Ninteenth-Century Shipwrecks and the Maritime Cultural Landscape of the Gulf of Mexico

Abstract

The Gulf of Mexico shifted from a colonial backwater to an active center of increasingly global maritime trade and commerce in the nineteenth century. This was due to the acquisition of the Gulf’s northern territories by the United States as a result of the Louisiana Purchase and the transition of the region and the seas surrounding it into an American territory and economic center. The shipwrecks and maritime infrastructure of the Gulf from that period are a cohesive maritime cultural landscape. That landscape, however, also includes elements and sites that are non-American, but which relate to the other groups and nationalities in the region, as well as shipwrecks associated with Gulf trade that wrecked or were lost outside the geographic boundaries of the Gulf of Mexico while in active trade.