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Ghosts, gods & sea monsters: a supernatural history of the Atlantic
00:34:14
Karl Bell dives into the eerie and enchanting folklore of the Atlantic Ocean, revealing how supernatural stories helped sailors navigate a perilous world
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- [00:01]
Narrator/Advertiser
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- [02:41]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
Carl we're here to talk about your new book, the Perilous A Supernatural History of the Atlantic. The to kick things off, what do we mean by that? Subtitle how can an ocean be Considered Supernatural?
- [02:53]
Carl Bell
There's two things there, I think. One is that there are histories of the Atlantic that kind of take priority over others. And we're very familiar with certain histories of exploration, of economics, of trade. I guess I would Refer to them as sort of the mundane type histories. But then coexisting with that are the cultures that developed around those seafarers and the trading routes that were very rich in terms of supernatural stories, this kind of maritime folklore. And that's what I wanted to explore. It's something that has been pushed to the margins of sort of respectable history, if you like. And yet in the book, I argue that it's. It's kind of very important for sort of psychological and cultural insights into how sailors operated in that. So it's partly that. And then it's also how we confront the ocean. The ocean is a natural space, obviously, but it's so vast and deep and there's kind of all these elements of unknown that the natural almost takes on these kind of supernatural properties. It exceeds nature in that way because we cannot really conceive of the ocean its entirety. It always sort of extends beyond our ability of knowledge and even imagination.
- [03:56]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
That's an excellent introduction, Carl. Thank you for that. And the parameters of this book are, broadly speaking, the mid 18th century through to around the middle of the 20th century. This is after the scientific revolution, it's after the Enlightenment. Why did you choose to focus on this period when, in theory, people were being a bit more rational?
- [04:15]
Carl Bell
I mean, partly it's because I'm a modern historian, so this is my time period that I focused on. And also the issues that I was looking at in this book are also things that I've explored in my earlier research, which is kind of challenging. That quite sharp divide between a sense of sort of the early modern and the modern. This idea that perhaps, you know, yes, we are in sort of a post Enlightenment period age of scientific revolution. But people don't necessarily become more rational. I mean, there's perhaps an educated elite that are. But I'm talking about how most people kind of continue to live their lives without a great awareness that the Enlightenment has taken place. You know, they're not reading the philosophes or anything like that. They are getting on with their daily lives. And particularly in this case, those daily lives involved a very considerable degree of hazard and risk. And it's about trying to come up with understandings and stories and beliefs and practices that allow them to navigate those risks. Really, it's not about sort of magic or modernity. It's often a case of magic in modernity, which has always fascinated me.
- [05:17]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
And if we dial back way before the focus of this book, if we go back to, say, ancient Greece, the sea has been subject to all sorts of strange tales. Even then, how did the Greeks perceive the sea?
- [05:28]
Carl Bell
They are essentially an island, archipelago, culture. They're always looking out to sea in many cases. And so it does kind of play on the imagination, the mind, I think, of the Greeks, and they go about kind of essentially personifying it. You create gods of the sea, so there is that kind of raw power and majesty of the ocean, or obviously, in the Greek's case, perhaps the Mediterranean. But in trying to understand it, why things happen, there is a kind of. Well, it happens because essentially they get personified into gods. You have Oceanus, you have Poseidon and Amphitrite, and you have these kind of various sea God and goddess dynasties that evolve. And as they evolve, they become more and more sophisticated in their understanding of the ocean. So Oceanus is essentially just the embodiment of the ocean, its might, its vastness. And yet you get to Poseidon, there's the idea that things like storms and tides are very much tied to his psychology. If he's angry, then storms will brew up. So there's this kind of direct connection between the sense of a God and nature. Things don't just happen because they're sort of meteorological phenomena. There is something behind the storm and it is normally some angry God, or if you have a great catch, it's kind of a benevolent God. And so it's the idea of trying to explain why the sea, and later the ocean, can be both a provider and also ruthlessly takes people away. It can feed people and provide a livelihood and it can also kill people and kind of dealing with those sort of two sides of the same thing. In a hazardous environment, there's got to be something behind nature and it must be a God who's feeling a bit moody that day, or feeling particularly kind.
