of drowned, and especially encrusted, things begins with the so-called “Scientific Revolution” of the seventeenth century, an interval the historian Richard Drayton associated with “the rise of an increasingly mathematical and mechanistic approach to the world” (2000: 90). As numerous scholars have lately shown, submarine regions were and remained key sites for the elaboration of such an approach. At just the same time, underwater realms acquired special importance as the locations of not only empirical but financial, military, and even imperial exploration. Still, the encrusting ocean did not simply offer itself up for co-optation and explication by the new science. Aesthetically, ontologically, and economically, encrustations might exemplify the “natural and casual treasuries of the seas” (Beale 1772: 446) or they might emblematize an oceanic tendency toward epistemological entropy. This enduring tension hinges, I argue, on the ways observers respond to the distinct formal character of encrusted and encrusting matters. The seventeenth century inherited and reoriented a lasting trope of

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submersed things as being acted upon by, or interacting with, their surrounds through protocols of encrustation, decoration, and adornment. The fraught and fascinating status of subsea form closely involved that of the creatures we now call marine invertebrate animals, creatures which have never stopped being refractory participants in marinal taxonomy. Sponges, bryozoans, corals, and their collaborators are morphologically unruly organisms whose behaviors subvert the central tenets of Western environmental aesthetics and resist paradigms of “environment” that prioritize earthy place and soily rootedness. At the encrusted wreck, lives and inanimate matters create meaning through mutual, distinctive, intra-active “discursive practices,” in the words of feminist theorist Karen Barad (2014: 227). With Chapter  2 I introduce fouling, our first habit of the encrusting ocean. The pivotal scene lies under the cold waters of Tobermory Bay, in Scotland, in the early eighteenth century, amidst an ambitious salvage diving operation. It would prove a failure on account of an “encrustation” that prevented a crew of accomplished, well-funded wreck-fishers from hauling up some sea-floor treasure (Fardell and Phillips  2000: 12). I argue that the Tobermory disappointment be recognized as a foul, a term derived from the languages of maritime labor which denotes a clogging, choking, encumbering,  or  overgrowing—and so a making slow, unsafe, or dysfunctional. Across sea-going literatures and discourses, from the frustrated accounts of seventeenth-century buccaneers to the similarly confounded reports of twenty-first-century fish-farm developers, fouling incidents illustrate the undersea’s long and vexed legacy as a location of value, and as a force that acts in consequential ways upon value. The encrusted foul supplements vital histories of maritime capitalism—such as those of Laleh Khalili (2020) and Christopher Connery (1996)—with a submarine counternarrative of “frictional resistance” and arrestation (West 1976: 3). From the early modern period to the present, salvage-work has reflected the intersecting claims of scientific and technological discovery, speculative finance, and imperial competition (Delbourgo 2011; von Mallinckrodt 2018). The vulnerability of such claims to oceanic fouling has never received the attention it merits. Since the first heyday of imperial systems of finance capital in the West, encrustations have stopped the circulation and recirculation of valuable goods, removing potentially salvageable things from European

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economic and colonial currents. By recognizing the encrusted foul as materially and temporally unruly, it may become possible to perceive submerged encrustations as doing more than simply biding their time between surface intervals. Through fouling, certain forms of underwater value are challenged, and certain others are encouraged. I  turn to Adrienne Rich’s classic poem “Diving into the Wreck” (1972) for evidence of a foul’s subversive, even radical, epistemological and ideological potential. Toward a non-normative, nondualistic, non-paternalistic, non-authoritarian poetics, Rich identifies with intermediate things (and happens also to aspire to invertebrate movement). “Half-destroyed instruments” and a “fouled compass” appear in the poem as ontologically meaningful in and of themselves, testifying to the wreckage of the past at the same time that they seem to renew the past’s material configurations (Rich 2013: 24). Concrescing, the second of our encrusting habits, is the subject of Chapter 3. My instigators, here, are a number of objects, held in the collections of the Western Australian Museum, which pertain to the Batavia, a Dutch East Indiaman that wrecked off the Houtman Abrolhos Islands in 1629. They are called “concretions,” a term that derives from the Latin concrēscĕre, meaning “to grow together.” Concretions, I show, are lively collaborations among sea waters, invertebrates, ocean sediments, and drowned anthropic objects, collaborations that operate through dynamic relations between encrustation and corrosion. Concretions materialize what Anderson and Peters regard as a distinctively marine “way of thinking,” whereby “one conceives of our (water) world as one which is in flux, changeable, processual and in a constant state of becoming” (2014: 4–5). These things have, however, often been coded negatively: confronted by inscrutable concrescent assemblages, descriptive language sometimes resorts to ambivalence and disgust. At such moments, encrustations are cast as forms of ontological and epistemological obfuscation, not to say bare waste. When they work to bring wrecky remains “out of concretion,” archeologists and conservators seek to return ready legibility to things caught up in encrusted relations (“NC Archaeology @Home” 2020: 9). The idea that concretions amount to so much epistemological interference relies on a sense of submerged growths as essentially ornamental, and so of encrustation as at best a kind of charming distraction, and at worst a grotesque erasure of the integral entity it overlays. Recognizing concretions as active

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oceanic processes in their own right would entail complicating the received dichotomy of object-ornament relations. Borrowing from Gunalan Nadarajan’s reading of Jacques Derrida, I propose the parergonal as a paradigm more suited to the encrusting ocean. A parergonal relation is one which inverts or confuses standard senses of the hierarchy of substrate and adornment (Nadarajan 2007). It is a concept that resonates powerfully with concretions’ habit of preserving the objects they grow together with, as in the case of the USS Monitor off the North Carolina coast, numerous well-known Spanish imperial wrecks off the  coast of Campeche, and elsewhere (López Garrido et al. 2015; Monitor 2008). Concretions and other parergonal relations vivify the long-standing trope of the ocean as an uncanny preservative of the things it receives, a trope that emanates from sources as diverse as the classical Japanese Man’yōshū, Thomas Heyrick’s The Submarine Voyage, and Pablo Neruda’s “blue shore of silence.” Multispecies encrustations literally maintain some matters, and some histories; this chapter elaborates an interpretive approach that reflects these temporal and ecological fusions. Variously obfuscating, preserving, and agglomerating, concretions generate formal, temporal, and narrative complexities that hold forth heretofore dimly perceived horizons of ontological and imaginative possibility. A large and wonderful concretion provides the impetus for our third habit of the encrusting ocean, one I am simply calling artmaking. Chapter 4 departs from Lost at Sea: Art Recovered from Shipwrecks, a recent exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco that reflects and contributes to a broad and broadening vogue for celebrating the undersea’s aesthetic effects, an enthusiasm exemplified by Jason deCaires Taylor’s numerous “underwater museums” (2014). I ask how the linguistic and affective protocols of artmaking are projected upon, and emerge from, wrecks, wrecky fragments, and the encrusting ocean. What I identify, first of all, is an oxymoronic, and to a significant degree unfortunate, practice of deploying encrustations for their astonishing effects while treating them, ultimately, as so much overgrowth to be cleared away. Even Lost at Sea, which clearly takes encrustation seriously as an engine of aesthetic effect, foreshadows its concretions’ ceasing to exist as they break down in air, so divulging “unseen objects from the interior.” Thus, perhaps, the central ambiguity of the encrusting ocean, so far as human spectatorship is concerned: oceanic amalgamations spectacularly

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reconfigure their constituent relations, but when they literally emerge to view, they are placed en route to some more settled, and perhaps disjointed, state of beings. I propose that a dynamic of this kind partly reflects a troubling tendency to comprehend the subaqueous as an inaesthetic zone—as not only unattractive but actively unforming. I contend, at the same time, that the power of Lost at Sea’s objects to startle suggests some promising, if so far unfulfilled, possibilities in the acknowledgment of concrescent (and other) aesthetics. Toward elucidating such possibilities, I make a start by asking how topside exhibitions of encrusted oceanities relate to another, no less meaningful tendency to trope the seabed as an unwalled museum of wrecky marvels. I turn, subsequently, to deCaires Taylor and the theory of distinctly marinal museology promulgated through his work and writing and through the numerous commentaries his installations have incited. DeCaires Taylor’s submerged sculptures function, I show, through a dialectic of inscription and unmarking that presents conventional senses of artmaking, and of display, with challenges that are literally profound. It is no coincidence that ambivalences like these also operate widely among wrecky agglomerations that so often appear to delineate the traces of anthropic submersions while deranging their forms. An idea of artmaking that works among—and does not heroically resolve— such tension promises not just to recognize the idiosyncratic character of subsea aesthetics but to subject conventions in “environmental” artfulness to salubrious reformations. The meanings of encrusted things do not simply lie underneath their exteriors, among the artifacts that might be recuperated from within. Nor, for that matter, do they consist only of the animal and other lives that envelop such stuff. They are expressed, rather, through dynamic and ongoing formal relationships that trouble the bounds of species and animacy and that are, in certain respects, distinctively oceanic. Encrusted thought entails thinking through forms, a practice that offers a way past some unproductive—and yet tenacious—structures in Western environmental aesthetics, structures that take for granted the existence of discrete subjects and objects, observers and observed. In the era Crutzen and others call the Anthropocene, as the myriad and multiplying ties between individuals and environment—between subjects and their ecologies—become more apparent, encrusted thought

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offers to re-center the realities of concrescent becoming, as well as to decline fixed distinctions between the artifactual and the ecofactual, the anthropic and the natural. We would do well to recognize sea sculptures, concretions, shipwrecks, and other encrusted somethings as growings-together, and to acknowledge the more-than-human, and more-than-animate, encrustations that are attending to and reimagining marine matters. That we inhabit ruins—imperial, late capitalist, and other—has become a key tenet of contemporary critical theory. That anthropogenic global warming and its attendant consequences are wreaking, and will wreak, anticipated and unanticipated ruination has become a central fact of twenty-first-century existence. By developing some of the tools we need to apprehend and imagine oceanic wrecks—as well as the wrecked ocean—this book makes a modest but meaningful contribution to the improvement of marine sensibilities, past, present, and future. Thank you for reading it.

1

Lively Debris: Ontologies of an Encrusting Ocean Interpreting the Undersea In 1907, sponge divers working a few miles off the town of Mahdia, along the east coast of what was then geopolitically defined as the French Protectorate of Tunisia, found a remarkable wreck. At depths greater than thirty-six meters were discovered “row after row of huge cylindrical objects.” Having surfaced, the spongers stated—in Jacques Cousteau’s retelling—that they were diving on a field of drowned cannons. The authorities called in reinforcements in the form of helmet divers, who reported the presence of some sixty-three armaments lying “in a scattered oval” amidst some “other large rectangular forms.” “All” these were “heavily encrusted with marine life.” One of the cannons was weighed up for closer inspection, and the “organisms” enveloping it were subsequently “removed.” As the encrustations gave way, “marble fluting was revealed” along the surface of the supposed great gun (Cousteau 1953: 71). Cleared of “shellfish and sponges,” and of whatever other lives and matters had accreted themselves to the objects, the cannon was rightly recognized as a Greek Ionic column. During the course of a salvage operation that lasted several years, these and numerous notable works of classical sculpture were “rescued,” in the artist and art scholar Beryl Barr-Sharrar’s words, “from the ocean floor” (1996: 54). Things from the Mahdia wreck are thought to have lain on the sea floor for approximately two millennia. Their recovery was the first such enterprise ever to be carried out in the Mediterranean (Wilson 2003). In the story of their surfacing, the bringing-up of submerged things and the removal from those things of oceanic growths represent multiple forms of “rescue.” During

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their underwater sojourn, the antique fragments had been more than hidden: they had effectively ceased to be. So long as and for whom the wreck remained undetected, its scattered remnants moldered not just in mud but in a kind of nothingness. Brought to the light of day, then, they seem to have been summoned up, ex nihilo, to swell the stores of art history, archeology, heritage, and—not least—the international trade in artifacts. They are prizes, in this sense, for that antiquarian spirit that indulges in a “cult of the past as radical continuity” (Schnapp et al. 2004: 2). We might say, moreover, that once it emerged from French imperial waters, this stuff recommenced a form of illicit journeying. In a caption to a recovered marble bust representing a Greek goddess, pitted with “shellfish damage,” Barr-Sharrar notes that the piece “may have been stolen from its setting by Roman soldiers during the consul Sulla’s sack of Athens and Piraeus in 86 B.C.” (1996: 55)1 (Traditionally identified with Aphrodite, Barr-Sharrar contends that the sculpture really figures Ariadne; Figure 8.) Cousteau is less circumspect: “The argosy of Mahdia was built,” he writes, “for the express task of looting the art treasures of Greece” (1953: 71). Plunder or no, the treasures in question now reside, high and dry, at the Musée National du Bardo, in Tunis. By rescuing these things, and by reconfirming their artifactual nature, the Mahdia salvors participated in a long Enlightenment project of overcoming the “interpretive barrier” that are salt waters (Roman 2019: 44). That said, such a triumph must be seen as qualified by the very fact that the treasures had to be removed from the sea to become legible. Underwater, they were subject to encrusting deformations and misrepresentations that made it impossible, for at least some of their observers, to accurately interpret them in subaqueous situ. This is to say nothing of the water column, or of the myriad and mobile impingements upon human sense that render “linguistic expression” of the subaqueous so “unstable” in general (Cohen 2014: 115). When Cousteau, his colleague Philippe Tailliez, and their team dived on the wreck in 1948, the argosy “looked nothing like a ship,” and what “columns” remained “were vague cylinders” enveloped in “thick blankets of vegetation and animals.” The divers were driven to draw on their “imaginations,” Cousteau wrote, “to conjure up

This chronology is the object of some dispute. The archeologist R. J. A. Wilson has written that the ceramics rescued from the wreckage suggest a date of sinking closer to 100 BCE (2003).

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a picture of the ship.” Even at four decades’ remove from the wreck’s initial “discovery,” and with superior equipment and a wealth of subsea experience to boot, Cousteau and company encounter a scene that is only interpretable

Figure 8  Bust of Aphrodite from the Mahdia wreckage, Bardo National Museum, Tunisia. E. Leroux, Catalogue du Musée Alaoui, 1897–1922. Public domain.

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via recourse to fancy. This “drowned museum” is an exhibition strictly insofar as the imagination makes it one, in a feat of what I’ll call, somewhat wonkily, terrestrializing prolepsis (Cousteau 1953: 75). There is no “drowned museum” to speak of here, not really, for by the time its holdings become intelligible they will have been hauled well ashore. As the past few paragraphs have, I hope, begun to indicate, what interests me is a language, as well as an aesthetics, that apprehends and interprets seafloor debris on something more closely resembling its own terms. Cousteau is aware, to be sure, that this drowned museum off the Tunisian coast is other things to other creatures. Besides those vaguely named “vegetation and animals” that cover the “vague cylinders,” the wreckage has become “an oasis for fish.” A “museum” for French divers, an “oasis” for “big rock bass” (Cousteau 1953: 75): Cousteau does not push the parallel so far, but one is tempted to ask whether what he perceives are two imaginaries—one human, one piscine—in implicit tension. To make reference to a fishy imagination is, of course, to hazard the appearance of anthropomorphic projection, not to say intellectual laziness. But I would prefer to run such a risk than abdicate all claims to understanding across lives, however different from one another such lives may be and “however mediated, provisional, fallible, and tenuous,” as the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn has written, “these understandings may be” (2013: 89). “Life,” argues Kohn in a study of Ecuadorian rainforest relationalities, “is constitutively semiotic” (2013: 9). Cousteau’s glancing acknowledgment of what the scene may mean for big rock bass is one I would like to understand as a minor, insufficient, but meaningful acknowledgment of wrecky representations other than human ones. Even more elusive than fishy representations are the characters of the Mahdia’s “blankets of vegetation and animals,” collective entities whose status in Cousteau’s description resembles that of those encrusting “shells and coral” from the V&A’s account of its sea sculptures. That is, these lively submarine agglomerations take on a kind of shapeless shape through language that is remarkable primarily for its imprecision. It is as if the power of encrustations to render ship and columns apparently formless also expressed itself through— or upon—discourses that do little more than signal their own interpretive inadequacy. This is a failure of environmental hermeneutics, insofar as it

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represents a minor crisis for “human mediation”—in these cases, linguistic, textual, and museological—“of the meaning of environments”—here, subaqueous, and specifically encrusting, ones (Utsler et al. 2014: 2). In view of crusts, blankets, envelopes, and other forms of submarine growth, certain interpretations struggle to yield more than minimal meaning—struggle, even, to perform the sort of cataloguing work that has long been nature writing’s most fundamental stock-in-trade. In subaqueous spaces where, as numerous scholars have thoroughly explained, the necessity for mediation is even more pronounced than usual, these limitations to, or emptinesses within, hermeneutic practice may appear starker still (Firebrace 2011: 59; Jue 2020: 3; Rozwadowski 2010: 521–2). I would like to propose that with regard to subaqueous realms, and especially in relation to wrecky, artifactual-ecofactual matter, our hermeneutic capacities are regularly lacking. This book is an attempt to furnish those who read and talk about such realms and matters with a group of interpretive tools—words, images, even “a form of thinking”—that may go some small way toward addressing this lack. I mean to emphasize “small”: writing and thinking the encrusting ocean is one contingent manner of apprehending and representing drowned worlds, and it will no more suffice to totally resolve our hermeneutic deficiency than would another. “Interpretation,” write the editors of a recent book on the philosophy of environmental hermeneutics, “is a structurally open project that never comes to final closure.” In diagnosing a lack, I join said editors in postulating that a hermeneutic approach contains an “inherent critical element”—that it must be possible to describe certain interpretations of underwater and other situations as more valid than others (Utsler et al. 2014: 3). Crucially, however, this work is not about isolating and elevating one interpretive modality as categorically superior to the rest, but about contributing some rigorously conceived hermeneutic instruments to a diverse and—it is ever to be hoped—growing collective set. The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer characterized the “critical task of hermeneutics” as an historically informed process of rendering “conscious” those “prejudices” that misinform interpretation and understanding (1988: 77). Over the past few decades, a range of specifically terracentric

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prejudices has become the object of sustained discussion across academic disciplines, arts practices, and environmental activisms. This conversation is too multifaceted and far-reaching to summarize here, but some of its preoccupations are directly pertinent for our concerns and so bear noting briefly. Ocean scholars in the humanities and social sciences have drawn close attention to the ways seas have been mischaracterized, particularly through Western aesthetics and epistemologies, as formless, unlocated, and ahistorical. This research has amply demonstrated, moreover, how such interpretive failures and misrepresentations have had socioecological as well as intellectual ramifications (Bolster 2012; Cusack 2014; Lamb 2019; Mack 2011). What I am setting out to show is that by thinking and writing with encrustation, we stand to improve—in a limited but significant way—the ways we encounter and represent submarine sites and forms, as well as the ways we interpret and tell subaqueous histories. Without pretending to supervene prejudice, let alone mediation, altogether, an encrusted hermeneutics lingers with strange seabed assemblages in order that their behaviors might be better reckoned. In an essay on “sea-writing,” or “thalassography,” Philip Steinberg observes that the sea does more than move: it is “constituted by vectors of movement.” He goes on to imply that this fact has too often been called in to justify reducing the ocean to “a metaphor for flux and flow” while neglecting the “actual mobilities” that make it up (2014: xv). Reading Underwater Wreckage is a book that aspires to think “from” bodies of water while keeping well clear of the tendency to treat marine subjects as what the anthropologist Stefan Helmreich has called a “theory machine” (2011: 134). Throughout the following pages, I attempt to test my hypothesis that by cultivating a language of, and sensibility for, submerged forms, it may be possible to simultaneously enrich a metaphorics of the submarine and sensitize us to the real contours of subsea matters and environments. Like all versions of what Donna Haraway has called “worldly embodiment,” encrustation is always “ongoing, dynamic, situated, and historical”—forever in flux, but forever actual, too, and forever in relation to its and other times and places (2008: 249). By attending to some of the undersea’s distinctive principles of unity, as well as its unique forms of thingness, it might be possible to do something more, and different, than taking terrestrial frames underneath the waves.

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Before addressing some of the cultural and historical contexts that impinge on this story of the encrusting ocean, I would like to iterate—at the risk of impertinence—their contingency. The idea that ocean depths and sea floors host irreducibly complex interminglings of matter, history, and feeling will come as no surprise at all to readers of, for instance, the writer and critical theorist Édouard Glissant, for whom deep Caribbean waters were “not only the abyss of neurosis.” They were, rather, “primarily the site of multiple converging paths” (1996: 66). Kamau Brathwaite argued, in a similar vein, that convergence was not only possible in but essentially characteristic of subaqueous zones. For Caribbean island peoples and cultures, wrote Brathwaite in an indelible phrase, “the unity is submarine” (quoted in DeLoughrey 2007: 17). This book is in regular, and at times deep, conversation with non-European intellectual traditions, but it does not masquerade as globally fluent. Furthermore, I strive to avoid committing the ethical as well as methodological mistake of summoning voices in a manner that deracinates them, and so neglects the contexts they most immediately address. As the next section begins to show, the sense for an encrusting ocean this text perceives, interrogates, and endeavors to improve has histories of its own. The following pages attempt the modest task of meeting this sensibility where it has been and where it is, as well as of helping point its potential paths into the future, where unforetold convergences will lie, whether we choose to acknowledge them or not.

The Natural and Casual Treasuries of the Seas Fascinations with what might be lying on the sea floor, and with the odd things that might be happening there, long predate Jacques Cousteau and The Silent World. Within the canon of English literature, the most famous fictional rendering of submarine form must come from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play thought to have been first performed in the court of James I in 1611. It opens on the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, as a party of aristocrats are sailing back to Italy from North Africa, where the daughter of Alonso, King of Naples, has been married to the King of Tunis. After the storm and shipwreck that catalyze the ensuing scenario, Alonso’s son, Prince Ferdinand, is cast up on an island shore. There he encounters a sportive

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spirit-creature named Ariel. As Ferdinand worries over whether his father has survived or drowned, Ariel sings him a cruel, exquisitely imagined fib: Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. (1864: 19)

The notion’s disorienting power derives in large part from its treatment of time. In the supposed course of Alonso’s drowning, the king’s body appears to have undergone instantaneous “change,” or—weirder still—slipped from one temporal stream to another. This mortal frame’s reorganization into coralline and pearly form may have happened all of a sudden, as if by magic, or it may be the case that undersea matter simply inhabits an alternative time-space where topside measures do not apply. The essential ambiguity of Alonso’s new identity—he has become a “something”—connotes, therefore, enriched and estranged temporalities as well as physical structures. Ariel’s alluring vision trades in and reproduces tropes of the undersea as wonderful, monstrous, precious, and exotic—and as exempt from, or even antipathetic toward, terrestrial nature. In these ways, it appears to accord neatly with narratives of Western oceanity which characterize eras like Shakespeare’s as fundamentally ignorant of subsea actualities. It is a commonplace, among histories of ocean environments and the marine sciences, to observe sea views becoming recognizably modern around the middle of the 1800s, more than two hundred years after The Tempest’s first showing. This chronology hinges on a number of indisputably pivotal developments, from the dawning of the great age of aquariums to substantial improvements in diving costumes to the epic deep-oceanographic research voyage of the HMS Challenger (Adler 2019; Firebrace 2016; Rozwadowski 2005). A similar periodization emerges from other disciplines and subjects, too: it was during the nineteenth century, writes the art historian David Clarke, that a “modern attitude toward water” in the West was being worked out on the canvases of seascape painters, most notably J. M. W. Turner (2010: 36). This is a complex, not to say vexed, simultaneity,

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because it may suggest that at just the same time that oceans were being brought to unprecedented empirical knowledge, oceanic prospects were being constructed as definitively sublime, and so shedding their “informational function” (Cohen 2010: 119). These tensions and ironies notwithstanding, however, a diverse scholarly consensus has emerged which holds that it was in the Victorian period that Western cultures acquired the marinal orientations we continue to live with today (Mentz and Rojas 2017: 1–2). By citing The Tempest in a book attempting to engage seriously with modern phenomena, therefore, I may seem to be doing nothing more than adorning a contemporary tale with a glittering relic. But if we make the choice to approach the story of oceans with something besides—or more than—“technological modernity” in mind, some other logics and narratives may present themselves to view (Abberley 2018: 5). So choosing needs by no means entail taking the position that the chronologies I have just mentioned are misguided or unhelpful. But it does imply that we would do well to supplement such chronologies with forms of apprehending human-ocean relations that a progressive teleology may not adequately recognize. The historian of science Natascha Adamowsky suggests as much when she proposes that if we exaggerate the extent to which the turn of the nineteenth century heralded a categorical transformation in oceanic consciousness, we risk oversimplifying not only prior sensibilities but subsequent ones, too (2016: 12–15). Shipwrecks, encrusters, and their myriad forms are signs, as well as enactments, of historical relations that may transcend or refuse certain sequences and configurations and suggest others. “Even with all our modern instruments for probing and sampling the deep ocean,” wrote Rachel Carson in 1951, “no one now can say that we shall ever resolve the last, the ultimate mysteries of the sea” (1956: 214). In the early modern period, submersed spaces appeared to house intriguing, and frequently horrifying, material mysteries. An encrusted hermeneutics is attuned to the numerous ways submerged things continue to present such difficulties and enticements, even for modern aesthetics and epistemologies. Shakespeare’s action was inspired, to a significant extent, by real wreckage, and by other wrecky tales. In 1610, a written report reached England from Virginia of the sinking of the Sea-Venture off Bermuda in the previous year. Shakespeare is thought to have been at least familiar with, and possibly to have borrowed extensively from, that text (Kerrigan 2018: 84; Mentz 2009: 1004).

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And The Tempest’s inaugural staging occurred within a cultural milieu that had long been preoccupied by the promise and peril of maritime voyaging. For cultures versed in Christian scripture and iconography, shipwreck was perhaps the emblem par excellence of mortal hazard, and of the limits of human volition (Corbin 1988: 19). At the same time, the tempestuous and naufragous sea was becoming paradoxically integral to Europe’s increasingly “ocean-bound” cultures (Mentz 2015: 6). Moreover, as a relatively small but growing body of scholarly literature has begun to explore, the fates of drowned things and the prospects of recovering them were becoming objects of widespread concern. Indeed, as the historian of science James Delbourgo explains, what may be most “surprising” about the ambience of “early modern submarine history,” from a twenty-first-century vantage, is not the alienness but the “longevity” of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subsea thought and practice (2011: 177). Too little, in other words, has been done to put Cousteau’s calm museum in conversation with older, and perhaps unfamiliar, but unexpectedly resonant images, Alonso’s transmogrifying body not least among them. This and the next several paragraphs will seek to convince their readers that in the historical vicinity of what we often now recall as the Scientific Revolution of the late seventeenth century, submerged things coalesced an array of apparently distinct discourses. These include, but are not limited to, salvage, early marine science, an aesthetics of novelty, speculative finance, imperial frontierism, and a poetics of diving and the drowned. Unsurprisingly, these strands did not always run in the same direction; as interests, they competed at least as often as they may have accorded. My intention is not to resolve such tensions but to meditate upon them, partly for the simple reason that their vitality has, I want to argue, been underrated, and their surprising longevities unobserved. Nineteenth-century oceanity, as Delbourgo has convincingly explained, must be placed in “a history of underwater intervention dating back at least to the Renaissance, one embroiled in technical experimentation, global capital flows, naval deployment and colonial trade” (2011: 151). Minimizing that history as premodern—technologically, scientifically, or otherwise—can have the unintended consequence of obscuring the entangled character of subsea space at a formative time of European “empirical experience” thereof (von Mallinckrodt 2018: 301). And it can limit our ability—as well as our

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responsibility—to reckon the ways the early modern undersea has influenced contemporary attitudes toward subaqueous space, process, labor, and life. In 1682, the Anglican clergyman and natural philosopher John Beale wrote an intriguing letter to the chemist Robert Boyle, Beale’s colleague in the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge. The missive complained that too little was being done to encourage “navigation” in submarine space. He was thinking especially of the training and employment of so-called “urinators,” or a class of divers who were particularly skilled in practices of underwater repair and salvage. It would be exceedingly “easy,” Beale writes, as well as “advantageous for our merchants, in all their voyages, to be furnished with such urinators,” who along with specially designed machines might bring up “all the natural and casual treasuries of the seas,” not least of all those “permanent goods which are lost by shipwreck” (1772: 445–6). “Casual,” in this instance, refers to just such losses—to all those valuable things that might reach a sea’s bed by chance or by accident, and might intermingle there with the ocean’s “natural” treasures. Who Beale imagines may have lost them is not immediately obvious, but we can be confident that he would prefer his English compatriots be the finders, not the losers. An image emerges, here, of the drowned world as a location of missing but redeemable value, and of that value awaiting rescue amidst a heterogeneous array of not only submerged anthropogenic stuff but “naturally” occurring oceanic things as well. The Royal Society is, Beale explains, an “empory” (or emporium), and the sea floor is one among numerous regions where its interests in science and in profit appear to merge. Such entanglements were especially pronounced with regard to wrecks and wrecky remains: in an illuminating study of the subaqueous confluence of commerce and natural knowledge, the historian of the early modern era Philippa Hellawell examines a boom in “wreck-fishing” in the latter decades of the seventeenth century. An extraordinary, and not uncontroversial, uptick in patents issued for diving engines in the period followed from the incredible success of a Bostonian named William Phips, who with the help of substantial financial backing had located and overseen the salvage of as much as two hundred and fifty thousand pounds’ worth of treasure from a Spanish galleon sunk off Hispaniola, or Quisqueya, in 1641. Thus did the undersea become an important destination for what were then known as “projects,” or ventures

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involving patrons and investors interested in securing fantastic yields (Hellawell 2020: 78). In the pursuit of drowned imperial ships, commercial, scientific, and state interests converged and generated new forms of “national competition”: for the historian Rebekka von Mallinckrodt, underwater worlds were thus a key, and too frequently ignored, domain through which the rising British Empire began to articulate itself (2018: 300–1). And such articulations, among imperial contexts throughout the early modern Atlantic world and beyond, always emerged in conjunction with human exploitation, racialization, and even slave labor (Dawson 2006; Warsh 2018). Fishing for submerged things, wrecky or otherwise, was one important feature of the vogue for collecting and contemplating wonders that captivated sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and prefigured the more sober and systematized practices of eighteenth-century natural history and taxonomy. By sourcing, gathering, and conveying naturalia, connoisseurs and philosophers established and relied upon increasingly global networks of exchange. Many of these webs were overtly or incipiently imperial. Emblematic, for Delbourgo, are the aquatic hoards of the British natural historian and physician Hans Sloane, who served the Royal Society as its president from 1727 to 1741. His collection, which was purported to contain six thousand shells, fifteen hundred corals and sponges, and fifteen hundred fish, derived from Sloane’s first-hand voyages to, as well as contacts in, the Caribbean and elsewhere, and frequently served as primary source material for scientists based in England (Delbourgo 2011: 153) (Figure 9). In his expansive account of the connections between natural history and imperialism in the eighteenth century, Richard Drayton sees Sloane as exemplary—as standing at the very core of an “informal empire of gentlemanly knowledge” (2000: 37). Through their multitudinous “submarine curiosities,” Delbourgo contends, Sloane’s collections enact a specifically subaqueous “imperial chorography,” indicating Britain’s maritime might through shelly, spongy, coralline, and piscine synecdoche (2011: 158). Marine specimens signified multiply, then, as icons of national and scientific, as well as divine, meaning. The natural and the casual—or, recalling the V&A’s language, the natural and the accidental—coincided, in this chorography, in forms like a certain barnacle Sloane called Balanus major, augustus purpurescens, which was wellknown for attaching itself to ships and other surfaces and was identifiable,

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Figure 9  Nicolas Robert, nine studies of shells, from an album of seventy-nine drawings entitled “Roberts’s Drawings of Plants, Birds, Shells &c. Vol.1,” including a spiral spiny shell at center. Watercolor and bodycolor, on vellum. 1625–84. © The British Museum.

