Introduction

The Victorian era witnessed a vast expansion of maritime infrastructures which elevated Britain’s commercial and imperial dominance to unparallelled heights (Aslami and Watson, 2024: 269; Cannadine, 2007: 4). Ships (first sail, then steam), coaling stations, docks and ports, lighthouses and submarine cables served as material infrastructures that enabled the mobility of goods and people while backing Britain’s ‘colonialist, expansionist, and extractive politics’ (Knopf, 2023: 72). In addition, the ‘process of transforming rivers, seas, and oceans into connecting highways’ (Knopf, 2023: 71) was shaped and sustained by numerous immaterial infrastructures, including such genres as popular sea fictions or heroic accounts of exploration in contemporary periodicals. Scholars of 19th-century British literatures set at or referring to the sea have shown that canonical narratives support capital- and empire-building endeavours based on anthropocentric ideas of mastering nature. As Peck observes in relation to forerunners such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and later examples including Austen’s Persuasion (1817) or Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), such texts are ‘always in some way […] about taking control of and dominating one’s environment’ (2001: 5). Along similar lines, Knopf discusses sea adventure novels such as Marryat’s Mr Midshipman Easy (1836) and Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) in terms of ‘a male Western genre that looks at the sea through a male, possessive, and often exploitative […] lens’ (2023: 74), reducing the non-human world to a mere setting for human drama and thus curtailing ecological imagination.¹

Instead of adding to these ecocritical analyses of canonical sea fictions, I examine how Victorian sailor writing redefines the conventions of narrating the sea to forge less exploitative visions of the natural world. Reading shipboard diaries and newspapers as oceanic ecofiction, I investigate the formal means by which sailors put material and immaterial maritime infrastructures into productive tension. Rather than scrutinising their representations of material infrastructures (such as the ship) or the natural environments in which they are located (such as the sea), I shift the emphasis to the ‘infrastructural work’ (Pettitt, 2024: 414) of genre and approach sailors’ texts as immaterial infrastructures in their own right, i.e., as textual patterns which encourage alternative forms of environmental perception and knowledge (Aslami and Watson, 2024: 272; Müller, 2023: 184). I contend that sailors’ writing position—between the material infrastructure of the ship and the ‘changing natural environment […] connected to, and influenced by, people’ (Rozwadowski, 2012: 583)—engenders an infrastructural dynamic of literary form which invites reflection on current ecological crises.

In advancing this argument, my article pursues two related objectives: First, it contributes to maritime literary histories from below by examining sailors as literary agents (Blum, 2008; Cuming, 2025; Liebich and Publicover, 2021). Second, it illustrates that these agents, owing to their class-based shipboard experience, notably broaden environmental humanities debates. The relative neglect of sailors as agents within literary and ecocritical discourses results from their paradoxical place outside bourgeois norms of literature (Williams, 1977: 146–149) and within the ecologically harmful systems of capitalism and imperialism. As Cuming notes, Victorian sailors, both merchant and naval, ‘propelled the juggernaut of imperial and commercial trade’ (2025: 4–5) and guarded Britain’s colonies through warfare. Conversely, their literary legacy interrogates these systems and their material foundations, i.e., infrastructures they otherwise helped shape and sustain.

My definition of their writing as oceanic ecofiction serves to demonstrate that Victorian sailors appropriate the conventional patterns of narrating the sea to disrupt human-centred fictions and develop more sustainable engagements with the natural world. Created beyond yet never fully outside the territorial logic of the nation state, these patterns invite ‘offshore perspective[s]’ (Mentz, 2009: 99) on the landed canon.² Sailors drew the attention of reformers striving to counter ‘the degenerate state of maritime life’ (Blum, 2008: 29), not least with the provision of shipboard libraries.³ Yet their writing, forged ‘literally on the move’ (Shaikh, 2021: 104), equally adapts generic conventions to the experiences of being at sea, ‘complicat[ing] an easy association between aesthetic form and nationalist sentiment’ (Blum and Rudy, 2013: 190). Deeply at odds with their preservation in national archives, my examples invite reconsideration of the relation between nation and nature.

Accordingly, I analyse the infrastructural dimensions of shipboard diaries by Sidney Smith (1867–68) and Richard Cotten (1879–87) or newspapers such as The Illustrated Arctic News (1852) and The Great Eastern Telegraph (1866), all held by the National Maritime Museum (NMM),⁴ not least to question the ‘national, and nationalist, overtone’ (Flint, 2005: 230) of Victorian Studies. Furthermore, I highlight the generic ‘variety of literature written at sea’ (Blum and Rudy, 2013: 189) by considering how sailors reconfigure both the diary’s and the newspaper’s conceptions of individuality and collectivity or modes of sobriety and satire to accommodate their shipboard experiences. Implicitly critiquing those material infrastructures its authors helped construct, sailor writing proves immediately relevant at a moment when capitalism, with its trade routes, data cables or extractive industries (Liebich and Publicover, 2021: 6–7), is increasingly dependent on the sea and when the sea increasingly challenges infrastructural ambitions, with climate change, polar ice melting or littoral erosion offering merely a small sample (Aslami and Watson, 2024: 274; Blum, 2019: 7).

