ABSTRACT
Container ships, passenger ferries and cruise liners are tied to schedules and predetermined and meticulously planned itineraries that guide the vessel, its cargo, crew and passengers from port to port. Yet ships are not empty vessels that traverse watery soulless highways, rather ships with their crew, passengers, human and/or non-human cargo, are lived and experienced places. In recent years, growing interest in geographies of the sea has challenged this terracentrism of geography and the social sciences (see Peters 2010; Blum 2013; Steinberg 2013). However, increasing concern with both the contemporary and the historical global movement of goods and people has somehow failed to simultaneously emphasise the importance of vessels – with the ship remaining an elusive, and largely forgotten space in social studies (Hasty and Peters 2012, 660). The relative lack of contemporary investigation
in to the ship (with the noted exception of Hasty and Peters 2012) neglects the lived experiences of those on board as a significant area of study. As well as a tool to exploring wider themes of commerce, globalisation, and time-space compression, the study of ships and their various and complex mobilities presents multiple avenues of enquiry for scholars, particularly in terms of social-spatial relations. Factors such as strict hierarchies of crew, watchkeeping and shift work directly impacts upon how people on board not only relate to each other, but also to the ship itself, the sea surrounding them and the shore that they have left behind, or indeed are heading towards. In this paper, I introduce another, very different, type of ship – the luxury superyacht. Instead of linear and rigid itineraries familiar to commercial shipping (see Martins 2013 for an excellent review of the mobility of shipping containers), the mobility of the yacht is largely determined by the whimsical demands of its super-rich passengers (hereafter guests). In addition, the ratio of crewmembers to guests on board, a yacht is close to 1:1 (depending on length and size of the vessel) which enables a more personal and attentive service to the guests and which thus creates different social-spatial interactions compared to large commercial passenger vessels such as cruise ships. Exploring the interactions between crew and guests on board, the luxury yacht highlights how each group experience mobile practices differently. Using the example of the superyacht presents numerous avenues of geographical enquiry that go some way to reinforce the significance of researching the mobility of ships which will be further explored throughout this paper. For instance in considering the cultural practices of the super-rich helps to identify and account for the group’s global mobility can help to stimulate further super-rich and hypermobile debates within mobilities studies (see Birtchnell and Caletrio 2013; Hay 2013 for super-rich mobilities). Following Cresswell, the mobility constellation disentangles these complex social-spatial politics, with a focus on six aspects of mobility: ‘motive’, ‘speed’, ‘rhythm’, ‘route’, ‘experience’ and ‘friction’ (2010, 17). In this paper, I use specifically the notions ‘motive’, ‘rhythm’ and ‘friction’ in order to disentangle the politics of super-rich mobility between guests and crew on board these ships. Thinking through mobility within these divisions allows mobility scholars to dissect unequal power relations that ultimately shape patterns of physical movement (Vannini 2011, 481). In this paper, I argue that the motives and rhythms of mobility experienced by crew and guests on board is continuously negotiated performance between the two groups. Super-rich mobility is performed firstly by superrich guests to their peers, and secondly by crew to create a spectacle of super-rich mobilities for their guests. Conversely, it is this desire to perform that circumscribes super-rich mobility when on board as their activities, encounters and practices are directed at specific venues and port towns in a limited geographic area.
