The ship journey, as David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram astutely argue, is not just an ‘experiment in habitation’: when ‘it transfers materials, ideas, nature and people across locales’, it also raises questions of how ‘to create, distil or transform cultural norms’, and ‘how to proclaim and dramatize from a culture from the deck and “across the beach” to a newfoundland’. 4 Thinking of the ship not only as a floating piece of ‘home’ but also as a piece of travelling communication which carries with it a certain set of people and ideologies allows us to interrogate more fully the colonising work that it does and disperses. 3 In ‘The Ship, The Media, and the World’, Roland Wenzlhuemer argues that ‘hen people, things, or ideas move, create a connection – sometimes fragile, sometimes more stable – between their origin(s) and their destination’. It argues that if the production of shipboard periodicals produced sociability at sea, then this sociability was also embedded in settler discourses of race and power.īringing the blue humanities into conversation with settler colonial studies through the lens of shipboard periodicals allows us to interrogate the ways in which the seemingly ephemeral genre of shipboard periodicals participated in creating ‘the persistent legacies of settler colonialism in the Global South’. 2 In contradistinction to this view, this chapter embeds maritime literary culture and the production of shipboard periodicals firmly within some of the key ideological frameworks of settler colonial discourse. 1 Shipboard periodicals are an ephemeral and marginal genre, in that they were an almost ubiquitous presence on voyages and held an important function and value at the time of their production, but are often characterised as being without ‘enduring literary value’. A critical body of work within the fields of settler colonial studies and the blue humanities has slowly begun to develop around this genre, with attention being drawn to the pivotal role that they played in shaping settler colonial aspirations and the broader contours of maritime literary culture. By the 1860s, newspapers produced on board the ship by passengers between Britain and the Antipodes were a regular affair: fair copies of newspapers were produced by hand and distributed around the ship, or, if the ship carried a printing press, newspapers were produced at sea. This chapter explores the spatialising methodologies of shipboard periodicals produced on three ships as they voyaged between Britain and Australia across the oceanic expanses of the southern hemisphere in the mid-nineteenth century: the Sobraon, the Somersetshire, and the True Briton.
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