- [07:07]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
So it's perceived through the whims of the gods and goddesses, then, yes, it's.
- [07:10]
Carl Bell
Kind of why do these things happen? There must be a purpose behind them. But also, if you think about it, once you have a gods behind things, there then becomes the possibility of negotiating with the gods. If you observe and you kind of pay homage to them and you perform particular rites or rituals and observances, then perhaps the gods will be favourable towards you. And so this is kind of really the beginning of that search for seafarers having some kind of agency at sea, some kind of influence over it. Not everything's going to go their way, but at least if you kind of worship them, you honour them, then they will look upon you favorably. And if you do something that annoys them. Then again, you're going to have to suffer the consequences of that too. So it's not just about the gods, it's also about your relationship with the gods.
- [07:53]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
So how then is that different to say what an 18th century sailor would think about the sea?
- [07:58]
Carl Bell
I mean, obviously Poseidon has kind of dropped away by the 18th century, particularly for sort of transatlantic sailors, but there's still the kind of the references. They're still collectively known as the sons of Neptune, but there are kind of elements of change. There is one that obviously you've got a more Christian worldview, and along with that, you still have, particularly in the 18th and into the 19th century, a belief in like a providential God and a devil. They're creating storms. So you've updated your gods, you've updated your pantheon, if you like, to a more respectable, slightly muted, I guess, religion. But at the same time, in the 18th century and into the 19th century, sailors are also represented as an irreligious bunch. They're tied to their folkloric beliefs and this kind of strange, magical worldview rather than being devout Christians. So there are those ideas. But a lot of the talk about Providence, about sailors or seafarers being tested by God and whether they survive, there's kind of debates about whether it's to do with human ingenuity and the skills of the mariner, or whether kind of God safely delivers them. Those conversations are still taking place, but they have evolved and updated from where we were with the Greeks.
- [09:07]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
And some sailors carry charms, don't they?
- [09:09]
Carl Bell
Yeah. Yes. Yes. Again, it's about this search for protection. Obviously, the great fear of any sea theory is the ship sinking and drowning. And obviously the Atlantic is a very unforgiving and brutal place. And so there are lots and lots of ideas of sailors carrying charms, particularly a caul, the kind of the membrane that forms around a child in the womb. They would sell those. So after the birth, they would dry them out and sailors would buy them. There's this idea of sympathetic magic at play there. The membrane that protected a baby in the womb would protect a sailor from drowning. And so they often had them perhaps sewn into their clothes, so they always had them on their person. And this idea that if you went into the water, you wouldn't drown. I mean, it wouldn't protect you from hypothermia or sharks. But this was the fundamental thing of not wanting to drown, which is obviously a big concern for sailors.
- [10:01]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
And you mentioned earlier, Carl, you mentioned that they're a pretty irreligious bunch, aren't they? And clergymen in particular were thought to be bad luck on ships.
- [10:09]
Carl Bell
Yes. It's not necessarily because they're anti religious. I think the clergyman tended to represent anything to do with death. They had a real fear that misfortune and death was somehow contagious or infectious. There are those kind of religious interpretations. If you have clergymen on board, it will bring the devil or spirits or demons. They will try to sink the ship because you've got one of God's agents on board. And the sailors will get caught in the crossfire. And that's their concern. But more often than not it's to do with clergymen being associated with funerals and burials. And therefore this kind of figure associated with death isn't somebody sailors want on board with them because again, they're very, very superstitious about carrying dead bodies. And there's kind of accounts of people having to, if they're actually being transported in a ship, sometimes referring to them as something else to kind of keep the superstitious sailors from panicking too much about what they're carrying in their ship.
