Late nineteenth-century British tourism narratives published during the 1870s and 1880s document a conceptual shift in the Western public understanding of coral reef ecosystems in colonial Caribbean and Southern Pacific regions. Innovations in glass technology improved visualization of inner lagoon aquatic inhabitants. Authors’ literary portraits of reef marine environments extended the previous generation’s parallels with cultivated domestic gardens and offered readers visions of unkempt wilderness regions, revealing tensions between idealized views of the lagoon and their own experiences. Tourist writers’ realizations that coral growth rate – interpreted in the 1870s not in terms of divine intervention but framed by Charles Darwin’s subsidence argument – predicted a calculable increase in the future Imperial reach. For Victorian-era tourists, coral measured the expanding geographic extent of the colonial empire.
Images of coral reefs in the public imagination transitioned from treacherous white-breaker coral rocks to the foreign yet familiar intimate spaces of inner lagoon regions. Reading travel diaries including J. W. Boddam-Whetham’s "Pearls of the Pacific" (1876) and "At Home in Fiji" by Constance Frederica Gordon Cumming (1883) together with the illustrated satirical periodical "Punch," this talk traces the circulation of publications documenting transient Western encounters with marine ecosystems and the extent to which the image of coral as colonial evolved in nineteenth-century print culture.

In 1893, State University of Iowa professor Charles Nutting led “an educational and scientific experiment,” setting sail from Baltimore aboard the schooner Emily E. Johnson with a group of students, including women as well as men, to undertake a scientific voyage to study marine life around The Bahamas (Nutting, 1895, p. v). The expedition can be understood from a historical perspective as innovative for a number of reasons, including, perhaps most strikingly, the involvement of women in the scientific party. The pursuit of marine zoology by faculty and students from a landlocked university represented a departure from marine science as the purview of coastal institutions, while the effort to demonstrate that marine science could be carried out inexpensively, with simple equipment, veered sharply from the contemporary practice of marine science aboard government vessels or the occasional well-outfitted yacht, supported by either state funding or single wealthy patron-scientists. Nutting himself viewed the expedition as novel and hoped it would provide a new model for studying the ocean that would make marine science more accessible and more widely studied. The case Nutting made for the importance of marine zoology to inland institutions and students speaks to the conference theme of connected and expansive histories, with twist on the local-global binary, and certainly speaks to the circulation of knowledge between sea and land beyond the coasts.

A centuries-long fascination with giant squid has been enhanced by scientists’ limited observations of these elusive creatures, but only recently have technological developments allowed researchers to study them in greater detail. This paper investigates three instances in which technology was used to bring giant squid to the attention of naturalists and a wider public. In the first, Rev. Harvey Moses' 1873 photograph of a giant squid captured near Newfoundland provided tangible proof of its existence. In the second, a giant squid caught off New Zealand's coast was preserved and displayed in a Paris museum in 2000. In the third, a film crew used a submersible to capture video footage of a living giant squid in its natural environment in 2012. This paper explores how these encounters have shaped scientific and lay perception of giant squid and their habitat, informing changing narratives about them. It provides a fresh perspective on the role of marine animals in forging understandings of the ocean’s depths, and on interplays between science, technology, and myth in defining the human relationship to the natural world.

Our oceans face spiking temperatures, rising sea levels, and more as humans confront a changing climate. In this world of the Anthropocene, we see not only political and economic instability, but the fracturing of civilization. The concerns of students mirror societal worries about our ability to change, adapt, and survive.
The study of the ocean environments offers what often seems like a staggering amount of data and observations. The sheer scope of this evidence can be overwhelming, but the study of history adds context to this information; it allows for a baseline analysis that situates ways in which this scientific knowledge is viewed and used. The oceans highlight how the natural world not only shaped human societies but the consequences of human manipulation of surrounding environments, as well as how culture and society shape the field of science. With continuing scientific and technological advances, our ability to observe the marine environment and its resident creatures is beginning to catch up with our imaginations, expanding our understanding and appreciation of the world and our interactions with it.
Recognizing this expanding world, the study of environmental interaction of humans with the oceans allows students to explore how societies adapted - or failed to adapt - to environmental disruption. As a laboratory for future decisions, the study of the past leads to a better understanding of what makes a civilization resilient and guides us in applying those ideas to today’s world in creative ways.