Our planet Earth is a blue planet . . .
. . . over seventy percent of it is covered by the sea. The Pacific Ocean alone covers half the globe. You can fly across it non-stop for twelve hours and still see nothing more than a speck of land.
David Attenborough
We know that the title of the BBC series Blue Planet and Blue Planet II revealing the life of the world's oceans refers, apparently obviously, to our planet Earth. It is a "common" cultural reference but with a source in a relatively recent history.
Earthrise . . .
The source of this idea that we live on a blue planet is contained in a photograph, this photograph!
TIME magazine says of this photograph:
It’s never easy to identify the moment a hinge turns in history. When it comes to humanity’s first true grasp of the beauty, fragility and loneliness of our world, however, we know the precise instant. It was on December 24, 1968, exactly 75 hours, 48 minutes and 41 seconds after the Apollo 8 spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral en route to becoming the first manned mission to orbit the moon.
December 24 1968
The Guardian ran this story on the front page of the print edition on 14 Jan 2020 with this headline and subheading:
Record heat in world's oceans is 'dire' warning on climate crisis
Scientists say warming of planet is irrefutable and accelerating
This story by Damian Carrington on 13 Jan 2020 brings us a report on the current condition of the world's oceans.
And it is NOT good news!
He writes:
The heat in the world’s oceans reached a new record level in 2019, showing “irrefutable and accelerating” heating of the planet.
The world’s oceans are the clearest measure of the climate emergency because they absorb more than 90% of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases emitted by fossil fuel burning, forest destruction and other human activities.
The new analysis shows the past five years are the top five warmest years recorded in the ocean and the past 10 years are also the top 10 years on record.
The amount of heat being added to the oceans is equivalent to every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens all day and all night.
Hotter oceans lead to more severe storms and disrupt the water cycle, meaning more floods, droughts and wildfires, as well as an inexorable rise in sea level. Higher temperatures are also harming life in the seas, with the number of marine heatwaves increasing sharply.
The most common measure of global heating is the average surface air temperature, as this is where people live. But natural climate phenomena such as El Niño events mean this can be quite variable from year to year.
“The oceans are really what tells you how fast the Earth is warming,” said Prof John Abraham at the University of St Thomas, in Minnesota, US, and one of the team behind the new analysis. “Using the oceans, we see a continued, uninterrupted and accelerating warming rate of planet Earth. This is dire news.”
“We found that 2019 was not only the warmest year on record, it displayed the largest single-year increase of the entire decade, a sobering reminder that human-caused heating of our planet continues unabated,” said Prof Michael Mann, at Penn State University, US, and another team member.
The analysis, published in the journal Advances In Atmospheric Sciences, uses ocean data from every available source. Most data is from the 3,800 free-drifting Argo floats dispersed across the oceans, but also from torpedo-like bathythermographs dropped from ships in the past.
The results show heat increasing at an accelerating rate as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. The rate from 1987 to 2019 is four and a half times faster than that from 1955 to 1986. The vast majority of oceans regions are showing an increase in thermal energy.
This energy drives bigger storms and more extreme weather, said Abraham: “When the world and the oceans heat up, it changes the way rain falls and evaporates. There’s a general rule of thumb that drier areas are going to become drier and wetter areas are going to become wetter, and rainfall will happen in bigger downbursts.”
Hotter oceans also expand and melt ice, causing sea levels to rise. The past 10 years also show the highest sea level measured in records dating back to 1900. Scientists expect about one metre of sea level rise by the end of the century, enough to displace 150 million people worldwide.
Dan Smale, at the Marine Biological Association in the UK, and not part of the analysis team, said the methods used are state of the art and the data is the best available. “For me, the take-home message is that the heat content of the upper layers of the global ocean, particularly to 300 metre depth, is rapidly increasing, and will continue to increase as the oceans suck up more heat from the atmosphere,” he said.
“The upper layers of the ocean are vital for marine biodiversity, as they support some of the most productive and rich ecosystems on Earth, and warming of this magnitude will dramatically impact on marine life,” Smale said.
The new analysis assesses the heat in the top 2,000m of the ocean, as that is where most of the data is collected. It is also where the vast majority of the heat accumulates and where most marine life lives.
The analysis method was developed by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and uses statistical methods to interpolate heat levels in the few places where there was no data, such as under the Arctic ice cap. An independent analysis of the same data by the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration shows that same increasing heat trend.
Reliable ocean heat measurements stretch back to the middle of the 20th century. But Abraham said: “Even before that, we know the oceans were not hotter.”
“The data we have is irrefutable, but we still have hope because humans can still take action,” he said. “We just haven’t taken meaningful action yet.”
LODE 1992
Re:LODE 2017
The LODE Zone Line and coastlines . . .
