The Raven and the Sea: The Lost Intertidal World of Eighteenth-Century Ornithology

In the Book of Genesis, the raven’s failure to return to Noah’s ark proves his apostasy. Biblical exegetes from Augustine to Jonathan Edwards describe the raven’s bad terrestrial habits: a carnivorous, scavenging nature enables the raven to survive on dead animals washed up on bare patches of land. This article argues that eighteenth-century ornithology inherits this biblical bias against the raven, confining natural historical depictions of the bird to a terrestrial plane to demarcate unregenerative nature. When read in relation to the oral literature of the Indigenous Pacific Northwest, Western ornithology’s discomfort with the raven’s maritime presence and stringent relegation of the bird to barren land becomes vividly apparent. In Haida, Tlingit, and other Northwest Pacific Indigenous traditions, the raven operates through an intertidal ecology to serve a prominent role as figure of creation and mischief. Reading the raven’s rise and simultaneous erasure in eighteenth-century ornithology alongside the Indigenous literatures of the Pacific Northwest restores some of this lost knowledge not only of Alaskan Native literature but also of what this oral tradition reveals about the lost worlds and recuperative possibilities at the heart of the Euro-Western tradition.