ship

Identities unhidden

1. A record of a life, partially erased

2. Some news, some weather, and some poetry, brought together in time and preserved sans rature on a page in an archive. Click to enlarge.

3. “S.S. Lucania, July 28, 1894.” Photograph by John S. Johnston

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Source:  Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det1994011734/PP/. Photoshopped.

When John S. Johnston squeezed a rubber bulb which actuated the shutter release on his 8-by-10-inch view camera, his closing hand juxtaposed into existence an array of detail in time and space. It isn’t a permanent array; it won’t last forever in the way the diagrams in Euclid will. It is merely historical. A part of its beauty is owed to the humorous operation of mere coincidence in space and time. On the hottest day in thirteen years, with the sky the color of copper, brush your teeth with the white hand of Beauty and fill your mouth with the taste of hay. For the moment, you might as well. Good hay, sweet hay, as Nick Bottom reminded us one night when the weather report was different, hath no fellow.

But before a backdrop of coppery sky with sun-ball suspended, John S. Johnston’s hand once did close around something that admitted to memory, for a while, a lacework of davits and railings, a haze of coal smoke, and a flag on thick damp cloth flopping in the steady breeze of a passage across time.

Estampe III


August 9, 1914: at the beginning of World War I, the American Line ship New York arrives in New York from Southampton, having departed from an England not yet at war.

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In Southampton, the New York had become an interesting footnote to the history of tragedy two years earlier, on April 10, 1912, when suction generated by the propellers of the departing Titanic tore the smaller ship from its mooring and drew it toward the Titanic’s stern. Only skillful ship-handling by the Titanic’s Captain Edward J. Smith averted a collision and allowed the Titanic to resume its journey toward the iceberg. That enriches the New York’s log for April 10, 1912, with irony. By comparison, the log for any other day in the ship’s long history (1888-1923) might as well be blank.

So this second image of the New York on August 9, 1914, is all but meaningless to the kind of history that consists in a log of things seen. The second image was taken closer to the ship in space and time, but proximity has left little ironic context within the image frame for a log’s words to work on. If anything, the camera’s privileged proximity has erased the rest of the contextual universe from consideration. Unlike the first image, this one fills the visual field solely with itself. There, it is nothing but a view of morally neutral steel, and of some human flesh seen in incidental connection with the steel.

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But look anyway at these smiling faces steel-engraved into the image. They are among the first refugee photographs of the Great War, and that is their claim on us and on memory. The claim isn’t visible within the image, however. Under that limiting spectral circumstance, the bodies pressed against a port-side railing on board the New York can be seen now only as representations of what is not present to the eye. As of August 9, 1914, in New York, the war zone is still elsewhere. We see the faces that have arrived from there, but as of August 9 we’ll never yet be ready to understand what there will look like and how history will remember it.

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Instead, we (don’t we? don’t you?) scroll back up to look again at the pretty ship New York and its busily helping tugs, two of whom have names we can make out: Claremont and Excelsior. Excelsior is the motto of New York State and also the title of an easy-to-read inspirational poem by Longfellow, composed during an era when great ships were being strenuously conceived. But August 9, 1914, was one of the dates when reading poetry began getting harder. If you come close enough now to this picture of a ship approaching land, you may feel the little zephyr of a closing book.

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Sources: “NEW YORK arrives, 8/9/14” and “On NEW YORK.” George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005017039/ and http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005017040/. The two larger images have been photoshopped.

Ark

To the New York World on June 19, 1913, the arrival of a brand new ocean liner at Hoboken’s pier 1 was a front-page event, but only one of many. After all, if a newspaper calls itself The World, it ought to be responsible for the history of everything.

By way of teaching us to think about what everything might mean, The World showed readers of its masthead on June 19, 1913 an emblem of an idea illuminating a port that gives on the entirety of the world. There is the idea, right between the paper’s first and last names, The and World: an image of Liberty lifting her lamp to bring the world’s hemispheres together in light. However, the masthead has also been posted with a cautionary notice about the limits of enlightenment. Of course, says the notice, the world still has its dark side. Representing the interest of the dark side, I ask you to read what I say I am: Evening Edition. Those other words, The and World, can’t speak for my department. It and I are here to shade and modulate light. Our job is to turn it down far enough to let you remind yourself, in rueful relief, “This won’t last. There will be another edition in the morning. Furthermore, fourteen months from now, a foreign secretary of England will remark that the lights are going out all over Europe.”

For the moment, however . . .

As of this evening, the largest, most luxurious ship in the world has now docked. A newspaper named The World has dispatched a photographer to the pier, and he has come back to his darkroom with an image of the ship’s most distinctive feature: its figurehead, a giant bronze sculpture of the imperial German eagle whose talons grasp a globe emblazoned with the motto of the Hamburg-America Line: Mein Feld ist die Welt, “My range is the world.” History, in retrospect, may decide to read the image in a diagnostic way. “Wilhelmine vulgarity,” it may say, or “Wilhelmine brutality,” or (thinking ahead to July 29, 1914) “hubris.” But on June 19, 1913, the Imperator also submitted to history’s redaction a view of a deck covered with a miscellaneous extra cargo, captioned with humble vagueness, “Immigrants & luggage.”

The phrase seems to equate the immigrants with the trunks they carried. Some people have sailed into the historical record along with boxes covered with the skins of dead horses or dead cattle. That, literally, is what “Immigrants & luggage” means. Of course the caption-writer’s intent probably wasn’t scornful; presumably he was only trying to keep his caption as short as possible. Adding one more word and possibly replacing the ampersand with another — “Immigrants and their luggage” — might have altered the caption to a text both syntactically unambiguous and emotionally rich, but it would also have competed with the emotion that a news photograph is generally supposed to communicate on its own, without words. In any case, this image dates from 1913. The time for learning to read it richly, with the resources that irony can provide, won’t arrive until some time later.

In fact, a whole series of times will soon be on the way, and each new time — say, 1914; and then 1924, when the golden door at Ellis Island was slammed shut; and then, of course, 1945 — will offer us one more tip for making a read text or a seen image seem fascinatingly complex. But for now in 1913, you have been granted the innocent luxury of reading an image almost free of its associated words. The words are there to be read, but as of 1913 they’re still pale and faint. They haven’t yet been hardened or darkened. They aren’t yet mature enough to withstand and repay an ironic reading.


Come closer, then. These words and this image can be remembered without distress. If you are an American of central or eastern European descent, the probability is high that your ancestors crossed over on one of the ships of the Hamburg-American Line. Of the faces you see now, as you remember, one may be yours. The ship that gave your face its meaning for The World in 1913 has vanished into the unrecorded, but in its vanishing it has bequeathed you an image of the life that will be yours.

Now think of what was about to happen in 1914 in the world you left behind. In the new world your news has been better. Think of The World slipping out of its press, evening after evening ever after, to redeliver that better news: the news you are rereading once again, the news that you were a passenger on the Ark.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Sources: George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005013360/ and http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005013520/. Photoshopped.