The evolution of young people’s spatial knowledge (the refiguration of space) 1st edition castillo u
The Evolution of Young People’s Spatial Knowledge (The Refiguration of Space) 1st Edition Castillo Ulloa
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Neuropsychology of Space Spatial Functions of the Human Brain 1st Edition Albert Postma
Young people imagine, perceive, experience, talk about, use, and produce space in a wide variety of ways. In doing so, they acquire and produce stocks of spatial knowledge. A quite dynamic and ever-changing process by nature, young people’s production and acquisition of spatial knowledge are susceptible to many kinds of conditions—from those that shape their everyday routines to those that constitute historical turning points. Against this backdrop and drawing on a qualitative metaanalysis, the authors set out to discover what changes the spatial knowledge of young people has undergone during the past five decades. To that end, sixty published studies were sampled, analyzed, and synthesized to offer a meta-interpretation in terms of both the evolution of young people’s spatial knowledge and the refiguration of spaces. As such, this book will appeal to scholars conducting spatial research on childhood and youth as well as scholars interested in urban studies from diverse disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture, urban planning, and design.
Ignacio Castillo Ulloa, PhD, is Researcher and Lecturer in the Institute of Urban and Regional Planning at Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, and co-editor of Spatial Transformations: Kaleidoscopic Perspectives on the Refiguration of Spaces. He is Researcher at the CRC 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces.”
Anna Juliane Heinrich, PhD, is Researcher and Lecturer in the Institute of Urban and Regional Planning at Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, and the coeditor of Education, Space and Urban Planning: Education as a Component of the City. She is PI at the CRC 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces.”
Angela Million, PhD, is Professor of Urban Design and Urban Development at Technische Universität Berlin, Germany. She is the co-editor of Spatial Transformations: Kaleidoscopic Perspectives on the Refiguration of Spaces and Education, Space and Urban Planning: Education as a Component of the City. She is PI at the CRC 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces.”
Jona Schwerer is Research Assistant in the Research Center “Transformations of Political Violence” at the Chair of Urban Sociology and Sociology of Space at the Technical University of Darmstadt. He is an associate member of the CRC 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces.”
The Refiguration of Space
Based on the premise that what is social always takes on a spatial form, this series explores the changes wrought in the relations of human-beings to spaces and their spatial practices by current social transformations, conflicts, crises and uncertainties. Welcoming studies from disciplines across the social sciences, such as sociology, geography and urban studies, books in the series consider the ways in which people (re-)negotiate and (re-)construct special orders according to a common pattern of ‘refiguration’, a process that often involves conflict and is frequently shaped by phenomena such as mediatization, translocalisation and polycontexturalisation.
Series Editors
Hubert Knoblauch is Professor of Sociology at Technische Universität Berlin, Germany.
Martina Löw is Professor of the Sociology of Planning and Architecture at the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany.
Titles in the series
Matters of Revolution
Urban Spaces and Symbolic Politics in Berlin and Warsaw After 1989
Dominik Bartmanski
The Evolution of Young People’s Spatial Knowledge
Ignacio Castillo Ulloa, Anna Juliane Heinrich, Angela Million and Jona Schwerer
Considering Space
A Critical Concept for the Social Sciences
Edited by Dominik Bartmanski, Henning Füller, Johanna Hoerning and Gunter Weidenhaus
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/The-Refigurationof-Space/book-series/ROS
The Evolution of Young People’s Spatial Knowledge
Ignacio Castillo Ulloa, Anna Juliane Heinrich, Angela Million and Jona Schwerer
First published 2024 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge
The right of Ignacio Castillo Ulloa, Anna Juliane Heinrich, Angela Million, Jona Schwerer to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis. com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—Projektnummer 290045248—SFB 1265.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 9780367568658 (hbk)
ISBN: 9780367568665 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003099727 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003099727
Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra
Boxes
4.1 Features of young people’s spatialities from the 1970s to today elaborated from the meta-interpretation 41
5.1 Types of spatial knowledge elaborated from the metainterpretation 105
6.1 Set of constructs elaborated to deconstruct the notion of spatial knowledge, look into its evolution and, in so doing, substantiate the meta-interpretations of our findings 131
7.1 Social control and spatial pedagogization as key concepts created for the meta-interpretation of results 186
2.1 The mutually structuring relationship between socio-spatial actions and (spatial) knowledge 13
2.2 The wedge between subjective and objective that leads to separation and differentiation of self from the world—the bedrock of an objective view of the world 15
3.1 Steps, phases, and parallel activities in our qualitative meta-analysis 24
3.2 The coding scheme used to analyze the selected empirical cases 27
3.3 Example of a key descriptor and its corresponding key concept 28
3.4 Analysis and synthesis phases of our qualitative meta-analysis 32
3.5 Depiction of the actual thematic clustering of the key concepts 33
3.6 Overview of selected studies for our meta-analysis 34
4.1 Co-existing features of young people’s spatialities from the 1970s to today 40
4.2 Simultaneity, overlapping, and intersection of different spatial structures leading to a pluralization and heterogenization of young people’s spatialities 69
5.1 Types of spatial knowledge elaborated from the meta-interpretation 106
5.2 Young people’s spatial perception influenced by comparisons in space (here-and-there) and time (before-and-after) 113
5.3 The sinuosity of young people’s spatial perception (and assessment) 126
6.1 Set of constructs elaborated to deconstruct the notion of spatial knowledge, look into its evolution and, in so doing, substantiate the meta-interpretations of our findings 130
6.2 Map of the diverse instances and scales of non-formal learning according to the material-normative interplay 154
7.1 Diversification of modes of social control and its gender-biased distribution 207
7.2 Young people’s coping strategies and tactics in the face of social control and spatial pedagogization 224
8.1 Changes between back then and today at a glance: The evolution of young people’s spatial knowledge 230
3.1 Comparing three forms of synthesizing research 23
3.2 Steps and phases of our qualitative meta-analysis 25
1 Finding change
Identifying and explaining how young people’s spatial knowledge is refigured
Young people imagine, perceive, experience, talk about, use, and act out of space in a wide variety of ways. In so doing, young people increasingly produce and collect stocks of spatial knowledge. A quite dynamic and ever-changing process by nature, the production and acquisition of spatial knowledge are susceptible to many kinds of circumstantial conditions—from those that shape everyday routines to those that constitute historical turning points. Thus, in this book, we set out to discover what changes the spatial knowledge of young people has undergone during the past five decades. This in turn attests, to a greater or lesser extent, to the refiguration of that knowledge.
In this day and age, many young people live in an increasingly interconnected world. They navigate through, and thus somehow need to cope with, a growing complexity embedded in their everyday lives. The fact that lifeworlds are prone to change—and in fact do change—over time is nothing new. To be sure, young people’s everyday lives and living environments have always been and continue to be subject to processes of subtle and radical transformations. However, we argue that a wave of discernible changes of an outstanding significance and dynamism has been unfolding since the late 1960s and early 1970s. We are witnessing both the development and proliferation of new media and (digital) means of communication, the emergence of knowledge societies, post-Fordism, neoliberalism, the spread of emancipation movements, and a general escalation in transnational entanglements and circulations. Hence, we believe this period has marked a watershed within the social and spatial organization of societies. As such, it represents the starting point of our research on how spatialities of young people have changed, and how this has played out in their spatial knowledge, over the last 50 years.
General background: The refiguration of spaces and Collaborative Research Centre 1265
The investigation of the ongoing social and spatial changes mentioned above serves as the leadoff of Collaborative Research Centre 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces” based in Berlin, Germany. Since 2018, an interdisciplinary team of over 60 researchers from the fields of sociology, geography, architecture, spatial planning, media and communication studies, and the arts has been empirically exploring
the diverse spatial expressions of such transformations and their concomitant conflicts from manifold perspectives. In this regard, this Collaborative Research Centre frames the common (and even converging) patterns of these changes as the refiguration of spaces. In itself, the refiguration of spaces captures the essence of, and thus represents, the key hypotheses underlying the Centre’s theoretical and empirical research.
Given that space is considered intrinsically social, this fundamental research endeavor is broadly underpinned by the overarching theoretical assumption that society should be thought of as spatial. Accordingly, space and sociality are understood as deeply entangled. Therefore, the starting premise of the Collaborative Research Centre is that transformations in social orders become particularly apprehensible (and thus apt to be explored) when looking at the (re)structuring of spaces. In order to determine the characteristics of the refiguration of spaces more precisely, the investigations span “from the level of subjective experience and vernacular knowledge of space to the level of the spatial interrelation between circulation and order, and, on a mediating level, communicative actions, interactions and practices connected with them” (website of CRC 1265: www.sfb1265.de). Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), this Collaborative Research Centre comprises fifteen research projects with an empirical focus on an assorted range of research subjects such as architectures of asylum, biographies of middle classes, everyday life in smart cities, locative media, and processes of de- and rebordering.
