Jamin Wells. Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach.

Abstract

In Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach, Jamin Wells argues that shipwrecks were essential to the transformation of the American shoreline from an isolated, largely unoccupied, and repulsive space in the late eighteenth century to a well-regulated and beloved playground at the end of the nineteenth century. In doing so, Wells brings a fresh perspective to the history of the seaside by connecting it with frontier historiography and the environmental history of disasters. According to a well-trodden narrative, most famously associated with historian Alain Corbin’s Lure of the Sea (1994), Europeans long turned their back to the coast, which they associated with the biblical deluge, marine monsters, pirates, and invaders. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, these fears had dissipated, and Europeans from all walks of life aspired to stroll, and even live, on the seaside. Where Corbin and others highlighted the cultural forces behind this momentous change—romantic sensibilities, medical discourses, and scientific discoveries—“materialists” saw the transportation and communication revolutions at work, connecting shorelines ever more closely to cities. Building on both arguments, Wells shows that there is a unique and specifically American version to this narrative and that shipwrecks are essential to it. On the shores of the early republic—more specifically the coastal communities situated between Boston and Philadelphia—shipwrecks were “common, almost daily occurrences” (5). In an economy dominated by maritime commerce, they represented major loss for the federal government and vessel owners, as well as tragic events. Over the course of the century, efforts by private groups and the government to prevent shipwrecks, save lives, and regulate salvage work “domesticated” the shore. In parallel, journalistic and fictional shipwreck narratives introduced Americans to the coast and its people. In the process, the unruly, frightening shoreline of yesteryear morphed into the “modern beach, a thoroughly commercialized, contested, and engineered space that is at the heart of the American experience” (2).