Head-Chowder: Kipling’s Wasteless Waters

Abstract

This article examines nineteenth-century marine waste discourses in Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous (1896–97). In the novel, the sheltered son of an American railway magnate is washed overboard from a steamer, saved by a fishing schooner, and inculcated into the cod fishery. While the fishing boat of Kipling’s novel acts as a mobile apparatus for producing rubbish, the novel imagines both industrial fishing and venture capitalism through fantasies of wastelessness. Through this case study, the article argues for the relevance that Victorian literature has for waste studies, opening up the possibility that maritime waste studies in particular—which often focuses on modern forms of marine pollution—might productively adopt a historicizing approach. The sea functioned as a convenient dumping ground long before the creation of the first plastics, with the nineteenth century in particular establishing the global modern waste practices that accompany the rise of mass consumerism, imperialism, and industrial capitalism—as Kipling’s novel goes some way to demonstrating.

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