wine dark sea yacht

"A master at accumulating and assembling quotidian materials to create art objects that also serve as uncommon altars and shrines to our past...these ships are suspended in one continuous current that moves tpwards the gallery's windows as if pouring out onto the bustling cityscape of midtown Manhatten. Floating on this tide are scraps and treasures from our shared histories which have left indelible imprints on our national narratives, even as we erase them from our concious thoughts...Locke offers us a maritime procession - at once celebratory and funereal - that is animated by the sub-marine pulse of history...a synthesis of symbols from intertwined historical and cultural legends and narratives...disparate legacies that surf the waves." - Zoe Lukov, Faena Art

'The wine dark sea’ is a description of the Mediterranean used by Homer throughout The Odyssey , and the phrase is repeated by Derek Walcott in his epic poem Omeros, set mainly in the Caribbean and referencing characters from The Iliad . This visual poem incorporates customised models of contemporary and historically resonant vessels - clippers and cargo ships, battleships and lifeboats - filled with hope, potential prosperity and gratification, as well as despair, anguish, and suffering. A ship is a symbolic object; vessel of the soul, means of escape, both safety and danger. No crew are visible - the boats themselves stand for crew and passengers.

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Issue 76 – January 2013

Non-Fiction

The Wine-Dark Sea: Color and Perception in the Ancient World

by Erin Hoffman

“And jealous now of me, you gods, because I befriend a man, one I saved as he straddled the keel alone, when Zeus had blasted and shattered his swift ship with a bright lightning bolt, out on the wine-dark sea.” —Homer, The Odyssey, Book V

Perception is a funny beast. Homer’s “wine-dark sea” has puzzled scholars for centuries , leading to such far-flung hypotheses as strange weather effects, air pollution, and mass Grecian color-blindness .

It’s a phrase repeated in the works of W. H. Auden, Patrick O’Brian, and Brian Jacques, among others. Reading it today, we naturally assume that it is intended as allegory, some evocative reference to the sea’s mystery, its intoxication.

We may never know for sure, but one peculiar fact casts the mystery in an interesting light: there is no word for “blue” in ancient Greek.

Homer’s descriptions of color in The Iliad and The Odyssey, taken literally, paint an almost psychedelic landscape: in addition to the sea, sheep were also the color of wine; honey was green, as were the fear-filled faces of men; and the sky is often described as bronze.

It gets stranger. Not only was Homer’s palette limited to only five colors (metallics, black, white, yellow-green, and red), but a prominent philosopher even centuries later, Empedocles, believed that all color was limited to four categories: white/light, dark/black, red, and yellow. Xenophanes, another philosopher, described the rainbow as having but three bands of color: porphyra (dark purple), khloros, and erythros (red).

The conspicuous absence of blue is not limited to the Greeks. The color “blue” appears not once in the New Testament, and its appearance in the Torah is questioned (there are two words argued to be types of blue, sappir and tekeleth, but the latter appears to be arguably purple, and neither color is used, for instance, to describe the sky). Ancient Japanese used the same word for blue and green (青 Ao ), and even modern Japanese describes, for instance, thriving trees as being “very blue,” retaining this artifact (青々とした: meaning “lush” or “abundant”).

It turns out that the appearance of color in ancient texts, while also reasonably paralleling the frequency of colors that can be found in nature (blue and purple are very rare, red is quite frequent, and greens and browns are everywhere), tends to happen in the same sequence regardless of civilization: red : ochre : green : violet : yellow—and eventually, at least with the Egyptians and Byzantines, blue.

“Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” — Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

Blue certainly existed in the world, even if it was rare, and the Greeks must have stumbled across it occasionally even if they didn’t name it. But the thing is, if we don’t have a word for something, it turns out that to our perception—which becomes our construction of the universe—it might as well not exist. Specifically, neuroscience suggests that it might not just be “good or bad” for which “thinking makes it so,” but quite a lot of what we perceive.

The malleability of our color perception can be demonstrated with a simple diagram, shown here as figure six, “Afterimages” . The more our photoreceptors are exposed to the same color, the more fatigued they become, eventually giving out entirely and creating a reversed “afterimage” (yellow becomes blue, red becomes green). This is really just a parlor trick of sorts, and more purely physical, but it shows how easily shifted our vision is; other famous demonstrations like this selective attention test (its name gives away the trick) emphasize the power our cognitive functions have to suppress what we see. Our brains are pattern-recognizing engines, built around identifying things that are useful to us and discarding the rest of what we perceive as meaningless noise. (And a good thing that they do; deficiencies in this filtering, called sensory gating, are some of what cause neurological dysfunctions such as schizophrenia and autism.)

This suggests the possibility that not only did Homer lack a word for what we know as “blue”—he might never have perceived the color itself. To him, the sky really was bronze, and the sea really was the same color as wine. And because he lacked the concept “blue”—therefore its perception—to him it was invisible, nonexistent. This notion of concepts and language limiting cognitive perception is called linguistic relativism, and is typically used to describe the ways in which various cultures can have difficulty recalling or retaining information about objects or concepts for which they lack identifying language. Very simply: if we don’t have a word for it, we tend to forget it, or sometimes not perceive it at all.

The famed neuroscientist Dr. Oliver Sacks (you might know him as Robin Williams’s character in Awakenings ) described a poignant example of linguistic or conceptual relativism with regard to schizophrenia. Accounts of the disease prior to the 19th century are rare, and none at all exist in ancient literature (as opposed to “madness,” which was documented, but primarily concerned aimless wandering and spontaneous violence). The broad classification of “madness” persisted well through the 19th century, with schizophrenia identified in the early twentieth, and still considered rare through the middle of the century. When Sacks began practicing in 1965 in New York City, and in particular began studying disorders related to schizophrenia, he was shocked by a gradually increasing awareness that the disease was not nearly as rare as the science of the day claimed—especially among the homeless. Importantly, the clinical assumption that “schizophrenia is rare” was reinforcing the rarity of its diagnosis, to the point of blinding doctors to what was right in front of them. These blooms in diagnosis—we have been for the last ten years experiencing a bloom in autism recognition—have as much to do with clinical perception as they do with the actual physical incidence of the conditions.

