Abstract
This chapter explores the myriad efforts of public and private individuals and organizations to map the early American coastal frontier. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the American littoral was an isolated, parochial, preindustrial space strewn with shipwrecks on the margins of a fledgling nation. In the decades after Independence, shipwrecks became one of the few reasons why outsiders trekked into this veritable frontier. Federal agents came to secure the duties that financed government operations, humanitarian organizations to succor the shipwrecked, and entrepreneurs to acquire and commodify the local knowledge that was essential for safe navigation. At the same time, newspaper editors, artists, authors, and other cultural producers brought tales of coastal shipwrecks into the homes and workplaces of Americans, introducing them to the wild coast and disaster through sensational narratives. Coastal shipwrecks, as this chapter demonstrates, are not only events, material remains, processes, or narratives that illuminate a maritime cultural landscape, but ones that defined and fundamentally shaped the landscape.
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Notes
- 1.
I have not been able to locate the logbook for the Industry. However, Lamson, Autobiography, 164–167 includes a fairly precise account. Schooner Industry’s crew included: Gideon Rae, master; John Stone, mate; Zachary Lamson (18 years old), John Low, Peter Woodbury, and John Porter (21 years old), seamen; Cato Gowing, cook (Lamson 1908:164–170).
- 2.
By law, the local sheriff would have taken responsibility of the wreck and cargo. Lamson makes no references to any local oversight. Nor does he mention Customs, which would have had an interest in the wreck. No relevant local or customs records survive.
- 3.
Apparently there were no takers—the same advertisement was published the following day. The second auction was presumably more successful; the ad was not published again.
- 4.
We do not know how many vessels actually wrecked in the early republic littoral. Cook (2013:30) offers a sound estimate that 4–5% of vessels were “castaway or lost at sea.” Newspapers reported individual wrecks, but they did not discuss shipwrecks synoptically. Even the preeminent maritime information source, Lloyd’s List, which had reported shipping casualties since 1741, did not systematically tabulate casualty returns until 1890. Further, no historian to my knowledge has undertaken the herculean task of tabulating turn-of-the-century shipwrecks. Reconciling the overlapping, inconsistent, and often contradictory accounts of marine disasters that do exist could still only provide a rough estimate.
- 5.
Of course the east coast was not the only “American” coast, which also included the shores of Lake Erie and the Mississippi River. But at the opening of the nineteenth century , the Atlantic coast was not only the scene of the preponderance of waterborne commerce but also captured the public imagination in a way these other shores would not for decades.
- 6.
Native Americans had been largely removed from the East Coast. By 1750, just a handful of “Indian Remnants” remained in the Greater New York littoral (Meinig 1986:208–212).
- 7.
American life and labor remained constrained by the world they lived in. This small-scale, adaptable, and thoroughly local world—what Lewis Mumford terms the eotechnic age—was powered by wind and water and built of wood and stone. Irregularity plagued the eotechnic age; its dependence on strong steady winds and the regular flow of water “limited the spread and universalization of this [eotechnic] economy” (Mumford 1934).
- 8.
- 9.
Even the waterfront of Early Republic port cities were liminal zones, borderlands between maritime culture and a nascent American culture. It was a space inhabited by cultural mediators par excellance, sailors, and merchants (Gilje 2004).
- 10.
- 11.
This articulation of “frontier” is judiciously defined by Stephen Aron as “lands where separate polities converged and competed, and where distant cultures collided and occasionally coincided” (Aron 1994:128).
- 12.
Between 1789 and 1800, customhouses collected $59.4 million, or almost 88% of $67.6 million in total federal revenue. Not until the Civil War would other revenue sources routinely match custom’s receipts. Consequently, domestic politics, foreign relations, state and federal finances, as well as the international reputation of the new republic would be intractably tied to maritime commerce throughout the antebellum period (Wallis 2006; Gautham 2008:149–154; Wood 2009:93).
- 13.
Of course, customs officials were only interested in shipwrecks involving dutiable cargoes; revenue cutters did, however, assist distressed vessels regardless of the status of their cargo, although they were not explicitly ordered to do so until 1831 (U.S. Coast Guard 2011).
- 14.
The federal government also focused on coastal defense beginning with the 1794 Naval Act. Coastal defense was “the historic twin of the Indian problem in American military history” according to Weighley (1984:98), and Congress voted to erect coastal fortifications and four arsenals for storing munitions. The War Department acquired sites through outright purchase or state succession while seaport residents contributed part of the necessary material and labor. Congress funded 764 rank-and-file to man the forts. By the War of 1812, 24 earthwork and masonry redoubts had been built along Atlantic Coast mounting 750 guns. These forts were located near seaports and did not expand the federal government’s presence in the coastal frontier like customs inspectors and lighthouses did.
- 15.
Enthusiasm for creating a better world seized post-Revolutionary America. While different sections of the new republic acted with differing opinions as to what that world would look like, many Americans saw their project as a vital contribution to the spread and fulfillment of the promises of the Enlightenment. They set about reforming and republicanizing their society, distancing it from its British origins and continuing the enlightened developments of the eighteenth century. As Wood (2009:470) writes, their goal was “to push back ignorance and barbarism and increase politeness and civilization.” Private reformers worked to republicanize education and knowledge. They also formed charitable and humanitarian organizations and dramatically reformed the country’s system of criminal punishment. Public initiatives dovetailed with these private efforts. Along the coastal frontier , state efforts to make the littoral more legible coincided with a range of enlightened private efforts to domesticate this illegible, premodern space (Gautham 2008; Wood 2009:4, 37, 469–507).
- 16.
The MHS was one of a cadre of humane societies in the turn-of-the-century Atlantic World motivated by Christian and Enlightenment values of universal beneficence. Founded in 1786 by Boston elites, the MHS was at the forefront of the “virtual explosion of philanthropic organizations” that began in the 1780s and continued into the nineteenth century (Wood 2009:470[quote], 470–495). Like other humane societies, the MHS combined the relatively broad membership of public charities, the international cooperation and exchange of knowledge of learned societies, and the moral responsibility to strangers advanced by groups from the Freemasons to abolitionists. It differed, however, in adapting the humane society movement’s core mission (saving the drowned) to local conditions (few drownings; many shipwrecks ) by constructing shelters for shipwrecked mariners and rewarding rescuers (Howe and Wolfe 1918:70–71; Heale 1968; Moniz 2009; Wood 2009:485–495).
- 17.
Freeman’s survey of the outer Cape resulted in half a dozen strategically located shelters that took into account topography, coastal erosion/sedimentation, weather patterns, coastal navigation, shipwreck patterns, and survivor psychology.
- 18.
Blunt (1822:v–vi) later explained the intended and actual use of coast pilots was for vessels who were unable to get a local pilot, because the charts were not up to task and because printed, narrated directions were “vitally important” for safe navigation of coastal waters.
- 19.
Every issue of Lloyd’s List for the year 1802, for example, included reports of at least one (usually around a dozen) vessel wrecked, lost, condemned, damaged, on shore, or foundered at sea. This is impressive given The List was published twice a week, every Tuesday and Friday.
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Wells, J. (2017). Mapping the Coastal Frontier: Shipwrecks and the Cultural Landscape of the Early Republic Littoral. In: Caporaso, A. (eds) Formation Processes of Maritime Archaeological Landscapes. When the Land Meets the Sea. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48787-8_3
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