Workers at the Virginia Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company who welded together Hull #318 in 1926 according to U.S. Coast Guard Plan No 44407, knew they were building a ship designed for ice operations. It specified four times the welds of any other ship they had constructed;, was double hulled for reinforcement against the ice;, lined with cork for warmth and its bow design would enable it to crush through ice, sliding on top and pounding downwards. What they, the naval architects, and the rest of the workers who labored on it never imagined was its reincarnation as the first Israeli warship twenty-two years later .
A mobile, geographical place
Like the classic Greek allegorical ship Jason’s Argo, ships often serve as a metaphor for the human condition. Pierre Boudon describes Jason’s Argo as ‘the unity of a presence and the multiplicity of a patchwork made of bits and pieces which renew her image little by little’ (Boudon, 1989). But beyond such signification, real ships are reified objects; material, mobile, built environments in and on which human experiences are placed in a distinctive maritime environment. They are, in effect, real places. Humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan characterizes space as movement, possessing areas and geometries, whereas place can be understood as pauses. ‘Each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place’ (Tuan, 1977). Human geographer Doreen Massey more recently proposed a fundamental shift in our concept of place as the ‘social geometry of power and signification’(Massey, 2012). This non-exclusive version of place disrupts simple anticipations of a ubiquitous term, reflecting the complexity and ambiguity of the phenomena which human geography seeks to explain. Place is, she says, a ‘…simultaneous multiplicity of spaces: cross-cutting, intersecting, aligning with one another, or existing in relations of paradox or antagonism (Massey, 2012).
The maritime world, as evidenced within the history of ships and the sea, affords an angle of view of ship as place which both embraces the ‘pause’ of Tuan and the complexity of Massey’s ‘contemporaneous multiplicity that depends on spatiality’ in less familiar, primarily non-terrestrial context. In this way, the cradle-to-grave biography of the ship built on Hull #318, produced within the mesh of geographical, social and temporal contexts of its missions and voyages, can be interpreted as a kind of palimpsest , etched with a history of geographically situated transformational politics and power relations. Despite the ancient and enduring connection of humans with waterways, seas and oceans, human geographers have only recently produced research situated in maritime geographies, leaving the majority of the earth’s liquid surface to other disciplines. Hester Blum believes we are mistaken if we understand the sea as merely metaphor; rather, it is equally a ‘workplace, home, passage, penitentiary and promise’ (Blum, in Steinberg, 2013). Phil Steinberg extends her position, arguing that ‘…the ocean must be engaged as a material space characterized by movement and continual reformation across all of its dimensions (Steinberg, 2013)’.
Recently, geographers Kim Peters (2010, 2011, 2014, 2015), William Hasty (2015), Anim-Addo (2014), Lambert (2006) and Mike Crang (2011) have joined Blum and Steinberg (2010, 2013) to extend human geography’s reach into maritime concerns. As Peters notes, ‘The sea is…a vital space and one that is integral to the workings of the world as we currently know it’ (Peters, 2010). The ocean, as familiar metaphor, is represented in colloquial song and story, classic literature and myth, as vast and empty. As the subject of geographical inquiry, it is a scarcely explored trove of nuanced, diverse material entangled with the human condition. Space and place are often theorized in problematic ways, as William Hasty cautions, a kind of fixed backdrop for human drama. We neglect to acknowledge it as produced by human process (Hasty, 2014).
The intrinsic motion of the sea, and corresponding movements of the vessels that encounter it, disrupt that perception of fixity along with other concepts long associated with terrestrial contexts. Consider, for example, John Agnew’s claim that, ‘All places are embedded in territorial states’ (Agnew, 2012), yet a ship is a locale that by virtue of its innate mobility disproves this assertion; unless in dry dock, it may be variously located in a port, within territorial waters or on the international waters high seas. Concepts such as ‘home,’ are automatically understood as situated on land, yet sea-going persons may spend years at sea with interludes of land leave, making the vessel their home. The Northland’s ship logs recorded ‘onboard’ as the home address for the majority of officers and crew during the depression of the 1930s.
