Editorial Response

On the Matter of SHSE-25 and the Proper Naming of Things

By Alistar Corvus, Presiding Concordant of the Order of the Great Fifth Sea

It is with both admiration and alarm that I have read the Great Lakes Research Consortium’s recent communiqué announcing their “leadership” of Submerged Heritage Site Evaluation (SHSE-25), the operation that in our own ledgers bears the proper and human name The Survey of the Silent Circle.

Let me begin by congratulating our colleagues for achieving what may be a regional record in the compression of meaning into acronym. SHSE-25 is, in many ways, a triumph of the bureaucratic imagination: a title so featureless it could refer equally to a shipwreck, a soil sample, or a budget revision. The elegance lies in its deniability.

The Order, by contrast, prefers words that point toward the world rather than away from it. To us, the site beneath Grand Traverse Bay is not a “submerged heritage resource,” but a question posed by time itself, an echo of those who stood on land that is now water. We do not “evaluate.” We listen.

It is therefore curious to find ourselves described as “heritage observers.” A tidy phrase, if one has never observed anything worth heritage. The record should show that the Order was not invited to observe this survey, but rather entrusted with it, hand-delivered instructions sealed and signed by those guardians whose discretion has protected the site since its discovery.

Our instruments may be analog, our vessel modest, our attire occasionally mistaken for costume, but our methods are exact and our purpose serious. The Little Concord may not bristle with Consortium hardware, but she carries something the GLRC often misplaces in its inventory: patience.

This is not a turf dispute, though I am aware it reads as one. It is a matter of vocabulary. Names, in the academic world, are territorial. To name is to stake claim. The Consortium may prefer “SHSE-25” because it files neatly, can be cited without poetry, and fits comfortably on a grant ledger. But The Survey of the Silent Circle is not for filing. It is for remembering.

Let there be no confusion. The Order will participate fully, honor cooperation, and record all findings with care. We ask only that our partners recall that inquiry is not improved by volume of equipment, and that data is not a synonym for understanding.

We await the November expedition with calm and inked resolve. If, in the course of collaboration, our colleagues find that their instruments malfunction in the presence of mystery, we will lend them a compass. We have several.

Signed and witnessed in good order,
Alistar Corvus
Presiding Concordant, Order of the Great Fifth Sea

Editor’s Note — Klara Nilsen, Deputy Archivist

This editorial prompted a weeklong cascade of correspondence between the GLRC and the Order. The Consortium responded with a six-page “clarification statement” that repeated the phrase “mutual understanding” nine times without ever defining it. The Order replied in triplicate. All letters are now stored in the Rawley Chapter House under the label “Diplomatic Weather Systems.” The offending communiqué is here appended for purposes of contextual clarification and historical accuracy.