Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins and the Uncanny 9463727701, 9789463727709

Citation preview

Sara A. Rich

Shipwreck Hauntography Underwater Ruins and the Uncanny

Shipwreck Hauntography

Maritime Humanities, 1400-1800: Cultures of the Sea Early modern oceans not only provided temperate climates, resources, and opportunities for commercial exchange, they also played a central role in cultural life. Increased exploration, travel, and trade, marked this period of history, and early modern seascapes were cultural spaces and contact zones, where connections and circulations occurred outside established centres of control and the dictates of individual national histories. Likewise, coastlines, rivers, and ports were all key sites for commercial and cultural exchange. Interdisciplinary in its approach, Maritime Humanities, 1400–1800: Cultures of the Sea publishes books that conceptually engage with issues of globalization, postcolonialism, eco-criticism, environmentalism, and the histories of science and technology. The series puts maritime humanities at the centre of a transnational historiographical scholarship that seeks to transform traditional land-based histories of states and nations by focusing on the cultural meanings of the early modern ocean. Series Editors: Claire Jowitt and John McAleer Advisory Board Members: Mary Fuller, Fred Hocker, Steven Mentz, Sebastian Sobecki, David J. Starkey, and Philip Stern

Shipwreck Hauntography Underwater Ruins & the Uncanny

Sara A. Rich

Amsterdam University Press

The publication of color images for this book is made possible by a grant from Coastal Carolina University. Research for this book has been supported by Coastal Carolina University, Appalachian State University, and the Maritime Archaeology Trust (PITN-GA-2013-607545).

Cover illustration: Hauntograph 6 / Magdalena 1: wrought iron cruciform reliquary with bones and shells threaded by gold wire (Sara Rich, 2019) Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 770 9 e-isbn 978 90 4854 382 3 doi 10.5117/9789463727709 nur 685 | 682 © S.A. Rich / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

For Jeremy, whose love bears with the chaos.



Table of Contents

Illustration List Preface: Hauntographies of Ordinary Shipwrecks

9 11

1. Resetting the Binary Bones 25 Legacy (Marigalante) 30 Liturgy (The Gresham Ship) 34 Litany (Santa María) 44 Liminality (The Nissia) 53 2. Broken Ship, Dead Ship 75 Ontology (The Yarmouth Roads) 77 Meontology (Holigost) 81 Deontology (Mary Rose) 84 Mereology (Argo and Ark) 94 3. Among the Tentative Haunters 115 Conversion (Terror and Erebus) 118 Inversion (Impregnable) 123 Delirium (Belle) 130 Desiderium (The Ribadeo) 134 4. Vibrant Corpses 149 Entropy (Nuestra Señora de los Remedios) 151 Negentropy (Magdalena) 158 Putrefaction (Sanchi) 165 Purification (Costa Concordia) 171 5. Macabre Simulacra 189 Exploration (Melckmeyt) 191 Exploitation (Thistlegorm) 195 Eschatology (Batavia) 199 Elegy (Bayonnaise) 209

Postface. On Underwater Séances and Punk Eulogies

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Complete Works Cited

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Index 263



Illustration List

Hauntograph 1: Nissia 1. Burned cow bones and adhesive (Sara Rich, 2019). 65 Hauntograph 2: Nissia 2. Burned cow bones and ash (Sara Rich, 2020).66 Hauntograph 3: Yarmouth Roads 1. Digital photographic collage (Sara Rich, 2016). Image credits: Maritime Archaeology Trust and the Isle of Wight Heritage 104 Service. Hauntograph 4: Yarmouth Roads 2. Digital photographic collage (Sara Rich, 2016). Image credits: Maritime Archaeology Trust and the Isle of Wight Heritage 105 Service. Hauntograph 5: Ribadeo 1. Cyanotype prints, cuttlefish-ink imprints on cloth, and fishnet fabric, draped by brass rivets on acrylic rods on found window, in order from top left to right, then bottom left to right (Sara Rich, 2017). Image credits: Miguel San 141 Claudio Santa Cruz and Raúl González Gallero. Hauntograph 6: Ribadeo 2. Watercolor on fabric and ink on paper (Sara Rich, 2017). Image credits: Miguel San 142 Claudio Santa Cruz. Hauntograph 7: Magdalena 1. Wrought-iron cross with bones and 178 shells threaded by gold wire (Sara Rich, 2019). Hauntograph 8: Magdalena 2. Glass and metal octagonal fixture containing bones and shard of beach glass sewn with gold thread onto blue velvet platform (Sara 178 Rich, 2018). Hauntograph 9: Magdalena 3. Lace and metal frame containing bone, wooden domino, and silver St. Christopher pendant (Sara Rich, 2018). 179 Hauntograph 10: Magdalena 4. Brass receptacle, bones, and rosary suspended between glass top and mirror platform by acrylic rods (Sara Rich, 2018). 179 Hauntograph 11: Magdalena 5. Brass lantern, rosary, and shell, with bones and glazed pottery sherd embedded in sand (Sara Rich, 2018). 180 Hauntograph 12: Bayonnaise 1. Collage and colored pencil drawing (Joy Carlson, 2019). 219

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Hauntograph 13: Bayonnaise 2. Glass bottle with shells, wood, and oil (Mercedez’ Carpenter, 2019). Hauntograph 14: Bayonnaise 3: Colored pencil drawing (Sarah Bartholomew, 2019). Hauntograph 15: Bayonnaise 4. Colored pencil drawing (Sarah Collins, 2019). Hauntograph 16: Bayonnaise 5. Colored pencil and marker drawing (Olivia Barbeau, 2019). Hauntograph 17: Bayonnaise 6. Mobile with shells, coral, bones, and fleur-de-lis print fabric sewn onto velvet-lined metal tray (Sara Rich, 2019).

219 219 219 219 220



Preface: Hauntographies of Ordinary Shipwrecks Abstract To preface the five chapters and postface to come, the role of shipwrecks in the modern imaginary is explored before examining the common ground between art and archaeology. The term hauntography is defined as a creative process that combines the methods of Bogost’s alien phenomenology—ontography, metaphorism, and carpentry—to attempt comprehension and communication of an object that is absent and present, bygone and enduring. To encounter a shipwreck underwater is a brush with the uncanny, the eerie, and the weird, but also the sublime and wondrous. Hauntography works to edge closer toward an ontological recognition of an inscrutable entity. Beginning with a personal apologia of sorts, the preface concludes by summarizing the arguments and evidence to follow. Keywords: alterity; blue humanities; hauntology; nautical archaeology; object-oriented ontology; sci-art

Sometimes, students and colleagues at conferences ask me how a farm girl from rural Kansas grew up to study shipwrecks. It’s a reasonable question, but to answer it requires going back in time a little—first a generation, then a geological era. Despite having also grown up on that same farm, my father was a Seabee in the US Navy, and given that I was born on a Virginia Navy base before moving back to my family’s homestead in Kansas as a toddler, I spent the first couple years of my life breathing salty air. Maybe this natal exposure to oceanic natrium even led me back to the shores of the Atlantic, on either side of which I’ve been living for the last several years.1 1 This book was written on occupied Waccamaw territory. My thanks to Waccamaw Chief Harold Hatcher and Vice Chief Cheryl Cail for their friendship, and for tolerating one more settler.

Rich, S.A., Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins & the Uncanny. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463727709_pre

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But despite all this skirting of the Atlantic, there’s also an undeniable—if latent—oceanic force deep within the prairie. This force silently swells up from the vast flatness of the limestone. Riddled with monstrous fossils, the calcareous limestone was formed in the Mesozoic era when Kansas was an inland sea. Where there once was saltwater and unimaginable creatures in it, there now grow tall grasses and grains that, while concealing more imaginable creatures, undulate against a seemingly infinite horizon. In Kansas, uncannily, the ancient sea is ever-present. Nineteenth-century settlers were well aware of its lingering conveyance when they constructed wind wagons, propelled by high plains gales instead of oxen, to sail across the long dried-up ocean in contraptions of wood, iron, and cloth. But when the wind wagons wrecked, and surely they did, what happened to their remains? Was the metal cut away and recast, the wood burnt in the fireplace of some sod house, the sailcloth cut into dresses for young settler children? Or was the wreck abandoned to other dissolutive forces of entropy, of which plains people are all too well aware? I like to think of the litters of jackrabbits birthed within an overturned hull, the red-tailed hawks who perched at the crux of splintered mast and yardarm while hunting prairie dogs and field mice, the coyotes who burrowed and denned beneath broken timbers, the termites who slowly devoured the xylem, leaving only metal bolts and scraps of dusty sailcloth beneath undulating waves of switchgrass. Wrecks, even dry ones, are such fertile things. And they are fertile things to think through and with. Steve Mentz recently wrote something that resonates in part with the way I’m thinking about shipwrecks as more than just failed ships. A shipwreck is that, of course, but because of that failure, it is also a life-affirming encounter with death: Being in the world means living inside shipwreck. […] A shipwreck ecology, however, needn’t be a place only of horror or nostalgia. There’s ecstasy in the waters too. Not the relief of having survived or the satisfaction of figuring it out: those things don’t last. But an intellectual tingle that ripples out into the physical world, a willingness to confront the inhumanity of our environment, and an appetite for experience that doesn’t mind getting wet.2

As researchers studying vessels of oceanic exploration, global trade, and maritime empire, one of the greatest challenges in nautical archaeology is 2 Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity, p. 166.

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getting past the water. We have even created algorithmic filters to eliminate the presence of water from photographic images taken down there.3 But despite physical and mathematical invasions, shipwrecks remain esoteric, as they lie in the dark, sinking further into primeval mud and coarse sand, oceanic currents gradually and violently ripping them limb from limb. Scientific attempts are often made to rescue the wrecks from themselves; yet more often than not, they remain out of reach, inaccessible. Their recalcitrance is haunting, and their ontologies unfathomable. Shipwreck Hauntography aims to account for the inscrutable ontological realities of watery wreckage by rendering these ruinous places as uniquely capable of dismantling the murky, fluid boundaries between past and present, sacred and secular, ‘nature’ and culture, and particularly life and death. These quiet, broken vessels that exist both beyond and despite our access are presented as liminal objects that generate a sense (a tingling one at that) of some especially elusive elements of reality that don’t seem real but are indeed. A close encounter with a shipwreck in its underwater realm is a brush with the eerie, horrific, and uncanny—but also the wondrous, ecstatic, and sublime. Not surprisingly then, we humans remain simultaneously drawn to and disgusted by shipwrecks, just as we feel so ambivalently about the mysterious oceanic realm in which millions of them reside, with more added to their numbers all the time. From the Paleolithic to the present day, we have been mesmerized by oceans and, at the same time, terrified of them. Shipwrecks and drowned landscapes are two examples of how oceans tantalize and destroy; yet vast bodies of water also symbolize and even induce human health and liberty. Volatility and vitality are shown to be two sides of the same coin, tossed hopefully into a psychoanalytic wishing well. To more thoroughly explore how shipwrecks can epitomize that longstanding human ambivalence toward oceans and seas, an experimental research approach emerged that, while pursuing negotiations between bodies of water and those of flesh, also establishes a stronger interface between maritime archaeology, critical theory, and art practice. In methodological terms, archaeology and art share a great deal in common, including an emphasis on materiality; experiential, analytical, and reflexive research practices; experimentation; digital and analogue techniques; and object exhibition in gallery or museum spaces. But exhibition produces a tension in space between public and private that bears down on interpretation. Conceived as underwater cultural heritage, shipwrecks are 3

CUVI, SeaBetter: https://seabetter.com/; last accessed 14 May 2020.

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public secrets harbored in watery beds and pried out to be told, visualized, experienced, supposedly reminding us of further ambiguity, of accessible secrets and mysteries revealed. Yet this prodigal return to the public gaze closes the gap of wonder, and in so doing, demolishes the most valuable of shipwreck treasures: the potential for a profound confrontation with the uncanny. Moving away from the capitalist networks of heritage and thinking instead of shipwrecks as discrete—if dispersing—objects, the idea of an ‘ontograph’ comes to mind, as described by philosophers Graham Harman and Ian Bogost. An ontograph depicts, in whatever format, the ‘way of being’ of a given object, whether cloud, matchstick, or shipwreck; or as Harman puts it, ‘ontography maps the basic landmarks and fault lines in the universe of objects’.4 Bogost further describes ontography as ‘embracing messiness’, another quality that artistic and archaeological processes share.5 These broad def initions of a philosophical neologism invite a creative cataloguing of site components that may or may not be aesthetically pleasing in and of themselves but that foster a movement toward a conceptual, imaginative experience of a thing, normally hidden or withdrawn. Etymologically, a ‘thing’, from the Old English þing, is a gathering, a séance of matter or a matter under discussion. Things gather underwater, and underwater things, like shipwrecks, are ghosts in a flooded and forgotten storm cellar. They are secluded to the point that they exist in a kind of ontological void, where the lack of a sense of presence leads to a lack of perceived being—in Derridian terms, they exist hauntologically. As further explained in Chapter 2, and exemplified throughout the following pages, a hauntograph imagines the uncanny spatial and temporal ambiguities and tensions of a liminal object that is both present and absent, both bygone and enduring. Put simply, a hauntograph is an ontograph for the revenant. Shipwreck Hauntography was developed out of questions that arose as I was researching, illustrating, and writing my two previous books on ships, shipbuilding, and shipwrecks.6 Over the last couple decades, several scholars have suggested that there is a dire lack of critical theory in the 4 Harman, Quadruple Object, p. 125. 5 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, pp. 38, 59. 6 Rich, Cedar Forests, Cedar Ships; Rich, Nayling, Momber, and Crespo Solana, Shipwrecks and Provenance. More specifically, this research agenda emerged while working as a postdoctoral fellow on the project ForSEAdiscovery: Forest Resources for Iberian Empires—Ecology and Globalization in the Age of Discovery (PITN-GA-2013-607545). My thanks to all project directors and fellows for stimulating conversations that have resulted in much of the work presented here.

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f ield of nautical archaeology which contributes to its separation from land-based archaeology.7 The work of nautical archaeologists, painstaking though it may be, does not tend to factor in to larger discussions within academic archaeology, and vice versa. To illustrate, for the last three years (2017-2019) at the Theoretical Archaeology Group, which is North America’s leading conference on cutting-edge theoretical approaches to the study of material culture and past lifeways, there has been a range of one to four archaeologists presenting maritime research compared to 40 to 147 presenting terrestrial archaeology. In 2016, when TAG Europe was held at the University of Southampton (UK), which is home to one of the world’s top research programs in maritime archaeology, there were only two papers on nautical archaeology out of a total of 229. The apparent lack of introspection among archaeologists whose work is underwater has contributed to the tapering of the study of shipwrecks so that enquiries are limited primarily to themes of cultural heritage, (re)construction (actual or virtual), and trade routes. This is not to suggest that these are invalid approaches, but the limitations that such narrow pathways present have become all too clear. Although I have been practicing archaeology underwater for twelve years and counting, it was due to my previous academic training in art history and studio art that I began to notice how, ironically, many archaeologists are not digging quite as deeply as they could be. It seems that a more theoretical, more critical perspective on shipwrecks is somewhat overdue and could help the niche disciplines of maritime and nautical archaeology transcend their self-imposed confines while at the same time bring actual, real wrecks into the many important conversations underway in related fields in the humanities and social sciences. To provide a case in point, a recent issue of the journal Australian Humanities Review devoted a special section to ‘Uncanny Objects in the Anthropocene’, which included several papers devoted to oceanic objects.8 Despite the very active field of maritime archaeology in Australia and the presence along its coastlines of numerous uncanny shipwrecks with bearing on the Anthropocene, none of the oceanic objects represented in the special issue was a wreck per se. This case is made here not to call out the editors, but to call out maritime archaeologists for not better communicating our 7 For a recent assessment, see Rich and Campbell, ‘Collapse, Cataclysm, and Eruption’, in press. 8 The special section, edited by Hannah Stark, Katrina Schlunke, and Penny Edmonds, is found in Issue 63, November 2018. It is freely available online here: http://australianhumanitiesreview. org/2018/12/02/issue-63-november-2018/; last accessed 24 May 2021.

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research, fascinating and relevant as it is, more frequently beyond the Journal of Maritime Archaeology and the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. Given the above, it’s not altogether surprising that, while there have been recent concerted efforts in Europe and North America to integrate art and archaeology, this integration has not really been extended to archaeology underwater.9 So in addition to examining critical issues related to shipwrecks and their study, Shipwreck Hauntography also explores what else art-making processes can contribute to this kind of research, beyond just illustrating our texts. Science and art have not always been estranged. Increased naturalism in the art of the late Middle Ages was an essential factor that prepared the ground for the emergence of Europe’s scientific revolution.10 European colonial voyages often consisted of a naturalist who catalogued, and thereby came to know, flora and fauna by drawing detailed depictions of specimens.11 For these naturalists, the communicative value of the illustrated herbarium was of secondary importance to its epistemological value. We still refer to such drawings as floral studies or anatomical studies for this very reason that the act of drawing something is a way of learning it. But contemporary sci-art movements are primarily oriented toward translating scientific truths into aesthetic phenomena via visualization or sonification. Given the historical precedent, I see potential for more diverse kinds of integration. More than merely a method of communicating abstract scientific processes, data, and phenomena, art is in itself a way of thinking, and thinking through. In making each of the hauntographs published here, the aim was first to use the process to work through a problem specific to an Early Modern shipwreck featured in each chapter.12 Processes included burning and breaking raw bones, overlaying semi-transparent digital images, printmaking with cyanotypes, building reliquaries, and stringing together objects to form a mobile. As will hopefully be clear enough in each chapter, the processes—or what precedes the finished product—mimic the methods 9 For a set of recent examples, see papers in the 2017 special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, volume 4 (no. 2), edited by Antonia Thomas, Daniel Lee, Ursula Frederick, and Carolyn White, titled: Forum: Beyond Art/Archaeology. It is freely available online here: https:// journal.equinoxpub.com/JCA/issue/view/1038; last accessed 24 May 2021. 10 E.g., Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 15. 11 See, e.g., Smith, ‘Art, Science, and Visual Culture’, pp. 83-100. 12 Apparently I am in good company because, unbeknownst to me at the time of composing this project, themes of shipwreck have had a recent resurgence in contemporary art practice due to the conceptual relationship between salvage and salvation (Cocker, ‘Salvaging a Romantic Trope’, pp. 218-233). My gratitude is extended to the anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to the incredibly helpful edited volume in which this work appears.