These two small examples illustrate the motivation behind William Waters’ proposal that we ought to view politics from the angle of vehicles. Waters
He coined the term viapolitics to advocate for vehicles to be understood as mobile zones of governance and contestation in their own right and they and their infrastructures can themselves become the objects and settings of political action (Walters, 2015). Viapolitics ought also to be extended to recognize vessels as more than sites – as places in the sense that Tuan and Massey propose, instantiated through built edifices, material objects caught up in multiple scales and assemblages of power geometries.
Transformation is endemic to the nature of ships. Names are changed, structural adaptations alter the materiality of the ship, their infrastructure is repaired and it decays in response to usage and the harsh, friction-filled environment of the sea. Ultimately, the object ‘dies’ and, in the case of some vessels, becomes memorialised in memory (Gregson, Crang & Watkins, 2011). It is also the case that we recall particular categories, or collections, of ships that figure in our cultural history. Recent scholarship takes on these subjects, and reveals precisely the kinds of nuanced, spatially attuned findings that this maritime surface affords.
William Hasty explores the persistent marine troupes of the pirate and the pirate ship in his article Metamorphosis Afloat, deconstructing how pirate-captured ships were structurally and socially reconfigured to suit piratical purposes, ‘Pirates having seized space at sea and made it their own,’ adapting quarters and deck space to reflect not only a need for speed, but a new, vaguely democratic social order on board. His findings alter our understanding of ‘The politics of piratical identities, the social and cultural worlds of sea-farers and the nature of being afloat, in the past, more generally’ (Hasty, 2014). Kim Peters and Jennifer Turner investigate the kinds of that permeate the internal space of convict ships:; naval vessels converted via changes in the material and spatial organization of the ships into prison hulks and conveyance ships. Specifically, these were adapted to cage the incarcerated in their ‘bowels’ (Peters & Turner, 2015). In ‘The Slave Ship’, Marcus Rediker provides a highly nuanced explanation of the evolution of slavers, including their physical and social transformation from predominantly merchant ships to slavers that embodied ‘…a strange and potent combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory.’
These texts approach these ships as composites derived from an aggregated set of similar vessels, providing evidence for how the social construction of space is produced out of material and social transformations onboard, power relations operating at multiple scales across political economies, global and local geographies. Individual ship biographies afford a richer, though singular, palimpsest through which to derive evidence for these kinds of processes.
Anthropologist Igor Kopytoff is a proponent of the object biography as method, making ‘…salient what might otherwise remain obscure. An eventful biography of a thing becomes the story of the various singularizations of it, of classifications and reclassifications in an uncertain world of categories whose importance shifts with every minor change in context’ (Kopytoff, 2013). The geo-biography of the aforementioned ship built on Hull #318, introduced at the outset of this paper, stretches across vastly differentiated human, geographical and political contexts, producing a unique and informative palimpsest on which the social geometry of power was inscribed into the materiality and social space of the ship as place.
Between 1927 and 1963, The Northland operated in Territorial Alaska; the North Atlantic; the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Its name was changed. Structural adaptations reflected changes in ownership and mission. Critically, thousands of people’s lives were enmeshed with the ship, including individuals who designed and built it, commanded and crewed it, and took passage or refuge in it. People were judged on it, took refuge in it, and captured on it. They were architects, shipyard workers, Coast Guard Academy graduates, enlisted crew, Native Alaskans, whalers, miners, teachers, anthropologists, reindeer herders, judges, priests, light house keepers, cannery workers, doctors, German POWs, Zionist volunteers, Jewish refugees, British naval officers and sailors, detention camp prisoners, dock workers, and intelligence staff.
Thousands of moments in the ship’s geo-biography are accessible via logbooks, photos, movies, testimonies, memoirs and material objects accessed in archives in Alaska, Washington D.C., NYC. Virginia, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. They are also to be found in memorials and museums in Israel. These sources enable us to, in Hasty’s words, ‘hold space still’ and use this ship as a research subject; a singularization of the maritime context (Hasty, 2014). Kopytoff states that ‘… each human biography, whether famous or ordinary, is composed of many biographies – psychological, professional, political, familial, economic and so forth – each of which selects some aspects of the life history and discards others. Biographies of things cannot but be similarly partial’ (Kopytoff, 2013). In this spirit, the following three small stories are an attempt to ‘press pause’ to capture moments in which this ship was a place in between spaces and advance our understanding, politics and power as seen from the viapolitical angle of this particular ship.
