Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach

By Jamin Wells

Reframing the American story from the vantage point of the nation's watery edges, Jamin Wells shows that disasters have not only bedeviled the American beach--they created it. Though the American beach is now one of the most commercialized, contested, and engineered places on the planet, few people visited it or called it home at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, the American beach had become the summer encampment of presidents, a common destination for millions of citizens, and the site of rapidly growing beachfront communities. Shipwrecked tells the story of this epic transformation, arguing that coastal shipwrecks themselves changed how Americans viewed, used, and inhabited the shoreline.

Drawing on a broad range of archival material--including logbooks, court cases, personal papers, government records, and cultural ephemera--Wells examines how shipwrecks laid the groundwork for the beach tourism industry that would transform the American beach from coastal frontier to oceanfront playspace, spur substantial state and private investment alongshore, reshape popular ideas about the coast, and turn the beach into a touchstone of the American experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781469660912

Jamin Wells

Jamin Wells is assistant professor of history at the University of West Florida.

Book preview

Shipwrecked

Shipwrecked

Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach

Jamin Wells

The University of North Carolina Press  CHAPEL HILL

© 2020 Jamin Wells

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wells, Jamin, author.

Title: Shipwrecked : coastal disasters and the making of the American beach / Jamin Wells.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2020]

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020018436 | ISBN 9781469660899 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469660905 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469660912 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Shipwrecks—United States—History—19th century. | Coasts—United States—History. | Beaches—United States—History.

Classification: LCC VK1270 .W45 2020 | DDC 910.9163/4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018436

Cover illustration: Granville Perkins, "The Stranded Steam-Ship L’ Amerique," Harper’s Weekly, January 27, 1877.

Portions of this book were previously published by the author in a different form and are used here with permission. Chapter 1 includes material from Mapping the Coastal Frontier: Shipwrecks and the Cultural Landscape of the Early Republic, in Formation Processes of Maritime Archaeological Landscapes, ed. by Alicia Caporaso (New York City: Springer Publishing, 2017), 31–52. Chapter 4 includes material from Professionalization and Cultural Perceptions of Marine Salvage, 1850–1950, Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord 17, no. 2 (April 2007): 1–22. Chapter 5 includes material from Lure of the Shore: Authenticity, Spectacle, and the Wreck of the St. Paul, New Jersey History 126, no. 1 (2011): 13–20.

To my patient, loving family

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

The American Coastal Frontier

CHAPTER TWO

Taming the Beach

Wreckers and Wreck Law on the Jersey Shore

CHAPTER THREE

Transforming the Shore

Tourism, Lifesavers, and the Rise of Quonnie

CHAPTER FOUR

Clearing the Coast

Captain T. A. Scott, a True American

CHAPTER FIVE

Shipwreck and Spectacle on the Modern Beach

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations and Maps

ILLUSTRATIONS

Captain Cook Cast Away on Cape Cod, 1802 35

Wreck of the Ship John Minturn 39

Frontispiece from The Wreckers; Or, The Ship-Plunderers of Barnegat 66

Death on Economy 93

Crowd watching lifesavers drill 101

The Old Wreck, Annie, Quonochontaug, R.I. 101

Captain T. A. Scott 106

T. A. Scott Company Warehouse 123

Advertisement for the T. A. Scott Company 129

T. A. Scott Company Plant at New London, Conn. 135

The Steamship ‘St. Paul’ Stranded on the Long Branch Coast 138

American Liner St. Paul, Broadside 145

Captive in the Sands, the St. Paul Makes a Jersey Holiday 150

MAPS

Barnegat-Squan 42

Greater New Jersey 43

Quonnie 71

Acknowledgments

It all began on a dare over a decade ago after a murky dive to a shipwreck long buried in the bottom of Narragansett Bay. While the wreck of the Addie Anderson does not appear in this book, the conversations I had with Rod Mather and John Jensen that day and ever since have profoundly influenced this project as well as all those other matters in which the best mentors, friends, and colleagues engage. That my office now shares a hallway with John’s is a slice of serendipity for which I will forever be grateful.

The University of Delaware was an exceptional place to develop this project as a dissertation. My advisor, Arwen Mohun, gave invaluable feedback and taught me how to ask a good question and hone an argument. Susie Strasser opened my eyes to the art and craft of history—I am reminded of her admonitions as I type these words today. David Suisman and David Shearer inspired me to think bigger and engage with the wider currents of history. Jim Delgado offered new ways to think about shipwrecks and public scholarship. And my fellow graduate students—Andy Bozanic, Holly Caldwell, Amanda Casper, Christy Croxall, Melissa Maestri, Nate Wiewora, and, especially, Lucas Clawson—offered friendship, humor, and support as we navigated graduate school during the Great Recession.