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of working through the relevant problems exemplified by each specific shipwreck, which in turn mimics the issues raised in each chapter’s thesis. While every hauntographic process represents a thinking-through of the problems of each chapter—and each chapter’s corresponding wreck—the hauntograph is also meant to act as a representation of the unrepresentable shipwreck itself. This threefold process of making is called simply hauntography. When I say that these hauntographs ‘represent’ the unrepresentable shipwreck itself, it is admittedly more complicated than that. Unlike Early Modern naturalists and contemporary excavation artists, I’m not drawing the shipwreck or a piece of its cargo, nor am I mapping, per se, a particular wreck site. The hauntograph is not meant to render visual likenesses or be recognizable even to someone else on my dive team who knows that shipwreck as intimately as I do, or more so. Hauntography is more akin to Bogost’s alien phenomenology, of which ontography, described above, is one method toward creating a secret, speculative window into an object’s way of being, and its way of being a part of other objects, while also composed of still other objects.13 Bogost’s second method—metaphorism—uses weird analogy (‘shipwrecks are ghosts in a flooded and forgotten storm cellar’) to maximize possible characterizations of object ‘experiences’, or how nonhuman (or rather, extra-human) objects relate to their environs: in other words, how they exist ecologically. These possible constructions are endless because we cannot know with certitude reality at all, even that of ourselves, let alone Others, and least of all extra-human Others. Reality is ultimately elusive, despite its solid existence.14 Stating that reality is elusive is not at all the same as stating that reality is subjective. Instead of narcissistically prioritizing subjective experience, recognizing elusive reality gives us all the more reason to edge closer, to sidle up, because these are lessons not in vanity but in humility, leveling supposed existential hierarchies of living over dead, animate over inanimate, human over everything else in existence. Bogost refers to his third method as carpentry, which ‘entails making things that explain how things make their world’.15 Carpentry moves beyond the confines of language and writing to engender constructions that embody praxis as theory, that manifest the conceptual connections 13 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology; see also Bryant, Onto-Cartography, pp. 62-74; and Chapter 2. 14 Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, pp. 225-226. 15 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, p. 93.

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between the real. At its best, hauntography attempts to combine these generative methods of discerning, distorting, and displaying the alien ambitions of things. And my hauntographs in particular are efforts at a thingly reorientation toward ‘a world of the dark flux, annihilative transformation, interruptive existence, and perpetual extinction’.16 Because shipwrecks are so unrepresentable, so inaccessible, so nonhuman despite human origins, they are ideal for testing all kinds of theoretical, practical, and existential limits. In recalling this near existential void in which shipwrecks reside, there is another overarching attribute of the following pages of which the reader will soon become aware. While my training in art is readily apparent in this book, elements from my doctoral studies in ancient Near Eastern religions also bubble up to the surface at times. And so, having learned from Gilgamesh who learned the hard way, this book might be summarized as a critique of eternity. I am quite comfortable with the conclusion that the eerie hollow of nonexistence is the norm in our universe and that existence—and life in particular—is, to borrow Wittgenstein’s word, miraculous.17 However, seeing existence as the only miracle is not a theistic view but rather one that celebrates uncertainty and coincidence, temporality and finitude, the supernova before the black hole, the minority of measurable matter and energy against the overwhelming and unknowable dark kinds. In researching this book and what I call the ‘resurrection model’ of shipwreck archaeology, I kept circling back to some troubling aspects of Western theism, particularly in the Protestant branches of Christianity that formed in the Early Modern era with the influence of Martin Luther and John Calvin. Oddly, perhaps, the common thread of the godlike sense of entitlement to eternity has tremendously impacted the academic treatment of shipwrecks, particularly those of the Early Modern era. But as Whitehead and many others since have pointed out, the scientific project of the European Renaissance was a theological project at heart:18 namely, an attempt to infiltrate the mind of God and to usher in a return to Eden, conjoined endeavors made possible by the divine principle, the glorious gift of having been created in the ‘image of God’ (imago dei). With that in mind, it may not altogether be surprising 16 Rosen, Speculative Annihilationism, p. 87. 17 On Wittgenstein’s miracle (Das künstlerische Wunder ist, daß es die Welt gibt. Daß es das gibt, was es gibt—something to the effect of ‘The only artistic miracle is that the world is; that there is what there is’.), see Wittgenstein, Notebooks, p. 86; Zemach, ‘Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of the Mystical’, pp. 38-57; Hepburn, Wonder, p. 140. 18 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, pp. 12-14; cf. Taylor, After God. This point will be expanded upon more significantly in the first two chapters.

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that nautical archaeologists, despite being practitioners of a relatively new discipline, bear along with our science the Early Modern legacies of theological imperialism and patriarchy, even if unwittingly. Along similar—and overlapping—lines, I have lamented previously that the global spread of Judeo-Christian ethics, beginning in the Early Modern period, has been a detriment to our extra-human neighbors composing, at least for the time being, the vast majority of this planet.19 The divine imperative issued twice in Genesis—once to Adam and once to Noah—for humans to ‘fill the earth and subdue it’ seems to be well on its way to fulfillment. These concerns with anthropocentric immortality, utopia, and ecocide are very much related and are at the backbone—or the keel, if you will—of each chapter’s thesis, each of which is bookended and woven together with a passage carefully selected from Luce Irigaray’s collection of watery aphorisms in Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. But by way of introduction to the individual yet overlapping arguments in the chapters to follow, let us first refer to Derek Walcott’s poem, ‘The Sea Is History.’ This excerpt poignantly metaphorizes each chapter’s anti-colonial sentiments, with the recognition that Early Modern shipwrecks are the remains of broken machines formerly harnessed into the ecocidal and genocidal agendas of colonialism. Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that gray vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History. … Sir, it is locked in them sea sands out there past the reef’s moiling shelf, where the men-o’-war floated down; strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself. It’s all subtle and submarine, through colonnades of coral, past the gothic windows of sea fans to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed, blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

19 Rich, Cedar Forests, Cedar Ships, p. 88; contra Keller, Political Theology of the Earth, p. 76.

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and these groined caves with barnacles pitted like stone are our cathedrals, and the furnace before the hurricanes: Gomorrah.20

Like Walcott’s guide into the deadly depths, I invite the reader to ‘strop on these goggles’, for even though they distort the view of reality, it’s the only way to edge closer to the ruination and wreckage. To evaluate the extent of the violent Early Modern legacy in nautical archaeology, the first chapter, ‘Resetting the Binary Bones’, situates shipwrecks within the greater discourse of ruins more broadly. Architectural ruins are popularly configured as places that confound the distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. But recently, this distinction itself has become increasingly challenged and has been blamed, justifiably, as the ideological basis for justifying all manners of socio-environmental injustices. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s theory of agrilogistics, Jason W. Moore’s Capitalocene, and Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of Lutheran immortality, this chapter suggests that ruins—especially those underwater—demonstrate the categorical and causal problems with the ‘severing’ of humanity from the rest of earthly existence, one of which is that the separation of human culture from ‘nature’ cannot allow for the return of broken anthropogenic objects to some kind of autonomous mode of existence, freed from their creator. Shipwrecks exemplify this capacity for shaking off the telos imposed by self-empowered humans onto nearly all things within reach. Attempts to force ruins back within the reign of the anthropos disclose that, in the end, the valuation of certain kinds of ‘heritage’ is indicative of an unfulfilled Western longing for the restoration of Edenic utopia, where death and decay—signified most egregiously by water—are overpowered at last. The two hauntographs for this chapter focus on the Nissia shipwreck, an example of ‘underwater cultural heritage’ that has so thoroughly dissipated, and which rests in a liminal state between Turkish and Greek Cyprus, that it has mostly succeeded in shaking off the confines of its anthropogenic function in order to become something else, perhaps seeking autonomy through its material redistribution. Building on top of the previous chapter’s ruins, Chapter 2, ‘Broken Ship, Dead Ship’, calls into question the archaeological approach toward 20 Walcott, ‘The Sea Is History’.

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shipwrecks as though they are dead ships, passively awaiting human intervention to rescue them from oceanic annihilation. Given the long-standing notions of ships as bodies and of seawater as corrupting and demonic, the ‘savior-scholar’ is deontologically compelled to raise the shipwreck from its watery grave. The presumed ontological rift between the ship and the wreck is reconsidered through a close reading of Heidegger’s ‘tool analysis’ alongside the principle of strange mereology from object-oriented philosophy. With Catherine Keller’s concept of ‘tehomophobia’, the chapter concludes that the ship/wreck rift, as understood by contemporary scholars, is actually a symptom, correspondent to a more primordial fragmentation: in ancient Western mythology from Babylon to the Bible, the separation of salt from fresh water preceded the confinement of oceans so that dry land might triumphantly emerge. The ancient identification of oceans as the feminine, chaotic place of the past and the dead lies in contrast to the masculinized and terrestrial realm of the future and the living. This chapter’s hauntographs feature the shipwreck at Yarmouth Roads, which exemplifies the tendency for scientists to focus their resurrective efforts on bodies that have resisted the dissolutive powers of the seas, perhaps a latent manifestation of the Christian idea that the holiest bodies do not decay. Those that have decayed, like the Yarmouth Roads, are susceptible only to periodic interference; even so, scientific instruments like tape measures and scaffolds are left behind like offerings at a shrine. The third chapter, ‘Among the Tentative Haunters’, explains the encounter that must occur between the ‘savior-scholar’ and the shipwreck prior to the latter’s resurrection by the former. Diving archaeologists must be willing and able to transcend the limits defined by our own bodies, and this chapter suggests that the motives behind such sacrifice might be found in the Biblical texts that name God as the Divine Architect who confines the oceans only to destroy them altogether before ushering forth the utopia of New Jerusalem. Feminist psychoanalysis further identifies the oceans with the womb, a powerful realm that inverts the logic of the masculine and dry, creating the Unheimlich (‘uncanny’) from the Heimlich. In order to overcome the uncanniness of this place, where even sense perception is turned inside out, divers must rely on ‘dystopian phenomenology’ to make sense from the dangers of nonsense. Compelled to overpower watery depths and deaths alike, scientists delivering the shipwreck from the unholy womb of the earth position themselves in much the same way as the colonizing conquistadors of the Early Modern period, driven by the joint desire to control the oceans and reestablish utopia from dystopia. The contemporary manifestation of such desires can be seen in the deliverance of the wreck

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from the sea and its eternal preservation in the microcosm of earthly order that is the museum, thereby fulfilling the Biblical prophecy so deeply rooted in Western science, which is itself a function of Christian theophilosophy. Derived from the philosophy of Michel Serres, the hauntographs of the wrecked galleon at Ribadeo illustrate how oceanic-induced dystopian phenomenology can include alternative senses that more humbly negotiate with the water rather than relying on vain attempts to dominate it through technological prowess. Chapter 4, ‘Vibrant Corpses’, explores an alternative to the ship-body metaphor that was so prevalent in Early Modern thought and which I suggest remains so latent in contemporary scientific practice. A Spanish seafarer’s assertion of his ship as a wretched city seems to foreshadow Michel Foucault’s much later claim that a ship is the ultimate example of a heterotopia. This chapter suggests that the heterotopian, holobiontic qualities of a ship do not change when it becomes a wreck; instead, they become even more pronounced, even while the tragic death blows of shipwreck nurture new lives that colonize the wreckage underwater. This trajectory from entropy to negentropy changes, however, when the shipwreck in question is a modern one, burning and carrying fossil fuels and covered in plastics made from them. When these ships wreck, as they often do, they create undead zones that surreptitiously snuff out the same lives trying to inhabit the ruins—like haunted houses that lure penniless young couples only to destroy them and their progeny. These modern wrecks make it clear that it is not oceans who are the corrupting force but human activity that corrupts oceans, poisoning Earth’s generative womb. These shipwrecks now function as distress signals that call on scholars, if we are to insist on acting as saviors, to prioritize modern vessels for purification, before the putrefaction goes too far. The process of entropy before negentropy and putrefaction before purification is represented in the hauntographs of the wrecked Magdalena. Each hauntograph is a reliquary consisting of broken, fragmentary objects that recall the certainty of death while signaling a new collective, a persistent transition into another phase of existence. The f ifth and f inal chapter, ‘Macabre Simulacra’, identif ies the new trend in nautical archaeology of creating 3D and VR tours of shipwreck sites as yet another form of resurrection practiced by the savior-scholar. This practice, however, is particularly insidious in that it is supposed to encourage public engagement with maritime heritage, but ultimately, it gives the user merely another method to rapidly consume the past while promising that ‘exploration’ can be achieved by oneself and without the expenditure of movement. Gaston Bachelard, Susan Stewart, Paul Virilio,

Preface: Hauntogr aphies of Ordinary Shipwreck s

23

and Walter Benjamin have all cautioned against the reduction of vastness, or original objects inhabiting specific spacetimes, to easily consumable miniatures, yet archaeologists have not yet heeded their words of caution, enabling a slip from contact with the sublime into shoddy solipsism. And further, as Jean Baudrillard has notoriously exclaimed, virtual shipwrecks are not shipwrecks at all. They are mere simulacra, copies of something that never actually existed as it is being presented. Shying away from the complexity of actual reality, the digital imagery is generally either devoid of the tragic nature of shipwreck, or it commodifies that historic tragedy into clickbait. And in contrast to claims of democratization, popular dry dives on shipwrecks offer to resurrect history, but it is only the history of the ‘Great Man’ that is really up for reanimation. Hauntographs of the Bayonnaise, most of which were created by my students at Coastal Carolina University, offer wonder as an antidote to the gimmicky fetishization of historic tragedy seen in digital shipwreck resurrections. Wonder and its kin, along with the anarchist archaeologist’s faith in community, are further explored in the postface for their potential to perceive shipwrecks in new ways that embrace finitude and autonomy, and that, in so doing, defy the Early Modern savior-scholar model of nautical archaeology. The critiques in these pages are forceful and infused with a sense of urgency. Because, by extension of these arguments, extinction is what is at stake, I had initially conceived of this book as a manifesto of sorts. But as my grandmother used to say, in her warm, viscous drawl, ‘You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar’. So I have aimed to temper the more volatile sentiments with lyricism and to imbue throughout these pages the very sense of wonder that is explicitly invoked in the concluding chapter as an antidote to the current systems, begun in full force in the Early Modern period, that are now failing us all. As active participants of Earth among all its biogenic, anthropogenic, and geogenic objects, we are now learning the extent to which we continue to collide with increasingly desperate endeavors at survival. Dissolving mirages of resurrection and immortality, existence is the only miracle.

Works Cited Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology: Or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Bryant, Levi R. Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

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Cocker, Emma. ‘Salvaging a Romantic Trope: The Conceptual Resurrection of Shipwreck in Recent Art Practice’. In Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day, edited by Carl Thompson, 218-235. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. Winchester: Zero Books, 2011. Hepburn, R.W. Wonder and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighbouring Fields. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984. Keller, Catherine. A Political Theology of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Mentz, Steve. Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550-1719. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam, 1984. Rich, Sara A. Cedar Forests, Cedar Ships: Allure, Lore and Metaphor in the Mediterranean Near East. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2017. Rich, Sara A., and Peter B. Campbell. ‘Collapse, Cataclysm, and Eruption: Alien Archaeologies for the Anthropocene’. In Contemporary Philosophy for Maritime Archaeology: Flat Ontologies, Oceanic Thought, and the Anthropocene, edited by Sara A. Rich and Peter B. Campbell, in press. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Rich, Sara A., Nigel Nayling, Garry Momber, and Ana Crespo Solana. Shipwrecks and Provenance: In-Situ Timber Sampling Protocols with a Focus on Wrecks of the Iberian Shipbuilding Tradition. Oxford: Access Archaeology, 2018. Rosen, Matt. Speculative Annihilationism: The Intersection of Archaeology and Extinction. Winchester: Zero Books, 2019. Smith, Pamela H. ‘Art, Science, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe’. Isis 91.1 (2006): 83-100. Thomas, Antonia, Daniel Lee, Ursula Frederick, and Carolyn White, eds. Forum: Beyond Art/Archaeology. Special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 4.2 (2017): 121-256. Walcott, Derek. ‘The Sea Is History’. The Paris Review 74 (Fall/Winter 1978); https:// www.theparisreview.org/poetry/7020/the-sea-is-history-derek-walcott. Last accessed 21 February 2021. Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press, 1967 [1925]. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Notebooks 1914-1916. Translated by. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1961. Zemach, Eddy. ‘Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of the Mystical’. The Review of Metaphysics 18.1 (1964): 38-57.

1.

Resetting the Binary Bones Abstract Early Modern shipwrecks may seem unrelated to contemporary ecocide, but prior to wreckage, they were the mechanisms of European colonialism that portended industrialization and neoliberalism. But now, being broken, and having broken free from their utilitarian, sociocultural functions, wrecked ships open insights into the false nature/culture dichotomy in relation to common ideas of heritage generally and ruins particularly. In so doing, preservationist agendas for underwater cultural heritage are exposed as a continuation of the same anthropocentric logic underlying quests for utopia and immortality that first sent colonizing crusaders across the Atlantic in 1492. The ontological particulars of the eighteenthcentury Nissia shipwreck, an Ottoman armed merchantman off the coast of Cyprus, exemplify why arbitrary conceptual borderlines are better left in dissolution. Keywords: anthropocentrism; agrilogistics; nautical archaeology; new materialism; dark ecology; Nissia shipwreck

From this ‘yes’ of her flesh that is always given and proffered to suit your eternity, you draw your infinite reserves of veils and sails, of wings and flight… Of sublimation and dissimulation. For this flesh that is never spoken—either by you or by her—remains a ready source of credulity for your fantasies.21

This book hopes to find its place among the growing body of literature that challenges the conceptual dualisms established in European Renaissance thought and which, through processes of colonialism and neocolonialism, have impacted human behavioral ethics on a global scale. The old binary bones are deserving of such contention. The ecological consequences of 21 Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 33.

