Troubled Waters: The Sailor, the Ship, and the Sea in the Eighteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the long eighteenth century, Britain developed into the foremost naval power in world; with a fleet that could match the combined might of the next two largest European powers – as demonstrated in the Napoleonic Wars – Britain was understood, and understood itself, through the lens of maritime mastery. At the centre of this enduring framework was a potent symbol of Britain in the fused image of the sailor and the ship, as James Thomson’s ‘Rule, Britannia!’ and David Garrick’s ‘Heart of Oak’ fastened together the nation, the sailor, and the ship in a narrative of divinely ordained power and freedom, at once a justification of the empire and its mythology. This dissertation examines the ways that authors navigated these prevailing currents of naval exaltation, focusing closely on how those patriotic constructions were coopted to question the imperial cause. Indeed, I argue that, far from being a stable patriotic icon, the metaphorical unit of the sailor-ship was hotly contested in the eighteenth century. This study contributes to the growing scholarship of the ‘oceanic turn’, decolonizing the imperial assumptions of maritime discourse of and about this period. The challenges to the national narrative confronted the metaphor with its lived realities, a methodology that works both in stories of triumph and scenes of catastrophe, repudiating its assertions of mastery and liberty. This project reveals the decidedly ambivalent portrayal of British naval culture in works by well-known authors like Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, William Cowper, and Olaudah Equiano in addition to engaging with some lesser-known labouring poets like Henry Needler and William Falconer.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".