Letting this project lie fallow for three years ultimately made it stronger; New Orleans is fertile ground. To my high school students, thank you for making our class a haven. You taught me how to teach, forced me to rethink the purpose of history, and reminded me how it can—and should—be a meaningful act of resistance. Thank you.

Since 2016, the University of West Florida has offered me an inspired home surrounded by an amazing group of historians and archaeologists studying the watery parts of the world. One could not ask for better colleagues. Marie-Thérèse Champagne and Dan Miller have offered sage advice from the beginning. I would have stumbled long ago without the indefatigable Gabi Grosse. The wit, wisdom, and camaraderie of Amy Mitchell-Cook, Greg Cook, William Lees, Monica Beck, John Jensen, Karen Belmore, Erin Stone, Rami Gougeon, Meredith Martin, Ben Burgen, John Bratten, Della Scott-Ireton, Katie Hendry, and Matt Purcell have saved me from more than one misstep and made Pensacola a great fit for me and my family.

Archives are the soul of our craft and I will forever be indebted to the tireless archivists and librarians at the New London Maritime Society, Henry L. Ferguson Museum, Charlestown Historical Society, Hagley Museum and Library, Monmouth County Historical Association Research Library and Archives, Monmouth County Archives, Mystic Seaport Museum’s Collections Research Center, New Jersey State Archives, Peabody Essex Museum, the University of Delaware Library, the University of West Florida Libraries, the John Hay Library at Brown University, and the National Archives in Waltham, New York City, and Philadelphia. In particular, Paul O’Pecko, Susan Tamulevich, Pam Lyons, Stu Reddish, Pierce Rafferty, Mary Hussey, and Claire Blechman have gone above and beyond in supporting this project.

Feedback and discussion at the following presentations provided immensely helpful input at pivotal junctures: Hagley Research Seminar, University of Delaware History Workshop, Seminar on Historical Change and Social Theory at Tulane University, 2019 American Historical Association Conference, and multiple conferences hosted by the North Atlantic Society for Oceanic History. I am particularly thankful to Alicia Caporaso, Michelle Craig McDonald, Walter Stern, Kristin Wintersteen, and the editors, reviewers, and readers of The Northern Mariner, New Jersey History, and Formation Processes of Maritime Archaeological Landscapes for comments on what would become the central chapters of this book. The insightful comments and suggestions on the full manuscript by the anonymous readers and John Jensen made this book significantly better. And I would be remiss not to acknowledge Brandon Proia, of UNC Press, who has been a pleasure to work with throughout the publication process. Any errors that remain, of course, are mine alone.

I was fortunate to have received support for research and writing from the University of Delaware’s Center for Material Culture Studies, the University of Delaware’s University Scholars Fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship at UWF, and a UWF faculty improvement grant. An NEH Summer Seminar at the Mystic Seaport Museum’s Munson Institute in 2018 reenergized me and drove the completion of the project. Glenn Gordinier and Eric Roorda engineered an inspired month of discussion, debate, and oysters along the Mystic River. I am particularly grateful for discussions with fellow participants and speakers, including Matt McKenzie, Lincoln Paine, Christina Bevilacqua, Mark Kelley, Anthony Medrano, Chris Pastore, Helen Rozwadowski, Matt Crow, and the Mallory House crew. A fabulous tour of the Saunders family’s stomping grounds in southern Rhode Island by Karen and Bob Madison stands out as a highlight of researching this book. Face-to-face conversations with Isaac Land in Lisbon and Chicago were as inspirational as the ongoing #coastalhistory discussions online, where a motley crew of historians, literary scholars, and others spread out across the globe are working to historicize the human relationship with our changing shorelines. I hope this book contributes to that project.

In keeping with tradition, I thank my family last though I owe them most. To my siblings, thank you for your patience. To my parents, thank you for your unwavering support. Lorelei and J. J., it is an honor to be part of your lives. Maida, born on a hurricane, long may you run. Daily you inspire me with your joy and passion for life. Kimberly, words cannot express my gratitude. So I offer you, my love, this humble thank you.

Shipwrecked

Introduction

The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor?