Infrastructure from Oceanic Perspectives

Conventionally defined as ‘built networks that facilitate the flow […] of goods, people, or ideas’ (Appel, Anand and Gupta, 2018: 3), recent scholarship has expanded the notion of infrastructure beyond material and technical systems to consider their social and cultural functions, including the intricate intersections between these domains (Pinnix et al., 2023: 12, 14). In this sense, infrastructures also ‘exist as forms separate from their purely technical functioning’ that must ‘be analyzed as concrete semiotic and aesthetic vehicles’ (Larkin, 2013: 329). Accordingly, material infrastructures—such as the ship or shipboard libraries, to give some examples relevant to my article—can be defined as ‘support structures of human sociality’ (Pinnix et al., 2023: 24) that shape and are shaped by social, cultural and literary practices. This expanded perspective is important, not least for the subsequent analyses, as it employs infrastructure as a critical lens for examining ‘how we understand the circulation of power’ and ‘how we define and seek to address modern inequity’ (Aslami and Watson, 2024: 268). Various scholars have stressed how infrastructures enhance systems of domination and subordination (Appel, Anand and Gupta, 2018: 5; Pinnix et al., 2023: 18). As Aslami and Watson claim, ‘[i]t is impossible to think about capitalism […], imperialism and coloniality, patriarchy’ and other structures of inequality ‘without confronting infrastructure in some form’ (2024: 269).

Given that capitalist and imperialist endeavours necessitated ‘the creation and expansion of Victorian infrastructure’ (Aslami and Watson, 2024: 284) on a global scale, it is unsurprising that the notion first developed through the translation of Karl Marx’s writings into French (Meyer, 2023: 41). A recent special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture starts from the insight that ‘[t]he nineteenth century is the period when so many of the infrastructures on which we rely for the transmission […] of ideas, people, and goods were […] established’ as well as ‘contested and transformed in practice’ (Aslami and Watson, 2024: 269). Asking ‘[w]hat forms of infrastructure underlay the […] expansion of empire, capitalism, and transatlantic slavery’ (2024: 270), Aslami and Watson move their inquiry beyond widely discussed Victorian infrastructures such as railways and trains. A section on ‘Water and Waste’ turns the focus to material infrastructures which served ‘the management and control of water: in steam engines, in canal networks and ocean navigation’ (2024: 272). The contributions to this section not only illustrate that ‘offshore perspective[s]’ (Mentz, 2009: 99) on infrastructure serve to strengthen ‘the transhistorical and transimperial work of critical infrastructure studies’ (2024: 269), as the editors assert. They also render explicit what blue humanities research has long implied: the sea, the ship and shipboard literary culture form an entangled ecosystem where the material and immaterial dimensions of maritime life co-produce one another.

Strikingly, the development of infrastructure studies parallels a broader shift within the study of maritime history as evident in the emergence of the blue humanities as a diversified field. Following Linebaugh and Rediker (2000), research into maritime history has steered attention from naval strategies and ship designs to ‘the seas as social […] sites of struggle and resistance’ (Cuming, 2025: 9). Researchers including Costello (2012), Lavery (2011) and Stanley (2016) examine issues of class, gender or race to demonstrate that ‘maritime life was diverse, though scarcely inclusive’ (Cannadine, 2007: 3). Without invoking infrastructure, these socio-cultural approaches show an acute awareness that the drastic expansion of maritime infrastructures underpinning the commercial and imperial agenda of the British Empire determined sailors’ material conditions and lived experiences, frequently to ambiguous effects. More recently, advances in a maritime literary history from below by Blum (2019), Cuming (2025) or the contributors to Liebich and Publicover’s Shipboard Literary Cultures (2021) have attributed an equally substantial role to the sea and the ship in shaping sailors’ reading and writing practices.

