Putting Eighteenth-Century Ireland Underwater

This essay looks at eighteenth-century Ireland from an underwater perspective, using blue humanities theory. It explores Ireland’s place in a new emerging sea of blue humanities scholarship, arguing that the eighteenth century marks a lynchpin moment in Ireland’s cultural entanglement with water. At the same time that Catholic inscription in the British navy rose to an all-time high and the penal laws limited tenants’ access to Irish waters, Irish culture also exhibited creative and decolonial ways of thinking with water. While the rest of Western culture was adapting to ‘modern water’, a concept Jamie Linton uses to explain humanity’s conceived social separation from aquatic ecosystems, Irish folklore thought about traditional Irish life in amphibious ways. Lastly, this essay approaches the shipwreck of the French frigate La Surveillante, scuttled in 1796 off Bantry Bay, to consider how Irish culture might hold underwater afterlives. The blue humanities can revitalize the way we think about eighteenth-century Ireland by helping us to see a sunken ship as a new underwater story.