The scope of our study: The refiguration of young people’s spatial knowledge
As a process that traverses societies in its various dimensions, the refiguration of spaces does not leave individuals unaffected. In contrast, how they are affected takes on miscellaneous forms at a subjective level: for example, in their practices and the many ways in which they make sense of social reality. Consequently, the refiguration of spaces entails changing knowledge—that is to say, the knowledge of individuals is refigured. In this respect, we focus our research project within the Collaborative Research Centre on individuals’ spatial knowledge. Spatial knowledge refers to the ways in which individuals think of, perceive, construct, synthesize, interpret, and associate with spaces. As a result, spatial knowledge plays a significant role in shaping and determining how people (inter)act with and in relation to spaces. In our research project, we have narrowed the scope to place emphasis on the spatial knowledge of young people. The reason behind this decision is twofold. On the one hand, we are interested in the periods of childhood and adolescence as formative phases of life and assume that young people’s experiences, and thus their spatial knowledge, deviate substantially from those of adults. On the other hand, we recognize young people to be the adults of tomorrow. Since presentday young people are the first generation of what are known as digital natives, we believe that our findings are in sync with future adult generations.
The aim of our research is by and large to trace, reconstruct, and characterize the evolution—namely, the variations and dynamics of change and stability—of
young people’s spatial knowledge from the 1970s on. In so doing, we regard both childhood and adolescence to be contingent, manifold, and variable phenomena shaped by specific spatial, historical, and social circumstances. Accordingly, far from striving to derive some sort of universal spatial knowledge for young people, we gather that young people’s spatial knowledge is actually as varied as their subjective experiences of growing up under particular socio-spatial conditions. Hence, to reconstruct the refiguration of spatial knowledge, we established tendencies, patterns, and commonalities in the evolution of young people’s spatial knowledge. At the same time, we endeavored to explore and highlight differences, nuances, similarities, and pluralities in young people’s multifarious spatial knowledge.
Methodological approach: Conducting (and adapting) a qualitative meta-analysis
Young people’s spatial knowledge can be investigated by means of its definitive objectivations. Thus, we analyzed the diverse ways—physical, verbal, visual, and material—in which their spatial knowledge is objectified. Specifically, we delved into young people’s spatial practices and appropriations, their perception and experience of spaces, and how they (re)arrange and make sense of spaces. For this purpose, we relied on synthesis research and made use of its inherently historical and processual character to conduct a qualitative meta-analysis using the refiguration of spaces as the lens through which the evolution of young people’s spatial knowledge was ultimately (meta-)interpreted. By means of theoretical sampling, we chose 60 empirical studies that represent and pertain to the spatial knowledge of young people to varying degrees. Given that the underlying assumption of the refiguration of spaces is that it happens differently everywhere, we selected studies published in English, German, and Spanish containing empirical cases of young people growing up in a total of 31 different countries spread out across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania in a wide range of urban, suburban, and rural settings. Likewise, the authors of these studies come from a broad range of disciplines: anthropology, architecture, education, geography, psychology, sociology, and urban planning, amid others.
A guide to navigating this book: Glancing at what lies ahead
Before releasing our copious meta-findings, we would like to explain how the book is structured and what contents await our readers. Following this introduction, we present the broader conceptual framework that guides the research and serves as an interpretative basis for the results obtained from the meta-analysis of sampled studies (see Chapter 2). Here, we explain both the refiguration of spaces and its accompanying three sensitizing concepts of mediatization, translocalization, and polycontexturalization. We then elaborate on our understanding of the categories of space and spatial knowledge by drawing on a relational conception of space and the German sociology of knowledge. In addition, we address how the notion of spatial knowledge is connected with the ability to view the world objectively and
its underlying learning processes. Finally, based on insights from the academic fields of children’s geographies and new social studies of childhood, we outline the notions of childhood and adolescence as culturally variable social constructs charged with different categories of difference. Moreover, we discuss the implications such a take on childhood and adolescence has for our research subject: the spatial knowledge of young people. Subsequently, we clarify our methodological approach and explain how we carried out our customized qualitative meta-analysis (see Chapter 3). Afterward, we reflect on what the experience was like.
Against this backdrop, we dive into the findings of our empirical research and discuss our interpretations in four chapters, each dedicated to one overarching theme from our analysis. We begin with a chapter on young people’s (everyday) spatialities and their features (see Chapter 4). This chapter’s key argument is that young people’s spatialities are increasingly and concurrently shaped and constituted by multiple features. In other words, we contend that instead of one feature or one specific model prevailing over the others, young people’s spatialities within the refiguration of spaces are characterized by various features and how they interact with one another. The four features we identified throughout the numerous sociospatial contexts represented in the sampled studies as the pillars underpinning young people’s spatialities are as follows: (1) circumambient spaces around the home, (2) the insular structure of multiple dispersed spaces, (3) spatial practices of being mobile, and (4) virtual spaces. Seen through the lens of the refiguration of spaces, we consider these features and their interactions to introduce pluralization and heterogenization into young people’s spatialities. Similarly, young people’s spatialities are increasingly impacted by the processes of polycontexturalization and translocalization, which in turn are reinforced by the advent of digital media. Overall, these developments are reflected in young people’s spatial knowledge as complex requirements to relate to multiple spaces at once.
While we span the broad framework in which young people’s spatial knowledge is embedded in the first empirical chapter, we take a deeper dive into more detailed aspects in the ensuing three chapters. First, we discuss the diverse spaces of childhood and adolescence with regard to young people’s spatial perceptions (see Chapter 5). We illustrate that from the 1970s onward, young people’s experiences have largely responded to a stable set of criteria they use to designate spaces as either positive or negative based on the extent to which their needs and preferences are met. We also see how regulated and controlled spaces are growing in importance. Moreover, we observed pronounced and wide variations among young people growing up in very different geographic contexts, as well as in urban, suburban, and rural settings worldwide with little to no access to spatial realities elsewhere. Nevertheless, an increasing number of young people already had experience from a young age with travel, migration, and transition to (and across) different geographic (and thus social and cultural) contexts and had therefore developed embodied and mediated experiences of spaces. In this regard, we sustain that young people’s spatial knowledge is composed of both embodied-experienced and, progressively, (digitally) mediated stocks. This refiguration influences not only the way young people assess spaces in their day-to-day lives but also, and perhaps
more than ever before, their prospective knowledge of what the future might hold for them (spatially speaking).
Afterward, we expand on the aforementioned dual composition of young people’s spatial knowledge to look at its evolution in connection with particular arenas and agencies at play throughout its production and acquisition (see Chapter 6). We explore the weight arenas and agencies have within this process by deconstructing how young people align their spatial cognizance (i.e., the ability to recognize and understand spatial knowledge) and spatial performance (i.e., the grasping and seizing of opportunities to use and even modify space physically and/or symbolically) to engage with space. Moreover, formal-institutional and non-formal learning processes also strongly impact both this ability and much of how spatial knowledge is produced/acquired, for they mediate the internalization of (natural/built) environmental transformations within young people’s intellectual development. In light of these points, we show how young people produce/acquire embodied-experienced and mediated spatial knowledge within the framework of their spatial systems and how this knowledge can be rendered (ir)relevant. Although the patterns of relevance-irrelevance might appear irregular, we identify points of intersection and nuances across our studies (such as the effects of mediatization and the ever-lasting search for latitude).
The last empirical chapter is centered around the question of how social control and spatial pedagogization (see Chapter 7) shape young people’s spatial knowledge. Control, regulation, supervision, and parental restrictions are ubiquitous across studies on spaces of childhood and adolescence. Young people’s selfdetermined spatial practices are regarded critically and thus limited in many contexts around the world. Therefore, in this chapter, we underscore how adults (notably parents) attempt to spatially tame, and thus to bring under control, young people and look into how this influences their spatial knowledge. Overall, we sustain that a pronounced characteristic of the refiguration of spaces is that more and more spaces, and consequently periods, of childhood and adolescence are shaped by social control, spatial pedagogization, and supervision—which in turn has multiple effects on young people’s spatial knowledge and their tactical and strategic spatial counter-practices.
We conclude this book with an outline of the most important changes and constants in young people’s spatial knowledge that we found through our meta-analysis (see Chapter 8). By having traced and examined the changes of young people’s spatialities over the past 50 years, we have identified transformations within the evolution of their spatial knowledge—and, by extension, of the refiguration of spaces. As expressions of changing spatial knowledge, we see both a significant increase in complexity within young people’s production of spatialities and their development of spatial strategies to cope with ensuing challenges. Amid the various causes of this rising intricacy, new media and communication technologies are becoming ever more significant, directly and profoundly impacting the spatialities of many, though not all, young people. Another trigger for change is the considerably greater amount of time young people spend immersed in spaces whose (subtle or explicit) physical-material arrangements are characterized by—and thus aim
to advance—control, pedagogization, supervision, and monitoring. At the same time, we consider gender bias, which cuts across the socioeconomic strata and geographic contexts represented in our sample, to be perhaps the most prominent continuity within the evolution of young people’s spatial knowledge. Moreover, structural economic and political transitions, sudden and gradual physical transformations of spaces, the growing relevance of formal-institutional learning and its concomitant spaces, and varying degrees of mediatization have underpinned the refiguration of young people’s spatial knowledge in the past and continue to do so today. One of the core outputs of this research is the multidimensionality that permeates young people’s spatial knowledge. By deconstructing this multidimensionality through different levels of empiricism, we not only made it possible to trace the evolution of young people’s spatial knowledge, but also managed to present our findings clearly enough to serve as a critical basis for reconsidering design and planning practices of shaping the built and natural environment. With this in mind, we wish our readers a thought-provoking read and hope to expand their (spatial) knowledge with our research.
