Makers and Memory

David Gange (History, Birmingham) - ‘The Material Ecologies of Small Wooden Seacraft: Rowing into North-Atlantic Memory’

On nearly every North-Atlantic coast, small rowed and paddled boats have, since records began, outnumbered decked sailing ships by at least forty to one. Yet, detached from formal markets, these boats are absent from most archives and the forms of history that deal with the sea have therefore had little space for them. Many of the shores these craft worked, roadless and sometimes now subaqueous, are also among the most significant historical sites in their regions never to have been excavated.

Using examples of an extinct Irish rowing boat, an unnamed style of craft from Gaelic-speaking Scarp and Bernera, recently revived Sámi seaboats, and the smallest Faroe vessel (known as nalvi, navels, or eggjakoppur, egg cups), this talk makes a case for the historical significance of small craft and the material worlds that were built on them. These boats have been focal points of story, identity, and economic independence in marginalized communities whose standards of living were far higher than modern states have been willing to concede.  

The method used for this research has included weeks in workshops, assisting those who maintain traditions of small boat building and are invariably walking archives of local story. It has also involved borrowing small traditional boats from coastal communities and rowing them on journeys through their historic oceanic heartlands. These journeys have been starting points for discussion with custodians of local memory, as well as for interpreting the rich material ecologies in which these boats operated. To see the North Atlantic through small boats is to see central spaces of European empires from unique perspectives. It also permits the gathering of conceptually diverse tools for interpreting the blurring of human and material being that occupying small boats on big seas implies.