Annotations: Honor Frost's "Under the Mediterranean"

As part of a research project back in Fall 2008, I produced an annotated bibliography of 129 nonfiction texts, all associated with aquatic subjects. I read far further in water-related fiction and nonfiction in the last eight months, but I decided on the specific bibliography in relation to teaching my courses, English 1A, English 93, and the prospective elective "Literature and the (Aquatic) Environment." Of course, not all 129 books on my list would suit our courses, but I had to read (or reread) to discover such fitness or lack of fitness. I share my findings for each one itself and for the critical model at work.

Here is one of my favorite books in the bibliography:

Frost, Honor. Under the Mediterranean: Marine Antiquities. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1963. Print.

I love this book by Honor Frost. I would place it in my personal top 10 for non-fiction, though I haven't yet found another reader who will appreciate this text as much as I do. Still, I think certain chapters would work well in the right combination for English 1A, mostly because Frost has that elusive, yet vital quality of being able to ask the right questions. To my mind, asking the right questions is the key to any situation or endeavor, whether intellectual, ethical, emotional, or physical.

Here Frost exhibits her wonderful questioning in a volume half-memoir and half-analysis. Alongside Cousteau, Dumas, and Dugan, Frost was one of that first generation of divers in the Mediterranean who ushered in the dawn of scuba and the practical applications of such diving in the fields of archeology and history. Frost was the first female in such illustrious company, a friend and freelance underwater draftsperson and artist, an essential component for transforming underwater archeology from mere scavenging to an accurate, methodical, fully scientific discipline. Frost begins with her own introduction to diving (in a well in England), but most of the book is organized around types of wrecks, sites, or underwater problems, and the autobiographical material is used to illuminate as needed. Frost focuses her narrative via the problems and the questions that need or needed to be asked; this approach raised the book from the mere record of what-happened to a much more valuable and conscious model of the methodological.
For taste, I want to quote her description of a shipwreck (pictured above). After emphasizing particularly how, if understood properly, a shipwreck may be a time capsule of it's historical present far more than a building or site on land, Frost clarifies the essential and necessary differences between an excavation of a wreck on the sea floor and a building on land, with the essential differences in attitudes necessary for proper handling of either site. Here are Frost's words:

A ship is a mobile, integral mechanism: it reaches the sea-bed only by accident. As a wreck it undergoes a sea change before it becomes stabilized within the local geographical environment. Buildings, by contrast, are imposed on the ground by man's will; even in decay they maintain this direct relationship with the earth. These are differences that must be taken in account in marine excavation. A collapsed machine can be reconstructed if, first, we understand the way in which its parts have been redistributed, and second, we examine its remains in their entirety as a once functional unit. The excavator's approach to architectural remains is quite different, for the size and character of a ruined building can be assessed by trenching through its foundations at strategic points. (Frost, xxi)

Note how Frost moves in this quotation from clarifying the intellectual significance of a shipwreck to the necessary understanding of the underwater archaeologist, the excavator who must imagine the trajectory of the wreckage from the remains on the sea floor and who must have faith --no-- who must have the confidence in that wreckage as the residue of a fully functional, and thus understandable, machine, the ship. In short, when you keep the intact puzzle in mind, you may discern the relationships and placement of the pieces of the puzzle, scrambled though they may be, so much more readily and successfully. Frost says all that so much more succinctly, don't you think?

I've found this passage regarding the ship as "mobile, integral mechanism" useful as a reader and teacher of literary texts and literary lives. I've also approached most people and situations, I realized after reading this passage, as if they were "shipwrecks," if I may say that. We, all of us, reach where we are, become who we are, partially by will and largely by circumstance. And yet the direction of our original voyaging, say, may help others (and ourselves) to better understand the present self. Lord Byron, to use a convenient example, was an obvious "shipwreck" of sorts, and you can chart much more accurately his life, his work, and his effects on others if you keep the "mobile, integral mechanism" in mind even as you approach, say, the "collapsed machine" of 1816 in the wake of scandal, separation, and exile. Byron, as a model, kept afloat far longer than his critics would have credited; Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage III and IV being wondrous monuments to his swimming ability and survival.

As a historical note, "free diver" in Under the Mediterranean and in Cousteau's books refers to a scuba diver, not to a snorkeler as the term is used nowadays; in context, the scuba diver was so much more free than the brass-helmeted diver, trapped upright in lead boots, that he (and she) superseded.

Additionally, Honor Frost, though English, learned to dive in the French style, which arose from breath-hold spearfishing for food during World War II and after, so she brings the swimmer's and the snorkeler's prejudices and judgments to matters underwater. She began as a true free diver, one who begins with the human mechanism and organic considerations rather than with technology and the mechanical imposition of will onto recalcitrant matter and problems. As a swimmer, she's very attuned to the power and effects of gravity and flow, and I like that, whether physical or intellectual. I want to leave this entry with one last quotation:

The law of gravity becomes complex under water, but it is not beyond our comprehension.

I salute Honor Frost and her book as worthy models. And, rereading her book always makes me want to get in the water, the ocean, and to look around for myself.