The ship as a material infrastructure for socio-cultural practice has drawn attention ever since Foucault described it as a heterotopia.⁵ No longer understood solely as ‘carriers and facilitators’, ships are conceptualised as ‘social spaces’ (Wenzlhuemer and Offermann, 2012: 83, 107) which transport people and ideas and thus ‘create, distil or transform social and cultural norms’ (Sivasundaram, Bashford and Armitage, 2017: 9). Despite its central condition of mobility across boundaries, the ship is often approached as a small-scale community representative of a nation or culture (Elce, 2013: 346) to highlight its twin role as an ‘ordered and ordering space’ (Pietsch, 2016: 11) in which shipboard hierarchies mirror broader social hierarchies. Linebaugh and Rediker’s take on the sailing ship as ‘an engine of capitalism’ (2000: 144) is apposite here, with the common sailor positioned at the bottom—literally and figuratively. As Rediker notes in an earlier study, shipboard labour ‘meant virtual incarceration, as the seaman was forcibly assimilated into a severe […] regimen of despotic authority, discipline and control’ (1987: 159). Such conditions were secured through myriad measures of ‘structuring’—in fact, regulating—‘space, time and role’ (Liebich and Publicover, 2021: 20) that covered leisure activities such as writing. According to Pettitt, this regulation fostered an ‘imperial culture of “punctuality”’ (2024: 413) in which the keeping of diaries contributed to the sailor’s professional development (Cuming, 2025: 66) or the creation of newspapers constituted part of officially sanctioned ‘regimens of amusement’ (Elce, 2013: 346–347). Seeking to emulate land-based literary culture, such measures also included the provision of shipboard libraries and printing presses, stressing the ship’s status as a complex material infrastructure of literary production.

Paradoxically, the stunning variety of measures regulating labour and leisure aboard ‘point to the prevalence of bodies uncontained’ (Pietsch, 2016: 211); discipline, that is to say, arises from the threat of resistance. This fear appears well founded if one follows Linebaugh and Rediker who equally conceptualise the ship as ‘a setting of resistance’ (2000: 144). As their remarkable literary productivity suggests, the material infrastructures of the ship as well as shipboard literary practices allowed sailors to combine ‘manual and intellectual labor’ (Blum, 2008: 2) and subvert disciplinary regimes, if only subtly and temporarily. Whereas Blum locates the resistant potential of sailor writing in its authors’ status as ‘jarringly anomalous wage labourers’ who ‘had no viable egress from their job site’ and often relied on ‘the capriciousness of nature’ (2008: 2) to perform their tasks,⁶ I wish to enhance her argument by putting emphasis on the natural environment in which the im/material infrastructures of shipboard literary culture are situated: the sea (Liebich and Publicover, 2021: 23–25). Concentrating on the entanglement of sailors’ literary production with oceanic environments, my take aligns with approaches in infrastructure studies which stress that ‘[i]nfrastructures are always specifically located’ and therefore shape and are shaped by ‘the environments around them’ (Pinnix et al., 2023: 28). Accordingly, the sea functions not merely as a backdrop to shipboard life but as ‘a place of dynamic change’ (Rozwadowski, 2018: 11).

If blue humanities research in the wake of Linebaugh and Rediker has challenged the reduction of sailors to symbols of the imperial nation, other scholars within the field have effected a similar corrective by ‘put[ting] the ocean in the centre of some of our histories’ (Rozwadowski, 2018: 7). This concern is echoed in Aslami and Watson’s view on maritime infrastructures that illustrate how distinctions between culture and nature blur ‘when infrastructure engineers the natural world, including its rivers and oceans’ (2024: 274). Indeed, historicising approaches to the ocean disclose that capitalism and imperialism entailed what Meyer aptly refers to as the ‘active infrastructuring of [the] natural environment’ (2023: 40). Tracing the long history of oceanic exploitation, Rozwadowski convincingly shows that industrialisation, globalisation and innovations in meteorology caused a radical increase in the 19th century (2018: 9). Moreover, Sivasundaram and colleagues investigate oceanic mapping as ‘a key mechanism of […] boundary-making’ that ‘impose[s] stillness on to the changeable medium of water’ (2017: 21). However, if shipboard writing tends to serve comparable functions, it is equally affected by the material realities of water that cannot be fully subordinated to human interests.

Investigating the sea as an environmental condition of shipboard literary culture’s im/material infrastructures is valuable as it helps explain the ambiguous patterns of sailor writing, including its potential to envision ‘infrastructures of sustainability’ (Pinnix et al., 2023: 29). Sailor writing emerges from a complex assemblage of material infrastructures—the ship, the objects that facilitate shipboard literary culture, such as libraries and printing presses, and the technologies that render the sea an infrastructured environment of knowledge and control—which helps regulate ‘the drift and dislocation of nautical travel’ (Blum and Rudy, 2013: 190). Some of my case studies even result from voyages seeking to turn the sea into an infrastructure, for instance by laying the Atlantic cable or searching for the Northwest Passage. Striving to command and contain ‘an inhospitable and unpredictable environment’ (Stam and Stam, 2008: 317), the recurring forms of sailor writing also register how the sea impinges on the ship’s (writing) ‘culture of “punctuality”’ (Pettitt, 2024: 413), thus creating a vivid resource for reflecting on the edges of human domination. It is their capacity to foster ways of knowing and being with the sea which invites critical analysis of our own exploitative perceptions and practices that leads me to group the sailors’ texts in my corpus under the term oceanic ecofiction. Loosely modelled on Blum’s concept of polar ecomedia, used to highlight the contemporary relevance of 19th-century Arctic and Antarctic shipboard newspapers, I employ the term to refer to ‘environmental writing by which […] we might imagine—and […] mediate—climate change and ecological extremity today’ (Blum, 2019: 5), while also signifying a conceptual extension in both geographical and generic terms. Approaching sailor writing as (vs. for) infrastructure (Aslami and Watson, 2024: 272), my analyses are concerned with the formal means by which sailors redefine the generic patterns of the diary and the newspaper ‘to work through questions about their time, place, and impermanence in the polar regions’ (Blum, 2019: 39) and beyond.

