Today, America’s east coast teems with people each summer, and oceanfront property demands top dollar. As Wells shows in this book, such was not always the case. Until the mid-nineteenth century, America’s east coast was uninhabited, remote, and generally avoided by people. Wells argues that this “coastal frontier” transformed into the “modern beach” within a single generation because of shipwrecks (2). These coastal disasters disrupted the “physical, social, and cultural world,” acting as a catalyzing force that first rationalized and later popularized the beach (34).American coasts were largely isolated or uninhabited spaces until the turn of the nineteenth century. Shipwreck survivors lucky enough to wash ashore often froze to death before help arrived. Investment from the American federal government served as the impetus for initial growth on beaches. Given that approximately 90 percent of federal revenue came from customs duties, the young federal government became heavily invested in protecting foreign commerce. Shipwrecked highlights the importance of improving navigational safety to the young U.S. government, which built lighthouses and organized coastal communities under the watchful eye of “wreckmasters” who patrolled beaches, rescued ships, and distributed funds to assistants and information to insurance companies.As shipping and ships changed in the nineteenth century, so did beach communities. Shipping grew with America’s economy and population, and shipwrecks peaked between 1860 and 1890. To mitigate the loss of life and property, the federal government financed the construction of shelters where people and equipment were available to respond to shipwrecks, culminating in the creation of the United States Life-Saving Service in 1878. According to Wells, these government programs stationed people on the beach and provided the infrastructure for beach tourism. People congregated to observe “shipwreck spectacles” from shore, as well as the heroic men rushing toward the beleaguered crews (8).The capitalist transformation of the United States even extended to the beach. Meticulous surveys to prevent shipwrecks rendered beach spaces legible for the state and for capital. Iron-hulled steamships carried ever-larger loads and were more valuable than their cargo, increasing the incentive to recover them. A capital-intensive “Industrial Corporate Wrecking Complex” emerged in the late nineteenth century (106). Salvage equipment became much more sophisticated, technical, and expensive, wresting control of the salvage industry from locals to a limited number of specialized professional outfits. Like necromancers, these companies summoned sunken ships to the surface with cranes and the iconic diving suits that now ornamentally grace fish tanks or restaurant walls. When the number of shipwrecks declined in the twentieth century, a thriving beach tourism industry had replaced them on the coast in both size and importance.Throughout the book Wells analyzes the place that shipwrecks and the beach held in American culture. Interest in beaches increased as people sought to escape the nation’s crowded industrial cities for picturesque natural settings. Crowds rushed to shipwreck sites in order to witness the salvage and rescue operations. Shipwrecks appealed to Progressive Era Americans because they “combined the fear of seeing the pinnacle of modern technology destroyed with the hope of seeing it saved” (153). Coastal salvors were like eastern cowboys, exemplifying the rugged masculine traits of the vigorous life, as celebrated during that era. Ironically, the popularity of dramatic coastal scenes peaked in literature and art as the phenomenon itself declined during the 1890s.Shipwrecked succeeds in bringing attention to a unique and overlooked form of disaster. It strains, however, to make its argument that shipwrecks created the modern beach. Improvements in transportation, explosive population growth, and Western culture’s rapprochement with beaches all seem to play at least equally important roles in the development of the coast. For example, Wells does not develop his claim that locals involved in ship salvage were often the first to open beach resorts. Nor does he make a convincing case that beach tourism in places like New Jersey depended on shipwrecks; shipwrecks were probably more a contributing factor than a causal one. In sum, the book succeeds as a study of shipwrecks themselves and their interesting and important place in the nineteenth-century American economy and consciousness.
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Open Access
Jun 13, 2023
James Parisot 