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therefore, as both natural and proximate to humanness. Delbourgo’s limpid term for this and other “curious hybrids of art and nature” in Sloane’s treasuretrove is an “encrusted natural history” (2011: 158). Unsurprisingly, shipwrecks and what they deposited on the seabed were exceptionally generative sources of “encrusted things” and the fascinations they provoked among their spectators (Delbourgo 2011: 176). Their appeal is comprehensible, to a meaningful extent, in terms of the broader fashion for shelly, coralline, and otherwise undersea aesthetics that pervaded eighteenth-century Britain and France, and that developed in close, if not always companionable, relation with early marine science (Quigley 2019b; Spary 2000). Still, what made “encrusted curiosities” particularly novel and evocative, but also particularly epistemologically challenging, was their multitudinous character, the ways “multiple histories” were “literally conjoined” in their forms (Delbourgo 2011: 176). In a manner that will be echoed in Chapter 2’s discussion of submarine salvage, an encrusted natural history produces remarkable phenomena that did not readily resolve themselves into the categories of value they may have been expected to express. Before the age of Enlightenment, the ocean had been arguably the preeminent furnisher of the marvels that adorned naturalia collections (Olalquiaga 2002: 211). But over the course of Sloane’s life, the very aesthetics of curiosity that had made space for encrusted curiosities in so many Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonders, gradually gave way to something more closely resembling the practices of art collection and art history that are familiar to us today. Through this transition, in the scholar Barbara Maria Stafford’s words, artifactual value detached from “bibelots, exotica, and shells” and gravitated toward “secular remnants and sacred relics” (1988: 12). By the end of the eighteenth century, something resembling the modern museum had become not only institutionally real but culturally and, we might say, ideologically dominant (Altick 1978: 32). But what the V&A’s sea sculptures, and this book’s many other encrusted somethings, may indicate is that naturalcasual, hybrid marine somethings have never stopped exerting exceptional fascinations, and never fully bowed to categorical ideals. In a recent edition of the Journal of Curatorial Studies, Pandora Syperek and Sarah Wade have argued that successful approaches to “curating the sea” demand among other things the “revival” of pre-Enlightenment modalities, not least the “Wunderkammer”

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(2020: 160). Not so much retrogressive as temporally and epistemologically unruly, sea-somethings challenge classificatory frameworks to suspend some of their core impulses. Alonso was, to the relief of some if not all of The Tempest’s characters, alive, but this is beside the point of the vision’s power, which derives from the idea that the king is not simply dead but passed beyond the estranging mirror of the sea. James Hamilton-Paterson writes that a drowned object is for the term of its immersion a “perpetually lost” one, which “cannot be touched because at that instant it will turn into something else: an ordinary ship, an ordinary battleship, which sank, which has a salvage value, which will attract looters” (1992: 146). The “something” that was Alonso exists “perpetually,” in that it will not submit to fading, and it (he?) is irrecoverably “lost” to conventional order. Reconstituting the submerged as a “something else” may be akin to what Beale wants for permanent goods, and what Cousteau wants for the drowned museum at Mahdia. An inquiry after encrustation asks what, if anything, may be worthwhile about dwelling with the first of these somethings, the one that remains and at the same time does not tell us exactly what it is.

Invertebrate Form To ask as much is not, as this section explains, to suggest that we will have nothing to say about the multitudinous lives and animacies that go into the unfolding of seabed things. The “Athenian marbles” Cousteau recorded seeing—imagining, rather—under the sea at Mahdia “were dark bluish shapes, blurred with blankets of marine life” (1953: 77). As the remaining pages of this book will copiously show, Cousteau’s bare accounting (or non-accounting) for the presence, identity, and meaning of encrusting organisms partakes of a much broader trope. I want to pause here to describe this trope, and to establish the important work it can be seen doing when it helps structure encounters with submerged stuff. One of my hopes for the book you are reading is that it might give writers, and observers of all kinds, a few extra tools for acknowledging and delineating the contours of “marine life,” so that such life might emerge from language as something more than blurry and blurring blankets. The tools I particularly mean are some sensitivities for the

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formal qualities of subaqueous lives and matters, especially but not exclusively as they are expressed by invertebrate animals. As they unshape and reshape drowned bodies, these creatures also lay bare some compelling weaknesses in our conventions for apprehension and representation, weaknesses that an encrusted theory may help ameliorate. The invertebrata, which include barnacles, sponges, corals, hydrozoa, and innumerable other oceanic as well as terrestrial life-forms, comprise a majority of our planet’s animal species (Phillips 2019: xii). Their sheer being is so colossal as to boggle the mind: in an important paper published late last century, the ecologist Stephen R. Kellert cited reports that there existed on average one thousand kilograms of earthworm and arthropod “biomass” per hectare of land in the United States, more than twenty-five times that of humans and “wild terrestrial vertebrates” combined (1993: 846). In the Southern Ocean alone, the population of krill, a marine crustacean essential to the diets of fish, birds, whales, and others, has been estimated at two quadrillion (McCann 2018: 186). Two thousand billion is a number so ludicrously high as to be basically incomprehensible, but its vastness helps indicate the starkly and ironically inverted relationship between the actual presence of invertebrates and the extent to which we tend to be aware of, let alone feel for, them. Apparently insuperable “morphological and behavioral differences,” write the literary scholar Elizabeth Leane and the marine ecologist Steve Nicol, contribute to “a sense of alienation” separating humans from invertebrates, a sense that may be nowhere more divisive than at sea (2011: 137). These oceanic creatures, we might say, are remote from us in terms not only of element but of “phylogenetic relatedness,” as though an instinct for cross-species kinship was substantially a question of formal similarity, and of formal unlikeness (Giggs 2020: 152). Invertebrates’ abundance has not shielded them from the impacts of planet Earth’s unraveling “sixth mass extinction,” which is reported to be resulting in “huge losses” of spineless species (Ceballos et al. 2020: 13597). This should drive us to ponder whether obstacles to, and failures of, humaninvertebrate empathy may be implicated in consigning these creatures to the category of “unloved others,” and so exacerbating their already parlous predicament (Rose and van Dooren 2011: 1). By encouraging a sensitivity for, and a language of, the encrusted and encrusting, this book attempts a modest contribution to the work of resisting “vertebrate bias,” bringing

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invertebrate animals to mind, and animating their presences within the environments we observe, learn with, and inhabit (Moore and Wilkie 2019: 654). This is different from, for instance, proposing that we recognize or manufacture a sense of marine invertebrates as “charismatic” in the same way that a narrow set of culturally prized, frequently megafaunal, animals are (Sodikoff 2012: 11). Thinking through a collective, formal, and ongoing phenomenon like encrustation is less a matter of selecting individual species for special consideration than reckoning the habits of lives and materials that flamboyantly display their interconnectedness with others. The encrusting ocean may be, in this way, emblematic of what Karen Barad calls the world’s “intra-active becoming,” its being constituted through relationships whose partners are always already internally as well as externally intertwisted (2014: 231). As Alonso’s body and Sloane’s collections imply, the alluring strangeness of encrusted somethings has long derived, to a meaningful extent, from their having been co-created with spineless critters. It is of course anachronistic, in some important ways, to think about Ariel’s pearls and oysters in terms of marine invertebrates, because this language was not available to Sloane and his contemporaries, let  alone to Shakespeare. Having said that, I think it is possible—and important—to characterize the status of oceanic invertebrata in the past several hundred years of Western culture in terms of significant continuities as well as discontinuities. In other words, I want to argue that we can acknowledge the past couple of centuries’ many and remarkable advances in marine-scientific knowledge of these creatures while also contemplating some of their longer-lingering provocations. Some of those provocations do touch upon natural history and science: if marine invertebrates were exceptionally problematic subjects for early attempts at establishing definitive taxonomic schema for comprehending nature, it is also true that they have never altogether stopped being refractory participants in marinal documentation and categorization. Yet more relevant for our purposes, however, are enduring understandings of these animals (and their fellow travelers) as formally distinctive—as living through literal structures, and structural relations, that may disrupt boundaries between artifact and ecofact, and that may even challenge some of our more cherished, and perhaps terracentric, ideas of nature and of life.

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Marine invertebrates’ problematic relationship with classification is expressed most pithily by a word that used to designate many of them. “Zoophytes” is a term, still current as recently as the late nineteenth century, for those supposed “plant-animals,” such as coral, poriferans, anemones, and jellyfish, that have seemed to embody the boundary zone between natural kingdoms (Gibson 2015: 44; Syperek 2014: 240). An idea of their essential in-betweenness had been promulgated influentially by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, whose Systema Naturae (1735) sought to organize every organism within a single framework and who referred to marine sponges and their ilk as “intermediate beings partaking of a twofold nature” (quoted in Hamilton-Paterson 1992: 94). As Delbourgo explains, coral generated a genuine “taxonomic dilemma” by seeming to refuse to obviously declare whether it was animal, vegetable, or mineral (2011: 157). A “piece of debateable land” was the Victorian naturalist George Johnston’s phrase for the ontological territory inhabited by the subjects of his A History of the British Zoophytes (1838) and its sequel, A History of British Sponges and Lithophytes (1842). On Johnston’s view, this uncertainty had proved an incitement to neglect, not curiosity: he speculated that “no other naturalist was likely to devote his time” to the zoophytes, “a comparatively limited and isolated class of organized beings, obscure in character, and possessed of less interest than attaches to almost every other.” Only an “eccentric borderer” would “find his pleasure in cultivating an intimacy” with the “rude tenantry” of so unstable a domain as this (Johnston 1842: v). In the twenty-first century, a sense of invertebrate liminality has not entirely abated: in the words of the contemporary marine ecologist Graham Edgar, sponges occupy an “intermediate” position in the natural order, because as animals lacking “true tissue and organs” they properly lie somewhere “between other invertebrate groups and the protozoans” (2019: 77). Defined in terms of what they are not, do not have, or have not developed, marine invertebrates have frequently been made a byword for simplicity and ancientness, and therefore for an extreme form of unhumanness. For René Descartes, who has been described as the “founding father of modern philosophy” (Blackburn 2016), it was ludicrous to posit that animals “thought as we [humans] do,” because to do so would be to suggest that “they would have an immortal soul as we do.” And “to believe” such a thing “of some animals” would entail in turn “believing it of all”: an intractable problem, for

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Descartes, because “many of them—e.g., oysters, sponges—are too imperfect for this to be credible” (1646: 191). Such seeming imperfection meant that these lives might be accorded lowly positions in the hierarchy of nature; the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once paraphrased the chain of being as extending “from the sponge up to Hercules” (1836: 51). But it bears reemphasizing, too, that invertebrates’ apparent oddnesses have also always been figured, by some, as forms of charisma. From the story of the origin of coral, in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to contemporary studies of sponges reconstituting themselves, as if magically, after being “strained through sieves” (Angel 2007b), the unique bodily and material affordances of these organisms have startled and inspired their observers and imaginers. Moreover, for numerous modern environmental theorists, the very distance that seems to yawn between humans and our spineless relations is exactly what makes the latter such useful companions for rethinking embodiment, sensation, and relation (Hayward 2012). The ocean, wrote the Irish-born zoologist John Ellis, “wherever it is possible to observe, abounds so much with Animal Life, that no inanimate Body can long remain unoccupied by some Species” (1755: 102). Ellis’s eighteenth-century researches strongly supported the position that zoophytes were in fact animals (Hamilton-Paterson 1992: 94), putting him in sympathy with the French naturalist Jean-André Peyssonnel, whose Mediterranean investigations had revealed that coral was the work not of flowering plants but of “insects” (Watson 1751–2: 448). Moreover, Ellis’s image of the abundant sea posited the occupation of the inanimate as the primary mode of zoophytic life. Peyssonnel had similarly discovered, in 1721, that because corals do not behave like conventional terrestrial flora, they flourish upon, and actually incorporate, diverse materials. So within coral branches one finds such bodies as rocks, shells, and even bits of broken bottles and pots (Peyssonnel: ff. 49–50). What emerges from even these relatively early works of what we would now call marine science is a vision of the sea floor as an animateinanimate jumble, where invertebrate animals envelop whatever body enters their element. Those bodies include a “stony” sea-ground (Watson 1751–2: 460) as well as a somewhat generic field of artifactual matter, which in Ellis’s telling cannot help but become blanketed once it has become submerged (Figure 10).

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Figure 10  Anonymous, shards of porcelain and red-baked earthenware with crusts from the seabed from V.O.C. ship the “Witte Leeuw,” before 1613. Earthenware, porcelain, and coral. Gift of R. Sténuit, Brussels. Rijksmuseum. Public domain.

Later inquiries cultivated a sense for the complexity of this naturalcasual relationship between spineless organisms and the things they occupy. Johnston would write that his subjects’ forms are “very irregular and variable” and are contingent, “in a great measure, on the peculiarities of their site, to which they easily accommodate themselves.” “Accommodate” comes from the Latin accommodāre, signifying not only to adapt to but to attach to: Johnston figures invertebrate growth as a process of vigorous affixation. In the course of their development, he explains, zoophytes “will incrust” whatever matter they occupy with what reads like a kind of solicitude, “following every protuberance and sinuosity” (Johnston 1842: 10). This careful—I am even tempted to say caring, in the sense of having an attachment for—attention to, and imitation of, “substrates” and their “local conditions” remains a central aspect of scientific understanding of marine invertebrate “form” (Campbell 2005). Such forms are often imbued with morphological unruliness. Some sponges, for example, are “free-standing” with a “definite shape,” some are encrusters, and some “occur in both encrusting and erect forms.” To make matters yet more compelling, invertebrate accommodation sometimes entails not only coming to inhabit

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a place but being materially inhabited by that place: some seabed creatures “incorporate sand and other external matter” into their own bodies, including structural elements of other animal species (Edgar 2019: 77). Through their manners of occupying, accommodating themselves to, incorporating, and otherwise growing with submerged things, marine invertebrates establish formal relations that are sometimes better described in terms of being “glued to the surface” of what they encrust than of achieving what we might think of as soily rootedness (Ehrlich et al. 2013: 2). This matters, because it indicates that some ways of living at depth are paradoxically shallow, and so these ways may appear to lack the sorts of “rooted ecological virtue” that environmental poetics and aesthetics have so frequently celebrated (Garrard 2009: 48). Encrusters, as the remaining sections of this book will continue to show, are like chorographers, iteratively interpreting and representing the substrates they inhabit through what Barad might call their discursive practices. At the same time, these animals and the diverse faunal, algal, bacterial, and mineral entities they live alongside trouble some terracentric views of what it means to be a situated organism, because the nature of their situation is apparently—or actually—superficial. This trouble has been met at times by a spirit of description and imagination that registers no contradiction in recognizing an abundance of marine life and comprehending that life as little more than incidental to the surfaces—Athenian marbles, perhaps— where it appears. As the next section of this chapter describes at greater length, an instinct for devaluing encrusting inhabitation may derive in part from a long-standing suspicion of the ornamental and decorative in Western culture. An enhanced sensitivity for invertebrate form may, it is to be hoped, prompt us to second-guess this suspicion, and to ponder the substance of the held-fast, and the seemingly rootless. As Cousteau and company hauled the Mahdia marbles up through the water column and into the relative radiance of shallow water, “colour grew on the crust.” Once “at the surface,” the blanketed artifacts “swung into the air ablaze with life.” The “many-coloured” dazzle of the marbles’ living “coat” soon “faded,” however, as its “flora and fauna” lay on deck, exposed to an element not their own. “We scraped, scrubbed, and hosed the snowy volutes,” Cousteau recalled, “and bared them to their first sun since ancient Athens” (1953: 77). Rescued from the deep, and from the aesthetic and identificatory

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blurrings enacted by ocean lives, the marbles are perceived to have been restored not just visually but temporally and chronologically: they can now signify what the V&A calls “historical significance” and “useful information” in a more or less straightforward fashion. But Cousteau’s account of the episode, while essentially triumphant, is clearly tinged—literally tinged—by a passing encounter with an extraordinary spectacle that seems the diametrical opposite of the “vague” or the vaguely “bluish.” To have encountered this exhibition at depth, where human capacities for perceiving color become radically hampered and everything begins to look greeny-blue (Merchant 2011: 223), would have required a different sort of imagination than the one that conjured up a picture of the ship. It would have necessitated an imaginary, that is, attuned to what Johnston called the “luxuriant growth” of lives that frequently deform and reform their habitations so far as to “render the original shape of the thing they grow upon irrecognizable” (Johnston 1842: 10–11). Encrusted thought asks what other recognitions, relations, histories, and pleasures may be luxuriantly growing atop and among marble and other surfaces and the organisms that occupy them, and are occupied by them in turn.

The Ornamental Ocean In their frequently declining to express formal regularity, invertebrate critters can be not only resistant objects of knowledge but difficult aesthetic objects, too. This would seem particularly true of what the literary scholar and animal ethicist Josephine Donovan calls a “Kantian mode” in apperception, which anticipates that things will exhibit themselves coherently for the circumspection of a disinterested, universalizing gaze (2016: 3). The case becomes only more vexed when one acknowledges the fact that to speak of a living, reef-building coral, for instance, is always to refer not only to polyps but to the zooxanthellae algae that reside with them, as well as to an even wider “array” of fellowtraveling “microbial symbionts,” notably “bacteria and viruses.” The technical term for such an “assemblage” is, as the legal scholar Irus Braverman explains, a “holobiont” (2018: 7). A holobiontic view is one that recognizes the things it notices as signs of the limited horizon of human observation, beyond which

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lie sublimely complex, expansive, and never-entirely-knowable multispecies relationships. Too often, however—and, I would argue, particularly among immersed situations—the presence of morphological ambiguity and holobiontic uncertainty has been expressed negatively, through language and imagery that would rather misrepresent complexity as indefiniteness than reckon their own incapacities. This is not the only seeming eccentricity that alternately stymies and inspires us toward a more rigorously encrusted aesthetics. As the previous section began to intimate, from the early modern period to the present, marine invertebrate life has been troped as that which superficially encrusts, decorates, or adorns underwater stuff. When this trope operates amidst, for instance, the curatorial language pertaining to the V&A’s sea sculptures, it produces and reproduces the idea that the identity, history, and epistemological content of those objects lie underneath, or past, their encrustations. When it appears in accounts of rescuing classical artifacts from the Mediterranean floor and from the organisms that had temporarily misrepresented them, it implies that encrusting growths are not only superfluous but potentially pernicious in their tendencies to obscure and derange. And when marine flora and fauna are cleaned, like so much graffiti, from the surfaces of Cousteau’s marbles, their removal can be seen to effect the sudden stripping-away of intervening times. What these examples share is a sense that in a manner more pronounced than—or simply different from—terrestrial ruins, a submerged something can be repaired into a something else—that the “breakdown of meaning” that ruination effects is redeemable, in an act of quasi-miraculous revelation, when the lives and matters that take place upon the seabed can be scraped away, actually, analytically, or imaginatively (Hell and Schönle 2009: 6). The pleasure, here, consists not in contemplating “incrusted” matter as picturesquely evoking the hands of history and nature but in excising it, and in fully recuperating such valuables as the ocean has sequestered and shielded from view (Gilpin 1804: 62). A Western history of associating subaqueous aesthetics with decorative practice extends at least as far back as the early modern period, when aristocrats eager to demonstrate their cultivation and learning had grottos built and decorated with astonishing numbers of shells, in order to produce an “underwater effect” (Olalquiaga 2002: 133; Rodríguez Rincón 2019).

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In the seventeenth century, grottos’ shelly décor was often augmented by “waterworks,” “sea-green Weed,” and other fragments, or figments, of “the richest treasure of the sea” (Aubin 1934: 411). In the eighteenth century, the English poet and scholar Alexander Pope famously and controversially designed an underground grotto for his villa at Twickenham, west of London along the Thames. Above a pebbled floor, the walls of the rococo chamber were “finished with Shells interspersed with Pieces of Looking-glass in angular Forms,” orchestrated to achieve optical effects that were inextricable from “the Aquatic Idea of the whole Place” (quoted in Willson 1998: 37). For Celeste Olalquiaga, this lineage extends yet further forward in time, to take in the “miniature underwater scapes” contained by the aquariums that brought submarine scenes into an ever-growing number of bourgeois homes over the course of the nineteenth century (2002: 131). Still more recently, the enduring legacy of subaqueous, or pseudo-subaqueous, adornment and the ways of looking it encouraged were expressed by the US marine geologist Francis P. Shepard, who in a 1959 book described coral reefs in terms of “grottoes and narrow passageways, where myriads of brilliantly colored fish form a neverending parade of beauty” (1959: 185). This genealogy intersects, in potent and problematic albeit rarely considered ways, with another tradition in Western aesthetics and epistemology that adopts a distinctly negative view of ornament and the ornamental. Since the first-century Roman architect Vitruvius’s De architectura (On Architecture) was rediscovered by Renaissance scholars and made a keystone of European architectural theory, a weighty strain of thought and practice has suspected adornment of irrationality, illogic, untruth, and even moral decadence. This view’s more influential modern proponents have included Adolf Loos, whose essay “Ornament and Crime” (1913), explains Vittoria di Palma, affiliated the decorative with a host of apparently undesirable energies, among them “the primitive, the infantile, the tattooed, the degenerate, the frivolous and the  feminine” (2016: 21–2). Criticisms of this kind cropped up in the vicinity of the quasi-marinal spectacles discussed in the previous paragraph, not least that of Pope, who was criticized by the prominent eighteenth-century critic Samuel Johnson for having “extracted an ornament from an inconvenience” and “produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage” (quoted in Willson 34). This sense, of the decorative as the

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sober and sensible’s opposite term, acquires an important and multifaceted ideological cast when it confirms the ornamental as subordinate to high art and architecture, and when it locates a propensity for ornament in the feminine and the effeminate (Fanning 2005: 650; Sheriff 2005: 83). A lowkey but meaningful fear operates, here, that that which decorates the exterior surface of a thing might overtake the internal—which is ostensibly to say the essential—meaning of the thing, and so demote “the primary function of an object to a secondary position,” with all the attendant confusions that such a shift might entail (Olalquiaga 2002: 40). By arranging so heterogeneous a field of histories, disciplines, and ideas, no single one of which is monolithic, I am covering a great deal of ground at a breakneck pace, and may appear to be asking my reader to accept the relations I am drawing as somehow certain or necessary. But it is my intention not to naturalize the notion of the ornamental ocean, or to propose that it has been everywhere and at every time in evidence, but to place the idea of the decorated and decorative sea in a broader, if definitely diffuse, context. Still more important, perhaps, is the broader question of whether and how we understand a thing as an assemblage of parts if some of those parts can be, in di Palma’s words, “scraped off.” This is the ornamental as that which is “applied and supplementary,” and not “integral to the object at hand” (di Palma 2016: 22). It is adornment as, in Immanuel Kant’s words, “only an adjunct, and not an intrinsic constituent in the complete representation of the object” (2000: 38). And it is in this spirit, I would like to say, that the hybrid materialities of submerged stuff are so frequently—too frequently— interpreted. Oceanic matter, mobilities, and lives are implicitly treated in these instances as that which can be, or in certain cases must be, scraped off, because they have settled upon substances and places in a manner that can be construed as a form of invasive contamination (Clark 2015: 44). Aesthetically, ontologically, and epistemologically, the actually or potentially scraped-off is that which appeals, as Kant had it, “only by means of its form” (2000: 38), and which might be removed without injuring the identity or integrity of the actual “object” within. Ornament and its close kin, like adornment, embellishment, and decoration, are forms and concepts that this book’s remaining chapters will explore at length in their close examinations of what I am calling the ocean’s diverse

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habits of encrustation. For now, what I hope I am drawing our attention toward are the ways that processes and prospects of scraping-off entail consequences that are significantly physical but more than that, too. Of the hybrid forms that make up an encrusted natural history, Delbourgo referred to their literally fusing plural histories within a single body. To acknowledge such junctures is to accord other-than-human temporalities and narratives a modicum of value that a scraping will not countenance, but that we had better try to come to terms with if we are ever to comprehend the innumerable drowned somethings that lie upon this planet’s ocean floors, and that we will never whittle down to recognizable shape and size. The “perspective of time” was the critic William Hazlitt’s admiring epithet for what a ruined thing makes present (1824: 55). An encrusted something challenges us, with special if not necessarily unique force, to admit the perspectives of numerous times, many of them inhuman and not all of them scrutable. To propose that writers, historians, salvors, archeologists, or others ought never to attempt to isolate one such temporal point of view, through an imaginary or actual scrapingaway, would be to romanticize ruination, and to burlesque the earnest and crucial efforts of those who labor to rescue obscured memories and meanings. What I mean to do, instead, is to help facilitate other modes of interpretation, ones intended more to supplement extant methods than to replace them. An encrusted hermeneutics which admits the possibility of the ornament’s accession to an equal, or even primary, relationship with what it blankets may sometimes serve the conjoined identities and stories of submersed matter with salutary complexity. The gist of this section has been that when marine phenomena are troped as ornamental, their being so troped tends to entail some kind of problem. But at least as significant as the views I have been sketching so far are those that have expounded the descriptive, formal, and imaginative potentialities of an ornamental undersea. Across poetics, aesthetics, and natural history, it is possible to track the indulgence of a “decorative topos” among literary and visual cultures of the submarine (Quigley 2019b: 29). That topos may suggest an alternative ontology for the natural, one predicated on adornment and fruitful of a genuinely productive mode for conceiving the submarine, and perhaps even for reconceiving nature. Here, for instance, is a subaqueous

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sequence from the poet, physician, and natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791): NYMPHS! you adorn, in glossy volumes roll’d, The gaudy conch with azure, green, and gold. You round Echinus [a sea-urchin] ray his arrowy mail, Give the keel’d Nautilus [cephalopod] his oar and sail; Firm to his rock with silver cords suspend The anchor’d Pinna [fan mussel], and his Cancer-friend [crab.] (Darwin 1791: 120–1)

And immediately thereafter: YOU chase the warrior Shark, and cumberous Whale, And guard the Mermaid in her briny vale; Feed the live petals of her insect-flowers, Her shell-wrack gardens, and her sea-fan bowers; With ores and gems adorn her coral cell, And drop a pearl in every gaping shell. (Darwin 1791: 121–2)

What intrigues about Darwin’s sea-urchin, fan mussel, crab, coral, and the rest is their reckoning the undersea as in a sense all surface, all—to anachronistically apply a twentieth-century biological term—epifaunal, a word which denotes, per the Oxford English Dictionary, “the animal life of a region that lives on the surface of a marine deposit.” This is liveliness as that which subsists through what Alphonso Lingis called surface effects, and which prompts us to interpret a poetics of the surficial as something rather more than frivolous. That said, cast against some influential narratives of marine cultural history and oceanic modernity, Darwin’s verse may look like an amusing and obsolete curiosity, a late example of poetic and scientific knowledges in productive relation. You will recall that as such stories go, with the advance of technological modernity, Romantic and other poetics get recognized as the purveyors of fantasy that they are, and scientific investigation of the undersea takes its proper place as arbiter of the subaquatic real. As I mentioned earlier, such an account has much to contribute, but it does not much help us understand

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how languages, and indeed practices, of adornment, embellishment, and ornamentation have continued to be of pervasive use in representations of underwater realms, realms that, as we are constantly being reminded, are for the far larger part still unmapped, unilluminated, and unenlightened (Hylton 2020). Take Carson’s “Undersea,” originally written for a US Bureau of Fisheries report and eventually published in The Atlantic in 1937: Sponges of the simpler kinds encrust the rocks …. Shell-less cousins of the snail, the naked sea slugs are spots of brilliant rose and bronze, spreading arborescent gills to the waters, while the tube worms, architects of the tide pools, fashion their conical dwellings of sand grains, cemented one against another in glistening mosaic. (Carson 1937: 322)

What is significant about the Darwin-Carson comparison is that these descriptions are separated in time, as historians of science would have it, by truly paradigmatic shifts in epistemology. In other words, thanks to a boom in European scientific investigations of oceans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Carson is working with a radically different, and arguably far, far more sophisticated understanding of seas and sea-lives than was Darwin. But the trope of ornamental invertebrate life persists, and as a vehicle for more than “mere” poetics or aesthetics. Accounting properly for the ornamental motif would require looking well past literary and natural-historical texts to the visual, and above all the plastic, arts, such as ceramics and porcelain-work—to sea sculptures, maybe, as well as to actual underwater museums. The artist Jason deCaires Taylor fashions the latter at and with depth, and his own description of a piece he calls The UnStill Life (2007–present) (Figure  11) is exceptionally pertinent: Following five years on the seabed, the Un-Still Life [sic] has become encrusted in marine life. The table is decorated in a fuzzy layer of turf algae, layers of pink encrusting sponges, and brown coral colonies. Patches of bright red encrusting sponge have grown on the jug and fruit bowl. A sea urchin ambles along, looking like a spiny piece of fruit. A finger of sponge pokes up from the fruit bowl, together with a colony of fire coral and a feather duster worm. (deCaires Taylor 2014: 68–9)

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Figure 11  Jason deCaires Taylor, The Unstill Life, Grenada Collection 2007, Depth 8m, Molinere, Grenada. © Jason deCaires Taylor. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2022. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor.

