Navigating nautical timescapes: ghosts and haunting in the Victorian and Edwardian maritime world

The sea can be perceived as a timeless terrain, simultaneously constant and constantly changing, so that the passage of time is not visible upon its surface. This chapter examines ghosts’ relationship to this nautical ‘timescape’ through reference to nineteenth-century maritime folklore and some of the sea-based short fictions of William Hope Hodgson. In doing so it considers the imbalance between the typically weak phenomenology of the ghost and the enduring power of haunting as a central trope within the Gothic. The ghostly represents decayed and disembodied presences that are caught between present and past, neither wholly present nor absent, and often bound in ways that suggests constrained or diminished agency. However, the maritime ghost will be shown to be more assertive than its land-based representatives, even adopting a predatory nature in the case of the Flying Dutchman legend. Evoking loss and tragedy, the unfixed nature of the dead at sea, sunken memory, and the return of atavistic threats, this chapter challenges the notion of the sea as atemporal, arguing instead for a marine environment saturated with hauntings and hidden histories.