The Oceans figure prominently in the LODE project of 1992, as determining twelve of the locations for the creation of the LODE Cargo of Question. These locations were situated on the coasts and shorelines of mainland Europe, Asia, Java, Australia, Colombia and Eire. The performances of loading and unloading in the ports of Liverpool and Hull completed the circle. And the art installations of 1992, in the Bluecoat Liverpool and the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, marked the places of these two maritime cities situated on the western and eastern coastlines of northern England.
Other coastlines along the LODE Zone Line remain to be included in the process of this ongoing project; the island of Heligoland; the Russian and Kazakh coastlines of the Caspian Sea; the coastlines of the island of Sumatra; the coastlines of the South Island of New Zealand; and the coastlines of Puerto Rico.
Unregulated releases of chemical and biological pollutants and global heating present an existential threat to the inland Caspian Sea.
This image of was used in a story headlined Seals, caviar, oil, warming: Caspian Sea faces severe pollution threat published in the Japan Times April 17 2019. The caption reads:
A gull walks on the shore of the Caspian Sea in Baku in March. Seals, once a common sight on Baku's waterfront, have been declared endangered. Pollution from oil and gas extraction, along with declining water levels due to climate change, pose a threat to the seal and other species such as the famed beluga sturgeon, and put the future of the Caspian Sea itself is at risk.
In the present context of the Re:LODE project of 2017 and Re:LODE Radio 2020 the global importance of the condition of the Oceans and Seas requires creating a level of "visibility" that goes beyond the reverie and gaze we might direct toward the distant (or not so distant) horizon.
In 1992 the LODE research (and the Information Wraps of news stories) concentrated on the human situations found along the LODE Zone Line, and the coastline provided a pause for re-charging, re-engaging with the spirit and the experience of nature that most landscape based art tries to conjure for the gaze of its audience. In a word (or two); the Sublime!
Nevertheless, the LODE and Re:LODE Cargo of Questions Information Wraps make many references to those histories that have shaped the globalized political and economic system of contemporary capitalism, and have included the Seven Seas and Oceans as part of these accounts.
In the Re:LODE Methods & Purposes section of Re:LODE 2017 the article on Globalisation - before the word - and now! ends with a reference from the biography of Joseph Conrad by Maya Jasanoff:
Conrad wouldn't have known the word "globalization", but with his journey from the provinces of imperial Russia across the high seas to the British home counties, he embodied it. He channeled his global perspective into fiction based overwhelmingly on personal experience and real incidents. Henry James perfectly described Conrad's gift: "No-one has known - for intellectual use - the things you know, and you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached." That's why a map of Conrad's written world looks so different from that of his contemporaries. Conrad has often been compared to Rudyard Kipling, the informal poet laureate of the British Empire, whose fiction took place in the parts of the world that were colored red on maps, to show British rule. But Conrad didn't set a single novel in a British colony, and even the fiction he placed in Britain or on British ships generally featured non-British characters. Conrad cast his net across Europe, Africa, South America and the Indian Ocean. then he wandered through the holes. He took his readers to the places "beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines," onto the sailing ships that crept alongside the swift steamers, and among the "human outcasts such as one finds in the lost corners of the world."Page 7, The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
These lines of communication, these networks, are part of what it takes to "stitch the world together". Perhaps it is in these flows of things and information that the essence of "modernity" emerges. And as Rudyard Kipling said:
Transportation is civilisation!The shipping records of the past can now be used to produce a moving image of the flows of goods, people and information, as well as monitoring the patterns of trade in our age of containerisation.
The British Empire vanished long ago, and not many people read Kipling anymore. But Conrad's world shimmers beneath the surface of our own. Today Internet cables run along the seafloor beside the old telegraph wires. Conrad's characters whisper in the ears of new generations of antiglobalization protesters and champions of free trade, liberal interventionists and radical terrorists, social justice activists and xenophobic nativists. And there is no better emblem of globalization today than the containership, which has made transport so cheap that it's more efficient to catch a fish in Scotland, send it to China to be filleted, then send it back to Europe for sale, than it is to hire laborers in situ. Ninety percent of world trade travels by sea, which makes ships and sailors more central to the world economy than ever before.Page 7-9, The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
This amazing video represents the movement of shipping as seen from space begins with a global view that pans eastwards across the Indian Ocean towards the Molacca Strait.
Global ship traffic seen from space - FleetMon Satellite AIS and FleetMon Explorer
To quote FleetMonCom
A week of ship traffic on the seven seas, seen from space. Get a glimpse of the vibrant lanes of goods transport that link the continents.The vessel movements were captured using newest terrestrial and space-borne AIS technology from FleetMon and its partner Luxspace. The records cover the world's merchant fleet with some 100.000s of cargo ships, tankers, ferries, cruise ships, yachts and tugs. FleetMon provides advanced fleet monitoring services, software APIs, reports and analyses of maritime traffic data. The inset shows live monitoring with the FleetMon Explorer software.
The Seven Seas
In the nineteenth century, seafarers like Joseph Conrad sailed in tall ships, like the famous Cutty Sark. The Clipper Ship Tea Route from China to England was the longest trade route in the world.