This is a scene that does not rely for its identity or for its aesthetic, formal, or agentic coherence upon the imaginative abstraction, let  alone the literal scraping-away, of encrustations, patches, or fuzzy layers. What imaginings it does host are certainly human, but just as certainly algal, spongy, corallian, and so on. Its  un-stillness entices not only on account of the variegation and unpredictability it entails, but for the ways it records and obscures past adornments, and presages future decoration. It is both artifact and ecofact; the hierarchy of substrate and surface element has been thrown into elegant disorder. What are the consequences for the idea of nature if the ocean is apprehended as prioritizing the ornamental —prioritizing, that is, elements that the neoclassical theorist Robert Morris influentially disparaged as “superfluity” and “garnish” (quoted in Adamson 2011: 153)? What would it mean to understand ornamental behavior as not incidental to, but constitutive of, a place, a scene, a subject—an ecology, an environment? Cumulatively, the disparate—and not unusually conflictual—practices in subaqueous representation this section has surveyed may help us understand both how the

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sign of nature has perhaps never been adequate to the sea, and how a renewed attunement to the ornamental ocean may perform a useful function in what I take to be our collective aspiration, these days, to establish and encourage plural forms of oceanic attention and oceanic care. The remaining chapters of this book are exercises in such a task.

2

First Habit: Fouling Wreck-Fishing and Undersea Value It is a widely acknowledged, albeit rather superficially considered, fact that one of the undersea’s primary meanings in Western culture has been as the site of lost—and potentially retrievable—treasure. In William Shakespeare’s tragedy Richard III (1592–3), George, Duke of Clarence imagines being pulled into the sea by his traitorous younger brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester. So musing, Clarence conjures a gothic scene of sea-floor finery: O Lord! methought what pain it was to drown! What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears! What ugly sights of death within mine eyes! Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks; A thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon; Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels, All scatter’d in the bottom of the sea: Some lay in dead men’s skulls; and in those holes Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept, As ’twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems, That woo’d the slimy bottom of the deep, And mock’d the dead bones that lay scatter’d by. (Shakespeare 1882: 61)

Clarence’s reverie figures the submarine as a horrifically topsy-turvy spot where ships cannot sail, “men” are made meat, and jewels accrue a kind of malevolent animacy. To be submerged, here, is to access a realm notable above all for being fantastic, otherworldly, and terrible. Despite being antiquated,

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this is a kind of vision that has never vanished altogether, however much its legitimacy has been implicitly or explicitly called into question. Witness, for instance, The Pearlers, a short film from 1949 depicting practices of diving for pearl shell off the coast of Broome, Western Australia. “When the face glass goes in,” intones that documentary’s narrator, the diver prepares to “enter a grotesque and inhuman world” (Robinson 1949). Witness, for that matter, enduring popular fascinations with shark accidents and the prospect of human bodies scattered gorily by the sea and its residents (Gibbs 2018: 206). (Natural history may have neutralized some of the ocean’s more nefarious connotations, but it also introduced some others. Of the “Sea Fig,” the zoologist John Ellis noted that it “smells very disagreeably when it is opened” to reveal “a great Number of little Bags of a yellowish Colour, full of a clear viscid Liquor.” As for the alcyonarian known colloquially as dead men’s fingers, Ellis reports that the “whole substance smelt cadaverous” (1755: 83–4).) Richard III’s seabed is the image of a fictional mind beset by mortal fear, and to interpret it as an authoritative document of either pre- or protomodern attitudes toward the sea would be to trivialize its artfulness. Still, what it does help us recognize, at a significant historical remove but also at certain discomfiting proximities, is the perversely tantalizing appeal of the coincidence, at depth, of sensory pain, horrifying spectacle, and awesome splendor. The last of these qualities was not necessarily less a product of—or conducive to— fancy than the others, but its long pedigree is also thoroughly entangled with real attempts to draw real riches from below the surface of the ocean. As Molly Warsh has indicated in her history of early modern imperial pearling projects off the coast of Venezuela, submarine valuables provoked a host of cultural connotations for the “European imagination,” connotations that interacted with actual immersive enterprises in complicated, significant ways. At least as early as the first century CE, when the Roman writer Pliny the Elder composed his pivotal Natural History, oceanic treasures and the measures undertaken to procure them inspired a paradoxical mix of fascination and revulsion. And as access to and control over marinal riches came to fascinate imperial actors in the so-called Spanish New World and elsewhere, the undersea’s ambivalent meanings extended to the persons—frequently Indigenous and African— whose free and unfree labors were instrumental to the cultivation of subsea value (Warsh 2018: 8, 14, 32).

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For the British and British-imperial contexts that lie about the center of this book’s research, the late 1600s and early 1700s hosted a temporary but remarkable craze for such “projects” as salvage expeditions, or what some termed “wreck-fishing” (Hellawell 2020: 78). As a small but important body of research has shown, these were enterprises where scientific and technological discovery, the ambitions of speculative finance, and “imperial rivalries” converged, consequentially and inextricably (Delbourgo 2011: 147). Early modern undersea-going, in other words, was never only scientific, or strictly commercial, or purely imperial: the material, legal, and imaginative configuration of subsea space entailed a motley array of persons, practices, and interests. Discussing a vogue for designing and patenting novel diving engines in the decades surrounding the turn of the eighteenth century, Philippa Hellawell makes the important point that clear distinctions between the “impartial pursuit of natural knowledge” and the “self-interested quest for money”—distinctions that were supposed to be fundamental to the Scientific Revolution—were always unusually blurry underwater (2020: 79). And as I have argued in a study of ocean-oriented pastoral poetry from the period, a sense for the submarine as a multifaceted frontier subtends not only schemes for technical developments in wreck-fishing but also structures underlying certain influential forms of sea-writing and sea-imagining (Quigley 2019a: 118). Prominent among histories of early modern salvage is a colonial Bostonian named William Phips (or Phipps), whose eccentric and occasionally scandalous career culminated in his achievement in 1692 of the governorship of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. In the 1680s, thanks in large part to connections gained through his marriage to a woman named Mary Hull (née Spencer), Phips raised funds for at least three salvage expeditions to the West Indies. In 1687, he embarked on a wreck-fishing venture to the supposed ruins of the Nuestra Señora de la Concepcíon, a Spanish treasure galleon that in 1641 had departed the Mexican port of Veracruz laden with “silver, gold and emeralds” intended for transport to Europe (Earle 1979: 18). The ship is understood to have been in poor shape to begin with, and after limping through the Gulf of Mexico it ran upon a coral reef north of Hispaniola and sank. Forty-six years thereafter, Phips sailed to the site with the financial backing of the Duke of Albemarle, who around that time briefly occupied the governorship of Jamaica. That island had been seized by the English in the 1650s, just a few years after

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Phips was born. The arrangement with Albemarle was significant, not least of all, for the fact that it followed Phips’s unsuccessfully seeking the necessary resources from the British crown. By effectively galvanizing a “subscription” of private monies, the Concepcíon project signaled wreck-fishing’s potential as an object of extra-public investment (Beckmann 1817: 187). Divers are of course central characters in salvage histories, but their persons, labors, and lives are poorly served by records that tend to focus primarily, if not exclusively, on wreck-fishing’s organizers and funders, not on its swimmers. As Warsh’s and others’ researches have helped demonstrate, divers’ skills and testimonies were central to imperial as well as local marine sciences, economies, and power structures from the early modern period on. In the New World and elsewhere, submarine labor was not only the object of particular exploitations but the source of particular agencies (Dawson 2006: 1329). As for Phips, Albemarle, and the crews they employed to dive on the Concepcíon, the identities of the undersea-goers are uncertain. Historians have speculated that they may have been “East-Indian pearl divers” or that they might instead have “come from Bermuda or Port Royal,” in Jamaica. We do know two of their names, which are Jonas Abimleck and John Pasqua (or Sasqua) (Delbourgo 2011: 164). Their work conduced, in any case, to the project’s phenomenal success: while accounts of the salvors’ haul vary somewhat, the consensus view is that they weighed up more than two hundred thousand, and perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand, pounds’ worth of riches (Hellawell 2020: 78). This phenomenal sum encouraged the craze for projects—for “projecting”—aforementioned, and motivated a more general sense that the submarine represented an inappropriately neglected realm of value-production that might, with the right support and the correct knowhow, yield further, spectacular gains. Drowned goods present an odd—and oddly compelling—formulation of value, because when things sink beneath the surface of the sea, they are frequently reckoned to have effectively ceased to exist. Shipwrecked, a quantum of riches that had been traversing an ocean’s surface has been not only halted but overwhelmed by an element that presents exceptional obstacles to detection. Beyond their occlusive impacts, ocean waters are also potent agents of corrosion, dissolution, and dispersion. When archeologists identify shipwreck sites, there is often nonetheless “very little left” of the vessels they

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record, thanks not only to the storms that sank them but to what the critic and oceanic humanist Charne Lavery calls the “daily ravages of the submarine environment” (2020: 271). In the mid-1990s, James Hamilton-Paterson went along on a bootless mission in search of an Imperial Japanese Navy submarine lost in 1944. “I feel sorry,” mused Hamilton-Paterson from a submersible at five thousand meters deep, “for those vanished men in their craft which might almost have dissolved completely away for all we’ve found of it” (1998: 213). Actually and imaginatively, underwater realms are capable of not only making precious things hard to see but apparently erasing them, and this capacity can render salvage-work an unusually, if not singularly, strange undertaking, open as it is to the possible—at times very likely—outcome that its result will be essentially negative, the empirical demonstration of a kind of vacuum where there had once been “men,” their “craft,” and whatever gold, pearls, stones, and so on might have previously accompanied them. For Daniel Defoe, the author most famously of the novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), even Phips’s spectacular success was a deeply unfortunate development for the ways it exacerbated the general climate of “projects” and “projecting” in late-seventeenth-century England. Composed in the middle of the Nine Years War with France, Defoe premised an account of his contemporary “Projecting Age” upon the sociohistorical idea that the War had occasioned economic disaster for the growing merchant class and so driven them to increasingly lunatic resorts. For Defoe, projects were something like what might nowadays be called pyramid schemes, mechanisms for amassing pecuniary resources on the strength of extraordinary and—importantly—unverifiable claims. Submarine regions were exceptionally suited to staging “Dishonest” endeavors, inimical as they were to observation and access. With An Essay upon Projects (1697), Defoe singled out projectors engaged in “Diving-Engines” and a range of other undertakings for elevating “the Fancies of Credulous People” and encouraging such “to part with their Money for Shares in a New-Nothing” (1697: 11–13). What made Phips’s haul exceptionally pernicious was that its “Success” blinded witnesses to the fact that it was basically a “Lottery,” a “hazard” run at such poor “odds” as should properly have shamed anyone “concern’d” therein. Had it failed, Defoe quipped, the Concepcíon voyage “woul’d have been as much ridicul’d as Don Quixot’s Adventure upon the Windmill”—as much ridiculed, that is, as the titular character from Miguel de Cervantes’s comic romance of

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1604/5, whose reason and imagination have been so far addled by chivalric notions as to impel him to do battle with windmills he mistakes for giants (Defoe 1697: 16). The Quixote reference drives Defoe’s point that Phips’s “Wreck-Voyage” drew from and reinforced an alarming overvaluation of fictional ideas. That apparently serious people would be enticed to “go Three thousand Miles to Angle in the open Sea for Pieces of Eight” is worse than absurd, because it expresses neglect of such actually beneficent undertakings as might conduce to the “Improvement of Manufactures or Lands, which tend to the immediate Benefit of the Publick, and Imploying of the Poor” (Defoe 1697: 15–16). About three centuries later, Hamilton-Paterson would muse similarly—if not quite so moralistically—that salvage inspired forms and degrees of “desperation” in even the “most ordinary treasure-hunters” that drove them to feats of “fantastical” narrative “inventiveness” befitting of “second-rate novelists” (1998: 182). On these views, the act of submersion in search of pieces of eight (or what have you) is the visible sign of a matrix of intricated—and quite possibly corrupting—narrative, emotional, economic, and even geopolitical phenomena. For Defoe, one of those phenomena is colonialism, which he apprehends as deeply entangled with the formation of the joint stock companies that mobilized speculative investment in overseas trade. “StockJobbing,” argues Defoe, is unimaginable without the incentives furnished by the “East-India, African, and Hudson’s-Bay Companies.” No more was projecting possible without the “Stock-Jobbing” that “nurs’d” it, and that it reinforced in turn, establishing a mutually reinforcing cycle which confirmed both as “Public Grievances” (Defoe 1697: 29–30). I have lingered with Defoe’s critique because it helps us recognize an early and—I would argue—enduring juncture between the idea that submarine regions are tantalizing frontiers and the idea that they are concerning zones of untruth. It also intersects, somewhat more obliquely, with the prejudice that performing labor in submarine (and otherwise hazardous) zones was basically ungentlemanly, even “savage,” because it seemed to represent an acute degree of “striving” after gain and because it was so unavoidably “physical” (von Mallinckrodt 2018: 312). One of the subtexts of An Essay upon Projects is that salvage projects are not polite undertakings because they are generally unwieldy, fantastic, and foreign. Tellingly, numerous among Defoe’s

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Figure 12  W. Hooper, Halley’s diving bell, in Rational recreations, 3rd ed., 1787. Open Artstor: Wellcome Collection. Creative Commons.

contemporaries sought to make undersea-going gentlemanly by minimizing the degree to which it involved actual immersion. For instance, in an essay entitled “The Art of Living under Water” (1716), the astronomer and physicist Edmond (or Edmund) Halley described a novel “Apparatus” he had designed to effectuate “the Skill of continuing under Water” (Figure 12). The “Diving Bell” Halley claims to have produced is a kind of submersible, the “whole Cavity” whereof is “kept entirely free from Water.” By the “Light” admitted through a “Glass Window,” Halley describes seeing “perfectly well to Write or Read” as well as “to fasten or lay hold on any thing under us, that was to be taken up.” Halley’s bell is notable for not incorporating wreck-fishing among its intended uses. What those do include are “Fishing for Pearl,” working on

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“the Foundations of Moles, Bridges, &c.,” scraping “Ships Bottoms when foul,” and so on (1716: 495, 498–9). An alternative ideal of submergence is coming to view, here, one that is illuminated, literate, and more straightforwardly economically productive—and, perhaps uncoincidentally, mostly dry. Bearing Jonas Abimleck and John Pasqua (or Sasqua), Defoe’s distaste for projecting, and touted advances in the technologization of submergence collectively in mind may give us a clue as to why histories of subsea labor have been mostly absent from the main stream of oceanic consciousness. The history of salvage does in fact furnish numberless opportunities to recognize the involvement of working people in wreck-fishing, European and otherwise. When the English battleship the Mary Rose sank off Portsmouth in 1545, the Venetian salvor Peter Paul Corsi was hired to recover what valuable military materials had been lost to the seabed. Corsi hired eight divers to do the job, at least one—and perhaps three—of whom were originally from West Africa, a place strongly associated, in the early modern period, with sophisticated swimming and free-diving (Kaufmann 2017: 38). For workers like these, labor conditions varied tremendously: by the time ordnance from the Mary Rose was being rescued from the English Channel, Spanish imperial pearl fisheries had established widespread practices of transatlantic slaving (Warsh 2018: 47). Meanwhile, expert Indigenous divers became objects of curiosity for natural philosophers like Halley, who opened “The Art of Living under Water” with a glancing reference to “a FloridaIndian” he had observed going underwater “at Bermudas” (1716: 493). The undersea’s multiple, and significantly fraught, legacies as the location of value cannot be understood without reckoning with the interlinked dynamics this section has barely begun to describe. How the seabed acts upon value is a subject the proceeding pages will attempt to explore.

Fouling the Wreck Thanks in large part to the scholars cited in the previous section, the importance of early modern salvage for understanding histories of labor, empire, and science is becoming increasingly clear. Somewhat less adequately understood are the manners whereby the ocean and its incalculable lives, materialities, and

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processes impinged—and continue to act—upon salvage and its imaginaries. As the “sea sculptures” we encountered earlier vividly indicate, the undersea and its denizens incorporate and leave their marks on wrecky matter in unpredictable, transformative, and sometimes indescribable ways. In such instances, we encounter what the geographers Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg have recently called oceans “in excess,” things that “carry” and have been transformed by the marine zones that previously held (or presently hold) them. Peters and Steinberg’s examples include “discarded trash,” “remnants of shipwrecks (or plane wrecks),” “rejected doors” enveloped by seaweed, barnacle-“encrusted” metals, and so forth. What they take pains to emphasize is that these things are not simply artifacts buoyed along by, or settling on the floor of, an inert element. They are in fact the material articulations of an entity whose “more-than-wet ontology” does not abide rigid distinctions drawn between the moist and the dry, the hard and the fluid, and so forth (Peters and Steinberg 2019: 302–3). When a salvor pursues or effects the “rescue” of a submersed something, then, they are engaging not an anthropic object residing in an undifferentiated void but material more or less remade by the ocean it has come to inhabit. In 1588, the Spanish King Philip the Second’s Gran Armada of one hundred and thirty ships sailed from Lisbon toward a famously ill-starred attack on Queen Elizabeth the First’s England. Having weathered difficult conditions and effective English assaults, Don Alonso Medina Sidonia’s fleet made it so far as the eastern reaches of the English Channel before suffering a decisive setback off Gravelines, in France. Incapable of leading his ships back whence they had come, Medina Sidonia led the retreat north up and around Scotland, into the North Atlantic, and down the west of Ireland. The Spaniards’ insufficiently detailed charts of Scottish and Irish islands and coastlines may have been a key driver of the disasters that subsequently ensued (Hadfield 2010: 136). All told, the Armada is estimated to have lost perhaps half its number. Spain’s maritime failure would for the English come to represent a sort of cautionary tale for ascendant imperial powers. It would be seen, moreover, to prove the absolute centrality of an effective navy to national and colonial aspirations (Orr 2001: 7). As for Elizabeth, her forces’ seeming (though still disputed) total victory went down as the single most “famous event” of an unusually storied reign (Hammer 2011: 435).

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The Armada meanwhile became a legitimate salvage object when, in 1665, a number of cannons were “retrieved” from a part of its wreckage. At the same time, a sense that projects for further exploring the Spanish ruins might be worthwhile gathered force from news of Phips’s profitable adventure. Various “societies” were established in due course in England for the purposes of raising funds and securing salvage rights (von Mallinckrodt 2018: 305–7). The doctor and scientist Hans Sloane, whose extraordinary collections of marinal specimens we encountered earlier, listed among his affairs at least two “aquatic curiosities” from the Armada. Each was a “piece of dish,” one ornamented by a “thin crust from the sea water” and the other conglomerated with “pebbles and sand,” the whole of the latter “cemented wt. a ducatoon in the middle” (Delbourgo 2011: 158). These odd treasures notwithstanding, the formation of “companies” and the granting of “exclusive privileges” to weigh up the Armada’s precious detritus were by no means guaranteed of success. The early historian of science John (or Johann) Beckmann noted in his multivolume A History of Inventions and Discoveries (1782–1805) that a seeming abundance of Armada wrecks in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides island group had provoked the “avarice of speculators” beginning in the late seventeenth century—but that said projectors were, for all their enthusiasm and the exceeding “depth” achieved by certain of their divers, frequently disappointed (Beckmann 1817: 186, 188). The Hebrides, comprised of over five hundred mostly uninhabited islands off Scotland’s west coast, were becoming a prominent spot in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century salvage geographies. Spanish detritus was, as Beckmann pointed out, an important driver of wreck-fishing endeavors in the region. That said, it bears pointing out that the Hebrides hosted many other than foreign ruins. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the remains of two English warships were discovered in the proximity of the Isle of Mull, part of the Inner Hebrides group. One, the Swan, had been part of a group of vessels conveyed to the islands in the 1650s, during the Cromwellian occupation of Scotland, in order to put down rebel activity there. A few decades later, a frigate called the Dartmouth would sink nearby in the course of anti-Jacobite action (Martin 2011: 63–5). The same waters that had received—the better word may be endured—the frequently catastrophic transit of part of Philip II’s fleet therefore hosted traces of rather more local political, religious, and

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economic conflicts. In his elegy “Lycidas” (1637), John Milton wondered whether a drowned friend’s “bones” might have been “hurld” so far as “beyond the stormy Hebrides” (2009: 79). Like that dispersed corpse, the fragments of English ships littered a growing part of the bottom of the Irish Sea and affiliated waters, through what we might interpret as a macabre but significant material affirmation of a submarine “commonwealth” (Lipking 1996: 207). Salvage projects constituted another practice of establishing marinal property, and even territory. In 1729, an accomplished English inventor named Jacob Rowe traveled to Mull to fish for a supposed Armada wreck—probably a merchantman called the San Juan de Sicilia—in Tobermory Bay (Kingshill 2010: 335). The site was “owned,” by virtue of its location, by John Campbell, Duke of Argyll, who in 1715 had famously headed the suppression of a Jacobite uprising in Scotland. Rowe and his collaborators made a contract with the duke for the exclusive right to salvage the wreck over a three-year period (Fardell and Phillips 2000: 12). Rowe was by this time the creator of a novel “machine for diving” as well as a proven salvor who had a track record of earning the financial support of an array of well-resourced persons (Woodcroft 1854: 1720). He had been an early and effective proponent of the “diving barrel” (as an alternative to the more common “diving bell”), a technology that was put to extensive use during the eighteenth century (Figure 13). In 1720, Rowe demonstrated the diving barrel’s utility during a project to salvage the Vansittart, a ship that had sailed for the British East India Company (EIC) and had been wrecked on the Isle of Maio (or Mayo), in the archipelago of Cape Verde, off the coast of West Africa. Since the mid-fifteenth century, Maio and the other Cape Verde Islands had been claimed and settled by the Portuguese, for whom they became key nodes in the transatlantic slave trade. The islands had also been made pivotal sites for attempts by European imperial powers to stewardship of and from maritime space. In the 1490s, Spanish and Portuguese negotiators used Cape Verde as a reference point for establishing their sovereigns’ “spheres of influence,” not least insofar as those spheres pertained to all the “non-Christian lands” that might have lain within them (Steinberg 1999: 255–7). As for the Vansittart, it and its cargo had been deemed sufficiently valuable by the EIC to merit an official salvage operation, but that plan was not brought to fruition. Rowe, backed by a group of “sponsors,” subsequently offered his services. While not a bonanza

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Figure 13  Jacob Rowe, diving barrel, c. 1720. One of a series of six illustrations showing the operation of an early diving “machine” or suit, from “A Demonstration of the Diving Engine” by Jacob Rowe, which is the first known treatise on diving in English. Rowe was a sea captain, inventor, engineer, author, and diver. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

on the order of Phips and the Concepcíon, Rowe’s wreck-fishing expedition was sufficiently successful that the EIC tried and failed to reassert ownership over the haul. The divers reportedly returned enough “silver” and “cash” to “fill 27 chests,” as well as significant numbers of “lead, guns and anchors.”

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The monetary value of the goods so rescued is estimated to have been around £17,000 (Fardell and Phillips 2000: 7–8). The salvage of the Vansittart inaugurated for Rowe a circuit of imperial and quasi-imperial salvage-work that remains remarkable, if not exceptional, for the oceanic trajectories it indicates. From the fragments of a British-imperial ship in Portuguese-imperial waters, Rowe soon traveled to plumb seabed ruins in (among other places) the “West Indies,” specifically the coast of Florida and the northwestern Bahamian district known as Bimini. The Bahamas, which had been colonized by English settlers in the middle of the previous century, are home originally to the Lucayan peoples, renowned divers whose skill had made them targets of Spanish agents engaged in the development of pearl fisheries in Caribbean waters (Warsh 2018: 38–9). Following his travels in the New World, a project in the Outer Hebrides rewarded Rowe and his affiliates with “Treasure” allegedly worth “about 14600 pound,” recuperated this time from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) vessel Adellar, stopped short on course for Java in the Indonesian archipelago (Fardell and Phillips 2000: 9–11). (This would prove a mixed success, as Rowe and his backers’ dealings were deemed questionable and the VOC laid successful claim to the treasure.) This itinerary is intended not to misrepresent Rowe’s career as heroically unfailing— its disappointments, as will be shortly discussed, were numerous—but rather to suggest its participation in a broader “empire of salvage” that scholars are only now beginning to extensively reckon (Hall 2019: 648). The seabed was and remains the location of imperial articulations and disarticulations, a space where the detritus of maritime power and trade becomes subject to highstakes depositions, reorganizations, and aspirations. After the Adellar affair, Rowe and his colleagues made their way to Tobermory Bay in search of the Armada wreckage. Despite managing to locate “a great Number of Casks & Chests” and other objects on the seabed, their work would prove bootless. The salvors spent years trying in vain to raise anything of value from the depths, frustrated not by a failure to find what they were looking for but by the potential riches’ being buried beyond reach or held captive by copious “encrustation.” Rowe did himself report discovering the casks and chests aforementioned but complained subsequently that “they being semented hard together we have Not been Able to take up a Specimen” (Fardell and Phillips 2000: 12). For the period that would become known, in hindsight, as the Enlightenment, the sea was “an obstacle to be overcome,”

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in Hanna Roman’s words, “in the search, through rational and philosophical methods, for what it covered and hid” (2019: 42). This is a kind of salvage spirit, and under the surface of Tobermory Bay it appeared to manifest itself in the revelation of Spanish casks and chests. However, working past obscuring waters to uncover hidden objects—and so redefine them as no longer lost, but found—was not enough to actually reclaim and reassimilate them. Another principle, that of “being semented hard together,” had asserted the existence of a different category of subsea artifact, one characterized by being locatable and even palpable and yet unattainable. If an Armada sinking brought a disappearance into being, its absence was always at least potentially correctable through submersed adventuring. Cemented stuff, on the other hand, is a sort of present privation, one that haunts the history of salvage with matter that is both apparent and gone. Under the surface of Tobermory Bay, Rowe’s oceanic cementations were effecting a disruptive and distinctively submarine form of our first habit, which is fouling. That word’s several overlapping meanings have included, in early modernity and since, the frustration of mobility. Recalling a voyage made in the South China Sea in 1685, the English buccaneer Ambrose Cowley recalled having failed to overtake “a Tartar Ship” that was “laden,” tantalizingly, “one half with Silver,” because the hoped-for prize “out-sailed us, she being clean and we as foul as we could be” (1699: 23). It is not clear exactly what circumstances Cowley was describing, but we can infer that his ship’s keel was encumbered by algal, invertebrate animal, or other growths which had rendered the vessel heavier and less streamlined, if not more substantially structurally damaged, and which the crew had not yet had the opportunity of “cleaning” away. Contending with befoulment has occupied mariners forever, but the problem became (and remains) particularly acute in the context of open ocean voyaging, where increases in a ship’s “skin friction” could add months to its voyage, necessitating unhoped-for stoppages for water, food, and other goods and diminishing the vessel’s economic utility (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution 1952: 125). These difficulties would not absent themselves with the passing of the age of sail: a 1978 analysis claimed that just two millimeters’ growth of a relatively benign fouler, “algal slime,” over forty percent of the subsurface regions of a “sixteen-knot tanker” would tend to slow the vessel by the temporal sum of eleven days (Jarvis 2007).

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At Tobermory, befoulment’s encumbering effects were visited not upon mobile vessels but upon settled matter, as well as upon the salvage cycle itself. The circulation of goods, interrupted by shipwreck, had been utterly arrested by an ocean floor that tended to leave things “semented hard together.” Early modern salvage, explains Delbourgo, was fundamentally involved with circulating—and recirculating—lost currency and other goods through acts of “de-objectification,” the “re-conversion of the trapped into the mobile” and the “curiously transfixed” into the “once-again exchangeable” (2011: 164). Rather than de-objectifying or re-converting what it found, Rowe’s project succeeded only in mobilizing a sense of its own frustration. Comprehending its difficulties in terms of fouling helps us recognize not only a likeness between surface and sea-bottom encumbrances but their wider implications, actually and imaginatively, for culture. “Some cleave to our Church,” inveighed the puritan preacher John Reading in 1641, “as Barnacles to the Ship-side, onely to foule and disadvantage us” (18). Reading’s simile suggests not just that marine fouling was for his auditors a widespread and well-known phenomenon but that it had become available as a figure of speech, or trope. Instead of dispersing the Spanish wreckage so completely as to make it vanish, the Tobermory encrustations had reasserted maritime ruins’ material presence but in a manner radically alienating. Having cleaved to the things Rowe had hoped to rescue, these vague foulers had transgressed the boundary between materially and morally offensive. So doing, they suggested— and still suggest—the existential as well as economic stakes of a ship-side slowed or a cask impossibly cemented. To begin contemplating the Tobermory foul in the spirit of an encrusted criticism, it is vital to think past Rowe’s language, which draws our attention only to that which the cementing might be made to release. The passivity of his description (“being semented hard together”) suppresses awareness of the oceanic processes that have worked on the wreckage, processes whose force articulates itself, nevertheless, in the would-be salvors’ disappointment. What sort of hermeneutic is adequate to the multispecies, more-than-animate encrustations that Rowe sees as casks and chests inconveniently cemented together, but that we might recognize otherwise? While it remains “perpetually lost,” as we have heard Hamilton-Paterson observe, a submerged thing stays “exclusive” and “heightened as the public myth.” Once “touched,” however, wreckage transforms “into something else: an ordinary ship, an ordinary

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battleship, which sank, which has a salvage value, which will attract looters” (1992: 146). The befoulments of Tobermory Bay suggest yet another possibility, that coming in touch with submerged things might generate extraordinary practical and ontological problems for the wreck-fisher. The Gran Armada remains had shifted their status from goods it might be possible to retrieve to things changed into the habitations and occupations of other-than-human principles of union. One way of describing all those casks and chests is as “lost,” temporarily or permanently. Another path might be to acknowledge them as having acquired novel meanings, and even novel forms of life.

