Abstract
Steve Mentz
Compared to many other mammals, humans swim slowly and somewhat awkwardly. We do share some evolutionary features with cetaceans and seals, including a subcutaneous layer of fat and the mammalian diving reflex, but we can’t keep up with our fellow creature in the water. Nonetheless, humans have lived close to, fed themselves from, and obsessively imagined themselves in contact with bodies of water for a longer time span than recorded history. As historian John Gillis has suggested, homo sapiens has been a coastal species since first leaving African roughly 50,000 years ago, foraging in the rich ecotone between land and sea. Living alongside and occasionally in the water means that swimming has long been a human activity, as live-saving skill, military tactic, salvage practice, scientific inquiry, and more recently as recreation. My talk explores some noteworthy turns taken by the history of swimming during the early modern period, as represented by the many swimmers of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Treating the play as a broad anatomy of early modern typologies of swimming, from epic struggle to musical descent to indigenous practice, I will argue that the play presents a series of rival fantasies about bodies and the sea that comment on the transoceanic aspirations of early modern Europe and the ecological limits that European mariners were fast encountering.
The “out of Africa” tag in my title indicates my desire to contextualize Shakespeare’s early seventeenth-century play in dialogue with the first and oldest African diaspora, when homo sapiens followed kelp highways along multiple coastlines into Eurasia, to Australia, and eventually to the Americas. I won’t go full “aquatic ape” in my speculative readings of human prehistory; I accept the scientific consensus against the evolutionary theory proposed by Alistair Hardy in 1960, championed by Elaine Morgan in the 1980s and ‘90s, and recently resurrected by David Attenborough on BBC Radio4 in 2016.[i] But I will suggest that the evidence for coastal subsistence is compelling, and I’ll present some evidence of prehistoric swimming as culture as well as labor. Furthermore, I locate the origins of human swimming in Africa, in ways that are important for my re-reading of Shakespeare in early modern context. As early modern Europeans began their violent and destructive maritime voyages to Africa, Asia, and the Americas, the people they met were almost always better swimmers than the sailors who encountered them. As Kevin Dawson writes in his great book Undercurrents of Power, “Nearly every white traveler” who visited the African coast during this period, “was amazed by Africans’ fluencies” in the water.[ii] Remembering that swimming may have carried an African valence in the early modern period, as it clearly did not in my own swim team-centric American childhood, informs my analysis of Shakespeare’s many swimmers in The Tempest. The quasi-epic prince Ferdinand, who swims to shore through a tangled metaphor that Shakespeare adapts from Virgilian epic, represents the labored strokes of European aristocrats. But the two other successful Italian swimmers in the play, Stephano and Trinculo, occupy lower rungs in the social hierarchy and swim quite differently. Caliban’s relationship to water gets entangled with his earthy and even rock-ish elements, but his status as the only African-born figure on stage resonates with his aquatic knowledges and practices. Ariel the spirit of air and storm like Caliban represents non-European water powers, and I suggest that his transformative “Full fathom five” music represents a sea-magic that is both elemental and to some extent Indigenous. The assembled swimmers of the play comprise a wet counter-challenge to Prospero, Miranda, and other members of the Italian nobility who both fear and cannot navigate the water. To swim, the play implies, means to know the strange depths of the blue world.
Key texts
Kevin Dawson, Undercurrents of Power
John Gillies, The Human Shore
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage
End Notes
[i] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v0hhm. Accessed 10 Decembe 2020.
[ii] Kevin Dawson, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) 15.