By Cayman Compass contributor Christopher Tobutt
Step into the Cayman Islands National Museum’s exhibition, ‘The Sea Is History’, and it becomes clear that this isn’t an art show in the polite, gallery sense. It’s a confrontation with the ocean that shaped Cayman long before tourism, long before modernity, long before anything was written down.
The first thing you feel is that the sea has followed you indoors. Not the sound of it, exactly, but its presence – a breath, a weight, a memory.
The exhibition borrows its title from Derek Walcott, and the museum notes the opening stanza “powerfully evokes the role of the sea in Caribbean identity”.
But the poem doesn’t sit on the wall like literature. It drifts in like a ghostly voice, nudging the visitor’s consciousness. The sea has locked them up; it murmurs the stories no monument ever held. Another echo rises later, softer: Nothing was written down … everything was carried by the waves.
The objects here aren’t precious because they’re rare. They’re precious because they survived, like a length of thatch rope worn down to a whisper. Old sepia photographs of Cayman built schooners from the first half of the 20th century — proud vessels made by hand, plank by plank, by men who trusted their craft and feared the sea in equal measure. These aren’t relics of an artistic tradition; they’re fragments of a working life.
There’s an old metal and glass diving helmet, found washed up on a local beach sometime in the 1980s or ’90s. Heavy, rounded, almost alien now, it would have been similar to the kind worn by Cayman diving pioneer Bob Soto in his earliest years underwater. Before scuba, before tourism, diving was dangerous, physical labour. The helmet feels less like an artefact and more like a memory the sea decided to return.
Nearby, a turtle decoy from the early 1900s rests in quiet dignity. A simple carved form – no detail, just the essential shapes: shell, head, flippers. It’s art, yes, but really, it’s art because it’s a tool of survival. A fisherman carved this not to express himself, but to feed his family. The integrity of the exhibition lies in moments like this, where beauty and hardship are the same thing.
Turn a corner and a Gordon Solomon painting, ‘The Middle Passage’, confronts the viewer with a cutaway sea, cold grey sky and luminous red water. Silhouettes of enslaved Africans sink in chains, linked like a macabre daisy chain. The painting doesn’t dramatise; it simply shows what the sea remembers. And somewhere behind you – or perhaps inside you – the whisper returns: The sea is history.
Chris Mann’s ‘Codex Caribbean’ painted in bright blues, yellows and reds, shifts the tone. A swirl of bio-geometric forms, like underwater hieroglyphics, floats against a deep oceanic blue – a language of the sea’s own memory.
By the time you leave, the exhibition has made its point without ever raising its voice: The sea does not erase history; it keeps it. The question is whether we will choose to remember what she has held for us all along.
‘The Sea is History’ will remain on display at the National Museum through the end of February.
Christopher Tobutt is a freelance journalist who has written for various publications in the Cayman Islands since 2003.
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