17 March 2022

A flood of words

In the 18th century, the sea burst upon the land with encyclopaedic force. Johann Hinrich Röding’s four-volume Allgemeines Wörterbuch der Marine in allen europäischen Seesprachen (General Dictionary of the Marine in All European Sea Languages, 1793–1798) was the first German-language work of its kind, but it was not the only one. Look in the online catalogue of the Herzog August Bibliothek and you will find the Universal Dictionary of the Marine (1769) by Scottish poet William Falconer, for instance, as well as the Vocabulaire des termes de marine anglois et François (1777) by French colonial official Daniel Lescallier. Both works would probably have been at Röding’s fingertips as he wrote his own work.

A pastor’s son, Röding had attended the Latin school in his home town of Buxtehude, on the Lower Elbe. However, he had not been to university. In his role as a grocer and tea merchant he felt a close association with seafaring. As his preface reveals, he was extremely well read and corresponded with kindred spirits as far afield as London and Lisbon. This enabled him to receive reading matter and information such as a catalogue of maritime literature written in Spanish from a ‘Spaniard at the El Escorial library’. Above all, however, he exploited his contacts to ‘foreigners who were seafarers by profession’, including those from Italy, Spain, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. He probably met them on a daily basis near his shop, which was situated right in the middle of Hamburg’s port.

At that time there were a great many seafarers – yet few people had any idea of how they lived and the work they did. If this state of affairs changed, it was largely due to Röding’s dictionary. The hefty quartet of volumes was evidently not designed to be used on board. It was published as part of a wider project in conjunction with the Allgemeines Polyglotten-Lexicon der Naturgeschichte (1793–1798) by the indefatigable legal expert, encyclopaedist, translator and travel writer Philipp Andreas Nemnich. Nemnich initially managed to attract the interest of Gebauer, a publisher from Halle an der Saale, but then went on to publish the dictionaries himself in Hamburg. The Allgemeine Wörterbuch der Marine was also a success in locations far from the coast: the subscription list included the literary society in Altenburg, the Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde zu Berlin (Berlin Society of Friends of Natural Science), bookshops from Basel to Copenhagen, numerous reading societies and libraries in universities, towns, councils, schools and churches – the ‘ducal library’ in Wolfenbüttel was also named. Individuals mentioned include esteemed citizens of Hamburg, numerous aristocrats, professors, legal experts, clerics, councillors of war, diplomats, chamberlains and a ‘theatrical director’, as well as women such as a ‘Fräulein von Frankenberg’ and ‘Madame Rahusen, née Roosen’.

The Allgemeines Wörterbuch is prepended with an annotated bibliography with an index of names and subjects. Thematically relevant essays from publications of the British, Swedish, Dutch and Russian academies are presented separately. The list of words contains ‘coined words’ in eight languages from subject areas such as sea trade, sea freight, ship- and boatbuilding, naval warfare, navigation and maritime law. Röding was interested above all in maritime trades: ‘the art of rope-making, sail-making, block-turning, &c.’ The fourth volume featuring 115 plates showed copperplates of ships and special equipment.

This was the kind of thing that Röding’s well-travelled informants had to deal with all the time, and the dictionary was undoubtedly useful in training seafarers. But Röding gave his express assurance that ‘in every word of an explanation I have endeavoured to express myself so clearly and comprehensibly that even someone who is not a seafarer will be able to understand the matter’. But why should an inland lay readership look up what the ‘fore royal lifts’, the ‘futtock shrouds’ or a ‘stropped fiddle block’ looked like? Why should people be interested in the way a sailor’s hammock was constructed or what it meant to have ‘sea legs’?

The early modern era: a maritime epoch

Röding’s work is a clear example of new realms of knowledge being opened up in the early-modern era – more specifically: the maritime realm. This phenomenon was also examined at a conference of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Frühe Neuzeit (a working group of the German historians’ association Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands), the results of which are now collected in the volume Das Meer: Maritime Welten in der Frühen Neuzeit (The Sea: Maritime Worlds in the Early Modern Period). A growing interest in the sea was a phenomenon of the era from 1500 onwards; indeed, the early modern times can be regarded as the maritime epoch.

Far from the coast, at places like the Herzog August Bibliothek, there are numerous indications of this, for example in the portolan charts (an early form of sea charts) in the ducal collection of maps or in the travelogues that were – as the loans register of the Herzog August Bibliothek shows – read with particular diligence in the 18th century. Last but by no means least there are numerous early modern graphic prints depicting shipwrecks and secluded islands. Maritime motifs were also widespread as emblems, and in fact an entire exhibition was dedicated to them in association with the conference. A publication about this show entitled Seewege und Küstenlinie: Maritime Welten in der Herzog August Bibliothek (Sea Routes and Coastline: Maritime Worlds in the Herzog August Bibliothek) is available as part of the Wolfenbütteler Hefte series.

The fact that the early modern era was also a maritime epoch was connected not only with technological and geopolitical developments but also with a change in perception. In ancient times and in the Middle Ages the oceans formed a mental ‘barrier’ and crossing them would have been viewed as a transgression; now, this seemed to be something that could be overcome. It was not uncommon for a risky sea voyage to be rewarded with wealth and the acquisition of knowledge. Whatever lay across the seas, it held the promise of a better future and even occasionally inspired utopian thinking.

When assessing the intrinsic value of the early modern era as an epoch, historians refer to the European expansion, which largely took place by sea. Transoceanic mobility increased noticeably in this period, which made it possible to find out about distant continents and lands over the seas with unprecedented ease.

Moreover, seafaring led to contact with unfamiliar cultures, which would prove critical for globalisation: the sea became a place where peoples could encounter each other. The plates in Röding’s book show not only a ‘Holzgelle or flat-bottomed boat on the Upper Elbe’ but also non-European types of ship such as ‘a djerm on the Nile’ or ‘a double pirogue common in O-Taïti [Tahiti]’. His multilingual book served as a work of reference for numerous translations. Liberal use was made of ‘seaspeak’ in the popular travelogues. Evidently the dictionary was so useful that Nemnich also published an English version in 1815.

Röding’s dictionary does, however, also present the downsides of European advances into maritime domains. The ‘Asiento de Negros’, for example, was a contract that enabled slave traders to abduct large numbers of people from Africa and take them to Spanish colonies. Just like the violent slave trade, the ever more frequently waged naval warfare was also an aspect of European expansion that the dictionary described in copious detail. After all, crossing the oceans also marked the start of the ‘Columbian Exchange’, which brought goods such as tea to Europe. This trade in organic goods did improve the situation in nutritional terms, but it also permitted diseases to spread which cost the lives of many people outside Europe. Last but not least, the changes it wrought upon the natural world had a deep impact.

Röding and his contemporary audience were fascinated by the sea and everything associated with it. Today, this fascination is a central area of enquiry for researchers of the early modern era, and one that holds a great deal of promise for the future.

PURL: http://diglib.hab.de/?link=133

Image: ‘A Chinese junk’, Johann Hinrich Röding, Allgemeines Wörterbuch der Marine in allen Europaeischen Seesprachen: nebst vollständigen Erklärungen; mit Kupfern, 4 vols (Hamburg/Halle, 1793–98), vol. 4: CXV. Copperpl. next to an explanation of the figures it shows, plate LXXXVI, F. 502, Herzog August Bibliothek, M: Jd 24:4.