- [11:03]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
And just then you mentioned that they felt that bad luck was contagious. So there's a case study actually of people refusing to save a drowning man.
- [11:12]
Carl Bell
The idea there is a lot of this stuff. Once you start to kind of think about the ocean in supernatural terms, once you think about it in terms of gods or magical influences or the supernatural, it almost borders on a sense of the ocean being sentient. It's kind of aware of you. And in fact, with things like Jonah's, this idea that if you're a sinner, you would be kind of punished. The ocean seems to know your every misdeed of your previous life. And when it comes to the not jumping in the water to save drownings of comrades, it was often this idea that the sea was owed its due. If you saved them, the story often went that you or somebody else would eventually be drowned in their place. And so it's kind of better to let this poor unfortunate person die rather than kind of perpetuate that. It's very callous. But again, it's sort of rationalizing why I'm not going to jump into probably freezing cold, very deep water to save somebody who's had the misfortune of being sort of swept overboard or falling into the sea.
- [12:09]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
And that term Jonah's. I mean, that's a biblical reference, isn't it?
- [12:12]
Carl Bell
It is. I mean, it comes from classically Jonahs trying to get out of doing what God wants him to do so, tries to take a ship to get away from going to Nineve, and God sends a storm. The crew, the ship identify him as the problem and throw him overboard, where he then famously gets eaten by a whale or some kind of sea monster. The whale thing has evolved over time, I think. And so there is that idea that there is an individual on board who is like a magnet. They're attracting ill fortune and bad luck and the best thing to do is to kind of remove them from the ship. And obviously in Jonah's case, it's quite dramatic in throwing somebody overboards and. But that idea certainly persists into the 19th century. There's talk of Jonas on board ships who, if there's a series of things go wrong, or even if the weather is bad, people start looking inwardly on the crew for who might be the source of this. So you get a sense of when you're in the middle of the Atlantic, stuck on a ship with a group of people, the tensions that could brew there, the sort of suspicions, and it puts you in a very vulnerable position if the entire crew turns on you as the source of all their problems.
- [13:17]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
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- [14:51]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
Bizarrely, Carl, there is one particular scapegoat in the book that I was quite surprised by, but there was a lot of suspicion about Finns. When I say Finns, I should clarify, that's people from what is now Finland.
- [15:02]
Carl Bell
Yes.
- [15:02]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
What was driving that particular hatred?
- [15:04]
Carl Bell
It's more of a suspicion. They had this reputation, and again, it goes through into the 19th century that they were kind of magical practitioners. They were sort of versed in witchcraft. They could change the weather for good or bad. They had this reputation in the Baltic and it kind of spills out into the Atlantic. Once that really develops of being a particular group of people who are a step closer to the supernatural than your average sailor, as you sort of suggested, you know, from the moment a Finn steps on board, there's always that kind of environment of suspicion of what they're bringing with them. And there are cases of a captain kind of demanding that a Finn stands at the front of the ship and changes the weather before he more or less lets him back from the prow of the ship. So this idea that they do feel that they had this ability to calm storms, to sort of dispel threats and this type of thing, but also the flip side of that. If you have magical power to do one thing sort of benevolently, there's always the assumption that you could always flip it the other way and create a storm and enhance risk. And so there's that superstition towards that group.
- [16:07]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
And from Finns we also have more fantastical creatures. I think when most listeners think of maritime folktales, they think of mermaids. Where does the mermaid actually come from?