On a lighter note, Sacks also recently recalled that the most magnificent thing he had ever seen in his life was a field of yellow, seen while he was—is it appropriate to say a famous neuroscientist was high ? Say rather that he was conducting experiential research in a varied state of neurochemical condition! But however you slice it, he says it was the most yellow yellow he had ever seen or expects to see again, a yellow beyond description, a yellow of interstellar radiance and the breath of ancient gods.

It isn’t the first time that Dr. Sacks has discussed color and altered states: in “The Dog Beneath the Skin,” he tells the infamous story of the 22-year-old medical student who, under the influence of PCP and amphetamines, enters a week-long heightened state of awareness. Among other things, this student—decades later revealed to have been Sacks himself, of course—perceived “dozens of browns” where previously he had seen only one shade. (Dr. Sacks does not now recommend this type of student experimentation.)

This particular super-sensory color perception is, too, reminiscent of another physical condition related to color: tetrachromacy. Most humans are trichromatic, possessing three types of color-sensing cone cells—but an undetermined percentage of women, as well as almost all birds, are tetrachromatic, possessing four receptor types. Tetrachromats perceive a kind of fourth primary color, usually a blue-green, that gives them a heightened ability to distinguish between shades of color, often to the point of distinguishing separate shades where a trichromat will perceive identicality.

“The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.” —Vladimir Nabokov, novelist, synesthete

We need not travel far to determine whether these enhanced states of perception—which, given that we remain the same species as Homer, can be societal or psychological in their impetus—can impact our worldview, or our creative selves.

We know that people with synesthesia , a neurological anomaly in which one sensation “bleeds” into other sensations, are eight times more likely to pursue careers in the arts than non-synesthetes. Synesthesia comes in many varieties, but those with a visual variant (for instance perceiving numbers and letters in colors) are more likely to become visual artists—or novelists.

Vladimir Nabokov, novelist and synesthete, wrote his synesthesia into his characters on occasion, and some of his descriptions—such as the word “loyalty” suggesting “a golden fork lying in the sun”—indicate that this crossing of senses, infused with color, certainly influenced Nabokov’s construction of language. Words themselves could be beautiful or garish depending upon their letter-level construction.

Some scientists have postulated that this phenomenon of carrying meaning from one sense into another—which is essentially the definition of a metaphor—is universal and contains insight into the deepest workings of our minds. In the case of the common grapheme-color synesthesia, such as Nabokov’s, a likely explanation is the close proximity of portions of the fusiform gyrus that deal respectively with word and color recognition in the brain. When a synesthete reads a word, some of the electrical energy from that word-recognizing region is possibly leaping over into that color recognition region. One remarkable side effect of this is that many synesthetes tend to perceive the same colors for letters (“A” tends to be red), which underscores the structural theory—and might suggest that this same phenomenon is at work in all of us below the level of our conscious awareness.

While the causes of synesthesia remain unknown, it is generally agreed that the physical basis is a kind of excess of interconnectedness between neurons. It may be that the “pruning” we undergo as children does not complete, leaving connections behind that in the mainstream population are eradicated—but provoked synesthesia in the cases of drug use or epileptic seizures suggest that non-synesthesian brains are capable of synesthetic effects.

A 1929 experiment by Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler elegantly illustrates what some call our natural synesthesia. Köhler drew two random shapes: one spiky and sharp, the other flowing and rounded. He then asked subjects to guess of these shapes which one was called “kiki” and which was called “bouba.” The results were very clear: 95-98% of subjects identified the sharp shape as “kiki” and the rounded shape as “bouba.” (Fascinatingly, autistic individuals make this match only 56% of the time.)

Köhler’s experiment wrapped science around what we would call onomatopoeia: when a word sounds like what it is. But onomatopoeia is by definition synesthesia, the transference of sound into orthogonal meaning.

The modern neuroscientist Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran suggests that Köhler’s experiment shows that, to a certain extent, we are all synesthetes, and further that this inherent interconnection between our cognitive functions is intrinsic to the most beloved traits of humanity: compassion, creativity, ingenuity. What, after all, is an idea, but one flash of thought leaping across the mind to suggest novel possibility?

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” —Aristotle

So, if we’re all synesthetes, and our minds are extraordinarily plastic, capable of reorienting our entire perception around the addition of a single new concept (“there is a color between green and violet,” “schizophrenia is much more common than previously believed”), the implications of Homer’s wine-dark sea are rich indeed.

We are all creatures of our own time, our realities framed not by the limits of our knowledge but by what we choose to perceive. Do we yet perceive all the colors there are? What concepts are hidden from us by the convention of our language? When a noblewoman of Syracuse looked out across the Mare Siculum, did she see waves of Bacchanalian indigo beneath a sunset of hammered bronze? If a seagull flew east toward Thapsus, did she think of Venus and the fall of Troy?

The myriad details that define our everyday existence may define also the boundaries of our imagination, and with it our dreams, our ethics. We are lenses moving through time, beings of color and shadow.

Erin Hoffman

Erin Hoffman is an author and game designer from California. Her fantasy series The Chaos Knight completes with its third volume, Shield of Sea and Space, in May 2013 from Pyr Books.

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The Wine Dark Sea

This is part of our special feature, Networks of Solidarity During Crises.

“The Wine Dark Sea” is a description of the Mediterranean used by Homer throughout The Odyssey, and the phrase is repeated by Derek Walcott in his epic poem Omeros, set mainly in the Caribbean and referencing characters from The Iliad. This visual poem incorporates customised models of contemporary and historically resonant vessels—clippers and cargo ships, battleships and lifeboats—filled with hope, potential prosperity, and gratification, as well as despair, anguish, and suffering. A ship is a symbolic object; vessel of the soul, means of escape, both safety and danger. No crew are visible—the boats themselves stand for crew and passengers.

