Astoria instructor finds links between diverse cultures for boat graves, burials at sea

Julie Brown is an English and humanities instructor at Clatsop Community College in Astoria. One of the most popular courses she teaches is on maritime culture, which takes students out of the classroom and onto the decks of ships to see firsthand what life is like working as a bar pilot on the Columbia River or as a deckhand on the Lady Washington, an exact replica of an 18th-century, 90-foot-tall ship that was the first recorded vessel to sail to the Oregon coast. Eight years ago, a former student encouraged Brown to train to work as a deckhand aboard the Lady Washington, which she did for two years, traveling from British Columbia to San Diego while juggling her teaching duties. The Astorian recently previewed a lecture Brown gave to a packed audience on how cultures as diverse as Vikings and Chinook Indians used boats to bury their dead at sea or on land. Brown joins us to talk about these ancient practices, and how her love for writing, literature and maritime history has taken her from the halls of Oxford to the bars of Astoria.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Julie Brown calls herself a lifelong learner. She got a bachelor’s degree and MFA in writing and then a PhD. She then went on to study at Oxford, Cambridge and the Sorbonne. But the Clatsop Community College instructor has not spent her life in classrooms. She has also spent time at sea with a deep interest in maritime culture. She spent two years working as a deckhand on a replica of a huge 18th century ship. More recently, she’s been researching how cultures all over the world have used boats to bury their dead at sea or on land. Julie Brown joins us now to talk about all this and more. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

Julie Brown: Thanks for having me, Dave.

Miller: How did you become interested in boat graves or ship burials?

Brown: Well, I live in Astoria which is surrounded by water on three sides and no matter where you look, you’re either watching the ships go by or hearing the fog horns, you can’t help but be curious about it. And as an English teacher, we’re allowed to create classes that follow our interests. So I created a class called Literature of the Sea where we read classic books like “Moby Dick,” “The Old Man in the Sea” and so on.

After a while, I realized I wanted to get into the more juicy aspects of life at sea, the actual hands-on experience and what kind of food they eat and the tattoos and superstitions and all that. So I expanded the class into humanities, an interdisciplinary class called Maritime Culture where we could look at not just the literature, but also movies, poetry, photography, art, and things like that.

Miller: And what about these kinds of burials? I think maybe you should also just give us a clarification. These are distinct from burials at sea. So what’s the difference?

Brown: So a burial at sea might be if you were in the Royal Navy in England in the 1800s and you died on board ship from a disease or an accident or injury of some kind, you would be wrapped up in your hammock or an old piece of sail and not really tossed but put overboard into the water.

Miller: Shoved over as we’ve seen in movies. So that’s just a kind of not too much ceremony, burial at sea. What are the kinds of burial in boats and systems that interest you that you’re talking about?

Brown: Yeah, I’ve been looking at three different areas geographically. One is the influence of the Vikings. So you have ships that have been found in Oslo, Norway. One that was found in England. One that was found in Ukraine and there are others as well where an important person was buried in his long ship along with a huge trove of treasure, animals. As many as 14 horses have been found in a ship and a number of slaves were killed to follow him or her to the afterword. So I’m looking at Northern European Germanic cultures as one area of study.

Miller: So let’s start with those. So what was the idea? It sounds a little bit like ancient Egyptians to me, the rich fancy people being buried in lavish ways with a lot of stuff for the afterlife. But why a boat?

Brown: Well, even in Egypt, the Pharaoh in the pyramid might have a little boat next to him, a replica of a boat, because they had an idea of crossing water to get to the afterword. But the Vikings were so invested in the ideas of their boats as being part of their identity–it was their transportation, how they fought, how they found women sometimes that being buried in their boat signified a really close connection to their life at sea– and they believed that they would sail then in their boat to Valhalla, there was no other way to get there. And so if you were a poor person, you might be cremated and your ashes put in a little tiny boat maybe the size of a shoe box because you still needed a boat to get to the afterworld.

Miller: So everybody would go in a boat?

Brown: Sure, except for slaves.

Miller: But some had toy boats. You’ve been saying their boats? So they wouldn’t be replicas of the leaders or the rulers’ boats, but the actual ones that they used. It’s like driving around for a decade in some car and then you get buried in your car.

