Fandom and the Borders of Reality

During my obsession with Star Trek, I cultivated an interest in astronomy and space travel, but it was frustrating. Here and now, launching a space shuttle is a huge and slow affair, with a train of cars following the shuttle as it creeps out to the launch pad, and the cloud of fire at liftoff shows how exasperatingly wasteful the propulsion is. The interior of a space station is cramped and confusing, like a submarine without floors. The astrophysics course I took was almost solely about nuclear reactions in stars, not really about the universe, nebulae, quasars, exoplanets. The only part of it that involved anything even remotely reminiscent of Star Trek was a lecture about supernovas by a postgraduate whose e-mail address started with "jim@astro". I was quite disappointed, my love for nuclear reactions notwithstanding.

Approaching from the other direction, Star Trek's science and technology are cardboard. Attempts at finding out more about warp drive or tachyon particles slam you up against that patchily camouflaged brick wall of reality. I find this less disturbing in TOS, because it's not trying as hard as TNG to construct a coherent, believable world - something that might well be impossible.

One of the lovely things about Age of Sail fandoms, therefore, is their smooth borders to reality. The characters in the novels of C S Forester and Patrick O'Brian are fictional, but their world is real and continues outside those pages: in other books, in museums, and in the world as we know it, since it's the product of its history. There's technobabble in Master & Commander and Hornblower just as there is in Star Trek, but on sailing ships, the technobabble makes sense; it's not smoke and mirrors. The ropes and pulleys each do something very specific and instrumental rather than being there for atmosphere like the buttons, lights, and levers aboard the Enterprise. I'm surprised by how much that means to me. I can go to the library and find books on masts and rigging, or crucial naval actions in the early 19th century, or the social situation aboard the ships of the Royal Navy around the year 1800, and it's ALL REAL. Or rather, was all real (because thankfully, times have changed). O'Brian sometimes retells historical events in his novels, with his characters playing minor parts, and both O'Brian and Forester let their characters come aboard ships that actually existed; there really was a Captain Edward Pellew in command of the Indefatigable, although there was never a Mr. Midshipman Hornblower under him, and the Shannon really did challenge the Chesapeake in the year 1813 (the event has its own Wikipedia entry), but without Jack Aubrey aboard. Sometimes I come across contemporary portraits of people I had thought of as fictional. It's great.

I was thinking of this as I walked along the row of wet thirty-pound cannon on the upper deck of the Jylland the other week. To some extent it was like visiting a reconstruction of the bridge of the Enterprise: the ship is in dry dock and various steel-mesh staircases and even a lift have been installed to facilitate for visitors, there was scaffolding up the foremast and green exit signs glowing on the dimly lit gun deck. The masts were bare; they probably store the sails somewhere dry in winter. In the waist, the sides were some six feet high, but through the gunports I could see the gift shop and the café; from the quarterdeck, the parking space and the surrounding town. The ship is little more than a backdrop, in some ways, and much of it is reconstructed rather than preserved - the Jylland spent decades as a decaying hull under a tarpaulin. Still, what is there is real in the sense that it's historically accurate and would work if you tried it. There's no styrofoam or balsa wood or plastic; everything you touch is hemp and iron, oak and tar, and it all fits together and makes sense. It's a very special kind of fandom-related joy.

The Thing About Sailing Ships, pt. I

One of the cool things about my job is that it takes me to places I'd never have expected a couple of years ago. Next week I'll be haunting some godforsaken backwaters in Jutland and am looking forward to it, not only because I appreciate change, but also because I've planned my route so that I can visit the frigate Jylland. Strictly speaking, that ship is at least fifty years too young for me, but it is a wooden sailing ship, a warship, and I believe it's similar enough to wooden frigates of the early 19th century to be interesting.

Last year, Patrick O'Brians Aubrey/Maturin novels and C S Forester's Hornblower books sparked a deep and unexpected interest in sailing warships, particularly of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in me. While reading the first part of O'Brian's series, I started looking all the naval terms up on Wikipedia, and it turned out that clicking around there was even more engrossing than the novel. The ingenuity of a sailing ship, the myriad details, the masses of ropes and little wooden objects, each handmade to fit exactly into its place and do what it's supposed to do, each one with its own name. Before that revelation, I'd never thought of a sail as very different from a bedsheet on a stick. Now I'm deeply in awe of the incredibly complicated, and yet perfectly optimized, system that is the rigging of a sailing ship. An immensely complex machine operated by muscle power and the forces of nature, how could that be anything but fascinating?

However, technology isn't the only reason for my interest in - whatever term I should use for the combination of naval fiction and naval history of the era around 1793-1815. "Age of Sail fandom" is mostly an umbrella term for O'Brian's and Forester's works with appendages (the Master & Commander and Hornblower movies, respectively) and doesn't necessarily cover historical fact, while "naval history 1793-1815" is quite a narrow definition that also makes it sound like I'm building dioramas where I reenact important naval actions and build models of HMS Victory in my spare time. Whatever; I'm also fascinated by life aboard ships, the unimaginable situation of being aboard a wooden vessel that's being shattered by cannon shot, the human aspect. I won't even start developing that theme here, but might write more about it some other time.

This interest in, let's just call it sailing ships for now, is actually quite comical. You see, I hate boats and all kinds of floating vessels. I'm afraid of water and even more of heights; one of the Hornblower TV movies ends with the main characters standing on what I think is the topgallant yard, and the mere thought of that makes my palms sweat. People like to hear and read about the things that frighten them the most, and I suppose that my interest is partly inspired by that impulse.

A couple of months ago, I was crossing the Sound from Elsinore to Helsingborg, a 20-minute trip on broad, heavy, perfectly safe car ferries where you have to look out a window to confirm that you're not on land anymore. During my childhood and teens, I went on those ferries a couple of times a year, but it had been almost fifteen years since the last time, and I was interested to see how I would feel about the journey now. It turned out that nothing had changed: as I stepped aboard, the old familiar conviction that the thing was going to sink welled over me for a moment. As soon as we were out of the harbour, I went out on deck to face my old fears and leaning against the railing, I thought of one of my earliest memories: being lifted up by one of my well-meaning parents so I could look over the side and panicking at the sight of the long drop and the green, frothy water at the end of it. It's not quite as scary when you're standing on your own feet, but deep down I still felt a stirring of that old fear. So, still a confirmed landlubber.

My excitement about visiting the Jylland is mostly about getting a feel for the physical space of a wooden frigate, what it's like standing on the gun deck, how long it takes to walk from the quarterdeck to the forecastle or from the orlop to the waist, being surrounded by ropes, touching and feeling the ship to get a better understanding of the novels I read. But there's also a curiosity as to my own reactions, how scary it will be to look up into the rigging and imagine being forced to go up into the top or to look over the side and imagine the ship heeling in a strong wind.