Article ID: CBB745030608

The Science of Shallow Waters: Connecting and Classifying the Early Modern Atlantic (2021)

unapi

Histories of ocean science have emphasized the ways that state-sponsored deep-sea expeditions ushered in a new age of oceanic understanding during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This essay, on the other hand, examines the ways that shallow waters played host to less formal but nevertheless important efforts to create oceanic natural knowledge, often centuries earlier. By documenting the legends and experiences of people who worked on and lived by the ocean—divers, sailors, and fishermen, among others—and corroborating their stories with firsthand observation, seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century natural historians built a nascent science of the sea. In its close focus on “sea beans” and “barnacle geese,” subjects of wide conjecture and earnest curiosity, the essay shows how shallow waters welcomed new actors onto the scientific stage and decentered the geographies of knowledge production, thereby advancing contemporary knowledge of oceanic circulation as well as the taxonomies and ecologies of coastal creatures.

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Article Wilko Graf von Hardenberg (2021) Knowing the Littoral: Perception and Representation of Terraqueous Spaces in a Global Perspective. Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 108-110). unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Hardenberg, Wilko Graf von
Mancall, Peter C.
Kok, Hans
Mentz, Steve
McCann, Joy
Bhattacharyya, Debjani
Concepts
Hydrography
Oceans and seas
Oceanography
Littoral zone, nearshore
Coastal zone and estuarine studies
Environmental history
Time Periods
19th century
Early modern
18th century
20th century, early
20th century
16th century
Places
Atlantic Ocean
Europe
Atlantic world
Greenland
St. Petersburg (Russia)
Mediterranean region
Institutions
United States Navy
St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences
United States. Office of Naval Research
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Great Britain. Royal Navy
Dutch East India Company
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