My children love the TV cartoon series "Octonauts". They are a collection of ocean explorers/ adventure heroes who live on a submarine called the Octopod, and undertake missions generally involving one real marine/aquatic species at a time, and something to do with their Mission Statement: "Explore - Rescue - Protect".
It's nice - boppy music, nothing violent, and now my kids have a reasonably comprehensive knowledge and fired-up curiosity about cone snails, gulper eels, triggerfish, several species of whale and of shark, various crustaceans, the Amazon River, and deep-ocean topographic features like trenches, hydrothermal vents etc. It does make their teachers a little bit crazy with their level of smartypants marine science knowledge.
One thing about this TV show has made me very uneasy for some time. I suspect all the domestic work on the Octopod is done by slaves.
Octonauts as Slave Owners
- I put it to you that the Vegimals (see that little yellow-headed fellow to the bottom left of that first picture, just above the Octonauts logo?) are the quintissential slave race. As explained in the episode 'A Very Vegimal Christmas' (which you don't have to watch unless curious about brine lakes and marine mucelage):
- The Vegimals were brought into the Octopod in infancy, separated from their previous environment, and taught to serve the Octonauts.
- They perform menial and service jobs, and are not paid for their labour (well, to be fair, financial renumeration of any kind is never discussed)
- They are all but invisible the bulk of the time, they are not acknowledged by any plot device in any episode until roughly the end of the 2nd season, and this episode at the end of the 3rd season is the very first one in which they feature significantly.
- Their leader - Tunip - is almost afforded the lowest-raking crew position, but not quite. This is a classic slave control tactic. He is Malcolm X's House Negro
- Many of them have no names. A Wiki I found has a list of 16 vegimals but only 8 are in the episode. Some - like Wallabaga, Charchard, and Salapeno have never ever been named or even seen on the series (and I have watched the whole series). They might be field negros.
- And the Vegimals are critical to the success of the Octopod's missions. Without someone else performing all the daily thankless tasks, Captain Barnacles, Kwazii, Peso and the others wouldn't be able to go on all their fabulous missions. In the words of Octonaut Chief Scientist Shellington: "I don't know what we'd do without the Vegimals".
- They sing as they work.
Slavery and Exploration - are they a natural partnership?
Exploration - the act of going far outside your territory to simply see what is out there - requires a (relative) large amount of resources. Risks to the explorers are high - the new environment often pushes the limits of survival. Resources - food, equipment, fuel - are taken from the community to support the explorers, and everything must be taken into the unknown, because it may not be available when you get there. The probability of the mission returning anything useful to the community is small, but when exploration pays off, it pays off megaloads. And glory shall be bestowed on the magnificent and triumphant explorer, or at least whichever explorer got the credit to stick to him.I shall explore this with examples and stop when my indignation gets too hot.
Mount Chomolungma
I remember reading about Sir Edmund Hillary reaching the top of Everest. There was a photo. In class, I wondered how he got a tripod up to the summit. My fat-headed yr 9 history teacher said "Oh, he probably balanced the camera on a rock or something, and used the auto-timer."It was some years before I found out that Tenzing Norgay was actually the one in the photo, and that Hillary was the cameraman.
What I failed to appreciate until relatively recently is that although they each carried their own loads up the mountain, Tenzing and the other sherpas spent - and their descendants continue to spend - vast energy and time in the preceeding weeks hauling equipment and supplies for "explorers" for very little financial reward (this page suggests $5000/climb) and virtually no recognition.
Sir Edmund Hillary did understand this massive inequity, and he devoted a large part of the rest of his life and fortune to the sherpa community. the Sir Edmund Hilary Foundation runs a hospital and secondary schools and supports reforestation and sustainable adventure sport in Nepal.
Polar Exploration
You might think that polar exploration didn't have the same shameless exploitation of the native population as Everest. This is indisputably true. But all the polar expeditions were resourced by, and built on, colonial imperialism, and economic growth.
I found this paper which talks about the funding of Arctic expeditions, eg looking for the North West Passage, and mentions the South Polar expeditions in passing. They were a mixture of publicly and privately funded, but aside from a few oddball explorers like Amusden, they were heavily nationalistic and driven by imperial expansion or competitive advantage in trade. Empires - whether national or corporate - are prepared to finance risky exploration on the possibility of a rare but massive payoff. Also see my future blog post on imperialism, slavery triangular trade, and economic growth.
At risk of setting my bra on fire and waving it about, I would love to mention in passing the misogyny of exploration - and polar exploration in particular. I heard a radio interview with Jesse Blackadder, author of a historical novel about the first women in Antarctica, and she was quite scathing about the ongoing attitude that Antarctica is no place for women, she even called it something like ' the last refuge of machismo'. The first women there - and many women since - have had to fight hard and pull sneaky tricks to make it there to visit, let alone winter. A relative of mine who wintered there in the 1960's described to me that women weren't allowed to winter over, notuntil the mid 1980's. The reunions have an extremely small number of women at them. I also found interviews with Sara Wheeler, author of an account of her own winter in Antarctica on the American base, who made reference to the ingrained sexism, for example that the survival manual suggests that if bare skin contacts cold metal and sticks to it, the best way to remove the skin is to urinate on it. And my final piece of evidence, while the ashes of my bra swirl away in the breeze, is the very educational "Culture" page of the US Antarctic Program, complete with Shakespearean cross-dressing in the theatrical productions.
Depending on where you go and who is in your team, the summer gender ratio varies from 2:1 to 5:1, and the winter ratio from 8:1 to 80:1.
Special thanks to Messrs Bellingshausen, Scott, Shackleton, Amusden, Shackleton again, Amusden again, Byrd, and Hillary & Fuchs for taking government money, never acknowledging their wives, peeing on their own skin, eating their dogs, and dying or not dying as the during polar exploration.
The Age of Sail
No. Don't even get me started on the crimes against humanity from the five hundred years of European ocean exploration and colonisation. I sometimes get vivid nightmares about the trails of scurvy corpses from abducted sailors that would be left behind those ships, the spread of smallpox and panic and violence across continent after continent, and the magnitude and horror of the enslavement of native populations. There's a whole indignant post coming on the Triangular Trade. It is still in draft because I get so very angry while writing it.
The Moon
The Space Race was driven by Cold War imperialism and military aggressiveness. Not strictly slavery - although some of the Russian engineers may have had cause to dispute the line between coercion and enslavement - but on balance, I think the lunar and space programs have been the best of our human exploration endeavours.
My brother has an autograph from an Australian astronaut, Andy Thomas. We found it in a box of old papers the other day. It's awesome.
I am running out of juice, even though I would also like to talk about mineral resource exploration, the history of aviation, and modern ocean exploration (both surface and deep).
So I will stop yakking and ask you guys - all three of my readers -
What do you think? Is exploration inextricably tied to slavery?