On August 21, 1927, USCG The Northland docked at the Southeast Alaska port of Ketchikan, her first Alaskan port of call. ‘And so to begin’ the service for which it was designed, named built, and commissioned. By the late 1920s, Alaska had become a legal ‘Territory’ by act of Congress. The gold rush and fisheries industry had increased the percentage of the non-Native population, but marine transportation continued to be the only way to access remote islands and villages, as bush aviation had not yet become a reality.
As part of the annual Bering Sea Patrol cruise fleet, The Northland’s official duties included transport of government officials, teachers, scientists and priests; delivery of supplies and mail for USCG stations, commercial ships and villages; enforcement of federal and territorial laws and fishing and hunting regulations; providing medical and dental services to remote communities; intelligence gathering and executing search and rescue missions.
Service in Territorial Alaska
The ice-hardened USCG The Northland was just over 216 feet long, had a beam of 38’9″ and a draft of 13’8.” Leaving aside the sailing rig (useful mostly for parades and publicity shots), Tthe ship was powered by two 6-cylinder diesel engines and one double-armature electric motor giving making it capable of a top speed of 11.7 knots. The ship was fitted three guns, and a sailing rig (useful mostly for parades and publicity shots) as the Coast Guard did not trust its engines in icepack conditions. The icebreaker hull and Brigantine rig combination proved incompatible and in 1936, the masts were cut down and the sails discarded. Still, The Northland’s design and materials were technologically advanced over the infamous, aged, wood-hulled sail-driven former-whaler turned USCG Cutter Bear that it was built to replace. In ambit and routes, the new ship took its officers and crew seamlessly into the wake of its predecessor.
The ship’s spatial organization embedded social geometries of power right into structural partitions and material specifications above and below decks. Although situated administratively in the civilian Treasury Department, Coast Guard personnel on a cutter during this period followed naval protocol. Commissioned officers, warrant officers and enlisted men’s status differed dramatically. Officer’s quarters were private spaces furnishes in oak with bookcases, a lavatory and specialized storage spaces for sword and revolver, equipment only officers were entitled to posses .
Daily practices of drills, watch and maintenance duties reinforced the formal hierarchy, as did practices of judgment (known as ‘being called to the mast’) and punishment. In addition to USCG personnel, the ship was a workplace for a dentist and doctor assigned to it from the Federal Public Health Service. They performed medical and dental procedures on board, transforming various spaces into surgical places. Towards the end of her service in Alaska, The Northland undertook sociological and oceanographic research, becoming at once both a scientific instrument and laboratory.
This work-based social-spatial organization co-existed alongside the presence of civilian passengers who boarded The Northland for a variety of purposes and durations. Many notorious ‘pioneers’ came aboard:, their names are recognizable from Alaskan history books and university campus building names. Mostly men, and oOften larger-than-life characters, mostly men, such as Ernest Gruening, Otto Geist, James Wickersham and Father Hubbard, they gave readings, concerts, films and lectures as part payment for their passage:, thuis turning spaces on the ship into a theatrical place and occasionally displacing officers from their quarters. In addition to providing passage from one point to another, the ship was periodically transformed into a mobile instrument of Governmentality, extending and materializing the territorial reach of federal legal powers at a time when ‘the law’ was more often an abstract concept. The annual seasonal ‘Floating Court’ transformed The Northland’s officer’s mess into a courtroom where Federal cases, were heard by a federal judge, and a local jury portaged from the nearest village (Naske, 1985; Schwaiger, 2009).
First Stories
Some researchers suggest that as Federal and Oregonian laws (adopted wholesale to Territorial Alaska) were increasingly enforced, traditional justice systems in turn were damaged (Jaeger, 2009). This is indisputable when viewed at the scale of Federal power over traditional lands, subsistence and cultural practices. However, viewed from the angle of the ship and as read from traces in the archives, evidence suggests a more nuanced perspective operated at the scale of the ship where a more intimate power geometry co-existed and intersected the scale operated by the state. Uniquely in Alaska, the commanding officer was authorized to ‘Administer oaths generally in Alaska,’ and as a consequence, The Northland’s deck frequently served as an open-air wedding chapel officiated by the commanding officer. Although Alaska Native marriage was subject to federal and Oregon law, native practices persisted when the ship served in Alaska.