“The Wine Dark Sea” is a selection of up to thirty-four boats, either hanging or on strands, ranging from 23 to 183 cms in length.

Hew Locke was born in Edinburgh, UK, in 1959; lived from 1966 to 1980 in Georgetown, Guyana; and is currently based in London.  He obtained a B.A. Fine Art in Falmouth (1988) and an M.A. Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London (1994). In 2000 he won both a Paul Hamlyn Award and an East International Award . His work is represented in many collections including those of the The Government Art Collection, The Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Tate Gallery, The Arts Council of England, The National Trust, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, 21c, The New Art Gallery Walsall, The Victoria & Albert Museum, The Imperial War Museum, The British Museum and The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.

These images are Courtesy of Hew Locke and P·P·O·W, New York Published on October 13, 2020.

Allegria by Giuseppe Ungaretti

Bard College Border Pedagogy: Experiential Learning, Syllabi, and a Model…

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Sailing down the wine dark sea

 How hard can it be for modern Greeks, as well as foreign scholars, to solve an almost 3000 years old riddle? For those who have chosen to cross the seas by boat to get to their vacation destination this summer, this riddle will show up on the waves’ foam while they will be gazing the sea’ s blue colour.

 While it may seem distant and unequal, Homer sets the ever-wanderer Ulysses on the same water, gazing himself the blue colour od the sea from his ship’ s gunwale on his way to Ithaca. However, the ancient bard, who possibly travelled as well by boat through the Greek seas, offers a different description on the sea’ s colour from what we all have in mind. From the very first lines of Odyssey, Homer recites that the hero sails down the “wine dark sea” (epi oinopa ponton). This verse is often repeated throughout Odyssey raising questions in all modern scholars of wine history, and, to this day, is still an unanswered riddle.

 Over the past 150 years, a lot of the secrets of wine have been revealed and now constitute common ground. Many researchers have used this knowledge in order to cast away the haze of time, covering with mystery the production of wine in ancient Greece. Despite science’ s achievements, the question still remains: what kind of variety or method could have been used to produce a red wine whose colour was compared with the colour of the sea as Homer describes?

 Acknowledging that viticulture in the Aegean and Ionian islands is a continuous – historically – tillage, it would not be daring to say many of the varieties that are present today on the islands have originated from Homer’ s time. Thus meaning, the first attempt to interpret the riddle would be the search of that specific variety, growing in the Aegean and Ionian islands, that could ascribe such a deep violet colour to the wine. Avgoustiatis, Vertzami, Kotsifali, Liatiko, Limnio, Mandilaria and Mavrodafni give from garnet to purple coloured wines, yet none of them resemble the colour of the sea, so the explanation must lie elsewhere.

 Another interpretation that many scholars espoused occasionally but not adopted massively, was the philological approach of the riddle. The bard likes to perplex things given that throughout Odyssey he often describes the wines that are being consumed. So, he recounts drinking sweet wines with their colour ranging from red (erythron oinon) to deep dark brown (aithopas oinos), but in no case deep blue.

 A further problem the scholars must surpass is the ancient Greek tradition that depicts Homer as blind, making every attempt of verse interpretation even more difficult. Some readings conclude that the “wine dark sea” is some poetic technique that served Homer in his recite. Others refer to the proverb as the delineation of the calm sea that was taken as a sign for a safe journey. Some scholars decided to travel by boat through the Greek seas to be able to witness with their own eyes Homer’s lyrics. They are responsible for the theories relating to the water’s colour on the point where the seas merge, and with the purple colour of the sea when the sun sets and dives in it. What both theories ignore is the saying “the sea is blue, but the wind blackens it”.

 A bolder explanation the present text espouses refers to the specific sociological characteristics that rule the seas that surround us since then. It is speculated that Homer came from the east side of the Aegean, with many cities of Ionia and Aegean islands wrangling over his origin. On the other hand though, Alcinous, kind of the Phaiacians on the island of Corfu, explains to Ulysses that there are no people like the Phaiacians, who are the best seafarers as well as singers and revelers. This undimmed spirit survives to our days and remains imprinted on the well-known Heptanesian song saying

“ [wishing] the sea were wine and the mountains savories

and the boats wine glasses for the revelers to drink from”

Could Homer have been influenced from this when he was describing the wine dark sea?

For those of you, who will be at the Aegean and Ionian islands, bear in mind that there are many choices from indigenous varieties to taste and savor. White and rose wines might be the undisputed kings of the Greek summer, nevertheless lightly cool red wines from the islands’ indigenous varieties could accompany harmonically your meals. For those of you who seek a summer reading, we dare you to find a case throughout Odyssey in which the wine being offered is not red.

Ulysses surely knew something, sharp as a needle as he was.

Special thanks to Greece’s eternal friend, Eckhart Koch , for his incitement to read Odyssey again.

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Book Review: “The Wine-Dark Sea” by Leonardo Sciascia

Whenever I move to a new country, I not only read guidebooks and history books, but I also try to find some novels and stories which portray my new domicile, whether in its contemporary age or in the past. When I moved to Sicily , one of my clients mailed me a copy of Leonardo Sciascia’s short story collection The Wine-Dark Sea .

The Long Crossing describes a 12-day journey by Sicilian émigrés, huddled under the deck of a boat whose captain promised to take them to America. (The stories were written between 1959 and 1972.) The Sicilians hoping for a better life have sold all of their belongings to pay for the passage. The more clever ones have taken out loans, knowing that they wouldn’t be around when the loan would become due. They have written down the names and addresses of relatives in the USA. They are optimistic. When they land 12 nights later and go on shore, they soon reach a road and remark its good surface, “but to tell the truth they found it neither as wide nor as straight as they had expected.” They are surprised to see so many Fiat cars. Finally they flag down a driver to ask for directions for Trenton, New Jersey, and only when the driver curses at them in Sicilian, the émigrés realise that they have just spent their life’s savings to be taken to the other end of Sicily. They sit down because “there was, after all, no need to hurry back.”