Levine’s infrastructuralism, which combines formalist and materialist criticism to investigate ‘the jostling, colliding, and overlapping of social, cultural, and technological forms’ (2010), is particularly useful to pursue my twin objective to position Victorian sailors as environmentally aware producers of literature. Focusing attention on individual and collective engagements with infrastructure on the level of form, it challenges the widespread trend among maritime historians to read sailor-authored texts ‘for their socio-historical content’ instead of their ‘literary qualities’ such as ‘aspects of voice, narrative structure and intertextuality’ (Cuming, 2025: 20). Put differently, literary form is not relegated to a superstructural position defined by the material infrastructures of the ship but actively mediates encounters with the natural environment to foster critical awareness of the sea’s agency.

Ink on Water: Shipboard Diaries

The dominance of the diary in Victorian sailor writing is far from coincidental. Sustained by and conducive to the ‘infrastructural transformations’ (Aslami and Watson, 2024: 272) of the Industrial Revolution, including the regulated temporality of the clock and ‘the manufacture of cheaper paper’ (Liebich and Publicover, 2021: 10), the diary became available for writers across the social spectrum. As a consequence, sailors acquired textual visibility, even if their urge to narrate the self remained tied to middle-class practices of economising time. Building on the conventions of Puritan diaries, which chronicle the ethics of hard work to prove spiritual and economic advancement, Victorian diaries require ‘an active account of personal productivity’ (Carter, 2015: 417), emphasising the writer’s desire to belong to hegemonic temporalities. Hence, Liebich and Publicover allude to the diary as ‘a means of accounting for time and for facilitating […] individual “development”’ (2021: 10). In this sense, the generic structure of the diary—its pursuit of ‘linearity, teleology, and narrative shape’ (Cuming, 2025: 58)— motivates writers to situate themselves in time and understand their lives through a conventional narrative of progress that depends on the exploitation of colonial and/or non-human Others. Robinson Crusoe is an obvious example ‘which recurs as a founding text of the amateur sailor’s quest for adventure and autonomy’ (Cuming, 2025: 48). In a chapter tellingly titled ‘Voracious Reading’, sailor Robert Hay, in his retrospective memoir, recalls how he ‘[r]ejoiced at [Crusoe’s] success, grieved at his misfortunes, and trembled when he was exposed to danger’ (1953: 28). Fuelling Hay’s desire to go to sea, Defoe’s character fosters the idea that a career in seafaring can generate wealth through trade, colonisation and resource exploitation.

Yet the diary’s conventionality also enhanced its flexibility. Victorian sailor writing includes not only retrospective memoirs that convert the flux of oceanic life into the fixity of print to serve as ‘a […] watery Bildungsroman for the working-class youth’ but also shipboard diaries which Cuming identifies as the memoir’s ‘oceanic counterpart’ (2025: 40, 62). While memoirs by Samuel Leech (1843) or James Choyce (1891) predominantly imagine time in linear terms, offering carefully constructed life stories in which the ocean is reduced to a metaphor for temptation and salvation, shipboard diaries negotiate and often contest extractive temporalities. Capturing ‘the strange instantaneity of life at sea’ (Cuming, 2025: 16), most of my case studies rework the spatio-temporal conventions of sea adventure fiction, including the sailor’s memoir, to accommodate their authors’ conditions and needs, thus challenging linear conceptions of time and associated master narratives of development.

This is not to imply that the sailor exists outside of the ship’s regulatory infrastructures. Mentioning the shipboard diary’s origins in the logbook, researchers such as Cuming stress its role as an official device implemented by naval authorities to supervise navigational education (2025: 66). Also, Cumings and Publicover consider the case of Edward Beck to support their claim that the diary approximates ‘an instrument through which the […] seafarer develops his maritime self’ (2021: 109). Juxtaposing the manuscript and its transcription, they point to the now-visible process of self-correction: ‘the first latitude is added as a superscript, while a word is half-formed and then crossed out’ (2021: 112).⁷ It is due to such corrections that the authors read the diary as a ‘navigational instrument’: if ‘published narratives recast earlier voyages in the light of the “aggregation of experience”’, they note, ‘diaries are a record of this aggregation in progress’ (2021: 108) that is both narrated and recorded in the manuscript. Put differently, the diary acts as a generic structure for absorbing, testing and refining nautical knowledge.