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Cape Cod

The twenty-first century has been hard on the American coast. Michael, Florence, Harvey, Maria, Irma, Sandy, and Katrina, Deepwater Horizon, sea-level rise, coastal erosion, king tides, red tides, dead zones, overfishing, subsidence—the list could easily go on. The national playground, the place where most Americans live, work, and play seems to be threatened like never before. While scientists and pundits debate causes, coastal communities find themselves in a profoundly changing world. Coastlines are more developed and vulnerable than ever before. Seas are rising. Storms are stronger. And beaches are disappearing.

The retreat has already begun. While federal support has helped some communities rebuild what was lost or defend what they have, more and more have begun to prepare for what an increasing number of people deem to be inevitable: inundation and abandonment of the current coastline. In 2016, the Obama administration awarded $1 billion in grants to help communities adapt to climate change, including $48 million to resettle the country’s first climate refugees living on a sinking coast by a rising sea. Local and state governments around the country are fashioning their own responses to rapidly changing shorelines.¹ Everyone seems to agree that we are facing a very new, very complex set of challenges. And yet constant change, disaster, and adaptation are not new to the American coast; they created it.

This book explores the radical transformation of the American coast’s physical, social, and cultural landscapes during the nineteenth century. It focuses on the oceanfront beaches and barrier islands that constitute the majority of the American coast rather than the natural harbors and estuaries where human settlement and the historian’s gaze have long concentrated.² Between the ratification of the Constitution and the inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt, disasters large and small, periodic and singular, real and imagined, upended human relationships with the American coast that had been relatively stable for millennia. In a single generation, itinerant, small-scale, seasonal habitation of frontier foragers gave way to permanent homesteading, industrial economic exploitation, and pleasure-seeking tourists.

Coastal shipwrecks, as singular events and collective traumas, accelerated these changes. This book examines how one type of coastal disaster, the shipwreck, helped fashion the physical, social, and cultural space we know as the modern American beach. It focuses on shipwrecks and oceanfront communities in southern New England and the mid-Atlantic—between Boston and Philadelphia—over the course of the nineteenth century because what happened there reverberated nationally and influenced subsequent changes along different shores, from the Great Lakes and Gulf of Mexico to the West Coast and beyond. It argues that the ubiquitous coastal shipwreck unleashed a torrent of public and private energies that turned the coastal frontier into the modern beach, a thoroughly commercialized, contested, and engineered space that is at the heart of the American experience. Disaster, simply stated, made the beach.

Today the coast is central to American life. According to the most recent figures (2019), four out of every five Americans live in a coastal state. Over 126 million Americans live in one of the nation’s shore-adjacent coastal counties, a quarter of them arrived in only the past fifty years. Put in other terms, 40 percent of the country lives on 10 percent of the land that borders an ocean or a Great Lake (not including Alaska). Consequently, coastal communities are far more crowded than their inland counterparts: average population density of coastal counties is 446 people per square mile compared with the national average of 87 people per square mile. Social scientists predict that number will continue its exponential rise in the decades ahead and have coined the term coastal squeeze to describe the competition for attention, space, and resources caused by this intensifying coastal migration.³

Economic production and infrastructure are similarly concentrated along the coast. In 2018, $8.3 trillion or 46 percent of our nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) was generated in coast-adjacent counties. In terms of GDP, if U.S. shore-adjacent counties were their own country, only the United States and China would have larger economies. A significant part of this economic activity is tied to coastal tourism, which accounted for 88 percent of all tourism-related revenues and contributed $124 billion in GDP (2018).⁴ Almost seventy-three million Americans—30 percent of the country—visited the beach in 2017, more than went to a museum, a bar, or a nightclub. More got sand between their toes than played a board game, went to a zoo, had a picnic, or barbequed. Another fourteen million participated in motor boating. Visiting the beach and boating are, of course, just two of the myriad ways Americans engage with the coast. Economists have just begun calculating what they term the non-market value of the coast, the recreational, environmental, and aesthetic values not found in the marketplace. By this they mean the societal value of a healthy blue whale population off Cape Cod or an unobstructed sunset view from the California coast. Their initial estimates place the minimum annual value in the tens of billions of dollars.⁵