- [16:18]
Carl Bell
It's kind of very complicated genealogy to that one. Again, going back to ancient cultures, you have hybrid human fish, gods and goddesses. Triton is a particularly good example, I think, in the sort of the Greek sort of pantheon. Essentially a fish man. This idea of bringing those together. You have the sirens, though actually the sirens aren't fish related. They kind of start off as bird like women and yet somehow they kind of get transformed, caught up into the sort of mermaid idea of the alluring beauty with the hypnotic song that will lead you to your doom. And that kind of evolves through time. There's kind of sort of a literary high culture version of the mermaid. And then there is the kind of the slightly more mundane sort of folkloric mermaid, which often has a more dangerous edge as well. There's always the idea that beneath the surface there is always Something hidden, which is kind of literally the case with a mermaid. You know, you have perhaps a beautiful woman, but then below the surface, she's not as she appears. And so there's always this sort of element of both allure and anxiety about mermaids. They do represent very much the otherness of the sea. They represent somebody that is far better adapted to living in a maritime environment than seafarers. They're aware that, yes, we're landlubbers, but we have the skills to navigate across the surface of the ocean. But mermaids have everything beneath that. And so there's always this idea of two separate worlds meeting there at the surface of the ocean.
- [17:40]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
And that classic image of the beautiful mermaid sunning themselves on a rock, is that so common also because it was a fantasy of men cooped up on ships for months on end, or was that a misconception, would you say?
- [17:52]
Carl Bell
I do try to tackle this in the book. I mean, I think there is an element of that. I think there is the idea that you're talking about a predominantly male group of people on a ship. There is going to be an aspect of that, but I think it's not the only explanation. You know, there is the idea of the male gaze. They're seeing things in the water. Why they would see beautiful women rather than just sort of a merman, which there are tales of mermen, but they're rarer. I tend to see or read the mermaid as representative of something bigger. She represents, in some ways, freedom. She represents a way to get off the ship in a way that sailors can't. So there's sort of a fantasy of escapism, if you like. There is these elements of somebody, as I said, that is far better adapted to the environment in which they're traveling through. So I think on a surface level, there is that kind of a bunch of men cooped up on ship and wanting to see women. But I think what they represent beyond that is kind of something slightly deeper and slightly sort of more profound in kind of what this is telling us about how sailors view the ocean as a place of both enchantment and wonderful, but also possibly of dangerous concealment and things that you shouldn't take it at face value, if you like. And that's often the case with mermaids, who can appear very appealing, and yet they might hypnotize you. They might kind of drag you underwater and eat you. In some cases, that kind of slowly gets eroded into the very cute Victorian image of many mermaids.
- [19:17]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
Fantastic summary there, Carl. Thank you. There are, of course, some rather more disturbing creatures that crop up time and time and again, notably the kraken. What did people think the kraken was?
- [19:28]
Carl Bell
Again, this evolves, and this is a kind of a fascinating history that I really liked exploring in that particular chapter, is that it starts off essentially as the embodiment of the fear and might of the ocean or the sea. It's largely linked to Scandinavian countries. There's this idea that it's so big that no one ever sees it in its entirety. So all you ever get is hints of something. And legends tell of this kind of huge creature that only had to feed once a year, but it would sit in the water and it was a jet sort of sent into the water. It would draw all the sea life to it, and then it would just swallow everything down at once. And there was tales about how fishermen in particular, if the water levels suddenly started to shrink, it often meant the kraken was rising beneath your boat and you had to then frantically get out of the way before this huge thing breached and came up to the surface, or at least part of it. That evolves over time. There are hints as early as the 18th century thinking about it as probably some kind of octopus, squid, giant or cephalopod. And that is really where that sort of story goes, particularly with the 19th century. Around the mid 19th century, you have the identification of the giant squid, and that sort of then suddenly leads to this retrospective rereading of Kraken stories. Suddenly, the Kraken isn't this kind of singular titan of a creature. It just becomes, well, these are misunderstood sightings of giant squid before we knew what a giant squid was. And so you are getting this attempt in the 18th, 19th century to kind of squeeze things that are supposedly unique and possibly supernatural. The Kraken was thought to be immortal at one point into kind of the categories of science. It's about bringing them in the realms of natural categorization. And this isn't supernatural. This is just something that we haven't understood, but now we can. You started by talking about the Enlightenment and scientific revolutions. This is part of that process of there should be nothing in the world that we cannot explain. And this is a way of bringing the supernatural into the natural in that way.
