Before the chapel of Notre Dame de Perros-Hamon, in the
town of Ploubazlanec, near Paimpol (Brittany), a young boy was photographed by Charles
or Paul Géniaux in about 1900. His seafaring costume of wooden clogs,
a fishermen’s beret and woolen sweater marks him as a mousse, or cabin
boy. He holds a model sailboat and sits on a stone wall that surrounds the
church yard. Unsmilingly, his gaze meets the lens of the camera. His skin has
been browned by the sun, as is clear in the contrast between his face and
collar. Sepia tones articulate the material facts of this composition: the
detail is fine enough to notice the nails in the sole of his wooden clogs, worn
over wool socks. Granite and slate textures of roof and wall are opposed to the
white fabric of the boat’s sail. Wool, canvas, and wood—materials
that went to sea—are set off against the stone of the Breton peninsula and its
culture. The model is not
a toy: it is a votive boat or “ex-voto,” either a material commemoration of a
devotional vow of thanksgiving or a demonstration of faith in future salvation
at sea. There is nothing accidental or spontaneous about the details of this
image: the boy’s dress identifies him as a member of the fishing community, the
boat he holds refers to his vocation at sea, and the chapel behind him is a
ritual site devoted to those lost at sea. This image is my starting point for
thinking about the cultural roles played by religious and commemorative
maritime imagery of the French North Atlantic in greater global ocean ecologies
and visual culture. In 1900, the cash economy of fishing (that this boy
may have already entered into) had been driving transatlantic trade for
centuries. I would like to suggest that the photograph can be read as attesting both to this boy’s entry
into a marketplace of global capital (as a human resource) and as a witness to
a very different sort of economy: the gift economy of memory and commemoration expressed
through the votive object.
The full text of this essay,
“Votive Boats, Ex-votos
and Maritime Memory in Atlantic France”
is forthcoming in Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century: Consuming Commemoration.
Grenier, Katherine Haldane, Mushal, Amanda (Eds., 2020.
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