In the late nineteenth century, going to sea on ships became established as a necessary practice for studying the oceans scientifically. Because large ships usually required the deep pockets of governments, they usually belonged to navies and other government agencies, meaning oceanography early on became almost exclusively available to men. A few women managed to participate as the wives of other researchers, and others studied marine biology from the shore, but the requirement to go to sea prevented most women from participating in ocean science.

This paper examines an exception to this rule, in the case of women who were able to go sea onboard the yachts of Prince Albert I of Monaco. Between 1884 and the First World War, the prince outfitted his personal yachts as spaces for science, equipped with state-of the art laboratories and sampling equipment. He invited scientists from around Europe to join him at sea. But because these yachts were also aristocratic social spaces, his expeditions occasionally included women, such as the painter Jeanne Le Roux and the botanist Hanna Marie Resvoll-Holmsen.

Still, these women remain exceptions. Even though Albert credited their constitutions and contributions, and he announced and published Resvoll-Holmsen’s scientific results, their participation was largely documented ashore. Their inclusion made little impact on the practice of ocean science, which would remain nearly exclusively male well into the second half of the twentieth century.

In the mid-twentieth century, scientists in the world’s temperate regions were fascinated by human performance in ‘extreme’ environments. The postwar period was a moment where scientists of environments and biological adaptations were deeply invested in questions regarding the limits and potentials of human beings. This paper charts the trajectory of Korean, Japanese, and American environmental physiologists’ scientific investigations on the respiratory and cold adaptabilities of Korea’s haenyeo and Japan’s ama. Haenyeo and ama—both terms literally meaning “sea women”—are female divers who rely on only the air in their lungs to dive and harvest shellfish and seaweed by hand from the ocean floor. This paper explores how knowledge-making about sea women’s bodies contributed to the formation of a trans-Pacific environmental physiology network in the postwar period. After coming across 1930s Japanese studies on the diving women, American scientists like Hermann Rahn (1912-1990) and Donald W. Rennie (1925-1992) became fascinated with the physiological capabilities of these women starting the 1950s. Research centered on the sea women necessitated a close, albeit unequal, collaboration between Korean, Japanese, and American scientists and a close working relationship between the scientists and the sea women. The scientists saw the sea women’s way of life as being outside the bounds of modernity, such as other perceived “primitive” peoples like the Inuit people of Alaska. Like physiological studies on Inuit people, sea women’s physiological data was seen as potentially answering questions about the possibilities of human adaptation in a post-apocalyptic world.

In the 1990’s, Cathie Koa Dunsford, a New Zealand novelist and editor of Maori, Hawaiian, and Paheka heritage, performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as an Indigenous storyteller. Her sojourns in Scotland and the Orkney Islands, informed a trilogy of eco-thrillers. Song of the Selkies (2001), Return of the Selkies (2007), and Clan of the Selkies (2014) transport a Maori/Indigenous Hawaiian storyteller and environmental activist named Cowrie to Scotland, where she joins Inuit and Orcadian activists in opposing nuclear power plants and commercial fish farms that threaten traditional lifeways (Keown 2013). Cowrie’s local host, Morrigan, is a selkie—a seal who sheds her skin and passes among humans. In Orkney, Ireland, Maine, and elsewhere in the boreal Atlantic, seal people embody human anxieties about relations with the ocean. Their enchanted skins enable mobility but render them vulnerable to capture and coercion, linking ecological matters of coastal subsistence and competition for prey with questions of consent and sexual exploitation.

Inspired by Dunsford’s selkie novels, I use marine shapeshifters from boreal Atlantic and Maori/Pacific traditions to recover gendered ocean literacies and explore women-led resistance to environmental violence and neocolonial exploitation. Mindful of the Congress theme and in conversation with feminist science scholarship on situated knowledge (e.g. Haraway 1988), I ask how ocean literacies and resistance strategies circulate amongst women in boreal Atlantic and Indigenous Pacific island communities. Indigenous and locally-anchored ways of knowing are considered crucial to environmental justice. Transoceanic solidarities among women, my paper argues, are critical to their circulation.