EISCA boat collection is a collection of largely traditional boats from around the world. It initially began its journey in 1969 and was set to be part of an exhibition of fast disappearing working boats of the world at Exeter Maritime Museum, with the founder’s aim of ‘discovering, obtaining, restoring, preserving and displaying of a cross-section of the worlds evolved working boats’.
At first there were only 23 boats but over the course of its life, until its fateful closure in 1997, the museum grew to total over 250 boats. The collection was then sold and after being housed in a number of locations, it eventually found sanctuary in Eyemouth, Scotland, where it stayed until it was eventually dispersed by sale at auction in July 2017. The vast majority of the collection was purchased by a Chinese national.
EISCA is now in China and a unique collection of 148 boats and 40 models from over thirty different countries around the World, and await to be displayed in Chinese museum. — It is also an unprecedentedly large-scale heritage movement that travel far across the ocean.
My research aims to physically preserve these traditional boats, set up a framework for dealing with a highly foreign collection in a new environment, and therefore bring it alive to new audiences, and in a wider context, address the calls to develop stronger theoretical frameworks and perspectives regarding representation of maritime archaeological objects in museum space.
The history of small boats is poorly documented, but experience suggests that the range is very wide indeed. These boats were generally produced by small local builders who did not formally document their work and types thus vary significantly.
Presenting a maritime collection that is non-conventional and regionally complex, is considered a challenge and a new opportunity. As we are at an early stage of developing the approach of delivering maritime messages in museums, this research will be a fresh contribution to the developing approach of delivering maritime messages in maritime museums in multiple dimensions; not only focusing on the Chinese aspect, but also other parts of the world in the developing course of the discipline.
I hope to reveal to the audiences today, a rich and complex narrative of different culture connections through intersecting the history of the collection and the story that each boat can tell. Thus, I am developing an outreach initiative to make maritime archaeological objects accessible to the public, not only the domain of academics. I want to use this collection to tell the stories of the past whilst connecting the present and the future; and, connect maritime archaeology with China.