This route took sailors through seven seas near the Dutch East Indies: the Banda Sea, the Celebes Sea, the Flores Sea, the Java Sea, the South China Sea, the Sulu Sea, and the Timor Sea.
So, the Seven Seas, in these quarters and during these times, referred to those seas, and if someone had sailed the Seven Seas it meant he had sailed to, and returned from, the other side of the world. And it is also the case that it was precisely in this part of the world that the modern history of the globalisation of trade begins, with one nodal point in the East Indies and another across the wide Pacific in a silver mine in what was then called New Spain.
It was the Manila Galleons (Spanish: Galeón de Manila) that were instrumental in making global trade a reality. These were the Spanish trading ships which for two and a half centuries linked the Philippines with Mexico across the Pacific Ocean, making one or two round-trip voyages per year between the ports of Acapulco and Manila, which were both part of New Spain. The name of the galleon changed to reflect the city that the ship sailed from, and the term Manila Galleons is also used to refer to the trade route itself between Acapulco and Manila, which lasted from 1565 to 1815.
The Manila Galleons were also known in New Spain as "La Nao de la China" (The China Ship) because it carried largely Chinese goods, shipped from Manila.
White represents the route of the Manila Galleons in the Pacific and the flota in the Atlantic. (Blue represents Portuguese routes.)
The Manila Galleon trade route was inaugurated in 1565 after Augustinian friar and navigator Andrés de Urdaneta discovered the tornaviaje or return route from the Philippines to Mexico. The first successful round trips were made by Urdaneta and by Alonso de Arellano that year. The route lasted until 1815 when the Mexican War of Independence broke out. The Manila galleons sailed the Pacific for 250 years, bringing to the Americas cargoes of luxury goods such as spices and porcelain, in exchange for silver. The route also created a cultural exchange that shaped the identities and culture of the countries involved.
The Manila-Acapulco galleon trade finally began when Spanish navigators Alonso de Arellano and Andrés de Urdaneta discovered the eastward return route in 1565. They were given the task of finding a return route. Reasoning that the trade winds of the Pacific might move in a gyre as the Atlantic winds did, they had to sail north to the 38th parallel north, off the east coast of Japan, before catching the eastward-blowing winds ("westerlies") that would take them back across the Pacific.
Trade with Ming China via Manila served a major source of revenue for the Spanish Empire and as a fundamental source of income for Spanish colonists in the Philippine Islands. Until 1593, two or more ships would set sail annually from each port. The Manila trade became so lucrative that Seville merchants petitioned king Philip II of Spain to protect the monopoly of the Casa de Contratación based in Seville. This led to the passing of a decree in 1593 that set a limit of two ships sailing each year from either port, with one kept in reserve in Acapulco and one in Manila. An "armada" or armed escort of galleons, was also approved. Due to official attempts at controlling the galleon trade, contraband and understating of ships' cargo became widespread.
Between 1609 and 1616, 9 galleons and 6 galleys were constructed in Philippine shipyards. The average cost was 78,000 pesos per galleon and using timber from approximately 2,000 trees.
"From 1729 to 1739, the main purpose of the Cavite shipyard was the construction and outfitting of the galleons for the Manila to Acapulco trade run."
Due to the route's high profitability but long voyage time, it was essential to build the largest possible galleons, which were the largest class of ships known to have been built. In the 16th century, they averaged from 1,700 to 2,000 tons, were built of Philippine hardwoods and could carry 300 - 500 passengers.
The galleon trade was supplied by merchants largely from port areas of Fujian who traveled to Manila to sell the Spaniards spices, porcelain, ivory, lacquerware, processed silk cloth and other valuable commodities. Galleons transported the goods to be sold in the Americas, namely in New Spain and Peru as well as in European markets. East Asia trading primarily functioned on a silver standard due to Ming China's use of silver ingots as a medium of exchange.
As such, goods were mostly bought by silver mined from Mexico and Potosí. The cargoes arrived in Acapulco and were transported by land across Mexico to the port of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, where they were loaded onto the Spanish treasure fleet bound for Spain.
This route was the alternative to the trip west across the Indian Ocean, and around the Cape of Good Hope, which was reserved to Portugal according to the Treaty of Tordesillas. It also avoided stopping over at ports controlled by competing powers, such as Portugal and the Netherlands. From the early days of exploration, the Spanish knew that the American continent was much narrower across the Panamanian isthmus than across Mexico. They tried to establish a regular land crossing there, but the thick jungle and malaria made it impractical.
It took at least four months to sail across the Pacific Ocean from Manila to Acapulco, and the galleons were the main link between the Philippines and the viceregal capital at Mexico City and thence to Spain itself. Many of the so-called "Kastilas" or Spaniards in the Philippines were actually of Mexican descent, and the Hispanic culture of the Philippines is somewhat close to Mexican culture. Even after the galleon era, and at the time when Mexico finally gained its independence, the two nations still continued to trade, except for a brief lull during the Spanish–American War.
