Fieldnotes from Solaris: Ship's Logs, Shipwrecks, and Salt Water as Medium

Hamann focuses on the fieldnotes from Solaris as a response to the dual paradoxes of void and barrier, and explores Mediterranean-Atlantic history in the Hispanoamerican world from 1421 to the late seventeenth century. The term Mediterratlantic is used to counter the second paradox of oceanic studie...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Grey room 2021-12, Vol.85 (85), p.100-145
Main Author: Hamann, Byron Ellsworth
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Archives & records
History
Navigation
Shipwrecks
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Hamann focuses on the fieldnotes from Solaris as a response to the dual paradoxes of void and barrier, and explores Mediterranean-Atlantic history in the Hispanoamerican world from 1421 to the late seventeenth century. The term Mediterratlantic is used to counter the second paradox of oceanic studies--but it has implications beyond them as well. To counter the first paradox, he brings together two kinds of material traces dynamically generated by the act of navigation itself: ship's logs and shipwrecks. These eloquent fieldnotes from a watery world provide them with a kind of saline archive. They offer an important complement (and contrast) to the land-based records so useful for previous studies of early modern navigation, sources that documented saltwater journeys after the fact: navigation treatises, satiric letters, cautionary travelogues, courtroom proceedings.
ISSN:1526-3819
1536-0105
DOI:10.1162/grey_a_00330