Acknowledgment: It was by far not a one-wo/man job
When we started our research back in 2018, we certainly did not know what we were getting into by undertaking a qualitative meta-analysis on such an ambitious scale. Fortunately, numerous colleagues actively supported us in this endeavor and thus contributed significantly to the realization of this book. We would like to take this opportunity to express our heartfelt gratitude to many of them for their valuable support and outstanding cooperation. First of all, we would like to thank our colleagues at Collaborative Research Centre 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces,” who provided a stimulating, interdisciplinary environment for our research and were a constant source of inspiration. Our special thanks go to the colleagues from the two subprojects on “Geographic Imaginations” (Ilse Helbrecht, Carolin Genz, Henning Füller, Lucas Pohl, Janina Dobrusskin, Anthony Miro Born, and Ylva Kürten) and “Locative Media” (Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer and Eric Lettkemann) for their continuous collaboration on spatial knowledge across different age groups. In addition, we would also like to thank Claudia Mock for the ongoing exchange of ideas and inspiring discussions on our shared research topic of young people and their spaces. Furthermore, we would like to express our utmost appreciation to the whole team from the head office of the Collaborative Research Centre and our department office, especially Nina Elsemann, Rim Winker, Thi Tuyet Nhung Dang, and Andrea Aho, who have made our daily work easier.
Over the past years, we have conducted several workshops to explain our methodological approach, empirical findings, and (potential) interpretative paths. We would also like to thank all of the participants from those workshops (Kathrin Hörschelmann, Louise Holt, Cindi Katz, Raphaela Kogler, Antje Lehn, Jorge Raedó, and Christian Reutlinger) whose critical and valuable feedback and encouragement for us to continue with this project constituted a great motivation. Likewise, it was very important to us to have key terminology and some of the main findings
Finding change 7
visually communicated. Thanks to Grit Koalick, a great research partner, we luckily succeeded in doing so. Furthermore, to successfully complete our metaanalysis and fine tune this book, we received indispensable support from our colleagues Sarah Friedel, Lýdia Grešáková, Julian Kaiser, Hannah Klug, Luisa Maria Landschoff, and Parna Rastgo: many, many thanks to all of you. An extra thanks go to Zachary Mühlenweg for the language editing. Last but not least, we would like to thank the German Research Foundation for placing their trust in the concept of the refiguration of spaces and for making our research possible by funding the Collaborative Research Centre.
2 Investigating the refiguration of spaces by means of young people’s spatial knowledge
A conceptual introduction
Before presenting the methodological and empirical chapters, in which we lay out how we conducted the qualitative meta-analysis and what the results were, we deem it pertinent to provide a short overview of the underlying theoretical concepts we drew on. Moreover, this theoretical framework constitutes the foundation for what we refer to as the second order of interpretation in the methodological chapter. As such, it is not only the very lens through which we synthetized our findings, but also the backdrop against which we outlined them. Therefore, we introduce below the overarching notion of refiguration of spaces and the concomitant sensitizing concepts into which it has been deconstructed: mediatization, translocalization, and polycontexturalization. Accordingly, we elaborate our understanding of both space and spatial knowledge and, in so doing, emphasize two distinctive elements: the attainment of an objective view of the world and its underpinning learning process. Afterward, we turn to the fairly challenging constructs of childhood and youth and define them based on long-standing debates from the field of children’s geographies. In addition, we clarify our use of the related and overlapping categories of children, youth, and young people and the way in which they shape our object of research: the evolution of the spatial knowledge of young people within the refiguration of spaces.
Spaces and their refiguration: A tapestry of interwoven spatial logics, meanings, and practices
Building on the premise that not only space is social, but also society—and therefore phenomena such as childhood and youth—ought to be thought of as spatial, the refiguration1 of spaces (Knoblauch and Löw 2017, 2020; Löw and Knoblauch 2019) describes and conceptualizes the ongoing and changing process the spatial organization of society has been undergoing since the late 1960s and early 1970s. This period is seen as a turning point within the social and spatial organization of society as it is marked by various fundamental changes, such as the intensification of transnational entanglements and circulations, the reorganization of global divisions of labor, and the development and proliferation of new (digital) means of communication, among others.
To better grasp the manifold changes the socio-spatial order constantly undergoes from an empirical perspective, the concept of the refiguration of spaces has been broken down into three hypotheses in order to operationalize and describe its transformations: mediatization, translocalization, and polycontexturalization (Knoblauch and Löw 2020: 277). These hypotheses, moreover, serve as sensitizing concepts (Blumer 1954) that lay the groundwork for our empirical research, though they may be challenged or adjusted based on substantiated findings.
Under the first hypothesis, mediatization, it is assumed that new spatial arrangements have surfaced in the wake of the mediatization of communicative actions, especially based on digital technologies: for example, when young people communicate virtually with people at faraway locations or gain knowledge about spaces that they have never, physically, visited. The next sensitizing concept, translocalization, focuses on the convoluted notion of connecting multiple places. More specifically, translocalization designates “the embedding of social units such as families, neighborhoods, and religious communities in circulations that connect the various places with each other” (Knoblauch and Löw 2020: 281). Young people, who frequently move from one city or country to another or regularly play online computer games with their virtual friends from all over the world, could be seen as growing up translocally in that they connect a myriad of spaces through their (both everyday and sporadic) actions and the relationships they establish with both physical and virtual spaces. Finally, polycontexturalization, the third sensitizing concept, refers to the increase of different spaces on various scales and with different spatial logics, in which individuals are simultaneously embedded. Thus, individuals concurrently (need to) address multiple heterogeneous spaces in their actions. Löw and Knoblauch (2019: 7), drawing on Löw (2018), illustrate this with the particular setting of young people in a schoolyard:
350 out of 477 schools in Hamburg have their schoolyards monitored by CCTV. At the territorial level, students communicate during break-time with other groups in the yard to distinguish or dissociate themselves; at the relational level, they communicate vis-à-vis some (schoolyard-)external control room from which they are observed; and digital media allow them to communicate with friends and family outside school, sometimes outside the country. It is thus the schoolyard, not the surrounding neighbourhood (unfamiliar to most, since they travel to school via the fixed trajectory paths of public transport), which represents the communicative hub with the students’ urban network.
According to the example above, young people experience their everyday lives polycontexturally as they are immersed in multiple spaces with various meanings and spatial logics at the same time. Moreover, this variety of meanings and overlapping spatial logics, as the case in question suggests, consequently confers spaces a pivotal role, although traditionally they have not been thought to play a significant role in young people’s communicative practices.
It is worth mentioning that the three hypotheses do not mutually exclude one another. Young people, like those in a schoolyard, grapple with polycontextural spatial settings, all the while communicating via new media and through their digital devices. In so doing, they link miscellaneous spaces at a translocal level. Against this backdrop, next we discuss two fundamental elements of our research: space and spatial knowledge.
Space and spatial knowledge: Delineating young people’s spatial cognizance
We consider space, as could be inferred from the previously outlined arguments, to be deeply entangled with sociality—and, in itself, a social product (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]; Soja 1989; Löw 2016). Soja (1989, 1996, 2003) observed that the sociospatial liaison is rooted in both Lefebvre’s and Foucault’s call to rebalance spatiality with sociality and historicality. To achieve that, Soja claims, it is necessary to develop a “more comprehensive and combinatorial mode of spatial thinking, one that [is] built upon traditional dualities (material-mental, subjective-objective, empirical-conceptual) but also move[s] the search for practical knowledge beyond their confines to open new ground to explore” (2009: 20). Spatial thinking can therefore be led in alternative directions for produced knowledge to not only be applied to future research but also inform practice.
Drifting from dualities through the relationality and synthetizing of space: What we talk about when we talk about space
Bearing in mind traditional dualities and seeking to keep them at a distance, we turn to a relational perspective of space. The idea of relational space can be traced back to Leibniz’s philosophical work, for whom space is not an entity existing independently of objects and events, but rather resulting from their interaction (Rescher 1991). Spatial properties, therefore, are relational, and the spatial positioning of objects is determined by their interactions with other objects (Scruton 1996 [1994]: 362). Accordingly, it is precisely this perspective of the internal relations among all substances and things that makes Leibniz’s relational space differ radically from the Newtonian assumption that both time and space “existed in their own right, that they were content neutral containers indifferent with respect to whatever it was that was placed within them” (Harvey 1996: 251). Furthermore, in sustaining that space was enduringly contingent on matter, Leibniz renders both time and space relational, for they “are nothing apart from the things ‘in’ them” and are derivatives of “the ordering relations that obtain among things” (Rescher 1979: 84). Thus,
[s]pace is the order of coexistence—that is, the order among the mutually contemporaneous states of things; while time is the order of succession that is, the order among the various different mutually coexisting states of things which—qua mutually coexisting—must, of course, have some sort of ‘spatial’ structure.
