ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Storying holes: marine woodborers in material and memory of British imperialism along Pacific coasts

• In Event: Collection Stories and Indo-Pacific worlds 3

English Abstract

The British National Maritime Museum collection holds three blocks of ship timber, each worn away and pock-marked by wood-eating species of bivalve molluscs. The historic action and agency of the bivalves is represented only by the holes left in the wood. Taking these holes as a starting point, I consider the way in which attention to absence and negative space in collections provides an entry point into different, multispecies stories of imperial expansion and its limits, focusing on British expansion into the Pacific from the 19th century onwards. Introduced wood-eating bivalves both moved along imperial shipping routes, though ballast water or ship planks, while endemic species moved into ships and new wooden infrastructure along colonial ports. These species were thus intimately tied to oceanic imperialism, while also weakening its material foundations: wharves, jetties, boats. Their histories are entangled with, but often forgotten within, wider maritime histories of empire, as well as deeper Indigenous relationships with native bivalve species. This paper will consider how we can story the collection holes to explore histories of human-mollusc relationships, oceanic imperialism, and different knowledges of wood-eating bivalves and their ecosystems.

Author

• Kate Stevens, University of Waikato, Pacific Circle