Richard Cotten illustrates that the educational purpose of the shipboard diary reaches beyond the mere encouragement of individual professional advancement. Comprising two volumes and an accompanying book of copied poems maintained aboard the Comus, the Bacchante and the Sphinx, Cotten’s journals meticulously record dates and place names, distances travelled and ‘miles traversed’ (1879–86), stressing his effort to manage time and ‘impose order on a novel ocean environment’ (Cumings and Publicover, 2021: 108). Yet in view of the ships’ role in securing British interests across the China and Pacific stations or the East Indies, Cotten’s writing clearly gestures beyond its function as a tool of personal and professional education, underscoring the extent to which shipboard diaries participated in the infrastructural ventures of a seafaring empire. As Pettitt observes in a related context, shipboard diaries, just as the ship, help sustain the ‘infrastructural logic of empire’; through his repeated, almost serial recording of arrivals at and returns to various overseas colonies and straits settlement such as Hong Kong and Singapore, Cotten’s ‘infrastructural work’ (2024: 14) reinforces both personal progress and the foundations of Britain’s colonial power.

Against this backdrop, it is notable that shipboard time is not inevitably linear but cyclical insofar as Beck, Cotten and others repeatedly return to and replicate earlier entries to stress that ‘textual seriality’ (Pettitt, 2024: 415) emerges from the seriality of shipboard labour, placing emphasis on the ordinary rather than the extraordinary. Both diarists do not begin with a preface asserting the extraordinariness of the life to be narrated (Cuming, 2025: 31). Instead, they offer down-to-earth, sober descriptions of tiring days of routine labour and drill in naval parlance. Consider Cotten’s entry: ‘Piped Scrub & Wash Clothes before the middle watch turned out & had several rubs at sail drill, stations & and same afternoon & both Dog watches & clued up with down Screw another day of Agony towards the end of Commission’ (1885–87).⁸ With their insistence on the regularity, even cyclicity of time, such renderings of shipboard labour validate widespread conceptions of sailors’ diaries as mechanical or monotonous. However, there is resistant potential in such passages, as Cuming remarks: ‘Making no apology for the repetition of […] content’, sailors ‘deemed repetitive work to be literally noteworthy’ (2025: 69–70). Taking her argument a step further, I suggest that such descriptions highlight the extent to which temporal experiences aboard ship were structured along class lines and thus reveal that the progress of one social group rested on the consistent routines of another.

Sidney Smith’s journals, created on board the Whampoa and SS Helvetia, imply that the sailor’s routines also fostered a strong sense of disorientation. As Smith reflects, ‘[i]t is just 3 years ago that I came on board ship and yet it seems to me as if I had been on board all my lifetime’ (1868). Such remarks suggest that the ship’s infrastructures of routine labour destabilise distinctions between past and present, compressing time into an undifferentiated experiential continuum. Notably, the act of recording one’s shipboard experience can further complicate rather than facilitate the writer’s spatio-temporal orientation. Much like the newspapers discussed in the next section, Smith’s journals repeatedly reference domestic time through which he seeks to recover familiar temporal patterns. Fixing his dislocated experience in the cyclical rhythms of domestic life, he imagines that his family, on a Sunday at eleven o’clock, are ‘sitting in church thinking and praying for me’ (1867–68). Without doubt, such references also serve to cope with the disillusionment that informs Smith’s writing. Contrary to the adventurous protagonists of sea fiction, he finds that ‘[t]he sea is miserable life, there is no mistake about it’ (1867–68). Markedly deviating from the many retrospective memoirs that represent seafaring as a route to social mobility in which the sea functions as stage for the creation of a male, national subject,⁹ Smith’s misery gains environmental dimensions as it arises from dynamic human-environment relations. Rather than a passive backdrop, the sea is constructed as ‘life’, as an active agent that cannot be easily mastered, despite his use of established generic patterns by which he strives to impose order on it (Cuming, 2025: 77–80).

The inadequacy of the diary’s spatio-temporal conventions in oceanic environments is further suggested by the subsequent entries in Cotten’s journals:

Nov 22      Left Sheerness for a cruise in the English Channel before proceeding on to China and encountered heavy weather and had to put into Queenstown.

Feb 12      About 10:30 PM a squall stuck us flack aback accompanied by heavy rain.

Mar 3      We arrived off the Crozet Group and made our search for Shipwrecked crews who may be cast away on these islands. […] There is a great many graves in different parts of these islands belonging to men who have been drowned in Whalers and while Whale fishing.