When In 1936, two native girls from the village of Gambell approached Captain Zeusler of The Northland, to ask if they were required under white man’s law to marry men their elders had chosen for them. In his ‘Confidential Notes on the Adoption of “White Man’s’ Laws of Marriage’, Judge Wickersham noted that ‘As I understand, the commander said they did not have to [marry those men]. Since then, the older people have put more pressure on the boys, thinking that the decision would not apply to the boys…Each older native is interpreting my explanation to his own liking. i.e., if the younger people can marry one of their choice after they reach a certain age, we, the older people, can put pressure on them to marry our choice before they reach that age (Zeusler Papers, 1936).
Following the girl’s visit, Zeusler and Wickersham consulted with elders and implemented a hybrid marriage agreement and ceremony; a solution that retained aspects of local custom within the administrative and legal constraints of US law. Archeologist Froelich Rainey took passage to dig sites on The Northland, and remarked on a Native wedding in his memoir Reflections of a Digger. In Savoonga, a village on in St. Lawrence Island, a man named Pillowak sent a radio message to The Northland asking Captain Zeusler if he would perform the wedding ceremony for his daughter Ellie. Not only did the Captain agree to officiate, but ‘The chief engineer made the wedding ring, the cook prepared a wedding breakfast, and the captain turned out the whole crew to greet the wedding party in dress formation. Up aboard the cutter, Ellie proudly marched down the line…’(Rainey, 1992).
These stories ‘stop time’ to identify how geometries of power were negotiated at multiple scales. The locus of legal and political power was the State. At the relatively intimate scale of the ship, it was possible to craft a solution that allowed elders to save face while the autonomy of village youth was increased by US law intervention in tribal marriage customs. Ellie’s wedding provides evidence that social relations between the ship’s personnel and local natives could be quite personal, although read in the ships logs they appear distant and formal. These moments of ‘stopped time’ coexisted with assemblages composed of other alternate spaces, social relations, scales and power geometries. After eleven years of Arctic service, it The Northland left Alaskan waters and never returned.
In 1939, The Northland was repurposed for Admiral Byrd’s second Antarctic expedition, but never reached the South Pole. Instead, as war broke out in Europe, its course was abruptly reset for the North Atlantic where its mission, under the aegis of The Monroe Doctrine, was to prevent and/or destroy German weather monitoring stations and survey the fjords of Greenland. At war’s end, it emerged in a materially diminished state, one of many fatigued ships in an inventory of surplus vessels.
Following several months of routine weather patrol off the coast of New York state in 1946, the US Maritime Commission sold it for scrap. The buyer, Weston Trading Company, represented the Zionist organization Hagana. It now had a new mission that entirely inverted its original purpose. Prior to the war, it had been a shining white, immaculately maintained naval vessel with a small but highly disciplined staff of officers and crew whose core mission was to be a floating, seasonal government extension into the liminal places of ‘the last frontier. ’ This next endeavour required secrecy, crudely re-structured the physical spaces of the ship, and challenged governing authority.
This secrecy was necessary as tThe Hagana organised clandestine immigration to Palestine in defiance of the British Mandate limitations on Jewish immigration quotas. Their objective was to accelerate immigration to Palestine in the aftermath of World War Twothe war. The Northland was adapted to carry thousands of refugees from among the remnants of Europe’s surviving Jewish population. If running the British Blockade failed, the Hagana would leverage the plight of its passengers to generate sympathy for the refugees and at the same time, loosen the grip of the British Government on Palestine. Timing and geography placed the ship in power geometries during a critical sliver of time between WWII and a full-blown Cold War. Small stories from this phase in the ship’s geo-biography
Second Stories
The designation ‘USCG’ was erased from The Northland’s hull and it was re-registered under the Panamanian flag. After loading rough lumber on board, it departed Baltimore for France, manned by a volunteer crew of mostly North Americans. In a Bayonne shipyard, French carpenters extended the infrastructure upwards in the aft section of the boat and installed minimalist bunks in every possible space. They believed they were outfitting the ship with shelving to carry fruit. In all, the ship designed for a crew of 40 plus a handful of passengers was transformed into a transport vessel with a capacity of about 2700 passengers.
