Divers Things: Collecting the World Under Water

Time: 4:30 p.m.

Place: 211 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University

To request a copy of the precirculated paper, send an email to mfanfair@princeton.edu.

Abstract. What did it mean to go under water in the early modern era? “I do not pretend to have visited the bottom of the sea,” wrote Robert Boyle in 1670, but that did not stop him from writing at length about the depths. Indeed, the same can be said of Jules Verne. This paper examines late seventeenth-century English travelers and natural philosophers' accounts of the submarine, in a period when diving projects proliferated due to dramatic new fortunes being made in Caribbean salvage. It begins by examining the significance of aquatic objects and perceptions of the deep in a providential framework that united the biblical Flood with contemporary natural disasters such as the 1692 earthquake in Port Royal, Jamaica. It argues that in addition to exemplifying connoisseurial fetishization of transformations between nature and art, collections of aquatic curiosities constituted a providential imperial chorography of the submarine. The paper goes on to situate collectors’ power to transform nature into art in relation to their ability to coerce the extraordinary capacities of Asian, American and enslaved African divers. Finally, it explores the shift from self-extension through human surrogates to the construction of prosthetic devices, in particular diving bells, linking programs of submarine knowledge at the Royal Society to entrepreneurial salvage projects, and attempts to colonize the depths by transforming the underwater world into dry land.