The Fluid Sea, Fouled Particularly in the warmer “Regions” of the planet, wrote John Ellis in 1755, all “Ships Bottoms [sic]” become “covered,” when submersed, “with the Habitations of Thousands of Animals.” The specific difficulties occasioned for ships’ keels by such “Animals” notwithstanding, these were nonetheless not the only objects to suffer such overspreading. “Rocks, Stones, and every Thing lifeless,” Ellis continued, become generally occupied with animal habitations “instantly” (Figure 14). This extraordinary phenomenon even extended beyond the realm of the apparently lifeless to take in, for instance, “the Branches of living Vegetables that hang in the Water.” These, wrote Ellis, are “immediately loaded with the Spawn of different Animals, Shell-fish of various Kinds.” The loading and covering did not stop here, for “Shell-fish themselves, when they grow impotent and old, become the Basis of new Colonies of Animals, from whose Attacks they can no longer defend themselves.” There is a palimpsestic quality to these habitative protocols, which seem remarkably—and perhaps unnervingly—unending. Surfaces become habitations, which become the locations of “new Colonies” in turn. Ellis is almost poignant when describing the fates of encrusters becoming the encrusted as, “through Accident or Age, the Vigour of the Republic fails” and, like “every other lifeless Being in the Ocean,” they “become the Basis of some more powerful, fortunate Successors” (Ellis 1755: 102–3). Ellis’s understanding of the phenomena he observed is outdated, scientifically speaking. But his sense for encrustation’s eclecticism remains helpful for its

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Figure 14  A barnacle or goose-mussle encrusted in a rock. Etching. Wellcome Collection. Public domain.

insights into certain general characteristics of submarine materiality. We have seen that the loading of “Ships Bottoms” with their diverse adherents has long been, and still remains, a source of trouble for maritime movements. “Fouling” has endured, simultaneously, as a term for the successions Ellis observed when those “Shellfish” and other creatures “become the Basis” of other “Animals”—as, for instance, of dead coral structures observed to have been “invaded” by “epibenthic” species in the Florida Keys (Glynn 1996: 500). As the lively becomes the “lifeless,” it is frequently reimagined as an object for novel dwellings, and the course of this transition gives rise to unanticipated, and sometimes unwanted, meanings. This section is devoted to a very partial (but, it is hoped, productive) discussion of those meanings—of when and where they arrive, of what shapes and tenors they take, and of how they are promulgated, ignored, or otherwise managed. My point, in so doing, is to lend my work to broader efforts to reckon the ways that seas are other and more than liquid, a fact that so-called fouling—among other things—helps us recognize and comprehend.

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The instant invasions and complex successions that preoccupied Ellis have not stopped happening. “Any surface placed in the ocean,” writes the biologist Martin Angel, formerly of the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences and the Southampton Oceanography Centre, “soon gains a cover of bacteria, algae and seaweeds, and animals such as barnacles” (2007a). So begin complicated relationships between immersed and oceanic materialities, relationships that are pivotally contingent, in their moral as well as physical consequences, upon the natures and purposes of the things sunk. Not infrequently, the coverings gained are interpreted negatively and rendered through the language of befoulment. In some of the more famous of these instances, ships slow, energy consumption rises, and infrastructures like fish farms and oil platforms become more vulnerable than usual to the impacts of heavy waves. “Biofouling,” opens a recent article in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, “is a major problem and costly factor in marine finfish aquaculture worldwide,” due to increased “hydrodynamic load,” a reduction in “water flow,” heightened “structural stress,” diminished “cage buoyancy,” and so on (Bosch-Belmar et  al. 2019: 1). Attuned to befoulment, the things  and surfaces mentioned here—as well as countless others—are identifiable, and nameable, as so many “attachment points” offering themselves up for colonization by those entities called, with notable vagueness, “fouling communities” (Jarvis 2007). Fluidities contracted, buoyancies lessened: these are things become heavier, overburdened, even more rigid through contact with seas and their encrusting and other habits. If they are intriguingly counterintuitive, philosophically and poetically speaking, they can also be actually disastrous for the economic endeavors they impede. When it fouls, therefore, the ocean furnishes a submarine counternarrative to the consensus—and in many important respects fundamentally accurate—view that marine materialities and spatialities have been key contributors to the literal currents of economic modernity. “Maritime transportation,” observes Laleh Khalili, “is not simply an enabling adjunct of trade but is central to the very fabric of global capitalism.” By drawing our attention to the “marine ephemerality” of shipping routes, as well as to those routes’ edification through maps and corporate plans, Khalili makes an important contribution to a well-established historiography of oceanity’s essential part in the drama of global modernity (2020: 15, 22). “The conquest

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of the world ocean being coterminous with the rise of Western capitalism,” argued Christopher Connery nearly three decades ago, “it is natural that the ocean has long functioned as capital’s myth element” (1996: 289). Central, in turn, to these histories has been an explicit or implicit equation of seagoing with mobility, of salt waters with fluxibility. What might we learn by supplementing these invaluable interpretations with more and more careful accounts of the things oceans fix and encumber? By drawing our attention to the accretions of fouling organisms (and their own eventual successors), Ellis prefigures some of the alarming threats that such forms would come to pose for navigation. When their structures ascended (and still ascend) so very far as to come within reach of “Ships Bottoms,” colonizing organisms would effect and represent a sort of abyssal threat to voyaging, animals that might first wreck a vessel and then encrust it (Braverman 2018: 9; Elias 2019: 124). But literal shipwrecks are only some of the more spectacular instances of a broad range of disturbing oceanic arrestations, as though the intercession of stillness within a fluid environment were unusually well-suited to creating interludes of unanticipated hazard. Consider, for an early example, the macabre tale of the sailor Tharsys, relayed by the fourthcentury BCE “scholar gypsy” Leonidas of Tarentum, whose writings remain renowned for evoking littoral labor with exceptional care. In the course of this story, the ship Tharsys is crewing unfortunately “fouled her anchor” while traversing the Ionian Sea, rendering the vessel immobile. Tharsys descended, Leonidas writes, and succeeded in disentangling the anchor from the seabed. Upon surfacing, however, and just before he made it out of the water, “a shark suddenly appeared and snapped off the poor man’s nether extremities.” His lower half taken by the animal, the “top part” of Tharsys’s body was, we learn, “fortunately saved from the monster and received honourable burial in the Shore Cemetery.” An epitaph on the sailor’s tomb is said to read “Here lies one buried both in sea and on land” (Wright 1922: 328, 332). Tharsys’s extreme misfortune may seem a weird digression from the subjects we have been engaging here. Its relevance, I would like to argue, lies in the way that an unhoped-for stoppage in maritime movement, effected by oceanic matter, creates a sort of unruly space where eventualities become less certain than they might have seemed when progress was literally in motion. “Day after day, day after day,/We stuck, nor breath nor motion.” Thus the harrowing and indelible

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account of the doldrums experienced by the Ancient Mariner, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime: As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink. The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea. (1896: 12)

The Ancient Mariner’s disaster is attributable, above all, to the low atmospheric pressure—and associated windlessness—that sometimes obtains in the area now known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Nevertheless, this image of horrible becalming furnishes a more widely relevant, unusually vivid instance of widely felt terrors of marinal stillness. In the case of the Rime, the end of “breath” and “motion” heralds a sequence of preternatural visions, imagined or real, that present themselves to the ship and its sailors in their time of unpremeditated, agonizing immobility. Not least germane to our purposes, of course, is the fact that among the numerous objects that come to view during this sequence are monstrous oceanic lives, and a monstrous oceanity, that are defined in common by slime, that “objective correlative,” in Dan Brayton’s words, of “early modern epistemological uncertainty” (Brayton 2016: 88). Coleridge’s famously ambiguous imagery may be best understood as an emblem of the undecidability that accompanies the derangement of a marinal physics from motile to stationary. An unwilled aesthetic has attended the Ancient Mariner’s bafflement, one which undermines rational interpretation and renders visible an overawing, other-than-human sea, regardless of whether a spectator wishes to observe it. Foulers share with the doldrums a tendency to interfere with the fluid movement of the things they effect, and so to occasion unwanted intervals of danger, waste, and narrative indeterminacy. This was true of the so-called age of sail, and it is true today. The “smallest amount of marine growth,”

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thundered a 1976 pamphlet published by the UK’s Royal Institution of Naval Architects, “if not prevented or removed, can cause extremely high increases in fuel consumption and is much more important, from the point of view of hydrodynamic drag on the ship’s hull, than the roughening of the plate by corrosion” (West 1976: 3). It is no sort of surprise, therefore, that “antifouling” methods have long been prominent concerns of mariners, scientists, and engineers eager to combat the “settlement and development of unwanted aquatic species on natural and artificial surfaces” (Bannister et al. 2019: 631). Techniques for staving off and removing befoulment—whether by toxic gas, poisonous paint, shovel, edger (or other blade), propane torch, or even “dry jet of abrasive”—are diverse kinds of “cleaning.” What they aim to promote is “smoothness,” a state of affairs as close to unrough and as inimical to otherthan-human settlement and development as possible (Jarvis 2007; West 1976: 20–1). Anti-fouling measures lent their name to the early “graving docks” where roughening nuisances could be scratched off the bottom of ships. The upshot of this was sometimes the establishment of fouling communities where they landed—thus one driver of the gradually globalizing ecologies of the planet’s ports and harbors (Jarvis 2007). With time, however, resistance to befoulment came gradually to prioritize the prevention of settlement over the removal thereof, the latter method tending to be relatively labor-intensive. In late-eighteenth-century Britain, it became increasingly commonplace to sheathe wooden ships’ hulls with “sacrificial” pieces of copper intended to progressively dissolve under the influence of marine growth. As they dispersed, these pieces would release toxic elements into the water, killing what encumbered the ship and rendering its immediate aqueous surroundings unfriendly to life. The significance of the Royal Navy’s adoption of copper plating has been interpreted, in retrospect, as so pivotal as to have been one decisive factor in Britain gaining the upper hand, in maritime and imperial terms, over France in the late 1700s and early 1800s (“Reducing the barnacle bill” 2011). It bears emphasizing, however, that naval boats were not alone in popularizing this means for frustrating the foulers: merchant ships, notably the slavers of Liverpool, were early proponents of the copper method (Jarvis 2007). The likely vintage of “anti-fouling copper” has in fact been used, by the archeologists and historians of the Slave Wrecks Project, as a datum for

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ascertaining the probable age of drowned ships that do (and do not) contain traces of such cladding (Lubkemann and Boshoff 2017: 42). As iron ships proliferated in the nineteenth century, fortune-seekers addressed themselves to inventing solutions for the distinctive befoulments that such novel, ferrous material occasioned (Jarvis 2007). Paints were applied that would gradually leach “suitable poisons” into the “water immediately surrounding” a ship. In these instances, “combinations of toxins” were needed to “combat” a variety of troublesome species that differed correspondingly in their responses to different noxious influences. Deadly and discouraging paints found their place, as the Royal Institution of Naval Architects explains, amongst “other methods,” the latter including the “ejection” of such factors as “poison-bearing liquids,” “chlorine gas,” and “liquids containing chlorine” from apparatuses mounted along the sides of ships’ hulls (West 1976: 3–4). One toxin of particular note, a frequent constituent of anti-fouling paints, is tributyltin (or TBT), a pesticide so harmful to marine communities as to be reportedly capable of “causing deformities” in target and other organisms “at concentrations in parts per trillion.” Alarms about TBT’s use were raised in the late 1970s by French and English fishers who reported observing strange alterations in oysters. Shells were thickening and changing shape, and the animals themselves were shrinking (Narus 1986). It was proved, eventually, that TBT had effected dramatic negative impacts on marine ecologies, especially in ports and harbors. An International Convention on the Control of Harmful Anti-fouling Systems on Ships, banning the incorporation of TBT into marine paint, was ratified by the International Maritime Organization in 2001, but the practice, as well as the embodied presence of the toxin, have lingered to an undetermined extent (Angel 2007a). (In a strange coincidence, one of tributyltin’s successors has been ivermectin, the anti-parasite drug that frustrates barnacle growth and that became a sought-after, albeit clinically unproven and sometimes dangerous, therapy for Covid-19 (“Reducing the barnacle bill” 2011; Goldberg 2021).) It bears emphasizing that fouling is not purely a principle of arrestation. In their being carried across vast distances by the surfaces they ornament, foulers garner marked attention from persons and organizations concerned with the spread of so-called “invasive” species. The anthropologist Jonathan Clark contemplated an exceptionally spectacular instance of this at Agate Beach, in west-central Oregon, in 2012. Around the middle of that year, a sixty-six-foot-

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long “commercial fisheries dock” was tossed up at Agate approximately fifteen months after it had been loosed from its moorings in Misawa, Japan by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The wreckage had been “fouled,” before and after it floated across the North Pacific Ocean, by a “teeming” community of marine organisms, among them seaweeds, barnacles, mussels, sea urchins, anemones, amphipods, worms, oysters, clams, snails, and tiny shore crabs …. The most recent count, published on 13  April, 2013, lists 130 species in all—thirty species of seaweeds; ten species of protists; one species of blue green algae; and 89 species of animals, all invertebrates. (Clark 2015: 29–30)

The overwhelming majority of the species so listed was categorized as Japanese natives. Agents of the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, worried about the consequences for Oregonian ecosystems of so much foreign life, set about scraping it away from the former dock’s surfaces with “shovels and lawn edgers” and torching what organisms were out of reach with propane flames. The haul came to “an estimated 4,260 pounds of biomass” which was subsequently “sprayed” with “bleach” and buried under the sand (Clark 2015: 34). The dock from Misawa had become covered by algal, protozoan, and invertebrate lives, encumbrances that were not so immobilizing as to keep what they overgrew from traveling all the way across the North Pacific. Fouled by the communities it carried, the dock itself became a sort of fouler, an object imbued by virtue of the organisms that had colonized it with a species of pernicious efficacy. What it needed was a good cleaning of the “biomass” that had come to occupy it and a re-conversion, in Delbourgo’s terms, into apparently inert matter. As Astrida Neimanis has observed, the ease with which such lives—seaweeds, protists, blue green algae, invertebrate animals, and so forth—are summed up and literally dispatched is remarkable (2011: 121–2). The habitations formed along the surfaces of the Misawan dock were home to creatures become “vermin,” organisms who had begun to “stray from their place, cross human-drawn boundaries, and threaten to contaminate individuals or the environment” (Arluke and Sanders 1996: 175). They did so not in spite of, but as elements within, seas that are fouling as well as fluid, encrusting as well as liquid. Whether we should and how we might respond to these habits somewhat less poisonously is the subject of the proceeding pages.

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A Fouled Compass: Intermediate Poetics “Ship-fouling,” averred a 2016 article in The Economist, “is still a problem.” It was bad enough that fouling communities were at the time costing the global economy “billions of dollars of year.” What was making circumstances even more difficult was the fact that such remedies—“toxic chemicals”—as had traditionally been employed to preclude and counteract befoulment were being “progressively restricted.” Thankfully, a new “biochemical line of attack in the war against fouling” appeared to be in the offing. This involved genetically modifying a bacteria, called Pseudoalteromonas luteoviolacea, which frequently makes its home on submerged surfaces and may play a pivotal role in the settling upon (or unsettling from) those surfaces of tubeworm larvae (“Foul play; Keeping ships clean” 2016). The Economist’s martial language of attacks and wars may strike us as overheated, but upon reflection this vocabulary is unsurprising. In 2006, the nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan—at the time the “most modern aircraft carrier in the world”—was at rest in Brisbane, Australia when it suffered an “acute,” non-encrusting “case of fouling” in the form of thousands of jellyfish that had made their way inside the vessel’s power plant. The hazard so occasioned was sufficiently worrying as to compel the Ronald Reagan to shut down completely (Flannery 2013). “Maritime militarism,” observes Elizabeth DeLoughrey, is as reliant upon materialities and vocabularies of “fluidity, mobility, adaptability, and flux” as any other articulation of ocean space (2019: 25). Perhaps it ought not startle us, therefore, to hear foulers and their fixations made the objects of such actual as well as metaphorical aggressions. Having devoted some time to considering fouling’s forms and provocations, as well as to some parts of its broader historical and cultural milieux, we return now to wreckage—to what ruined ships in particular might teach us about befoulment, and to what an attentiveness to fouling might help us better understand about seabed remains. As several of this book’s examples have already implied, fouling and biofouling are acutely conceptually pertinent to the integrity not only of nautical vessels and submarine infrastructures but of heritage sites. Befoulment’s negative implications for such sites become alarmingly clear when (for example) artifacts of interest are rendered disappointingly incoherent by the accession of other-than-human

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processes and organisms. Foulers have been blamed for, among other things, the “aesthetic deterioration” of archeological objects as well as the “loss of historical information” offered thereby, as for instance when markings inscribed upon found things have been rendered impossible to decipher by what has corroded and covered them (Guiamet et al. 2012: 339). That said, foulers have also been credited with playing a “beneficial” role in the “in situ preservation” of certain wrecky fragments, particularly such as take shape through and upon “iron archeological artifacts” (López Garrido et al. 2015: 405). Chapter  3 will examine the latter, complexly concrescent phenomena at some length. For now, what is important to note is the real ecological and epistemological ambiguity that fouling can create in the world, an ambiguity that it is the purpose of this section to partially reckon, and to provisionally describe. For a significant and perhaps increasing proportion of observers, the meanings of sea-bottom befoulment have changed rapidly at the same time that the precariousness of the world’s oceans has become a prominent object of not just conservationist but popular concern. No longer strictly antipathetic toward such oceanic growths as have seemed to hinder the desired functioning of anthropic marine structures, marinal discourses have increasingly devoted themselves to expressing regret for such structures’ effects on subsea ecologies. This remorse frequently combines—or alternates—in turn with a rising enthusiasm for the ameliorative potential of seabed ruins’ becoming integrated within ecological systems. Along these lines, shipwrecks, particularly when they happen to be disposed in ways that maximize “habitat complexity,” have been seen as acceding to unprecedented virtue insofar as they become home, over the course of their underwater lives, to diverse “fouling communities” (Walker et  al. 2007: 435). To be clear, the idea that incidental or deliberate submersions might encourage desirable types and quantities of life is not new: in sixteenth-century Japan, it was a common practice to deposit bamboo logs on the sea-bottom in order to create circumstances attractive to comestible fish (Scales 2014: 22). What is novel, rather, is the instability of the foul as a marker above all of uncleanness, pollution, and indeed sin. It is as though contemporary foulers, as they make their habitations upon wrecky detritus, remobilize their substrates along unanticipated trajectories, recuperating ruins from abjection by refreshing their ontologies.

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The most radical possible improvement in a wreck’s meaning may be its being recast as an “artificial reef,” a term that has rapidly become commonplace in the vocabularies of conservation science, recreational diving, fisheries management, and on (Jouffray et al. 2020: 43–54). In 2005, the Australian warship HMAS Brisbane was sunk off Kabi Kabi and Jinibara land in southeast Queensland. Soon thereafter, a group of scientists dived the wreck to ascertain what degree and character of salutary befoulment might have colonized it. What they found were surfaces covered by a “diverse assemblage of encrusting invertebrates” representing thirty-one “epifaunal taxa.” This was despite the ship having been drowned just a year earlier, and it seemed to portend good things not only for “sessile invertebrates and algae” but for the fish that were benefiting, and would benefit, from the novel habitat. Moreover, the organisms were assembling despite the presence of some “residual anti-fouling paint” which had rendered specific parts of the hull inhospitable to potential residents but had apparently not poisoned the entire place. “Artificial reefs and shipwrecks,” reflected the scientists after their Brisbane plunge, “provide a complex mosaic of habitats for the establishment of both fouling and fish assemblages” (Walker et al. 2007: 435–40). Taking language and its histories seriously, it is striking that “foul,” “fouling,” “fouled,” and their affiliates have attained such flexibility of meaning, lamented by The Economist at the same time that they are invoked, approvingly and perhaps even hopefully, by scientists attuned to emergent ecologies. For an ecocritic, the potential ideological subtexts of accounts of positive “foulings” are as complicated as they are compelling. Do prospects of thriving mimic reefs promise to fulfill some deep-ecological dream of the salubrious triumph of nature over its human despoilers? Or do they threaten, rather, to effect novel kinds of “greenwashing,” not least insofar as they are seen to transform instruments of literal war into habitat mosaics (Nixon 2011: 37–8)? To recast wreckage in the light of the “dawn of a new wild” is to offer an electrifying, and profoundly consoling, image of an aqueous earth restored not just in spite of, but through, the matters that had once injured it (Flyn 2021: 6). The force of this framing’s appeal must be recognized, however, as a sign of its dangers as well as its virtues. To ricochet between a debasing and a sanctifying regard for foulings and foulers would be to project a binary moral system upon polyvalent situations. To make a foul clean, in this manner, might also imply a smooth and

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total ontological shift—from maritime military catastrophe to rehabilitative ecosystem, say—that weirdly obscures a wreck’s real, ongoing shiftiness. (It bears emphasizing, in this connection, that even within the bounds of scientific epistemologies, the conjoined impacts of “fouling communities” and “artificial reefs” on marine ecologies are not uncontroversial subjects. In one study, scientists working in the Gulf of Mexico have noted the multivalent effects of habitat formation along decommissioned oil and natural gas infrastructures. Here, “ecosystem services” are credited to marine assemblages attractive to “economically important fish species.” There, observers complain that they encourage “species invasions” as well as “jellyfish blooms” and other noxious phenomena (Schulze et al. 2020: 1).) An encrusted hermeneutics had better be on special guard against performing such simplistic projections and obscurings. I now turn, for instruction and inspiration, to what may well be modern literature’s exemplary engagement with befoulment and its interpretive contingencies. In her extraordinary “Diving into the Wreck,” from 1972, the poet and essayist Adrienne Rich gives voice to a diver descending to examine some seabed ruins. Her preparations for submersion have begun with reading “the book of myths,” a trove of uncertain convention accessed as one part of some wider, vaguely unsettling protective protocol. A knife, a rubber suit, and the rest of her gear take on the aspect of defensive equipment donned in advance of a solemn— and notably solitary—plunge into a fearful element. Significantly, before it can serve its wearer, all this “body-armor” will first impair her as she struggles, gawky and alone, down the rungs of a dive ladder. Becoming displaced, finally, from terrestrial air to undersea is a transition the diver-poet appears to not so much perceive as suffer, her senses all but nullified by deepening, darkening environs. But if this descent has been awkward and discombobulating, it is also proving revelatory of another state of affairs and of “another story.” Going underwater entails negotiating a realm that is kinetically and conceptually distinct, inhabited by stirrers and swayers whose invertebrate, fishy, and algal behaviors reflect the difference they inhabit (Rich 2013: 22–3). “I came to explore the wreck.” Stating her intent, the diver-poet pulls her attention free from its compulsive absorption in the alterity that surrounds her. Through a group of declarative, structurally iterative lines, she theorizes the virtues of “words”—they “are purposes,” “are maps”—and affirms her

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efficacy as an agent who has come “to see,” who strokes her “lamp/slowly” around the contour of the fragments she encounters. Imbued with a kind of assurance, and with something very much like care, Rich’s figure names the object of her immersion, the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth

The “story of the wreck” is a phrase that will recur, in Chapter  3 and elsewhere, as a shorthand for the distillation of seabed ruins’ multiple and unfurling times, lives, and relations into a univocal expression of a particular form of historical information. By clarifying what she does and does not seek, the subaqueous poet of “Diving into the Wreck” dares to suppose that some alternatives are thinkable—that knowing the myths is not necessarily the same thing as having one’s interpretive faculties determined altogether by them, and that a less- or otherwise-mediated encounter with the detritus “itself ” is possible (Rich 2013: 23). We need only to recall her ungainly gear and whelming initial descent to recognize that by claiming such potentialities, the diver-poet is not proposing to have transcended her condition as an embodied person located in (submarinal) space and time. She ventures, by contrast, an act of poetics in the strong sense of that word, a poiesis that strives to imagine and provisionally effect an irregular arrangement of self and world (Sobral Campos 2019: ix–x). Confronting and confronted by “the drowned face” of the ruins she surveys, Rich’s subject reckons catastrophe’s aftermath in terms not only of endurance but of the sea-changes impinging upon it. Some “tentative haunters” in the wreckage’s vicinity are either a host of marinal lives, or the diver herself, or both—and this indeterminacy marks only one of the ways the diver and her reader will find identity becoming a slippery thing as the poem proceeds. In an antepenultimate stanza, the diver’s self appears to widen, or split, or become characterized at last as the multiple entity it was all along. Here, a trio of referentially ambiguous figures—an “I,” a “mermaid,” and a “merman”—form a unitary “we” that drops yet further, into the wreck’s hold. Once inside, an already multiform poet coalesces with the ruin itself, “he // whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes” (Rich 2013: 24). The wreckage’s masculine

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gendering—a subtle but significant departure from nautical convention—is less an alternation than a continuous dilatation, a moving outward from the limits of a single category toward something bravely, precariously plural. Delineating the parts of these sea-bottom ruins, the diver’s articulations of subjecthood grow still more distributed and collective. This development reaches a kind of climax when Rich’s speaker proclaims an affinity with some of the compromised matters that make up this broken vessel: we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass

These wrecks-within-wreckage are remarkable for legibly conveying artifactual forms—textual, technological, and so forth—while abrogating their functions, anthropically construed (Figure  15). Typically of drowned

Figure 15  Dr. Dwayne Meadows, NOAA/NMFS/OPR, engine order telegraph on the Kansho Maru—sunk during the Second World War, September, 2006. Federated States of Micronesia, Chuuk. NOAA Photo Library. Flickr. CC BY 2.0.

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remnants, these middling instruments reflect an atmosphere of provocative intermediacy that is not obviously en route to resolving itself coherently into a quality of presence or absence. By coordinating themselves toward and with things like these, the diver reckons—which is not to say romanticizes—inbetweenness and its interpretive disconcertions. Against the story of the wreck and the book of myths where “our names”—as Rich’s final line has it—“do not appear,” spoiled logs and compasses hold the memories of their makings while discomposing their courses and demanding other protocols of reading, relating, and—thinking of Colson Whitehead’s estuary-bottom—even kinmaking (Rich 2013: 24). Reading Rich’s dive as a poetic rendering of (potentially) real wreckswimming, this interpretation may seem to treat its subject simplistically or—to invoke a location of more general importance to this book’s project— superficially. The ocean of these verses, ventured Patricia Yaeger, is essentially “a metaphor for the psyche” (2010: 526). To ignore or deny the symbolic resonances of “Diving into the Wreck”—and of the collection of poems that bears its name—would be to burlesque the achievement of a writer so committed to, and skilled at, the formation of literary images. Symbol and imagination are indispensable aspects of Rich’s poetics, as well as of the politics it sings forth: searching, feminist, anti-masculinist, anti-authoritarian, incendiary, revolutionary. Still, as Lavery has written recently, the diver, the fouled compass, and their companions do constitute a “materially” scrupulous representation of the “embodied experience” of going under, as well as of the “undersea ecology” it is possible to encounter there (2020: 280). And as Neimanis has lately explained, mulling the poem need not—perhaps ought not—entail disintricating its allegory of “gendered power” from its evocation, for twenty-first-century readers if not for Rich and her immediate contemporaries, of the “ecological wreck of the sea” itself (2019: 495–6). An ecocriticism attentive to actual oceanity holds poetry’s figural inventiveness in dynamic relation with the marine realms it enframes—heeding Yaeger’s warning to avoid “transforming literature into ecology” while also resisting the temptation to perform the inverse operation (2010: 526). What I have hoped to do, from these pages, is join Rich in recognizing the hermeneutic strangenesses of wrecky forms and reformations, strangenesses that might point away from the taxonomic neatness of artifact or ecofact and

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toward something more disruptively intermediate. Amidst “the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail” lie conjunctive befoulments that a neat environmental imaginary, lurching between cataclysms and redemptions, struggles to describe. “Diving into the Wreck” implies that staying with such foulers’ interpretive troubles, to adapt Donna Haraway’s phrase, might facilitate our becoming attuned to their “myriad unfinished configurations” as well as to their devastations. As Haraway contends, the purpose of such focus is not to reread the “apocalyptic” as the “salvific” or vice versa—not, in other words, to  stagger from one categorical extreme to another (2016a: 1). Attending carefully to this book’s intermediate forms might help cultivate, instead, a modestly more nuanced protocol of scrutiny, underwater and elsewhere. Chapter  3 continues this work by making company with some remarkable coalescences.

