The Lure of the Beach

A Global History

Robert C. Ritchie

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520974654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

A human and global take on a beloved vacation spot. The crash of surf, smell of salted air, wet whorls of sand underfoot. These are the sensations of the beach, that environment that has drawn humans to its life-sustaining shores for millennia. And while the gull's cry and the cove's splendor have remained constant throughout time, our relationship with the beach has been as fluid as the runnels left behind by the tide's turning.

The Lure of the Beach is a chronicle of humanity's history with the coast, taking us from the seaside pleasure palaces of Roman elites and the aquatic rituals of medieval pilgrims, to the venues of modern resort towns and beyond. Robert C. Ritchie traces the contours of the material and social economies of the beach throughout time, covering changes in the social status of beach goers, the technology of transport, and the development of fashion (from nudity to Victorianism and back again), as well as the geographic spread of modern beach-going from England to France, across the Mediterranean, and from nineteenth-century America to the world. And as climate change and rising sea levels erode the familiar faces of our coasts, we are poised for a contemporary reckoning with our relationship—and responsibilities—to our beaches and their ecosystems. The Lure of the Beach demonstrates that whether as a commodified pastoral destination, a site of ecological resplendency, or a flashpoint between private ownership and public access, the history of the beach is a human one that deserves to be told now more than ever before.

1

The Lure of the Sea

Baiae was the first beach resort. Located on a peninsula on the northwest corner of the Gulf of Naples, the resort was built around a small bay. Nearby were the naval base at Miseno and the port of Pozzuoli. The latter was a vital port in the Roman economy, where trade from the East and the grain ships of Egypt stopped on their way to Ostia, the port of Rome. These important shipping facilities were not the main reason Baiae came into existence. Instead, the attractions were the Gulf of Naples and the Phlegraean Fields. The Greeks first settled there in the ninth century BCE and by the sixth century BCE had founded Neapolis, the future city of Naples. As the Romans swept south, they conquered this region and settled there. Neapolis, however, remained very much under the influence of the Greeks and was an important cultural center. Given its prominence, the emperor Nero launched his public career as a singer in Neapolis. Besides Neapolis, around the bay were clustered towns such as Pompei and Herculaneum, suburban villas taking advantage of the superb vistas, and, of course, Vesuvius, the dominant feature.

While Vesuvius was the most famous volcanic site of the region’s thin crust, the Phlegraean Fields was less spectacular, with craters, hot springs, and bubbling mud pools all well known to the Romans. Such locations were prized for their curative powers, just as much as cold mineral springs. For instance, the asclepion at Pergamon, one of many sites dedicated to Asclepious, the god of cures, had three cold springs to treat different diseases. The Phlegraean Fields could offer far more choices of curative springs. There was also Lago d’Averno, the entry into the Roman Netherworld, and Monte Nuovo, a volcano far inferior to Vesuvius but dangerous nonetheless. Long renowned for its curative powers, it was not until the second century BCE that this area was sought out as a locale for pleasure.

At that time, Rome’s empire was expanding, so loot and tribute poured into the hands of generals, politicians, bankers, and other members of the elite, providing them with the means to indulge in luxurious living. They sought out places to relax away from the bustle and distractions of Rome. Villas started to appear along the coast south of Rome. Unfortunately, they, in turn, attracted pirates, making life uncomfortable for the inhabitants, so in the end they would turn to Baiae. Not only was it adjacent to the Phlegraean Fields, but it was also safely tucked away in a bay, close to a naval base. Few pirates would be so foolish as to attack it. Many of the beneficiaries of empire settled there, such as Lucullus, Caesar, and Pompey, along with emperors—Nero, Hadrian, Germanicus, Titus, and Tacitus among them. They built lavish villas with views of the bay. These buildings were different from the normal configuration of the Roman villa in that they faced out to take in the view, unlike the usual structures built around a peristyle to protect the families’ privacy. A sense of the splendor of these buildings can still be appreciated at Oplontis, across the bay near Pompeii, where an imperial villa was built for Nero’s wife, Poppea.¹ This more typical suburban villa is grand in size and has elaborate paintings throughout the main living areas. It also has a splendid swimming pool. The opulence of these villas can further be seen in the artwork recovered from the Villa Pappiri at Herculaneum, where an extensive statuary collection enhanced the gardens, and the interior contained a large library.² The villas built around Baiae are now mostly lost due to volcanic activity. Monte Nuovo came to life in 1538 with an eight-day eruption, and the earth was warped by tectonics, putting much of the town under water. There are two archeological sites remaining. One is a complex of temples, baths, and administrative and commercial buildings, including the second largest dome (after the Pantheon) in the Roman world, an indication of the wealth that made Baiae famous.³ The other site is under water and can only be visited with the proper equipment.

