A Rabbit's Review 10/27/2011

A Rabbit's Review

By LisaMary Wichowski

The Sea and Their Graves: an Archaeology of Death and Remembrance in Maritime Culture

David J. Stewart, 

University Press of Florida

ISBN-13: 978-0813037349

...shipwrecked, plunging to death from the rigging, being mutilated by cannon or sword, expiring from a gruesome disease in some tropical backwater, falling overboard and drowning, being washed overboard in a storm, drowned by the upsetting of a boat, perishing from malnutrition, being presented with a choice of burning to death aboard a flaming vessel or jumping over the side to drown or sinking into the depths aboard a foundering ship.

Sailors and fishermen face death daily from a vast array of causes, both natural and accidental.  Like miners, loggers, soldiers and all those in hazardous occupations the community culture of those who make their living in sea trades both reflects and absorbs ever-present reminders of mortality.

David Stewart’s book The Sea and Their Graves is a new look at Anglo-American maritime folk culture, based on a study of over 2,100 memorials.  These monuments and gravestones are not only individual or family stones but also community memorials and larger scale, state-sponsored tributes such as Trafalgar Square. His time period, the seventeenth through the late twentieth century, is quite broad for a relatively short text, but even so he effectively traces changes in the work, life and folk culture of mariners and the resulting changes in commemoration.

Stewart highlights the outgrowth of burial-at-sea rituals from their land-based counterparts. He insightfully explains how specific traditions, such as why burial in a shroud continued longer at sea while coffins became the norm on land.  Sailors were often wrapped in their own hammocks for shrouding, fitting with the metaphor of death as sleep and, more practically, to prevent another from sleeping there, as that would be as taboo as wearing the dead man’s clothes.  The rituals of a burial at sea, including internment prayers, are parallel but not identical to those of a death on shore.  Stewart emphasizes how rituals of the land create inseparable boundaries between the living and the dead in a way that sea burials cannot; thereby shedding light on the role of the supernatural in maritime lore and culture. This chapter alone will be valuable for those interested in understanding the anthropology of shipwreck and ghost lore.

            Of special importance is the chapter on faith and the prominence of the anchor in memorialization.  Sailors were a notoriously irreligious lot, many enough so to forcefully discourage the presence of clergy onboard a ship. Why, then, do so many memorials from the early nineteenth century display pious sentiment?  Stewart’s contends that the religious revivals of the time affected the land-based members of the groups, ordinarily those having control over the choice of remembrance.   Wives and parents who remained on shore were participants in mainstream culture as well as the specific folk culture of mariners.  The Great Awakenings (and contemporaneous British movements) increased religious sentiment overall, and became a source of comfort to those on land.  The memorials erected were explicit in expressing “the hope that mariners would anchor safely in the port of heaven at the end of life’s voyage.”  Hopes of resurrection, a central theme of these religious movements, had particular meaning to those families denied the closure of having a body to bury.

As for so many of us Stewart finds answers to questions about the culture of the living in memorials to the dead.  At first glance The Sea and Their Graves may seem to be a book only for those interested in a narrow spectrum of sea folklore and memorialization.  That couldn’t be further from the truth.  Not only does Stewart’s work help us understand the symbolism of the stones we come across in our graveyarding, but his thorough understanding of the processes involved in the making of a folk culture can also help us to more fully understand other unfamiliar cultures we may encounter in cemeteries.