(1879–86; emphasis my own)

Instead of framing the sea as a setting for narratives of progress, Cotten’s persistent reference to weather conditions and natural phenomena indicate that the sailor’s precarious proximity to the sea encourages a distinctly oceanic consciousness which entails the narrative subversion of linear conceptions of time. Resisting anthropocentric ideas of mastery, Cotten highlights how the seriality of shipboard labour and literature emerges not only from human imposition but also from the sea as an unpredictable environment, with chronic slow-downs, shipwreck and drowning figured as ‘the fitting rewards for hubris in contravening our terrestrial destiny’ (Sivasundaram, Bashford and Armitage, 2017: 8).

Print on Water: Shipboard Newspapers

Shifting attention from the individual genre of the diary to the collective genre of the newspaper, this section reads Arctic Miscellanies (1852) or The Daily Liar (1892), among other examples, as oceanic ecofiction. Shipboard newspapers raise crucial questions about collectivity beyond nationality, including its relation to print culture—or ‘print-capitalism’ (Anderson, 2006: 18)— and the natural environment of the sea because they stress community as well as the role of literary production in forging it. Like sailors’ diaries, shipboard newspapers are best approached as instances of the previously outlined ‘culture of “punctuality”’ (Pettitt, 2024: 413), serving to manage oceanic space and time and exert control over the natural world. The creation of shipboard newspapers mainly functioned as a disciplinary measure by keeping sailors occupied and fostering the social bonds necessary to navigate oceanic environments while mediating their connection to the shore and, by implication, land-based print culture. I am especially interested in how the collective dimensions of the newspaper’s formal features enable more ‘playful departures from canonical literary culture’ (Blum and Rudy, 2013: 192). Often including heavily illustrated and highly entertaining contributions in the form of poetry, enigmas and riddles, conundrums and (mock) news, reviews of shipboard performances, comical sketches and satirical articles, newspapers substantially deviate from the sober style of the diary, suggesting a distinct approach to negotiating maritime infrastructures and their in/capacity to transform the natural environments in which they are embedded.

Compared to sailors’ diaries, shipboard newspapers have been scarcely studied, although they are no longer ‘completely overlooked’ (Wenzlhuemer and Offermann, 2012: 116). In particular, research on passenger steamships has demonstrated that newspaper production was exceptional. De Schmidt’s research in Australian archives unearthed ‘over 200 different titles’ (2016: 232); Lyons, also concentrating on Australia, mentions 18 additional examples (2018: 11). Whereas de Schmidt and Lyons focus on the heyday of shipboard newspaper production in the latter half of the 19th century, the genre’s origins date back to 1819–20, with The New Georgia Gazette,¹⁰ ‘the first Arctic newspaper’ (Blum, 2019: 15), created aboard the Hecla during an early attempt to locate the Northwest Passage. The central concern of this section, newspapers produced by crew members during the Victorian period, may not match passenger-produced newspapers in quantitative terms; yet they exhibit strong similarities in form and function.

Resonating with my broader claim about the particularities and paradoxes of shipboard writing, most scholars of passenger newspapers emphasise the environment of the ship and the sea—fluid, mobile and transitory—as well as their impact on literary production. As de Schmidt points out, the genre played a vital role in creating a shipboard community while negotiating connections to home (2016: 240). Like sailors, passengers ‘drew upon a familiar vocabulary’ (Shaikh, 2021: 109), including the formal conventions of land-based newspapers. Although often cheerful, it would be reductive to read them as ‘amusing parodies of “real” newspapers’ (Lyons, 2018: 22) alone; shipboard newspapers served various functions for their contributors, helping them cope with an unfamiliar environment or ‘idle away the […] monotonous hours […] aboard without many tasks’ (De Schmidt, 2016: 232). De Schmidt’s latter observation is obviously not applicable to sailors ‘whose lives were dominated by overburdened schedules and physically demanding tasks’ (Elce, 2013: 349); at least as long as they were not trapped in ice for weeks and sought to ease ‘the tedium of an Arctic Winter’ (1821: v), as Edward Sabine, the editor of The North Georgia Gazette, puts it. By contrast, de Schmidt’s first observation on the coping function of newspaper writing is not only pertinent to sailors’ practices but also compatible with the educational purpose Cumings and Publicover ascribe to the shipboard diary (2021: 108, 112).

Part and parcel of the broader infrastructural efforts of shipboard writing (Pettitt, 2024: 412), newspapers show a similar tendency as diaries to juxtapose social and natural environments. However, in multi-authored newspapers, this effort is more closely tied to notions of community and civilisation. Passengers, for instance, consider their newspapers essential to social cohesion, as de Schmidt emphasises with a quote from the editorial of The Ligurian (1882): ‘One of the necessities to a civilized existence is a newspaper’ (2016: 249). While the witty tone suggests light-heartedness and mockery of land-based print culture, it should not obscure the crucial role of the newspaper in negotiating community and its relation to the natural world. As Coppinger observes, ‘[t]he attempt to keep the crew’s mindset in the orderly society of home’ takes on special significance vis-à-vis polar expeditions where ‘cramped and dark conditions’ evoked fears of madness and mutiny that ‘emerge textually as the newspaper promotes all […] signifiers of European civilization’ (2011: 122; Elce, 2013: 343, 347). Prefaces such as that of The Illustrated Arctic News, which establishes a clear link to ‘the Titans of the Southern Press, who may fear our entering the field as competitors in these regions’ (1852), not only contrast land-based and shipboard newspapers (and playfully mock the former) but also construct the newspaper as a significant balancing force against nature. This finding is further reinforced by the astonishingly quick establishment of newspaper committees on merchant and naval ships, the persistent encouragement of crew members to participate in the production process and the numerous forms of entertainment to which the (creation of the) newspaper is connected, including theatrical performances and the use of printing presses.