In Philology , two Mafiosi discuss the etymology and the meaning of the word “Mafia”, reverting to other languages from Arabic to French, to dictionaries and the opinions of learned men, before one of the gangsters concludes: “Culture, my friend, is a wonderful thing.” The Test describes the travels of a Swiss recruiter who is hiring Sicilian girls for a factory in Switzerland.

My favourite story has to be End-Game . A husband has hired a killer to finish off his wife. As the killer enters the marital home, he is shocked to see that the wife has been waiting for him. It turns out that she is much cleverer than her husband, and has not only seen through his plot, but has also devised a plan to convince or blackmail the killer into accepting her proposition to kill the husband instead. Her devious plan goes beyond that even. This is a very smart crime story with hilarious dialogue.

The title-giving story The Wine-Dark Sea is the longest one in the book, but no less captivating than the others. Describing a long train journey from Rome to Sicily, the dialogues of the people who randomly get together in a compartment, among them two rowdy but smart children, bring the trip to life as if the reader was sitting there, not able to suppress a smile at the witty exchanges. A romance between two of the passengers evolves, not unnoticed by the others. The discussions between the men reveal the tension between Sicily and the rest of Italy. There is more in these 40 pages than many novels can offer. As the protagonist Bianchi says at the end of the story, when all the others have disembarked and only he continues the journey: “Lord, what a trip!”

Enjoy that trip! Get this book, even if you have never been and will never come to Sicily. Some of these short stories are among the best stories in world literature. I forced myself to take a pause of a day or two after each of the stories, to let them sink in and to revel in each one of them. And now, I’ll put the other books by Leonardo Sciascia on  my wishlist .

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8 responses to book review: “the wine-dark sea” by leonardo sciascia.

This sounds like a great book, and I will begin the search for it….chances of it being in the library of Oaxaca, Mexico are slim…Soldotna, Alaska even slimmer. But I know it’s out there somewhere! Thanks for the recommendation.

Maybe you should also start a wishlist. Although far fewer people do actually send books than promise to do so.

E’ veramente un’ottima idea riprendere Leonardo Sciascia oppure “Il mare del colore del vino” che non conosco ancora. Grazie

After some confusion with Patrick O’brian I found it! Thank you.

I was born in Germany my mother is still a German citizen. Can I regain my German status?

Please have a look at my FAQ on German citizenship law or my infographic on that subject.

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The Art of a Wine-Dark Sea

“Free soul, thou shalt always cherish the sea,” wrote Charles Baudelaire. The sea he means is the Mediterranean, the “wine-dark sea” that worked its magic on writers from Homer to Hemingway and enchanted the most celebrated painters of modern times. Thus the artistic event of the autumn season at the Grand Palais, Paris, called “The Mediterranean, from Courbet to Matisse” presents over 90 paintings, including many chefs d’oeuvres, spanning the second half of the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th century the works of painters whose names resonate through the annals of modern art: Auguste Renoir, Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Paul Signac, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse prominent among them. They represent the major artistic upheavals of the period including Impressionism, Pointillism, Neo-impressionism and Fauvism, in enduring testimonials to the spell that the Mediterranean casts.

This was not always the case. Although the Mediterranean, cradle of civilization to the Greeks, had already hypnotized Homer, mid-19th century civilization regarded it as a venue for fashionable winter resorts or sanatoriums where consumptives came to die. The sand and the sea and the sun held little attraction, but with the belated arrival of the French industrial revolution and the concomitant advent of the railroads, the Mediterranean began to attract avant-garde writers who composed lyrical hymns to this watery Eden. Artists were not far behind in discovering a painterly paradise of incomparable luminosity, vibrant colors and ravishing landscapes.

The exhibition embraces the coastal region from Catalonia to the Gulf of Genoa, and is divided into nine sections: “Discovery of the Mediterranean Landscape”; “Shores”; “Rocks”; “Mythologies”; “Through the Trees”; “Holiday Resorts”; “Ports, Fishing, Sails”; “Luxuriances”; and “Openings onto the Sea.” Each section presents the expected masterpieces, beautiful and breathtaking, throbbing with joy and sensuality, landscapes flattened by the sun, awash in luminosity, metamorphosed into spheres or cubes or dots or splashes of primary colors. But it also includes picture postcard images, some pleasant surprises, blatant disappointments and lesser but not always uninteresting works of artists who were never able to become truly great.

Gustave Courbet’s diminutive painting, The Shore at Palavas, opens the exhibition. It clearly depicts the free soul longed for by Baudelaire, who was a great admirer of this fellow subversive. On a deserted beach, a tiny figure of a man Courbet himself pays homage to the immensity of the sea in a grand gesture of defiance: brandishing his artist’s cap, arm boldly outstretched, an infinitesimal figure challenging the legendary mare nostrum. The sea is calm, yet disturbing with its dark, opaque blue and limitless horizon. The azure sky inhabits half of the painting, thick near the horizon with billowing white clouds, suggesting metaphysical longing.

In “Shores,” Cezanne’s L’Estaque, View of the Gulf of Marseilles, along with two other paintings of the Provenal Alps by the same artist on view, thrice proves that he is the master of them all. Here luminosity gives way to structure, forms and subdued colors highlighting the sea as a great triangle cutting into the land and mountains beyond the coastline. Three early works of Picasso attest that he was still searching for his unique inspiration. Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida’s lovely Shadow of the Boat depicts a black shell of a fishing bark and mauve shadows of an invisible sailboat on an undulating sand taken up again in a narrow cloud bank skirting a changing sea.

In “Mythologies” Frederic Montenard’s Cemetery in Provence confronts us with the pervasive role death played in a region dedicated to ephemeral pleasure, but which, for many, was the last stop on the way to eternity. Desolate dunes, crosses and graves surround a small boy kneeling, the sea beyond as the hereafter rendered in pale tones. In “Luxuriances,” quintessential impressionist Monet’s The Villa Trees at Bordighera dazzles us with its rainbow palette of pink and blue mountains, vegetation in every hue of green, a triumph of light and color.