Brown: Exactly. And it’s kind of interesting in the Oseberg ship in Oslo, Norway. If you ever have a chance to go to the Viking Ship Museum in Norway, there was a beautiful 65 ft ship, very intricate and ornate that had two women in it, which is a little bit unusual, probably mother and daughter buried together. So they were either very important to their group or married to someone important. They also could have been warriors because there were a few weapons found with them, but mostly domestic items.

Miller: A 65-foot ship. I’m just trying to wrap my head around the resources and time to build that.

Brown: Exactly.

Miller: Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and then to allocate those resources to someone’s afterlife. It shows just how important this was. It’s a huge outlay of something that was worth so much.

Brown. Right. Not only was the ship valuable but the grave goods that were buried with them were incredibly valuable. If you go to the British Museum in London and look at the Sutton Hoo Exhibit, you can look at the grave goods that were buried in England in a Viking longship and it included a beautiful helmet that was decorated with gold and silver and outlined in tiny garnets. And they studied the garnets and they came all the way from Sri Lanka. So they were traded all the way across. And the Sutton Hoo  Exhibit included armors, swords, axes, lots of jewelry, a music harp, dishes and coins, a silver plate from Istanbul and lots and lots of drinking horns and just about every burial I’ve studied has some kind of a drinking vessel. So that was important to them and music - drinking and music were important.

Miller: Now are the ones that you’re talking about here–because you’ve used the word burial–were these dragged onto land and put into gigantic holes in the earth or were they pushed out to sea?

Brown: There are different variations of that. If you’ve ever read “Beowulf,” there are four funerals in “Beowulf” and each one is different. So they could be burned. They could be put out to sea while burning. So they would burn into ashes out at sea. They could be set to sea and not burned. They could be burned and then buried, but they were normally buried with a big mound of dirt over them. It would kind of resemble a hill from a distance. So they were kind of buried almost above ground in a way.

Miller: So that’s the Vikings. That’s just one culture that has interested you in recent years. What’s another one?

Brown: Well, then I started looking at Asian cultures that had not necessarily ship graves but more like boat graves because they were smaller. So in China, you had a group of people that lived about 3,000 years ago called the Bo people and they were buried in canoes and the canoes were hung from the side of a very tall cliff. So they were visible to everybody walking by and they were lifted up and pinned to the side of a cliff with some wooden stakes. And it’s thought that they were elevated, possibly so that animals couldn’t scavenge the bodies, so that they couldn’t be looted, so that disease would be kept away from the people. But most people believe that the spiritual component would be that you’re closer to heaven because their concept of the afterworld was a heavenly or above us kind of a place. So they were that much closer to heaven.

Miller: It’s a fascinating combination because you’re in a boat but in the air and thus closer to heaven.

Brown: Yeah, Marco Polo saw them in 1271 and wrote about them. He was impressed by that.

Miller: What about closer to where we are now? What have you learned about Indigenous peoples in the Northwest and boat burials?

Brown: Well, it’s so fascinating because from China, the concept spread east from China. So there are boat burials in Vietnam, in the Philippines, and in Indonesia. Just briefly, to mention that in Indonesia, the thought was that your boat would hitch onto a rainbow and sail on the rainbow up into heavens, which I think is a lovely image. And then that brings us around to the Chinook Indians that lived around the Astoria area at the mouth of the Columbia River. They also buried their dead in canoes.

Miller: What do you think unifies these different cultures that are very different over vast physical distances and time differences?

Brown: Well, I think for a lot of Westerners and Americans, you think of being buried in the ground and it’s kind of a static place where your body stays put, your soul might migrate to a different place, but your body stays put. And all of these groups saw that the body needed to travel to another life and canoes and boats were very, very important to them because these are all cultures that were on the water.

Miller: I mentioned in my intro that you spent two years as a deckhand on a gigantic ship called Lady Washington. What is it?

Brown: Lady Washington is a beautiful wooden tall ship. And by that, I mean, it’s propelled by sails that extend vertically at very tall masts, the tallest mast is 89-feet high. And if you’ve ever seen the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean,” and you can picture the Black Pearl, the Lady Washington looks exactly like that boat. In fact, she was used as one of the extra boats in the filming of that movie. So that’s the quickest way for people to visualize what I mean by a tall ship.

Miller: Why did you decide to work on it?

