Speaking at a conference in 1962, the underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau foretold the appearance of a novel kind of hominid. “Homo aquaticus” was coming, thanks not to “the slow blind natural adaptation of species” but to “a conscious and deliberate evolution.” Cousteau’s aqueous posthuman was meant to herald the arrival of a new historical era, but his fantasy has an old pedigree. In 1648, the priest and mechanical philosopher John Wilkins published an essay on submergence which ventured the intriguing (and comparatively modest) claim that while “long use and custome” might not entirely enable a person “to live in the open water as the fishes do,” a practised diver was sure nonetheless to be relieved of the inconvenience of always requiring “pure” air for breathing. Where Cousteau anticipated “future generations born in underwater villages,” Wilkins had pondered numerous “Colonies...having their Children born and bred up without the knowledg [sic] of land.” 

 

This paper takes Cousteau’s and Wilkins’s visions as exemplary of a long history of testing the edges of human bodily necessity, and even inventing new forms of humanity, via prospects of extraordinary immersion. As well as experiments in defamiliarizing terrestrial views—Wilkins imagined the submarine children’s amazement at discovering the “strange conceits” of “this upper world”—such prospects have frequently testified to the (reputed) achievements of real divers, that international cast of (mostly) breath-hold experts who have populated poems, scientific treatises, novels, and visual art, abundantly and marginally, for the past four centuries and more. Their meanings have been as plentifully diverse as their appearances, but they share a literally profound concern with the affordances of unbreathing for alternative protocols of sensing, knowing, and inhabiting. As well as pivotally informing significant trajectories in submersed poetics in and beyond the Romantic era, those protocols’ contemporary salience suggests the importance of forms and practices in un-inspired humanism for the future of our “more oceanic” planet.