The season at Baiae commenced in April when the Senate recessed. Dignitaries and their retainers traveled down the Appian Way and then turned toward the coast when they reached the Via Campana. At Baiae they would find the resources that made resorts essential for leisure—housing, food, drink, shopping, and all manner of services, all in an appropriate setting for a well-off clientele. Once ensconced in their lodgings, the elite could take off their togas and treat themselves to restful and curative trips to the baths before setting out on a round of dinners, beach parties, feasts, theater, concerts, and boating parties. These are the activities associated with resort life, but Baiae had an edge as it quickly gained a reputation for licentiousness and debauchery—orgies and hot sulphur baths could be indulged in equally. Seneca, a well-known stoic, was appalled: “I left it the day after I reached it, for Baiae is a place to be avoided. . . . Luxury has claimed it. . . . Persons wandering drunk upon the beach, the riotous reveling of sailing parties, I need not witness it.” Rushing out of town, he condemned Baiae as “dangerous,” “a home of vice” that a wise man would find contrary to “purity of behavior.”⁴ Those enjoying themselves probably did not miss him. Seneca stood for the virtue of true Roman republicans whose simple life and military virtues had made Rome great. Baiae’s decadence was regarded as the worst aspect of luxury that the new wealth from the empire introduced to Rome, thereby weakening Roman character and posing a future in which leisure would wreak havoc on manly virtue, dooming Romans to failure.

Almost all the ancient commentary on Baiae noted the reputation for vice that made the resort famous and synonymous with the new luxury economy. Having sated themselves at Baiae in the spring, the notables returned to Rome, then spent the summer in their country villas to rest up in an agrarian setting and restore their Roman virtue. The memory of its decadence lingered on among those who read Seneca and Cicero, absorbing their denunciations. While Baiae might not outstrip the reputation of South Beach in Miami or the most riotous Club Mediterranee for wild behavior, it does prefigure the general reputation of future beach resorts as places where normal behavior could be set aside and fun and games indulged in. However, for a very long time, few resorts would equal the spending power of the Roman aristocracy when it came to leisure and profligacy.

For centuries Baiae remained a part of the Roman social calendar, and as Rome declined, so would it. Locals might continue to use the pools for therapeutic reasons, but the town lost its cachet. As various peoples swept across Italy disrupting the empire, the accumulation of fortunes declined, meaning luxury became more and more limited. The Arabs sacked what remained at Baiae in the eighth century, and when Monte Nuovo blew up in 1538, the site was severely damaged.⁵ As Baiae faded, it would be a very long time before another beach resort emerged.

Much of the wealth in the Middle Ages poured into the building of cathedrals, religious decoration, and castles. As for outdoor leisure, it was mostly hunting and hawking. Display and spectacle were present in the Church and with kings and princes, but not the open celebration of hedonism associated with Baiae. Bathing for therapeutic purposes, cleanliness, and for ritual practice did, however, continue in the medieval era. Charlemagne built a large bath in his palace at Aachen, where he bathed and swam.⁶ Hot bubbling mineral water and cold mineral springs, present all over Europe, attracted the sick, who flocked to them in search of a cure, or at least a degree of relief. In some sites a saint came to be associated with the cures, adding the aspect of a religious pilgrimage to a medicinal plunge. Elites flocked to the more urban sites, as all major cities had baths for public use. Once there, men and women bathed together in scanty costumes, perhaps seeking more than relief. Poggio Bracciolini, a papal secretary, while on a trip hunting manuscripts in early 1416, visited Baden, the famous spa, where he was surprised at the nudity: “It was comical to see women going naked into the water before the eyes of men and displaying their private parts and their buttocks.” Men wore leather aprons and the women short skirts, but both left a lot of naked flesh on display.⁷ Vice once more reared its ugly head. Prostitution followed, lowering the tone even more. But now, rather than a howl of indignation from the likes of Seneca, the Church and civil authorities stepped in to police such activities. Nonetheless, the curative powers associated with springs attracted the sick, because a medical practice that had severe limits on diagnosis and cure left lots of room for folk medicine and belief, and those who felt the lure of the springs kept them going. Public baths would only lose their attraction when plague and syphilis made them dangerous in the eyes of many.⁸