Rich, S.A., Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins & the Uncanny. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463727709_ch01

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dualistic thinking so prevalent in Western discourse, of course, could not likely have been prognosticated by Kant or Descartes, whose separations of mind and body have reverberated into the rifting of existence itself into a series of antonyms. Even so, these philosophers’ dialectics of bifurcation, in combination with the unique missionary quality of Western culture and the Enlightenment metaphor of Earth as machine, have contributed enormously to the ecological crisis that some humans have been inflicting upon everyone composing Earth’s biomass. Early Modern shipwrecks may seem to have little to do with any of this, but prior to wreckage, they were the mechanisms of European colonialism and the globalization that portended contemporary neoliberalism.22 And yet, this book is neither analysis nor narration of those mechanisms—not the galleons, frigates, caravels, and carracks, nor the conquistadors, crusaders, and pilgrims sailing them. This book is not about the ships really at all; it is about their wreckage. And yet, the ship and its wreck are one and the same, in the way that a vestigial organ is still an organ even though it outlives—or resists—its original telos. There is a strange loop at work in the way that shipwrecks have traditionally been regarded by scholars. To follow this loop is to ‘trace the specter of religion in ostensibly secular culture’, but this loop is strange because it is less a return than a haunting: ‘Religion does not return, because it never really goes away; to the contrary, religion haunts society, self, and culture even—perhaps especially—when it seems to be absent’.23 The era of widespread anthropocentrism, a product of Renaissance theophilosophy, began in the Early Modern period of Europe, the era that also produced transoceanic colonizing missions. In turn, the increased traffic in global sea lanes produced ever greater numbers of shipwrecks scattered across the planet, starting with Christopher Columbus’s La Santa María, which ran aground Ayiti (modern Haiti) on Christmas Day in 1492. Interpreting the shipwreck as divine providence, Columbus claimed the island for Spain and renamed it Hispaniola as he began enacting his mission of forced conversion and labor. As fellow inheritors of the humanistic tradition of Early Modern Europe, we seem to be caught in this cycle of anthropocentrism designed by our ideological forebears and continually reinforced by our own scholarship. It is only with great diff iculty that we can escape the Narcissan temptation, not to gaze lovingly into the reflection, but to look without bothering to see beyond our foregrounded 22 Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity, pp. 2, 75. 23 Taylor, After God, p. 132; cf. Dawson, Religion, p. 18.

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selves.24 In this tradition, to see the human self is to see God, and so, caught in this weird, myopic regression, even agnostic scholars of shipwreck concentrate on the human by restoring the ship before the wreck, or at least before its disappearance from the human horizon. For example, in the history of art, we can detect ‘an aesthetic reluctance to penetrate the surface’, in that most artists of wrecked ships display them just prior to slipping below the waves, and the subject matter is often symbolic, selected intentionally to stoke nationalism or its critique.25 In the field of literary studies, written accounts composed by survivors of wrecking events have been analyzed to revise the usual narratives of empire as experienced by English, Spanish, and Portuguese contributors to global expansion.26 More often, though, shipwrecks are scrutinized by archaeologists, who generally consider their physical remains in order to achieve one of three ends: assigning a cultural and historical context to the assemblage in the interest of heritage; establishing ancient and historical trade networks; or reconstructing the ship from the wreck, either actually or virtually.27 Philosophers have also considered shipwrecks, analyzing the ‘repertory of this nautical metaphorics’ to include ‘coasts and islands, harbors and the high seas, reefs and storms, shallows and calms, sail and rudder, helmsmen and anchorages, compass and astronomical navigation, lighthouses and pilots’.28 Despite the litany of wet forces and salty objects, the philosophical focus on shipwrecking is also ironically located on the sea’s surface, not at its depths. For Hans Blumenberg, placing the event where it is most visible to human eyes is necessary to determine why a terrestrial species would prefer to imagine its overall condition—its entire existence—in the symbolic terms of the sea voyage.

24 For an extended analysis of the mirror metaphor used in Early Modern philosophy regarding the subject-object dichotomy, see Dupré, Passage to Modernity, pp. 79-80. 25 Donovan, ‘What Lies Beneath’, p. 151. 26 E.g., Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity; Blackmore, Manifest Perdition; analyses of literary accounts of shipwreck in the Greco-Roman world can be found in Dunsch, ‘Describe nunc Tempestatem’, pp. 42-59. 27 E.g., Bass, Archaeology Under Water; A History of Seafaring Based on Underwater Archaeology; Archaeology Beneath the Sea; Muckelroy, Maritime Archaeology; Babits and Van Tilburg, eds., Maritime Archaeology; Gould, ed., Archaeology and the Social History of Ships; Steffy, Wooden Ship Building and the Interpretation of Shipwrecks; Catsambis, Ford, and Hamilton, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Maritime Archaeology; Adams and Rönnby, eds., Interpreting Shipwrecks. A valiant attempt to transcend this trend in maritime archaeology can be found in Van De Noort, North Sea Archaeologies. 28 Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, p. 7.

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But a literally superficial focus on shipwrecks at the surface, or as a mere means to an end of some topside entanglements, obscures what else they are. Look deeper into that image in the mirror, and see beyond the human. Objects are right here, closer even than they appear, and they are not to be trusted with their autonomy, which only promises to wreck the hierarchies, the orderliness, and the utilitarianism of the human-centered cosmos that we moderns designed for ourselves and imposed upon everyone else. Being broken, and having broken free from their sociocultural functions, shipwrecks are entanglements of above and below, past and present, sacred and profane, and especially life and death. In their denial of human access and telos, the autonomy of brokenness is ‘groundless and hence an-archic’.29 Their persistent existence poses the question of what freedom means for nonhuman objects made by humans for humans, because upon sinking, ships transcend the dangerous mentality of a human culture in opposition to some pre-existing thing called nature. The broken anthropogenic object declares independence from its designer’s intentions as it becomes a participant in a new ecology, one that is characterized by extra-human dramas, re-shaped by extra-human architects, now in the alien realm of the seafloor. Gazing deeper into the mirror’s reflection, beneath the watery surface, this study of shipwrecks— archaeological at its core but borrowing from philosophy and literature too—tries to meet them on their own terms, where they most often reside: not in an imaginary restored past or reclaimed narrative, not in a museum or in future generations, but distantly underwater in an occluded present. In agreement with Descola that the nature/culture dichotomy is the most important question of the Anthropocene, this first chapter considers the origins of binary thinking and the effects of dualism on common ideas of heritage generally and ruins particularly.30 Shipwrecks are situated within the discourse on architectural ruins and underwater cultural heritage, but they squirm there instead of resting comfortably. Like other ruins, they resist simplistic labels born of nationalism and the tired lessons of civilization in decline. In their uncanniness and liminality, ruins—all the more so for those underwater—subvert the convenient, antonymous modes of classification because they cannot accurately be conceived of in terms of ‘either/or’: either nature or culture, either past or present, present or future, sacred or profane, living or dead.31 Thinking with ruins re-fuses the binaries in the sense of an 29 Taylor, After God, p. 128. 30 Descola, Ecology of Others, p. 81. 31 Cf. Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay. On exchanging the ‘either/or’ mentality for ‘neither/nor’ and more, see Taylor, After God, pp. 349-359.

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obstinate refusal to be classified as ‘either/or’ but also in the sense of fitting back together two things that have been ideologically torn apart: namely, humans and our byproducts—oversimplified by the all-encompassing terms ‘culture’ or ‘society’—from Earth, its inhabitants, and its systems, collectively referred to as ‘nature’. But this tear was not just a ripping of one thing in half; it was the forced coercion of a diverse multitude into segregated and unequal spheres of existence. Therefore, re-fusing begins by rejecting the misleading and oversimplifying dualism of nature/culture, while holding tight onto the commonalities and complexities of diverse forms of existence on Earth and beyond. Re-fusing insists that all things are simultaneously independent from and interdependent on each other. In this way, re-fusing is essential to the restoration not of the ship from the wreck (even metaphorically) but of our species to an appropriate proportion of planetary existence. In vehement rebuttal to the claim that ‘Power does not stem from notional dichotomies’, as will be seen below, it certainly does when these dichotomies are used to legitimize its abuses.32 Ideology is powerful, as exemplified by the human invention of a distant, nebulously defined thing called ‘nature’, the extraction of human ‘society’ from it, and the elevation of one such ‘society’ above all Others that would be relegated as inert ‘nature’. The violent severing of human from world, the conflict trope of man vs. nature or civilization vs. savagery, is precisely what has given way to the Anthropocene, the epoch of the human who overwhelms all other geological forces. And arguably, this epoch was cemented—lithified—at the start of the Early Modern period along with the humanities and the scientific method, alongside colonialism and capitalism, a period that, despite claims to the contrary, never really relinquished the sacred from the secular.33 But to question the 32 Malm, Progress of this Storm, p. 188. My assertion here is in sharp contrast to Malm’s insistence upon keeping society as emergent from but also fundamentally apart from nature, which is supposed to enable a more straightforward attack on capitalism as a social product that endangers ‘nature’; numerous logical fallacies in the analysis aside, one might begin by questioning whether capitalism not only endangers his idea of what nature is but also engenders it. This question is further complicated by the fact that his definitions of ‘nature’ and ‘society’, upon which the entire analysis rests, are questionable, and the vocabulary as defined is used inconsistently. 33 Taylor, After God, pp. 130-132; Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life. On the farce of the separation of sacred from secular in modernity, and contrary to Weber, Taylor attributes these modern entanglements to Lutheranism rather than Calvinism; see Weber, The Protestant Ethic; Green, ed., Protestantism and Capitalism; Dawson, Religion. However, Lutheranism provides one of the most poignant examples, as Weber himself notes regarding the word ‘calling’ (German Beruf ), which originally had a religious meaning, as having been called by God, but which in the writings of Martin Luther came to be associated with one’s career or job: Weber, Protestant Ethic, pp. 79-92.

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foundations of modernity is to threaten its firmament, ‘the equilibrium of this majestic modern edifice’, and to undermine ‘the preeminence that it assumes over the collection of disparate huts upon the rubbles of which it was constructed’.34 Because they are failed attempts at human efforts to dominate the multiplicity of beings and forces misidentified as ‘nature’, Early Modern shipwrecks can teach us more than what it is to live inside the cataclysms and collapses of civilization. As if that weren’t enough, they also teach us about the dangers of interpretation if the only hermeneutics are those emanating from centuries-old Eurocentric patriarchy. In retaliation, these shipwrecks teach, not preach, anarchic recalcitrance.

Legacy (Marigalante) How is it that we, bipedal biomes, have come to ‘Other’ the ‘Mother’, the matrix of our existence? As Bruno Latour stated, ‘the very notion of culture is an artifact made by bracketing Nature off ’.35 Even though neither nature nor culture actually exists, this artifact of our own creation is our heritage. But heritage too is a mercurial concept. It has to do with inheritance, with the past, yet it also has to do with the future as defined by the values of the present.36 Because heritage is rooted in historicity, generally defined by the modern state, ultimately, the concept of heritage relies on anthropogenic time—a linear, tripartite phenomenon: ‘Westerners bring history along with them in the hulls of their caravels and their gunboats, in the cylinders of their telescopes and the pistons of their immunizing syringes’.37 The historicity of heritage is dependent upon ideas of progress, generally defined by the West’s obsession with it. Despite the commonplace appearance of heritage concerns in contemporary cultural studies, neither heritage nor the chronological time upon which it is based is grounded in universal human experience.38 Within the context of human cognitive and cultural evolution, both concepts have emerged relatively recently, with calendrical time seeming to have gradually expanded with the evolution of agriculture, which 34 Descola, Ecology of Others, p. 61. 35 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 104, original emphasis. 36 E.g., Harrison, Heritage; Tilley, ‘Excavation as Theatre’, pp. 275-280. 37 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, p. 97. 38 E.g., Feener, ‘Muslim Cultures and Pre-Islamic Pasts’, pp. 23-45; Smith, Uses of Heritage; Fairclough, Harrison, Schofield, and Jameson, eds., Heritage Reader; Meskell, ed., Global Heritage. On multicultural concepts of time, see Tanaka, History without Chronology; Lucas, The Archaeology of Time.

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in turn enabled the emergence of monotheism in Greater Mesopotamia. Many ancient and non-Western calendrical systems tended—and still tend to—track time as episodic, but the harnessing of time as a singular trajectory characterized by progress was fundamental to the project of modernity, which is ultimately a theological invention.39 While the modern project may have institutionalized progress and linearity, its origins are much older. This new time is bound to the tenets of Abrahamic religious texts that describe the theological entanglement of teleology, eschatology, and utopia, where humanity itself has the utilitarian function of filling the earth and subduing it. Upon the failure of the original, material utopia, creation became implicated in its own demise so that a superior, immaterial utopia might be established at the end of time. 40 The failed, earthly utopia, according to scripture, resulted in agriculture: the painful toil, the sweat of the brow, the plants of the field grown from a cursed ground that humans plow until death returns them to that very dirt, where they await the end of time and the restoration of Eden, and with it, redemption with the rewards of immortal life in paradise. According to science and scripture, agriculture is a technology thousands of years in the making with Mesopotamian origins following an ideological shift. According to science, the shift was perpetuated gradually by global climate change at the end of the last glacial cycle. According to scripture, it was less shift than meteoric fall, the plummet from perfection following disobedience, or at least a metaphoric expulsion from Paleolithic paradise. Scripture and science also agree that agriculture is the most ancient method of genetic modification. Although genetically modifying wolves to produce the domesticated dog preceded experiments with grains and legumes by thousands of years, dogs were bred as companion animals primarily and food sources secondarily. By contrast, plant domestication and livestock production were achieved to feed growing populations of increasingly sedentary Neolithic humans, ever more reliant on accumulations of surplus. With seasons of planting, growing, harvest, and dormancy echoed by seasons of birthing, weaning, breeding, and pregnancy, humans began to track time differently than in the pre-agricultural past. People looked skyward to monitor the movements of celestial bodies and record them as calendars on clay tablets, stone stelae, and hieroglyphs on papyri. Objects in the sky were determined to dictate so much of what happened on Earth: 39 Taylor, After God, pp. 43-47. 40 Keller, Political Theology of the Earth; Lundin, Thiselton, and Walhout, The Promise of Hermeneutics, p. 121.

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when rivers would flood, floodwaters would recede, winters would end, trees would be felled, and crops would be harvested. Gods were removed from the earth and relocated to the heavens. The cosmos was divided into three tiers: the heavenly and divine, the earthly and human, and the forbidden underworld of the wet and dead. In some places, to legitimize the consolidation of earthly power into the hands of one ruler, the gods in the sky were homogenized into one, and creation was achieved by that one god in one act, which took place once in a distant past. The singular omnipotence of that king of gods masculinized creation and deified masculinity. Lines took the place of loops. And with the divine located in the heavens above, there emerged a new conceptualization of earth: as soil to toil, as beds to own and to inseminate. Scriptures and sciences agree on much of this. With the conceptual shift toward material utilitarianism, the essential form of all things was only to fulfill a specific function: humans to serve the sky god and subdue the earth, dogs to serve and aid the humans, crops and livestock to feed the humans, fresh water and fertile soil to feed the crops, women to birth more humans. As the species multiplied and ancestral territories and private properties were contested, boats were built to conquer and cross dangerous salty waters and to find new soil to till, new plants to domesticate, new animals to harness, new objects to own. Eventually, the omnipotent god in the heavens would be incarnated, and his appearance on earth would become the pivotal point between time that stretches backward, into chaotic and sinful beginnings, and time that stretches forward, nearing closer to his return and kingdom come. Consuming thousands of solar years, this process of consolidation and severing is what philosopher Timothy Morton refers to as agrilogistics. In offering a response to the question posed at the beginning of this section, it is the way of thinking spacetime agriculturally, where humans are walled off from the ‘symbiotic real’ and placed in opposition to it.41 Morton locates the start of the Anthropocene with agriculture in Neolithic Mesopotamia and its resultant theologies that, in mimicry of the sky god himself, separate 41 Morton, Humankind, p. 23. The concept of agrilogistics is introduced and detailed in Morton, Dark Ecology. Morton’s idea of ‘the severing’ is in keeping with Latour’s ‘Great Divide’ in We Have Never Been Modern. While in agreement with Morton (and Latour) on the dangerous identification of ‘nature’ as something external to ‘culture’, Levi R. Bryant disagrees with him that we ought to do away with the concept of ‘nature’ altogether; Bryant sees nature as the firmament of material life and culture as simply an ecological manifestation of human clusters: Bryant, Onto-Cartography, pp. 156, 281. As will be demonstrated throughout these pages, I follow Morton by leaning on words like ‘existence’ when referring to the entirety of what is usually meant by ‘nature’ along with its human variant of ‘culture’.

