VOL 61, NO 4 (DECEMBER 2009)

 SPECIAL ISSUE: ‘STORY OF THE VOYAGE'

Guest editors: Michael Titlestad and Pamila Gupta

Ships distil social relations at the same time as they carry ideological, political and economic cargo across the seas. This special issue of the South African Historical Journal gathers essays by nine scholars concerned to explore the multiple and contesting ways in which sea-voyages have been narrated. The stories told – of exploration, conquest, mutiny, convalescence, imperial pageantry and calamitous shipwreck – all express the hopes, priorities and anxieties of particular constituencies. Recounting and analysing these stories demonstrates the emergence and passage of transnational histories: of imperialism, subaltern dissent, and the ways in which sailors and voyagers have insinuated their priorities through their representations. The collection, which develops endeavours to historicise the ocean, represents a significant counterpoint to landlocked historiography.

Michael Titlestad and Pamila Gupta
Introduction: Story of the Voyage

Michael Pearson
Class, Authority and Gender on Early-Modern Indian Ocean Ships: European and Asian Comparison

Nigel Worden
‘Below the Line the Devil Reigns': Death and Dissent aboard a VOC Vessel

Nicole Ulrich
Dr Anders Sparrman: Travelling with the Labouring Poor in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Cape

Emma Christopher
From The ‘Ballad-Singing Monkey' to the ‘Cunning Savages': The Voyage to Found a British Colony on the Orange River, 1785–6

David Featherstone
Counter-Insurgency, Subalternity and Spatial Relations: Interrogating Court-Martial Narratives of the Nore Mutiny of 1797

Michael Titlestad
‘Dead to the World, and Almost to Ourselves': William Mackay's ‘Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Juno' (1798)

Pamila Gupta
A Voyage of Convalescence: Richard Burton and the Imperial Ills of Portuguese India

Cindy McCreery
Telling the Story: HMS Galatea's Voyage to South Africa, 1867

 Jonathan Hyslop
Guns, Drugs and Revolutionary Propaganda: Indian Sailors and Smuggling in the 1920s