In general, the sea was a place to be avoided during the long medieval era. Classical texts and the Bible testify to the presence of monsters in the seas. As one text noted, there was “a vast sea where there is nothing but the abode of monsters.”⁹ One medieval chronicle notes that on reaching northern waters “certain foul and very dangerous creatures, which indeed up to that time had not been seen, swarmed around covering the sea; and with horrible violence struck the bottom and sides, stern and prow with such heavy blows that it was thought they might go through the ship’s covering of hides.”¹⁰ Such fears would last for a long time. Henry David Thoreau wrote in 1865, “The ocean is a wilderness reaching around the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences. Serpents, bears, hyenas, tigers, rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves.”¹¹ Those who lived on or near the sea and traded, fished, and fought in coastal waters regarded the sea with respect, both for the creatures it held and the great storms that smashed human structures with casual ferocity. However, until about the year 1000, most fishing was conducted in fresh water where conditions were safer. Two factors then turned fishermen toward the sea. First, the inland fisheries were depleted by overfishing, and secondly, habitats were destroyed by dams and polluted by city industries. The adoption of Viking fish drying technology (air drying on wooden frames) also meant that ocean fishing was now viable as ships and men could voyage out into the Atlantic to hunt cod, herring, and other deep-water fishes; thus, the fisheries expanded.¹²

The ocean still retained its reputation as a fearsome place, yet with the expansion of the fisheries and the rise of more and more ports and fishing villages on the shore, there were simply more and more people living near the sea. Those who worked on it or lived near it granted it respect. When a positive reference occurs in literature from the time, it is almost always a therapeutic reference. In France, some curative powers attributed to salt water brought kings to the sea. For example, in 1578 Henri III was ordered to Dieppe by his physician to gain relief from a tormenting skin itch. Also, for some time there was a belief in France that salt water cured rabies. Henri IV took his dog Fanor to Dieppe seeking a cure. In the late seventeenth century three ladies of the court rushed to Dieppe to throw themselves, while nude, into the sea three times after being bitten by a rabid dog.¹³ This tradition carried on into the eighteenth century as doctors in Bordeaux sent their patients with rabies to the beach at Arcachon for the cure.¹⁴

The rabies cure at the beach seems not to have traveled beyond France. Instead, there was a general folk tradition of an annual trip to the beach that cleansed the soul as much as the body. In Jewish communities there is a very old tradition, still carried on today, of casting bread into the sea as a symbolic way of casting off sin.¹⁵ Another folk tradition existed in the midlands in England and northern Wales, where whole communities made long journeys to the sea seeking relief by drinking salt water and dipping in the sea near Blackpool and Liverpool. A reporter for the Preston Chronicle counted seventeen hundred people returning from the seashore on one Sunday.¹⁶ When upper-class commentators started touring these places in the eighteenth century, they noted that “country people” or the “lower class of people,” whom they called “padjammers,” would travel to the beach in wagons or by walking as much as forty miles to “wash away all the collected stains and impurities of the year.”¹⁷ What also caught their attention was that those seeking relief went into the water naked and in mixed company. Bathing costumes lay in the future, and these traditional immersions were performed in innocence as they always had been.¹⁸ After an intense few days of bathing, the sojourners packed up and went home. Folk traditions such as these in France and England were repeated elsewhere, so that going to the beach seeking therapeutic relief for many communities was nothing new.

• • •

It was not until the eighteenth century that beach resorts reemerged, and they would first appear in England. During the eighteenth century, England experienced a rapidly expanding economy built on the profits of empire, landholding, early manufacturing, and finance. Sugar, tobacco, indigo, silk, spices, drugs, and all the other products of England’s growing empire boosted trade. Driving a lot of these commodities was slavery, another trade from which English merchants profited. On the home front, new techniques in farming brought prosperity to the agricultural sector. And then, during the last third of the century, the manufacture of a variety of domestic goods through the use of improved technology, especially steam power, created another area of prosperity. Finally, growing wealth enhanced London’s reputation as a financial center where bankers, goldsmiths, and stockjobbers all pushed forward the boundaries of finance capitalism. Rising prosperity meant that more and more people benefited from economic growth, leading to an explosion of consumerism and of leisure.¹⁹

As with Rome, the upper classes benefited the most from these developments. The English arist...

Table of contents

• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Lure of the Sea
• 2. The Rise of the Resorts
• 3. Leisure Comes to America
• 4. The Industrial Revolution Finds the Beach
• 5. Can a Proper Victorian be Nude?
• 6. Entertainment Comes Front and Center
• 7. The Modern World Intrudes
• 8. Beach Resorts Become a Cultural Phenomenon
• 9. Who Owns the Beach?
• 10. The Relentless Sea
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index