Matisse’s astonishing exercise in a minimalist, quasi-abstract representation of a French Window at Collioure closes the exhibition. “I have begun to use pure black as a color of light and not as a color of obscurity,” he explained. And indeed, strips of window defined by muted colors of green and blue and gray open onto a deep black plane stretching over half the canvas. In casting off the superfluous, it is the culmination of the artist’s search for “balance, purity, serenity.”

We have come a long way from the vast expanse of Courbet’s Mediterranean. In 1854, Courbet saluted the sea with exultation. In 1914 Matisse looked out of a window at the same sea and what did he see? Blackness.

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A virtual port of call for all those who love the sea , hosted by nautical novelist rick spilman.

When Did the Wine Dark Sea Turn Blue?

This is nothing new. Homer referred to the famously blue Aegean as the “ wine dark sea .” When did the wine dark sea turn blue?

In the Iliad and the Odyssey , Homer never uses the word “blue” once. William Gladstone, the British prime minister, was also a classical scholar, who wrote 1700-page study of Homer’s epic poetry. In one chapter, he describes Homer’s strange choice of colors. Sheep wool and ox skin are purple. Honey is green, while horses and lions are red. The sky is filled with copper or iron colored stars, but neither the sky, nor the sea, nor anything else in his poetry is ever “blue.”  Gladstone was so baffled by this confused yet incomplete rainbow that he theorized that the ancient Greeks must have been not capable of distinguishing color. Science does not support his theory, which, in its day, was met largely with derision.

While Gladstone was wondering if the Greek’s were color-blind, a German philologist, Lazarus Geiger , was casting a broader net. He examined ancient texts across a range of cultures, including Icelandic sagas, the Koran, ancient Chinese stories, and Hindu Vedic hymns and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible. He comments about the Vedic hymns, “ These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening dawn’s play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and ether, all these are unfolded before us, again and again … but there is one thing no one would ever learn from these ancient songs … and that is that the sky is blue. ”

In many cases, blue was considered a shade of green , gray or purple, but not distinguished as its own color.

Gieger observed that the definition and description of color evolved with most cultures over time. Black and white were the first colors designated, followed by red. Yellow and green came next (although in some cultures green came first.) Finally, blue arrived. Some have speculated that this may be because blue is fairly rare in nature. Others have theorized that until a culture is capable of artificially creating the color, they do not distinguish it from other shades.  The one ancient culture which had an early word for blue was the Egyptian. The Egyptians also manufactured a blue dye far earlier than anyone else in the world.

But to return to the original question — when did the wine dark sea turn blue? The distinction between green and blue in English appears to have begun around the Middle Ages. The modern English word blue comes from Middle English bleu or blewe , from the Old French bleu , a word of Germanic origin, related to the Old High German word blao .  But who first called the sea blue?  I don’t have a good answer.

Shakespeare’s saltiest play, “ The Tempest ,” mentions the sea over 30 times, water over a dozen and waves around four, yet only once does Shakespeare mention the color of the sea. “…’ twixt the green sea and the azured vault. ..’  Shakespeare identifies the sky as blue (or at least azure) while the sea remains green. Based on a word search on Open Source Shakespeare , the bard did describe the sea as silver as well as green, but never did he call it blue.

Google has a search feature, the Ngram Viewer , that allows searching for words or phrases from the books scanned in Google’s library. Searching for “blue sea” and “blue water” between 1500 and the year 2000, suggests that the prior to around 1700, there were few mentions of the sea as blue.

No one could see the color blue until modern times

Why Isn’t the Sky Blue?

When Did the Wine Dark Sea Turn Blue? — 5 Comments

I saw the dress as either tan or dark brown and white stripped or light blue stripped. I did not see gold.

No matter what color you think you saw, the fact remains.

The dress is ugly!

The Minoans used abundantly blue decorative motifs in Knossos 4000 years ago.

From what I have read, the Minoans acquired blue dyes from the Egyptians and that the Phoenicians acquired it from the Minoans, who later brought it to Mycenae.

Pingback: Coloring Perception. | loonmusings

Read ‘Through the Language Glass darkly’ by Guy Deutscher and find out Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages. It’s brilliant.

September 16, 2024

North West Island to Airlie

Sorry it has taken me so long to get around to this post. It’s not like I can blame my hectic lifestyle. My pilgrimage to Sarah’s resting place complete, I was called back to reality by the need to get back within communication range for a video conference the next morning. I weighed anchor and […]

Bundaberg to North West Island

I had been weighing up a few options for this next leg. Do I do a short hop to Pancake Creek or Lady  Musgrave? Or a longer leg directly to North West Island. Frankly it came down to not wanting to spend any more time with my keel in the mud at Bundberg. At its […]

Mooloolaba to Bundaberg

With the handover of the Sydney Football Stadium imminent, I could start my long 2 months of live-aboard. Joining me for that last overnight passage for a while, around Fraser Island, was long time crew and ex-work colleague Doug Rayment and girlfriend Sascha EE. This would be the first overnight sea passage on a sailing […]

Southport to Mooloolaba

Lindy Hardcastle joined me for the short trip from Southport to Mooloolaba. I flew up on Sunday morning and met up with my uncle, Steve, and my cousin, Sean. The later of which works for Riviera yacht on the Gold Coast. The place was pumping, so much so the yacht club couldn’t accommodate us for […]

Sydney to Southport Solo

This year the delivery of Wine-dark Sea to Queensland for Airlie beach race week and magnetic island race week is being juggled with the final commissioning of the new Sydney football stadium. Eyeing up a potential 5 day weekend without commissioning and a favourable weather window, on the tail of a southerly blast, I decided […]