Statistics, of course, cannot fully capture the centrality of the beach to American culture. The sheer scale of the preoccupation with beaches seen in books and magazines, blogs and Twitter feeds, theater and film, visual arts and music is suggestive of the extent to which coast and coastal are at the heart of America and American. Unfortunately, the contemporary coastal fetish obscures the fact that for much of our history the oceanfront beach was an isolated frontier that was more likely to have been avoided than visited, never mind actually inhabited year round.⁶ The earliest surviving written records describing the American coast come from a motley crew of sixteenth-century European explorers who, like many of the indigenous peoples they encountered, preferred natural bays, harbors, and estuaries to the oceanfront. Giovanni da Verrazzano’s first impression of the North American coast, for example, was far from exuberant: It appeared to be rather low-lying. Like later explorers, Verrazzano looked past the sandy beaches and barrier islands that one in four Americans now visit every year to the many beautiful fields and plains full of great forests … promontories and aggregable natural harbors. He was, of course, seeking gold and glory rather than surf, sun, and leisure by the sea.⁷

For the next 250 years, English, French, Spanish, and Dutch settlers agreed, and they tended to avoid the open shorelines of North America, because they were, by one account, much too preoccupied with the labors of survival and agriculture to launch an aggressive attack on the most difficult of all environments to tame.⁸ While the oceanfront between Philadelphia and Boston remained largely unoccupied and ignored until the early nineteenth century, waterfront settlements nestled in natural bays and harbors and along the rivers developed into bustling entrepôts, large and small. Even so, indigenous peoples struggled to maintain their oceanfront lands. A few—particularly the Wampanoags of Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard, the Mashpee on Cape Cod, and the Shinnecock on Long Island—remained alongshore. Many others left or were forced off the beach, if not literally then figuratively as colonial narratives of indigenous disappearance took root and spread. It was primarily Euro-Americans who filled the void.⁹ By the close of the nineteenth century, this stretch of the American coast had become the summer encampment of presidents, a common destination for millions of urbanites, and home to rapidly growing new suburban beachfront communities.

So how did we get from abhorring and avoiding the beach to loving and living on it? John Stilgoe’s observation made two and a half decades ago holds true today: All alongshore lies one of the most visited, most noticed, most pictured, and least scrutinized places in North America. Few have tried to answer the question, but those who have tend to fall in one of two categories. Scholars with a cultural inclination argue that evolving medical ideas, aesthetic values, the fancies of the well-to-do, or the calculated decisions of subjugated minorities fueled the rediscovery of the shore. Materialists, on the other hand, foreground the coast’s valuable resources and the large-scale social, economic, and technological changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Materialists’ accounts of coastal development veer toward a since the coast had it or an If you build it, and they have time, they will come argument in which natural resources, spreading railroads, rising wages, and the advent of leisure time became the prime movers in the birth of the American beach.¹⁰ As a whole, these histories of coasts and coastal communities accurately capture the complex of historical forces that collectively nudged, then kicked America to its oceanfront. But market, transportation, and communications revolutions do not a beach trip make.

This book seeks to understand how these large-scale historical forces translated into on-the-ground change, and it tries to balance the cultural push with the materialist pull without losing the essential human contingency and lived experience of life alongshore. In other words, it seeks to answer two basic questions. What first brought America to the coastal frontier, and how did this foreign place populated by mysterious people become the home, the dream, the escape of tens of millions? The short answer to both is coastal shipwrecks.

Shipwreck is traditionally defined as the destruction or loss of a ship by its being sunk or broken up by the violence of the sea. It can also refer to the remains of a wrecked vessel, often called a wreck.¹¹ A shipwreck, then, is a physical object—the stranded or sunk vessel—and an idea—the story, or narrative, of the wrecking event. As objects, shipwrecks posed navigational challenges for sailors, became points of interest for sightseers, and provided employment for salvagers. Over time, they were degraded by wind and wave, and salvaged by wreckers in a process underwater archaeologists refer to as the evolution of a shipwreck.¹² In stories, shipwrecks have been at the center of tales of loss, of going bust, of bankable plots, and even redemption. Shipwreck describes particular things, states of being, processes, and even people (the shipwrecker or wrecker, for example, who salvage shipwrecks). What one thinks, however, when one hears shipwreck is a function of who one is, where one lives, what one does, and when one hears it. They are, as one historian writes, contested terrain whose meanings are always contingent and contextual rather than inherent or timeless.¹³ Where the shipwrecked may only see loss, the wrecker spies gain. And yet, shipwreck always connotes a story that links people, place, and mishap. It is an adaptable yet generic narrative, one of Western Civilization’s master tropes.¹⁴ Shipwrecks—both as physical objects and as intellectual constructions—helped create the modern American beach.