(Rescher 1979: 86–87; italics in the original)
In a similar vein, Löw (2016: 188) conceptualizes space as “[…] a relational arrangement of social goods and people (living beings) at places.” Hence, (social) space is always based on individuals drawing relationships between different elements and entities. To investigate this spatial relationality, Löw introduces an analytical differentiation in the subjective process of constructing spaces; she distinguishes processes of spacing from an operation of synthesis. While the former describes the process in which social goods and living beings are actively placed and positioned in relation to each other, the latter unites this relational ensemble of social goods and social beings subjectively in a space. As Löw writes, “[…] an operation of synthesis is required for the constitution of space, that is, goods and people are amalgamated to spaces by way of processes of perception, imagination, and memory” (Löw 2016: 134–135; italics in the original). Moreover, both processes, instead of taking place arbitrarily, are socially pre-structured by shared stocks of knowledge. For example, due to their common knowledge, most individuals would relate elements that they identify as a swing, a sandbox, a slide, and some children with adults to each other and synthesize them as the meaningful construct of a playground space. They assign the meaning “playground” to such a spatial arrangement and act correspondingly in this construction of space. However, this does not necessarily always have to be the case. If we consider someone who has never heard of or seen a playground, this person would probably synthesize these elements in a quite different and singular way, which would not match what is usually taken to be a playground. Furthermore, such a person may not even link and relate the swing, the sandbox, and the slide to one another and thus not produce a spatially coherent arrangement.
As the abovementioned discussion on relational space suggests, this example is based on the structuring dimension of spaces. Spatial structures, as routinized and institutionalized spatial arrangements, shape the social actions of individuals. Institutionalized spaces, as spatial structures, are imbued with meaning and power and thus permit specific actions while restricting others (Löw 2016). To return to the playground example, the routinized construct of a space as a playground allows children and parents alike to play there without any need to question these actions. However, teenagers meeting at a playground to hang out, smoke, and maybe consume alcoholic beverages—to name a bold and simple example—would be seen as a deviating action and a construct of space that might well be sanctioned. Therefore, specific routinized constructs of spaces, spatial arrangements, and processes of synthesis are related to stocks of knowledge regarding how to act appropriately in specific spaces, what meaning these spaces have, and what purpose these spaces serve. However, this does not mean that spaces instantly determine actions in their entirety. Rather, they shape those actions in specific ways by constantly and routinely being reproduced. In other words, space simultaneously results from a subjective process of spatial construction and shapes social actions in the form of spatial structures (Löw 2016). As such, exploring spatial phenomena—like the evolution of young people’s spatial knowledge—requires a spatial analysis that, as contended by Lefebvre (1991 [1974]: 12), does not attempt to subdue the material to the mental, given that the perceptions, symbolizations, significations, and imaginations we produce, although they can be told apart, are not detached from physical and social space.
The mutually structuring relationship between spatial knowledge and socio-spatial actions: Searching for the significance of space
Regarding the notion of knowledge, we mainly draw on the German theory of the sociology of knowledge, which was inspired by Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) Social Construction of Reality and has been further developed through communicative constructivism (Knoblauch 2019, 2020). Hence, knowledge is understood as “socially mediated meaning” (Knoblauch 2019: 26), given that, since every action is defined by meaning, knowledge both shapes and defines actions (Knoblauch 2019). To put it another way, our actions, as well as the way we make sense of the world and interpret and experience situations, are strongly dependent on and defined by our subjective knowledge. Consequently, knowledge is social to the extent that it is broadly shared by members of a society, a social group, an expert community, and the like. Thus, knowledge is socially mediated in distinctive collectivities and allows (in most situations) for a common understanding and interpretation of reality. Nevertheless, knowledge is also situated in and fashioned by individual experiences and can therefore diverge between individuals.
Societal transformations take place at a subjective level, amid knowledge changes, and in the many ways individuals act and make sense of social reality. Consequently, the refiguration of spaces articulates the knowledge of individuals, which in turn rests on the manifold manners in which space is experienced, perceived, and constituted. Thus, the refiguration of spaces is deconstructed by analyzing the knowledge of individuals. More concretely, we focus our research on the spatial knowledge of individuals (Löw and Knoblauch 2019; Castillo Ulloa et al. 2022). Moreover, exploring spatial knowledge is thought to lead to a better understanding of how spatial arrangements in which individuals live and act are constantly being refigured. As indicated above, spatial knowledge includes the ways individuals think of and perceive spaces, how they construct and synthesize spaces, how they interpret specific spaces, and which actions they connect to such spaces. It shapes the way people act with and in relation to spaces. Thus, there exists a veritable mutually structuring relationship between, and consequently a constant reproduction of, spatial knowledge and socio-spatial actions (see Figure 2.1).
To define the conceptual contour of spatial knowledge more precisely and address the phenomenon of refiguration of spaces, we propose the following definition2:
Spatial knowledge refers to the (socialized) experience of space and perceptions of space, as well as the emotions and affects associated with it. Subjectified spatial knowledge has to be physically, linguistically, or materially objectified to become the subject of investigation. Similar to the general concept of knowledge, spatial knowledge contains not only explicit and linguistic forms, but also implicit, corporal, and routinized practices. It is shaped by institutionalized stocks of knowledge as they in turn are produced and mediated by institutions such as family, science, school, standard regulatory systems (e.g., building regulations), or art. These institutions communicate to the subjects ideas about the spaces in which they live, how these spaces should be arranged, and how to deal with these spaces. These ideas contain, for example,
Figure 2.1 The mutually structuring relationship between socio-spatial actions and (spatial) knowledge. Graphic: Grit Koalick, visuranto.de, based on our elaboration.
the lifeworld belief about what is considered “far away” and what is “close,” the knowledge about the scales of spaces or notions of how the world is spatially refigured, and where individuals are situated within this figuration.
Reading between the lines of this definition, we see that deconstructing spatial knowledge presupposes, in one way or another, a quest for significance: that is to say, the significance of space. This exploration, moreover, entails a re-assessment of “the traditional saying that ‘things occur in space’ by asking where, how and why they do occur where they do” (Sack 1980: 14; italics in the original). Otherwise, the connotation and importance young people ascribe to spaces—and how this consequently enables them to situate themselves in the world as it becomes spatially refigured—would go unnoticed. To avoid this trap and comprehend the evolution of the spatial knowledge of young people, we contend that it is necessary to understand how they become spatially cognizant in the first place.
The spatial knowledge of young people: Learning to view the world objectively
The evolution of young people’s spatial knowledge is related to their intellectual development. By and large, humans develop their cognitive capacity in two stages. The first stage implies a sensorimotor perception of the separation of the self from the world. During this stage, intellectual development remains global and syncretic and, despite the distinction of the self/world divide, “objective and subjective facts are still closely connected and are often intertwined in the process of evaluating self and world” (Sack 1980: 122). In the subsequent stage, conceptual thought arises, which allows humans to both perceive and represent themselves and their worlds by way of symbols, whose “primary effect […] is to drive a wedge between the subjective and the objective, to further differentiate and separate self from the world” (Sack 1980: 122). Eventually, a stable perception and conception of objects, spaces, and their interactions is achieved—that is, an objective view of the world (see Figure 2.2).
From very early on, young people render their surroundings meaningful by sensorially and motorically engaging with all things external to them. “By involving the thing in an action, the thing and the action become fused” (Sack 1980: 123). While young people increasingly gain the ability to recognize themselves and objects in space and time in a moderately steady way, they still get a sense that the things they have fused through action are very much active and dynamic. In other words, they animate their surroundings (Werner 1980 [1940]; Piaget 1971). Likewise, their objective view of the world is never completely detached from their subjective one; in fact, they can shift from one to the other with far greater ease than adults. At some point, following Piaget and Inhelder (1967: 375), young people obtain a complete conception of space and thus of a spatial system “grounded in and derived from substance and their spatial properties and interrelationships” (Sack 1980: 127).
In our view, young people produce and acquire embodied-experienced and mediated stocks of spatial knowledge throughout their intellectual development within the framework of their spatial systems. While the former are produced through corporal, physical, and sensorial explorations of the (natural/built) environment
Figure 2.2 The wedge between subjective and objective that leads to separation and differentiation of self from the world—the bedrock of an objective view of the world.
Graphic: Grit Koalick, visuranto.de, based on Sack (1980: 122).
without any intermediating agency, the latter are acquired through an intermediating agency (e.g., educators). We argue that learning processes, both formalinstitutional and non-formal, play a decisive role in this process.