- [21:23]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
So it's demythologized in a way, it is.
- [21:25]
Carl Bell
And although people talk about the Kraken, there isn't much sense by the 19th century of people talking about it as a kind of reality. And you never get anyone who says they have seen it. It's Always kind of I heard of it or I believe in it, but. But I've never seen it. And that's interesting in itself. You don't need proof of something to believe in it.
- [21:42]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
What about sea serpents, though? Because there are some stories in the 19th century. There's one particular one in the 1840s.
- [21:48]
Carl Bell
I believe it's in the 1848, and it's sighted by a Royal Navy ship. They report this back to the Admiralty and somehow the report to the Admiralty gets out into the newspapers and it's the Royal Navy. You know, it's kind of respectable and kind of. These aren't. People are going to necessarily be given to sort of, you know, flights of fancy and superstition. When they start talking about seeing a sea serpent, it kind of leads to this debate. It runs for a couple of months in the autumn of 1848 through the times about what they had seen. And then it becomes this interesting contest between different authorities. You have kind of early paleontologists like Richard Owen claiming, well, sea serpents can't exist. It can't be some kind of prehistoric creature. Perhaps it was a length of seaweed. And then obviously that's very insulting to Royal Naval officers who kind of say, well, we've spent decades at sea. We know the difference between some seaweed on the surface and a sea serpent that we saw for 20 minutes slowly making its way past the ship. And interestingly, there are images available of this. They kind of get picked up by the Illustrated London News and they're readily available online, actually, if people want to go and find those. And it looks quite benign. It looks like essentially a large worm just kind of gently moving past the ship. It's nothing particularly fierce.
- [22:58]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
Fantastic. Now, Carl, let's talk about ghost stories and specifically ghost ships. Has this always been a common trope?
- [23:07]
Carl Bell
There does seem a sort of how far back the ghost ships go. Again, I raised this point about you don't hear many stories of Viking longships, ghostly Viking longships. They tend to go back to sort of the early modern period. And this can often be a case of if you're asking somebody to imagine something kind of how far back we can go in picturing that. But certainly the need for ghost stories, I think, has got a long history at sea. It does seem to link to the haunting presence, obviously, of all the people that have gone before you and haven't made it successfully across the Atlantic. You know, the Atlantic is full of shipwrecks. It's full of the dead. There's Always that sort of haunting presence which I think generates these stories. And then you have particularly something like the Flying Dutchman story, which does evolve into quite a developed sort of backstory. It's kind of like an onboard purgatory. People stuck at sea forever. Even after they're dead, they are still doing the same hard job, laboring away. And so I think that strikes a chord with a lot of mariners, too, that essentially the afterlife is going to be pretty much as bad as the one they're having at the moment. And so that particular ghost story seems to play in that way. And then you can read a sort of a practical element to ghost stories. They are very memorable ways of teaching people lessons, safety lessons on board ship. You know, the story of somebody who slips and falls from the rigging and dies and then comes back and haunts his shipmates. Next time you're up the rigging and you've got that kind of memorable way of thinking about this, you hopefully step a little more carefully when you're up there. There's ways often of criticizing bullying captains or crewmates. There are various stories. There's one by Walter Scott of a captain who kills a crew member and then is haunted by this man who nobody else can see but him, until he eventually throws himself overboard to get away and the ghost pops up beside him in the water. So even as he's drowning, he still can't get away from the guilt of what he's done. So it does become an interesting way of talking about life at sea, the dangers at sea, the rules that people had to live by, often the very brutal hierarchies that you had on board ship. Ghost stories can become a way of articulating a lot of those concerns.
- [25:12]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
And, Karl, we can't really talk about the Atlantic without talking about the transatlantic slave trade. And there are ghost stories associated to slavery, aren't there? And also that feeling of guilt.