Getting ready to rumble…

It feels great to be getting back into the routine. As departure approaches I’m now in my route planning routine. Every 12 hours, when the new forecasts are released, I download the 6 models from Predictwind and import them into Expedition to run my optimized routes at 6 hour departure times. Currently I’m debating slightly […]

Modifications aplenty. Some planned, some not so much

So long since my last post. Well I didn’t seem to get out much on the boat over summer. Not really sure why. The general blur of the last 2 years of the ‘rona has me wondering what exactly I have done with the last 2 years. I even had to Google when we came […]

Here we go again…

…a little scaled back though. Today we finally start the 2021-2022 sailing season. I’ve decided to back my racing off for a few reasons, so I am only planning to do Friday twilights. I might throw in a regatta here and there depending on crew interest. One of the main reasons was that over the […]

Sorry its been so long…

….but COVID has made a right mess of things for all of us hasn’t it. So what’s been happening? (I can’t believe my last post was for Sarah’s birthday last year) At that time I was newly installed in my brand-new-second-hand apartment in Dee Why. I’m well settled in now and have ripped up the […]

Happy Birthday Sarah

Today would have been Sarah’s 56th birthday. Today I feel her loss as keenly as the day she was taken from us all too soon. I can’t help but think what we would have been doing. I suspect we would have, as I have this morning, gone down and watched a beautiful sunrise over the […]

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Noakes Sydney Gold Coast Yacht Race 2024

Wine-dark sea (th).

Competitor Details

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Full Standings available approximately three hours after the start.

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The wine-dark sea

by Mariska Buitendijk | May 27, 2020 | News | 0 comments

The KNVTS has a proud tradition to connect its vision on the future with a view on the historic past of shipbuilding practice. Time for the chair of the KNVTS Ship of the Year Committee Rien de Meij to take a step back and reflect on the idea of “vision”. Here is the story of “The wine-dark sea”.

The vase from Cerveteri of which a detail is presented below, is dated ca. 520 BCE. The purpose of the vase was to mix wine and water for a group of merry men, sitting orderly to listen while the table is loaded with bread and meats. The cup-bearer draws wine and fills the cup for every guest at the drinking party [ sumpósion ].

Let’s take a glimpse over the rim of this Terracotta column- kratēr . The inside of the rim is decorated with three ships, equally spaced, the filling ornament between each two ships being a dolphin. Imagine the vase being filled with dark wine: the three ships sailing through a wavy sea, in endless pursue of each other. The wine and the painting bring to light and life the Homeric metaphor of ships on a “wine-dark sea” [ oinops pontos ].

The snout-shaped cutwater [ steira ] protrudes in front of the stem contour, lengthening the water lines and reducing the angle of entrance, making the ship qualify as “swift” [ thoísin ]. The stem post is straight-horned [ orthokrairáon ]. The sides of the red-cheeked prow have once been baptized with red wine.

The hull of this merchant ship with its large freeboard is black and huge. Horizontal white lines over the hull represent the strakes of the gunwale planking. The sail is rigged like window blinds. The brails [ kálos ] were made fast to the foot of the sail [ histíon ] and were rigged through fairleads along the forward surface of the sail. From there, they were run over the yard and to the stern. Letting out full sails is done by slackening off on every brail.

The oversized steersman [ kubernētēs ], seated on a bench [selma] on the raised half-deck [ íkria ], handles the tillers [ oiáklon ] of the twin rudder-oar [ pēdálion ] The stern post carries an in-board facing bird-head decoration [ aphlaston ].

There is a version of Euripides’ tragedy Alkestis (438 BCE) – that is played in an opera of Jean-Baptiste Lully (1674 CE) – which begins at the wedding of Admetus and Alkestis: ‘An undeclared suitor, Hēraklēs, prepares to leave Lolcos. A jilted suitor, Lykomedes, abducts Alkestis under the guise of giving a party for the betrothed couple; his escape is aided by a storm at sea: the sea-nymph Thetis, sister of Lykomedes, rises from the sea on a marine chariot and at her command the four winds start to blow. However, the wind god Aeolus calms the sea, allowing Admetus army (including Hēraklēs) to pursue Lykomedes’ ship. Hēraklēs triumphs and delivers Alkestis, but Admetus is mortally wounded.’ Artemis was involved too; at the wedding, Admetus forgot to make the required sacrifice to Artemis and found his bed full of snakes.

In this interpretation, the three ships depicted on the inside of the rim of the kratēr may represent the pursue of Lykomedes by Hēraklēs, in which Hēraklēs triumphs. The decorations on the side of the vase narrate the story of the Struggle for the Tripod: Lykomedes in a chariot, Artemis; Iolaos in a chariot, Athena; Hermes, Dionysus, gods and goddesses.

Dionysus cup

The wine in the vase will be used to fill the drinking cups of the guests at the drinking party. Such a cup is depicted in the next figure; it is the Dionysus cup [ kylix ] which is dated ca. 530 BCE. The front side of the cup shows how Dionysus looks you in the eyes, when you lift the cup for drinking. The backside of the vase shows a defeated person, possibly a Scythian, threatened by soldiers who are ready to kill the grounded person. The images around the handles probably depict the battles for the corpses of Patroklos and Achilles, with the naked corpse being Patroklos.

The Dionysus cup – side view focusing on the stylized face.

How would such drinking work? Trying to get the picture, you can firstly see the ships of Hēraklēs and Lykomedes sailing through the dark wine that fills a large kratēr to the brim. After the wine is poured into your kylix , the eyes of Dionysus stare at you from the side of it, invitingly. You accept the cup and while you start drinking, Dionysus breaks through the surface of the wine, sitting on a ship that travels directly towards your mouth (figure below). The drinker drinks the wine and closes in to the god who leaves him incapable of speaking letters in the right order.

Here is what Antiphanes said about it:

I’m not too drunk to think, but just enough that it is hard to form any letters with my mouth

The ship in the cup

The next image shows the decoration on the inside of the Dionysus cup. It shows Dionysus in a ship, sailing among dolphins. From the mast foot grows a vine.