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Second Habit: Concrescing ­Scrutinizing the Concrescent Sea Liquidity, circulation, volume, surge, flow: these and affiliated properties are fundamental to the oceanic imaginaries of much contemporary criticism (Anderson and Peters 2014: 4–5; Cooppan 2019: 411; June 2020: xi; Mentz 2018: 69–70). Scholarly practices of sea-writing, or “thalassography,” generally contend with marine spaces that are not just characterized but constituted by “vectors of movement,” and that therefore refuse conventional protocols of situation (Steinberg 2014: xv). A “wet” ontology preoccupies itself, then, with tides, waves, currents, gyres, and so on—and with the myriad ways marinal phenomena might challenge terrestrial knowledges and politics (Steinberg and Peters 2015: 248). Materially and intellectually stimulating for recent theorists of a seaward humanities, the “world ocean” has also been credited, as Chapter 2 remarked, with inaugurating “modernity” as well as functioning as “capital’s myth element” (Connery 1996: 289). Moreover, if it is true that “hydro-criticism” and “neoliberal globalization regimes” share vocabularies of “mobility, adaptability, and flux,” so too may “military hydro-politics” (DeLoughrey 2019: 24–5). Across these variegated and contested fluidities, salt waters move and are mobilized beyond landed fixities. But as befoulments have rendered vividly—and sometimes infuriatingly— clear, beneath their surfaces seas also arrest, encumber, and slow. Under the waterline and in contact with a ship’s hull, “marine growth” may be the cause above all of inefficiency, “frictional resistance,” and “drag” (West 1976: 3). At the sea-bottom, things not only stir but become encrusted, so thoroughly at times as to become apparently “lodged in place” (Van Tilburg 2011: 600). Among sponge-clad wreckage, coral-covered oil platforms, and

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hydrozoan-encumbered aquaculture cages, oceans are doing something other, or more, than flowing. The present chapter continues this book’s work of supplementing the fluid sensibilities of marine criticism with a concern for how (and what) oceans fix, preserve, obstruct, and adorn. Its particular subjects are seafloor concretions, ambiguous and ongoing combinations of anthropic and dishuman matter that form with (for instance) shipwrecks and their myriad fragments. The “new work of critical ocean studies,” argues Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “engages sea ontologies, figuring maritime space as a multispecies and embodied place in which the oceanic contours of the planet, including its submarine creatures, are no longer outside the history of the human” (DeLoughrey 2017: 42). The contours of the undersea are taking shape, in part, through concrescing things, lives, and times—and their lineaments are not less oceanic for their being comparatively unliquid. Figure 16 features nine so-called “artifacts,” collectively entitled “BAT395— Concretions,” from the shipwreck collections of the Western Australian Museum. They comprise, in the pithy language of their object description, “bolt concretion, hollow iron” (“BAT395—Concretions”). They pertain in part to a ship’s bolt, one

Figure 16  Bolt concretion, hollow iron, from the wreck of the Batavia, 1629. Registration number 395. ID 1762. Western Australian Museum.

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that formerly provided structural integrity to a famously unfortunate Dutch East Indiaman called the Batavia. In October 1628, the Batavia sailed from Texel, in the western Wadden Sea. Its intended destination was its namesake port, which had for nearly a decade been the Javan headquarters of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company (VOC). On the fourth of June 1629, while traversing the Indian Ocean, the Batavia struck a reef and sank near the Houtman Abrolhos Islands, off the coast of Nhanta country. (The place is now also known, in settler-colonial parlance, as the Midwest region of Western Australia.) Those persons who made it ashore—where a notoriously violent mutiny ensued—have been recalled, anachronistically, as the “first known White [sic] inhabitants of Australia” (Wilde et al. 1994). Elsewhere, scholars have speculated that a party of the Batavia’s erstwhile crew, upon sailing the ship’s boats to the mainland in search of water, may have thereby become the first Europeans ever encountered by the Indigenous inhabitants of that part of the continent (Van Duivenvoorde et al. 2019: 28). The scaffolds erected on the orders of the Batavia’s commander, Francisco Pelsaert, to execute the mutineers have been “remembered” as some of the “first European constructions in Australia” (Parlati 2009: 271). Between the seventeenth century and the early 1970s, when the Batavia was first extensively studied and salvaged, successive communities of marine organisms, notably coralline algae, colonized the ship’s submerged ruins. As such communities live and die, they layer what they encrust with calcium carbonate skeletons which serve, in turn, as staging grounds for the establishment of still other forms of life. For the establishment of nonlife, too: the “rough outer surface” of a newly concreted thing makes a “good trap” for sand, bits of coral, and whatever other “sea bottom debris” might land atop it (North 1976: 257). Importantly, these artifactual “substrata” of the ocean floor are not necessarily passive objects of submarine habitation. In its corroding, and in its working chemical transformations upon the matters that “encapsulate” it, iron provides an especially useful example of how concretion can operate in multiple directions, and through multiple agencies, at once (López Garrido et  al. 2015: 406). In concretion, a ferrous object is likely to diffuse an acidic solution outward through the inner layers of its crust. This results in the transformation—not the dissolution—of those layers, which may become “a replica of the marine growth and deposition,” but with “iron

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corrosion products” substituted for calcium carbonate (North 1976: 257). If encrusters establish new shapes along the surfaces of immersed things, so may those things reinterpret the structures that progressively encase them. The Latin root, here, is concrēscĕre, for “to grow together.” Concretions are ontologically ambiguous growings-together of human and other-than-human, artifactual and ecofactual matter, conduct, and history. This chapter asks how we can, and how we should, interpret them as arrangements of oceanic memory, ongoingness, and futurity. By beginning with an admittedly partial but representative sketch of recent ocean theory, it has aimed to foreshadow a few of the ways that concretions elude interpretive frameworks preoccupied above all by aqueous flux. Far from disparaging such framings, my aim is to show how a criticism sensitive to concrescent growths contributes to the emerging project of complicating and pluralizing our sense of what constitutes oceanic matter. (Ultimately, I will also take care to acknowledge the limits of an approach to wreckage, and to seas, that prioritizes physical presence over absence.) What forms of interpretation, I ask, have concretions provoked and challenged? What hermeneutic practices have they foreclosed? Why do these matters matter for efforts to comprehend imperial and post-imperial oceans as more than repositories of what the critical theorist Debarati Sanyal calls “so many relics” (2019: 347)? By way of articulating some provisional answers, I sketch a few related—and sometimes contradictory—trajectories in concretional becoming. Those trajectories are preservation, obfuscation, and agglomeration, and they name a few significant but definitely inexhaustive vectors in seabed materiality. Instead of purporting to summarize the meanings of wrecky concretions, at the Batavia or elsewhere, the following makes a start at tracing the possibilities of encrusted relations upon shipwrecks and other ruins. “Sand and coral rubble, shell particles, coral, bryozoans, calcareous algae, tubeworms, and other”: thus the elements of “composition” of some concretions “recovered” in the late twentieth century from the HMS Pandora, an English frigate wrecked in the Coral Sea, in the northern reaches of the region now often called the Great Barrier Reef, in 1791. In conjunction with “artefact material,” the stuff of this self-consciously open-ended litany contributed to multiple instances of what the archeologist Stella Randall called the concrescent “matrix.” In some cases, the objects’ artifactual identities were

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Figure 17  Unidentified wood/iron concretion from the wreck of the HMS Pandora, 1791. Registration number MA4880. Queensland Museum.

readily visually detectable. Where salvaged things were “fully concreted,” meanwhile, their referents were accessible obliquely, as via the use of metalattracting magnets, or not at all. Under Randall’s careful gaze, the Pandora’s remains offer some promising resources for observing and analyzing how different anthropic materials—metals, brick, and wood—participate in seabed growings-together. But as her essay turns to the various “unidentified materials” at hand (Figure 17), quantitative accounts of “concretion coverage,” “average number of tubeworms,” and so on give way to sustained attention to things in themselves (Randall 2000: 49–50). Confronted by obstinately anonymous matter, Randall’s mode of writing and looking changes, subtly but substantially, to become descriptive, naturalistic, and aesthetic. In the absence of evident substratal contour, a concretion asserts a “unique” shape unto itself. At the same time, it becomes “interesting” as a substrate in its own right. “Note,” writes Randall, “the presence of a number of different oxygen dependent organisms … on the outer surface of [one unidentified] concretion.” (Said concretion is of a sort with, but not necessarily identical to, the example pictured in these pages.) Her reader is subsequently invited, for the first time, to inspect a concretional

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image carefully and at length. Here, a “light coloured nodule” is identified as “the skeleton of an encrusting coral colony.” There, some “small round white dots” signal “a type of small tubeworm called Spirorbis spp,” a taxonomic name for spiral tube worms (Randall 2000: 51–2). The character of Randall’s hermeneutic has suddenly changed, quietly but fundamentally. No longer serving primarily as evidence of the tendency of different kinds of artifacts to attract different varieties and ranges of “coverage,” the “unidentifiable” becomes identifiable differently as the location of relationships that comprise but also exceed the stuff they have encrusted, deformed, and made home. What historical information—what “facts,” as the scholar of literature and material culture Crystal B. Lake might have it (2020: 22)—do nameless growings-together convey and conceal, and what novel meanings are in formation through and upon them? “The ocean,” write Kimberley Peters and Philip Steinberg, “is not simply liquid; it is not simply wet.” Peters and Steinberg’s account of a “more-thanwet ontology” has informed previous segments of this text, and it informs this one, too. Having reflexively examined their earlier, influential call for a “wet ontology,” and having come to find that concept lacking, the geographers herald a sense for the marinal wide enough to encompass that which exceeds “material liquidity” (Peters and Steinberg 2019: 294). This relational oceanicity incorporates, among much else, such “objects” as are “suspended” in seawater and such marine “space” as may be “transformed as solid” and may come thereby to express distinctive modes of temporality and mobility. The “detritus of the ocean,” write Peters and Steinberg—including “remnants of shipwrecks,” barnacle-encrusted metals, and so on—“can be reconfigured as the ocean—an ocean articulated differently—beyond its chemical materiality to a more-thanplanetary, artificial materiality” (2019: 300–3; emphasis in original). More than gathering, moving, and recombining the things it receives and contains, a “more-than-wet” sea establishes the ontological terms of those things, making them over in its own image and along its own contours. Peters and Steinberg’s various minglings—of the detrital with the liquid, the artificial with the planetary—are provocative and useful, but their thesis raises many more questions than it claims to answer. What are the possible terms of oceanic reconfiguration? What are the potential registers of the sea’s differential articulation?

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I would like to argue that concretions present a few significant sites for reckoning the presence—acknowledged or otherwise—of an excessive oceanity, and for cultivating practices of fuller, and more ethical, description, narration, and historicity. As Randall’s unidentified materials imply, the concrescent is a modality that threatens to problematize identification, individuation, and classification. But these negative—or critical—effects are also the signs of emergent ontological possibility, as the “underwater life” of an anthropic thing gives rise to ingenuities that may express themselves formally, ecologically, and otherwise (Randall 2000: 52). Such occurrences do not necessarily give rise to a shift from one state of hermeneutic stability to another. For a team of maritime archeologists engaged to dive on the wreck of the sixteenth-century Spanish vessel San Esteban off the barrier island now called “Padre,” in the Gulf of Mexico, the behaviors of concreted matter functioned like a kind of oxymoron. The abundant “metal concretions” that legibly “delineated the shipwreck” refused, at the same time, to make their contents known, “heavily encrusted” as they were “with marine growth.” The very same stuff, in other words, that “revealed” the “alignment and extent” of the former ship divulged no “details” of its constituent parts to observation (Hamilton and Smith 2011: 288). On the seabed, these growings-together literally traced wrecky remains while arresting certain processes of epistemological and historical recovery at extensively ornamented surfaces. Of course, this is not to say that the San Esteban’s frustrations—“the diving archaeologists often complained”—were or ought to have been insuperable. Ashore and in the “conservation laboratory,” hammers, chisels, and pneumatic devices called “air scribes” were used to access concreted “secrets” and so reveal “the story of the wreck” (Hamilton and Smith 2011: 288–90). The theory of narrative priority so implied is a narrow one, predicated as it is on the idea that the event of the San Esteban’s sinking is where the wreck’s story begins and ends. To be clear, this obvious insight is not necessarily intended as a vehicle of critique: the idea that maritime archeologists might be preoccupied above all with human interest is unsurprising and not essentially objectionable. But if we bear Peters and Steinberg’s more-than-wet ontology—not to mention Adrienne Rich’s poetics of the thing itself (see Chapter 2)—in mind, it becomes incumbent upon us to consider what meanings it may be possible and desirable to glean from an encounter with oceanic materials that both direct attention

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to maritime-imperial remnants and represent those remnants in ways that limit their mobilization through the terms and logics of conventional historical recuperation. Put another way, at the San Esteban and elsewhere, concrescent growths look like paradigmatic examples of excessive oceanity, so much unassimilable surplus that needs removing for conventional protocols of memory and storytelling to operate. Recovering the story of the wreck, off Padre Island and elsewhere, is a kind of salvage-work. Like fishing for lost treasure, this is a practice committed to recuperating what it seeks from its contingent situation and recirculating it— committed, in James Delbourgo’s phrase, to re-converting “the trapped into the mobile” (2011: 164). With respect to concreted wreckage, extracting story in this fashion takes on the surprising and ironic character of renouncing a thing’s oceanity in the act of setting it (back) in motion. This is revelation as the suppression of what the postcolonial literary scholar Vilashini Cooppan has recently theorized as “oceanic spacetime,” a state characterized by the presence of seemingly “untimely” things that “straddle zones of existence and states of becoming.” Oceanic spacetime is, for Cooppan, more than conceptually stimulating: its political force takes shape through imperial and post-imperial memories articulated in terms not of “clock-time” but of the “rubbing up of one history against others, their collective layering on top of and below, inside and outside of one another, intersecting and interpenetrating” (Cooppan 2019: 398,  412). Concretions, especially insofar as they materialize challenges to the ready revelation of historical relics, would seem unusually pertinent figures for this spatial and temporal scheme and for performing the labor of entangled memory. At the sea-bottom, the ruins of maritime endeavor and empire challenge as well as exemplify Cooppan’s thesis. Oceanic spacetime, she writes, refuses temporal registers that are “hard like the iron hands of a clock” in preference for those which are “soft like the swells of the sea” (Cooppan 2019: 397–8). Concrescent growings-together, as of the material imperfectly identified as the Batavia’s bolt, signal intermediate processes and times that are not less entangled, or less oceanic, for being partially ferrous, and basically hard. “Physically encrusted” artifacts, urged Delbourgo, “alert us to the multiple histories literally conjoined in the more peculiar things fished out of the seas” (2011: 176). Concretions condense and reconfigure human and other-thanhuman, animate and inanimate, artifactual and ecofactual histories through

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oceanic articulations that occasionally defy identification so far as to present wholly new contours. But these subversions also frequently accompany a semiotics of the sea floor whereby the unidentifiable literally renders recognizable—delineates—the detritus of earth’s 3 million sunken ships. If this is a kind of revelation, it is so only on the basis of transformations so complete as to demand distinctly sub-marinal forms in description, in memorialization, and in—better yet, beyond—storytelling. The proceeding sections of this chapter test a very few of them.

Adamantine Archives, Oceanic Out-Doings By creating partial boundaries between what they encrust and the salt waters that immerse them, colonial encrustations may diminish rates of corrosion and so contribute to “in situ conservation” of seafloor wreckage (López Garrido et al. 2015: 414). This has been observed, for example, off the coast of North Carolina, where layers of “thick marine calcareous growth” sheath and protect the USS Monitor, a Civil War-era ironclad warship which sank in late 1862 (Monitor National Marine Sanctuary 2008). It has also been recorded by archeologists and scientists working with early modern Spanish wrecks off the coast of Campeche, in Mexico. In the latter instances, scholars have even encouraged the “induction and stimulation of settlement of encrusting organisms” in order to promote the “preservation” of once-imperial parts (López Garrido et al. 2015: 415). What is secured from total dispersion and corrosion, in these and other cases, is the integrity not only of particular objects but of particularizing times. In 2008, a wreck site was discovered “by chance” along the far southern coast of Namibia. Numerous “ferrous concretions” were found in the surrounding area; once disarticulated, they divulged “an array of pewter tableware, navigational and barber/surgeon equipment, personal possessions, and other artifacts.” The “material culture” so recovered was instrumental to the ship’s identification as a Portuguese merchantman (perhaps the Bom Jesus) and its dating to the third or fourth decade of the sixteenth century (Werz 2011: 484–5). At sites like these, concrescent seas appear not to have dissolved historical material culture but rather to have played primary roles in securing (parts of) that material from liquefaction. This is something like the opposite of what

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James Hamilton-Paterson made of his deep dive in the submersible MIR 1 in the course of a (gainless) salvage mission in the mid-1990s. That descent was remarkable exactly because of the “nothingness” it accessed, a void becoming a stage for revelations of personal history. “I have been moving,” wrote Hamilton-Paterson, “through a bath of solvent which has thinned away crusts and membranes which had built up around certain memories” (1998: 217). Contrariwise, concrescent seas encrust wrecky remains through what can appear to be acts of extraordinary memorialization, the edification— and not the diffusion—of maritime debris. “Imperial formations” was Ann Laura Stoler’s term for such enduring “processes of becoming” as can persist in empire’s aftermath. Stoler was thinking primarily, if not exclusively, of immaterial ongoingness, but her language resonates powerfully in relation to concreted artifacts, processual formations that present unusually vivid examples of the “vital refiguration” of imperial residue (2008: 192–4). Far from exhibiting the character of Hamilton-Paterson’s abyssal dissolutions, concretions conserve and refigure the matter of nautical enterprise with something resembling solicitude. As they do so, they produce an atmosphere of disconcerting ambivalences—affective, epistemological, ontological—that a criticism attuned to the concretional endeavors to describe and interpret. The trope of the ocean as an uncanny preservative of the things it receives has of course had a long and complicated life, from the Sea God’s everlasting palace in the classical Japanese Man’yōshū to the petrified “sea-things” that populate the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s “blue shore of silence” (Bates 2005: 67; Neruda 2003: 35). And its particularly imperial aspects have been mobilized in texts like the English writer Thomas Heyrick’s The Submarine Voyage (1691), a long poem published several decades after the Batavia went down. Advertised as a “Pindarick,” the work is styled as a lyric in the tradition of the classical Greek poet Pindar, whose public odes acquired a reputation for exaltative flourish and whose template for poetic and intellectual “diversion” became a prominent model for English poets in the late seventeenth century (Scodel 2001: 184). Toward the beginning of The Submarine Voyage, Heyrick’s speaker stands upon a promontory imploring “some kind Genius” to indulge his “daring Curiosity” and make accessible “The Wonders, Nature secret keeps/ In her vast Storehouse of the Deeps” (1691: 5). Said wonders prominently include sunken ships, the loot they contain, and the encrusting marvels—such

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as corals, shells, and pearls—they are imagined to accrue: one notable imperial wreck, “Enrich’d with Eastern and with Western Store/Now sunk grows Richer, than it was before” (Heyrick 1691: 13). Heyrick’s is explicitly a poetics, or indeed a metapoetics, of salvage, wherein submersion constitutes an act of heroic revelation and recuperation. (“I could do more,” remarks the poet, “than PHIPPS [sic] and all his Divers did,” a by-now familiar reference to the colonial Bostonian who famously hauled over £200,000 worth of treasure up from the Caribbean remains of a Spanish ship in the late 1680s (Heyrick 1691: 15).) At the same time, the poem wittingly or unwittingly registers a sense of the salvor as a figure who deals in “Fancies,” and in what Daniel Defoe decried as “the shadow of Expectation” (1697: 11–3). Has the wreck actually grown “Richer” at the sea-bottom, or has its story generated an aura of splendor its detritus cannot really match? Having established its method, The Submarine Voyage imagines discovering Atlantis, the decadent island civilization described, in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, as having been drowned and disappeared in the course of an extraordinary flood. Heyrick’s prospect of accessing “th’ Palace o’th’ Atlantian Kings” is remarkable above all for the chance it represents of seizing the place’s voluminous archives, a “Faithfull” compendium “of all/The memorable Conquests of the Sea” (Heyrick 1691: 22–3). As well as total knowledge of oceanic histories (including, not least of all, that of shipbuilding), the palace’s “Secrets” are supposed to express extraordinary prescience, as of “Who shall in future Ages rule the Sea.” Crucially, The Submarine Voyage implies that the endurance of the Atlantian register owes much to phenomena we might anachronistically, but perhaps not impertinently, call concrescent: This Palace once th’ Atlantian Kings did own, In its own Structure Beauteous ‘twas and Great: But all its former Glories are outdone, By Juices which do ly to us unknown, Such as do Gems and Precious Stones beget: And by the Plastick Power which Nature secret keeps, But in dark Mines reveals, and i’th’ unfathom’d Deeps; By these her Structures all are turn’d to Adamant, And neither Darling Beauty nor unyielding Hardness want. (Heyrick 1691: 32–3)

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This is an image of the ocean floor as a zone of preternatural preservations, an archive and an oracle that is sturdier—and, not coincidentally, more formally dazzling—by virtue of being submersed. In a manner that chimes with the spirit Ariel’s song, from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), the palace of the Atlantian kings has been preserved from fading by a concretionary power that transforms a thing in the act of rendering it solid. (Flip back to Chapter 1 if a reminder of the disorienting force of Ariel’s mischief-making would be helpful here.) The adamantine archive is a paradoxical figure. On the one hand, it supplies an image of the sea-bottom as not only a region of exception from topside deterioration but an active enhancer of the aesthetic and epistemological value of the things it receives. On the other, it allows for the possibility that recovering the contents of the Atlantian storehouse will risk annulling those contents’ integrity by abstracting them from the places they have been secreted. Furthermore, the prospect of a sort of subsea empory— remembering John Beale’s epithet, recorded in Chapter  1—having become lodged in place may raise some more broadly existential concerns. It would be an error to imply that these represent insuperable vexations: as Delbourgo has suggested, encrusted “curiosities” often signified rather straightforwardly, for early modern observers, as emblems of imperial power (2011: 167). Joseph Hall reads The Submarine Voyage persuasively along lines like these, arguing that its poet’s plunge functions above all to frame an “empire of salvage” predicated on the idea that immersed wreckage might be recognized as so much “colonizable property” in potentia (2019: 644, 648). Furthermore, it is undeniably true that Heyrick’s Pindaric effusion performs the recuperation of oceanic histories in order, specifically, to locate “beloved Brittain” in the rolls of the “Great Commanders of the Floud” (1691: 24). Still, by attending so closely to Atlantis, “that most Potent Isle,” the poem centers a maritime civilization represented as a transcendentally and mystifyingly gorgeous—but also unnervingly wrecked—memento mori (Heyrick 1691: 22). Moreover, the fates of the Atlantian kings may be less exceptional than their reader expects: “The memorable Conquests of the Sea” refers also to the sea’s conquests, not least such “new” ones as may unfurl “When th’ Ocean shall … what did once belong to Her, retake” (Heyrick 1691: 24).

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Strangest and, for present purposes, most pressing may be the uncertainty of rescuing anything whatsoever from so much unyielding hardness. If this would seem practically strenuous, it also implies a sort of historical naiveté: when a thing’s “former Glories” have been “outdone,” what exactly can a salvor hope to recover? By juxtaposing The Submarine Voyage’s poetic submersions with this chapter’s numerous empirical accounts of drowned things, it becomes possible to detect the shadows of concretionary growings-together amidst a wide array of invocations of the undersea’s strange conservations. Multispecies, other-than-animate encrustations are involved in the literal maintenance of some immersed matter, including shipwrecks and wrecky remains. But as they preserve, concrescent seas effect vital refigurations, as well as what Peters and Steinberg might call transformations, of the things they receive (2019: 302). This may make them available to reductive instances of aestheticization and commoditization: placing enigmatic curiosities on display in museums, poems, or academic books risks iterating long-standing practices of admiring oceanic oddities as the wonderful icons of an institution’s, or a researcher’s “maritime reach” (Delbourgo 2011: 158). However, and as this reading of Heyrick’s salvage poetics has—it is hoped—begun to demonstrate, an encounter with the concreted is never not haunted by an imagery of imperial forms being superseded by waters that overwhelm them, and by encrusters that remake them at the same time that they hold them. When they memorialize imperial stuff, concretions may prepare recognitions that are also alienations, monuments whose meanings have never seemed so vivid or so unstable. Transformations of this extent and intensity have provoked some observers to comprehend the concrescent habits of sea-bottom life as engaged in a kind of estranging violence. The nineteenth-century naturalist George Johnston, whose spongy and otherwise zoophytic researches we encountered in Chapter  1, drew descriptive color for his studies from the classical Roman poet Ovid, the fourth book of whose Metamorphoses recounts the story of the naiad Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite (Figure  18). Salmacis, desirous of and eager to secure Hermaphroditus’s partnership, embraces him as he bathes in her fountain in much the same manner as—Ovid similizes—“the sea-polyp holds its enemy caught beneath the sea, its tentacles embracing him on every side” (1916: 203, 205). By way

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Figure 18  Bernard Picart, Salmacis en Hermaphroditus, 1733. Etching, 253 × 178 mm. Gift of D. H. Cevat, Guernsey. Rijksmuseum. Public domain.

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of poetic evocation of the principles of material union he observes among his underwater subjects, Johnston directly cites several adjacent lines from the Metamorphoses, rendered here in Frank Justus Miller’s English translation: For their two bodies, joined together as they were, were merged in one, with one face and form for both. As when one grafts a twig on some tree, he sees the branches grow one, and with common life come to maturity, so were these two bodies knit in close embrace: they were no longer two, nor such as to be called, one, woman, and one, man. They seemed neither, and yet both. (Ovid 1916: 205)

An Ovidian “sea polyp”—in the Latin, polypus—most likely refers to an octopus, cuttlefish, or squid, not an encruster. What Johnston’s citation suggests, nonetheless, is a sense for the submarine as a space of immobilizing and at times antagonistic enfoldings, where bodies “speedily coalesce” with one another or with whatever “site” they happen to “incrust.” What “altered form” tends to arise from such metamorphic “contact” is likely to “perplex the nomenclator,” name-work becoming acutely difficult in proximity to life made weirdly common or, in Ovid’s splendid phrase, “neither, and yet both” (Johnston 1842: 10–11). From a contemporary vantage, Johnston’s citational practice appears epistemologically credible: poriferans are mostly hermaphrodites capable of producing ova and spermatozoa. Many marine sponges happen also to be capable of reproducing “asexually,” as when “pieces broken off the parent” settle on a substrate and develop into new organisms (Edgar 2019: 77). It bears stressing, though, that the particular roles of surfaces—wrecky or otherwise—amidst these novel growths would seem to be pivotal. Perhaps we ought to say, therefore, that if the protocols of “hermaphroditic and colonial sea creatures” evoke a kind of queerness (Syperek 2014: 253), this is so partly because their combinations are unimaginable without the underlying things they colonize, and to which they so assiduously “accommodate” themselves (Johnston 1842: 10). “Two-formed” was Ovid’s epithet for the issue of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus’s embrace, a condition of multiformity that will not submit to unravelling (1916: 205). While this sort of jointure has attracted fascination and admiration, it has also—as the adversarial language of the Metamorphoses may anticipate—spurred expressions of revulsion. A “horror of compounded forms, organisms and sexes,” writes the science studies

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theorist Eva Hayward, has impelled the apprehensions of observers inclined to be disconcerted by the provocations of queer oceanicities (2012: 166). A sensitivity to concrescence assists us in recognizing the extent to which such compoundings exceed biological life by incorporating not just the other-than-human but the other-than-animate, including the ambivalent “artifacts” that characterize certain sea floors. Reckoned as such, concretions suggest conditions of what Karen Barad has called “trans/materialities,” states of being that transgress such “sacrosanct divides” as are frequently observed (and projected) between the organic and the inorganic, the machine and the animal, the material and the intelligent, and so on (2014: 235). As the proceeding section of this chapter will lengthily explain, transgressions like these sometimes proceed so far as to completely confuse the constituent parts of concretional growth—to “render [a] form nugatory as a specific character,” as Johnston might have had it (1842: 10). But as it is seen to conserve, delineate, and even archive drowned matter, concrescence is interpreted on something like the contrary terms: as so much making-secure of anthropic material, memory, and narrative as might otherwise have been disappeared in the course of fragmentation. If the central “horror” of history’s “metamorphic processes of decay” involves a “drift into formlessness” (Schnapp et al. 2004: 12), a preservative concretion may appear to arrest this movement, and therefore to assuage its considerable terrors. The “story of ” the San Esteban, a “Faithfull” record of the sea’s “memorable Conquests”: from certain vantages, the concrescent submarine resembles a remarkable or even magical refuge for recuperating pasts, as though the sea-bottom’s “museum without walls” was worked by an indefatigable, exquisitely talented host of encrusting and corroding conservators (Kenderdine 1997: 7). The appeal of a submerged vision such as this is not difficult to understand, and it would be churlish to impugn it as simply fantastical: concretions really can effect extraordinary preservations, sometimes of immersed objects themselves and sometimes of their shadows. In these respects, the archeological work of compelling a shipwreck to “surrender artifact after artifact” can involve rescuing vivid absences as well as presences, as when concretions are X-rayed to divulge the “ghostly echo” of what corroded things were once held inside them (Lubkemann and Boshoff 2017: 48). Surely, however, a metaphorics of “surrender” inaptly—or at least incompletely—characterizes the involvement

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of concrescent growths, as well as of the element they inhabit, in the event of artifactual and historical continuance. Would not a language and imagery of care, and even of wrapping bygone times in an oceanic embrace, more fittingly describe these feats of legibility and conservation? In the Batavia’s case, preservative growths might be addressed, meaningfully, as endurances that do more than facilitate contact with imperial incident—that embody, for example, some minor expressions of saltwater memories, and of underwater life, that encompass but also far exceed the parameters of conventional historical chronology. A poetics like that of The Submarine Voyage, if disagreeable for its jingoism and quasi-imperial adventuring, creditably signals a tradition of wondering at the sea’s “Plastick Power.” Those powers have included, among others, a capacity for lodging lost things in place, and even for making them brightly discernible to submersed perception. They have expressed, at the same time, an ambivalent tendency to leave conserved things secure and “outdone,” unalienated and yet strange. In the following pages, the extent of such estrangement becomes yet more difficult to overlook.

