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Short abstract:

This talk zooms in on radical changes in how deep seas were perceived historically. Shifts in perceptions—visible on sea maps—were driven by new investigations into the depths of the oceans, which themselves were carried out in the hope for economic and military fortunes.

Long abstract:

Open seas have long been outside of the scope of strategic and scientific interests. Notwithstanding their heavy use for transport, before 1650 there were no serious attempts to investigate what was underneath their surfaces. Anything that sank was simply gone forever. Even the surfaces themselves were perceived as strange spaces. They were not claimable like lands. They first lacked geographical boundaries but, second, also posed a technical problem. To enforce borders, one needs cartography. But although maps of the oceans surely existed, it was technically impossible to find one’s actual position on such a map, let alone compare said position to hypothetical borders.

This talk focuses on how and why seas and oceans became an object of study in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on maps and published treatises, I show how developments of depth technologies relied on the local knowledge of fisherfolk, pearl divers, and sailors. Hope and loss were central. Sailors’ depth measurements, for example, were aimed to find safe places to land or anchor, and to avoid the danger of wrecking on underwater rocks or banks. Over the eighteenth century, however, depth measures did get tied up with highly politicized claims of ownership. Here strategic hopes and losses popped up: as I will show, oceans depths were explored in the hope to find and claim the riches of the seas’ volume and their bottom. Even though the material technologies needed to explore depths were utopian, their imagined future drove further investigations of the ocean’s depths.