How a trade route becomes a UNESCO World Heritage project
In 2014, the idea to nominate the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade Route was initiated by the Mexican ambassador to UNESCO with the Filipino ambassador to UNESCO.
An Experts' Roundtable Meeting was held at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) on April 23, 2015 as part of the preparation of the Philippines for the possible transnational nomination of the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade Route to the World Heritage List. The nomination will be made jointly with Mexico. The papers presented and discussed during the roundtable establish the route's Outstanding Universal Value.
The Mexican side reiterated that they will also follow suit with the preparations for the route's nomination.
Spain has also backed the nomination of the route in the World Heritage List and has also suggested the archives related to the route under the possession of the Philippines, Mexico, and Spain to be nominated as part of another UNESCO list, the Memory of the World Register.
In 2017, the Philippines established the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Museum in Metro Manila, one of the necessary steps in nominating the trade route to UNESCO.
This video shows the maritime trading flows that shaped global capitalism in the period of European colonial exploitation of the resources of subjugated peoples in the east and in the west.
A year of ships
To quote Ben SchmidtA looped visualization of all the voyages in the Climatological database for the world's oceans as if they occurred in the same year, to show seasonal patterns in ship movements and predominant shipping lanes from 1750 to 1850.
Entr'acte
Trains and boats and planes . . .
Joanie Sommers – “Trains And Boats And Planes” (Capitol) 1967
Nowadays global communication and travel take place using trains and boats and planes. In 1992 the transportation used for the LODE project included air travel, trains, boats and cars. The carbon footprint for these researches and creative activity would have been significant by today's standards and expectation. But that was then and this is NOW! Today's here and NOW requires actions that adopt the principle-led approach and methods of Greta Thunberg in her recent 2019 trans-Atlantic crossings. There is a Wikipedia article on this called the Voyage of Greta Thunberg.
Video Shows All Roads, Air, and Shipping Routes on the Entire Planet
To quote baric82
See more on: Science NewsScientists are thinking about starting a new geological era: the Anthropocene, the period of geological, environmental and biological transformation of the planet by humans. Cities, towns, shipping routes, global roads and air networks are all changing Earth. This video shows the extent of this change.
The new era's name (anthropo- means human and -cene means new) refers to the effect of humans on Earth ecosystems, including the transformation of terrain and life all around us. This visualization of Earth-made by anthropologist Felix Pharand-Deschenes-shows this effect.
While there is a growing awareness of the environmental impact of aviation and its carbon footprint there is less understanding of the current scale of the environmental cost of shipping. This story by Sandra LaVille for the Guardian (Mon 9 Dec 2019) on how European shipping emissions are undermining international climate targets says that greenhouse gas emissions equal the carbon footprint of a quarter of all passenger cars.
European shipping emissions undermining international climate targets
In 2008 this Guardian report by John Vidal on a leaked UN report carried this alarming new information that carbon emissions pollution from global shipping was three times higher than previously thought.
The true scale of climate change emissions from shipping is almost three times higher than previously believed, according to a leaked UN study seen by the Guardian.
It calculates that annual emissions from the world's merchant fleet have already reached 1.12bn tonnes of CO2, or nearly 4.5% of all global emissions of the main greenhouse gas.
The report suggests that shipping emissions - which are not taken into account by European targets for cutting global warming - will become one of the largest single sources of manmade CO2 after cars, housing, agriculture and industry. By comparison, the aviation industry, which has been under heavy pressure to clean up, is responsible for about 650m tonnes of CO2 emissions a year, just over half that from shipping.
Deep Sea and Foreign Going by Rose George - review
Sukhdev Sandhu is startled by how much we rely on container ships
Sukhdev Sandhu
Fri 13 Sep 2013
In The Sea Inside, his recent tribute to the imaginative potency of the ocean, Philip Hoare decried the rise of the container ship: "No one rhapsodises over these maritime pantechnicons," he observed. "No one celebrates their arrival after heroic journeys to and from the other side of the world." Containerisation is widely seen as a symbol for much of what's wrong with modern society – the way it renders bustling port cities into semi-anonymous non-places, its emphasis on profitability over people, its role in ushering in an especially alienated form of globalisation.
According to Rose George, even the men who work on container ships don't show much interest in the boxes they transport: "They think they are boring, opaque, blank. Stuff carrying stuff." But she finds that blankness "entrancing" and, in Deep Sea and Foreign Going, an account of a five-week trip from Felixstowe to Singapore, has penetrated a world noted for its secrecy – most container ports, heavily protected by barbed wire and security cameras, are segregated from the cities in which they are found – to produce an ethnographic travelogue that is as fascinating as it is troublingly insightful.