The Dionysus cup – top view focusing on the ship of Dionysus.

The curves of the ship start with the silhouette of the straight-horned [ orthokrairáon ] stem post. The forebody then projects far forward into the shape of a snout-shaped cutwater [ steira ]. The pointed snout, or embolos , is decorated with a pair of eyes [ ophthalmós ]. The bow is fitted with a closed railing, which continuous towards aft as an open railing mounted to vertical struts. The shoulders of the ship, both fore and aft, have been decorated with a dolphin. On the cutwater we see the eyes [ ophthalmós ] of the ship that either look straight ahead to scare of the enemy, or look sideways to ward off the evil eye that will cause misfortune or injury.

The contour then continuous towards the aft, a slight discontinuity in the fairing of the lines, in the location where the lower contour of the snout-shaped bow moves over in the keel line, suggest that the snout-shape is an appended feature; not a part of the bare hull itself. The curved keel line runs into the rounded shape of the stern of the ship. The curve of the keel makes her more suitable for beaching stern-first than vice-versa. The stern quarter (right) carries a steering-oar and a boarding ladder [ apobáthra ] or lading plank . The stern post curves forward, giving the boat her characteristic scorpion-like contour.

The decorations on the Dionysus cup may help to envisage the image of the ancient Greek ship, however mostly she was a point of departure for seamen in a pensive mood, considering the pros and cons of getting drunk.

Picture (top): Detail of interior of Attic black-figured cup from Cerveteri (c. 520 BCE).

Acknowledgements

This story could only be formed thanks to the CHS Oinops Study Group of the online community for Classical Studies of The Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, guided by Jacqui Donlon. Her work was published, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license at https://kosmossociety.chs.harvard.edu/?p=11283. Where possible, the images have been selected from pictures that are freely available with open source or Creative Commons licenses.

• Figure 1 – Detail of interior of Attic black-figured cup from Cerveteri (c. 520 BCE). Boats cup, detail of the interior showing a frieze of five boats in contest. Attic black-figured cup, ca. 520 BC. From Cerveteri. Gift of the Prince Torlonia. From Wikimedia Commons. User: Bibi Saint-Pol, own work, 2007-05-31.
• Figure 2 – The Dionysus cup – side view focusing on the stylized face. Exekias, black-figure kylix, c. 530 BCE. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, München. Bibi Saint-Pol (photo, side view) Dionysus in a ship. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
• Figure 3 – Ancient Greek ship form, depicted on a kylix (c. 530 BCE). Exekias, black-figure kylix, c. 530 BCE. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, München. Bibi Saint-Pol (photo, top view) Dionysus in a ship. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
• Description of the Alkestis opera: Sadie, S., Macy, L. 2009, The Grove Book of Operas. Oxford University Press.

Series of articles

• “ The theoretical ship ” (also appeared in SWZ|Maritime’s January 2020 issue)
• “ The modelled ship”  (also appeared in abbreviated version in SWZ|Maritime’s February issue)
• Navigare necesse est: To sail is necessary  (also appeared in SWZ|Maritime’s March issue)
• The essential ship (also appeared in SWZ|Maritime’s April issue)

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Ceres I path

From June 1

‘Dark’ tanker crash exposes dangers of China’s thirst for cheap oil

SINGAPORE — A crude oil tanker traveling from Iran made a delivery to the Chinese port city of Ningbo a few months ago before heading back toward the Middle East. The Ceres I had made this round trip several times in the past year, according to ship-tracking data. But it didn’t complete this voyage.

The Ceres I and another tanker collided off Malaysia in the South China Sea on July 19, causing significant damage to both vessels. Malaysian authorities said the Ceres I had experienced “technical difficulties.” But shipping and energy analysts say the pattern of the vessel’s movements before the collision suggests another explanation: The Ceres I had been broadcasting a fake location on ship locator channels.

Among groups that track ship movements, the Ceres I was widely known to be part of a “dark” fleet of tankers operating outside international regulations to feed China’s appetite for sanctioned crude oil. China, the world’s biggest importer of oil, is one of the few remaining customers of crude from countries such as Iran, Venezuela and Russia, which are subject to heavy sanctions by the United States.

China needs this fuel, which is discounted from international benchmarks, to supply its manufacturing sector and prop up its flagging oil refineries. To bypass Western financial systems and shipping services, China relies on a fleet of aging, substandard tankers that operate illicitly and increasingly threaten the safety of international sea lanes, analysts say.

Radio frequency signals

from the Ceres I

Leaves from

Malaysia to Iran

Radio frequency signals from the Ceres I

No detectable

February 2024

According to satellite data tracked by analytics firm Spire Global, the Ceres I started its journey to Iran after spending nearly five months in waters near Malaysia.

After about a week in Iranian waters, the vessel turns around and makes its way back to China. During this trip, it is not detectable via radio frequency on multiple occasions.

The Ceres I leaves China and travels to Singapore. After anchoring there for some time, the ship heads north toward Malaysia, where it later crashes with the Hafnia Nile.

A collision involving ships like the Ceres I was “not a matter of if but a matter of when,” said Ian Ralby, a senior fellow for maritime governance at the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies. Crew members from both vessels in the crash were injured but none died. If the Ceres I hadn’t just offloaded its cargo of oil, Ralby said, “we’d be looking at catastrophe.”

The Chinese owners of the Ceres I did not respond to inquiries for this story.

Last year, over objections from Iran and Russia, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the United Nations shipping agency, issued a resolution expressing grave concern over the prevalence of “dark” tankers, adding that there were as many as 600 tankers servicing this shadow trade — vessels that had unclear ownership, were not compliant with safety standards and lacked adequate insurance.

Tankers are required to broadcast their location on their Automatic Identification System (AIS) so they can be detected by other vessels. But “dark” tankers were masking or falsifying their locations on AIS — a process called “spoofing” — to travel illicitly, the IMO said. The safety risks, the agency warned, were “real and high.”