Marine Obliterations and Parergonal Encrustations In the early 1990s, researchers conducting submarine investigations of the ancient port of Poompuhar, Tamil Nadu happened upon a large area of wreckage on the sea floor. Unlike the concretions that delineated the San Esteban, “heavy barnacle encrustation” and “sediment deposits” at the Poompuhar site rendered it “very difficult” to discern the vessel’s “orientation.” Attempts to access a couple of “circular structures,” possibly “cargo holds,” were likewise frustrated by “thick encrustation.” Detaching artifacts for the purposes of identification and dating was not an easy task, “cemented together” as things were by “barnacle growth.” It is tempting to read this language as its own sort of ghostly echo, as for instance of Jacob Rowe’s testimony from Tobermory Bay, where the taking-up of specimens was hindered by things “being semented hard together” (Fardell and Phillips 2000: 12). (For more on those difficulties, see Chapter 2.) An odd recurrence like this one should, arguably, give us pause: in the critical media studies scholar Lisa Han’s perceptive telling, sea-bottom salvage and extraction have always been affiliated exploits, imaginatively as

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well as temporally. The “blue archive and the blue frontier,” writes Han, “are two sides of the same coin” (2019: 464). At Poompuhar, archeologists were eventually successful in retrieving and describing a number of “lead ingots.” And from some inscriptions thereupon, it did prove possible to surmise that the wreck dated to some time after 1792. Ultimately, however, the ruin’s “identification, exact date, and origin” remained unknown, obscured in part by growings-together that seemed to render the labor of historical revelation an exercise in sodden futility (Gaur and Vora 2011: 529–30). Sometimes, the preservative tendencies of algal, bryozoan, spongy, and other-than-animate concretions appear to make them exceptional assistants to reading the artifactual identities of seafloor stuff. At other times, they are critically antagonistic to legibility. “Giant blobs”; “mysterious and unrecognizable lumps”; “thick formless mass”: these epithets testify to the ways description falters, and perhaps signals its own contingent inadequacies, when confronted by certain concrescent becomings (Kuiper 2018; NC Archaeology @Home 2020: 9). We might characterize this language as at best ambivalent, and at worst disgusted: it defines encrustations, ontologically, as forms of excess, and of waste. If fouling organisms, like the ones that teemed along the surfaces of the Misawan fisheries dock, behaved like so many “bad animals,” concreted stuff acts, at Poompuhar and elsewhere, a bit like bad matter (Arluke and Sanders (1996: 175). To contravene its interference, researchers often use X-rays to see past shapelessness to detect what determinate forms—what other ghostly echoes—may be hidden within. At other times, conservators may use something called an “air scribe” to “remove the encrustation” so that the “artifacts” can come “out of concretion” (NC Archaeology @Home 2020: 9, 21). An air scribe’s appealingly poetic name reflects its development as a tool for industrial engraving, a function that finds its converse expression when applied to “fossil preparation.” In the latter cases, the machine’s “hardened bit” works “at blurring speed” to effect the “removal of hard matrix.” When viewed under a magnifier, explained the author of one review of air tools, an obdurate matrix in the course of being scribed “looks as if it is melting” (Ratkevich 1998: 418). The clearing-away of concretional growth by means of a pneumatic implement is a practice that implicitly theorizes inscription as an act of uncovering—as an act, that is, of relieving a legible sign of the stuff that had

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unfortunately concealed it. “Matrix” refers, in this context, to what The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology describes as the “material or sediment in which cultural debris is contained,” the “surrounding deposit in which archaeological finds are situated.” Extending one of this book’s essential terms, we might say that when it is identifiable as this sort of (tacitly acultural) residue, concrescence carries out a type of fouling, one requiring another version of the “graving” that we formerly observed along ships’ bottoms. (To become reacquainted with said observations, see Chapter  2.) Whether stymying identification, frustrating salvage operations, or otherwise, seabed growingstogether may interrupt the course of observation, description, extraction, and so forth—and so produce epistemological befoulments that are not necessarily less problematic than their more obviously, materially embarrassing versions. When they foul, concretions become refractory participants in submerged interpretation and epistemology, obfuscating scrutiny and introducing obstinately material manifestations of a submarine je ne sais quoi. Even among things whose (past) identities they have not completely obscured, concrescent seas can bewilder meaning by interfering with the correct operations of submersed artifacts. An encrusted criticism engages such bewilderments from a somewhat eccentric angle, asking what imaginative and ontological provocations might inhere in—as opposed to lie under, through, or past— blobs, lumps, and other varieties of mysterious mass. When concretions obscure and rearrange marine and maritime form, what thresholds of identification and narrative open, and which become foreclosed? Some unusually pertinent clues emerge from the archeologists Donny C. Hamilton and C. Wayne Smith’s account of the recuperation in the late 1990s of some encrusted artifacts from the wreck of the La Belle, one of the ships that sailed with the French explorer and colonialist René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle’s failed 1684 voyage to the mouth of the Mississippi River. Hamilton and Smith attend in particular to a curious wooden chest, the contents whereof had become “heavily concreted” due to the prevalence of ferrous material therein as well as to the “mineral load” of the environing waters. As much of this concrescent matrix as possible was duly “chipped away.” Meanwhile, some “encasing iron concretion” had actually “helped save” certain “non-iron metallic objects” from the wreck site “by forming a barrier against any circulating salt water.” Yet other formal relations issued

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from some “marine concretion” that had obscured and arrested the motion of a “nocturnal” of English origin, constructed originally out of “three boxwood plates” and happening to feature a “detailed planisphere” on its reverse side. Since at least as early as the late sixteenth century, nocturnals were used as aids to navigation by mariners, who aligned their various parts with stars in the night-time sky in order to determine the hour. “The English,” claim Hamilton and Smith, “were noted for making the best nocturnals” of all (2011: 293–7). Weighed up from the sea floor and conveyed to the conservation laboratory, the La Belle “nocturnal/planisphere” was observed to be “heavily concreted,” the “intricate details” formerly traceable along its planisphere side “obliterated” on account of “iron corrosion products from adjacent artifacts” as well as of “marine concretion.” The relations so described communicate a vivid sense of the undersea as intensely and multifariously inimical to artifactual integrity and scrutation. Conservation-work enters this milieu under the sign of the mitigation, and indeed amelioration, of marinal obliteration. In the case of the planisphere, the conservators’ expressed aim was to “reveal the markings,” or to recover the object’s legibility, and to “allow the plates to rotate smoothly,” or to occasion the return of the artifact to mobility and functionality. A series of procedures followed, from the chemical softening and mechanical removal of “gross encrustations” along the nocturnal’s surfaces to the extrication of “concretions” from between its plates using “beading needles,” “hydrochloric acid,” and other tools. At the end of the “conservation regimen,” the nocturnal had been restored to a remarkable degree, its plates rotating well and its “marking details” clearly and crisply identifiable (Hamilton and Smith 2011: 297, 299) (Figure 19). The planisphere could again be read, and the nocturnal might once more tell time, which is to say that these joined things recovered their intended artifactual natures as well as their integrity as cohesive antiquities. It would be a nonsense to propose that the conservators’ intentions were categorically compromised by virtue of their arguable negligence of the nocturnal’s other-than-human legibilities, temporalities, and so forth. But it would be equally ludicrous to suggest that the only legitimate way of relating to an encrusted object is to attempt to bring it out of concretion. Previous sections of this book have referred to the work of Caitlin DeSilvey, whose geographical investigations have sought to understand how meanings emerge and get made

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Figure 19  Nocturnal from the wreck of the La Belle, c. 1684, after conservation. Courtesy of the Texas Historical Commission.

at various extant or potential “heritage sites,” such as a “derelict homestead” in Montana. In the course of her work at said homestead, DeSilvey encountered “ambiguous matter” that “mixed up the categories [she] used to understand the world,” categories like “artefact” and “ecofact,” among others. What DeSilvey recounts becoming interested in over the course of her fieldwork are the ways decay not only diminishes certain historical traces, or begins to threaten particular ways of knowing, but might be understood to generate “a different kind of knowledge.” “The disarticulation of the object” in the course of its ruination, she writes, “may lead to the articulation of other histories, and other geographies.” As an artifact sheds certain forms of legibility, in other words, it is not only or even primarily less epistemologically rich than it had been previously: “objects transformed or disfigured by ecological processes of disintegration and regeneration,” DeSilvey argues, become “hybrid” “things” which we should understand as having and continuing to acquire multiple lives—or, better yet, multiple kinds of life (2006: 318–35). The obfuscatory habits of oceanic growings-together are habits of articulation as well as disarticulation, excessive figurations whose “oblique commentary” may require protocols of interpretation that the conservation

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laboratory cannot (yet) muster (DeSilvey 2006: 329). As we observed of Adrienne Rich’s commitment to the wreck-in-itself, the ethical stakes of a practice that turns and returns to the “scene” of catastrophe while resisting the urge to sublimate it into “story” are real and consequential (2013: 24). Like Rich’s fouled compass, a concreted nocturnal would seem an unusually apt site for cultivating what Sanyal has described as a regard for “temporality as a changing, many-stranded, and entangled phenomenon”—an attentiveness to historical “vitality” that resonates with particular strength along the contours of an encrusted timepiece (2019: 347). Conventional procedures of archeological and heritage preservation may frequently produce narrative wonders, but an encrusted criticism prods us to consider what is lost as well as gained in the course of bringing things out of concretion. Returning the heavy growths of the La Belle’s nocturnal and planisphere to mind, what ecologies of memory—to adapt DeSilvey’s language—might become differently legible if we recognized these concrescences as oceanic transformations of anthropic debris? (2006: 336). It is an obvious but important fact that the nocturnal and planisphere spent the overwhelmingly greater portion of their conjoined lives as maritime artifacts on the bottom of the sea and as themselves a kind of bottom—as a ground, that is, for the diverse and unravellable encrustations that deformed and reformed them. The matrices that came to enfold them operate, from the vantage of the conservators who erased them, a bit like ornaments—like obfuscatory embellishments upon substrates that (ought) never altogether lose their essential identities as discrete artifacts. As Chapter 1 began to explain, the ornamental ocean is a pivotal, ambivalent, and too-rarely examined feature of marine tropologies in the West. With regard to concretions, this wider decorative topos takes on a distinctly unfavorable valence, one that hinges on the idea that an obliterating encruster is ontologically—and even morally—subordinate to that which it adorns. An ornamenting matrix is, on these terms, something like an “afterthought,” as opposed to the sort of thing that might be recognized as serving some “primary function” (Carter 2010: 69). We have already observed a few of ways that what Isabelle Frank calls the “Western, European tradition” has defined the decorative in terms of objects that have been “added on” to some extant whole, and that cater to the ostensibly frivolous purposes of conveying “sensual pleasure and enjoyment”

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(2014). When they clear smothered specimens of meddlesome concrescence, conservators put matter back in what is supposed to be its rightful place, disintricating extravagant additions from the secret truths they have briefly overwhelmed. Ornament is frequently troped, then, as counter-epistemological: as superfluous to, or even antipathetic toward, substantive knowledge and selfhood. One among numerous influential articulations of this view comes, as the art theorist Gunalan Nadarajan has argued, from the philosopher Immanuel Kant, for whom an adornment is only ever “an adjunct,” never “an intrinsic constituent” (Kant 2000: 38). Nadarajan follows his nearer contemporary, the French post-structuralist Jacques Derrida, in attending in particular to the Kantian concept of the parergon, which refers to such parts of an object as are involved in it “only in an extrinsic way as a surplus, an addition, an adjunct, a supplement” (Derrida quoted in Nadarajan 2007: 44). Like Derrida, Nadarajan does more than accept Kant on the German metaphysician’s own terms. Instead, he identifies in the parergon a “capacity for deconstructive operations” in cases where demarcations between intrinsic and extrinsic become difficult to read, let alone enforce—or where a supplement may come to obtain something like ontological priority over a primary surface (Nadarajan 2007: 44). One might think, in this instance, of Johnston’s account of invertebrate materialities, zones of merging and growing-together productive of unions “so natural and perfect that no difference of structure—not even an ideal line—indicates the original place of meeting” (1842: 11). If this sort of thing might prove perplexing for a nomenclator, we have seen it become the enemy of the archeologist, for whom the loss of indicative meeting-places conduces to the inability to distinguish intrinsic matter, meaning, and story from their allegedly exogenous others. What concerns Nadarajan, above all, are the possibilities of a “parergonal aesthetics,” through which “ornament is deployed in order to unsettle notions of essentiality and functionality” (2007: 51). A deliberately parergonal approach to reading concretional matrices might ask what aspects of a thing’s underwater life could become scrutable through encrustations comprehended as intrinsic constituents of subsea forms. In certain cases, the obfuscating ocean can seem even to necessitate such a framing. Recall, for a moment, Randall’s unidentified materials from the Pandora and the descriptive displacements they came to demand—the uniqueness and interest they seemed suddenly to convey once

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their refusal to neatly declare an artifactual origin became too difficult to ignore. The aesthetic they entreated was characterized, not least of all, by multispecies presence, color, and structure, as though an attention to the ornamental was also and—on the terms of Western philosophy—ironically an attention to the oceanic real. Ornamentation “returns us,” writes the aesthetic theorist Theo Davis, “to the uncertain, unfolding contingency of the immediate” (2016: 12). Parergonal encrustations invite us to (struggle to) reckon the excesses and transformations of marinal ongoingness, bewildering becomings that sometimes enfold anthropic materials and memories in obfuscatory growths. To write them off and out of the objects they outdo is to chip away the intricate details of sea-bottom histories and immersed geographies. Lingering with their commentaries is one of the tasks an encrusted reading takes on, not so much to resolve their obscurities or obliquities as to better perceive their operations.

­Cataloguing Pasts and Futures in Agglomerative Waters As the literary and film historian Margaret Cohen has observed, wrecks and wrecky things are preeminent disrupters of spatial limits and relations—of insides, outsides, tops, bottoms, and so forth (2019: 161). The agglomerative patterns of concrescent seas issue signal challenges to such aesthetic and epistemological conventions as would explicitly or implicitly prioritize the value of depth over surface, or substrate over ornament (di Palma 2016: 21). As agents, in certain respects, of “trans-corporeality,” encrustations are not profoundly enmeshed in all respects, conducive as they can be to the literally surficial attachment of corals, sponges, and other aquatic invertebrates to the artifacts they engage (Alaimo 2008: 238). The exteriority of such growths is an obvious factor in their removal, discursively or materially speaking, from the primary—which is to say artifactual—objects of conventional art-historical and heritage concern. Less evident, but critically pertinent, is the intrication of this epistemological preference for what lies underneath encrusted surfaces with another, overtly aesthetic idea that an ornament is always of secondary importance to that which it adorns. Concrescent seas lend material presence to a few of those varieties of relation that such attitudes cannot, or will not, adequately comprehend. In the pages of archeological reports, upon museum

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floors, and along the sea-bottom, agglomerative excesses perform unruly arrangements of oceanic matter and of time, matrices of becoming that appear unlikely ever to submit fully to being cleaned up. Let us cast our minds back, for just a moment, to a scene from the very early, prefatory section of this book. Upon Colson Whitehead’s East Riverbed, we were invited to read the bones of the workers who built the Brooklyn Bridge mixing among, and maybe-gesturing from, a scattering of refrigerator doors, license plates, and who-knows-what-other stuff. The ambience of Whitehead’s inlet floor is tonally ambiguous, characterized as it is by occlusive “murk” as well as kin-ward stirrings. But whatever ends we think it might (not) serve, symbolically and narratively speaking, this immersed image testifies powerfully to the poetic potentialities of subaqueous spaces which appear to gather disparate matters into novel and eccentric multiples. One useful noun for naming this, I think, is “agglomeration” (from the Latin verb agglomerāre), which the Oxford English Dictionary gives as 1. The action or process by which separate particles or elements collect together in a mass or group; combining in a coherent but often unassimilated or disorderly mass; heaping, binding, or congregating together; the result of this. 2. A mass or assemblage formed by union or approximation, often without assimilation; a loose collection; a clustering or cluster. The pertinence of Whitehead’s estuary-bottom springs from underwater realms’ famous, but arguably little-considered, reputations for clustering things together—for receiving and recombining materials and meanings in provocative ways. Not infrequently, watery recombinations appear not only to challenge assimilation and order but to burlesque them, as if this planet’s submersing majority were engaged in a sort of parody of topside relations and distinctions. In Whitehead’s hands, this messiness conduces to a weird conjunction of the grotesque and the sentimental, and it is the surprising, unsettling poignancy of his (character’s) vision that gives it its power. I think what lies underneath Whitehead’s Brooklyn Bridge is thinkable, productively, as a form of wreckage—and maybe even as a kind of growingtogether. But in case any of that seems strictly incorrect, we need only turn to another and more immediate informant to perceive the agglomerative

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action of concrescing waters upon and with ruined ships. Randall’s rubric for “measuring” the combinative protocols of concretions from the Pandora worked through categories like “artefact material,” “sand and coral rubble,” “shell particles,” “coral,” “bryozoans,” “calcareous algae,” “tubeworms,” and “other.” These words derive from an academic journal in the field of maritime archaeology; a fictional (or semi-fictional) view beneath the waters of the East River they are not. But in contemplating Randall’s and Whitehead’s descriptions in tandem, as experiments in positing (formerly) immersed congregations, it becomes possible to recognize some significant hermeneutic continuities. Like Whitehead’s rubbish, Randall’s “composition” is a sort of ontological heap—of not only the artifactual and the ecofactual but the biological and the inanimate. This is to say nothing of those two notions, “rubble” and “other,” that function a bit like the positive signs of interpretive negativity and that crop up so frequently among the makings of an encrusting ocean (Randall 2000: 23). What, we might ask, does agglomeration achieve as a principle of collection? To what effects does it give rise, and in what manners do its observers attempt to reckon it? It is worth noting that wrecky disorderliness has been registered at multiple spatial and conceptual levels. For Brad Duncan and Martin Gibbs, Port Phillip Heads co-organize an “agglomeration of shipwrecks,” suggesting that the marks made by nautical detritus beneath the so-called Rip and proximate waters may be defined by a sort of constitutive arbitrariness (2015: 55). A metaphorics of agglomeration implies that what these sinkings inscribe on the bottom is a kind of muddle, a loose cluster of nautical catastrophes that does not readily declare its meaning. Rediscovering and naming lost vessels has the effect, under circumstances like these, of counteracting irregularity with practices of historical and narrative assimilation—of recovering the stories of the wreck. Something related takes place near concretions, which express agglomerative behavior in ways that leave linguistic and syntactic traces as well as material ones. In 1886, a British vessel called the Dunnottar Castle departed Sydney for a journey across the Pacific Ocean to Los Angeles Harbor. At Kure Atoll (Hōlanikū), a northwesterly member of the Hawaiian Islands, the ship struck, and became stuck upon, a coral reef. Abandoned by its crew, the Dunnottar Castle gradually broke up amidst the waves. In 2006, its remains were

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discovered by chance and found to be in fairly good shape. Some parts of the wreckage—particularly those bits comprised of wood and fabric—were gone, but its “heavier elements” remained. The maritime archeologist Hans K. Van Tilburg’s litany of said elements is striking for its abundance: Large sections of iron hull plate, iron frames, rigging, masts, auxiliary steam boiler, keelson, anchors, windlasses, winches, capstans, davits, rudder and steering gear, cargo hatches, bowsprit, hawse pipes, chain locker, ballast stone, deadeyes, chains, stringers, bitts, ladders, and so on, are solidly encrusted in place on the sea bottom. Large blocks of coal are also lodged in place. (Van Tilburg 2011: 600)

Van Tilburg’s inventory names the parts of the Dunnottar Castle abundantly and precisely. So doing, it seems to return the vessel a kind of deconstructed integrity: however unusually distributed, this nautical stuff is exemplarily identifiable. During and since classical times, Western poetics has explored a theme known as ubi sunt—in English, “where are”—that often takes shape through a “catalog of absences” serving to emphasize the contingency of life and the unstoppable progress of pitiless time (Hornsby et al. 2012: 214). Van Tilburg’s census suggests something like ubi sunt’s reversal, the wreck site becoming through language a catalogue of artifactual presences whose being “encrusted in place” has somehow become a testament to their endurance and not their having disappeared beneath the surface of the sea. Listing works, here, to return the “surrounding world” to a kind of “order,” to rescue “sequence” and “arrangement” as well as historical data and story (Belknap 2004: xii). In an obvious but significant sense, Van Tilburg’s congeries can be read as according its artifactual constituents a sort of ontological priority in the act of elucidating them. The effect of his long first sentence is to assert the individuated diversity of anthropic objects beyond “elements,” a word that may have threatened to absorb the whole lot into genericity. Like an air scribe, Van Tilburg’s way of looking clears the nonspecific away to not just reveal but enact the singularized. The sentence’s syntactical passivity compounds this sense: these strictly particularized things’ being “solidly encrusted in place” constitutes the extent of the passage’s verbal action. But what an encrusted criticism knows is that the sentence and its companions are haunted by some absented agent(s) of encrustation, members of an excised or as-yet-unrealized

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subordinate clause indicating who or what has fixed all these bits and pieces to the sea floor. Like any list, Van Tilburg’s is a framework attempting to, in Robert E. Belknap’s words, “hold separate and disparate items together” (2004: 2). With relation to growings-together, it is also comprehensible as a sort of metonym for concretionary agglomerations. “Are solidly encrusted,” “and so on”: the contingent inadequacies of the Dunnottar Castle litany may express a hermeneutic refusal to more fully reckon this wreckage, but they cannot ultimately erase the higher-order holding-together effected by concrescent seas. By compiling and keeping heavy elements, these encrustations might even be understood as facilitating the conditions necessary for such superfluity of words. Confronted by the solidly encrusted bits and pieces of the Dunnottar Castle, the nomenclator’s work grows simultaneously promiscuous and banal. It is possible, to be sure, to comprehend these blocks and elements as adding up, so to speak, to make the story of a lost boat. The fact that maritime archeology mostly commits itself to such summations is a reflection of (among others things) such summations’ usefulness. So it is not necessary to contradict such practices to say that assimilating the agglomerated is also a sort of mythmaking, to yet further adapt the terms we gleaned from “Diving into the Wreck.” Another, less conventionally satisfactory mode of engagement might involve apprehending the linguistic articulation of a wrecky agglomeration as an index of matters (temporarily) out of joint. From certain views, the long-windedness provoked by the Dunnottar Castle is interpretable as a triumph of archeological perception and descriptive classification. It could be recognizable, from certain others, as a strenuous accounting for a disassimilated heap, a reckoning with things become irredeemably separate. On Duncan and Gibbs’s terms, the sea should be apprehended as having secured the Dunnottar Castle’s inclusion as one among its innumerable agglomerative drownings. Oceanic encrustings may be doing something similar, if on a considerably more intimate scale, configuring new arrangements of such artifactual and ecofactual particles as grow together upon this stretch of Pacific floor. Heyrick’s “Faithfull” archive prominently included “all/The memorable Conquests of the Sea,” a record that signifies, in the first place, a history of heroic human—and particularly Euro-imperial—maritime endeavor. Among the more remarkable of the “Secrets” so held must be knowledge of “Who

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shall in future Ages rule the Sea”—as well as those other future ages when the sea will reverse the vector of these relations by retaking “what did once belong to Her.” In an era of climate change, and specifically of anthropogenic sea-level rise, concrescent agglomerations can be read as uncannily proleptic of retakings like these. Consider, in this connection, the essayist and scholar Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (2018), a searching confrontation with transformations taking place, and anticipated, along the USAmerican littoral. From a conference venue in Miami, Rush reflects upon some stark watery predictions she has just heard. Should they prove true, she writes, then every single object I have seen over the past seventy-two hours—the periodic table of elements hanging above [a lecturer’s] left shoulder, the buffet currently loaded with refreshments, the smoothie stand at my seaside hotel, the beach umbrellas and oxygen bars, the Johnny Rockets and seashell shop, the lecture hall with its hundreds of mostly empty teal swivel chairs— will all be underwater in the not-so-distant future. (Rush 2018: 70)

There is a complex and important analogy to be traced between a catalogue like Rush’s—at once uncontrollably loquacious and totally mundane—and the one Van Tilburg reported from the remains of the Dunnottar Castle. In Miami, Rush performs the collecting work of scenic description, particularizing her surroundings in order to heighten our sense of the extent and unsparingness of coming inundations. What she conjures is a species of wreck, and what she mobilizes against it is a form of pre-emptive memorial, an elegy for the notyet drowned. As Rush knows, and as Van Tilburg’s enumeration cannot help but admit, the salt waters that may be coming to whelm the smoothie stand and oxygen bars will dismantle their situation while preserving certain of their constituent parts, agglomerating materials vividly and strangely as they do so. Concretions’ epistemological and aesthetic qualities are complicated and multiple: though frequently apprehended as interfering with the interpretation and identification of the things they grow together with, their preservative properties are sometimes credited with securing traces of the past that would otherwise have deteriorated beyond recognition. It bears emphasizing that an approach focused on the patterns of concretionary traces is not remotely exhaustive of oceanic im/materialities. As Arabella Stanger suggests in a study

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of Sondra Perry’s recent Typhoon coming on (2018), the “absence of figural debris” in marinal representation may draw invaluable attention to such “invisibilized” violences as have characterized the consequences of “colonial modernity” (2019: 11). The hermeneutic protocols provisionally sketched in these pages, therefore, represent only some among a multitude of approaches to apprehending wet and more-than-wet ontologies. It is hoped that, for all their limits, these methods will prove applicable well beyond the examples briefly sketched in this chapter. Actually and imaginatively, the structures and meanings of subsea materiality are in a period of extraordinary flux. Here, the proliferating submarine cables that render the internet “global” furnish ever more colonizable surfaces for marine invertebrate life (Starosielski 2015: 54). There, deep sea mining threatens to reduce available “substrate options” for oceanic organisms by scouring the floor clean of suitable matter (Reid 2020: 28). At the same time, as the infrastructures of marine extractivism proliferate and enlarge, oceans are hosting a growing array of “hard surface” (Farrier 2019: 95). All the while, the richly ambiguous status of subsea wreckage—as ongoing or potential environmental hazard, as so much ecologically beneficent “artificial reef,” and so on—has elicited unprecedented interest and importance. Learning to more carefully observe, describe, and curate the material traces of submersed growings-together may leave us somewhat better equipped to reckon some of the sea’s incalculable formations and reformations. If a critical ocean studies calls for, among other things, refreshed attention to marine and submarine bodies and embodiments, the concrescent offers one unusually promising hermeneutic for marking, and even feeling, the oceanic contours of the planet. In galleries, in language, and underwater, agglomerated things are presenting challenging combinations of feature and shape. Among wrecky atmospheres, concretions enact complex, undecidable, and frequently metamorphic growings-together among anthropic and otherthan-human stuff. The foregoing instances suggest the incalculable and unanticipated transformations taking shape along ocean floors. Artifactual, ecofactual, and more, the blue planet’s incalculably numerous submerged becomings disarticulate the matters they grow together with so markedly as to force a distinctive reckoning with the ways we rescue meaning from the ruins of disastrous pasts. Concrescent habits effect excessive forms, multispecies

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and other-than-animate diffracted contours that are simultaneously situated and historied and in tension with terrestrial conventions in situation and historicity. They may be exceptionally generative interlocutors for thinking the entangled pasts, presents, and futures of empire and its aftermaths. Those entanglements are not least of all ecological and climatological. Moreover, growings-together may be salutary incitements to wider considerations of the usefulness (and otherwise) of forms and formalisms for environmental hermeneutics—and the limitations, and strangenesses, of “story.” Protecting, obfuscating, and agglomerating, but not only: more-than-human, morethan-animate concretions are attending to, and reimagining, imperial, postimperial, and other matters. Perhaps we would do well to attune ourselves to them.

