Christina Thompson, Sea People

 

Anaho Bay, Marquesas [photo: Semhur, Wikipedia]

A remarkable book, gripping in a way that few popular science narratives are. It is well written and well informed – a comparison with other popular science titles (such as Dava Sobel’s Longitude) maes it clear Christina Thompson can write. 

Nonetheless, Sea People represents an interesting case study of science communication. In this post I’ll explain a little more about how this book works, and how it doesn’t work, as a piece of science communication: it inspires, but it doesn’t really inform. Just to note, I include archaeology and anthropology as within the scope  of science communication.

Sea People tells the story of Pacific exploration and settlement. Polynesia is remarkable because the Polynesians are themselves immigrants, but for many years it was not known how they travelled to the many widely-spread islands of the Pacific. It tells the story of the European navigators, from Cook to Heyerdahl, but also describes the attempts to understand how the inhabitants travelled. So it is a story of origins, of navigation, from the 16th-century to the present day, and with inference back to the earliest arrival of people on these islands. What makes the book remarkable is that it describes something truly astounding: how early peoples were able to sail hundreds of miles to other islands without navigational aids. 

That’s the positive view. The telling of this tale, however skilful as a narrative (and this book is a real page-turner), is not matched by the presentation of the information, or by the communication of the science. The author is let down by the format, and by a lack of scientific understanding (no less). 

The science here, for example, is navigation. The author describes efforts over many years to understand how the early Polynesians navigated. For me, to understand that meant I needed to know how the Europeans navigated. It’s a mark of this book that on reading it, I was compelled to go to Wikipedia and other sources to try to find out just how early explorers navigated. There is no mention in this book, for example, of the measurement of longitude, about which whole books have been written. Instead, we get descriptions of traditional navigation. 

When we get to traditional navigation, we are told it was a combination of looking at the position of the sun and the stars, observing the swell of the ocean, noticing any birds – but, I imagine, this is what the early European explorers must have used. Apparently Drake had an astrolabe, which enabled him to measure latitude, but for longitude it was guesswork. 

Here is my criticism of Thompson’s book. Although she writes a fine narrative, I didn’t come away from the book with any great knowledge of navigation. It’s as if the technical details were skipped over as being less interesting. Sure, every character is described in rich detail, including, for some of the men, how handsome they were.

On a wider note, this book is yet another example of the dreadful divide between illustrated and non-illustrated books. The book contains sixteen pages of colour illustrations that are never referenced within the text. Why not? In addition, each of the unnumbered chapters has a small illustration, but these are not described in any detail in the text. There are two grossly inadequate maps. For a book about widely-dispersed islands and their discovery, this is woeful. It might be more of a challenge to link maps with text, or illustrations with text, but that is what we pay for when we buy a book, surely? 

My third objection is that the book retains an air of colonialism about it. Even though the author is married to a Maori, the impression I get is that the appeal of these islands is, ultimately, the great beaches and dreams of paradise. The book ends with a glowing description of the beach at Anaho Bay in the Marquesas (but don’t expect this book to show you exactly where), where Robert Louis Stevenson lived. The book is called “Sea People”, but is really about the people who tried to discover the islands and to find out how they got there. I bought this book in the bookshop of the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, having seen an exhibition of Pacific items in the collection, with comments from present-day  inhabitants of the region – and they aren’t always very complimentary. 

Should you read this book? Absolutely, but at the same time it will leave you wanting much, much more information. I want to know exactly what these traditional Polynesian canoes look like. I want to know how the ten or twenty people on the boat survived for three weeks or more without reaching land – what did they do for water, for example? How did those canoes sail against the prevailing wind, which determined the course of all the early European explorers? It’s a mark of the success of this book that you want to know more. 

Reading about Renaissance Florence

 

Cover of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, English translation

It seems a straightforward question. You visit Florence, you would like to know why it is regarded as so special. There are plenty of books about the Renaissance, and many Renaissance cities, but Florence is regarded as the epicentre of the Renaissance – which may be because Florence had Vasari writing the story of art from a Florentine perspective. Whatever the case, Florence is worth reading more about.

My choice of books was not exceptional. I started with Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published 1860 but still being read. Why? Because Burckhardt gives the reader an image of the Renaissance as something new, something radical, something fundamentally different from what came before. Reading Burckhardt, there is an excitement, something lacking in so many academic works. Even the chapter titles suggest this passion: “The State as a work of art”, “The discovery of the world and of man”. Of course, today we challenge Burckhardt’s thesis – he overstates his case, he deliberately understates what happened in the Middle Ages. But he tells a great story.  

It is a noticeable contrast to turn to another classic title, written almost a hundred years later. Gene Brucker’s Renaissance Florence (1969)  indicates how much more mature the subject has become, the work of an academic who has clearly spent a considerable time in the archives. You feel that Brucker sets out to provide evidence for every argument.

Reading Brucker makes me think about the nature of historical writing. What can a historian tell us? Brucker’s method is one of the accepted ways of writing history. He takes a theme, for example, religion, politics, and then draws on many years of studying Florentine archives and primary sources to provide examples for and against a point of view. This view, implied or stated, is usually Burckhardt’s, which, for religion, is that there was a new emphasis on secularism. Here is Brucker’s opening of his chapter on the Church:

Studies of Florentine religion tend to fall into two categories. One interpretation, particularly favored by clerical authors, emphasize the continuity of religious institutions and traditions … At the other extreme are those historians like Jakob Burckhardt, who minimize the importance of Christianity in Renaissance Italy. For Burckhardt, the most significant feature of Italian religious history in the Renaissance was the secularization of institutions and beliefs. [Brucker, ch 5]

 Brucker examines the records, and gives us fascinating extracts. One monk records everything in the monastery archive, even the expenditure on eggs in his monastery (S. Trinita). But there is also a record of the same convent providing large quantities of beef, eggs, salad and fruit for a local festival in the parish. Another monk states it’s not worth bothering with keeping a record. Elsewhere, Brucker notes a report of men climbing over nunnery walls to get to the women inside. They fail to find the woman they were seeking, and then ran away to escape the fine imposed on them.

What’s the problem with such meticulous reporting? After all, these are all from good primary sources. Using this technique as a historical  methodology raises, I think, two problems. First, it is difficult for the reader to get an overall interpretation. Was religion taken seriously in Renaissance Florence or was it not? Did it decrease in importance or not? Brucker provides examples for and against, so the answer so often is “sometimes”. That doesn’t give us a very clear picture of the Renaissance. It may be more accurate than Burckhardt, but it is less clear.

Secondly, although this is less of a limitation, Brucker is restricted to whatever records exist. He has no control over the archives. Not surprisingly, the biggest archives appear to be official records, so, for the example above, the record is most likely the record of a fine imposed, with little information about the story behind it. We don’t know how typical or frequent such episodes were.

Neither of these problems is insuperable, but other historians, such as Eamonn Duffy, in my opinion solve them much better. Duffy, in The Voices of Morebath, uses official records, but mainly just one, the parish archive, and manages to create a vivid and captivating account of a whole generation in rural 16th-century England. Of course, Duffy’s writing is polemical – he is a Catholic, and arguing that much of England was far less radically Protestant than contemporary nationwide events might appear – but we can live with that. Iin fact, we prefer it from a historian. The best historians argue a case; they don’t try to be neutral, because neutral leaves us none the wiser. We want a kind of periodization, if only so that we can later react against it. We want to hear someone arguing for the celebration of the independent city-state, and the art it produced, even if we know that it all ends with Medici dominance, and (if the decoration of the Pitti Palace is anything to go by) two hundred years of poor art.