China does not officially acknowledge that it imports sanctioned oil but defends its trade with countries such as Iran. “China conducts normal energy cooperation with other countries under international law, which is legitimate and lawful,” Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for China’s Embassy in D.C., said in a statement.

Secretive transfers at sea

The Ceres I was an archetype of the “dark” fleet, analysts say.

Launched in 2001, it had been operating past the 15- to 20-year limit that tanker operators impose for safety reasons. In the past five years, it has operated under four different flags, most recently under São Tomé and Príncipe, an African island nation known for having low registration fees and lax oversight.

Data provided to The Washington Post by the space-based data firm Spire Global, which uses satellites to track and validate the location of vessels, shows that in the two years before the Ceres I’s collision, it had been traveling predominantly between China and Iran, with regular pit stops in the waters off eastern Malaysia in the South China Sea.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, nearly 90 percent of China’s oil shipments pass through the South China Sea, a highly disputed waterway that is claimed in part by seven governments and thus difficult to police.

In recent years, a stretch of the South China Sea near Malaysia has become a hot spot for the ship-to-ship transfer of oil, which is when tankers mix sanctioned oil with oil from elsewhere to deliver as “blends,” said Muyu Xu, a China oil analyst at the maritime analysis group Kpler. This maneuver increases the risks of collision and pollution, especially when done hastily or when ships are not broadcasting their accurate locations.

Since August 2023, Kpler has detected more than 1,005 unique vessels participating in ship-to-ship transfers here, at least 30 percent of which Kpler estimates were doing so illicitly.

This stretch of sea was also where the Ceres I arrived in mid-July after leaving port in Singapore, according to Spire’s data.

The weeks leading up to

the Ceres I crash

Vessel radio frequency signals

In mid-June, the Ceres I arrived in Singapore from China. It then took a trip to the eastern coast of Malaysia and returned to Singapore, where it anchored on July 8.

Anchors on July 8

The Ceres I sailed north for three days before stopping again in eastern Malaysia, where it stayed for a week.

At 3:55AM on July 19, the Ceres I stopped transmitting its location via AIS and soon after collided with Singapore-flagged Hafnia Nile.

Approximate location

Sources: Spire Global, MarineTraffic

The weeks leading up to the Ceres I crash

On the evening of July 18, the Ceres I broadcast via AIS that it was “at anchor” there, although Spire’s data shows it was moving northward. At 3:55 a.m. on July 19, the Ceres I stopped transmitting its location via AIS and did not begin again until 26 hours later. During this period, the Ceres I crashed into another tanker, the Singapore-flagged Hafnia Nile, bound for Japan. Spire was not able to pinpoint the exact point of the collision.

After the crash, the fire-damaged Hafnia Nile was towed back to home port by a Singaporean naval vessel. The Ceres I went missing for two days and then was intercepted by Malaysia’s coast guard, which found the tanker being pulled deeper into the South China Sea by two tugboats.

Unanswered questions

Malaysian authorities said based on preliminary findings that the Ceres I had dropped anchor because it was experiencing technical difficulties, and that the Hafnia Nile had tried to avoid it but failed.

Three shipping analysts who studied the movement of the Ceres I said this account raises major questions.

It’s unclear why the Hafnia Nile would have had problems avoiding the Ceres I, a 1,000-foot-long supertanker, if the latter vessel had been anchored and transmitting its authentic location, said Michelle Wiese Bockmann, a principal analyst at the maritime-trade research firm Lloyd’s List Intelligence. Leading up to the crash, the Hafnia Nile had been traveling at 14 knots, near its maximum speed, suggesting it did not detect another vessel in its way, Bockmann said.

Hafnia, the company that owns the Hafnia Nile, declined to respond to questions, saying it was still investigating.

Dimitris Ampatzidis, a risk and compliance analyst at Kpler, said he thinks it’s likely the Ceres I had been “spoofing” its location, preventing the Hafnia Nile from detecting it. AIS data transmitted by the Ceres I in the days before it went dark has unusual gaps and shows “erratic and overlapping movements in a concentrated area, followed by sudden, sharp turns and long, straight paths” — patterns consistent with spoofing, he said.

Ampatzidis, who leads Kpler’s monitoring of suspicious vessels, said he has identified activity suggesting the Ceres I carried out ship-to-ship transfers on multiple occasions this year, including at least three times in Malaysian waters. “What we’re talking about is a vessel that has been connected to illicit activities for an extensive period of time,” he said.

From 2019 to 2021, the Ceres I was operated by a Shanghai-based company, Shanghai Prosperity Ship Management, which shares contact details with another shipping business whose owners were placed under sanctions by the United States for oil transactions with Iran, according to corporate records. More recently, the Ceres I has been owned and operated by a Hong Kong-based company, Ceres Shipping Limited.

Shanghai Prosperity Ship Management did not respond to inquiries. Ceres Shipping Limited does not have public contact information. A listed agent of the company did not respond to inquiries over email or to calls, and the Hong Kong Shipowners Association, the main trade group for shipowners in the Chinese territory, said it was not aware of the company.

In August 2023, customs officials in Ningbo warned in an essay in a state-owned outlet that Western sanctions were going to drive more Russian oil toward China’s shores in “black fleets” that “pose a threat to our country’s maritime entry and exit order.” Around the same time, authorities in Shandong province began detaining tankers with safety lapses.

While these efforts suggest that Chinese officials, at least on the local level, have concerns over the substandard tankers arriving at their ports, they have not made a dent in curbing the trade of sanctioned oil, analysts say. In 2023, oil from Iran, Venezuela and Russia made up 26 percent of China’s oil imports, up from 20 percent in 2021, according to data from Kpler. In the first seven months of 2024, this figure was up to 28 percent.

“As long as Iran continues being sanctioned and as long as China continues to buy, this trade will continue,” said Emma Li, a China oil analyst at Vortexa, an energy analytics firm.

Wu reported from Taipei, Taiwan, and Ledur from Philadelphia.