Shipwrecks affected change because they were disasters—unexpected and consequential disruptions in the material, social, and cultural world.¹⁵ Tens of thousands of vessels wrecked on the coast of the United States during the nineteenth century, and while they were common, almost daily occurrences, individual wrecks on particular stretches of coastline remained unexpected. The farmer-fishermen who lived along the Jersey shore never knew when a vessel would wreck near their houses, but they knew all too well that somewhere on the American beach a shipwreck or two happened most days of the year. Whether they cost lives, made heroes, imperiled profits, or provided opportunities, shipwrecks disrupted the worlds of the shipwrecked and the communities they interacted with. Like all disasters, shipwrecks destroy and create. The Titanic disaster, for example, destroyed the largest moving object in the world and killed hundreds of people, but it also led to the creation of new regulations that made transatlantic travel markedly safer.¹⁶ This dialectic of disaster fundamentally shaped and defined modern American social, political, economic, and cultural institutions. Disasters, in other words, profoundly affected America’s physical and cultural landscape. Shipwrecks, like historic hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, and floods, played a prominent role in expanding the purview of the American state and redefining public and private realms. As laboratories of social reform, disasters enabled people in positions of power to make extraordinary changes in the name of necessity throughout American history.¹⁷ The tens of thousands of nineteenth-century coastal shipwrecks destroyed incalculable amounts of property and claimed untold lives. In so doing, they profoundly shaped ideas about the beach, ushering in an array of efforts by local, state, and federal governments as well as business and philanthropic groups to prevent and mitigate loss. Artists, authors, and tourists followed in their wake, catered to by entrepreneurs who reshaped the beach to meet the evolving needs of ever-growing throngs of visitors. Together, these diverse stakeholders pioneered the customs and habits of thought and action that would come to define the American beach.

Like shipwrecks, beaches are remarkably complicated. They are among the most dynamic environments on the planet and stubbornly resist efforts to quantify, chart, or define. While physical scientists might agree that the shoreline is characterized by dynamic equilibrium, few scientists, scholars, agencies, governments, or residents can settle on what exactly counts as the beach. For some, it extends hundreds of miles from the place where land meets water. For others, the beach is only a few hundred yards on either side of that ever-shifting line in the proverbial (and literal) sand.¹⁸ Historians are beginning to demonstrate how specific ideas about the beach are tied to particular times, places, and people. Indeed, more than one has drawn perceptive distinctions between the dynamic, natural shore and the engineered, anthropogenic coast and beach.¹⁹ Because we are interested in the American coast’s evolving cultural significance as well as the social networks that shaped it during the nineteenth century, this book eschews arbitrary definitions of beach in favor of a holistic cultural landscape approach. This approach is attentive to the human and the natural components of specific places and their generative interrelationships. It forefronts how the physical elements of a landscape (i.e., geology, geography, climate, and living resources) shape and in turn are shaped by its human elements (i.e., structures, objects, ideas, and activities). Change is central to maritime cultural landscapes, which as a theoretical construct offer a particularly useful way to conceptualize the dynamic complex of space, place, and the patterns of habit and thought among a broad range of historical actors.²⁰

We range far in the pages that follow, mapping a sprawling maritime cultural landscape that included farmers and fishermen, politicians and pundits, cultural producers and consumers, adventurous and armchair tourists, as well as disasters, heroes, and villains real and imagined. The beach we examine includes not only the sand dunes of New Jersey, but the granite halls of government, the counting houses of merchants, and the cozy parlors of homes across the country.²¹

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the American beach fit contemporaries’ definition of a frontier. The coastline was a limit and a boundary, a national border, and a site of furthest settlement. Frontier conditions characterized a landscape known for its sparse, thinly scattered parochial population; its isolation from emerging nodes of American life; and its status as a liminal space where different people and cultures converged, competed, and occasionally cooperated. Shipwrecks were at the heart of the three interrelated factors—maritime commerce, enlightened reform, and the search for national identity—that began to turn the new nation’s attention toward its eastern frontier. The federal government and urban humanitarian groups took the lead, focusing on the dynamic shoreline in an effort to make it safer for maritime commerce and shipwrecked sailors. At the same time newspaper editors, artists, authors, and other cultural producers brought ever-more tales of coastal shipwrecks into the homes and workplaces of Americans, familiarizing them with the shore and marine disaster through sensationalist narratives. Each of these groups endeavored to gain knowledge about the coast, to intellectually organize and cognitively map one of the most dynamic physical environments on earth—a necessary precursor to actually regulating and physically transforming it.

