ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Shipwrecks and the maritime underground

• In Event: UNEARTHED I: The Many Lives of Res inanimatae

English Abstract

Seafaring in the early modern Portuguese world was inextricably connected with stories of loss, and tales of ships, lives, and material riches lost at sea are manifold. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, countless wrecked Portuguese ships and the people, animals, and objects they carried, joined the ocean floor to merge with the global salt waters. These range from a relatively well-known case like the Bom Jesus, wrecked in front of the Namibian coast in 1533 and rediscovered in 2008, to many others only documented in text, whose physical remains have never been found. With a focus on material culture, my paper combines an analysis of Portuguese shipwreck narratives with examples of early modern maritime recovery. Looking at an example like the Nossa Senhora dos Mártires, sunk in 1606 on its way back from Asia near the port of Lisbon, I examine early attempts to recover parts of the material culture of ships in relation to the liminality of coastal areas, where fresh and salt water, and the earth and its violent movements came together to cover and again throw up remains of vessels. In a second step, the paper considers the values of things that perished at sea and how a perspective from the seabed might compel us to rethink loss as transformation.

Author

• Elsje van Kessel, University of St Andrews