When
the Sea Brought Light to the Land
The marsh grass,
cinching the granules of sand fast to Earth, sways in the wind one hundred
feet above my favorite beach in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Patterns of
light and dark seem pronounced on the face of the cliff leading down
from the solid land to the loose sand of the beach; upon closer inspection,
the blemishes can be discerned as a steady stream of sand raining downward,
loosened by the effects of wind and moisture. The passing sand marks
the exact site at which the ocean’s forces touch the
land. The methodical meeting of worlds reveals the temporality of one
entity as the other incessantly wears it into submission, grain by grain.
Is
it the edge of the land or the edge of the sea? Perception, vantage point,
priorities offer the answer. Humans, huddled beneath a large patterned
umbrella, try to make these distinctions clean, abrupt, and meaningful,
when in fact the dependent relationships overwhelm such culturally constructed
borders. For hundreds of years, just as the sea’s winds have reached
far inland, so too humans have reached beyond the beach and into the
sea in search of something more. The tidal zones have become crucial
jump-off spots, defined by their simultaneous membership in both and
neither worlds. The interrelationship appears readily in the form of
dunes and cliffs along any coast, or in the marshlands that naturally
buffer the joining of water and land.
The natural forms taking shape along
this edge are indicative of larger relationships. The sand drizzling
downward at Wellfleet is connected in multiple ways —ecological, historical, philosophical—with
many other sites along the Atlantic coast, including the unremarkable
Fish Island in the Acushnet River off of New Bedford. And in the modern
world, web of relationships grows larger, to encompass even the mundane
land-locked BP gasoline station at which I now stand pumping gasoline
into my Volkswagen.
~~~~~~~~~~
The naturalist and writer Rachel Carson believed that an innate
attraction brought the human to the sea, based in our species’ own watery
origins. In fact, "our inheritance" from the day that we came
ashore still flows through our veins, "in which the elements are
combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water." Yet,
while we may begin life in "a miniature ocean" within our mother's
womb, we humans are by no means a member of the marine community—no
matter how our snorkels or submarines try to disguise our inadequacy.
We are of the land, anchored by the basic needs of our physiology, and
we have only imposed ourselves on the fathomy deep.
Today, the progress
of the human has shifted our relationship with the sea from one of maternal
reliance to that of almost ceremonial celebration. Ironically, this reconnection
with the "sea-mother" has significantly
fueled human development throughout history. For generations, the sea
provided exclusive access to foreign nations and to valuable commodities.
During the Age of Sail, which historians date from 1300 to the mid-1800s, "control" of
the sea served as the necessary determinant of national power. And in
the nineteenth century, the dynamic connection between the land and sea
literally fueled the most dramatic technological and cultural shift in
the human environment—when the sea brought light to the land.
~~~~~~~~~~
The story of our path toward energy intricacy begins with New
Bedford, Massachusetts, and its centuries-old tradition of whaling. Prior
to the 1820s, whale oil served as one of the most critical commodities
of the colonial era and perpetuated American dependence on the sea. Developments
in New Bedford in the early nineteenth century, however, added scale
and scope to the industry, bringing humans the ability to control time
and task through home and workplace lighting. The cultural and economic
liberation accompanying this shift allowed the human species to expand
in ways inconceivable to prior generations.
By the early 1800s, whaling
ships remained at sea for three to five years so that they could catch
a sufficient quantity of blubbery mammals to fill their impressive stores.
These first oil tankers were factory ships, stripping the outer layers
from the beasts, boiling down the blubber while at sea, and, finally,
storing the oil below. The vast majority of these whaling vessels hailed
from New Bedford, the commercial experiment of a few of Nantucket’s most successful whalers. At the apex of
American whaling, nearly half of the recorded voyages left from New Bedford;
mid-century, New Bedford's fleet numbered 320 with the next "competing" port
possessing only 65. The added responsibilities of New Bedford made it
unlike other seaports of the era.
For much of human history, seaports
have been the connecting link between sea and land. In the case of a
seaport, a town grows out of the consistent effort of human culture to
circumvent or manage such a border; whether launching an off-shore drilling
platform for petroleum or re-introducing marsh grass in order to slow
erosion, the degree and details of such activity indicate the larger
cosmological priorities of human culture. Truth be told, the seaside
site of genuine work is often not the quaint seaport of Mystic Seaport
fame; instead, for reasons of simplicity and profit, sites of heavy industry
might also be found in towns along the edge of the land.
And indeed, unlike
a traditional seaport, by the mid-1800s New Bedford served as much more
than entrepot. While the docks and berths allowed large ships to use
New Bedford as a port, the town's one-dimensional infrastructure clearly
positioned it as a fusion both of oil transshipment and of refining,
parallel to such present-day sites as Valdez, Houston, or Baton Rouge.
Thus, despite maintaining the Seamen's Bethel, counting house, and other
hallmarks of maritime society, New Bedford’s infrastructure
was less designed around the sailor and more conditioned for industrial
workers, such as refiners and factory workers.
By the 1850s, sprawling
sites for processing oil—known as oil
works-- had been added just outside of the riverfront section of town.
The industrial nature of the enterprise derived from the need to refine
both whale and sperm oil. Among this industrial cityscape, numerous sites
might provide us with a unique symbol of the relationship between the
land and the sea. Fish Island, though, brings us to the irony of this
relationship that Carson makes so terribly clear.