- [25:23]
Carl Bell
Yes, there are. We're not necessarily talking about something that could be pinned down to fact, but I think the stories exist. Again, as you say, kind of links to the guilt of what's going on there. Interestingly, looking at the sort of sources, the slave trade is sort of marginalized in a lot of these, but that's probably because it's coming from a European American perspective, a lot of the information. But, yeah, there are stories of a captain who throws a load of slaves overboard on the transatlantic crossing, and they die, obviously, but then they come back that night as ghosts, and they kind of storm back on board, forced the rest of the Crew to sort of jump ship and then they torture the captain, tie him to the mast, and this kind of ghost ship sails around this spot where they had all been killed. And people claimed that they'd seen this ship, they'd seen this captain still tied to the mast, being harassed by the ghosts of the slaves that he had killed. So there is definitely stuff there about guilt capturing things in story. Even if the reality of those slaves being just treated like cargo and thrown into the water is kind of. That gets erased because obviously those bodies disappear, but the act doesn't because it gets remembered in those kind of stories.
- [26:31]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
In terms of memory and how these stories are recorded. I guess there's that cliche which I think you talk about of the salty old sea dog sitting by the dockside telling these disturbing tales from far, far away. But were these stories also recorded by people in coastal communities as well? So the so called landlubbers?
- [26:50]
Carl Bell
Yeah, there's a very interesting dynamic there. There is often the presentation of sailors as a kind of a tribe apart. And sometimes with a lot of those stories that the Salt L Sea dog is telling, true or not, and probably in many cases not, they do want to play up this kind of the strangeness, the weirdness of the sea. This is something that landlubbers do not know. They've been there, they've seen it all and that kind of thing. So it does kind of play into that. But equally, a lot of those people who go to sea do tend to come from coastal communities. And that's where they first hear about these magical beliefs and these supernatural stories and ghost ships and the Flying Dutchman. They learn a lot of this stuff on land, they take it to sea, they exchange these stories in foreign ports, they pick up news stories in these places, they come back, they exchange them. And so there is kind of this really interesting sort of import export of supernatural tales taking place across the Atlantic at this time. And coastal communities aren't necessarily separate from that. They're very much part of that process.
- [27:49]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
And Dee, these stories die down when the age of sail becomes the age of steam.
- [27:53]
Carl Bell
That is the big narrative that a lot of critics want to push in the 19th century. Again, going back to the Enlightenment rationality. Critics of this are very keen to present sailors as other, as kind of ignorant, superstitious. But they link it to the age of sail. And obviously the sort of 19th century into the early 20th century is this period of transition from sail to steam. And so they want to present it as this is the whimsy of the past. And it's fading away. And you get people talking about that. And there's this idea that the modern Mariner of the 19th century is a very different type of person. They are essentially sort of proletarian workers. The stoker in the big steamships are just shoveling coal all across the Atlantic. They don't really have any engagement with the maritime environments. The winds aren't really that much of a factor anymore. As long as they keep that furnace fed. The steamship will bully its way across the Atlantic. So there is that kind of sense of disenchantment there, if you like. They kind of cut away from the natural world. That has inspired all of these supernatural beliefs. But as is often the case with the supernatural, it finds ways of adapting. People still have a need for these things. And so you do get quite quickly, stories of haunted steamships. The Great Eastern in 1858 is a sort of a famous one. Where a riveter had supposedly died while building it. And had fallen inside the hull. And for some strange reason, which is never really explained in the logic of these things. They just sealed it over. They put the plates over it. You know, forget him. And yet the rivet was then supposed to have been heard hammering. As they kind of sailed across the Atlantic. And to kind of explain the noise, which turned out to be a piece of sort of floppy metal or something. They evolve a ghost story around it. And you get the same thing into the 20th century with haunted German submarines. Case of something called UB65, which is a sort of a jinxed German submarine. When they're loading the torpedoes, originally, one of them exploded and it killed the second officer. And he then haunts this submarine. It ends up having a series of misfortunes. They even get a pastor to come in and perform an exorcism. And then it disappears, either in combat or possibly through a malfunction. Possibly off the coast of Ireland or near Cornwall. It's kind of a little bit vague, but it doesn't make it through the wall.
