Raleigh’s Ark

Tempestuous Life: Ralegh's Ocean in Ruins

“…There, in contradistinction to the nation-based focus of Fuller and Helgerson, Shannon locates (and at the same time de-locates, that is, unmoors) the biopolitical and technological center of Ralegh's History in the hull of Noah's ark: "The story of Noah's ark taxed the early modern imagination," Shannon writes, triggering "doubt about how Noah could have built a craft sufficient to hold all the earthly kinds" and inducing "early modern commentators into the cold waters of mathematical calculation." 60 Among these commentators, Shannon singles out Ralegh for "weeding out such creatures as could easily be reconstructed rationally," thus conserving space on Noah's ship: "For those beasts which are of mixt natures," Ralegh writes, "either they were not in that age, or else it was not needfull to praeserve them: seeing they might be generated againe by others." 61 From the hull of Noah's ark to the shores of the "black Atlantic," Shannon shows how Ralegh's speculative calculations about animal life and death on Noah's ark prefigure the transatlantic traffic in "human chattel," making the sea voyage itself, and not just the text written about it, key to understanding the biopolitics of early modern globalization.…”