Learning processes: Spatial and agential underpinnings of the spatial knowledge of young people
Stocks of spatial knowledge, as we have succinctly explained, result from young people’s ability to increasingly develop more complex mental schemata and stable spatial systems, upon which their objective view of the world is founded. This constitutes a learning process in which young people acquire, construct, and refine their spatial knowledge and literacy. Generally speaking, learning can take the shape of formal institutional or non-formal processes. Despite each process having its own distinctive form and nature, there are several key differences that set them apart (Smith and Phillips 2017). First, non-formal learning is characteristically related to physical learning and thus to the acquisition of skills through the senses (particularly, observation). Formal institutional learning, on the other hand, is structured around abstract and theoretical knowledge, which is usually conveyed through oral or written means. Second, formal, as opposed to non-formal, learning is connected to, and takes place in, institutional spatial settings (e.g., schools and their premises or university campuses). By contrast, non-formal learning is not institutionalized, for it is not subject to a fixed curriculum, is not intended for certification, is not state-led, and predominantly occurs beyond the spatial settings of formal institutional learning.
To avoid ascribing the status of non-formality to everything that young people learn outside school hours and premises, and thus underscore the spatiality of their non-formal learning processes, it is necessary to go beyond the assumption that young people’s learning processes are constructivist (Piaget 1963; Kahn 1999; Chawla and Salvadori 2003: 296). More specifically,
This means that their conceptions of physical and social worlds reflect a continuous exchange of assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration in which they take in what they are ready to absorb according to current levels of understanding; while at the same time they progressively adjust their understanding in response to new and unexpected experiences. They are not passive learners, but active producers of knowledge with an innate drive to explore and learn.
(Chawla and Salvadori 2003: 296)
This non-passivity is where we identify the ability of young people to actively produce stocks of spatial knowledge of an embodied-experienced character. In addition, they acquire mediated stocks of spatial knowledge (which could eventually be used to produce others). As such, both types are intertwined and lie at the core of young people’s intellectual development. A key factor within this production and acquisition of stocks spatial knowledge is the enacting agency of each type of learning.
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“All hands!” was echoing fore and aft, and I rushed below to close the gates in our watertight bulkheads and stand by my steam pumps, not knowing what effect this sudden release of our bow from the ice might have on that leak we had been pumping, so it seemed, forever. Paradoxically, however, the leak immediately decreased, probably because our freed stem floated several feet higher than before, so I returned quickly on deck to find the crew under the captain’s directions busily engaged in preparing to re-ship our longdisused rudder. This, delayed by frozen gudgeons, took some hours. But when it was completed, and everything meanwhile had been cleared away from booms and yards for making sail, the Jeannette for the first time since 1879 (though we never saw the irony of that till later) was again ready to maneuver as a ship.
Amidst the hoarse orders of the bosun and the noise of seamen clearing running rigging and scrambling out on frosty yards to loose the preventer lashings on the long-unused sails, I climbed to the bridge. There I found De Long calmly smoking his pipe while he eyed the smooth black water in our bay, now perhaps a quarter of a mile wide between the separated edges of our late island.
“Shall I fire up the main boilers, captain, and couple up the propeller shaft?” I asked anxiously.
“How much coal have you left, chief?” he countered.
“Only fifteen tons, sir.”
Fifteen tons. That would keep us going only three days normal steaming. De Long thought a moment.
“No, chief, don’t light off. There’s no place for the engines to take us anyway and we might burn up all our fuel just lying here. Save the coal; we may need it to keep us from freezing next winter. We’ll make sail if we have to move, but just now, all we can do is get some lines ashore and tie up to that starboard floe, till we see what the pack is about.”
So instead of trying to move, Cole ran out the lines to ice-anchors on our bow and quarter and we moored to the floe.
Then began a desperate fight with De Long struggling to save his ship should the ice close in again before it broke up completely and let us escape. A measurement nearby showed the ice sixteen feet thick; deeper than our keel. If the pack, pressing in on us now, got a fair grip on our sides, we should be squeezed between thicker ice than ever before we had been, in a giant nutcracker indeed. But what could we do about it? The water lead was short, there was no escape from it ahead or astern. Just one chance offered itself. A little ahead of where we lay, on our port bow was a narrow canal joining two wider bays in the parted pack. If we could only fill that canal up with heavy floes, they might take the major thrust of the closing pack, thus saving us from the full pressure. Savagely the men on watch turned to and fought with lines and grapnels, hooking loose floebergs everywhere and dragging them through the water into that canal, anchoring them there as best they could.
We had made fair progress on filling the gap, when at 7:30 . . the ice started to advance. The sight of that massive pack slowly closing on us like the jaws of doom, quickened our muscles, and we strained like madmen shoving drifting ice into the opening ahead. Just then, as if playing with us, the pack halted dead, giving us a better chance to finish the job.
De Long came down off the bridge to encourage the men with the grapnels. Standing on the edge of the canal, directing the work, was our ice-pilot. Approaching him along the brink of the pack, the captain looked down through the cold sea at the submerged edge of the floe, the blue-white ice there glimmering faintly through the water till lost in the depths; then he looked back at the Jeannette with her tall masts and spreading yards erect and square at last across the Arctic sky, while her stout hull, stark black against the ice, seemed grimly to await the onslaught.
“Well, Dunbar,” asked the skipper, “what do you think of it?”
Dunbar, worn and dour, had his mind made up.
“No use doing this, cap’n,” he replied dully, indicating the men heaving on the grapnel lines. “Before tonight, she’ll either be under
this floe or on top of it! Better start those men, instead o’ hauling ice, at getting overboard the emergency provisions!”
De Long shook his head. He couldn’t agree. In terrible winter weather, the sturdy Jeannette had often beaten the pack before; he couldn’t believe that she would fail us now.
At ten o’clock, the ice started to advance once more. Our job in plugging the canal was finished. We had done all that man could do. Now it was up to the Jeannette. But as we watched that pack come on, flat floes and tilted floebergs thick and jagged, urged forward by endless miles of surging ice behind, our hearts sank. In spite of our thick sides and heavy trusses, the contest between hollow ship and solid pack looked so unequal.
On came the pack. The bay narrowed, thinned down to a ribbon of water on our port side, vanished altogether. The attacking floes reached our sides, started to squeeze. The Jeannette, tightly gripped, began to screech and groan from end to end. With bow lifted and stem depressed, she heeled sharply 16° to starboard, thrown hard against the floe there, while we grabbed frantically at whatever was at hand to avoid being hurled into the scuppers. Then to our intense relief, the ice we had pushed into the canal ahead came into play, took the further thrust, and stopped the advance, so that for the moment everything quieted down, leaving our ship in a precarious position, but at least intact. Our spirits rose. Perhaps we had saved her!
Thus we lay for two hours till eight bells struck. Cole, a little uncertain as to routine now, glanced up at the bridge. De Long nodded, so Cole piped down for mess, and with our ship pretty well on her beam ends, one watch laid below. There clinging to the stanchions, they ate the dinner which the imperturbable Ah Sam, still cooking in all that turmoil, had somehow, by lashing his pots down on the tilted galley range perhaps, managed to prepare.
At two bells, mess was over and most of us on deck again, hanging to the port rail. Soon we got another jam, listing us a little further and still more raising our tilted bow, but the Jeannette took it well and I did not consider it anything serious, when suddenly, to
everybody’s alarm, my machinist Lee, whose station at the time was down on the fireroom floor running the little distiller boiler, shot out the machinery hatch to the deck, shouting,
“We’re sinking! The ice is coming through the side!”
“Pipe down there, Lee!” ordered the captain sharply. “Don’t go screaming that way to all hands like a scared old woman. You’re an experienced seaman; if you’ve got any report to make, make it to me as if you were one! Come up here!”
Lee, white and shaking, climbed up the bridge ladder, his woundweakened hips threatening to collapse under him. The captain beckoned me, then faced Lee.
“What is it now, Lee?”
“Her seams are opening below, sir! The sides are giving way!”
“Is that all?” asked De Long bruskly. “What are you frightened at then? Here, Melville; lay below with him and find out what’s wrong!”
With the reluctant Lee following, I climbed down into the fireroom. There was no water there.
“What in hell’s the matter with you, Lee?” I asked angrily. “Do you want to shame me and the whole black gang for cowards? What set you off?”
“Look there, chief!” cried the agitated machinist. He led me into the starboard side bunker. We were well below the waterline. The air there was so full of flying coal dust it was difficult to breathe, and as the ship thumped against the ice outside, new clouds of dust continuously rose from our panting sides. “Look at that! She’s going fast!” yelled Lee, indicating with his torch. I looked.
The closely-fitted seams in the thick layer of planking forming our inner skin had sprung apart an inch or more, and as we watched, these cracks opened and closed like an accordion with startling frequency; but outboard of that layer we had a double thickness of heavy planking which constituted our outer shell, and though I could see traces of oakum squeezing out of the seams there, that outer planking, pressed by the ice hard in against the massive timbers of
our ribs and trusses, was holding beautifully and there were no leaks.