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human from world and, in turn, elevate the human above all other earthlings populating an imagined scala naturae, each of which is placed into varying positions of subservience.42 This divine elevation is seen twice in the book of Genesis: once when Adam and Eve are instructed to fill the earth and subdue it (1:28), and again when Noah exits the Ark and is given ‘into his hand’ all the beasts of the earth, birds of the sky, and the fish of the sea, who will ‘fear and dread’ mankind (9:1-3). The extraction of human from world, or culture from nature (and the tacit acceptance that there are monolithic things called nature and society to begin with), is what ‘gives rise to the duality of humans plus their nonhuman, proprietary cattle’.43 Embedded within that word ‘cattle’, we find ‘chattel’, the kind of slavery that is inherited and that makes people into personal property, and ‘capital’, the kind of wealth that increases its owner’s financial assets through self-reproduction. Although cattle, chattel, and capital all have origins in the Neolithic, the rampant accumulation and commodification of the Early Modern era is most evident. Not long after Columbus’s 1493 voyage to ‘Hispaniola’, led by the flagship Marigalante carrying cattle across the Atlantic to the Americas, came the institutionalization of chattel slavery and capitalism, only one of which has yet been abolished. Partially due to these same reasons, Jason W. Moore traces the Anthropocene’s origins to the mid-fifteenth century with the scientific developments that gave rise to capitalism. Like Morton, Moore implicates the severing of ‘Society’ from ‘Nature’ as establishing the ideological permissibility of large-scale corporate exploitation. In response to claims that the burning of fossil fuels, proliferating of plastics, or exploding of atomic bombs marks the beginning of our eponymous epoch, he implores that to recognize the Early Modern impetus, ‘with its audacious strategies of global conquest, endless commodification, and relentless rationalization, is to prioritize the relations of power, capital, and nature that rendered fossil capitalism so deadly in the first place’.44 While Morton would certainly agree with 42 Cf. discussions of vertical versus horizontal ontologies in Bryant, Onto-Cartography, pp. 236240, Table 8.1. 43 Morton, Humankind, p. 26. 44 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p. 172. Contra Malm, Progress of this Storm, who seems to claim that because the fossil-fuel economy can be identified as the primary culprit of global warming, we need not consider the events and encounters leading to its impetus. As he pits ‘society’ against ‘nature’, it becomes clear that his Marx-derived definition of ‘society’ is exclusive to Industrial and post-Industrial nations, and in so doing, he discounts the widespread ‘harm’ inflicted by other people groups upon species, ecosystems, and climate patterns prior to rampant Industrialization (see, e.g., Berry, ‘Irish Ruins Ancient and New’, pp. 175-196). This oversimplification and omission leads one to wonder whether Malm might consider pre-industrial, pre-historic,

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Moore that ‘How we conceptualize the origins of a crisis has everything to do with how we choose to respond to that crisis’,45 Moore’s downplay of explicitly religious motives from the history of capitalism render his account somewhat less complete. By contrast, Morton’s materialist response to the crisis of the Anthropocene requires the rejection of the entire agrilogistic legacy that we have inherited, including the ‘agricultural-age religion that still structures our world’ by furnishing the rationale behind capitalist power relations that continue to seek dominance over a planet conceived as passive and proprietary, or god-given.46 Only superficially secular, science also contributes to the severing of human from world, as the European scientific tradition has always been in service to empire, industry, and church.47 As I hope to make clear in the following pages, even the scientific study of shipwrecks as carried out by nautical archaeologists is still almost entirely informed by the same teachings of the religion that sent Columbus across the Atlantic, pioneers across the American West, and missionaries into North Sentinel Island. In a modest, incremental departure from this tradition, these pages aspire to offer some conceptual alternatives to the agrilogistical study of shipwrecks.

Liturgy (The Gresham Ship) In all their majesty, architectural ruins conjure visions of once-held grandeur, and in their magic, they stir something inside us, the vulnerability that lurks at the threshold of realizing that the human destiny is the same as that of all other things—from dust we are and to dust we shall return. Whether a crumbling farmhouse, a bombed-out cathedral, or an abandoned factory,

and/or Indigenous ‘societies’ to fall closer to the ‘nature’ end of this assumed spectrum. To be sure, this is exactly why such dualisms do not work: they cannot even account for the complexities of human behavior, let alone the behaviors of an entire planet and all the inscrutable things that compose it. 45 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p. 173. See also Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock of the Anthropocene, for another detailed investigation into the origins of the new epoch; although, like Malm and many others, they would also prefer to implicate the fossil fuel industry in the geological establishment of the Anthropocene, they also recognize the validity of Moore’s position on what he calls the Capitalocene (pp. 228-252). 46 Morton, Humankind, p. 26; Dark Ecology, pp. 42-59. For a contrasting account in defense of this theology, see Keller, Political Theology of the Earth. 47 Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation; Pimentel, ‘Iberian Vision’, pp. 17-30; Keller, Political Theology of the Earth, p. 8; Taylor, After God.

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ruins are entangled with memory and place—and therefore identity. 48 Constructed in the past for a specific purpose, persisting in the present though functioning differently, ruins heighten the awareness of the past’s recalcitrance, its everpresence. Ruins have a unique power to extract the essence of the bygone and infuse it into the present, and perhaps this temporal transcendence is why ruins are so often conscripted into the service of Empire and its post-Enlightenment heirs, State and Church. Control the present interpretation of the past, and you control the future. In Volney’s classic Les Ruines (1791), the author visits the ruins of Syria, which prompt him to ponder the significance of cursed grandeur and the cause for the collapse of these great ancient empires. Just when he is on the brink of despair in contemplating the possibility of God having blasted these once-luxurious cities with a secret anathema and, in turn, the certain eventual downfall of French civilization too, the apparition of a Genius arrives to reason him through his preemptive grief. He assures Volney that the scene of demise before him was not God’s doing, but man’s: No, the caprice of which man complains is not the caprice of fate; the darkness that misleads his reason is not the darkness of God; the source of his calamities is not in the distant heavens, it is beside him on the earth; it is not concealed in the bosom of the divinity; it dwells within himself, he bears it in his heart. 49

But rather than descending into misanthropy, the lesson the Genius ultimately provides Volney is one of hope in the future of humankind. The demise of these great Mesopotamian civilizations was only due to the ignorance of their populace: These are the celestial anathemas which have smitten these walls once so glorious, and converted the splendor of a populous city into a solitude of mourning and of ruins! But as in the bosom of man have sprung all the evils which have afflicted his life, there he also is to seek and find their remedies.50

48 For a moving account on memories as ruins and their resistance to reparation efforts, see Spelman, Repair, pp. 102-123. Trigg, Aesthetics of Decay, uses the well-worn ruminations of ruins as memorials to provide a brilliant and novel critique of modernity’s drive for progress by way of a critique of reason itself. 49 Volney, The Ruins, p. 7. 50 Volney, The Ruins, p. 21.

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Analogizing the ventures of botanists seeking plants in colonized lands to procure a panacea, the Genius implores Volney to ‘believe, young man, the testimony of monuments, and the voice of the tombs’, to see this desolation in contrast to the progress of the Enlightenment: the printing press that enabled rapid communications over long distances, the unprecedented availability of scientific knowledge, the advances of government toward democracy, and the promise of a universal civilization in which ‘The human race will become one great society, one individual family, governed by the same spirit, by common laws, and enjoying all the happiness of which their nature is susceptible’.51 As will be explored further below, Volney’s meditations on ancient ruins is exemplary of the Judeo-Christian utopian vision that has permeated Western science and politics since La Santa Marίa wrecked on the Caribbean shores of Ayiti in 1492. It took only one year after that portentous shipwreck for Columbus to lead his second voyage, whose mission was the conquest and conversion of the Taíno people and the colonization of the ‘New World’. The global colonization to come was at once an enterprise in domination and the pursuit of redemption for the sins of Eden. Both could be achieved by building a new world, effectively restoring paradise, made all the more effective if it came at the expense of the old world’s ruination. But the modern redemptive impulse is paradoxical in that while taking pleasure in the ruination of ancient and Indigenous civilizations, the trajectory of deterioration is often intentionally halted so that the state of decay might be stagnated if not reversed to some previous derelict condition that best facilitates the lessons of the past in the teaching of future generations. And thus we see scaffolding on the Parthenon, tents over Malta’s Neolithic temples, and Mona Lisa behind a bullet-proof glass vitrine. Attempting to deny the vulnerability of materiality, such preservatory efforts derive from perceived threats to purity, especially the pollutive effects of time and of some regressive thing called ‘nature’ being at frequent odds with the linear progress of ‘culture’. But at the same time, modernity also issued the paradoxical idea that the stability of cultural identity is reliant on the same ‘nature’ hellbent on deteriorating its icons. Physically and metaphysically, one of the consequences of colonization was the pollution of the familiar and sacred by the foreign and demonic, which began to threaten European identity. When combined with the visibly grisaille effects of the industrialization of the continent and some of its colonies, places that had acted as ‘resources’ of European identity were perceived as threatened. The encroachment of cities upon the countryside 51 Volney, The Ruins, p. 51.

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and factories upon clean air, waterways, and woodlands appeared to pose a risk to the places that marked a pristine, sacred, or more glorious past.52 Further seeking Self in the face of Other, the lack of interventionist policies in place by colonized peoples to protect from further decay their ruined temples and monuments was twisted into further justification for colonial intervention.53 Embedded deeply within the identity crisis that produced such overwhelming nostalgia was a longing for lost purity. Increasingly, pre-industrial ruins, especially those recalling the ill-fated height of Empire, came to be associated with the Judeo-Christian narrative of the fall from grace. These changes in the ways that the material past was regarded led to its demarcation in the form of state-sponsored heritage projects.54 Statecontrolled processes of demarcation necessarily rely on the emplacement of value on some things and its denial in others: for example, establishing legal protections for large-scale pre-industrial remnants while leaving to the weeds post-industrial ruins that materialize the failures of progress.55 The logic of redemption is still riddled with paradox, as these systems of exaggeration and reduction have, over the course of decades, resulted in the industrialization of the very things that were supposed to be protected from it. Heritage is now spoken of in terms of ‘industry’ and ‘economy’, fitting it neatly into a globalized capitalism. Heritage is a kind of semi-diabolical transaction, a roadside swindle of an heirloom or firstborn for a bag of pebbles. In swapping kinship for commodity, heritage seduces by fiction, telling stories of falls from grace and glory; it ruins by preying on pathological pride and nostalgia. As archaeologist Lynn Meskell notes in passing, heritage is a ‘dangerous supplement’.56 She refers to Derrida’s reading of Rousseau’s Confessions, in which a ‘fatal advantage’ seduces the traveler away from the path of goodness and ‘toward its loss or fall’.57 Derrida’s dangerous supplement corresponds to Rousseau’s separation of Evil from the intrinsic goodness of Nature, where Evil is by 52 Harrison, Heritage, pp. 42-47; see also Morton, Ecology without Nature, for a detailed analysis of the role of Romanticism in further separating nature from culture with ideas of wilderness as pristine and environment as something to be rescued. 53 E.g., Tiffin, Southeast Asia in Ruins; Nochlin, ‘Imaginary Orient’, pp. 33-59. 54 This section has been especially informed by the research collected in the following books: Harrison, Heritage; Smith, The Uses of Heritage; Fairclough, Harrison, Schofield, and Jameson, eds., Heritage Reader; Meskell, ed., Global Heritage; Meskell. A Future in Ruins. 55 For complications on evaluating ‘heritage’ to be protected versus left to its own devices, see, e.g., Berry, ‘Irish Ruins Ancient and New’, pp. 175-196; Gordillo, ‘Ships Stranded in the Forest’, pp. 141-167; and especially the research compiled in Olsen and Pétursdóttir, eds., Ruin Memories. 56 Meskell, ‘Introduction: Globalizing Heritage’, p. 2. 57 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 151.

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its own nature supplemental and exterior, and as such, it is the distorted image, the ill-conceived representation of Nature. The supplement is the violent extraction, the severing, the perversion through commodification, and its seduction is dangerous in that it ‘destroys very quickly the forces that Nature has slowly constituted and accumulated’.58 If the past can only be understood—and thereby controlled—through the writing and retelling of histories or through the sanctioned places and performances that recollect and thereby reinterpret the past, then we are left with a fundamentally flawed representation of what time has ‘slowly constituted and accumulated’. In effect, entire shipwrecks are reduced to phantasmagoric beacons of Great Man narratives in the same way that bronze statues of Confederate soldiers, erected to terrorize newly naturalized Black Americans while rewriting the history of the Civil War, have been translated into symbols of Southern valor, pride, and culture. Heritage is ‘slippery’ indeed.59 Perhaps it is no coincidence that, like wrecked ships of European ‘discovery’, public monuments to Christopher Columbus and slave trader Edward Colston have been torn from their pedestals and thrown into bodies of water on either side of the Atlantic, only to be fished out so that they might be placed on display yet again, all in the name of heritage.60 In its claims to transcend the temporal trinity of past, present, and future, heritage might be considered to transcend easily the categories of nature and culture, and yet in most cases, it only serves to reinforce this severing, along with another of the descendent mind/body dualisms—materiality and immateriality. Even more recent ‘cutting-edge’ texts on global and Indigenous heritage studies and its criticisms understand the relationships between city park monuments and sacred landscapes, or religious rituals and traditional culinary practices, as a Venn diagram with overlapping spheres of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, or tangible and intangible, despite the lack of such categorical distinctions in many non-Western cultures.61 If the diagram with its ‘bridged’ sets is flattened, the categories find convenient emplacement on a spectrum, the format familiar to modernity for understanding everything from the alleged extremes of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ existence to the linear stretch of chronological time. Composing one aspect of supposedly cultural heritage, ruins have long found themselves located near the middle of the 58 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 151. 59 Meskell, ‘Introduction: Globalizing Heritage’, p. 2; Harrison, Heritage, p. 5. 60 Cf. Rich and Campbell, ‘Collapse, Cataclysm, Eruption’, in press. 61 E.g., Byrne and Ween, ‘Bridging Cultural and Natural Heritage’, pp. 94-111; Harrison, Heritage, pp. 204-226. Thankfully, a more critical approach to heritage and its categories is currently underway, evidenced by the new open-access tome by Harrison et al., Heritage Futures.

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spectrum, confounding the ‘spectral’ extremes of time and (im)material causation.62 There, like many other more portable relics of the past, they can be understood as having first materialized out of human design and desire before being abandoned to the forces of ‘nature’, which quickly encroached upon the original cultural design, overtaking it, returning the materialization gradually to the dust from whence it, like humans themselves, originated. In this scenario, the object’s susceptibility to the dangerous supplement, or fatal advantage, echoes another aboriginal fall. As Rose Macauley states in the introduction to her seminal work The Pleasure of Ruins (1953), ruins can produce a ‘mystical pleasure in the destruction of all things mortal and the eternity of God’ and a ‘righteous pleasure in retribution’.63 Her latter sentiment recalls that of Georg Simmel, who hails architecture as the ‘most sublime victory of the spirit over nature’ and, conversely, architectural ruins as a particular ‘cosmic tragedy’ of ‘nature’s revenge for the spirit’s having violated it by making a form in its own image’.64 Ruins provoke a morbid delight in the anathematic blast that crushes hubris, that takes comfort in the divine retribution that must precede the restoration of its order, but at the same time, they also force observers into the acute discomfort of realizing the decay that awaits all our earthly bodies. And this discomfort prompts the modern human observer to cling ever harder to the ancient promise of immortality. In direct response to the conflicting sensation of this pleasure in and resistance to what ruination implies for our own mortality, humans, through preservationist narratives, often use their unique powers to halt or reverse those effects, those forces of time and entropy to ensure that whatever is designated as heritage remains a ‘resource’ for future generations. Clearly employing the language of capitalism, this practice—so common in heritage ‘resource management’—consists of walling off certain places and performances or removing them from their original context altogether in order to ensure their purity alongside their accessibility. Ultimately, however well-intentioned, this practice relies on the very same ideology of severing that exists behind the act of inventing a thing called ‘nature’ so that it can serve the function of ‘resource’ to culture. As I have written elsewhere, in this act of separation, one buys into the very same concept that provides the philosophical grounds for exploitation: that there is a Nature, that it is different from us, and that it was made to serve us, whether as resource 62 Swaffield, Rising from the Ruins, pp. 72-91. 63 Macauley, Pleasure of Ruins, xv-xvi. 64 Simmel, ‘Two Essays’, p. 379.

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for fuel, copper, landscape painting, hybridizing potted plants, poetry, religious pilgrimage, camping destinations, rejuvenation, healing herbs, or pretty animals and shades of green that we like to look at.65

Picturesque vine-covered ruins, mossy rubble harboring animal dens, abandoned factories sheltering bird nests, sunken ships forming reefs: these and other mutilated architectural and artifactual relics allow us to see through, even if only momentarily, the superficial underpinnings of the nature/culture dialectic. This is the conclusion that Simmel seems to draw as well when he says that the ruin reminds us that the work of humankind is ‘entirely a product of nature’ and that its ambivalence resolves assumed tensions between ‘purpose and accident, nature and spirit, past and present’.66 In addition to their aesthetic and historical provocations, and far surpassing any pretense of acting as storage units of scientific knowledge, perhaps this ability to collapse the old dialectic once and for all is the greatest ‘value’ of ruins in this global society.67 In addition to helping us conjure new terminology to describe the complexities and connectedness of all earthborn things, analyses of ruins will help to combat those of the dialectically dependent ‘heritage’. Contrary to contemporary discussions of heritage on a global scale, ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are not distinct categories that occasionally hook up to produce hybridity, nor are they separated by lines to be bridged or transgressed. There can be neither harmony nor tension between them because there was never a symmetry. That which is signified has always been a pair of fictitious, seductive and dangerous inventions that should be understood as the consequences of increased emphases on possession and privatization, even while such heritage ‘resources’ are ushered into ‘the public sphere’.68 Put simply, state is to heritage as culture is to nature: the inventor, the enactor, and the beneficiary, all in one. Although in the Anthropocene it is less urgent than the collapsing of the nature/culture dialectic, the constructs of tangible and intangible ‘heritage’ are also in need of annihilation, as they rely on a false separation of possible 65 Rich, Cedar Forests, Cedar Ships, pp. 219-220; cf. Morton, Ecology without Nature; Dark Ecology. 66 Simmel, ‘Two Essays’, pp. 381, 385. 67 See especially Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, but also Cooper, ‘Should Ruins Be Preserved?’ pp. 222-235, and positions stated in Korsmeyer, Bicknell, Judkins, and Scarborough, ‘Symposium’, pp. 429-449. 68 On the importance of establishing the public sphere to the establishment of the construct of heritage, see Harrison, Heritage, pp. 42-67. On the Lutheran roots of the public-private tension, see Taylor, After God, pp. 268, 359.

