Nodes of knowledge, managing transfer: Shipbuilding and repair during the transformation from sail to steam

The core theme of the special issue in which this article appears is the inherent impossibility of confining the knowledge required to build and sustain the instruments of travel to a single space or institution. This is certainly true for the ships that built empires - the large sailing and later steam ships produced by navies and companies in the process of European expansion. Ships traveled between polities and required repairs overseas, taking the construction knowledge and practices with them. Skilled laborers - experienced shipwrights and increasingly also trained engineers - helped to transfer shipbuilding practices across oceans, and to adapt these practices to local conditions based on forms of "blended know-how." This article explores how the circulation of shipbuilding knowledge and practices within and between maritime empires changed with the increasing pace of industrialization. It does so on the basis of three moments: the Dutch East India Company's shipbuilding activities in Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the interaction between private industry and the Dutch state in advancing machine-manufacturing in both the Netherlands and on Java in the 1830s and 1840s; and the aid provided by Dutch engineers in laying the groundwork for Japanese industrial warship-construction in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such transfers put high demands on the capacities of states and naval administrators in controlling the flows of necessary resources and skilled labor, requiring complex arrangements between states and private capital. Industrialization did not change this basic fact, but it did change the nature of these arrangements. Although shipbuilding knowledge always remained practice-driven, highly mobile and susceptible to local adaptation, the increasing technological demands created by the transition from sail to steam and wood to iron, combined with the extension of the power of states and transnationally operating manufacturing companies, considerably changed the institutional embeddings and societal consequences of its circulation.

Sourcing Elephant Ivory from a Sixteenth-Century Portuguese Shipwreck

The oldest known shipwreck in southern Africa was found in Namibia in 2008.^1-4 Forty tons of cargo, including gold and silver coins, helped identify the ship as the Bom Jesus, a Portuguese nau (trading vessel) lost in 1533 while headed to India.^4-6 The cargo included >100 elephant tusks,⁷ which we examined using paleogenomic and stable isotope analyses. Nuclear DNA identified the ivory source as African forest (Loxodonta cyclotis) rather than savanna (Loxodonta africana) elephants. Mitochondrial sequences traced them to West and not Central Africa and from ≥17 herds with distinct haplotypes. Four of the haplotypes are known from modern populations; others were potentially lost to subsequent hunting of elephants for ivory. Stable isotope analyses (δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N) indicated that the elephants were not from deep rainforests but from savanna and mixed habitats. Such habitats surround the Guinean forest block of West Africa⁸ and accord with the locations of major historic Portuguese trading ports.^9,10 West African forest elephants currently range into savanna habitats;^11-13 our findings suggest that this was not consequent to regional decimation of savanna elephants for their ivory in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. During the time of the Bom Jesus, ivory was a central driver in the formation of maritime trading systems connecting Europe, Africa, and Asia. Our integration of paleogenomic, archeological, and historical methods to analyze the Bom Jesus ivory provides a framework for examining vast collections of archaeological ivories around the world, in shipwrecks and other contexts.