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Third Habit: Artmaking Encrustations Exhibited Late in 2019, an exhibition opened at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco entitled Lost at Sea: Art Recovered from Shipwrecks. The show displayed numerous “artworks” that had been successfully “recovered” from two separate, far-flung wrecks. One of the salvage sites in question pertained to a ship that sank off the coast of Somalia, in the Arabian Sea, in 1877. It had been carrying, among other things, a set of twelfth-century stone sculptures plundered from Central Vietnam in the late 1800s, when the region was known administratively as French Indo-China. The other featured excavation was carried out upon a vessel of “hybrid Chinese-Southeast Asia design” that drowned while sailing off the Hoi An coast of Southern Vietnam in the fifteenth century. These latter remains, when discovered and salvaged in the 1990s, were found to contain a five-hundred-year-old cache of “blue-and-white ceramic bowls, plates and jars.” Some two hundred and fifty thousand of these objects, the curators explain, had once comprised the Hoi An trading vessel’s cargo. They were detected, at first, by fishermen who began discovering bits of porcelain in their nets along with the rest of their hauls (“Lost at Sea”). Weighed up from the seabed, the sculptures and ceramics were reestablished as art objects, an ontology that may have been at least occluded, and perhaps denied altogether, while they lay on the floors of the Arabian and South China Seas. Lost at Sea’s “most astonishing artifact,” notes the critic Edward Rothstein, is a baffling thing entitled “Concretion of ceramics from the Hoi An shipwreck, approx. 1450–1500” (2020: A.13) (Figure 20). Like the V&A’s “sea sculptures,” but to a substantially more radical—and more alienating— extent, the Hoi An concretion confronts its observer with the intermingling of

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Figure 20  Concretion of ceramics from the Hoi An shipwreck, approx. 1450–1500. Vietnam. Stoneware, stone, antler, shell, corroding iron, and remains of sea creatures. Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Acquisition made possible by Betty and Bruce Alberts, Will and June Arney Roadman, Annie and Cameron Dorsey, Jean and Lindsay MacDermid, Rhoda Stuart Mesker, and Ann Witter. 2000.31. Photograph © Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

identifiable and unidentifiable objects, describable and indescribable forms. For materials, its caption gives “Stoneware, stone, antler, shell, corroding iron, and remains of sea creatures.” From the perspective presented in the image I provide here, whole and fragmented porcelain artifacts cluster haphazardly around a brittle, rough-looking, gray- and rust-colored substance that looks a bit like exposed concrete, or maybe a bit like petrified wood, or fossilized bone. Looking closely at the surface of the concretional material, whatever it may be, it is possible to discern not only smaller bits of ceramic but myriad shells, not to mention colors, shapes, and surfaces that do not readily declare their identities. At the left side of the image, a large, finely wrought item with a generally rectangular shape juts out relatively cleanly, mostly intact and basically free from encumbering growths. Despite this thing’s clear artifactual nature, explains the Asian Art Museum, it—a “brick-shaped carved stone object”—remains “a puzzle.” Could it have been “part of an altar”? An “incense burner”? (“Concretion of ceramics from the Hoi An shipwreck”) Presented by the Asian Art Museum under the sign of “art,” the Hoi An concretion produces in the transition from underwater life to topside existence

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a generatively ambivalent congeries of aesthetic and hermeneutic provocations. This “really startling item” is, in Rothstein’s words, a “nondescript gray mound,” a “jumbled mass” which “randomly” organizes the things that make it up. The fact of being startled, here, might be expected to conduce to a careful consideration of the Hoi An thing’s surfaces, a heedful detailing of the forms, textures, and indeed lives that could be in evidence there. This would be a way of looking on the order of what Stella Randall’s became when she turned her attention from recognizable to unrecognizable objects recovered from the wreck of the HMS Pandora. In that instance, a preoccupation with what hidden things a concretion might be understood to conceal gave way to concerted interest in surface effects that were also signs of life. Paradoxically, in Rothstein’s case astonishment is rather at odds with his own tacit understanding of the appropriate telos of restoration and exhibition. The latter processes, he writes, properly culminate in objects that “scarcely” express the time they have spent “underwater.” The Hoi An concretion functions, on this view, as a kind of icon of “what this pottery had to be rescued from, at great expense and risk.” Lost at Sea, then, is seen to assemble the fruits of salvage practices interpreted as the heroic recuperation, despite great technical difficulty, of “relics” from “a half-millennium of detritus” (Rothstein 2020: A.13; emphasis mine). In this connection, the Hoi An concretion signifies nothing so much as the residue of excessive oceanity overcome, indistinction clarified, and randomness reorganized. As the exhibition’s accompanying literature makes clear, the Hoi An concretion is not finished transforming. Since it first became exposed to air, certain of its “internal materials” started oxidizing and the entire agglomeration “began to slowly fall apart.” As it has disintegrated, it has begun revealing “unseen objects from the interior.” By the time Lost at Sea welcomed first-hand observers (and subsequently second-hand onlookers, restricted to virtual space by the SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 pandemic), some of the concretion’s newly observable artifacts were enumerated in its labeling, where visitors could “read,” in the curator’s words, “what we are learning from them” (“Concretion of ceramics from the Hoi An shipwreck”). The aesthetic and epistemological protocols of this encounter are not straightforward. On the one hand, the concrescence is reckoned a “really startling” composition, arguably the “most astonishing” in the show. (The words are Rothstein’s, but by positioning the jumble at the center of the relevant gallery, the Asian

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Art Museum also lends it manifest priority.) On the other, the interpretive apparatus designed to help visitors comprehend the “nondescript” entity at hand looks—indeed, narrates—past the concretion to a time when its exterior will have disappeared and its secret objects will have been fully relinquished. It is as though the Hoi An concretion presented such profound problems for characterization that it can only be addressed insofar as it foreshadows the event of its own disappearance, when descriptiveness will succeed to the je ne sais quoi that currently obtains. This dynamic, expressive of a similar kind of “ambivalence” to that which Marion Endt-Jones detected in the vicinity of the V&A’s sea sculptures, is in some important respects unfortunate (2017: 177). By implying that the Hoi An concretion’s interest consists strictly in its being a kind of dazzling prelude to its re-conversion into discrete artifacts, the museum implies that its entanglements—artifactual and ecofactual, natural and casual, and so on—are valuable, at best, in terms of their “merely aesthetic” effects. The latter phrase comes from the cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who in Capitalist Realism lamented the “transformation of culture into museum pieces” and the “conversion of practices and rituals” into inert matter, arrayed for pleasure along the surfaces of gallery spaces (2009: 10). Fisher was thinking of human cultures and their objectifications, but his words are helpful for thinking about other-than-human practices and rituals, too—and about the ways they can be trivialized, even totally erased, through the functions of the so-called heritage industry. In the case of encrusted wreckage, writes Endt-Jones, museological approaches too often ignore the fact of “conjoined matter,” encrusted and encrusting forms that signal an “accretion of time, history and memory” that “jars with any category or classification the Enlightenment museum may have devised for it” (2017: 188). With the Hoi An concretion in mind, we might say that museological practice fails to reckon integrally with what it treats if it can only address an encrusted something by anticipating a time when its accretions will have come asunder and presumably been forgotten. As this and other of our previous examples have begun to show, museums, galleries, and similar institutions are good places to think with because they are locations where the hermeneutic rubber hits the road—where decisions must be made, and language must be framed, around objects’ “provenance,” “location,” and so on (Pearson 2021: 101). If it is true that some of the language

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surrounding the presentation of the Hoi An concretion seems lacking, it is also the case that an alternative protocol sometimes shimmers through the Asian Art Museum’s presentation. Another striking, if not quite so disorienting, thing exhibited at Lost at Sea was a “Storage jar with attached concretion from the Hoi An shipwreck.” In this case, an even pithier object description gives only “stoneware” for an account of the artifact’s “materials.” The museum’s label is subtly provocative, nonetheless, for the way it defines the type of jumbled mass that clings, here, to a “utilitarian” jar. “Concretions,” we read, “are encrustations of material that have been cemented together by sea creatures and their remains (shells, etc.)” (“Storage jar with attached concretion from the Hoi An shipwreck”). However negligent the object description may seem to be of other-than-artifactual elements, the concretionary definition is notable for the way it emphasizes the active contribution of lively “sea creatures,” as well as lifeless “remains,” to the configuration of these strange assemblages. In contrast with—for example—the  syntactical passivity of Rowe’s report from Tobermory Bay and Van Tilburg’s catalogue from the Dunnottar Castle, the curators’ account of cementation would appear to furnish its audiences with a fuller, if also relatively eccentric, view of its agents. The oceanic clusterings of Hoi An spectacularly reconfigure their constituent relations but are—by virtue of their current terrestrial atmospheres— supposedly en route to some more settled, not to say disjointed, state of beings. Nonetheless, by making a concretion an exhibitory centerpiece, Lost at Sea asserts a potent, ambivalent poetics of concrescent becoming. For the time being, until its “slow disintegration” concludes, the Hoi An profusion provokes a mass of detail that does not straightforwardly accrete art-historical meaning (“Concretion of ceramics from the Hoi An shipwreck”). Like the agglomerative lists that attempt to figure it and things like it, the concretion articulates the power to, in Francis Spufford’s account, “halt a horizontal march across the plains of narrative” by constructing a mass of elements “of no obvious usefulness” (quoted in Belknap 2004: 18). (For a few more words on concrescent enumerations, see Chapter 3.) Not yet the sort of “docile matter” that might readily be made to conform to conventions of story or temporality, this stuff continues to figure a materiality that is strikingly excessive and irreducibly oceanic (Bennett and Chaloupka 1993: x). At the same time, in other words, that the agglomeration appears to portend the progressive

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relinquishment of the objects it will be possible to “learn from,” it insinuates a profound, if temporary, oxymoron into the space of the gallery. If institutions “tend,” as John White wrote in his study of the V&A “sea sculptures,” to “limit their understanding of design as a realm of human command and creativity,” then the Hoi An concrescence reimagines form as subject to other-thanhuman articulations and conveyances (forthcoming). The present, final chapter of Reading Underwater Wreckage returns to several of its early themes by asking what we stand to learn by considering the presences within “art” exhibitions of astonishing encrusted things, as well as the stirrings in subsea space of what we might call artfulness. As the foregoing paragraphs have shown, Lost at Sea is an unusually vivid example of the power of growings-together to generate aesthetic effects but denotes, at the same time, the numerous challenges posed by concrescent forms for interpretation and description. It would be a bit simplistic to suggest that the agential and compositional ambiguities presented by the Hoi An concretion and its relations are totally novel. As the proceeding pages will indicate, the idea that “nature” might interact with anthropic matter to effect compelling, ontologically marginal “artworks” is not new. Traditions in interpreting, for instance, terrestrial ruins will prove useful for beginning to characterize the hermeneutic textures of wrecky objects and their disparate trajectories. It bears emphasizing, nonetheless, that seabed and more broadly submarine compositions and exhibitions do express irreducibly distinctive relations with not just materiality but agency, aesthetics, and indeed audience. A landed display of submersed artmaking is, on certain significant terms, an oxymoron, and acknowledging as much might make one small step toward refining how we talk about, and look at, startling marinal stuff. A diverse and rising chorus of curatorial (among other) voices has lately been imagining and reimagining approaches to “curating the sea,” toward more faithfully and integrally configuring engagements with marine realms. For Pandora Syperek and Sarah Wade, a relatively promising method will necessarily prove fundamentally multidisciplinary and consistently attuned to contemporary “threats” to marine life. It will, at the same time, look well beyond the horizons of the present as constituted by traditions in “Enlightenment thought” and by the “modernist ideal of progress” that potently informs orientations toward the “natural world.” If the destination of their gaze is not

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necessarily premodern, it does explicitly take in pre-Enlightenment forms in the arrangement of natural form and knowledge. Syperek and Wade especially highlight the Wunderkammer (German for “wonder chamber”), an originally sixteenth-century term for collections of natural rarities that conduced to a view of creation as brimming over with stupefying, unassimilable wonders (2020: 159–60). (It is probably not a coincidence that such cabinets of curiosity have been widely in vogue, these past several years, among artists and theorists keen to recuperate “lively” and less-determinate orientations to organizing environmental epistemologies and environmental aesthetics (Nixon 2018: 3).) But their orientation is by no means purely retrospective: against “linear exhibition narratives,” Syperek and Wade urge “fluid exhibition possibilities that are necessarily transdisciplinary, transgeographical and even transspecies” (2020: 160). A curatorial distinction between “narratives” and “possibilities” neatly summarizes one of this study’s recurring themes: namely, the difference between accessing the undersea in search of a limited type of historical story and other, substantially more undecidable modes of going under. “Uncertain and transformative” are among the curator and theorist Stefanie Hessler’s keywords for an “oceanic” practice operating “at different temporal scales” and incorporating “various forms of knowledge, both human and nonhuman” (2020: 250). An ostensibly nondescript encrusted something would seem an unusually apt collaborator in an undertaking such as this one. As well as confronting (certain influential kinds of) interpretation with significant difficulties and upending conventional formal relations among artifactual and ecofactual parts, the Hoi An concretion and objects like it create unruly agglomerations of times and knowledges. Shipbuilding, ceramic-making, sailing, drowning, settling, growing-together, salvaging, marketing, and exhibiting are only a few of the durations that have been involved in the lives, underwater and otherwise, of this stuff. The astonishment that accompanies a glimpse of these various combinations might be read, moreover, as the index of unassimilable epistemological presence—of an overwhelming matrix of knowledges that include plural human as well as nonhuman ones, from the manifestly artful to the rubbly. This book has argued, throughout its pages, that by refreshing inherited logics in observation, identification, description, and interpretation in response

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to marinal forms, it may become possible to reckon oceanities differently and—it is to be hoped—more integrally. This task takes on a salutary urgency in relation to philosophies of exhibition, aesthetics, and artmaking, irreducibly complex domains of discourse and of practice that the present chapter will not pretend to summarize. As the past few pages have implied, what this treatment will do is point out a few of the ways that protocols of oceanic becoming may be poorly served by extant structures in explication and display. Ultimately, though, my aim is less to adjudicate the goodness or badness of particular instances of curatorial labor than it is to make the modest but hopeful case that experiments in the curation of encrusted things tend to give rise to theoretical and practical problems of widely consequential kinds. In the weird and unsettling spaces where art meets, and is even made of, marinal encrustations, it is sometimes possible to detect unforeseen trajectories in artfulness—and in the modalities of perception we who meet them may feel driven toward.

Museologies in an Inaesthetic Ocean When the Asian Art Museum’s wrecky things lay—for five centuries, in some cases—on the seabed, were they still art? Or had they, in the absence of (human) interpreters, reverted to some state of relative ontological indeterminacy? Could they even—recalling Thomas Heyrick’s poetics of drowned enrichment, from The Submarine Voyage—have been carried further along, to some higher degree of exquisiteness? (See Chapter 3 for an extensive discussion of Heyrick’s notion and various of its implications.) Lost at Sea’s position on these queries would seem to be at best unsettled, and at worst terracentric, to borrow the historian Marcus Rediker’s evocative term. “Terracentrism,” argues Rediker, is a basically modern disposition toward the relationship between landed and marine zones which tacitly accords the former a quality of the “real” that the latter somehow lack. Among the numerous connotations of such a view are the fallacies that “history happens only on land” and that oceans are by contrast “unreal, ahistorical voids”—“anti-spaces,” in Rediker’s memorable epithet (2013: 115). By presenting the Hoi An matrices as being compelled to free legible meaning—or “learning”—from their clutches as they gradually degrade, Lost at Sea figures oceanic matter as expressing a literally negative

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relationship to hermeneutic possibility. Less concretion conduces, here, to more significance. One does not need to push this logic very far to arrive at a sense for submarine art as a contradiction in terms: if the accretion of oceanic form inevitably occludes interpretable signs, then the undersea would seem to exclude the artful altogether from its repertoire of possibilities. Lost at Sea’s curators did not invent their show’s titular phrase, but by employing it they iterate an old tradition of troping the ocean as a space that does not so much receive things as make them disappear. This convention is so commonplace that my inquiring after it may seem to flirt with triteness. But its influence bears contemplating in relation to exhibitions of “rescued” objects, especially shows that not only anticipate but stage the terrestrial reiteration of the stuff they gather. These protocols suggest that when they sink beneath the waves, artifacts vanish into a sort of parallel dimension, one which obscures their identity, history, and—not least—value so far as to effectively erase them. Not just artifacts, of course: the problem of lost ceramics is comprehensible in terms of a far wider, and sometimes far more terrible, anxiety respecting negative submersings. Here, for instance, is part of the USAmerican writer Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Ocean” (1833), an elegy for perished sailors and a counsel for those who struggle with the drowned having become invisible: The awful spirits of the deep, Hold their communion there; And there are those for whom we weep,— The young, the bright, the fair. Calmly the weary seamen rest, Beneath their own blue sea; The ocean solitudes are blessed, For there is purity. (Hawthorne 1834: 34)

­ hese “seamen” inhabit a “deep” that behaves distinctly unlike the one we T heard sung, in Chapter 1, by William Shakespeare’s Ariel. As if articulating the direct opposite of a “sea change,” Hawthorne’s ballad quatrains give us the total stoppage of progressive modification. Ongoingly “young,” “bright,” and “fair,” the sailors-cum-angels have been awarded a full exemption from the forces of material dispersion and decay. Even dry ground is unseen, on these terms,

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to furnish a preferable alternative—“The earth has guilt, the earth has care,/ Unquiet are its graves”—and this is no trivial gesture, maritime venturing being haunted so by the terror of precluding interment (Hawthorne 1834: 34). “The Ocean” takes care to leave its sinkings off-page, only briefly metonymizing them by way of a contrast between surfaces and depths: “Though there be fury in the waves,/Beneath them there is none” (Hawthorne 1834: 34). Furious waves comprise a delicate substitution, a consoling replacement of the awful prospects of maritime catastrophe by a reassuringly generic marinal quality. For all that, this is nevertheless a wrecky poem, and its faithful inventions emblematize one manner of coping with the representative demands of aqueous vanishments. Hawthorne’s heavenly deep is not just a tonic for the practical difficulty of seeing “Beneath” the waves but a turningaway altogether from the material contingencies of submersion. “In the sea,” wrote James Hamilton-Paterson of immersed corpses, “it is generally the lips, eyes and fingers which go first, being most easily seized by creatures with small mouths or pincers” (1992: 137). Decompositions like these are terrifying not only for what they reveal about the generally precarious (and actually doomed) integrity of human bodies but for how they conjure the specifically dissipative effects of salt waters and their inhabitants. Hawthorne’s abyssal figures are works of poetic art exactly insofar as they establish a discordant relationship with the element into which they have unfortunately fallen, or been cast. “Their own blue sea” is just that, a wholly alternative ocean which admits its reader’s gaze because it has been configured in accordance with one standard of contemplation’s requirements. Human remains and (fragmentary) artifacts are not equivalent, metaphorically or actually. “The Ocean” and its peaceful sleepers are helpful, nonetheless, for our efforts to comprehend the alarm spurred by once-lost things asserting, in the wake of their recovery, the irreducibly idiosyncratic habits of a blue sea not entirely their “own.” Hawthorne’s term for the state his seamen inhabit is “purity,” a concept that resonates powerfully with the cleanings and clearings—successful or otherwise—that have cropped up over the course of this study. Think of Jacques Cousteau off the Tunisian coast, scraping, scrubbing, and hosing the Mahdia marbles and so feeling that he and his colleagues had reestablished them as ancient, and as Athenian. (Turn to Chapter 1 for more on this.) Or think, in a wider sense, of foulers, the surfaces

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they encumber, and the various mechanisms employed to counteract them with feats of making-smooth. (Chapter 2 features a lengthy discussion of such efforts and the frustrations that inspire them.) And so forth: in what can appear to be the overwhelming majority of cases, the fact of physically recuperating the oceanically lost—that is, of bringing disappeared things to sight, and to hand—is a pivotal but insufficient step on the road to returning them their ontologies, artful or otherwise. Rescue’s actual fulfillment frequently requires a secondary act of active or passive de-fouling, as of the “half-millennium of detritus” that Rothstein reads amidst the Hoi An concretion. Dislodging such a burden is an act not only of epistemological but of ideological reorientation, and the impurities so engaged are more than technically troubling. A “drowned museum.” The “calm museum of the floor.” Those are a couple of the phrases Cousteau used to conjure the wrecky spaces explored by his band of adventurers. As I argued earlier, the epithets only make sense as retrospective formulations for subsea regions that at first divulged “nothing” of the appearance of the things they were revealed, in the course of rescue, to contain. Artworks did not so much subside on the bottom of Cousteau’s Mediterranean Sea as become remade in the process of their recovery. What salvage was effecting, in this instance, was the reconfiguration of “units of form,” to adapt the cultural historian Tricia Cusack’s words, “against the formlessness of the ocean” (2014: 8). Cusack is thinking, above all, of seascapes’ well-known tendencies to frustrate conventions in pictorial feature. With regard to submersed art, however, oceans can appear to not just decline to participate in standard views but to energetically deform the previously featured. “Radicalement inesthétiques” was Alain Corbin’s shorthand for such early modern European impressions of the sea as comprehended oceanicity as chaotic, impure, and essentially unnatural (1988: 14). “Inaesthetic” is an unusually apt word for an element appearing to be not only unpleasing but fundamentally void of aesthetic potential. As an “anti-creation,” a realm is more than imperfectly formed (Guerrini 1995: 114). It is really inimical to form. Some intriguing continuities articulate themselves between Corbin’s inaesthetic ocean and contemporary accounts of seas becoming erased and unformed in the throes of marinal extinctions (Quigley 2022). For present purposes, though, what I have wanted to underline are a very few of the ways that the artful and the oceanic have been regarded as mutually

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opposing energies at the same time that the undersea has been imagined to contain untold recuperable aesthetic treasures. It might be a bit rich to call this a paradox. Better, perhaps, to observe the simpler but not necessarily less suggestive fact that the generation of art from underwater has often been taken to entail the restoration of the very possibility of appreciable form to things that had temporarily inhabited form’s elemental antagonist. The nondescript, the jumbled, the random: rescuing pottery (for example) from such conditions of submerged indefinition is doing a great deal more than moving past a perceptual horizon to bring back a refound artifact. Rothstein refers to the “great expense and risk” involved in conveying the contents of Lost at Sea from the sea-bottom to a gallery floor. As mighty, we might say, has been (and will be) the achievement of unremembering the sub-marinal deformations that rendered certain of these art objects temporarily incoherent. Their coming, suddenly or slowly, to index their underwater lives only “scarcely” is not merely a peripheral feature of their becoming relocated as well as re-legible and re-read. The foregoing has attempted to somewhat more fully characterize the labors—imaginative, anti-fouling, and so forth—that attend terrestrial displays of drowned “art.” But this leaves unaddressed another, arguably stranger, and yet pertinent tropology of subsea exhibition. For the self-styled underwater explorer James Delgado, the maritime archeologist’s workplace is “that great, rarely visited museum on the ocean floor.” Diving on shipwrecks and “learning their stories,” Delgado claims, entails a “responsibility” to “bring forth the images and stories and share them” (2001: xiii). This spirit of bringing-forth shares with Cousteau’s vision a sense for the seabed as an extraordinary and limitless showroom, but Delgado’s salvage objects are the stories of the wreck, not such monumental works of ancient art as might be discovered amid the debris. “Museums without walls” is a common epithet for drowned remains apprehended in a spirit of historical recovery as much as, and often more than, prospective material reclamation (Kenderdine 1997: 7). “Wrecks,” avers the archeologist Sean Kingsley, “should be used as museums for memory and education” (quoted in Alberge 2020). Being prepared, through work in wallless galleries, are not salvaged artifacts or art objects but information and narrative, as of “what really happened” in the event of nautical travel and of nautical ruin, or what practitioners might call “the moment of deposition”

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(Ascherson 2021). Wreck sites are, from these vantages, a little like sunken heritage museums, and their discursive, ideological, and performative aspects are just as worthy of examination as any other institution of this sort (Katriel 1993: 71). That in situ conservation of shipwreck sites is the practice of choice for scientists, heritage professionals, and others appears manifestly preferable to its more extractive alternatives (Edney 2016: 281). It bears emphasizing, nonetheless, that the archeological ideal of a great oceanic museum shares more with the terrestrial project of exhibiting rescued art than may be immediately obvious. In both cases, the material forms and reformations effected by encrusting seas are at best aids to the preservation of artifactual integrity— think of the calcareous growths that clad the USS Monitor, as described in Chapter 3—and at worst directly hostile to legibility and interpretation. If this is a wide spectrum, what holds it together is a sense that marinal enfoldings of wrecky stuff are not epistemologically, narratively, agentially, temporally, or aesthetically interesting on anything like their own terms. The stories and images that are reckoned worth conveying from submersed memorymuseums are commonly construed as emerging rather cleanly from the waters, sediments, ornaments, and growings-together that may have helped hold them. “On the bottom,” mused Delgado, “on a ship that slipped beneath the waves with guns firing, time seems to stand still” (2001: ix). Such seeming stillness, however actually contingent upon the unstill habits of the sea that accomplishes it, conduces directly to the quality of “insight into the past” a fragment of “underwater cultural heritage” is perceived to offer (Perez-Alvaro 2019: 3). The undersea’s status, throughout, remains conceptually subordinate: even when salt waters are taken to effect extraordinary conservations, what they conserve is ideally hailed as unscathed, not oceanically enriched. In a galvanizing recent book, the interdisciplinary scholar Sara Rich theorizes athwart what she understands as the interpretive assumptions carried to shipwrecks by underwater cultural heritage frameworks. Through such framings, she argues, wrecks are conceived as “public secrets harbored in watery beds and pried out to be told, visualized, experienced.” What this protocol refuses, Rich writes, are the “inscrutable ontological realities” that really characterize “watery wreckage,” realities that are actually “capable of dismantling the murky, fluid boundaries between past and present, sacred

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and secular, ‘nature’ and culture,” and “life and death” (2021: 13–14). Rich’s inspiriting criticism draws attention, first of all, to the persistent tropologies that have shaped patterns of wrecky thought, and that have largely preoccupied the book you now read: tropologies of secrets revealed, stories excavated, treasures rescued, and so forth. Moreover, her attention to scrutation and its others points toward the essential, and essentially fraught, roles of legibility and of “reading” amidst practices of apprehending drowned ruins. Such practices will inevitably falter, she explains, if they fail to comprehend the limits of an anthropocentric hermeneutic (willfully) negligent of wrecks’ “heterotopian, holobiontic qualities”—their tendency to shrug off whatever “telos” a tendentious interpreter attempts to project upon them. Worst of all may be a “resurrection model” of wrecky reading, one that strips a sunken thing of its multifarious liveliness in the act of reanimating it narrowly (Rich 2021: 18–22). Such reanimations are everywhere at work, not only from the sea floors that are Rich’s primary studies but from galleries and archives. An encrusted criticism calls attention to the strictly—and sometimes startlingly—partial natures of ideologies of formal and informational rescue and asks what descriptive and interpretive resources might incline us otherwise. As Lost at Sea’s “Storage jar with attached concretion” has already indicated, such resources are frequently close at hand, and a first step toward accessing them may entail little more than better structuring our sentences. The witting or unwitting subtext of that concrescent thing is that “sea creatures and their remains” have “cemented together” certain “encrustations of material,” material that includes and exceeds an artifact in stoneware. Creaturely agencies come suddenly to mind, potently if uncertainly, as language reorients attention to a kind of artfulness constituted by—and not in spite of—what the artist and theorist Kuai Shen Auson has described as “intricate multispecies associations.” Growingstogether become recognizable, on these terms, “as aesthetic performances,” not as occlusive clusterings of the nondescript requiring reconstitution (Auson 2019: 681; emphasis mine). More promising still, the associations and performances so acknowledged not only allow for but insist upon a sensitivity for the milieux they have inhabited and helped establish. Far from inaesthetic, but not straightforwardly scrutable, oceanities begin to emerge, here, as something other than conveyances for or hindrances to anthropic artmakings

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and memories. As the next section endeavors to show, some more intricately immersed developments in submarine aesthetics are taking (and losing) shape beneath the surfaces of earth’s seas. Their performances may prove animating.

More-Than-Human Interest in Underwater Museums The idea that the sea floor, in particular, might be construed as an exhibitory domain has earned a good deal of renewed attention lately, thanks in part to the artist Jason deCaires Taylor’s numerous submersed installations, to innovative terrestrial shows like Lost at Sea, and even to such rather more questionable efforts as Damien Hirst’s roundly maligned spectacle of imaginary plunder, the Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable (2017) (O’Hanlan 2019: 149–51). (We briefly encountered deCaires Taylor, and his The Unstill Life (2007), in Chapter 1. I encourage you to thumb your way back to that image as a point of reference for the following.) As Hirst’s example makes vividly and uncomfortably clear, an aesthetic sense for the seabed is always at risk of being perverted into an exoticizing one. To regard the ocean as primarily a repository of novel sights and stuffs, that is, may be to treat it as not much more than a candidate for “resource conversion”—as an example, in methodological and epistemological terms, of what Macarena Gómez-Barris has called an “extractive zone” (2017: xvi). As the preceding section of this chapter has attempted to suggest, extractions and conversions of a not-so-spectacular— but nonetheless concerning—sort function frequently among efforts to return to the submersed to a state of being found. Practices of deliberately drowning artifacts in order to effect a kind of artfulness may offer some fruitful points of contrast with approaches predicated, so profoundly, on ideals of recovery and rescue. Exemplary of such alternatives are the subaqueous installations of deCaires Taylor, who over the course of nearly two decades has assembled more than one thousand immersed sculptures at sites around the world, from Grenada in the Caribbean Sea to the shores of Bindal and Wulgurukaba country, along the Great Barrier Reef. They have been constructed, deCaires Taylor explains, with ecological “benefit”—with positive foulings, we might say—at front of mind. In a 2014 survey of his sculptural sinkings, entitled The Underwater

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Museum, the artist claimed to have by then “created more than one thousand square meters of habitat space for various types of marine life” (8–9). Becoming purposefully lost beneath the waves, these artworks were operating from the start through multiple ontological situations. Their being aesthetic objects unfurled in tandem with, and not in contradiction to, their being (potential) “habitat space,” and it is not difficult to understand why so many have found this simultaneity so compelling. Through these performances, artistic and ecosystemic values are seen to not just travel together but mutually establish one another, as if beauty and biodiversity were literally identical pursuits, at depth and possibly elsewhere. Among the things that make deCaires Taylor’s oeuvre so pertinent to an encrusted criticism are its complex and unresolved relations to protocols of marking and unmarking, inscription and erasure. “My objects,” he explains, “are moments in passing.” What is being proposed, here, is a specific theory of aesthetic duration—better, durations—that has significant consequences for artfulnesses and their acknowledgment (or not). Citing his formative experiences as a graffiti artist in the UK, deCaires Taylor asserts a sensitivity to the idea of artmaking as the production of a “temporal encounter.” Tagging a train car, he explains, entailed the generation of an aesthetic object, and the potential for an aesthetic encounter, that was predicated upon an awareness of their inevitable extinguishment. Just as his graffiti would be “washed off ” what it had decorated, so do the sculptures become “covered by algae,” a process whereby “details and forms” become “lost forever.” The overt horizon, so to speak, of deCaires Taylor’s oceanic practice is therefore that practice’s becoming occluded so far as to become actually undetectable. Along what the sculptor calls “defacing surfaces,” anthropic form is primary only in the comparatively humble sense that it comes before deformations that will finally unwrite it (deCaires Taylor 2014: 8). “Instead of leaving my mark on the environment with my work,” avers this underwater museologist, “the environment is leaving its mark on my work” (deCaires Taylor 2014: 8). The antithesis is powerfully appealing for what it suggests about the potential for creative relinquishment to constitute an artful gesture. Thinking with encrustation, however, attunes us to the really unendingly intricated relations that are growing-together upon this planet’s ocean floors. As deCaires Taylor would no doubt accept, his work makes

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marks on subsea environments, sometimes monumentally so. One recent installation, The Coral Greenhouse (2019), is reputed to weigh one hundred and sixty-five tons (deCaires Taylor 2019). Thus, surely, a pivotal aspect of these underwater museums’ allure: as (frequently) colossal interventions in underwater zones, their sheer size implies the scale of the ecological difficulties they seek to address, as well as the extent of art’s potential to ameliorate them. If a mark like this one is bound to become overtraced, what results is sure to more closely resemble a kind of palimpsest than a surface cleaned of every recognizable detail and decorated anew. For at least one prominent interlocutor, the potential of deCaires Taylor’s sculptures to inscribe previously “featureless stretches of seabed” with novel marks is exactly what lends them their imaginative potency (Scales 2014: 28). In an essay for The Underwater Museum, the critic and curator Carlo McCormick interprets the likes of The Coral Greenhouse as so much making-legible, and making-navigable, of otherwise incomprehensible realms: Much as early man looked to the vast unknown of the heavens above and projected a diagrammatic cosmology of animals and gods upon the stars, using the known and recognizable to make intelligible aspects of the universe beyond our ken, Jason deCaires Taylor proffers the identifiable as a kind of literal anchor by which we can navigate the mysteries of the ocean deep with some level of discernment. (McCormick 2014: 11)

By “the identifiable,” McCormick means deCaires Taylor’s well-known practice of mobilizing a subsea aesthetics through what might in the first place be called mundane figurations—of cars, tables, domestic spaces, and above all human figures. On this account, the submersed exhibitions are engaged in the making-scrutable of an element that had previously languished—and, where presently unanchored, still languishes—in a state of essential unintelligibility. We would seem to have returned, here, to the inaesthetic ocean, albeit from a place of relatively greater faith in anthropic art’s capacity to make it discernible. To remake a void in “man’s” image, the implication goes, we might simply take up the manifestly artifactual—Lost at Sea’s describable things, perhaps— and arrange them underwater, delivering identifiability to spaces that had not known it previously.