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experiences of place and performance into what can be touched versus what can be felt.69 Carved stone friezes and wooden henge pillars removed from their original context and placed in museums exemplify the destruction of the ‘intangible’ aspects of the ruin for the sake of preserving the ‘tangible’ ones.70 Underwater, wooden shipwrecks are wrapped in sheets of plastic geotextile weighed down with sandbags. Occasionally, they are moved to a different location, still underwater, where they serve as a lower-risk attraction for diving tourists and archaeology students. For example, the hull of an Elizabethan merchantman built by Sir Thomas Gresham in the sixteenth century was relocated in 2012 from its wreck site in the Thames Estuary to Stoney Cove Dive Centre in the English Midlands.71 Elsewhere, shipwrecks are covered in situ with protective scaffolding to keep diving tourists content and treasure hunters at bay, or they are hoisted frame by beam and rebuilt in museums on land.72 The archaeological imperative to preserve for science and future generations of heritage consumers can have the unintended effect of preventing people in the here and now from having meaningful interactions with in situ relics that help situate us in time and space. Therefore, heritage preservation that separates tangible from intangible often also separates space from time. And because of this, the instinct to preserve too often becomes a self-defeating enterprise in exclusion, which is an unfortunate but logical outcome considering that its entire conceptual basis is the segregation of past from present and present from future, of culture from nature, sacred from secular, and even of tangible from intangible encounters with the past, a past that is situated in both time and space. In the rush to preserve materiality, the not touched but felt aspects of a place or performance are often sacrificed, and consequently, this imagined sensory dialectic limits who and what is privileged with which sensation. The strange and self-consuming loop of heritage as resource is, appropriately, informed by circular reasoning: these things should be preserved because they are valued, and they are valued because they are still preserved.73 Preservationist agendas are legitimized by the shaky assumptions that future generations will have the same modern Western values and concepts of heritage that overpower current discourse on a global scale and 69 70 71 72 73

Cf. Korsmeyer, Things, pp. 24-28. Cooper, ‘Should Ruins Be Preserved?’, pp. 222-235. Milne et al., ‘Researching an Elizabethan Shipwreck’, pp. 37-41. See Chapter 2 for more on the ‘resurrection’ model of shipwreck archaeology. Cf. Holtorf, ‘Is the Past a Non-renewable Resource?’ pp. 125-133.

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that these next generations might be deprived of their heritage were we to not intervene and preserve it on their behalf.74 Besides easily identifiable and refutable ideas of a passive past and a passive future contrasted by an active and omnipotent present, there is another dangerous assumption at work here too. That is, that without contemporary ‘resource management’, future generations will be deprived of the opportunity for meditations on the history of a place and who peopled it, which is made so abundantly possible by ruins as portholes to the past. This assumption too is grounded in the narcissism of the present: the desire to leave behind some legacy, which is almost certainly informed by a reluctance to accept the mortality of self and civilization. In addition, this assumption neglects the reality of the Anthropocene: that, firstly, this epoch is defined by the ruins and waste of humanity, so there can hardly be any legitimate concern that there would be a shortage in the future; and secondly, given the imminent destruction of entire coastal cities at the hands of global warming, there can neither be any legitimate concern for a decreased proliferation of large-scale architectural ruins upon which future generations might ponder the effects of time and the meaning of existence.75 Upon inspection, most motives behind the preservationist agenda crumble into a heap of capitalist hoarding fetishes, the narcissism of ‘now’ and its associated technophilia, and the persistence of a Christological drive for, if not entitlement to, resurrection and immortality. Heritage advocates and industries ought to at least consider carefully what exactly is being resurrected and why before proceeding with the miracle.76 Effectively, completing the godlike gesture locks things into a utilitarian function, a declaration that certain antiquities and exotica have intrinsic value as ‘resources’, which ultimately removes the capacity for the things in question to be freed from the social telos imposed upon them from anthropogenesis. As Volney muses at the beginning of his encounter with the ruins of Syria, ‘Ah! when the dream of life is over, what will then avail all its agitations, if not one trace of utility remains behind?’77 Despite his epiphany about the promise of freedom for all, ruined architectural forms 74 These assumptions are refuted in Cooper, ‘Should Ruins Be Preserved?’, p. 226. 75 Cf. DeSilvey, ‘Making Sense of Transience’, pp. 31-54. For the ruins of the future, see Collings, Stolen Future, Broken Present, pp. 103-113. The horror of these realities is qualified in Trigg, The Thing; however, considering the sheer unthinkability of the world under such postapocalyptic conditions leads one into the limits of philosophy, which is addressed in Eugene Thacker’s three-volume trilogy, Horror of Philosophy: In the Dust of this Planet, Starry Speculative Corpse, and Tentacles Longer than Night. 76 More on this in Chapter 5; cf. Korsmeyer, Things, p. 150. 77 Volney, The Ruins, viii.

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are disallowed the freedom to exist on their own terms and instead remain harnessed to a function that serves only humans: the lesson to be learned on the corruption of the past and the promise of the future. More often than is commonly realized, the telos in question is not only anthropogenic but also steeped in the colonial violence of European value judgments. In the play A Tempest (1969), Aimé Césaire’s anti-colonial adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611), the character of Gonzalo personifies—even more potently than the original—this enduring modernist tendency to make ‘resources’ from all things considered outside of self-defined ‘culture’. Having just shipwrecked on a small Caribbean island, the nobleman and intellectual from Naples epitomizes Rousseauian primitivism as he vocalizes his intentions there (Act II, Scene 2, lines 28-33): I mean if the island is inhabited, as I believe, and if we colonize it, as is my hope, then we have to take every precaution not to import our shortcomings, yes, what we call civilization. They must stay as they are: savages, noble and good savages, free, without any complexes or complications. Something like a pool granting eternal youth where we periodically come to restore our aging, citified souls.78

Anachronistically parodying and presaging the rise of tourism in the twentieth century, the Christian scholar Gonzalo designates the island in its entirety as a resource, ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’. Throughout this scene, he exhibits equally powerful desires to create an island utopia, to ‘recreate’ there as a tourist, to enslave and assimilate the islanders, and to harvest guano to fertilize future plantations. All these efforts would be realized under the guise of manifest destiny, in the predicted best interests of future generations, and backed by the historicity of divine command. The active hand—of God and Gonzalo—would subjugate the passive, bygone entities of island and islanders alike. Little did Gonzalo and his fellow colonizers realize that their dismissal of the island as submissive and confined to the past could not have been further from reality and that, by the slave Caliban’s recalcitrant embrace of his identity—mother tongue, nonhuman animal compatriots, and ancestral spirits—the man formerly classed as monstrously subhuman, savagely closer-to-nature, would regain freedom from the telos of objecthood. Césaire’s heroic Caliban does not accept the tradeoff of state-sanctioned heritage ‘resources’ any more than the ludicrous concepts of nature or culture upon which such heritage is based 78 Césaire, ‘A Tempest’, pp. 343-372.

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and which is still further grounded in that great unspoken European value of ‘whiteness’.79 Césaire’s poignant satire enables us to recall once again Morton’s agrilogistics, where the interconnectedness of Western ideological inheritances—from colonialism and capitalism to their theological foundations in Genesis, and from the violent separation of whatever constitutes humanity from the whole of Earth to the industrial demarcations of heritage and resources—becomes more crystallized. The contradiction of simultaneously walling off and insisting upon accessibility are features of agriculture itself, which is an inheritance even more ancient than Genesis. Twelve thousand years of horticulture have established a pattern of progressive and innovative new forms of perceived dominance over realms construed as passive and willing servants. Terraforming, mining, livestock production, and fossil fuel extraction are all descendants of the initial prehistoric experiments in eugenics that led to food crops. As Syrian theologian Theodoret rightly observed, c. 450 CE, even ship architecture is an heir to ancestral agriculture, with its inherited processes of arboriculture and cultivation, harvesting and crafting plant matter into diverse forms, and the similarity of tools used to achieve this hylomorphism.80 Harnessing the power of trees, iron, ropes, and tar, ships were built to overpower unruly wind and waves, but as Shakespeare and Césaire both note, after these perfectly crafted vessels wrecked, enterprising survivors might go on ashore to subdue and cultivate ‘virgin’ territory, making the invention of culture materialize from that of nature—or rather, vice versa.

Litany (Santa María) Terms like ‘broadcast’, ‘cultivate’, ‘cross-pollinate’, ‘disseminate’, and ‘field’, borrowed from agriculture and applied to academia, are eerily suggestive of the scientific inheritance of agrilogistics. Like agriculture, writing also started in Mesopotamia as a way to account for increasingly complex economic transactions that resulted from and reinforced agriculture, alongside urbanization and extreme social stratif ication. That we write and the 79 Cf. Hall, ‘Whose Heritage?’, p. 222. 80 Rich, Cedar Forests, Cedar Ships, p. 202; Theodoret of Cyrus, On Divine Providence, p. 53, Discourse 4.19. The practice of arboriculture for ship architecture seems to have presaged NASA’s new practice of mycoriculture, or myco-architecture, which may utilize directed fungal growth to enable a more efficient colonization of Mars; see Rothschild, ‘Myco-architecture off Planet’.

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authority and privileges bestowed upon the office of the scribe are rooted in Mesopotamian thought. Or, as Morton, muses, ‘How we write and what we write and what we think about writing can be found within agrilogistics’.81 One salient example of agrilogistics at work in language can be found in conceptual alterations to the making of metaphors from pre-Modern to Early Modern Europe. In the late Medieval period, interpretation was boundless, as was the potential of creation. Symbolism and metaphorization were attempts, ‘never complete, to explore one facet or another of a semantically inexhaustible cosmos’.82 But in Early Modern humanistic thought, metaphors became manifestations of singular linguistic genius which, in turn, were reflections, if not microcosmic reenactments, of the original act of creation, born ex nihilo. Himself omnipotent and omniscient, the metaphorisician drew from nothingness to create anew. This even though, as the following chapter will explain, according to those ancient texts, there never was a nothing but always a something: a tehom, a chaos, an abyssos, or a tiamat.83 And the deep not-nothing was always-already wet. Published posthumously in 1626, Francis Bacon’s unfinished fable, New Atlantis, begins with a sea voyage, which, although treacherous, is guided by divine benediction to salvatory shores. Exemplifying on two levels the new humanist approach to metaphorical language—and by extension, to invention and discovery—Bacon’s sea voyage echoes the original act of creation described in Genesis: So that finding ourselves in the midst of the greatest wilderness of waters in the world without victual, we gave ourselves up as lost men, and prepared for death. Yet we did lift up our hearts and voices to God above, who showeth his wonders in the deep, beseeching him of his mercy that as in the beginning he discovered the face of the deep, and brought forth dry land, so he would now discover land to us, that we might not perish.84

Set in the South Pacific, the association of this watery wilderness both with immanent death and the preexisting nihil is telling of how liquid expanses were regarded in the Early Modern period, a characterization that will be essential to the analyses of the following chapter. For the present discussion 81 Morton, Dark Ecology, p. 44. 82 Dupré, Passage to Modernity, p. 37. See also Bogost’s metaphorism discussed in the Preface to this book, which is akin to the Medieval conception of metaphor: Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, pp. 62-79. 83 Keller, Face of the Deep; this concept is discussed further in Chapter 2. 84 Bacon, Francis Bacon, p. 419.

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though, it may be more relevant to consider first that Bacon positions God as a fellow ‘discoverer’, albeit of something already familiar to someone else. This divine precedent for having ‘discovered’ the face of the deep before adding wondrous things to its, or her, substance augurs the Christian ‘discovery’ of ‘new’ worlds before implementing the irreversible changes of colonialism. Additionally, Bacon’s extended metaphor of the near-death experience preceding salvation exemplifies the interdependencies of humanism and Christianity. In his genius, Bacon imitates the divine individual to perform a new act of creation, which literally and figuratively announces his domination over that which he has created. But surpassing even artful imitation, Bacon’s manufactured creation, in the form of an allegory, was also an influential call to dominate the very ‘nature’ that it described. The Early Modern view of literarity, of metaphor and creation ex nihilo, had clear implications for art, too, and especially its relationship with ‘nature’. For the humanists, form was an ideal to achieve, not an experience of the real. Therefore, ‘nature came to be viewed as a work of art created in accordance with aesthetic rules. Artistic achievement, then, far from being a pale imitation of nature, became the very norm by which to measure nature’.85 This humanistic ideal of the emancipation of mind from matter affected art and architecture profoundly. Even playing by her own rules, man could, if not should, transform ‘nature’, if for no other reason than to demonstrate that she could be beaten at her own game. As Bacon wrote in Novum Organum (1620), ‘Now the empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her’.86 This ideal of humanism—patriarchal, imperial, and scientific—is demonstrated most vividly in Early Modern naval architecture. Beginning as early as the sixteenth century, ship architecture coalesced what Bacon identified as the three most important European discoveries: printing, gunpowder, and magnets.87 While all three discoveries were appropriations or plagiarisms of the achievements of Muslim and Buddhist innovators,88 when put to use in the service of Christian-European naval architecture, the result was fleets of ships that were ‘arguably the equivalent of today’s space shuttles’.89 Magnets made possible accurate navigation by compass; gunpowder fueled the deadly rows of cannons fitted to each ship, 85 Dupré, Passage to Modernity, p. 44. 86 Bacon, Francis Bacon, p. 374 (Novum Organum aphorism CXXIX). 87 Bacon, Francis Bacon, p. 373 (Novum Organum aphorism CXXIX); see importance of printing in Taylor, After God, pp. 73-82. 88 Hamdani, ‘Islamic Background to the Voyages of Discovery’, pp. 273-306. 89 Castro, ‘In Search of Unique Iberian Ship Design Concepts’, p. 64.

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whether coming in the name of commerce, Christ, conquest, or all three; and the printing press permitted shipbuilding treatises to be replicated and disseminated throughout the continent and its colonies. These treatises emphasized symmetry in the hull and perfect proportions of length to breadth in order to imitate God’s works in form and function.90 Other handbooks illustrated the reliance of naval architecture on arboritecture.91 They instruct foresters on how trees should be pruned, coppiced, pollarded, and trained into curved frames and bent knees to furnish the thousands of timbers needed to construct just one of these perfect ships. In order to conquer oceans, forests had first to be dominated. The imitation of divine omnipotence was only appropriate considering that, while these vessels flew the flags of Castile, Portugal, or England, ultimately, they sailed in service to the divine. In addition to the appropriation and application of certain technologies, the developments of mathematics, experimentation, and the scientific method allowed for the increased standardization of shipbuilding and, at the same time, an increased capacity for flawless navigation and seamless incorporation of colonial ‘discoveries’ into European possession.92 Navigating the way toward capitalism’s endless accumulation, the abstractions made possible by mathematizing the real—reducing the planet to maps and planetary forces to navigational charts—were in themselves forms of domination that arguably acted as the initial enabler of neoliberal globalization.93 Within this scheme, superior ships built with superior science carrying superior seafarers plied dangerous oceans and plundered savage races to bring civilization in the form of superior religion and culture to the world—and this world with neither God nor culture, from uncharted territories to the heathens who occupied them, was all designated ‘nature’. The academy must be implicated in the resulting atrocities; as philosopher Elizabeth Grosz writes, ‘Twin rafts over chaos, philosophy and art, along with their more serious sibling, the sciences, enframe chaos, each in its own way, in order to extract something consistent, composed, immanent, which it uses

90 Dupré, Passage to Modernity, p. 75. 91 Aragón Ruano, El Bosque Guipuzcoano en la Edad Moderna; see also index entries for ‘coppice’ and ‘pollard’ and numerous photographs illustrating these methods of forestry in Rackham, Woodlands. 92 Like access to gunpowder, magnetic compasses, and printing technologies, these developments too began with the Crusades: Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation; Pryor, ‘Crusading by Sea’, pp. 174-188. 93 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, pp. 206-217.

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for its own ordering (and also deranging) resources’.94 Naval architecture encompassed art, philosophy, and science as much as it facilitated the navigation that soon encompassed Earth, and this was all understood as fundamental to divine order. When Bacon’s Novum Organum was published in 1620, the frontispiece featured a magnificent triple-masted ship sailing through the Pillars of Hercules, out of the Mediterranean Sea and into the Atlantic Ocean.95 Recalling again the trinity of teleology, eschatology, and utopia that have defined Judeo-Christian thought for centuries, Bacon offers discovery as a means to recover from the lapsus humani generis described in Genesis. Inspired by the works of Iberian intellectuals before him, Bacon’s writings emphasize that the greatest sin is to neglect the God-given right to knowledge by means of conquering ‘nature’ and that his era was the precise moment in which the true purpose of humankind ought to be actualized: ‘Only let the human race recover that right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest, and let power be given it: the exercise thereof will be governed by sound reason and true religion’.96 While the fall of angels in the book of Genesis was due to their having sought power that conflicted with their telos, ‘man fell through an opposite desire for pure (as opposed to practical) knowledge that interfered with his calling to dominate nature’.97 According to Bacon, the utopia of Paradise could be regained by heeding the call of Eden: to fill the earth and subdue it. The so-called Father of Empiricism refers to a feminized ‘nature’ rather suggestively as having been ‘laid open’ by the ‘distant voyages and travels which have become frequent in our times’.98 He then conjures the spirit of Columbus and ‘that wonderful voyage of his across the Atlantic, when he gave the reasons for his conviction that new lands and continents might be discovered besides those which were known before’.99 In surpassing the knowledge of the ancient Greeks and Romans, Bacon again claims that the then-recent ‘discoveries’ of Europeans were akin to acts of divine creation. He quotes King Solomon in Proverbs 25:2, who is supposed to have said that ‘The glory of God is to conceal a thing; the glory of the king to search it out’, before claiming that through the superior technology of 94 Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, pp. 8-9; cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 204-205. 95 Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation, p. 15, Fig. 2.1; Pimentel, ‘Iberian Vision’, p. 24, Fig. 2. 96 Bacon, Francis Bacon, p. 374 (Novum Organum aphorism CXXIX). 97 Dupré, Passage to Modernity, p. 71. 98 Bacon, Francis Bacon, p. 356 (Novum Organum aphorism LXXXIV). 99 Bacon, Francis Bacon, p. 359 (Novum Organum aphorism XCII).

