海洋環境史視野下臺灣海峽海難：以清代班兵與水師為討論中心

Shipwrecks of the Taiwan Strait under the Perspective of Maritime Environmental History: The Case Study of Qing's Rotating Soldiers and Navy

本文回顧海洋環境史之研究方法與觀點，透過清代檔案中班兵與水師海難的紀錄，論述臺灣海峽的地理與環境特性，氣溫或為審視渡海的觀測指標。藉由具有歷史研究參考性的科學調查所重建的氣溫數據，以長時段觀察康熙到道光百餘年間的班兵海難事件，發現1790到1840年代的嘉、道年間，因氣溫偏低導致海難較前期頻發。清代關於班兵與水師海難撫卹的相關制度亦多出現和重新制定於此二朝，且時人也對此氣溫變遷與渡海間的關係有所觀察，進而重新描述和制訂渡海之月份。此文試圖以新的研究觀點和方法，重新審視海難研究和渡過臺灣海峽的討論。

This article reviews maritime environmental history, which has been proposed and dominated by Anglophone scholarship. In Sinophone scholarship, many studies could be placed under the framework of maritime environmental history. Still, they rarely focus on environmental elements, and lack interdisciplinarity. The present study utilizes shipwreck studies, a long-traditional focus in East Asian maritime history, as an agent to understand how to conduct maritime environmental studies in Sinophone scholarship. This article investigates the number of rotating soldiers and navy shipwrecks. Due to the Taiwan Strait's geographic features, the temperature is one of the most significant variables used to measure ocean current and wind intensity during the sailboat period. Using historical temperature reconstruction, this article argues that relatively low temperatures caused frequent shipwrecks in the Taiwan Strait during the Jiaqing and Daoguang periods, around the 1790s to 1840s, so the Chinese government reformed naval systems including the rotation of sailors, and pensions for the families of crew lost in shipwrecks.