2: Found in Prison: The Poetics of Oceanic Sympathy

How does one write about sympathy/empathy when my archives curve round ocean based fiscal depredations of the East India Company in the late 18^th and early 19^th century? When what those archives conserve and record is the fiscal through memorials, petitions, pleas on pensions, insurance, credit and debt, pleas made, in our case, on behalf of mariners who have found themselves hapless and imprisoned?

I seek responses to these queries on the archives from a series of petitions sent by Captain Lynch, a mariner of no account, from his endless sojourn in debtor’s prison in Calcutta. Lynch sailed the Arabian Sea, through the Indian Ocean all the way to China, encountering shipwrecks, pirates, working with conclaves of islanders struggling against colonial trussing, and Lynch’s own hounding by East India Company officials. Conversant in many languages but with his base in India, Lynch’s petitions lay out, through an aesthetic as finely honed as his ships, a political oceanography of the seas around the Indian Ocean. And I will go on to show how, as he becomes more and more desperate, it is through the details of oceanic life that Lynch begins to argue for sympathy, and through it for an entirely different rendition from below (unlike those given by the usual stable of philosophers) of belonging to a nation, one that accounts for the compensatory capitalization of the emotional/empathic and physical labor invested by those who have no value (such as himself) in composing oceanic nationalisms.