Czechs on ships: liners, containers and the sea

ABSTRACT The essay juxtaposes, as in a poetic metaphor, Czech sea voyages to Southeast Asia in the late colonial era, as described in the travellers’ writings, and the author’s recent voyage on a container ship from Rotterdam to Singapore. A reflection on sea travel and an experiment in historical research, it is an account of accessing the past through the experience of a voyage. The essay reflects on size, speed, time, and modernity; on containers, classes, nations, colonies, and empires, past and present. How can our present journeys help us grasp the experiences of past travellers, as well as our relationship with them, our nearness and our distance? How can old travelogues enrich our perception of present-day travel, shipping, and colonialisms? How do present, past and future overflow into each other, on the fluid borders between physical, economic and industrial reality and narrative/poetic imagination? How is containerisation, whose (pre)history this essay traces, part of our ‘knowledge production’? The essay performs these questions with a Czech accent that reflects a specific historical situation and the self-image of a variously colonised European people who navigate(d) in particular, often clownishly improper ways, in the world of colonies and empires, old and new.