Brown: Well, I had a student at Clatsop Community College who had been working as a deckhand on that ship and he wrote an essay about it in one of my classes and I read the essay and I was so intrigued by it, I asked him to please tell me more about it. And the more he said,

the more excited I got. And so the next time it sailed up the Columbia River into Astoria, I went down to meet it at the docks and asked them how I could start working on the boat and they sent me to a deckhand training school, basically. And when I was finished with that, I was qualified to sail on the Lady Washington as a deckhand.

Miller: Do you remember the first day you were on it?

Brown: Yeah, I was really scared. I had to fly down to Morro Bay, California, and I joined it there and it was one of the worst storms they’d ever had. They had to close the bar, but the ship had already gone out to sea. They had to string what’s called a lifeline from the bow to the stern. And we had to always hold on to it when we were moving around in case we fell off the boat.

Miller: Just with your hands.

Brown: Just with your hands.

Miller: It wasn’t like you were carabinered into it.

Brown: No, just with your hands. And the cook passed out large Ziploc baggies and I found out what those were for pretty quickly. It was a very rough ride.

Miller: Did you use the baggy? [Laughter]

Brown: No, I didn’t. I put a patch behind my ear so I don’t get seasick.

Miller: What was the daily work for you? What did it mean to be a deckhand?

Brown: It’s very interesting. Everything’s done on a four-hour rotation. So you might be a navigator for four hours looking at the charts. You might be on some kind of a cleaning duty and we really do swab the decks. And the reason you do that is to keep them damp so that they don’t dry up and crack. You might be on watch for four hours where your job is to sit at the prow of the boat and be on the watch for usually crab pots, pieces of driftwood, small boats, things like that. And so

I didn’t realize, I guess, until I really got involved that they’ll actually wake you up either at midnight, four in the morning or eight in the morning. to take your shift if you’re on watch at night so you can see what’s in front of the boat because we don’t have headlights.

Miller: So, what was your age?

Brown: I was 54.

Miller: How is that compared to the average age of the deckhands?

Brown: Most of them were in their twenties and early thirties so I was clearly old enough to be their mother. And they were very kind to me and very patient with me and I learned so much from them.

Miller: What have you most taken from that time?

Brown: Well, one of the rules when you’re on the Lady Washington is what you prioritize in an emergency, which is ship, shipmates, self. In other words, you have to take care of the boat or we all go down, you have to look after your shipmates and then you put yourself last. And I think that’s kind of a good metaphor for how we should go about things when we’re in a group situation.

Miller: That’s profound and terrifying in some ways. If, when one thinks selfishly, it’s terrifying. Has that actually changed the way you go through life since you’ve gotten off the ship?

Brown: I’m so much more aware of weather and climate and geography. You have to be aware of the weather 24/7, no matter what. You have to be feeling the water under your feet. If you’re in your bunk, you’re feeling the waves as you’re rocking back and forth. I don’t think I’ve ever been so acutely aware of weather and climate as I have been on the Lady Washington.

Miller: Just briefly, you were one of the founders of the FisherPoets Gathering. How did that come to be?

Brown: Ah well, I didn’t know this but a lot of fishermen out at sea write poetry and they read it to each other over the radio. And a fisherman named John Broderick from Cannon Beach, Oregon, contacted me and said, hey there English professor, I’ve got these piles of poems from fishermen that I know and I’m not sure what to do with it. And I immediately thought that some kind of a gathering or festival would be a good place to showcase them. And so the two of us collaborated and a group of like-minded friends helped us and we came up with the idea of a festival for commercial fishermen who write poetry.

Miller: Why do you think it’s endured? It’s a couple of decades now, right?

Brown: Yeah, this will be our 26th year. I think it’s because we really do still have a very strong fishing fleet in Oregon, Alaska. It’s not a mythological idea from the past, which is kind of how I look at the Cowboy Festival, but we really do have fishermen. And also…

Miller: Is that a common thing that you’re now on the side of the fishermen over the loggers of the cowboys? You’re in a story through and through.

Brown: Yeah, but I’ve got a funny story about fishermen and loggers, too. But there’s also the recognition that that way of life is starting to decline and may not be around forever. So this is also a way of preserving and honoring the stories and experiences of these people, men and women.

Miller: Julie Brown, it was a pleasure talking with you. I look forward to talking again.

Brown: Thank you so much, Dave.

Miller: Julie Brown is an English and humanities instructor at Clatsop Community College.

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