The cultural theorist Paul Virilio has argued that "we are moving from a revolution in transport to one in loading". That's not exactly the kind of revolution that makes front-page news. Part of the challenge for anyone who writes about logistics and infrastructure is to show how a subject that appears remote impacts on the lives of the general public.
George does this by the simple trick of opening her eyes: aboard an English train she looks at the headphones, uniforms and trolley food in front of her and explains that almost all of them have been brought here by ship. The reason is economics: shipping has become so cheap, she explains, that it's less costly for Scottish cod to be sent 10,000 miles to China to be filleted and then exported back to restaurants here than it is to pay the (already small) salaries of Scottish filleters.
Container ships, often assumed to be more environmentally sound than sending freight by road or air, are catastrophic in other ways too: collectively they produce more pollution than Germany; by 2008 the sewage they discharge had created more than 400 oceanic dead zones; in Los Angeles the sulphur dioxide they spew is responsible for half the city's smog; the level of underwater noise they generate is rising by three decibels every decade and causing acoustic hell for fin and blue whales.
It's rare for researchers to get access to container ships: owners often have a lot to hide. George's Maersk shipping line-sponsored voyage is not conventionally eventful (she spends a lot of time playing backgammon with a terse third officer), but her arguments are action-packed. In an excellent chapter set in the Gulf of Aden she skewers (tacitly) historians such as Marcus Rediker, who represent pirates as radicals who subverted the values of Atlantic capitalism and (explicitly) Harvard Business School, which, in 2010, selected Somali piracy as its business model.
Some readers may want to hear more first-hand accounts from Asian workers on board the containers.
Those who are theoretically inclined and eager to understand the relationship between containerisation and coastal "exo-urbanism" will turn first to Olivier Mongin's Villes Sous Pression. But this is still a remarkable work of embedded reportage – hair-raising, witty, compassionate – that deserves to be read alongside Allan Sekula's groundbreaking Fish Story (1996) and by anyone interested in the cartographies of the contemporary world.
Fish Story
FISH STORY by ALLEN SEKULAFish Story by Allen Sekula is mentioned above in Sukhdev Sandhu's review of Deep Sea and Foreign Going by Rose George.
The "blurb" at MACK, advertising this commodity, a product of "critical realism", says:
Completed between 1989 and 1995, Fish Story saw Allan Sekula’s career-long pursuit of a contemporary ‘critical realism' reach its most complex articulation. Fish Story reconstructed a realist model of photographic representation, while taking a critical stance towards traditional documentary photography. It also marked Sekula’s first sustained exploration of the ocean as a key space of globalisation. A key issue in Fish Story is the connection between containerized cargo movement and the growing internationalization of the world industrial economy, with its effects on the actual social space of ports.
The ambition of Fish Story lies both in its immense complexity and global scope and in its emphatic challenge to the dominant climate of postmodern theory and practice of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Fish Story occupies a pivotal place in a gradual shift, still nascent in the early 1990s, from a widespread culture of resignation and cynicism to one of renewed radical engagement in the art world.
In the the section of the work titled RED PASSENGER Sekula references Frederick Engels The Condition of the Working Class in England.
Sekula notes that Engels account begins aboard the deck of a ship, and like the beginning of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the ship's location is the River Thames, and sailing towards London Bridge from Woolwich."For Engels, the increasing congestion of the Thames anticipated a narrative movement into the narrow alleys of the London slums. Very quickly, the maritime view - panoramic, expansive, and optimistic - led to an urban scene reduced to a claustrophobic Hobbesian war of all against all."
Sekula then notes that Engels original "geographical passage from river to city was on a more subtle level a historical shift from one motive force to another:""the river was still ruled by wind while the city ran on coal."Sekula quotes a footnote that Engels added to the 1892 German reissue of his book The Condition of the Working Class in England:
"This was so nearly fifty years ago, in the days of picturesque sailing vessels. In so far as ships still ply to and from London, they are only to be found in the docks, while the river itself is covered with ugly, sooty steamers."
Twenty five years ago,
this was the scene on
the Jakarta Sunda Kelapa
quay where the traditional
"pinisi" are loaded and
unloaded with the cargoes
of the wide Indonesian
archipelago.
PinisiThe pinisi or phinisi are a type of rig, that includes the masts, sails and the configuration of the ropes (‘lines’) of Indonesian sailing vessels.
Last of the engineless pinisi setting sail for Java with a cargo of sawn timber, Banjarmasin, South-East Kalimantan 1983.
Today the term pinisi is often applied to the very large, motorised timber ships that replaced them, hand-built in the South Sulawesi style by Bugis or Makassan shipwrights and trading all over Indonesia. Some still carry small auxiliary sails. In ports where these contemporary ‘pinisi’ traders gather in large numbers, such as Jakarta’s Sunda Kelapa, they’re a tourist attraction.
Mainly built by the Konjo tribe of the Bulukumba regency of South Sulawesi, and still used widely by the Buginese and Makassarese, for inter-insular transportation, cargo and fishing within the Indonesian archipelago.