Considering their capacity to forge ‘a common identity where none existed’ (Lyons, 2018: 18), maritime authorities had a key interest in promoting the shipboard production of newspapers, especially in the hazardous contexts of ‘naval and […] Arctic missions’ (Coppinger, 2011: 121). Indeed, the majority of 19th-century crew newspapers emerges from these contexts.¹¹ Akin to diaries in that they ‘reinforce the reader’s [and producer’s] sense of belonging to a regulated, logical, and consistent Empire’ (Stam and Stam, 2008: 301), newspapers slightly modify the diary’s regulative role by following intricate ‘regimens of amusement’ (Elce, 2013: 346–347) that facilitate the imperialist ‘infrastructuring of [the] natural environment’ (Meyer, 2023: 40). Stam and Stam observe that ‘[f]or the British, the penetration of the polar regions was motivated by a variety of factors: first, to find a trade route to China through a Northwest Passage’ from 1818–40; and second, to find the crew of Sir John Franklin in ‘almost 369 separate expeditions’ (2008: 303) from 1847–59. It is thus unsurprising that Elce describes polar newspapers as ‘expressions of imperial purpose’ which construct the Arctic as ‘a backdrop for British heroism’ (2013: 344, 355). As the many print-upon-return versions of shipboard newspapers suggest, these constructions both replicated and reinforced the public image of such expeditions as ‘heroic struggles to master nature’ (Riffenburgh, 1993: 196) in metropolitan newspapers.

Official efforts to control shipboard life by turning ‘fun and leisure [into] sanctioned activities’ (Elce, 2013: 346, 355) constituted an integral part of Britain’s imperial project, including its expansionist and exploitative practices. As Hoag notes, William Edward Parry, captain of the Hecla whose members created The North Georgia Gazette, ‘developed a wintering regime’ that encompassed the provision of pen and paper and ‘encouraged creativity and learning among the officers and men’ (2001: 89). The printing press became an officially approved resource of amusement from the mid-century and enjoyed its prime in Franklin Search expeditions.¹² Initially provided ‘by the Admiralty for printing balloon-papers’ (Arctic Miscellanies, 1852: x) and cairn papers to support the search,¹³ it was soon ‘incorporated into […] activities’ such as ‘producing playbills, broadsides, and announcements’ (Hoag, 2001: 89). On the Resolute, sailors occupied themselves with printing experiments, using different colours or ‘print[ing] on the back of a linen shirt […], a handkerchief’ or ‘brightly coloured silk’ (Hoag, 2001: 91).

Given their strictly regulated production contexts, it is striking to what extent sailors appropriate the newspaper genre to ironically subvert the image of expeditions as conquests of nature in the service of commercial and imperial interests, thereby suggesting a less exploitative relationship between humans and the natural world. To be sure, one encounters a number of contributions that adopt ‘the language of the Burkean sublime’ and the tendency to ‘inaccurately describe the Arctic as an uninhabited wasteland’ (Blum, 2019: 38) by armchair explorers. As an example, The Illustrated Arctic News, dedicated to the Admiralty, features a poem, ‘Songs of the North’, which constructs the Arctic as a ‘weary waste’, ‘roam[ed]’ by British expedition members who anticipate that ‘with success our hopes are crown’d, / And fortune should restore us’ (1852). Yet such examples markedly differ from the broader range of literary and journalistic categories playfully revised by the ‘rough and weather-beaten tars before the mast’ (Arctic Miscellanies, 1852: viii). If ‘the Poet’ reproduces conventional tropes, ‘[t]he Sportsman and the Essayist, the Philosopher and the Wit’ as well as ‘the Plain Matter-of-fact Man’ (Sabine, 1821: viii) collectively contribute to the mocking subversion of the expeditionary enterprise.