“Keep your head next time, Lee,” I advised gruffly as I came out of the bunker. “We’re doing fine! Now mind that distiller, and don’t salt up the water!” Blinking my eyes rapidly to clear them of coal dust, I climbed on deck to inform the captain that there was no cause for alarm—yet.
So we lay for the next two hours, with the poor Jeannette groaning and panting like a woman in labor as the pack worked on her. At six bells, the captain, confident now that the worst was over and that she would pull through, took sudden thought of the future. The ship was a remarkable sight; what a picture she would make to print in the Herald on her return.
“Melville,” said the captain, puffing calmly away at his meerschaum, “take the camera out on the ice and see what you can get in the way of a photograph.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Early in the voyage, when Collins had been relieved of that task, I had become official photographer. I went to the darkroom, got out the camera, tripod, black hood, and a few of the plates which I myself had brought along and for which I had a developer. Stepping from our badly listed starboard rail directly onto the ice there, I picked a spot about fifty yards off on the starboard bow and set up my clumsy rig.
The view was marvelous. Heeling now 23° to starboard, the spar deck, covered with men clinging to the rigging, the rails, and the davits to keep from sliding into the scuppers, showed up clearly; while with her black hull standing sharply out against the white pack, and with bow and bowsprit pointing high in air and stem almost buried, the Jeannette looked like a vessel lifting while she rolled to a huge ice wave. Never again would I see a ship like that!
I exposed a plate, then, for insurance, another; and folding up my rig, stumbled back over the ice to the ship, laid below to the darkroom on the berth deck, poured out my chemicals and
proceeded with much difficulty (because of the extraordinary list) to develop the plates, which in that climate had to be done immediately or they would spoil. In the vague red light of a bull’s-eye lantern, I was struggling in the darkroom with this job, when the ship got a tremendous squeeze, the berth deck buckled up under my feet, and amidst the roar of cracking timbers, I heard Jack Cole’s shout,
“All
Hands! Stations for Abandon Ship!”
Leaving the plates in the solution but extinguishing the red lantern, I hastily closed the darkroom door and ran on deck.
“Water coming up now in all the holds! I think that last push tore the keel out of her!” announced the captain briefly as I ran by him toward the cabin to get out the chronometers and the compasses. “I’m afraid she’s through at last, chief!”
Behind me as I ran, I heard in rapid succession the orders to lower away the boats, to push overboard the sledges, and to commence passing out on the ice our emergency store of pemmican. Carefully I lifted out the two chronometers and the four small compasses which it was my job to save. Below me I could hear water gushing up into the afterhold, while from above on the poop deck came the creaking of frozen cordage and blocks as the falls ran out and our heavy boats dropped to the ice. As tenderly as I could, I gripped the chronometers, sprang out on the ice, and deposited my burden in the first cutter, already hauled a little clear of the ship’s side.
The next few minutes, against a background of rushing water, screeching ice, and crunching timbers, were a blur of heaving over the side and dragging well clear our pemmican, sledges, boats, and supplies. Lieutenant Chipp, so sick in his berth that he could not stand, was dressed by Danenhower, and then the two invalids went together over the side, the half-blinded navigator carrying the executive officer who guided him.
I got up my knapsack from my stateroom, tossed it into the cabin in the poop, and then turned to on our buckled deck in getting overboard our stores while below us the ship was flooding fast. De Long, himself checking the provisions as they went over the side,
looked anxiously round the spar deck, then asked sharply of the bosun,
“Where’s the lime-juice?”
Our last cask of lime-juice, only one-third full now, was nowhere in sight.
“Down in the forehold, sor,” said Cole briefly.
The forehold? Hopeless to get at anything there; the forehold was already flooded. De Long’s face fell. There would be no distilled water any more; no more vegetables at all; nothing but pemmican to eat and salty snow from the floes to drink on our retreat over the ice, a bad combination for scurvy. The solitary anti-scorbutic we could carry was that lime-juice. He had to have it.
“Get it up!” ordered De Long savagely.
“I’ll try, sor,” answered the bosun dubiously. He went forward accompanied by several seamen, peered down from the spar deck into that hold. Water was already pouring in a torrent from the forehold hatch, cascading away over the berth deck into the lee scuppers. It was impossible to get into the hold except by swimming down against the current through a narrow crack left in the hatch opening on the high port side which, the ship being so badly listed to starboard, was still exposed. Yet even if a man got through, what could he do in the blackness of the swirling water in that flooded hold to find and break out the one right cask among dozens of others submerged there? But then that barrel, being only partly full, might be floating on the surface on the high side to port. There was a slight chance. Jack Cole looked round at the rough seamen about him.
“Any of yez a foine swimmer?” he asked, none too hopefully, for aside from the danger in this case, sailors are notoriously poor swimmers.
“I try vot I can do maybe, bosun.” A man stepped forth, huge Starr, our Russian seaman (his name probably a contraction of Starovski), the biggest man on board. “Gif me a line.”
Swiftly Cole threw a bowline round Starr’s waist. No use giving him a light; the water pouring through would extinguish it. He would have to grope in blackness. Starr dropped down to the berth deck. Standing in the water on the low side of the hatch, he stooped, with a shove of his powerful legs pushed himself through against the current, and vanished with a splash into the flooded hold. Cole started to pay out line.
How Starr, swimming in ice water in that Stygian hole amidst all sorts of floating wreckage there, ever hoped to find that one barrel, I don’t know. But he did know that the ship, flooded far above the point at which she should normally sink, was held up only by the ice, and that if for an instant, the pack should suddenly relax its grip, she would plunge like a stone and while the others on the spar deck might escape, he, trapped in the hold, would go with her.
With a thumping heart, Jack Cole “fished” the line on Starr, paying out, taking in, as the unseen swimmer fumbled amongst the flotsam in the black hold. Then to his astonishment, the lime-juice cask popped up through the hatch and following it, blowing like a whale, came Starr! Another instant and Starr, tossing the barrel up like a toy, was back on the spar deck, where all coming aft, Jack Cole proudly presented his dripping seaman and the precious cask on his shoulder, to the captain.
De Long, with his ship sinking under him, paused a moment to shake Starr’s hand.
“A brave act, Starr, and a very valuable one. I’m proud of you! I’ll not forget it. Now, bosun, get Starr here a stiff drink of whiskey from those medical stores on the ice to thaw him out!”
The lime-juice, still borne by Starr, went over the side, the last of our provisions. The floes round about the Jeannette were littered with boats, sledges, stores, and an endless variety of everything else we could pitch overboard. With our supplies gone, I tried to get down again on the berth deck aft to my stateroom to salvage my private possessions, but I was too late. The water was rising rapidly there, and was already halfway up the wardroom ladder, so I went back
into the cabin in the poop above, where I had before tossed my knapsack, to retrieve it and get overboard myself.
The deck of the cabin was a mess of the personal belongings of all the wardroom officers—clothes, papers, guns, instruments, bearskins, stuffed gulls, that heavy walrus head over which Sharvell had once been so concerned (and apparently now, rightly) and Heaven knows what else. Pawing over the conglomerate heap was Newcomb, uncertain as to what he should try to save. As I retreated upwards into the cabin before the water rising on the wardroom ladder, De Long stepped into the cabin also from his upper deck stateroom, and seeing only Newcomb fumbling over the enormous pile of articles, inquired casually,
“Mr. Newcomb, is this all your stuff?”
Pert as ever in spite of his illness, Newcomb replied with the only statement from him that ever made me grin,
“No, sir; it’s only part of it!”
And even the captain, broken-hearted over his ship, looking at that vast heap, stopped to laugh at that.
But from the way the deck was acting beneath me, there was little time for mirth, so I seized my knapsack and walking more on the bulkhead than on the deck, got outside the poop, followed by the captain carrying some private papers, and Newcomb lugging only a shotgun.
Things moved rapidly now on the doomed Jeannette. The ship started to lay far over on her beam ends, water rose to the starboard rail, the smokestack broke off at its base, hanging only by the guys; and then the ship, given another squeeze by the crowding ice, collapsed finally, with her crumpled deck bulging slowly upward, her timbers snapping, and the men in the port watch who were trying to snatch a last meal forward from scraps in the galley, finding their escape up the companionway ladder cut off by suddenly rising water, pouring like flies out through the forecastle ventilator to slide immediately overboard onto the ice.
It was no longer possible, even on hands and knees, to stay on that fearfully listed deck. Clinging to the shrouds, De Long ordered Cole to hoist a service ensign to the mizzen truck, and then with a last look upward over the almost vertical deck to see that all had cleared her, he waved his cap to the flag aloft, cried chokingly, “Good-by, old ship!” and leaped from the rigging to the ice.
