Shipwreck narratives

Shipwreck narratives constituted a specific kind of travel narrative that proliferated, especially in Portugal, by the end of the 16th century.

The increase in European ships sailing longer distances during the 16th century led to a related growth in the number of shipwrecks. The increase was not surprising given the fact that sailors had no reliable way to measure longitude, astrolabes and cross staffs provided clues about latitude but could be difficult to use, no one knew how to avoid the submerged portions of icebergs or shoals that had not yet appeared on European maps, and there was no reliable way to predict the arrival of major storms. Further, printed charts contained errors, as the English writer Edmund Wright argued.

The best known shipwreck narratives came from Portugal, and many of them described disasters that befell ships on the return part of the Lisbon to Goa route (the so-called carreira de India), when the ships were often overloaded with spices or passengers or leaving too late in the season when the risk of monsoons was greater. They included the Navragrio of Jorge d’Albuquerque Coelho, which had many elements of a classic bit of literature: capture at sea by pirates, religious clash between Protestants (see Reformation) and Catholics, a captain’s bravery, and divine intervention. But the themes struck there appeared time and again. Consider the narrative of Diogo de Couto, who wrote about how the crew of his ship endured an entire night “in great trouble and distress, for everything they could see represented death. For beneath them they saw a ship full of water, and above them the Heavens conspired against all, for the sky was shrouded with the deepest gloom and darkness.” Those on board presumed that their end was near. “The air moaned on every side as if it was calling out ‘death, death’; and as if the water which was entering beneath them was not sufficient, that which the Heavens poured on them from above seemed as if it would drown them in another deluge.” The author of the narrative, like others, presumed that such actions were the result of a divine plan. Those on board agreed with such an assessment, at least according to the narrative. “Within the ship nothing was heard but sighs, groans, shrieks, moans, and prayers to God for mercy, as it seemed that He was wroth [extremely angry] with all of them for the sins of some who were in the ship.”

The number of shipwrecks declined after the middle of the 17th century, but the narratives remained popular. The best known were published in Lisbon and were sufficiently popular to have been reprinted in the mid-1730s, when a two-volume work included shipwreck narratives that dated from 1552 to 1602. The modern historian C. R. Boxer notes that these accounts came directly from survivors or were compiled by contemporaries, and that they were “as a rule movingly and graphically written, if not always as grammatically as could be wished.” The narratives also tended to provide ethnographic details about foreign peoples, especially about Southeast Africa, the location of a number of shipwrecks. Modern reprintings suggest that the narratives continue to appeal.

Further reading: C. R. Boxer, ed., The Tragic History of the Sea, 1589-1622, Hakluyt Society 2nd ser., 112 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959; reprinted with a new foreword by Josiah Blackmore [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001]) ;-, Further Selections

From the Tragic History of the Sea, 1559-1565, Hakluyt Society 2nd ser., 132 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).