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the ‘most civilized’ Europeans, they have the divine right to surpass mere discovery into outright conquest.100 Although Bacon was writing in the early seventeenth century and thus without direct knowledge of the earliest voyages, it appears that the official narrative surrounding Columbus had already begun to shift in the decades after his death. Columbus died in 1506 having fallen far from the favor of the Crown, but by 1593, his landfall in Ayiti would be revered as ‘The greatest event since the creation of the world, save the incarnation and death of Him who created it’.101 The already waning memories of the conquistadors’ original intentions are apparent in Bacon’s admonitory account in that the transoceanic voyages, those of Columbus in particular, had always been with the aim of conquest and never with that of Genesiac discovery.102 By the time of Novum Organum’s publication, much of the world’s habitable landmasses had already been claimed for the kingdoms of Christendom. Increasingly, the utopian Paradise was coming further into focus as the Christian colonial project extended around the globe. Drawing from the 1606 records of Pedro Fernández Quirós’s quest for Solomon’s Ophir, and therefore hardly creatio ex nihilo, Bacon’s New Atlantis exemplifies the conceptual—and Christological—connections between global conquest and the reclamation of Eden.103 In the story, the inheritors of Atlantean perfection are the residents of a Pacific island called Bensalem, itself a clever name meaning ‘son’ (from Hebrew ‫בן‬, or ben) of Salem, or heir of Jerusalem. A clear reference to the biblical prophecy of New Jerusalem, Bacon’s utopian island is filled with a godly people whose mission is described as ‘the knowledge of Causes and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible’.104 Although ostensibly motivated by his desire for all of humanity to benefit from more knowledge, Bacon was essentially echoing Iberian calls from the previous century that had established the scientific and theological grounds for unbridled and unabashed colonial expansion and exploitation.105 100 Bacon, Francis Bacon, p. 373 (Novum Organum aphorism CXXIX); Dupré, Passage to Modernity, p. 72. 101 Francisco Lopez de Gomera, Historia General de las Indias, cited in Delaney, ‘Columbus’s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem’, p. 260. 102 E.g., Hamdani, ‘Islamic Background to the Voyages of Discovery’, pp. 273-306. 103 Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation, p. 22. 104 Bacon, Francis Bacon, p. 447. 105 On the motives and methods of Iberian science in the colonies, see Pimentel, ‘Iberian Vision’, pp. 17-30; and especially Cañizares-Esguerra, ‘Iberian Colonial Science’, pp. 64-70; ‘Iberian Science in the Renaissance’, pp. 86-124, and the collection of English-language essays in

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Beginning in the Early Modern period, oceanic voyages were not motivated merely by curiosity but rather by the belief in and exercise of religious and cultural superiority.106 Having erupted from the ‘medieval crusading milieu’, transoceanic voyagers from Columbus to John Smith conceived of themselves as crusaders and were numerously portrayed by their contemporaries as knights on a mission from God, guided across the watery wilderness by Providence.107 Considering exploration as a form of exorcism, these voyages resulted in large-scale forced conversion, chattel slavery, and genocide.108 As Glissant has noted, the poet’s vision of a boat steered by open skies does not account for these kinds of historical voyages, in which the boat carrying cattle, chattel, and capital in its belly is ‘pregnant with as many dead as living under the sentence of death’.109 To fund the Early Modern oceangoing religious missions, flora, fauna, and ore were violently extracted: Indigenous slaves mined gold, silver, and gemstones that were taken back across the Atlantic to enrich Europe; African slaves were shipped en masse to the Americas where the survivors and their descendants were conscripted into delivering the birth of the very nations who enslaved them; tobacco agriculture was appropriated from Indigenous peoples of North America and capitalized by white plantation owners; indigo, cotton, and rubber plants were uprooted and made to grow in foreign soils, while tomatoes and potatoes would become iconic of European cuisine, an ocean or two apart from their endemic territories; and beaver, bison, and deer pelts became haute couture in Europe, the sales of which generated extraordinary wealth among white traders, with the fully intended byproduct of further cultural erosion among Indigenous communities.110 And yet still in the postcolonial era, Early Modern oceangoing watercraft like galleons, carracks, schooners, and caravels—some of which were converted to slave ships and all of which were fully armed and equipped to ‘fight the good fight of the faith’—are referred to as ships of ‘discovery’ and Cañizares-Esguerra’s book Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World. 106 Ḳedar, Crusade and Mission; Delaney, ‘Columbus’s Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem’, pp. 260-292; ‘Hamdani, Islamic Background to the Voyages of Discovery’, pp. 273-306. 107 Hamdani, ‘Islamic Background to the Voyages of Discovery’, p. 273; Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation, pp. 10-11, Fig. 1.1; Taylor, After God, pp. 86-91. 108 Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors. 109 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p. 6. 110 Cf. Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock of the Anthropocene, pp. 230-235, and Vergès, ‘Racial Capitalocene’, both of which go further by explaining more directly the links between these maneuvers and the ecocide of the Anthropocene.

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‘exploration’. This is as much the case among popular sources for historical and archaeological information, such as public museums and magazines, as it is in academic circles, among people who should know better the abuses of language, representation, and the past. These troubling claims might be validated through a single example. At a 2019 symposium at the University of South Carolina Beaufort, twelve senior scholars presented research on Early Modern seafaring and shipwrecking in North America.111 The geographical focus was primarily on the American Southeast, the region that experienced the most intensive waves of early colonization efforts by the Spanish and French and later on the British. With few exceptions, the narratives—not just of the underwater efforts to study the wrecks in question but also of the purpose of the ships having been in these waters to begin with—were riddled with the language of the colonizer: expedition, venture, discovery, voyage, exploration. Consider this excerpt from the conference program: European expansion into the newly discovered Western Hemisphere during the sixteenth century resulted in numerous shipwrecks—victims of accidents, carelessness, storms, warfare, scuttling, and myriad other hazards and perils. In fact, scarcely two months after discovering and exploring the newly found island in the New World, Columbus lost his largest ship, the nao Santa Maria, on the north coast of the island of Hispaniola. The Americas had claimed their first European shipwreck with many more to follow.112

In this day of lectures by noted experts, exploitation was a non-issue. The simple facts that the Western Hemisphere was not discovered by Europeans, that this world was only ‘new’ to European seafarers, and that the island later called Hispaniola was home to hundreds of thousands of people when Columbus arrived, were barely alluded to. Instead, presentations were focused on the intrepid nature of the voyagers and their competitive spirits in a new market that would lay the foundations for unprecedented globalization, industrialization, and capitalism. This science is clearly an inheritor of the Columbine legacy and the Protestant Baconian humanism that followed 111 The symposium was titled Shipwrecks of America’s Lost Century and was held on the university campus on 5 April 2019: https://santa-elena.org/shipwrecks-conference-announcement/; last accessed 21 February 2021. 112 See program on the symposium website here: https://santa-elena.org/shipwreck-conferenceprogram/; last accessed 21 February 2021.

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in its wake.113 At the symposium, presentations also accentuated the artifacts ‘discovered’ at shipwreck sites, further aligning the archaeological missions with those of the Early Modern ‘explorers’ before them, who themselves were aligned with the original ‘discovery’ of God in the first act of creation. Amidst the litany of artifacts resurfaced, particular attention was paid to the guns that forced and enforced submission and subjugation as well as the gold crosses and silver bullion, and the museum collections that hoard them all with apparent disregard for the violent circumstances of the raw materials’ acquisition. The 500-seat auditorium was nearly packed with students of all ages experiencing a knowledge transfer that illuminated only one side of the story of the Early Modern colonization of the Americas: the usual narrative of grandeur, bravado, machismo, and manifest destiny. It may come as no great surprise that the demographic composition of the invited speakers was largely reflective of the first Early Modern colonizers: out of twelve, all were white; all were middle-aged or older; all but one were male; and only one—the sole non-American—was working with Indigenous peoples to develop the histories of maritime communities and circumstances of shipwreck from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. How the past is purveyed in the present is a question of integrity; who purveys the past to those present is a question of propriety. And the past as property is an issue of heritage, especially heritage as a ‘resource’. Compounding the colonialist narrative, the symposium’s agenda was supplemented with the mooring at Beaufort’s downtown marina of the Spanish replica of Columbus’s wrecked nao, La Santa María. Ticketed spectators were invited to board the vessel and embody the explorer, to feel what Columbus felt when he sailed 500 years ago, hear the ominous creaking of the timbers and be stung by the salty spray of seawater, both cruel reminders of the precarity of human life at sea and the bravery of the men who conquered it and these ‘new’ lands, thereby paving the way to modernity. The organization behind the replica’s construction expresses its mission as retracing the ship’s history and working to ‘promote the columbine heritage’.114 The literal and figurative vehicle of European colonization in the Americas is reduced to a symbol of Spanish nationalism specifically and Eurocentrism more broadly,

113 Cf., Kehoe, ‘Archaeology within Marketing Capitalism’, pp. 169-178; Nicholas and Hallowell, ‘Postcolonial Archaeology’, pp. 59-60. 114 Refer to the Fundación Nao Victoria website at https://www.fundacionnaovictoria.org/ replica-nao-santa-maria/; last accessed 21 February 2021.

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readily affirmed by the throngs of intrepid, ticket-holding consumers of a one-sided narrative, materialized. This shipwreck symposium is an expression of how the field of nautical archaeology conforms to and perpetuates the Western social norms, in place since the Early Modern period, of capitalist ownership fetishes reinforced by the Christian tenets of manifest destiny and entitlement to Edenic utopia, and with it, immortality. And because of this inheritance, we seem to be unable to cease thinking of Earth and its systems in terms of an ergonomic project: either as a machine—devised or to devise—to complete our dirty work or as a divine work of art interpreted for the sole benefit of humankind. As religious philosopher Louis Dupré lamented over 25 years ago, Our continuing failure to ‘think’ the new, despite our growing dissatisfaction with the old, appears all too visibly in the unprecedented ecological disasters of our time, in the increasing hazards of a yet uncontrolled technology, and in the dismaying lack of aesthetic harmony in our humanmade environment.115

And so, instead, the ruins of ships built hundreds of years ago out of subjugated forests in order to subjugate waters before subjugating bustling continents continue to be conceived in and by the same terms under which they were sailed: domination, ownership, and salvation. But sunken ships have an opportunity to resist the confines of imperialist narratives to which our own minds seem persistently to conform.116 This is one of the ways that wrecks can defy their anthropogenesis.

Liminality (The Nissia) There have been numerous attempts to twist shipwrecks—and other ruins—into representing the remains of imperial power, and because of this association, through no fault of their own, they are subject to nationalistic debates of ownership. Property rights at sea are just as contentious as those on land—perhaps more so simply because of the unruly nature of water. Ownership of water and things in it has long been fluid, and rigid delineations have historically been arbitrary and quickly breached. For example, the Treaty of Tordesillas signed by Spain and Portugal in 1494 drew an 115 Dupré, Passage to Modernity, p. 90. 116 Rich, ‘Hauntography of an Ordinary Shipwreck’.

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imaginary line, running north to south, through the Atlantic. Lands to the west of the meridian, including most of the Americas, became the rightful property of the Spanish Crown of Castile, while those to the east, including Brazil, the Azores, and Africa, would belong to Portugal.117 Only 35 years later, following disputes over land in the Pacific, the two empires signed the Treaty of Zaragosa to allocate the East Indies to Portugal and the rest of the Pacific to Castile.118 Regardless, the Philippines would be claimed by Spain within only a few decades, testifying to the contagion of amnesia that oceans seem to inflict upon the soil-derived constructs of territory. Disputes over oceanic properties continue to rage on. In 2015, the Colombian Navy located a shipwreck at a depth of 600 meters using an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), which took photographs that would later identify the wreck as the Spanish galleon San José, confirmed by the dolphins—symbolizing salvation of the soul from death at sea—cast in bronze cannons onboard.119 After a decade of service to kings earthly and heavenly, the San José wrecked in 1708 while transporting stolen gold, silver, emeralds, and jewelry from Portobelo, Panama. Upon intervention of a British fleet near the destination port of Cartagena, the San José’s powder magazines detonated, sinking the ship along with King Philip V’s stolen treasure and almost all of the 600 men onboard. The wreck was located 26 kilometers (16 miles) offshore, well inside Colombia’s Exclusive Economic Zone, which includes territory within 322 kilometers (200 miles) of a given country’s coastline, including the water column and seafloor.120 But in 1981, a group of American treasure hunters claimed to have discovered the wreck and demanded 50 per cent of the billions of dollars of cargo that the ship still contained. After years in Colombian and American courts, their case was finally dismissed in 2015 and full rights to the wreck were granted to Colombia. But just days after the Colombian president announced the discovery of the San José, Spain, to whom the ship belonged at the time of sinking, also claimed rights to a portion of the cargo. However, that cargo was stolen, primarily from Peruvian and Bolivian Indigenous peoples, whose 117 Waisberg, ‘The Treaty of Tordesillias’, e18003; Coben, ‘Events that Led to the Treaty of Tordesillas’, pp. 142-162. 118 Hayes, Historical Atlas of the North Pacific Ocean; Giraldez, Manila Galleons; Kelsey, First Circumnavigators. 119 Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art, p. 159. 120 Christopher Mirasola, ‘Swimming against the Tide: Colombia’s Claim to a Shipwreck and Sunken Treasure’, Harvard International Law Journal, January 2016; last accessed 23 December 2019 at https://harvardilj.org/2016/01/swimming-against-the-tide-colombias-claim-to-a-shipwreckand-sunken-treasure/. On the potential privatization of water, see Taylor, After God, p. 365.

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governments also claimed entitlements to the goods. Eight years previously, when the treasure-laden frigate Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes was found off the Portuguese coast by a different American salvage company, Peru had also tried to stake a claim in the wreck, but to no avail. The courts decided that because Peru was the property of Spain at the time of wrecking in 1804, the contemporary state of Peru had no legal rights to the cargo of gold and silver, despite its geographical origins and the nature of its extraction. With this legal precedent, Peru and Bolivia had no case for even partial salvage rights to the San José. Furthermore, Colombia had just passed auspicious federal legislation in 2013 declaring that all manmade objects found in waters under Colombian jurisdiction were the rightful property of Colombia, and because of ambiguities in international treaties defining legal ownership and responsibilities for heritage protection, Colombia could rightfully claim exclusive control over the wrecked ship and its cargo.121 It appears that the San José, having sloughed off its anthropogenesis for over 300 years, will now be subject again to the whims of nation in a slight revision of its initial utility: to deliver stolen wealth to colonizing institutions. But in this revision, the humans next to encounter the wreck will be forced to negotiate with its ruined, deepwater state, where the assemblage has been participating in processes of reconstitution with the new architects of shifting sediments, colonizing marine organisms, and corroding chemical reactions. In the sunken ship’s freedom from service to man, it detached itself from anthropogenesis and achieved a kind of autonomy that is grounded in newfound pluripotency.122 Those seeking only its bejeweled cargo and bronze cannons will have to reckon with the fact that a function, or a use, is not possessed by an object but rather imposed upon it, and 600 meters down, enforcing impositions is difficult at best. The ruins of the San José and other doomed representatives of Spanish treasure fleets demonstrate a neocolonial underwater land rush to claim even the smallest percentage of ownership of the wreck, resulting in decadeslong legal quagmires that reinforce the global reach of capitalist greed while reinfecting old colonial wounds.123 By contrast, other shipwrecks are claimed by no one. These wrecks represent neither the pride of imperialism nor the nostalgia of glory faded, neither the hope of restored wealth nor the promise 121 See UN’s Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS, articles 149 and 303) and UNESCO, Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage, article 7. 122 Cf. Rich, ‘On Boats and Brokenness’; Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 169; Bryant, Onto-Cartography, pp. 23-24. 123 This is also true of China’s claims to wrecks in the South China Sea in order to justify continued imperial measures against Taiwan and Vietnam; see Han, ‘Blue Frontier’, pp. 463-468.

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of a new heritage ‘resource’. In Cyprus, the shipwreck known as the Nissia lies less than one kilometer away from the village of Paralimni on the southeast coast of the island, 27 meters deep in territorial waters of the Greek-speaking Republic of Cyprus. The Nissia has long been rumored to be the remains of an Ottoman warship or armed merchantman, wrecked in approximately the eighteenth century when Cyprus was enveloped within the vast Ottoman Empire. Yet neither Turkey nor the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus has expressed any notable interest in the wreck. And the interest of Greek Cypriots has historically been characterized by pillage.124 Particularly since the civil war, peaking in 1974 with the Turkish invasion, Greek-speaking Cypriots have often denounced the Muslim minority Turkish-speaking Cypriots and Turkish settlers in the occupied zone on the north side of the island. Among the Greek Orthodox majority of Greek-speaking Cypriots, the entire British colonial (1914-1960) and postcolonial (since 1960, and most vehemently since 1974) period has witnessed a widespread pro-Hellenic sentiment and strengthening of ties to mainland Greek heritage, despite the fabrication of many of those binding yarns.125 Add to this that until very recently, Greek-speaking Cypriots have all but dismissed three centuries of the island’s heritage associated with the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Therefore, despite the dearth of Ottoman shipwrecks available for scientific study, the Nissia has not been protected or valued as underwater heritage of any sort until the last few years. The consequence of this dismissal of some of the clearest inheritances of the island’s non-Christian Early Modern history has been unabashed looting of the wreck site. The vast majority of the site’s material culture, from clay tobacco pipes to entire cannons, has been lifted from the seafloor and either pocketed or sold on the antiquities market. These illegal activities have hardly been surreptitious. Instead, islanders possessing articles from the wreck site often boast of their accomplishments, as if in retaliation, conscious or subconscious, for damages brought on by the civil war.126 And yet, plundered and picked to pieces, the Nissia still 124 Beginning in 2014, Stella Demesticha at the University of Cyprus has overseen excavations and monitoring dives at this site, and she is largely responsible for turning the tide and raising the profile of the wreck among local community members to decrease unscientific ‘salvage’ practices; see Demesticha, ‘Underwater and Maritime Archaeology in Cyprus’, pp. 62-78. My heartfelt thanks are extended to Stella and to everyone on the 2015 field season team for the opportunity to work on this site and to gain essential insights into the wreck’s shifting place in the Cypriot imaginary: ευχαριστώ πολύ. 125 The reader is encouraged to investigate beyond the commonly accepted narrative in the West of the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, starting with Oberling, The Road to Ballapais. 126 Personal communication with Anna Demitriou, 2015. On underwater cultural heritage management in Cyprus, see her recent paper: ‘Managing Shipwreck Sites in Cyprus’, pp. 60-77.

