Sea-Floor Property and Imperial Futures in Thomas Heyrick’s “The Submarine Voyage” (1691)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay revisits the early eighteenth-century ode to demonstrate how its poetics, labelled by the Augustans as undisciplined and perplexed, were instead used to frame ambivalence about the limits of empire and the nature of property. Focusing on Thomas Heyrick’s “The Submarine Voyage” (1691), I argue that Heyrick uses the strophic turns of the ode to speculate on the commercial and imperial value of sea-floor spaces. More than a sui generis flight of fancy, Heyrick’s speculation existed alongside Restoration scientific inquiry and commercial salvage forays into sea-floor spaces by prominent figures such as Robert Boyle, Edmund Halley, and Daniel Defoe. While later eighteenth-century authors, including Jonathan Swift, would mock these projectors as blithely unaware of the flimsiness of their own projects, Heyrick’s ode reveals intense doubt over how England might constitute knowledge and property in oceanic spaces even while envisioning English empire as reconstituting itself from salvaged oceanic materials.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".