Technology from Overseas: Misunderstanding Vessels from Afar

Technology from Overseas: Misunderstanding Vessels from Afar

In the maritime heritage preservation field, we preserve what we value, and (perhaps) we only value what we truly understand. The nautical technology of traditional Chinese sailing vessels that crossed the Pacific, often demonstrated through the stories of their voyages, have now opened a window for non-Chinese to understand more of the maritime heritage of China and the legacy of Chinese seafaring. Yet, when the Western public first began to encounter these unfamiliar vessels, very few were capable of understanding what they were seeing. With the exception of the few nautical experts of the time, most could not grasp the technical or cultural construction features. Foreign observers were hampered by their social biases, reluctant to grant maritime expertise to shipwrights and sailors from a non-European tradition, unable to recognize the obvious skills that produced vessels so unfamiliar to their own experiences.
They regarded Chinese vessels as quaint and unwieldy creations, derived somehow by accident, or built after the fashion of sea monsters. Vessel designs were generally thought to represent "ancient times," no matter where or when they may have truly originated. Public appraisals often comprised an odd mixture of surprise and contempt. As we now know, the exact opposite was often true: the Chinese vessels that found their way to scattered ports across the Pacific were complex craft. Most represented successful regional designs evolved over many years of trial and error on long sailing voyages.
The Free China was one of the vessels that successfully crossed the Pacific, yet was then subject to some of this foreign bias and misunderstanding. The obstacles faced, therefore, in the preservation story of the Free China include not just the storms of her ocean passage and the ravages of shipworms and weathering over time, but also inherent biases and misunderstandings during her sojourn to the West. Maritime encounters on the global ocean, including Western experience with versions of Chinese traditional ship design, sometimes tell us more about our own limitations as humans, than they do about the amazing variety of nautical design within our shared maritime past.

Hans Van Tilburg

The Museum of Underwater Archaeology

November 2021

English

Van Tilburg, Hans. 2021. “Technology from Overseas: Misunderstanding Vessels from Afar.” Edited by Brian Fahy,
Hans Van Tilburg, Bill Jeffery, T. Kurt Knoerl, and Riley Smith. In Proceedings of Fourth Asia Pacific Regional
Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage: Keelung,Taiwan, and Virtual, November 1-5, 2021. The Museum of
Underwater Archaeology URL: https://apconf-much.org/proceedings/exhibits/show/apconf-muchproceedings/item/680

Asia Pacific Regional Conference on Underwater Cultural Heritage