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lies on the seafloor, persisting independently of its status as symbol of an invented and politicized heritage. When it comes to material relics of the past, there is a tendency for national governments to either clamor toward control or to shy away from the responsibilities thereof. And because of the ease of manipulation of certain relics from the past to suit the agendas of the present, material culture is frequently decontextualized and re-entangled in schemes of legitimation and authorization of atrocities in the name of nation, state, or empire—and, ultimately, the particular construct of heritage that is desired. One need only reconsider the role of Confederate monuments to white supremacy in the thousands of twentieth-century lynchings in the American South; recent iconoclasms of the Taliban, Daesh (ISIS), and al-Qaeda in the Middle East to cut off ties to a pre-Islamic past; or Nazi archaeology carried out by the Ahnenerbe to support the existence and supremacy of a fictional Aryan race.127 Following the horrors of World War II, it became painfully apparent that the past’s capacity to be politicized and mobilized in the agenda of evil should be contained so that it might be co-opted for the purposes of good instead. The idea that a shared, global perspective on cultural heritage might facilitate world peace was at the heart of Julian Huxley’s utopian project, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO. Huxley recognized that ‘he who controls the past controls the future’, and as archaeologist Lynn Meskell explains, his vision for that future was grounded in his personal beliefs in utopian social engineering, development and progress, cultural internationalism, and a voracious intellectualism that were all tied up with the end of empire. His is often called a ‘planetary utopia’, nothing less than a global vision for an ideal polity through the creation of a united world culture.128

Echoing the centennially penned utopias of Thomas More (1516), Francis Bacon (1626), and Constantin-François Volney (1791) before him, Huxley followed in the humanist traditions of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment 127 There is a multitude of research on each of these topics, so I offer only select examples of further reading here. On the US South, see, e.g., Ifill, On the Courthouse Lawn. On Daesh, see, e.g., Turku, Destruction of Cultural Property as a Weapon of War; Cunliffe and Curini, ‘ISIS and Heritage Destruction’, pp. 1094-1111. On Nazi archaeology, see, e.g., Black and Kurlander, eds., Revisiting the ‘Nazi Occult’; Arnold, ‘Pseudoarchaeology and Nationalism’, pp. 154-179; ‘The Past as Propaganda’, pp. 464-478. 128 Meskell, Future in Ruins, p. 3.

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but brought to them a twentieth-century neoliberal twist, emphasizing the role of museums, cultural tourism, and the capitalization of knowledge in achieving his distinct vision of globalization. His efforts were underpinned by a utopian philosophy of scientific humanism, and like More and especially Bacon, Huxley’s utopian world was based on the premise of European cultural superiority, which ought to be shared with the rest of world in order to ‘improve’ upon colonial lands and peoples. And like Volney, he believed that ‘science and technology not only could provide new possibilities for trade and industry, in a utopian sense, but also might contribute to the material advancement of colonized peoples worldwide’.129 However, Huxley’s utopia ostensibly departed from those of his earliest humanist precursors, namely More’s Catholic and Bacon’s Anglican foundations, and moved closer to Volney’s veneration of the ‘laws of nature’ and the ‘religion of evidence and truth’ as grounds for dissipating discord and achieving unity.130 Similarly, Huxley concurred that utopia cannot be achieved by enforcing or even acknowledging one religion as true; instead, his unified world would be ideologically grounded in the supposed neutrality of science and democracy. However, not even Huxley’s proposed secular utopia could escape the theophilosophical roots of the entire concept. The promotion of world peace through heritage conservation retains its Judeo-Christian foundations. The conservation and preservation programs essential to this mission, to be achieved in the names of optimism and altruism, aimed to cordon off ‘the natural and cultural wonders of the world for the future’.131 By harnessing the past in the control of the future, Huxley’s UNESCO still attempts to halt the violent effects of time or the detrimental effects of ‘nature’ on ‘culture’, and in so doing, there is an apparent if latent longing for the restoration of Edenic perfection and its accompanying desire for immortality. Whether that immortality is actualized through scientific or spiritual means, assuming any actual distinction between the two, is less relevant than simply the desire for its actualization. At the threshold where teleology, eschatology, and utopia meet, one finds immortality there, or at least a longing for it. The Judeo-Christian idea that sin is inherited by all humans and that the consequence of this inheritance is death has led to the related idea that the transgression of sin can itself be transgressed. Referring again to Simmel, and specifically his remarks on death and immortality from a Protestant perspective, death is 129 Meskell, Future in Ruins, p. 15. 130 Volney, The Ruins, p. 144. 131 Meskell, Future in Ruins, p. 15.

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merely a limit to transgress, and to transcend this imposed boundary is to experience the essence of life.132 This desire to escape the demise for which all the living are destined pre-dates Judeo-Christianity, of course, and like so many of the most resilient kernels of agrilogistics can be traced further back into the distant recesses of Mesopotamia. In the world’s first written work of fiction, composed between c. 2100-1200 BCE, the Epic of Gilgamesh follows the eponymous hero’s quest for eternal life. After the death of his close friend Enkidu, the urgency of immortality is pressing, and he asks for assistance from a wise barmaid named Siduri: Gilgamesh: Enkidu my brother, whom I loved, the end of mortality has overtaken him. I wept for him seven days and nights till a worm fell from his nose. Because of my brother I am afraid of death, because of my brother I stray through the wilderness and cannot rest. But now, young woman, maker of wine, since I have seen your face do not let me see the face of death which I dread so much. Siduri: Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.133

Even though Siduri is generally interpreted as an earthly manifestation of the Sumerian goddess Inanna (Babylonian Ishtar), Gilgamesh does not heed her advice and continues to pursue immortality. Finally, he learns to accept that the lot of humankind is the same as that of all living things: that the wages life pays is death, but that there is plenty of this life in which to rejoice. Writing some 1700 years after the Sumerian and Semitic authors of Gilgamesh, the Jewish intellectual who penned the biblical book of Ecclesiastes echoed the ancient barmaid’s advice to enjoy life while you have it because in the realm of the dead, there is nothing to await humankind.134 Even so, following the Protestant Reformation, humanistic Christian 132 Simmel, View of Life. 133 Paraphrased from the Old Babylonian Tablet X; see George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, p. 498. 134 Ecclesiastes 9: 7-10.

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theophilosophy has so powerfully indoctrinated rights to eternity and the supremacy of immateriality that these ideas have thoroughly permeated the ideology of the West and its colonies around the world, at the expense perhaps of rejoicing in the tragically mundane materialities of earthly life.135 While this prevailing idea of the immortal individual can be correlated to the early Christian belief in the resurrection of the body, the doctrine of individual immortality is a function of modernity.136 As philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach wrote in 1830, ‘the trademark of the entire modern age is that the human as human, the person as person, and therefore the single human individual in his own individuality, has been perceived as divine and infinite’.137 This divine and infinite self finds its ultimate precedent in God—not the universal inscrutable God but the fleshly incarnation of God as an individual man.138 And this, Feuerbach says, is ‘the focal point of the Protestant believer in Christ, the God-man, or the essence of humanity unified with the essence of God in the shape and form of Christ’.139 In the pietist branch of Protestantism, such veneration was extended even to the corpse of Christ, and Feuerbach sees pietism as transitional to the later evangelicalism, which venerates the intersubjective form of Christ that is located in the heart of the individual believer. The corpse-venerating pietists were the forebears of the moralists and rationalists, for whom ‘the object of the subject is the subject himself, in which the person alone is everything, is the essential and infinite reality’.140 But Feuerbach also recognizes that the longing for immortality courses through the veins of science as much as it does the church. In a sarcastic poem addressed as Humble Petition to the Exalted, Wise, and Honorable Learned Public to Receive Death into the Academy of Sciences, he positions Death as the antithesis of the Protestant immortality that overwhelmed all philosophical discourse: 135 And according to Nietzsche, such rejoicing includes not just the everyday joys but the everyday suffering, the tragedy of existence. For an excellent discussion of this in the context of Nietzsche’s ‘Eternal Return’ and its relation to the split subjectivity of Lutheranism (of which Nietzsche was an inheritor), see Killian, ‘Not Another Image of Torment’, pp. 133-145. 136 See Chapter 6, ‘Born Again: The Resurrection of the Body and the Restoration of Eden’, in Jansen, Understanding Early Christian Art. 137 Feuerbach, Death and Immortality, p. 10. 138 Dupré, Passage to Modernity, p. 38. See also: Taylor, After God, pp. 62, 109, who summarizes Kant, following Luther, that the duality of self as both mortal and divine, both sacred and profane, sinful and redeemed, can only hope to achieve infinite progress in moral development, and this can only be achieved by virtue of personal immortality. 139 Feuerbach, Death and Immortality, p. 10. See related examination of changing views on corpses and death in post-Reformation England in Zimmerman, Early Modern Corpse, pp. 24-66. 140 Feuerbach, Death and Immortality, p. 10.

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Highly learned and esteemed gentlemen, May I hereby present before you Death In order that, in your lofty circle, You may raise him to the doctorate. So that you do not find it disgraceful If he sits in consultation with you, I hereby proclaim to you What he might contribute to science. He is the best doctor on earth; None of his cures have yet failed; And no matter how sick you become, He completely heals nature. To be sure, he never has concerned himself With Christian theology, Yet he will have no peer In understanding philosophy. So then I implore you to receive Death into the academy, And, as soon as possible, to make Him doctor of philosophy.141

With effects saturating the academician as much as the peasant, Feuerbach casts the institutionalization of immortality, at the expense of decay and death, as just as much a product of the manipulative, utopian project of science as of religion.142 By deadening human sensitivity to finitude and casting off the one certainty in life, which is death, there emerges the imaginary and unnecessary rift between subject and object or between people and the 141 Feuerbach, Death and Immortality, pp. 1-2. See also his later work, Essence of Christianity, which expands these ideas into other areas of the Christian religion, including further thoughts on immortality but also the Christian’s lack of interest in the material world, and much more. Feuerbach’s cheeky reproach of modernity’s extreme thanatophobia, as seen in this poem and elsewhere, seems to presage Midas Dekkers’ De Vergankelijkheid [‘The Way of All Flesh’], a wry, stream-of-conscious mockery of the (post)modern fear of decay; or put differently, Dekkers may have been conjuring the spirit of Feuerbach while penning his book in the years before the turn of the last millennium. 142 Cf. Becker, Denial of Death, p. 284.

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terrestrial world around them. Everything from a sense of close community to a sense of kinship with extra-human earthlings is sacrificed to allow for the individual experience of the divine, including the personal savior and personal revelation as well as the artificial elevation of the individual man above all other creation. Feuerbach locates the severing of human from world not in Mesopotamia like Morton nor in capitalism like Moore but rather in the idea that the individual Christian is of supreme importance to God, and because the individual Christian is by definition ‘Christ-like’, each and every one has immortality as his rightful inheritance. To deny death is to accept a distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ and to suppose that man, namely the Christian man, transcends all other forms of earthly existence. Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity—and with it, Western thought and modernity as a whole—resonates with much of the critique found here in these pages. The widespread denial of finitude applies not just to human lives but also to the things that humans make which have come to represent the divine nature of humanity. If God is understood as the supreme artist, the cosmic architect, then it follows that humans created in his image should cordon off their own creations from decay.143 Works of art and architecture, including even crude performances, crusty artifacts, and crumbling ruins, are recurrent reminders of the divine source of human ingenuity, that all things manmade are made possible through divine inheritance, inspiration, and enlightenment. Ultimately, the scientif ic instinct to save the past—whether relic or ritual—from itself, from the erasure of memory, rests on the same logic as the missions to save colonized peoples from themselves and to preserve their artifacts for the future generations who persist long after those people and their bygone beliefs are extinct or so fully assimilated as to become unrecognizable. The science of saving is derivative of the religion of saving. If salvation has as its additional consequence monetary profit, as Huxley advocated in his utopian heritage project, then the mission might be considered all the more successful in that it results in an economy of saving too. And saving is essentially accumulation abstracted to a different kind, indulgences piled up in response to mortality. Anthropologist Ernest Becker connected capitalism with the fear of death, and he recognized in it a divergence from other attempts to transcend humanity’s creatureliness through mystical rites or legendary heroism.144 Stockpiles of gold and silver are nothing new, 143 Taylor, After God, pp. 122-129. See also Chapter 3. 144 Becker, Escape from Evil; many of these observations are a continuation from his previous book, The Denial of Death. On the evolution of the fear of death in the West, and the particular

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but the supposedly equal opportunity for the accumulation of wealth that is available to each individual is a descendent of Christian humanism. The ritual accumulation of money and the belief in its omnipotence is merely a thinly veiled attempt to transcend the ‘Adamant’ imposition of death.145 Consequently, the apotheosis that money affords is manifested in immortalizing projects from presidential portraits on currency to cryonic resurrection, and, currently, the colonization of Mars. And perhaps most significantly, there is a common feature among these immortalizing projects: that is, the undeniably dry qualities of the missions, from paper and metallic mint to bodily fluids in solid state and finally to terraforming red Martian dirt, on a planet where the only water at all is frozen beneath the ground. These examples illustrate that the severing of culture from nature, of human from world, and of human from death, also requires a severing of human from water. This is because nothing recalls the immanence of death quite like the occlusion of deep water. Whether sedated and profound or raging and unfathomable, death rides on watery ripples and waves. The mysteries of waterways, from the Mesopotamian Absû to the Greek Styx, have long channeled the enigmas of death, and these currents run deep in the human psyche. As Gaston Bachelard summarizes, ‘death associated with water is more dreamlike than death associated with earth: the pain of water is infinite’.146 Uncannily, death is shipwreck and shipwreck is death—‘the last voyage’—and in the primordial tomb of water, it is ‘our final dissolution’.147 While all ruins are subject to great preservatory lengths, wrecked ships are especially vulnerable to the destructive and polluting forces of the world’s oceans and seas. Further revealed in the following chapter, those wet, feminine forces place shipwrecks in a particularly grave danger from which they must be rescued by the emergent savior-scholar. The scientific preservation of underwater ruins, especially those signifying civilized prowess and humanized divinity, strike so loudly at the chords of immortality because ‘To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become a part of depth or infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water’.148 But a disappearance into infinite depths is not the embrace of eternity familiar to Christianity. Rather, deep water is an invitation to eternal death, a dripping finger beckoning role of American puritanism in its direction, see Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death. 145 Cf. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 86; Becker, Escape from Evil, pp. 74-76; Weber, The Protestant Ethic. 146 Bachelard, Water and Dreams, p. 6. 147 Bachelard, Water and Dreams, p. 12. 148 Bachelard, Water and Dreams, p. 12.

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the recollection of the deepest knowledge of all: that life is transitory and ultimately seeks death.149 To die is to share life, but the obsession with the eternal individual prohibits the fluid redistribution of existence in favor of the one, the ego.150 Could it be that the unexplored reaches of the farthest ocean are now your most dangerous beyond? […] No doubt they promise new discoveries. But will you not need to move beyond yourself, lowering your sail even, if you are to approach an other sight? For the man who searches too hard within the compass of his sails finds only what he has already found, and lost.151

149 Bachelard, Water and Dreams, pp. 47, 55. 150 This Feuerbachian sentiment makes clear the inheritance of his thought in Freudian psychoanalysis; see Levitt, ‘Freud’s Intensive Reading of Feuerbach’, pp. 14-35; Feuerbach, Death and Immortality, pp. xxx, 121-122. 151 Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 38.

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Hauntograph 1: Nissia 1. Supplementing this book’s agrilogistical inheritance of writing as the primary form of scholarship is the process of hauntography. At once a depiction of an object’s way of being, an acknowledgment that this depiction can only ever be metaphorical, and a construction that attempts to explain how things make their world,15249 this book’s first hauntograph represents the conundrum of the Nissia shipwreck. Much of the Nissia can be found 27 meters beneath the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, approximately one kilometer off the coast of Paralimni, Cyprus, beyond a small group of islands that gave the shipwreck its contemporary name, which almost certainly deviates from that with which it was christened hundreds of years ago. Simultaneously restless and listless, the wreckage persists despite—or perhaps to spite—all efforts to the contrary, and this is certainly due to its liminal position between the violent hubris of Western modernity and everything else. The shipwreck’s persistence can be correlated with its autonomy because its original function in the service of humankind has been thwarted. In defiance of anthropogenesis, the wreckage sinking onto the seafloor—dissipating into the water or the antiquities trade or dusty cabinets of curiosity—embraces finitude. Through its unbecoming, it becomes something else, acquiring new features and functions, which, in this hauntograph, was approximated by firing a selection of bones until they cracked apart into the ashes, at which point they were fitted back together. At the same time, this hauntograph is also self-referential to the very process of hauntography, which thinks practice as theory. The bones can be understood as the analysis—from the Greek αναλυείν, ΄ to loosen a ship from its moorings, which in the 1580s came to mean ‘to loosen up’ or ‘to set free’ by simplifying the complex—that precedes synthesis—from the Greek σύνθεσις, to combine, which in the 1610s came to refer to reasoning as a whole. Thirdly, the bones broken and reset also indicate the surgical urgency to re-fuse the severing of culture from nature, human from world, human from death, and human from water. Burned cow bones and adhesive (Sara Rich, 2019).

149 See Bogost, Alien Phenomenology; and Preface, this volume.

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Hauntograph 2: Nissia 2. The re-fusing of conceptual binaries remains so essential because without it, too much is left indeterminate, thrust aside without fitting neatly into a presupposed grid of antonyms. The Ottoman-era Nissia shipwreck does not fit neatly into categories of Greek or Turkish, so its status as Cypriot ‘heritage’ has been left in limbo, its parts washing into private collections and marine sediments. Perhaps because of this, the Nissia is particularly enigmatic and is known better through its local reputation than through the limited results of scientific inquiry. While the process of analysis is essential to epistemology, that which is analyzed cannot always be synthesized; uncertainty, loose ends, missing sections, reduction beyond recognition, and total loss can work to prevent clear resolution, thereby reminding the learner of the limits to human knowledge. Burned cow bones and ash (Sara Rich, 2020).