Flooded, stove in, and buckled up, the Jeannette was a wreck. The pack had conquered her at last. Only that death grip with which the floes still clung tenaciously to her kept her afloat. With heavy hearts we turned our backs on the remains of that valiant ship, our home and our shield from peril for two long years, and looked instead southward where five hundred miles away across that terrible pack and the Arctic Sea lay the north coast of Siberia and possible safety—if we could ever get there.
CHAPTER XXVII
Our situation was now truly desperate. There we were, thirty-three men cast away on drifting ice floes, our whereabouts and our fate, whether yet alive or long since dead, totally unknown to the world we had left two years before, completely beyond the reach of any possible relief expedition. Five hundred miles away at the Lena Delta lay the nearest shore, where from the charts in our possession, we might expect to fall in on that frozen coast with native huts and villages such as long before we had visited at Cape Serdze Kamen, and find even a slight pretense of food and shelter and perhaps a little aid in getting over the next thousand miles south into Siberia itself to civilization at Yakutsk.
How much of that five hundred miles before us was ice and how much was water, nobody knew That a part of it, just north of Siberia, was likely to be water in the summer time was certain, so we must drag our boats with us across the pack between us and that open sea or else ultimately, unable to cross it, perish when we came to the fringe of the ice pack. A few uninhabited islands, the New Siberian Archipelago, lay halfway along the route, but we could expect no aid there of any kind nor any food. Grimly ironic on our Russian charts was the notice that all visitors were prohibited from landing on the New Siberian Islands unless they brought with them their own food, since the last party permitted a few years before to go there as fossil ivory hunters had all starved to death for lack of game.
But at the Lena Delta, the charts showed permanent settlements, and a book we had of Dr. Petermann’s described in considerable detail the villages and mode of life there. Magazine articles published and taken with us just before we left San Francisco indicated that the Russian government was then in 1879 about to open the Lena River for trading steamers from its mouth to Yakutsk, a thousand miles inland. Since it was now the middle of 1881 that should be completed and the river steamers running.
So “On to the Lena Delta!” became our object in life, and to the Delta we looked forward as our Promised Land. But getting there seemed next to impossible. We were well acquainted with all previous Arctic expeditions. Not one in that long and tragic history stretching back three centuries, when disaster struck their ships, had ever faced a journey over the polar pack back to safety half so long as what faced us, and some on far shorter marches over the ice had perished to the last man!
Gloomily we faced our situation. We would have to drag our boats; we would have to drag our food; we were handicapped by one halfblind officer, by another too weak to stand, by several men, Alexey and Kuehne mainly, who, thrown on the ice, promptly had had a severe relapse of cramps from lead poisoning, and by the knowledge that many others of the crew were weakened by it and might break down at any time.
But worst of all we had to face was the pack itself. The most wretched season of the year for traveling over it was thrust upon us. Under the bright sun, the snow was too soft now to bear our sledges on its crust, but the temperature, from 10° to 25° F., was too low to melt it and clear it from our path. And as for the rough pack ice itself, I knew best of all what traveling over that meant—the twelve mile journey to Henrietta Island with a far lighter load per man and dog, had nearly finished me and my five men. And here, how many hundreds of miles of such ice we had to cross, God alone knew!
The loads we had to drag across the ice if we were to survive, were enough to stagger the stoutest hearts. To carry our party over the open water when we reached it, required three boats and the three boats weighed four tons. And to keep ourselves alive over the minimum time in which we could hope with any luck at all to reach Siberia, sixty days, required three and a half tons of food. Seven and a half tons at least of total deadweight to be dragged over broken Arctic ice on a journey as long as the distance from New York halfway to Chicago! And the dragging to be done practically altogether (for at most our twenty-three remaining dogs could be expected to drag only one heavy sledge out of our total of eight) by men as beasts of burden—before that prospect we all but wilted.
But it was drag or die, and George Washington De Long was determined that not one man should die if he had to kill him to prevent it. For over De Long from the moment we were thrown on the ice had come a hardness and a determination which were new to us. Gone was the gravely courteous scholar, interested mainly in scientific discovery, scrupulously anxious to hurt no one’s feelings if it could be avoided. The Arctic ice had literally folded up his scientific expedition beneath his feet, closing the books at 77° North, in his eyes practically a complete failure. That part was all over, gone with the ship, and with it vanished the scientist and the explorer whom we thought we knew. In his place, facing the wilderness of ice about us, stood now a strange naval officer with but a single purpose in his soul—the fierce determination to get his men over that ice back to the Lena Delta regardless of their hardships, regardless of their sufferings, to keep them on their feet tugging at those inhuman burdens even when they preferred to lie down in the snow and die in peace.
For five days after the crushing of our ship, we camped on the floes nearby, sorting out stores, loading sledges, distributing clothes, and incidentally nursing the sick. What he should take along was in the forefront of every man’s mind. We had salvaged far more of everything than we could possibly drag—what should be left behind? De Long abruptly settled the question with an order limiting what was to be taken to three boats, sixty days’ food, the ship’s papers and records, navigating outfits, and the clothes each man wore including his sleeping bag and his knapsack, the contents of which were strictly prescribed. All else, regardless of personal value or desirability, must be thrown away. That was particularly trying to the men in freezing weather greedily eyeing the huge pile of furs, clothes, and blankets tossed aside to be abandoned on the ice, but there was the order—wear what you pleased in fur or cloth, trade what you had for anything in the pile if it pleased you more, but when you were dressed in the clothes of your choice, you left all else behind. The solitary article excepted was fur boots or moccasins; of these each of us could have three pairs, one on, one in his knapsack, and one in his sleeping bag along with his (half only) blanket.
But with the exception of much grumbling over the clothing to be left behind, there was no need of orders to enforce among the crew at least the abandonment of other weights; all the grumbling there was over what the captain ordered taken. Improvident as ever, the seamen growled over dragging so much pemmican, growled over dragging lime-juice, growled most of all over dragging the books and records of the expedition. But they didn’t growl in the captain’s presence. In range now of the steely glitter of those hard blue eyes, strangely new to them, they only jumped to obey. Still, among themselves (and I was always with them now) there was a continual growl over the loads building up on the sledges, and as for what articles they were themselves to carry, I saw seamen weighing sheath knife against jack-knife to determine which was lighter, and then tossing the heavier one away.
The start of our life on the ice the night we lost our ship was inauspicious. Dead tired from superhuman laboring, first in hurriedly getting stores off the ship and then in dragging them over the ice to what looked like a safe floe two hundred yards away from her, we turned in at midnight, camping in five small tents, five or six men and an officer in each, stretched out in a row on a common rubber mackintosh. At one a.m., with a loud bang the floe beneath us split, the crack running right through De Long’s tent, and the ice promptly opened up. Had it not been for the weight of the sleepers on the ends of the mackintosh there, the men sleeping in the middle would immediately have been dumped down the crevice into the sea! Even so, practically helpless in their sleeping bags, they were rescued with difficulty, while all the rest of us, weary as we were, hastily turned out to move our whole camp across the widening crack to another floe. By two a.m., this was done, and again we turned in, leaving only Kuehne on watch. At four a.m., as he was calling Bartlett, his relief, from my tent, he announced suddenly,
“Turn out if you want to see the last of the Jeannette! There she goes, there she goes!”
I leaped up and out of the tent. There was the listed Jeannette coming slowly upright over the pack, for all the world like a ghost rising from a snowy tomb. The floes holding the ship, as if satisfied at
having fully crushed the life from her, were evidently backing away She came erect, her spars rattling and creaking dismally as she rose, then the ice opening further, she started to sink with accelerating speed. Quickly the black hull disappeared, then her yards banged down on the ice, stripped from the masts, and in another instant, over the fore-topmast, the last bit of her I ever saw, the dark waters closed and the sturdy Jeannette had sunk, gone to an ocean grave beneath the Arctic floes!
I stood a moment in the cold air (the temperature had dropped to 10° F.) with bared head, a silent mourner but thankful that we had not gone with her, then crawled sadly back to my sleeping bag.
On the sixth day after the crushing of the ship, our goods were sorted, our sledges all packed, and we were ready to go southward. Eight sledges, heavily loaded with our three boats and our provisions, carried about a ton each; a ninth sledge, more lightly loaded carrying our lime-juice, our whiskey, and our medical stores, was considered the hospital sledge; while a tenth, carrying only a small dinghy for temporary work in ferrying over leads, completed our cavalcade.
To minimize the glare of the ice and the strain of working under a brilliant (but not a hot sun) all our traveling was to be done at night when the midnight sun was low in the heavens, with our camping and sleeping during the day when the sun being higher, his more direct rays might be better counted on to dry out our soaked clothing.
At 6 . . on June 17th, we started, course due south.
Our first day’s journey was a heart-wrenching nightmare which no man there was like to forget till his dying gasp. The dogs were unable to drag even their one sledge; it took six men in addition to keep it moving. And so bad was the snow through which the sledges sank and floundered, that we found it took our entire force heaving together against their canvas harnesses to advance the boats and their sledges one at a time against the snow banking up under the bows of the clumsy boats.