- [30:09]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
Staying in the 20th century, Carl, how does Hollywood shape our impressions of the Atlantic. And maritime law more generally?
- [30:17]
Carl Bell
A lot of the Hollywood stuff sort of moves away. There is this reframing. The supernatural becomes a harder sell beyond the 19th century. And so you get people sort of updating it. Instead of referring to the supernatural. You kind of talk about the paranormal. Which has a scientific gloss to it, I guess, that the supernatural may have older connotations. What you get with a lot of the Hollywood stuff. Particularly with the sort of the creature feature. The Horror. You want the fantastical, but you can't necessarily explain it as the supernatural. So you go towards other type of genres like science fiction. And then you have the sort of the fabulous idea of the atomic explosion that releases the beast from 20,000 fathoms or Godzilla or whoever it may be to then kind of come and wreak havoc across your cities as punishment for your arrogance and your unthinking sort of actions. And that sort of becomes very popular, obviously through the sort of the 50s, right through to, I guess, the wrong ocean. But things like Pacific Rim and the kind of giant sea creatures in that they're aliens coming through the ocean as a kind of a portal from some other dimension, you know. So it's kind of leapt away from the Kraken as this sort of just legendary supernatural beast, to aliens transporting into our world, hidden under the oceans. It still speaks to the unknown. But you're just sort of repackaging the wonders and the fears through a different framing.
- [31:29]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
And we're in an age now where we're probably more disconnected from the sea than we ever have been before. Do you think this supernatural history of the Atlantic has a role to play today?
- [31:40]
Carl Bell
It does. I mean, it's not the stuff on the surface, it's not necessarily the ghost story itself, but it's the stuff below it. You're talking about guilt, you're talking about memory. And I think a lot of the stuff with magic is a search for agency in an environment that seems uncontrollable, is beyond our control. And so I think there is a role to play. If you kind of dig below the superficial parts of the stories. What is going on psychologically when you tell these stories? A lot of the time it's to do with hope. It's to do with the hope that you're going to start a journey and you're going to get to your destination alive. You know, that's the sort of the fundamental hope. And there is a real sort of pragmatism to maritime folklore as well. Callous, as we've seen when it comes to jumping in or not jumping in the water, but also the sense that we're working together. You've got to work as a crew. So I think there is that kind of collaborative element with a lot of this. That kind of culture there. It is about kind of will, it's about endurance, it's about adaptability. And I guess these are very much issues that we are having to think about now. As anxious or as fear ridden as some of these sailors were. They still did it, they still moved forward. And I think that's kind of one of the sort of key messages that comes from this. We can wrap it up in the supernatural and folkloric ideas, but essentially it's the psychological strength to feel that you can do something and that you can move forward rather than just endlessly standing still and being horrified by the situation you're in.
- [33:02]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
And are you referring there specifically to say, the climate emergency?
- [33:05]
Carl Bell
Yeah, I guess. I mean that's obviously the most obvious sort of the whole relationship. Where it was us kind of previously fearing the ocean as something that's being done to us, it's kind of flipped to what we're now doing to the ocean. And yeah, I mean, obviously those climate concerns are increasingly sort of going up to the sort of the top of the agenda there. And I think that's kind of what we're looking for now. Rather than just keep projecting solutions into an imagined future, it comes down to practical, pragmatic steps trying to, you know, work as a crew, work collectively. Those type of messages I think are there.
- [33:38]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
Thanks so much for your time.
- [33:39]
Carl Bell
Thank you, John.
- [33:41]
Narrator/Advertiser
That was Carl Bell, associate professor in cultural and social history at the University of Portsmouth. His new book, the Perilous A Supernatural History of the Atlantic is out now.
- [34:02]
Carl Bell
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- [34:45]
Interviewer (John Bauckham)
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