Alan G. Jamieson - Out of the Depths: A History of Shipwrecks

OUT OF THE

A HISTORY OF SHIPWRECKS

ALAN G. JAMIESON

REAKTION BOOKS

For Maggie and Dan

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

Unit 32, Waterside

4448 Wharf Road

London N1 7UX, UK

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2022

Copyright Alan G. Jamieson 2022

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN 9781789146202

O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown,

What dreadful noise of water in my ears,

What sights of ugly death within my eyes.

Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wracks,

A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon,

Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,

Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,

All scattered in the bottom of the sea.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

King Richard III (15923), Act 1, Scene IV

Willy Stwer, The Sinking of the Titanic, 1912, engraving from Die Gartenlaube.

O n 14 August 2020 the animal transport Gulf Livestock 1 departed Napier, New Zealand, bound for China. The Panamanian-registered vessel was carrying almost 6,000 live cattle and had a crew of 43: 39 men from the Philippines, including the captain, two from New Zealand and two from Australia. On 2 September, when the ship was southwest of Japan, an emergency message was sent out. The engine had failed and the vessel was drifting in stormy seas caused by Typhoon Maysak. The Japanese coast guard responded and picked up two survivors, both Filipinos. They said the ship had been struck by a large wave and had capsized. The other 41 members of the crew had died, along with the cargo of cattle.

News items about this incident appeared on various media sites for a few days before it was forgotten. This recent shipwreck was one of so many across the centuries. The oldest known shipwreck, off the coast of Greece, is more than 4,000 years old, and UNESCO has estimated that there are more than 3 million shipwreck sites around the world. Shipwrecks have always been part of human experience, with the earliest account of a shipwreck, from ancient Egypt, being almost as old as the oldest known shipwreck.

The loss of the Gulf Livestock 1 fits the most popular image of a shipwreck, with a vessel being overpowered by the forces of nature in a storm at sea. Other conceptions involve ships being driven onto a rocky coast by stormy seas. Yet the best-known shipwreck, that of the Titanic in 1912, took place when the North Atlantic Ocean was almost calm; an iceberg was the cause, not stormy seas. There have been many types of shipwreck over the centuries, including ships that simply disappeared, and this book will look at a wide range of ship losses, whether in peace or war.

Even in the age of sail, when shipwrecks were much more common than they are today, most people had never been in a shipwreck or even seen one from the shore. Yet shipwrecks, like other types of disaster, were popular subjects for storytelling, and most peoples knowledge of disasters at sea came via such stories. Thus it seems reasonable to begin this book by looking at how people became aware of shipwreck stories, both fiction and non-fiction, through literature, art and other cultural media.

Shipwrecks feature in Homers Odyssey, written in the eighth century BCE, and St Pauls shipwreck at Malta appears in the Bible, but shipwreck narratives as a literary genre only started in the sixteenth century CE when Portuguese survivors of shipwrecks produced pamphlets about their experiences, which found many readers. The non-fiction shipwreck narrative enjoyed its heyday from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, with Archibald Duncans six-volume anthology The Mariners Chronicle: Containing Narratives of the Most Remarkable Disasters at Sea (first volume 1804) being perhaps the greatest of them all. However, even in the late twentieth century stories such as Sebastian Jungers book The Perfect Storm could achieve considerable popular success.

The dramatic nature of shipwrecks made them obvious targets for transformation into fictional literary forms. A number of William Shakespeares plays feature shipwrecks, most notably A Comedy of Errors (1594), Twelfth Night (1602) and The Tempest (1611). Shakespeares inspiration for the shipwreck in the last of these three is said to have been the story of the wreck of the Sea Venture in 1609.

The Sea Venture was part of a supply fleet on its way to the struggling English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, in North America. Encountering a storm while crossing the North Atlantic, the ship was wrecked on the island of Bermuda. The survivors managed to construct two smaller vessels from the shattered timbers of the Sea Venture and in 1610 they sailed on to Jamestown, only to find the colonists ready to evacuate the settlement. Fortunately, another supply fleet arrived and the colonists decided to continue with their new life in America. An account of the Sea Ventures wreck and subsequent events was published in London in 1611 and was probably known to Shakespeare when he wrote and presented The Tempest later that year.

After Shakespeare, the man who did most to bring the shipwreck into English literature was Daniel Defoe. Originally a London merchant, Defoe was swept up in the shipwreck-hunting mania that followed New Englander Captain Phipss recovery of treasure from a sunken Spanish galleon in the Caribbean in 1687. Phips brought great wealth to himself and his backers in England. Many companies were set up to go on similar hunts for sunken treasure and Defoe invested in a diving-bell concerned with that aim, even becoming its treasurer. Like most such ventures this company achieved nothing; Defoe lost his money and was accused of financial irregularities.

This debacle was one of the reasons Defoe went bankrupt in 1692. To salvage his fortunes, he took up writing, producing both fiction and non-fiction. In 1703 a great storm swept across southern England and sank a dozen Royal Navy warships as well as forty merchant ships, with hundreds of sailors drowned. Defoes book The Storm (1704) was a detailed study of this disaster and was the first book to cover a national weather event.

Defoes fictional work Robinson Crusoe (1719) is regarded by many as the first English novel. It is a shipwreck from which Crusoe is the only survivor that begins the tale of his adventures as a castaway. The story of the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk is usually taken to be the inspiration for Defoes work, and it is certainly true that the authors account of Crusoes life on the island owes much to details of Selkirks time as a castaway. However, Selkirk was not shipwrecked. After a dispute with the captain about the seaworthiness of his ship, Selkirk had asked to be put ashore on an island in the Juan Fernndez group in the Pacific Ocean off South America in 1704. Only in 1709 was he rescued by a visiting British ship. Selkirk did at least have the satisfaction of learning that the ship he had left did later sink, and that only the captain and a few other men had survived. The fact that Selkirk was not shipwrecked has led some scholars to suggest the authors of various contemporary shipwreck narratives as possible alternative inspirations for Defoes castaway.