UNESCO designated Pinisi boat-building art as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity at the 12th Session of the Unique Cultural Heritage Committee on Dec 7, 2017.
IndonesiaInscribed in 2017 (12.COM) on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity
Pinisi, or the Art of Boatbuilding in South Sulawesi, refers to the rig and sail of the famed ‘Sulawesi schooner’. The construction and deployment of such vessels stand in the millennia-long tradition of Austronesian boatbuilding and navigation that has brought forth a broad variety of sophisticated watercrafts. For both the Indonesian and the international public, Pinisi has become the epitome of the Archipelago’s indigenous sailing craft. Today, the centres of boatbuilding are located at Tana Beru, Bira and Batu Licin, where about 70 per cent of the population make a living through work related to boatbuilding and navigation. Shipbuilding and sailing are not only the communities’ economic mainstay, however, but also the central focus of daily life and identity. The reciprocal cooperation between the communities of shipwrights and their relations with their customers strengthen mutual understanding between the parties involved. Knowledge and skills related to the element are passed down from generation to generation within the family circle, as well as to individuals outside of the family through the division of labour. The communities, groups and individuals concerned are actively involved in safeguarding efforts, for example through marketing initiatives and the publication of books on the subject.
Indonesian Wooden Boats Building website
The maritime history of traditional vessels in the Indonesian archipelagoThe Pinisi is the largest type of the Bugis traditional wooden sailing schooner, and also the largest Indonesian traditional vessel, since the disappearance of the giant jong following the Dutch colonial occupation of Java.
The Javanese jong, or djong, was a type of ancient sailing ship originating from Java that was widely used by Javanese and Malay sailors. The word was and is spelled jong in its languages of origin, the "djong" spelling being the colonial Dutch romanisation.Jongs were used mainly as seagoing passenger and cargo vessels. They traveled as far as Ghana, and even Brazil in ancient times. The average burthen was 4-500 tons, with a range of 85-700 tons. In the Majapahit era these vessels were used as warships, but still predominantly as transport vessels.
This is a model of a Javanese jong in the Maritime Museum in Singapore.The Nusantara archipelago was known for production of these large jongs. A Portuguese account described how the Javanese people already had advanced seafaring skills when they arrived:
(The Javanese) are all men very experienced in the art of navigation, to the point that they claim to be the most ancient of all, although many others give this honor to the Chinese, and affirm that this art was handed on from them to the Javanese. But it is certain that they formerly navigated to the Cape of Good Hope and were in communication with the east coast of the island of San Laurenzo (Madagascar), where there are many brown and Javanized natives who say they are descended from them.
— Diogo de Couto, Decada Quarta da AsiaWhen the Portuguese captured Malacca, they recovered a chart from a Javanese pilot, Albuquerque said:...a large map of a Javanese pilot, containing the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal and the land of Brazil, the Red Sea and the Sea of Persia, the Clove Islands, the navigation of the Chinese and the Gom, with their rhumbs and direct routes followed by the ships, and the hinterland, and how the kingdoms border on each other. It seems to me. Sir, that this was the best thing I have ever seen, and Your Highness will be very pleased to see it; it had the names in Javanese writing, but I had with me a Javanese who could read and write. I send this piece to Your Highness, which Francisco Rodrigues traced from the other, in which Your Highness can truly see where the Chinese and Gores come from, and the course your ships must take to the Clove Islands, and where the gold mines lie, and the islands of Java and Banda, of actions of the period, than any of his contemporaries; and it appears highly probable, that what he has related is substantially true: but there is also reason to believe that he composed his work from recollection, after his return to Europe, and he may not have been scrupulous in supplying from a fertile imagination the unavoidable failures of a memory, however richly stored.
— Letter of Albuquerque to King Manuel I of Portugal, April 1512.For seafaring, the Malay people independently invented junk sails, made from woven mats reinforced with bamboo, at least several hundred years before 1 BC. By the time of the Han dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD) the Chinese were using such sails, having learned it from Malay sailors visiting their Southern coast. Beside this type of sail, they also made balance lugsails (tanja sails). The invention of these types of sail made sailing around the western coast of Africa possible, because of their ability to sail against the wind.
Production of djongs ended in the 1700s, perhaps because of the decision of Amangkurat I of Mataram Sultanate to destroy ships on coastal cities and close ports to prevent them from rebelling. By 1677, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) reported that the Javanese no longer owned large ships and shipyards. When the VOC gained a foothold in Java, they prohibited the locals from building vessels more than 50 tons in tonnage and assigned European supervisors to shipyards.
Q. Do the Oceans and Seven Seas belong to us all?
During the Age of discovery, between the 15th and 17th century, sailing that had been mostly coastal became oceanic. Thus, the main focus was on long-haul routes. Countries of the Iberian Peninsula were pioneers in this process, seeking exclusive property and exploration rights over lands discovered and to be discovered. Given the amount of new lands and the resulting influx of wealth, the Kingdom of Portugal and the united kingdoms of Castile and Aragon began to compete openly. To avoid hostilities, they resorted to secrecy and diplomacy, marked by the signing of the Treaty of Alcáçovas in 1479 and the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.