State-level efforts to regulate shipwreck rescue and salvage did the most to break down the isolation and frontier conditions that characterized the coast during the first decades of the nineteenth century. New York, New Jersey, and other states with wreck-prone coastlines codified ancient Wreck Laws in the decades after the American Revolution as they modernized state legal codes and attempted to control their eastern frontiers. Wreck laws worked on the ground by co-opting the authority of local elites who engineered local buy-in of the well-regulated littoral by making legal salvage more profitable than illegal plundering. As commissioners of wrecks or wreckmasters, they maintained order at isolated disasters, mobilized labor on a desolate frontier, and supervised the rescue and recovery of shipwrecked goods and people while balancing civic, business, and humanitarian duties. They operated under the umbrella of novel state wreck laws, but their effectiveness rested on their ability to mediate competing local and outside interests alongshore. Some failed. But on the whole, commissioners of wrecks tamed a wild frontier, integrating the beach into the framework of state authority through their personal management of coastal disaster.

Yet even as wreck laws regulated the actual beach, representations of the coast in American culture increasingly depicted an unregulated frontier inhabited by piratical wreckers who lured ships ashore for murder and plunder. The roots of this image lay in the coast’s notorious association with pirates, privateers, and wartime raids. But the veritable explosion in depictions of criminal wreckers in the 1830s was a direct consequence of the emerging national print culture, the expansion of coastal tourism, and a cultural milieu primed to consume violence. In fact, sensational stories of locals plundering shipwrecks were among the first widely distributed, highly visible accounts of the American beach, and they would remain touchstones of the coastal landscape for generations of Americans.

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, shipwrecks propelled three developments that fundamentally transformed the American beach: state regulation, private-sector investment, and the expansion of federal infrastructure. Efforts to prevent shipwrecks and mitigate their consequences, epitomized by the establishment of the United States Life-Saving Service (USLSS) in 1878, drove significant and sustained federal interventions that remade the physical landscape and recast popular perceptions of American beaches. Widely disseminated depictions of the successful, heroic USLSS surfmen in newspapers and periodicals helped domesticate the beach by bringing depictions of the beach into the homes and thoughts of a continental nation and by refashioning isolated seaside federal outposts into popular destinations. In the decades after the Civil War, lighthouses, mothballed coastal fortifications, and USLSS stations became important nodes in the nation’s growing leisure landscape. Development of a sophisticated professional marine salvage industry removed shipwrecks from the physical landscape and displaced narratives of piratical wreckers with accolades for professional engineers, leaving the beach cleared of flotsam (articles not deliberately thrown overboard) and jetsam (articles deliberately thrown overboard) and primed for modern tourists. Indeed, coastal shipwrecks facilitated the development of coastal tourism by reshaping representations of coastal people and places and by undergirding the infrastructure that transformed the beach into a pristine American playspace devoid of the detritus of past disasters.

In the late nineteenth century, savvy entrepreneurs and established businesspeople and industries commodified coastal shipwrecks, turning everyday disasters into mass spectacles. Thousands of spectators routinely traveled to witness the shipwrecked vessels and the industrial salvage operations that regularly saved wrecks. They went to the beach for many reasons—labor, leisure, edification—and they left with different memories and mementos. From the factory worker looking for an inexpensive day away from the city, to the middle-class parents seeking to show their children the technological marvels of the age, to the savvy local fishermen rowing daring spectators around a wreck for fifty cents, shipwreck spectacles embodied the complex, heterogeneous social milieu of the modern American beach. Ultimately, these spectacles became another way in which the sea, shore, and ultimately disasters were domesticated and commercialized. They also marked the culmination of a process of abstraction and integration that began with late eighteenth-century efforts to preserve life and property in the coastal frontier.

Just as the 1912 wreck of Titanic became the paradigmatic modern shipwreck, the coastal shipwreck became an anachronism. Two world wars militarized the coast, reducing the once-common shipwreck to a quaint accident. Ongoing navigation improvements and the modernization of maritime transportation industry simultaneously reduced the number of coastal shipwrecks. Instead of the shore being strewn with rusting hulks and rotting hulls, abandoned vessels massed in the backwaters of harbors and ports, until they too were removed, were destroyed, or just disappeared from view. In the end, coastal shipwrecks became salty tales of a distant maritime past and underwater sites to explore along the modern coast they helped to create.

CHAPTER ONE

The American Coastal Frontier

Sad is the scene,—despair frowns ’mid the wreck;

Hopeless, benumb’d,