Dunbar had gone ahead, planting four black flags at intervals to mark the path which he as pilot had selected for us to follow, the fourth and last flag, only a mile and a half along from the start, being the end of our first night’s journey. But so terrible was the going that by morning only one boat, the first cutter, had reached that last flag; the runners had collapsed under three of the sledges, stalling them; a wide lead had unexpectedly opened up in a floe halfway down our road, blocking the other sledges and requiring them to be unloaded and ferried over it; Chipp (who, with Alexey and Kuehne, in spite of being the sick were dragging the hospital sledge) had fainted dead away in the snow; Lauterbach and Lee had both collapsed in their harnesses, Lauterbach with cramps in his stomach, Lee with cramps in his legs; and by 6 . ., when our night’s journey should have been finished and all hands at the last flag pitching camp, we had instead broken down and blocked sledges scattered over that mile and a half of pack ice from one end to the other!
It was sickening. Twelve hours of man-killing effort and we had made good over the ice not even one and a half miles!
Willy-nilly, we made camp, breakfasted, and turned in at 8 , for our exhausted men could do no more without a rest. But for Surgeon Ambler, there was no rest. While the remainder of us, dead to the world, slumbered that day, Ambler, who as much as anyone the night before had toiled with the sledges along that heartbreaking road, labored over the sick, struggling to get them on their feet again for what faced them that evening.
That night we turned to once more, repairing runners, shifting loads, digging sledges out of snowbanks in which they were buried, and fighting desperately to advance all to the first camp. Regardless of a temperature of 20° F., we perspired as if in the tropics, and tossing aside our parkas, worked in our undershirts in the snow All that night and the next night also, we labored thus. By the second morning following, thank God, we had all our boats and sledges together there, and tumbled again into our sleeping bags, wearied mortals if ever there were such on this earth! Three nights of hell to make a mile and a half of progress! It was worse even than my journey to Henrietta Island had led me to believe could be possible.
And then that day, of all things in the Arctic, it started to rain! Miserable completely, we sat or lay in our leaking tents, soaked, muscle-weary, and frozen, while the cold rain trickled over us and over the icy floors of our tents. But while I had thought no creatures could possibly be suffering greater misery than we, I changed my mind when I saw our dogs, cowering in the rain, snuggle against our tent doors, begging to be admitted to such poor shelter as we had. So soon, with men and beasts shivering all together, the picture of our misery was completed.
In the midst of all this, Starr opening up the rations for our midnight dinner, found in a coffee can a note addressed to the captain, which he brought to him. It read:
“This is to express my best wishes for success in your great undertaking. Hope when you peruse these lines you will be thinking of the comfortable homes you left behind you for the purpose of aiding science. If you can make it convenient drop me a line. My address,
G. J. K—, Box 10, New York City.”
“Apropos, eh, Melville? I guess we’re thinking of those homes, all right,” commented De Long bitterly, showing me the note. “Where’s the nearest post-box so I can drop that imbecile a line?” Nearby was a crack in the floe. “Ah, right here.” De Long scribbled his initials on the note, drew an arrow pointing to the writer’s address, and dropped it into the crack. “Now we’ll see how good the seagoing Arctic mail service is. At that, it may get to New York before we do,” added the captain grimly.
Before we moved off from this camp, the captain decided to check the loads to make sure we were taking nothing more than was absolutely necessary. The first thing he discovered was that flouting his order about clothing, Collins had smuggled into our baggage and was taking along an extra fur coat. Immediately, under the captain’s angry eye, it went flying out on the ice. And the next thing he found was that in their knapsacks (which were towed along stowed inside the whaleboat) the seamen almost without exception were taking
some small mementoes of the cruise, trifling in weight in themselves, in the aggregate under our circumstances, a considerable burden. They went sliding out on the ice alongside Collins’ coat.
And then having cleaned house, the captain waited for the rain to end.
Since it rained all night, we stayed in camp, getting a rest if such it can be called. Next night we were underway again on a new schedule, the load of supplies on each sledge now cut in half (except of course for the boat sledges) the idea being to lighten up our overloaded sledges so we could move them to the designated point more easily and with less danger of breaking runners, then unload and send them back empty for the other half of their cargoes. Working this way we started out, only to find half a mile along a crack in the ice, not wide enough for a ferry, too wide to jump with the sledges. Here the ice broke up with some of our sledges floating off on an island, stopping all progress till we had lassoed some smaller cakes for ferries and on these we rode over our remaining loads, finishing our night’s work with hardly half a mile gained and everyone knocked out again.
So for the next four days we struggled along, sometimes making a mile a day; once, by great good luck, a mile and a quarter The going got worse. Pools of water from the late rain gathered beneath the crusts of snow and thin refrozen ice. As we came along, the surfaces broke beneath us, leaving us to flounder to our knees through slush and ice water. More sledge runners broke; Nindemann and Sweetman were kept busy at all hours repairing them. Chipp got worse, Alexey vomited at the slightest provocation, Lauterbach looked ready to die, and Lee staggered along on his weakened legs as if they were about to part company at his damaged hips. Danenhower, of all those sick, while he could hardly see, at least had some strength, and was added to the hospital sled to help pull it under Chipp’s pilotage. Ahead Dunbar scouted and marked out our road south by compass, then with a pick-ax endeavored to clear interfering hummocks from that path, aided a little in that by Newcomb. I bossed the sledge gangs and kept them moving, putting my shoulders beneath a boat or a sledge when necessary to get it
started. Ambler when not tending his patients, armed with another pick-ax helped Dunbar clear the chosen road. And bringing up the rear was De Long, supervising the loading, checking food issues, and relentlessly driving us all along.
On June 25, we had been underway eight days since starting south. By such grueling labor over that pack as men cannot ordinarily be driven to, even to save their own lives, and which in this case only the overpowering will of De Long rendered possible, we had made good to the southward by my most liberal calculation a total distance over the ice of five and one-half miles. I contemplated the result with a leaden heart. Even should the ice extend southward only one hundred miles out of the five hundred we had to cover (which seemed far too good to be true), at that rate of advance it would take us one hundred and fifty days to cross to open water. Long before that, unless we died of exhaustion first as now looked very probable, our sixty days’ rations would have been consumed and we should be left to perish of starvation midway of the pack.
In despair, I gazed at our three cumbersome boats, overhanging at both ends their heavy sledges, the last of which after soul-wrenching efforts my party had just dragged over rough hummocks into camp. Around it the men, too exhausted even to go to their tents, were leaning their weary bodies for a moment’s rest before they undertook the labor of lifting again their aching and frozen feet. Those massive boats, like millstones round our necks, were what were killing our chances. With our food alone, divided into reasonable sledge loads, we might make speed enough to escape, but with those boats—! Incapable of division, the smallest over a ton in weight, the largest over a ton and a half, dragging those boats was like dragging huge anchors over the floes. If only we could abandon them! But with a sigh, I gave up that dream. With an open sea somewhere ahead, the boats were as necessary to us as the pemmican. But only five and a half miles made good in our first week when we were strongest! It looked hopeless. We could only labor onward and pray for a miracle. I quit thinking and turned toward my tent, my supper, and my sleeping bag.
On the way, I bumped into Mr Dunbar, just returning from a preliminary scouting trip over our next night’s route. Dunbar, hardly fifty, hale and hearty, a fine example of a seasoned Yankee skipper when first he joined us, now with his face wrinkled and worn, looked like a wizened old man staggering under a burden of eighty years at least, and ready to drop in his tracks at the slightest provocation.
“Well, captain,” I sang out jocularly to cheer him up a bit, “what’s the good word from the front? Sighted that open water we’re looking for yet?”
The whaler looked at me with dulled eyes, then to my astonishment broke down and sobbed on my shoulder like a baby. I put a fur-clad arm gently round his heaving waist to comfort him.
“What is it, old shipmate? Can’t you stand my jokes either?”
“Chief,” he sobbed, “ye know it ain’t that; I like everything about ye. But that ice ahead of us! It’s terrifically wild and broken, and so chock-full o’ holes, chief, I could hardly crawl across! We’ll never get our sledges over it!” The weeping old seaman sagged down in my arms, his gray head nestling in my beard.
“Don’t be so sure, mate,” I said with a cheeriness I didn’t feel. “My lads are getting so expert heaving sledges over hummocks, I’m thinking of putting ’em on as a flying trapeze act in Barnum’s Circus when we get back, and making us all as rich as Commodore Vanderbilt in one season! Come on, captain, forget it; let’s have a cup of coffee to warm us up—no, let’s belay the coffee. Come to think of it, I guess I still got drag enough with Dr Ambler to work him for a shot of whiskey apiece for a couple of good old salts like us.” And I led him away to the hospital tent, where Ambler, after one look at Dunbar, hardly needed the wink from me to produce without a word his medical whiskey.
Leaving Dunbar with the doctor after swallowing a drink myself, I started again for my own tent, but once more I was stopped, by the captain this time, who beckoned me to join him in the snow alongside the deserted whaleboat. All hands were in their tents by now, working on their cold pemmican.