Iberian 'mare clausum' in the Age of Discovery.
The papacy helped legitimize and strengthen these claims, since Pope Nicholas V by the bull Romanus Pontifex of 1455 prohibited others to navigate the seas under the Portuguese exclusive without permission of the king of Portugal. The very titling of Portuguese kings announced this claim to the seas: "King of Portugal and the Algarves, within and beyond the sea in Africa, Lord of Commerce, Conquest and Shipping of Arabia, Persia and India". With the discovery of sea route to India and later the route of Manila the concept of "Mare clausum" in the treaty was realized. This policy was refused by European nations like France, Holland and England, who were then barred from expanding and trading, and engaged in privateering and piracy of routes, products and colonies.
In the 16th and 17th century Spain considered the Pacific Ocean a Mare clausum – a sea closed to other naval powers. As the only known entrance from the Atlantic, the Strait of Magellan was at times patrolled by fleets sent to prevent entrance of non-Spanish ships. On the western end of the Pacific Ocean the Dutch threatened the Spanish Philippines.
The legal treatises on the freedom of the seas "De Indis" and "Mare Liberum"Sekula, in FISH STORY, references a treatise by the Dutch Jurist Hugo Grotius.
The treatise was initially, but provisionally, drafted under the title De Indis (On the Indies). The events that formed the background to this legal argument and thesis are set out in the Wikipedia article on Grotius:
The Dutch were at war with Spain; although Portugal was closely allied with Spain, it was not yet at war with the Dutch.
The war began when Grotius's cousin captain Jacob van Heemskerk captured a loaded Portuguese carrack merchant ship, Santa Catarina, off present-day Singapore in 1603.
Heemskerk was employed with the United Amsterdam Company (part of the Dutch East India Company), and though he did not have authorization from the company or the government to initiate the use of force, many shareholders were eager to accept the riches that he brought back to them.
Not only was the legality of keeping the prize questionable under Dutch statute, but a faction of shareholders (mostly Mennonite) in the Company also objected to the forceful seizure on moral grounds, and of course, the Portuguese demanded the return of their cargo. The scandal led to a public judicial hearing and a wider campaign to sway public (and international) opinion. It was in this wider context that representatives of the Company called upon Grotius to draft a polemical defence of the seizure.
The result of Grotius' efforts in 1604/05 was a long, theory-laden treatise that he provisionally entitled De Indis (On the Indies). Grotius sought to ground his defense of the seizure in terms of the natural principles of justice. In this, he had cast a net much wider than the case at hand; his interest was in the source and ground of war's lawfulness in general. The treatise was never published in full during Grotius' lifetime, perhaps because the court ruling in favour of the Company preempted the need to garner public support.
In The Free Sea (Mare Liberum, published 1609) Grotius formulated the new principle that the sea was international territory and all nations were free to use it for seafaring trade.Grotius' argument was that the sea was free to all, and that nobody had the right to deny others access to it. In chapter I, he laid out his objective, which was to demonstrate "briefly and clearly that the Dutch [...] have the right to sail to the East Indies", and, also, "to engage in trade with the people there". He then went on to describe how he based his argument on what he called the "most specific and unimpeachable axiom of the Law of Nations, called a primary rule or first principle, the spirit of which is self-evident and immutable", namely that: "Every nation is free to travel to every other nation, and to trade with it." From this premise, Grotius argued that this self-evident and immutable right to travel and to trade required (1) a right of innocent passage over land, and (2) a similar right of innocent passage at sea. The sea, however, was more like air than land, and was, as opposed to land, common property of all:
The air belongs to this class of things for two reasons. First, it is not susceptible of occupation; and second its common use is destined for all men. For the same reasons the sea is common to all, because it is so limitless that it cannot become a possession of any one, and because it is adapted for the use of all, whether we consider it from the point of view of navigation or of fisheries.Grotius, by claiming 'free seas' (Freedom of the seas), provided suitable ideological justification for the Dutch breaking up of various trade monopolies through its formidable naval power (and then establishing its own monopoly). England, competing fiercely with the Dutch for domination of world trade, opposed this idea and claimed in John Selden's Mare clausum (The Closed Sea):
"That the Dominion of the British Sea, or That Which Incompasseth the Isle of Great Britain, is, and Ever Hath Been, a Part or Appendant of the Empire of that Island."As conflicting claims grew out of the controversy, maritime states came to moderate their demands and base their maritime claims on the principle that it extended seawards from land. A workable formula was found by Cornelius Bynkershoek in his De dominio maris (1702), restricting maritime dominion to the actual distance within which cannon range could effectively protect it. This became universally adopted and developed into the three-mile limit.NOTE:
Giambattista Vico called Grotius, Selden and Samuel Pufendorf the "three princes" of the "natural right of the gentes". He went on to criticise their approach foundationally. In his Autobiography he specifies that they had conflated the natural law of the "nations", based on custom, with that of the philosophers, based on human abstractions. Isaiah Berlin comments on Vico's admiration for Grotius and Selden.