The merchant crew had committed themselves to deliver the vessel to the Hagana in France, each free to depart and avoid an inevitable, potentially lethal conflict with the British Navy. Only one chose to do so , but precautions were taken to obscure their identities. Crewmembers captured by the British and charged with abetting ‘illegal immigration’ were subject to imprisonment in detention. The crew officially signed off the ship, and then re-registered as its crew under false identities prepared by the Hagana. A British Intelligence report noted that ‘…her master, Captain MITCHELL, was ordered to move to BAYONNE for refitting. There, a certain CAPTAIN MORGAN of Room 32, GRAND HOTEL, took over command’. In fact, they were the same person. The Northland’s material and transformation while docked in France recalls Massey’s concept of place as ‘existing in relations of paradox or antagonism.’ and immersed in subterfuge and substitution.
In September of 1947, the ship set course for the port of Varna, Bulgaria, shadowed by several British destroyers and aircraft. Courtesy of the emerging iron curtain, the escort backed off as it entered the Black Sea, and in Varna it took two days to embark 2,700 Jewish refugees. The British Navy resumed shadowing the ship as it re-entered the Mediterranean. While underway, a large banner was unfurled from the pilot house declaring a new name; Medinat Ha’Yehudim, Hebrew for ‘The Jewish State.’
Despite avoidance manoeuvres in international waters, the British destroyers rammed the ship, boarded it by force using tear gas and hoses against uncooperative passengers and towed it to Haifa Harbour. Medinat Ha’ Yehudim’s ice-hardened hull protected it from serious structural damage and inflicted unexpected damage to HMS Cheviot which required six months to repair. Anticipating capture, most crewmembers had disguised themselves as civilians garb and blended into the mass of passengers. A handful of the crew hid themselves in the water tanks and awaited Hagana operatives disguised as cleaning crew to release them.
A British Navy sailor recounted this incident in his diary, and later reflected on it in a letter to an author. ‘The most profound and unforgettable experience I had as a young man of nineteen years was, without doubt, coming to terms with the stark reality of having to help in stopping the exodus of Jews reaching Palestine from war ravaged Europe. Witnessing at first hand the desperate plight of these people who had somehow survived unspeakable horror and were simply trying to reach the promised land was most humbling…I can readily understand and appreciate the instinctive loathing and hatred those people must have felt towards us at that time’ (Wallis, 1997).
‘When the NORTHLAND drew alongside the quay at HAIFA…Groups of Jews in various parts of the ship began to sing HATIKVAH lustily and in many different keys No longer an immaculately maintained military vessel, it was described in the same report as ‘filthy and more crowded than almost any other illegal ship on records’ (BIR, 1947). Nearly all the passengers were deported to British detention camps on Cyprus. When, in 1948, the state of Israel was declared and the British Mandate terminated, Medinat sailed to Cyprus, picked up Jews interned in the camps and transported them to the nascent Jewish state, transforming them in the process from captives to citizens.
As one of the few Aliyah Bet fleet to survive confrontation with the British Navy, Medinat was renamed EILAT A-16 and became the first warship in the diminutive Israeli Navy and the first vessel that took fire from the Egyptian Air Force in the war of independence in 1948. Over time, it was replaced by more modern vessels, but remained a part of the Navy first as a trainer and a later as a floating barracks until eventually it was assessed as beyond useful duty.
In 1963 it was again sold, as scrap. This time this time to an Italian scrapyard, but it wasn’t disassembled until after it was honoured with a de-commissioning ceremony. The ceremony was attended by the officers, crew and survivors who had journeyed to a new homeland on it, and those in the Israeli Navy who had served on it.
Conclusion
This paper briefly examines just a few small stories derived from the geo-biography of The Northland, AKA Medinat Ha’Yehudim, Eliat-17 and The Matzpen. 1927-1963, R.I.P. Through these accounts, ‘stopped time’ reveals maritime-situated places that afford a viapolitical angle on complex geometries of power and place. A more extensive selection of stories from this ship’s history, and the singular histories of other vessels, could potentially extend our understandings much further .
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