Crossing Shallow Seas: Muddy Imaginaries in the Age of Exploration

This paper examines the environmental history and cultural geography of the Atlantic during the Age of Exploration. How, it asks, did early modern oceanic imaginaries shape the contours of European expansion and cultural contact? From the ancient period through early modernity, numerous commentators posited that the Atlantic was a shallow, swampy place swirling with seaweed and debris. And this informed their ideas about Native American origins. As late as 1743 the American naturalist and explorer John Bartram concluded that America had been peopled not by way of heroic ocean passages, but via incremental advances. The seas surrounding North America, he concluded, could be better described as filled with networks of islands, gulfs, and capes that could be traversed step-by-step with minimal scientific expertise. Among Bartram’s seas—small, contained, and easily navigated stretches of water—the shore loomed large. An archipelagic America, in other words, was deeply connected, culturally and geographically, to the rest of the world. Drawing on the accounts of early modern explorers, naturalists, and cartographers, this interdisciplinary look at how culture, ecology, and geography became firmly entangled reveals that the material and conceptual complexities inherent in oceanic spaces played powerful roles in creating new human networks and identities.