Specifically, it is shipboard newspapers’ advertisements and wildlife representations that illustrate how material and immaterial, technical and generic infrastructures jostle and collide (Levine, 2010). Consider the following advertisement in Arctic Miscellanies which humorously undermines the commercial and imperial underpinnings of polar expeditions by offering ‘[t]wo new cottages, called Marble Villa and Cerulean Cottage, […] in a very picturesque neighbourhood’ that features ‘extensive undulating grounds in front’ (1852: 37), rendering the notion of possessing a natural place in which ‘any quantity of water can be obtained by sinking wells’ (1852: 38) absurd. A similar awareness of the ways in which nature can set boundaries to extractive human practices emerges from a poem titled ‘Stray Shots’ in The Illustrated Arctic News which addresses the obstacles of hunting the Arctic fauna. Humbly confessing that, since ‘sage Punch can not here roam’, they can merely ‘scatter round’ (1852), ‘the men of the Arctic are scattershot in their […] hyperborean aims’ (Blum, 2019: 112).

Non-polar newspapers show a similar tendency. The Rocket, created on the Minotaur, a flagship for the Channel Squadron, playfully juxtaposes word and image to subvert the ship’s prime task of defending Britain’s maritime infrastructures. Contrary to the first volume’s title page, which features the drawing of a rocket carrying a banner with the military motto ‘Vincere Vel Mori’, the editorial clarifies that the newspaper’s weapons—humour, satire and wit—serve to topple the ‘destructive missile’: ‘The Rocket is to keep itself going by the force of its own composition’ (1868–69). This agenda informs, among numerous other examples, a humorous deck scene titled ‘Coaling Ship’ which relates a dialogue between an officer and crew members concerning an appropriate place for storing coal; the suggestion to store it on deck gives way to a playful pun, with one man noting that this would result in ‘a case of colapse (coal-hapes)’ (1868–69). This subtle association of coal with chaos or even breakdown is a far cry from Joseph Conrad’s representations of steamships and coaling stations which, according to Miller and Hegarty, foster the ‘systemic and logistical thinking […] that made oceanic infrastructure increasingly central to the imperial project’ (2024: 350).

Equally satirical, The Daily Liar, produced on the Northampton during a 1892 North Sea cruise, comprises 31 handwritten and heavily illustrated issues which, to the same subversive effect as The North Georgia Gazette, represent plant and animal life ‘through the crime reports and society pages of a newspaper’ (Coppinger, 2011: 119). In one of its recurring series titled ‘Distinguished People Interviewed’, which consists of mock interviews with ‘Spring-Onions’ or ‘Mousey-Jones’, the newspaper not only undermines the strict class hierarchies aboard ship but also makes fun of humans’ ambition and ultimate failure to control wildlife—‘whether it be the wild polar bear […] or the little sparrow fleeting over the ocean’ (The Daily Liar, 1892). The same critical perspective on the degree to which maritime infrastructures affect the ocean emerges from several illustrated stories told by ‘two little Thames mermaids’ who repeatedly complain about ‘that horrid coaling’ or ‘the horrid coal dust’ (1892). Contrary to their construction as mythical creatures in land-based print culture (and despite reinforcing Victorian gender norms), the mermaids criticise human intrusion, fostering empathy for ocean habitats. Apparently, Arctic extremity is not required for the emergence of fiction ‘by which […] we might imagine—and […] mediate—climate change and ecological extremity’ (Blum, 2019: 5).

Conclusion

Victorian infrastructure, Aslami and Watson claim, ‘is the infrastructure of […] empire and extractive capital’; how much ‘twenty-first-century infrastructure is built on these foundations’ (2024: 284) is effectively illustrated by a poem that accompanies The Great Eastern Telegraph, a newspaper created on the Great Eastern while ‘laying the atlantic cable, on a second attempt’ (1866). Written by signalman C. Scovell and using a chorus and an iambic rhythm, the poem’s musical features underline its function to unite the crew in its infrastructural mission. At the same time, the numerous repetitions of ‘laying the cable through’ (1866) not only underscore the seriality of shipboard labour but also evoke the long history of unsuccessful attempts to lay the Atlantic cable. Irrespective of the speaker’s assertion that the men are ‘careless of clime’ and possess the instruments necessary to handle ‘a fog’ that may ‘arise in the Midday skies’, the poem’s repetitive structure highlights that, ‘[i]n the case of infrastructures, the poetic mode means that form is loosened from technical function’ (Larkin, 2018: 329).

Putting infrastructure studies and the blue humanities into dialogue, as my article suggests, proves mutually productive while opening new approaches to studying Victorian sailor writing. Infrastructure studies helps analyse such writing in view of its formal means which arise from sailors’ ambiguous experience of and engagement with oceanic environments and their embedded material infrastructures—the ship, shipboard libraries and printing presses as well as pen and paper. In turn, oceanic materials and methods considerably extend infrastructure studies beyond its national and historically specific focus by situating infrastructural analysis within transnational and transhistorical frames. Emphasising infrastructural developments which act across broader spatial and temporal scales, including the digital infrastructures anticipated in Scovell’s poem (Pettitt, 2024: 416), this approach positions sailor writing as a key resource for tracing the environmental legacies of Victorian maritime infrastructures.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.