~~~~~~~~~~~
The crucial juncture in this energy story becomes a seemingly
subtle shift in illuminating oils during the 1860s. During these years,
Americans continued to derive light from oil lamps, but filled them with
kerosene instead of whale oil. The greatest distinction between these
resources was supply.
In short, these years saw the cultural desire for
illumination lead Americans from the sea, and the pursuit of whales,
to the land, and the pursuit of rock oil or petroleum. Not merely a transition
in resources, from animal to mineral, this shift literally occurs within
the fashion that Americans applied technology—from passive to active.
By
construing this as a shift in technological intensity, we can more clearly
see our contemporary world deriving from trends founded in the nineteenth
century, but with roots in this age-old bond to the ocean. This startling
shift in the human condition clearly translated into the redefinition
of specific locales. At Fish Island, in particular, we made a fateful
choice: We stared in the face of natural limitations—a
ceiling upon our development if you will—and we chose the riskier
path that possessed what seemed to be limitless possibilities based on
a limitless supply.
Fortunately, this story does not require us to physically
excavate the site, which is now smothered beneath a bridge spanning the
Acushnet River as it leads tourists and others to Buzzard's Bay and the
Atlantic Ocean. Instead of physical excavation, the story of the island's
significance requires historical context. Against historical background
of these two technologies, Fish Island frames the transition of the young,
seafaring United States as it came to pursue technological growth and
innovation tied to more extensive use of land-based resources not subject
to the vagaries and instability of the sea.
In fact, the times were changing
all around the whaler of the 1860s, a man who controlled little of his
own fate. Herman Melville and others have attempted to confuse the issue:
to convince us that the whale hunt existed as a romantic trial between
man and beast, land and sea. Despite its primitive guise, whaling was
no fishing trip. Whale oil was the nation's first energy production technology,
and it possessed its own industrial system to support it. Additionally,
it helped sow the seeds of its own demise.
As the world’s capital of whale oil production, New Bedford was
also the global leader in oil refining. And following Colonel Edwin Drake's
successful Pennsylvania oil strike in 1859, as developers searched for
a location in which to refine the first petroleum kerosene for use as
an illuminant, New Bedford offered the world's most advanced refining
center. A few outmoded distilleries had closed, and it was the closed
refinery on Fish Island that attracted developers of kerosene. In 1860,
Fish Island produced the first shipment of kerosene refined from Pennsylvania
crude.
This is one way that we can excavate a connection between the sea
and my guzzling automobile of today. To be sure, the connection is more
than historical: When we stand at the pump as I do today at my local
BP station, our supply of crude is almost certainly connected to the
sea. To fill the station’s tank that lay below my feet, crude oil has most likely
been wrenched from the Earth half a world or more away and put in mammoth
tankers that sail to ports such as Trenton, New Jersey; or, the crude
may come from off-shore wells, one of the most incredible productions
of human technology. But on the level of lifestyle and ethics—why
I stand here pumping gas into my transportation device only to have to
incessantly repeat this process and all of those that put the gasoline
in the pump in order to live my everyday life—we must return to
the path that we Americans chose for humanity at Fish Island in 1860.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Did the petroleum discovery slow the "Nantucketers" who chased
whale blubber to the furthest stretches of the globe? Not immediately.
Rather, historians of the American whale fishery date the industry's
demise to a chilling incident (literally: an arctic freeze) that occurred
twelve years later—a story for another time.
But, in fact, change did come in the wake of Drake's discovery in Pennsylvania.
And rapidly.
Within a decade, kerosene had become the world's most popular
illuminant. The loss of the whaling industry—which had afforded the U.S. a
prominent role in the world maritime theater—proved a dramatic
change in the economics and culture of New England; in the national scene,
however, the change barely registered in economic circles. How can this
be? During the growth years of the early 1800s, each sperm whale proved
to be the equivalent of a small gusher. By 1850, roughly $3 million of
capital supported this industry that created a product valued at nearly
$8 million annually. So, why then didn't the world take note when the
whaling industry collapsed?
Because, as consumers, we chose its fate.
That is the simple answer. Its implications, though, are riddled with
complexities.
The shift to petroleum reveals the human desire for more
control—what
today we might refer to as “energy independence.” Without
the limitations of the whale hunt, kerosene was the first low-priced
illuminant available to the masses. Such control made possible a larger
scale of the illumination industry and moved the human from its reliance
on the rhythms of the sea nearer to a free-standing life on the land.
It is a version of our current desire to divorce ourselves from reliance
on other nations for our energy supply. But, without the larger changes
that took place at Fish Island, we may not have steered into a century-long
trip into an aberration of energy security based on petroleum. At Fish
Island, we decided to take our chances. We stared in the face of the
finite we deluded ourselves with dreams of the infinite. Today, our gas
prices suggest that the days of this delusion are ending—that we
are at the cusp of another change, another energy transition.
Therefore,
the big idea of Fish Island rings as true today as it did in 1860. As
Carson showed better than any other thinker, we are bound in a web of
life dependent on many other entities, one of which is the sea. In essence,
through the choices we make and the ethics we exert, it can be said that
the land and the sea figuratively meet in each of us. We can choose to
live within these constraints or we are doomed to return again, to watch
the drizzling sand continuing to fall into the furious water at sea’s
edge. And, then, we will choose again.
Copyright © 2007 The Author. All rights reserved.