Q. What are we doing to OUR Seven Seas and Oceans?
A. Turning them acid with carbon dioxide! Filling them with pollutants and plastic!
Production must end now, says first ever estimate of plastic’s cradle-to-grave impact
The pressures remain as global shipping steadily increases in scale
The Gunhilde Maersk - 4K Time Lapse by Toby Smith
Indonesia president opens Priok port expansion in Jakarta - ReutersWorld News
September 13, 2016
“We cannot delay the development of modern ports any longer. This supports trade flows and investment in this country,”President Widodo said at the opening of New Priok Container Terminal (NPCT) 1 in Kalibaru, the first of five phases of an expansion of Priok port that are to be completed in 2019.Tanjung Priok port in North Jakarta, which handles the bulk of international shipments into Southeast Asia’s biggest economy, has been plagued with bottlenecks and long handling times due to years of under investment.
Logistics costs in Indonesia are up to 2.5 times higher than in neighboring countries, Widodo said.
“If we’re slow we’ll be left behind,” he said.Widodo has taken a special interest in reducing port dwell times, part of his government’s broad efforts to improve the nation’s infrastructure to drive economic growth. Dwell time at Priok is now between 3.2 and 3.7 days, down from up to a week in 2014, Widodo said, adding that he has asked for the wait to be reduced to less than three days.
Bringing Priok in line with global standards will depend on how quickly it can move cargo away from the docks, and whether it can alleviate congestion problems that slow the movement of ships and cargo, increasing costs for exporters and importers, shipping experts said.
“The expansion of Tanjung Priok may encourage shipping lines to launch more direct ship calls to Jakarta, but I do not see it as a major threat to Singapore’s transhipment status,”said Jonathan Beard, head of transportation and logistics in Asia for design and consultancy firm Arcadis. The new terminal adds 1.5 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) to Priok’s existing 7 million TEU annual capacity, said Elvyn Masassya, CEO of Pelabuhan Indonesia (Pelindo) II, Indonesia’s state-owned port company that operates NPCT 1 in a consortium that includes Singapore’s PSA International and Tokyo-listed Mitsui (8031.T). With 8 cranes that can move 30 containers per hour and berths that can dock ships with a draft of as much as 16 meters, the new terminal will allow Priok to accommodate vessels carrying 10,000 TEUs from Europe and East Asia for the first time, Masassya said. According to senior maritime consultant Jakob Sorensen, this depth would be adequate to meet Priok’s “current and near future requirements for container vessels.”
The pressures upon ports and their facilities, the pressures upon people working in these ports, seas and oceans continues . . .
What about the pressures on the life of the seas and oceans themselves?
Greenpeace UK
Six out of seven sea turtle species are threatened with extinction. Watch their story and sign the petition calling for a global network of ocean sanctuaries to protect the turtles’ homes: http://www.greenpeace.org/turtlejourneyTurtle Journey was created by Greenpeace and Aardman Animations (Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep), and features special guests Jim Carter, Olivia Colman, David Harbour, Giovanna Lancellotti, Helen Mirren, Bella Ramsey and Ahir Shah.
This project is showing across the UK in cinemas. The use of animations to communicate the facts of this global crisis, and threat to the sustainability of life in OUR seas and oceans, contrasts with the imagery of Blue Planet II, referenced at the top of this post.
The visual quality is determined by the high definition video imagery that contemporary film and video technology allows. This way of capturing and communicating the visual realities seems to encourage top of the range production values that the contemporary audience has come to expect. This expectation has become the norm. When Marshall McLuhan discussed the TV medium as being "cool" he was making a comparison between the low definition image with the "hot" high definition medium of photography and cinema. In those days TV was a fuzzy low definition experience. He recognised that this low "quality" image encouraged the audience to become involved in an intense but unconscious participatory experience of "decoding", or "seeing" the image. The contemporary high definition format creates a different sensibility, one that creates a relatively low level of participation in making out an imagery that celebrates a passive relationship to a visual "spectacle".
This experience of "spectacle" creates a "distance", and a kind of "voyeurism" in our relationship to nature. In fact, the audience is both part of the planetary natural environment, while also immersed in an the information environment that frames our experience of natural environment. The experience of spectacle discourages empathy. By contrast, the Aardman Animations production, allows us to use the very special human capacity to empathise with the predicament of sea turtles.
And, for OUR seas and oceans, for the conservation of life and the avoidance of mass extinctions, the seas and oceans require OUR human agency . . .
Planet Earth is blue . . .
. . . and there's something we can do . . .
. . . today
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