Journal for the History of Environment and Society

The introduction to this special issue of the Journal for the History of Environment and Society argues that diving has been and remains a crucial practice for experiencing the sea, studying the underwater environment, and exploiting life and resources below the surface. Given the precarious state of the world’s oceans, knowledge of the past is essential to understanding the present. In addition, the exploration and exploitation of the undersea environment continues to challenge history and its sub-disciplines: it forces the blue humanities to recognize how deeply knowledge of the undersea – including scientific, intellectual, physical, and emotional knowledge – has been intertwined with diving as a technological practice. As a first step, the introduction reviews the state of historical research. It does so by proposing three chronological steps, namely 1) the ways in which helmet diving systems up to the mid-twentieth century were implicated in the exploration and exploitation of the undersea, 2) the ways in which the diving revolution of the 1950s drove high-modern approaches to the undersea, and 3) how the 1970s and the environmental age changed the ways in which divers imagined and perceived the world below the surface. In a second step, the introduction suggests four productive avenues for future historical research and outlines how the articles in the special issue contribute to them: 1) diving, oceanography, and state power, 2) diving technologies and aquatic economies, 3) body, gear, and gender, and 4) making kin with the multitude of marine life.

The scuba-era of the 1950s led to a large body of underwater literature and film in which divers represented their adventurous explorations and encounters with marine life. Sharks appeared to challenge human freedom in the ocean: in learning to dive with them, underwater authors responded variously to threat and fear, drawing on ideas of human dominance and masculine potency. I discuss shark encounters in the writings of Hans Hass, Franco Prosperi, Lotte Hass, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau with Frédéric Dumas, to show how theories of shark aggression and behaviour informed human responses, and how underwater literature departs from film in handling species’ dominance through encounters re-enacted on the page. Recent studies show shark body language in a different light.

Cyprus’ rich sponge beds have attracted sponge divers from the Dodecanese since the mid-nineteenth century, but they have not attracted the Cypriots’ attention. As the island transitioned from Ottoman to British hands, the British decided to organize the “Cypriot sponge industry” and train Cypriots, hoping to end the Greek monopoly over the island’s sponge beds. The author combined historical, legislative, and ethnoarchaeological data to: a) clarify the historical evolution of this profession during British colonial rule, b) present an understanding of underwater hazards from three viewpoints (colonial government, Greek sponge divers, and Cypriot non-divers), c) determine how colonial policies influenced maritime labour, and d) ascertain whether the British succeeded in creating a nucleus of local sponge divers. Evidence shows that few Cypriots practiced sponge fishing even after the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960. Their weak relationship with this specific maritime profession did not improve after the advent of scuba, and the last Cypriot sponge diver retired in 1986.

This article aims to provide an overview of the developments that resulted in the use of light divers onboard GDR distant-water fishing vessels as well as the technological, organizational, and administrative challenges of implementing the idea. It also discusses why this concept remained unique to the GDR fishing fleet. Prior to looking at the specific development in the GDR, the article will provide an overview of the relation of distant-water fishermen with the world underwater and why it remained for fishermen onboard GDR fishing vessels a black-box, while fishermen from western fishing nations could gain limited indirect access to the world underwater with the help of highly sophisticated technology. In a broader analytical perspective, the issue will be raised if the use of light divers should be understood as an element of the GDR culture of improvisation, explaining why other distant-water fishing nations did not opt for the concept of using light or scuba divers to support their distant water fishing fleets.

Focusing on the British underwater archaeologist Honor Frost and the West German marine biologist Hans Fricke, the article explores how underwater research in the second half of the twentieth century was linked to the scuba diving revolution. I argue that from the late 1950s through the 1970s, Jacques-Yves Cousteau remained both an inspiration and a challenge for researchers developing ways to conduct fieldwork underwater. With the many “firsts” that Cousteau represented in the exploration and exploitation of the underwater environment, he provided vital cultural and technological inspiration to these fieldworkers. At the same time, Cousteau’s enthusiasm for technological gadgetry and his showmanship in producing images of the underwater world meant that he lacked the disciplinary rigor required by the academy. In addition, and because of his enormous influence on twentieth-century maritime history, Cousteau also presents a challenge to historians. To avoid reproducing familiar clichés of him as a larger-than-life historical figure, the article suggests examining the ways in which subsequent generations of divers have perceived and approached Cousteau’s legacy.