Gathering Acorns Over Break

This past spring break was a welcome opportunity to slide some more bricks into place in the wall of my larger research project on historic maritime clothing, gathering evidence (while canoeing, drinking tea and generally brainstorming). The material is fascinating, but the time needed to download and organize the various files was incredibly tedious (several days of copying, pasting and labeling), and so had not happened until now due to the time-demands of term. However, with this done, the next step will be the process of analyzing these images for potential conclusions, and then linking them with prior research as well as the historiography on the wider topics of transnational history and material culture (my upcoming short essay). While it’s frustrating to not yet know whether this diligent collection will pay off in full, I’m satisfied both that I now have these files on hand for future projects, and that I can potentially make some really interesting connections between the new evidence I describe below…

The first source I dug into were two sets of printings of the ‘Cries of Paris’, both currently housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York). These genre images of urban life are part of a series which consist of about 70 engravings which show various street vendors and itinerant laborers on the mid-18th century streets of France’s capital. While not directly related to my topic, these will be useful for putting the depictions of sailors into context by demonstrating the ways in which other members of France’s urban working class dressed, to find if there are any similarities (like use of clogs), or differences (the length of garments for instance, or styles of legwear). However, this series only deals with Paris, so I might have to find the other later and earlier editions by other artists which depict the streets of Dublin and London, to put this in truly international perspective!

Two larger paired sources were two 1790s French encyclopedias amassed by Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, the first (Illustrations de Encyclopédie des voyages, contenant l’abrégé historique des moeurs, usages, habitudes domestiques, religions, fêtes…) housed in the National Library of France (Paris), and the second (Costumes de Différent Pays) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Over 500 colored engravings in total are shown, depicting the dress of groups around the world as understood by late-18th century French scholars. While the accompanying text from the book itself has very unfortunately not been digitized, which will likely limit the force of argument I can muster, the engravings themselves beautifully capture the way in which regional ethnic groups dressed, both within and outside of France. Besides just visual sources, an extant mahiole Hawaiian feather helmet in the collection of the British Museum which I was led to starting with its depiction in this book may also make an appearance in my coming work! So the potential for drawing and marrying evidence from written, visual and material sources is really promising so far, provided I can read enough to critique and use sources wisely. I’m hoping to reference these items in larger discussions of ‘Enlightenment anthropology’ to use these within a discussion of how sailors linked the world as agents of trade and European exploration, and how these connections were reflected in the clothing they wore (or didn’t, depending on the nation).                                                                                                                                            

A final major breakthrough was the downloading of a 2 Volume Traité Général des Pesches et Histoire des Poissons (Vol. 1 1769, Vol. 2 1772), by Duhamel Du Monceau. While this document spends an incredible amount of text on the fish species themselves and the manner in which they are harvested, throughout it consistently and explicitly draws comparison between the economic models, ships, techniques, infrastructure, crews, and even clothing used by the various nations at work in the major European fisheries. And secondly, it is beautifully illustrated with dozens of engraved plates which are remarkably clear in their depictions of men dressed in day-to-day work within the various maritime trades. This work is both comparative and international in its outlook, which is similar to a lot of other sources I’ve found so far from this pre-19th century period, when European ‘nations’ were far more heterogeneous than we are used to.                                   

I could gush about more pieces, but my word-count is up, and I’d rather get back to reading, so I can muster the theoretical framework I need to use these sources effectively.