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With an encrusting ocean in mind, McCormick’s manner of characterizing deCaires Taylor’s achievement reads as weirdly forgetful of the innumerable literal anchors—wrecky ones not least—that have long helped structure human frames for locating the submarine. But simply decrying such a view is not my intention here. The underwater museums are frequently described, by their maker among others, in explicitly didactic terms, as mechanisms for conveying (for instance) a “strong message” respecting anthropogenic ocean warming and its consequences for marine life (Chomicki and Palmer 2019). By postulating so consequential—and so unambiguous—a relationship between sculptural intent and spectatorial learning, a rhetoric of strong messaging coincides with McCormick’s suggestion that these works perform an aesthetics of clear writing and easy reading. And to an obvious but nonetheless fascinating degree, that resonance chimes awkwardly with deCaires Taylor’s claims respecting the defacing and unmarking of the surfaces he drowns. Can these apparently conflictual trajectories in oceanic artmaking—here, toward environmental communication, and there, toward environmental effacement—coexist without rendering one another mutually incoherent? Holding The Unstill Life, The Coral Greenhouse, and deCaires Taylor’s other sculptural immersions alongside this book’s many growings-together makes it possible to recognize the underwater museums’ interpretive complexities as instances of a wider hermeneutic ambience. The core provocation of an encrusting ocean is its tending to give rise to signs that are simultaneously perceptible and not conventionally scrutable. It will not be necessary to rehearse this study’s many examples to recall the varieties of compensation, if not obliteration, that this tension has frequently provoked in its observers. What deCaires Taylor’s own summary—his antithesis between environmental markings and artful ones—ironically reinforces is a binary sense for subsea hermeneutics. On these terms, we remain in the realm of things that are either lost or rescued, and these “roles” becoming “reversed” is not the same as their coming to more faithfully reflect the real entanglements of the matters at hand (deCaires Taylor 2014: 8). What wrecky growths have been showing us, in league with the more scrupulous among their commentators, is that the thing itself presents neither the prospect of anthropic marks enduring pristinely nor the tidy vanishment of human traces. Each of those images

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furnishes an affiliated form of consolation, a story offering to condense unruly agglomerations into deposits of uniform and stable meaning. The underwater museums assert their strong—if unstraightforward— affinities with submerged wreckage to anyone happening to dive upon them. Anthropic structures at the seabed cannot but evoke disastrous sinkings, and the accession of new life thereupon inevitably suggests the transformative protocols of watery ruins. For that matter, deCaires Taylor’s own accounts of his art’s configurations in and of marine space help clarify these continuities. Recollecting the first of his submarine installations, the sculptor describes working with fellow dive operators in Grenada to help that island’s ecosystems recover from Hurricane Ivan, in 2004. “All the tourists” responded to the devastation by flocking to, and so increasing pressure on, the last “pristine reef ” left in the storm’s wake, an area located at a westerly site called Flamingo Bay. The “underwater sculpture park” that deCaires Taylor and his collaborators subsequently devised was designed to provide divers and snorkelers an “alternative, a bit like a shipwreck, that could help to start to divert some of that traffic” (quoted in Gillespie 2021). They chose, in other words, to inscribe a kind of alluring sign on the sea-bottom, one that prospective seagoers might choose to scrutinize. “A bit like a shipwreck,” the museum at Molinere Bay was an (intentional) episode in the making-legible of oceanic space, a spectacle functioning to charm its audiences away from places their presence had the potential to harm. To be clear, deCaires Taylor’s sculptures have been credited not just with analogously resembling but with really exceeding wrecky phenomena. The underwater museums “will stay solid and firm for many years,” even “decades,” writes the marine biologist and author Helen Scales, and this will lend “slowgrowing corals plenty of time to create their own self-renewing edifices.” Most “shipwrecks,” by comparison, “swiftly corrode and crumble away” (Scales 2014: 25). Whether or not this contrast rings true—various of this book’s remains have been nothing if not sluggish crumblers—it underscores the degree to which the naufragous sea has defined many of the terms of marinal marking, and of subsea artmaking. This is important, because it implies that for an artist committed, like deCaires Taylor, to exploring the distinctive qualities of the “most incredible exhibition space an artist could ever wish for,” the parameters of an undersea aesthetics have been set by agglomerative, natural-

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casual sinkings that express unusually ambivalent forms in materiality, agency, and meaning (2015). They have been set, in other words, by submersed ruins, the articulations of excessive, transformative oceanities that have reputations for nothing so much as burlesquing human purposiveness, no matter martial, commercial, scientific, or aesthetic. (It bears noting that in this regard, the underwater museums may also be extending their spectators the simple but not-insignificant relief of seeing something appearing to break down. “Antiruins” is the art historian Abigail Susik’s perceptive appellation for such oceanborne, frequently plastic detritus as is “nearly immortal” and “will long out live [sic] us in a horrifying, zombie-like fashion” (2012). A corroding, crumbling thing may prompt, instead, the ironically reassuring awareness that certain human manufactures will eventually unburden the planet of their forms.) As they become ornamented and reformed, the drowned sculptures do more than shed their natures as anthropomorphic artworks. They persist as substrates at the same time that their features become reimagined by otherthan-human, and even other-than-animate, colonizers. Of a figure named Grace, from a large Mexican installation called The Silent Evolution (2010), deCaires Taylor explains that her first surface resident was a “fuzzy layer of turf algae.” Subsequently this layer vanished, “perhaps nibbled down by grazing fish,” to be succeeded “by patches of orange and pink coralline algae.” In time, writes her sculptor, Grace’s “features are lost beneath layers of encrusting coral and sprouting tufts of fleshy algae” (deCaires Taylor 2014: 62–3). Upon another sculpture, this one dedicated to a man named Leocadio Rodriguez Garcia, the first settlers are said to be a “fine halo of stinging hydroids.” What follow them are “red and pink blotches of coralline algae and brown coral colonies that eventually establish after three years and cover up his features” (deCaires Taylor 2014: 72–3). Yet another, called Charlie Brown, “is completely smothered” by a “luxuriant growth of pink sponges, fleshy green algae, and purple patches of coralline algae” (deCaires Taylor 2014: 96–7). Growing-together, with and from anthropoid contours, are not only emergent ecological communities but agglomerations of shapes, textures, colors, and other aesthetic occurrences, every one of them relationally conceived. Concrescing, furthermore, are heady and undecidable mixtures of times, agencies, and desires—and an art criticism heedful of these involutions will prefer tracing their curvatures to digging them up in search of story.

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As deCaires Taylor’s own testimony has implied, histories of the underwater museums point to the Molinere sculpture park as exemplary of the installations’ general potential for promoting “biological diversity” at sites “that might otherwise hold little interest for underwater visitors” (Scales 2014: 28). An other-than-human regard for sea-sculptural aesthetics compels us to broaden our sense of who and what those “visitors” might comprise—and for the forms such “interest” might take. This may ultimately be the truly radical incitement of The Silent Evolution and its ilk: the demand that immersed things be recognized, rightly, as matters of concern for a multifarious, and only semi-scrutable, oceanic matrix. Here as elsewhere, I employ the latter term advisedly, winking at that oddly straitened sense for matrices as only ever holding “archaeological finds” and other “cultural debris” within them. (For more, see Chapter 3.) A better accounting would reckon them as articulations of “multispecies submarine ontologies,” as Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues in her outstanding commentary on deCaires Taylor’s submersions. “These transformations,” DeLoughrey writes, “are truly unforeseeable,” since the humanoid sculptures’ “very eyes have been reconfigured” by what grows with them to host “other kinds of sensing mechanisms” (2017: 42). Scrutiny becomes both more luxuriant and more precarious from optical faculties encrusted through feats of unanticipated, other-than-human attention. Beyond antitheses of anthropic and environmental (un)marking, deCaires Taylor’s sculptures perform what might properly be called “morethan-human” aesthetics (Heise 2017: 299; emphasis mine). An attitude toward artful sinkings that perceives them as given over, fully and finally, to subsea curation hazards the ethical as well as interpretive mistake of reifying strict boundaries between the terrestrially intact and the oceanic lost. On the other hand, the notion that topside conventions in expression and legibility slide smoothly between the waves with their communicative capacities—and their meanings—utterly secure treats the submarine as a blank canvas needing filling in. What are being navigated, upon and from these underwater museums, are provisionally choreographed but essentially uncertain enfoldings of human and other-than-human interest, aesthetics, and interpretation. If they agglomerate forms of intelligibility, these are not invitations to easy or consoling reading. In the proceeding, final section of

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this chapter—and of this book—we will return to some familiar matters to consider what a more-than-human sculptural practice stands to teach us about them.

R ­ e-Entering Concretion Among the objects resident at the Davis Museum, Wellesley College are a few compellingly ambiguous things called, in the language of the collections database that arranges them, “sea sculptures.” In one of the works, stacks of chipped and shattered teacups agglomerate, with layers of encrustation, into an asymmetrical, many-tiered mass of ceramic artifact and indefinite sediment. From one perspective (Figure  21), the “sculpture” looks almost stable enough to stand. From another (Figure 22), its bearing is exposed as irredeemably wonky, one of its axes being encumbered by an extra, especially fragmentary protrusion. This thing’s full name, Sea sculpture from the Ca Mau shipwreck, functions to both categorize it as a particular—if unusual— sort of artwork and to distinguish its provenance. Its point of origin is set forth as a Chinese ship, sunk in a fire sometime in the 1720s or 1730s and found by fishermen working of Vietnam’s southern Cà Mau province in 1997 (Flecker 2011: 20–1). Its object record, however, gestures right past the wreck and its centuries-long submergence to define the assemblage strictly in terms of its inception as an artifact. “Made” in China around 1725 by an “unknown” artist working in the “medium” of porcelain, the sea sculpture is classed as a member of an “object type” called “decorative arts” (“Objects”). Classificatory systems like the one at work in the Davis Museum produce descriptions that are inevitably partial, and to acknowledge as much is by no means necessarily to impugn their usefulness. But with the sea sculpture in view, the space that separates the details purporting to characterize a thing from that thing’s evident appearance may look exceptionally wide. Whether or not this Sea sculpture’s appearance rendered this obvious, its provenance will by now have informed us of its kinship with the V&A somethings we contemplated toward the very beginning of this book. Like those “sculptures,” this one was acquired from the Vietnamese government in 2007 via the Amsterdam branch of Sotheby’s auction firm (Jörg 2007). These

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Figures 21 and 22  Unknown, Chinese, Sea sculpture from the Ca Mau shipwreck, c. 1725. China. Porcelain. 5 7⁄8 in. × 8 ½ in. × 7 in. (14.9 cm × 21.6 cm × 17.78 cm). Decorative Arts. Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, Museum purchase, The Dorothy Johnston Towne (Class of 1923) Fund, 2007.67.

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materials’ collective commoditization for the international art market is, it bears reiterating, a crucial aspect of their becoming articulated as “sea sculptures.” As this book has attempted to show in some detail, their being recognized as tradeable owes something, in turn, to longer histories of salvage—as well as to a very broad sense for the undersea as the repository of extraordinary lost or unrealized value: as the location, for instance, of a quantity of precious minerals exceeding that of “all the continents combined” (Hylton 2020). Regarding the V&A specimens, White interprets those objects’ movements—from sea floor to Sotheby’s to a display case in London—in terms of the belated culmination of a capitalist “trajectory” that, far from being subverted, may have been strangely enhanced by their becoming temporarily drowned (forthcoming). Thus a very few parts of what we might call the problems with “sea sculptures,” difficulties that the foregoing segments of this study have endeavored to keep in view, and to describe. In what little space remains, I aim to gather several of our strands together toward asking to what extent, and in what ways, an ambivalent discourse of oceanic artmaking might represent a productive (as well as undecidable) mode of reckoning with wrecks and their more-than-human worlds. As we have already begun to observe, sea-sculptures and the agglomerated relations they express tend, as they emerge from (frequently Global South) salvage sites to be distributed via the currents of the global art trade, to be made subject to acutely reductive forms of interpretation, aestheticization, and valuation. One of the queries Reading Underwater Wreckage has hoped to raise, and to train our attentions upon, is whether such simplifications are also the negative signs of a host of possible, preferable hermeneutic alternatives. Such others, I am suggesting, include comprehending and describing sea sculptures as subjectively and agentially intermediate artworks constituted at marinal, and sea-bottom, scales. To demonstrate as much would be to do more than enlarge standard formal and interpretive vocabularies or widen extant aesthetic frames. It would involve critically evaluating those frames’ susceptibility to integrally apprehending the habits of an encrusting ocean—and maybe even to becoming encrusted themselves. For assistance I resummon one of our early informants, with whom we have so far tarried only too briefly. Rachel Carson’s “Undersea,” first published in

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1937, is, as Chapter 1 argued, a potent testament to the enduring value of an ornamental hermeneutics. It is a great deal more than that, too, and not least among its contributions is the declaration of ambivalent submarine poetics that it asserts at its very outset: Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of midocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere. (Carson 1937: 322)

Prospects for sea-knowing become even less certain from here, as Carson’s opening lines venture onward toward the “ocean floor” and—deeper still— “the recesses of the abyss.” With her second paragraph, however, she asserts the real epistemological potential of immersive unknowing: To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea we must shed our human perceptions of length and breadth and time and place, and enter vicariously into a universe of all-pervading water. (Carson 1937: 322)

This arrives, mind you, at the beginning of an article of a few thousand words, printed in The Atlantic magazine, for reading with earth-bound senses. It makes, as David Herman has pointed out, a signal, self-conscious instance of the “paradox of narrative prosthesis”—of the simultaneous denial and enactment of the “possibility of imagining the experiential worlds of animals living underwater” (2016: 53). That it does so is not incidental, as Herman knows and as Carson knew better, to the universe it addresses and enters, a sensory realm that both invites “human perceptions” and refuses the greater part of their satisfactions. Like many of this book’s primary influences, Carson knows the ocean, obliquely, as a substantially detrital zone—as pervaded, and indeed sustained, by the “remains” that it receives “from the land” and that it produces and recycles itself (1937: 325). The luxuriant descriptions she employs to render the world of waters are more than expert evidence of the natural history of the sea. They are ways of sensing, experiments in characterization that both

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rely on human faculties and push those faculties against the limits of an anthropic imaginary. Dropping downward a scant hundred feet to the white sand beneath, an undersea traveler would discover a land where the noonday sun is swathed in twilight blues and purples, and where the blackness of midnight is eerily aglow with the cold phosphorescence of living things. Dwelling among the crepuscular shadows of the ocean floor are creatures whose terrestrial counterparts are drab and commonplace, but which are themselves invested with delicate beauty by the sea. Crystal cones form the shells of pteropods or winged sails that drift downward from the surface to these dim regions by day; and the translucent spires of lovely Ianthina are tinged with Tyrian purple. (Carson 1937: 323–4)

Here, again, the transportive qualities of Carson’s prose belie the uncertain intelligibility of the scenes she sketches. This marine floor is a space where the formal conventions of the terrestrial world are inverted and oceanic denizens become invested with an exquisite marinal aesthetics that seems incontrovertibly the sea’s own. These protocols of making and unmaking—of and from cones, shells, sails, and spires, in all their particular colors—take shape with Carson’s writing, but their being scrutable in letters and words never succeeds in altogether transcending their alterity. “Undersea” is a modality of encounter that is at once strenuous and uncertain, knowing and unknowing— and in this, it models some promising trajectories in aesthetic impression, and in submerged art-writing. As Carson was well aware—but as her essay opts not to explore—a dropping-down to the seabed can furnish meetings with not only white sands but with shipwrecks and other ruins. The galleries of delicate beauty bodied forth by “Undersea” take shape, in wrecky situations, through variously preservative, obfuscatory, and agglomerative growings-together of artifactual and ecofactual matters. As deCaires Taylor’s drowned museums are helping us understand, the interest that issues from such foulings is never univocally expressed, let  alone unilaterally attended-to. Like Randall’s cognizing the unrecognizable, Carson’s knowing unknowing effects a self-consciously tentative and unresolved mode of relating, through observation and language, to unruly becomings. This, I have been

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learning, is the glimmer of a practice of environmental hermeneutics that does not pretend to be adequate to concrescing and other wrecks in a total sense—but that points toward, and helps animate, some more integral vectors in the interpretation thereof. The practice, that is, of an encrusted art criticism starts in a more searching and more caring—and inevitably more frustrated—delineation of the contours of (previously) sunken things, and in a scrupulous recording of their articulations, even (or especially) as they prove temporarily or permanently inscrutable. Unidentifiable surfaces and depths may offer unforeseen arrangements of material and maker to those willing, or simply compelled, to register and reckon the limits of their intellection. I hope Reading Underwater Wreckage has seemed prepared to do so, and perhaps to provide its readers with some tools for undertaking the same themselves. What we are learning from the sea-bottom is that concrescing things combine forms and practices of artfulness that become, as they grow together, more than the sum of their parts. That their jointure gives rise, from not a few perspectives, to a confrontation with the nondescript might—ought—be hailed as an incentive to address encrustations as nearly as possible, and not to look, narrate, or indeed scribe past them. This would entail striving to see things themselves, in all their adorned and adorning immediacy, as opposed to treating them as the not-quite-rescued. Such a project may appear to hazard a species of facile romanticism: by seeming to valorize the unidentifiable, the wrong kind of encrusted criticism can come to look like a kind of quietism, if not just another in a long line of ruinbibbings. Reading Underwater Wreckage has endeavored a different kind, one that reads the unrecognizable as a site where meanings, histories, and futurities are being agglomerated, recollected, and remade. The otherwiseidentifiable, and otherwise-recognizable, become conduits to interpretation that an anti-fouling hermeneutics tends to clear away. Ultimately, a rigorous attention to submerged somethings—human, other-than-human, and more-than-human, natural and casual—serves critical pluralisms that are not just convenient for, but demanded by, matters like these. Excessive oceanities are growing-together with, transforming, and rearticulating the stuff they accommodate. At shipwrecks and elsewhere, the habits of encrusting seas are becoming perceptible at the same time that they

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are compelling us observers toward unfamiliar thresholds of description and interpretation. Fouling, concrescing, and artmaking are a very few of the ways we might productively be reading and writing their frequently astonishing, and as often obfuscating, contours. These pages have sought to muster some tools for better heeding them.

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Index Abimleck, Jonas 66 Aboriginal Australians xxiii Wadawurrung people and country xiv–xv, xix, xxi, xxv aesthetics environmental 11, 28, 31 inaesthetic ocean 31, 137, 143 Agate Beach (Oregon) 84–5 agglomeration 119–23 air scribe 112, 121 Albemarle, Duke of 65–6 algae xvii, xxi, 13, 15, 19, 53, 60–1, 76, 80, 85, 88–9, 98, 142 coralline 97, 146 turf 146 zooxanthellae 54 Anthropocene 8, 31 anti-fouling see fouling archaeology 14, 29 conservation 101, 103, 114, 139 maritime 101, 112, 117, 120–2 matrix 112–13, 116, 147 archive, figure of 105–6 “Art of Living under Water, The” (Halley) 69–70 artificial reefs 19, 88, 124 artmaking 26, 30–1, 127–54 Asian Art Museum (San Francisco) 30, 127–32, 134–5, 140 Atlantis 105–6 barnacles 48, 80, 100, 111 “BAT395—Concretions” 96 beachcombing xxii Beale, John 27, 43, 106 Beckmann, John 72 biofouling see fouling blue humanities 7 Blumenberg, Hans 17 Botanic Garden, The (Darwin) 59

“Bottom of the Harbor, The” (Mitchell) xxviii–xxxi Boyle, Robert 43 Brathwaite, Kamau 27, 39 bryozoans 28, 98 Burnet, Thomas 18 cables, submarine 124 Cameron, James 19 Campbell, John, Duke of Argyll 73 Campeche (Mexico) 30, 103 capitalism 28, 80–1 Carson, Rachel 16, 41, 60, 150–2 cementation 76, 111, 131 Cervantes, Miguel de 67–8 Chuuk Lagoon 18 Clark, Jonathan 84–5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 18, 81–2 collecting naturalia 44, 46 Wunderkammern 46, 131 Colossus of New York, The (Whitehead) xxix–xxxi concrescing xxiv, 26, 29–31, 95–125, 127–33, 140, 146 concretions see concrescing coral xvii, xx–xxi, 2, 4, 19, 23, 28, 36, 40, 44, 46, 48, 50–1, 54, 60, 79, 95, 98, 100, 146 reefs 56, 65, 120 Coral Greenhouse, The (deCaires Taylor) 143–4 Corbin, Alain 18, 137 Corsi, Peter Paul 70 Cousteau, Jacques 13, 20, 33–6, 47, 53–5, 136–8 Covid-19 84, 129 Cowley, Ambrose 76 critical ocean studies 7, 96, 124

176 Darwin, Erasmus 59–60 Davis Museum (Wellesley College) 148 De architectura (Vitruvius) deCaires Taylor, Jason 30–1, 60, 141–8 decoration see ornament Defoe, Daniel 67–9, 105 Derrida, Jacques 30, 117 Descartes, René 50–1 diving 9 archaeological 101 engines for 43, 65, 67, 69, 73 Indigenous 64, 70, 75 for pearl and pearl shell 64 SCUBA xvi–xix, xxii for sponges 33 “Diving into the Wreck” (Rich) 89–93 doldrums 82 Dutch East India Company 75, 97 East India Company (British) 73–4 ecocriticism 12, 88, 92 ecofact 14–15, 19, 32, 37, 49, 61, 92, 98, 102, 124 The Economist 86, 88 Elizabeth I, Queen 71 Ellis, John 51, 64, 78–9 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 51 empire 28, 34, 44, 64–6, 73–5, 101–7, 122, 125 Enlightenment 34, 46, 75–6, 130, 132–3 environmental hermeneutics see hermeneutics environmental humanities xxxi, 7–8, 12 Essay upon Projects, An (Defoe) 67–8 Ezekiel, Book of 18 Fisher, Mark 130 Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary 19 fouling xxi–xxii, 26, 28–9, 63–93, 113, 136–7 anti-fouling 83–4, 88 biofouling 80, 86 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 38 Gilpin, William xxii–xxiii Glissant, Édouard 39 gold rush, Australian xxi gorgoniæ 13

Index “Grave, A” (Moore) xxx Great Barrier Reef 98 Gulf of Mexico 65, 89, 101 greenwashing 88 grottos 55–6 Halley, Edmond 69–70 Hamilton-Paterson, James 8, 20, 47, 67–8, 77–8, 104 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 135–6 Hazlitt, William 58 heritage industry 130 hermeneutics 22–6, 37–8, 92, 98, 100–1, 130, 144 anti-fouling 153 encrusted 38, 41, 58, 89, 124 environmental 20, 27, 36–8, 125, 153 ornamental 151 Heyrick, Thomas 30, 104–7, 122–3, 134 Hirst, Damien 141 History of Inventions and Discoveries, A (Beckmann) 72 holobiont 54–5 Houtman Abrolhos Islands 29, 97 hydroids 146 hydrozoans 13, 15, 48, 96 invasive species 84–5, 89 invertebrate marine organisms 21, 28, 47–53, 88 iron xxi, 84, 87, 96–7, 113–14, 121 jellyfish 50, 86, 89 Johnson, Samuel 56 Johnston, George 50, 52, 54, 107–9, 117 Kant, Immanuel 57, 117 Kipling, Rudyard xxi Kure Atoll (Hawaiian Islands) 120 La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de 113 Leonidas of Tarentum 81 Linnaeus, Carolus 50 lists 121–2, 131 Livy xxiii Loos, Adolf 56 Lucretius 17 “Lycidas” (Milton) 73

Index Man’yōshū 30, 104 maritime archaeology see archaeology Medina Sidonia, Don Alonso 71 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 51, 107–9 Milton, John 73 mining, deep sea 124 MIR 1 104 Mitchell, Joseph xxviii–xxxi Moore, Marianne xxx Morris, Robert 61 Musée National du Bardo 34 Natural History (Pliny) 64 natural philosophy 22 natureculture 8 Neruda, Pablo 30, 104 New York Harbor xxvi–xxviii East River xxix–xxx ocean studies xxxi, 7–9 “Ocean, The” (Hawthorne) 135–6 ontology more-than-wet 71, 100, 124 wet 95, 100, 124 ornament 21, 29, 56–8, 60–1, 116–18 “Ornament and Crime” (Loos) 56 Ovid 51, 107–9 oysters 51 parergon 30, 117 Pasqua (or Sasqua), John 66 Pateshall, Nicholas xiv The Pearlers (Robinson) 64 Perry, Sondra 124 Peyssonnel, Jean-André 51 Phips, William 43, 65–8, 105 pilotage xx Pindar 104 Plato 105 Pliny the Elder 64 Pope, Alexander 56 Port Phillip Bay/Nerm xiv–xxii, xxvi Popes Eye xvii–xviii Port Phillip Heads xx–xxii, 120 The Rip xix–xxi The Wall xix projecting 43–4, 66 Pseudoalteromonas luteoviolacea (bacteria) 86

177

Queenscliff, Victoria, Australia xiv–xvi, xx–xxvi Queenscliffe Maritime Museum xxiii–xxv wreck bell xxv–xxvi queerness 109–10 Randall, Stella 98–101, 117, 120, 129 Reading, John 77 Rhodian Sea Law xxiii Rich, Adrienne 29, 89–93, 116 Richard III (Shakespeare) 63–4 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The (Coleridge) 18, 81–2 Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (Rush) 123 Ronald Reagan, USS 86 Rowe, Jacob 73–7, 111, 131 Royal Society of London 43–4 Rush, Elizabeth 123 Ruskin, John 6 Sacred Theory of the Earth (Burnet) 18 Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, story of 107–9 salvage xxiii–xxiv, 17, 22, 28, 43, 65, 70–7, 102, 111–12, 137, 150 poetics of 105–7 Schulman, Grace xxv–xxvi Scientific Revolution 27, 42 sea-level rise, anthropogenic 123 “sea polyp” 109 “sea sculptures” 1–6, 9, 14–15, 22–5, 127, 130, 148–50 Shakespeare, William 39–42, 63, 106 sharks 64 shipwrecks Adellar 75 Batavia 29, 96–8, 102, 104 Bom Jesus 103 Brisbane, HMAS 88 Cà Mau 2–5, 148 Dartmouth 72 Dunnottar Castle 120–3, 131 Exxon Valdez 18 Hoi An (Vietnam) 127–35 Joseph H. Scammell xxiv La Belle 113–15 Mahdia, 33–6, 47, 53–4, 136

178 Mary Rose 70 Monitor, USS 30, 103, 139 Nuestra Señora de la Concepcíon 65–6 Pandora, HMS 98–9, 117, 120, 129 Poompuhar (India) 111 San Esteban 101 Sanchi 18 Sea-Venture 41 Second World War 18 Spanish Armada 72 Swan 72 Thistlegorm, SS 19–20 Tobermory Bay (Scotland) 28, 73, 75–8 Vansittart 73–5 Silent Evolution, The (deCaires Taylor) 146–7 Silent World, The (Cousteau) 13, 20 Slave Wrecks Project 84–5 slavery 44, 70, 73, 84 Sloane, Hans 44 Sotheby’s 5, 148 South China Sea 6 Spanish Armada 71 sponges, marine xvii, xx–xxi, 13, 28, 33, 44, 48, 50–2, 60, 95, 109, 146 story 26, 33, 39–41, 89–92, 101–3, 116, 120, 131, 133

Index Submarine Voyage, The (Heyrick) 30, 104–7, 111, 122–3, 134 Systema Naturae (Linnaeus) 50 technology 28 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 39–42, 47, 106 thalassography 38, 95 terracentrism 37–8, 134 tributyltin (TBT) 84 tubeworms 60, 98–9 spiral 100 Typhoon coming on (Perry) 124 ubi sunt 121 “Undersea” (Carson) 60, 150–2 underwater cultural heritage 22, 139 underwater museums 137–46 unidentifiability 99–103, 128, 153 UnStill Life, The (deCaires Taylor) 60, 144 Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) 1–6, 15–16, 23, 127, 130 Vitruvius 56 Western Australian Museum 96 “Whelk” (Schulman) xxv–xxvi Whitehead, Colson xxix–xxxi, 92, 119–20 zoophytes 50–1

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