The present research reads Jeremy Wade's television series Mysteries of the Deep (Discovery Channel, 2020 to present) as a sustained engagement with one of the Blue Humanities’ most productive ideas: that a shipwreck does not end a ship's existence so much as transform it, opening onto a stranger, richer afterlife we call a catastrophic heterotopia. Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia, Steve Mentz's account of wreck as catastrophe and Philip Steinberg's work on the ocean as socially constructed space, we analyse three episodes centred on Atlantic-networked wrecks: the Titanic , a 150-year-old wreck off the Gulf coast of Mexico and the German submarine U-864 , whose cargo still contaminates fisheries more than 80 years after its sinking. The series, we argue, models a way of knowing the sea that privileges vulnerability over mastery, which reverses human scientific artefacts back into nature, keeping open questions that official history, and commercial commemoration, would rather close.
Despite the extensive German archival evidence, there is still some historical opinion that Germany did not constitute a threat to Australia in 1914. It was clear to both British and German military planners that an effective way to fight an enemy was to disrupt its trade and food supplies. The effect this would have on any war effort, particularly the civilian population, could be dire, thus influencing military outcomes. In addition to the plans for specific naval action against shipping and port infrastructure, the use of the merchant marine as auxiliary naval vessels to interdict supplies of raw materials and food to Britain was an integral part of German war scenarios in the Asia-Pacific region, which would have isolated Australia economically and militarily. Thus, the Royal Navy would be forced to dispatch warships from home waters to defend these essential economic interests and infrastructure in the Dominions.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, three cities in Holland and Zeeland established maritime courts. While their competence included adjudication over all maritime disputes, they were specifically designed to resolve disputes between crews and their skippers over wages. The municipal authorities felt that recurring violence on the streets made such legal resolution important, and existing maritime legislation codified in Habsburg times was expanded with regulations that dealt with mariners as employees, fighting for wages. This article analyses the historical development of maritime law in the Habsburg Netherlands and subsequently the United Provinces in relationship to the rights and duties of sailors. It discusses the development of the maritime court system and makes a beginning with quantitative research on the daily experience of litigants who appeared before these courts in Amsterdam and Rotterdam between 1641 and the end of the eighteenth century.