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Oberling, Pierre. The Road to Ballapais: The Turkish Cypriot Exodus to Northern Cyprus. Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 1982. Olsen, Bjørnar, and Þóra Pétursdóttir, eds. Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Pimentel, Juan. ‘The Iberian Vision: Science and Empire in the Framework of a Universal Monarchy, 1500-1800’. Osiris (2000): 17-30. Pryor, John H. ‘A Medieval Mediterranean Maritime Revolution: Crusading by Sea ca. 1046-1204’. In Maritime Studies in the Wake of the Byzantine Shipwreck at Yassiada, Turkey, edited by Justin Leidwanger, Sarah M. Kampbell, Deborah N. Carlson, 174-188. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2015. Rackham, Oliver. Woodlands. London: William Collins, 2015. Rich, Sara A. ‘Hauntography of an Ordinary Shipwreck: Paradox, Appellation, Provenance, Apparition’. In Heritage under the Sea: Maritime History and Archaeology of the Global Iberian World (16th to 18th Centuries), edited by Ana Crespo Solana, Felipe Castro, and Nigel Nayling. Cham: Springer, in press. –––. ‘On Boats and Brokenness’. PLATFORM. 6 July 2020, https://www.platformspace. net/home/on-boats-and-brokenness. Last accessed 21 February 2021. Rich, Sara A., and Peter B. Campbell. ‘Collapse, Cataclysm, and Eruption: Alien Archaeologies for the Anthropocene’. In Contemporary Philosophy for Maritime Archaeology: Flat Ontologies, Oceanic Thought, and the Anthropocene, edited by Sara A. Rich and Peter B. Campbell, in press. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Rothschild, Lynn. ‘Myco-architecture Off Planet: Growing Surface Structures at Destination’. NASA. 30 March 2018, https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/ niac/2018_Phase_I_Phase_II/Myco-architecture_off_planet/. Last accessed 21 February 2021. Simmel, Georg. ‘Two Essays’. The Hudson Review 11.3 (1958 [1919]): 379-385. –––. The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms. Translated by John A.Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010 [1918]. Smith, Laurajane. The Uses of Heritage. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. Spelman, Elizabeth V. Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. Steffy, J. Richard. Wooden Ship Building and the Interpretation of Shipwrecks. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012. Swaffield, Bruce C. Rising from the Ruins: Roman Antiquities in Neoclassic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Tanaka, Stefan. History without Chronology. Amherst: Lever Press, 2019. Taylor, Mark C. After God. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Theodoret of Cyrus. On Divine Providence. Translated by Thomas Halton. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1988.

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Tiffin, Sarah. Southeast Asia in Ruins: Art and Empire in the Early 19th Century. Singapore: National University of Singapore, 2016. Tilley, Christopher. ‘Excavation as Theatre’. Antiquity 63 (1989): 275-280. Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of this Planet. Winchester: Zero Books, 2011. –––. Starry Speculative Corpse. Winchester: Zero Books, 2015. –––. Tentacles Longer than Night. Winchester: Zero Books, 2015. Trigg, Dylan. The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009. –––. The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror. Winchester: Zero Books, 2014. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015. Turku, Helga. The Destruction of Cultural Property as a Weapon of War: ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea). United Nations. 10 December 1982, https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/ unclos/unclos_e.pdf#68. Last accessed 21 February 2021. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientif ic and Cultural Organization). Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. United Nations. Paris, 2 November 2001, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000126065. nameddest=6. Last accessed 21 February 2021. Van De Noort, Robert. North Sea Archaeologies: A Maritime Biography, 10,000 BC – AD 1500. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Vergès, Françoise. ‘Racial Capitalocene’. In Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Luben. E-book. London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2017. Volney, Constantin-François. The Ruins: Or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires. Translated by Thomas Jefferson and Joel Barlow. Paris, 1802. Waisberg, Tatiana. ‘The Treaty of Tordesillas and the (Re)invention of International Law in the Age of Discovery’. Meridiano 47, 18 (2017): e18003. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 1996 [1930]. Zimmerman, Susan. The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

2.

Broken Ship, Dead Ship Abstract While we think of ships as transporters and connectors, once they break, they become forgotten rejectamenta, removed from the human-social sphere. And yet archaeologists go to great lengths to reinstate their ‘authentic’ sociocultural statuses. This chapter identifies the longstanding metaphorical connections between ships and bodies and the religious associations of bodily failure and fragmentation as the driving forces behind archaeological resurrection. Because the Western academic tradition has developed alongside Early Modern Christian theology, and because archaeology developed out of its defense, there appear to be latent theological motivations behind the ways that nautical archaeologists approach wreckage, especially when located underwater. The sixteenth-century Yarmouth Roads Protected Wreck, of presumed Spanish origin located in English waters, helps flesh out arguments against exhumation. Keywords: maritime archaeology; speculative realism; nautical archaeology; strange mereology; Yarmouth Roads shipwreck

And your whole will, your eternal recurrence, are these anything more than the dream of one who neither wants to have been born, nor to continue being born, at every instant, of a female other? Does your joy in becoming not result from annihilating her from whom you are tearing yourself away? Eternal is the joy that carries within it the joy of annihilation, the affirmation of destruction.153

Shipwrecks are often understood, even by specialists who excavate them, as little more than dead ships. They are things to salvage, scraping from the seabed the artifacts worth studying or selling. Salvage operations might be 153 Irigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 26-27.

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likened to underwater grave robbing, and indeed, academic archaeologists often do draw this comparison.154 By contrast, archaeologists see their own positions as less salvor and more savior. That is, nautical archaeologists practice a kind of resurrection, returning the shipwreck to the elevated status of the ship. This practice, whether achieved through a literal ‘raising’ of the ship or by way of the virtual resurrection, assumes that the wrecked ship’s rightful place is among the living—that is, living humans. Both forms of academic resurrection work on the human savior’s assumption that the shipwreck was in need of intervention to begin with, or that its sheer existence is somehow incomplete as is. In other words, a ship is dead when it ceases to serve human needs, but life can be reinstated by granting it a new form and function as tourist attraction, public outreach initiative, cultural heritage token, or research subject. Ostensibly, humans have the power to build ships, sink them, and resurrect them, asserting absolute control over these objects’ destinies. However, humans have not always imposed destinies upon ships and boats. Instead, many cultural groups across time and space have recognized watercraft as autonomous entities, agents, or persons.155 Even so, what happens to that autonomy when these vessels are reduced to wreckage at the bottom of the sea? Ships abound with bodily metaphors (hull planking as skin, frames as bones, wood as blood), but how are those metaphors adapted to the new forms that occur with the supposed death of the ship-body? In addressing these questions of transformation, if not transubstantiation, this chapter channels the bounds between the ship and the wreck while examining—‘archaeoteleologically’—the humanistic instinct for resurrection.156 If instinct may be defined as Freud claims, as ‘a tendency innate in living organic matter impelling it towards the reinstatement of an earlier condition, one which it had to abandon under the influence of external disturbing forces’, we might consider this instinct in light of the previous chapter’s discussions on immortality and utopia and thereby understand it as a response to a perceived aberration in the human telos precipitated by

154 For a legal perspective on marine salvage versus the science of archaeology, see Bryant, ‘Archaeological Duty of Care’, pp. 97-145. Of tangential interest to the present discussion of the ‘resurrection model’ or ‘savior-scholar’ paradigm of shipwreck archaeology is that the obsolete term ‘resurrectionist’ was used as a euphemism for a grave robber or body snatcher, attested from the late eighteenth century. 155 See archaeological and ethnographic examples (and references) in Rich, Cedar Forests, Cedar Ships; Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture; Gell, Art and Agency. 156 Taylor, After God, p. 181.

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a fall from grace.157 Even if, ultimately, ‘the goal of all life is death’, there is a latent modernist instinct to deny Thanatos in favor of Eros and to return to immortal life under Edenic conditions. The instinct for the resurrection of the body and the restoration of Eden arises from the ‘inescapable fact of death’ which ‘may be the most profound source of spiritual anxiety’ in the Christian West and its colonies.158 In its more modern manifestations, this drive for immortality is projected even beyond the human body to encompass certain divinely anthropogenic things, especially those vehicles of God’s will done on Earth that have been swallowed by the darkness of demonic seas.

Ontology (The Yarmouth Roads) As objects of transposition, ships and boats literalize metaphor: meta (across) + phorein (to carry).159 A fleeting moment, a naval fleet, both have etymological origins in the Old English fleotan (to ‘drift’, ‘float’, or ‘flow’)—the object is inextricable from its method of temporal-spatial passage. Ships may be the ultimate objects of mobility, but what about shipwrecks, which are ships that have apparently failed in their singular task of carriage? While we speak of ships as transporters, mediators, and connectors, like other tools, once they break, they are disposed of and become forgotten rejectamenta; they are cast out of the human-social sphere.160 And yet when archaeologists examine them, we go to great lengths to reinstate their ‘authentic’ sociocultural statuses, perhaps at the expense of exploring gateways into the ontology of the object itself. In all their liminality, ships and shipwrecks are particularly suitable channels with which to think through the ontologies of

157 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 25, original emphasis; see also Chapter 1 of this book and Taylor, After God, pp. 174-177. 158 Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art, p. 180. 159 Elements of this chapter originated from my contribution to a forthcoming edited volume; see Rich, ‘Hauntography of an Ordinary Shipwreck’. These and other ideas presented here were strengthened through discussions held with fellow participants of the Maritime Mobility session at the 21st Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in Glasgow in September 2015, audience members at an Archaeology Department seminar at the University of Wales-Trinity St. David in Lampeter in May 2016, and attendants of my lecture for the Anthropology Department at Appalachian State University in April 2017. My deepest appreciation is extended to those who facilitated these opportunities and contributed to the conversations. 160 Lucas, The Archaeology of Time, p. 129; Harman, Towards a Speculative Realism, pp. 95-98; Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor, and Witmore, Archaeology, pp. 27-31.

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objects, in part because of the paradoxes associated with their behavior.161 But ontology goes beyond behavior, beyond outward-facing psyche; it is actions, interactions, and reactions; it is comings and goings as internal as external; it is change and defiance. Shipwreck ontology encompasses not just appearances or representations but also vibrating apparitions and shifting reverberations. Ontologically, ships differ from wrecks most vividly in their utility for human purposes. Ships are objects meant to transfer other objects. To succeed, they are characterized by movement, even speed, and yet, surprisingly, in Paul Virilio’s essay on the acceleration of modernity, so are shipwrecks: The fleet in being creates a new dromocratic idea: the notion of displacement without destination in time and space. It imposes the primordial idea of disappearance in distance and no longer in the danger of cataclysm; it rushes non-stop toward the beyond. The end [becomes] the point of no return […] simulating its own wreck, like those submarines that jettison fake debris and fuel to escape their pursuers, thus anticipating their actual disappearance; like those old warships hauled out to sea one last time to be sunk in the apotheosis of an ultimate explosion; the staging of great naval funerals where the vessel is sucked into the liquid funnel of the maelstrom—sucked in by its own rush to the point of no return.162

Virilio’s neologism ‘dromocracy’ refers to the phenomenon of modernity as a culture whose changes are propelled by a desire for acceleration. The Early Modern era was born of a view of the globe as a race course (Greek, dromos), where Christian and Islamic empires competed for domination through large-scale religious conversion. More so than their opponents, the Christian mechanism for global domination was the fleet, and so for Virilio, ships and fleets of them are floating nations, mimicking European empires as they rise and fall, and resembling ‘that other Time machine, History’.163 His conception of time as linear parallels that of superficial nautical movement, as both speed into the horizon before disappearing altogether. Ships wittingly accept their imminent peril by rushing forward, their temporary denial of 161 Cf. Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity; Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator; Rich, ‘Hauntography of an Ordinary Shipwreck’. 162 Virilio, Speed and Politics, pp. 40-41. 163 Virilio, Speed and Politics, pp. 44.

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Thanatos hauntingly similar to our own reluctantly headlong rush into the everpresent nothingness until nothing, or at least no-thing, we become.164 But the speed of becoming no-thing, or unbecoming a thing, is variable, as the horizontal trajectory is disrupted by verticality. Like the empire it mobilizes, the ship also falls, collapses, from grace. Its inevitable sinking may take agonizing hours of quaking, burning, terror, capsizing, and drowning.165 As the failed ship is gradually embraced by the same waters that held it up, its dromocratic trajectory becomes palindromic instead, as its ultimate origins and destinations are rendered irrelevant by the backs and forths, the to’s and fro’s, of wrecking, sinking through untold wet atmospheres of pressure. Once the ship reaches the seafloor, always broken, sometimes in pieces, its movement still does not cease. A famous nautical archaeologist, Keith Muckelroy, once described shipwrecks as the static seabed remains of a formerly dynamic, organized machine;166 yet this uncanny landing is anything but static. Matter, like time, is always on the move. And what is movement if not an impudent display of consciousness. Given the thousands of trees used to build them, Early Modern ships are conceived poetically as forests afloat, and if we can speak intelligently of how forests think, it stands to reason that ships, and their wreckage, might too.167 It may be that the ship upon sinking looks death in the face and can rejoice in knowing its future, its sealed fate is now. Its mirror image in the water’s surface might disclose the fragmented, deadly doppelgänger that awaits it in mimicry on the other side of the looking glass. But when bound together, face to face with the putrefied Other, not only does the living see itself as already dead, but so does the dead gaze upon the living and shiver ‘with worms and dread’.168 This horror is temporary, as the image of itself as the living dead breaks with the waves that wash the whole crumbling ship directly into the path of entropy, which reigns supreme on the seafloor as 164 Here I am using ‘nothing’ more colloquially than in the strictest philosophical sense of the absolute absence of something. See Sorenson, ‘Nothingness’. 165 See literary accounts of shipwreck in Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity, and Blackmore, Manifest Perdition. 166 Muckelroy, Maritime Archaeology, p. 157. As will be further explored in Chapter 4, neither is a ship’s status as machine revoked upon sinking; philosopher Levi Bryant would likely refer to a shipwreck as an ‘inanimate corporeal machine’: Bryant, Onto-Cartography, pp. 25-30, 37-53. 167 For an ethnographic analysis, see Kohn, How Forests Think; and for corroboration in the natural sciences, see Simard, ‘Tree Communication, Learning, and Memory’, pp. 191-213, and other scientific and philosophical contributions to the same volume, Memory and Learning in Plants. 168 Negarestani, ‘Corpse Bride’, p. 135; on the putrefied Other, see Rosen, Speculative Annihilationism, p. 82.

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it does everywhere else.169 But inevitable destruction is eventual creation. The paths of entropy, like those of time, are overlapping rather than linear, and this is nowhere more apparent than underwater. Down there, time as tracked through incremental, systematic change is often inconsequential. The changes underwater are methodical, episodic, and frequently cyclical, difficult to reconcile with anthropogenic mechanisms for keeping track of them. Wreckage is covered, uncovered, discovered; it oxidizes, is eaten, is colonized; it accretes and it drifts, a post-human afterlife deeply withdrawn from its architect’s consciousness, surreptitiously withdrawn from anthropogenic mechanisms for tracking. Shipwrecks are evasive. Lurking on, alluding to the eerie thresholds of shipwreck ontology, ontographic processes do not just study the way of being of an object but arrange, make, design, craft, image, and amplify that ontology. The ontography of a shipwreck should embrace the liminal and produce more meaningful ways of relating to and relaying what’s all down there. Ontography allows elusive elements of reality, which is composed of objects, to reveal themselves via interaction through collocation.170 A shipwreck ontograph would not be linear like a biography, or topographical like a map; it would not be ordered like a site plan, or act as a window to another dimension like a trompe l’oeil;171 it might be all or none of those things, but it would relay, somehow, the way it might be to be that shipwreck. Like other forms of art and design, ontography ‘emerges when sensation can detach itself and gain an autonomy from its creator and its perceiver, when something of the chaos from which it is drawn can breathe and have a life of its own’.172 The ontology of a shipwreck, of course, is fundamentally as breathless as it is autonomous, and ontographic attempts would need to register this mode of being alone in a no-zone, a blind spot in the deep. Existing in their voluminously foreign, violet-black, murky green, and hyaline blue worlds,173 shipwrecks are notoriously isolated, secluded, really physically and metaphysically withdrawn from human accessibility. They are neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive. They characterize a near ontological void, the lack of a sense of presence, which leads to a lack of perceived being—in Derridian terms, they exist hauntologically.174 The 169 Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, pp. 257-286, 295-297. 170 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 38; Harman, Quadruple Object, pp. 124-135. 171 Adams, ‘Experiencing Shipwrecks and the Primacy of Vision’, pp. 85-97; see also Chapter 5. 172 Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, p. 7. 173 Alaimo, ‘Violet-Black’, pp. 233-251; Mentz, ‘Shipwreck’, 1-15; Steinberg and Peters, ‘Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces’, 247-264. 174 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, pp. 9-10, 63, 202.

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logic of haunting brushes up against eschatology and teleology, and also efforts to fathom the incomprehensibility of something that has ended yet persists, something that has ended and yet resists that end. In this respect, a ‘hauntograph’, rather than an ontograph, might still better address that tension in space of something both accessible and withdrawn alongside the temporal tensions felt as we relate to and relay the bygone yet enduring. A hauntograph is an ontograph for the revenant. The shipwreck exists regardless of the human gaze, but the ontographer is limited to and by her access, which includes the attempted comprehension of the incomprehensible; in this way, we can never really be ontographers but hauntographers instead. So to consider shipwreck ontologies, we must embrace the liminal, yes, but also the eerie. As theorist Mark Fisher explains, ‘The perspective of the eerie can give us access to the forces which govern mundane reality but which are ordinarily obscured, just as it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether’.175 And to relay, hauntographically, something of that reality beyond the mundane, we might consider what it means to be an assemblage of so many materials, submerged: the ‘form that is perhaps most appropriate to the weird is the montage—the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together’.176 Flowing between the ontic and the meontic, the hauntographs revealed here in these pages are weird conjunctions of shipwreck relics, real and imagined, and always withdrawn; they are mysterious time materialized as collisions between past and present.177 Drifting materials in time, shifting forms in space, shipwreck presence, like the present, is an apparition, fleotan.

Meontology (Holigost) Like proofs of the paranormal, shipwrecks are evasive. They are the architectural ghosts that follow the inevitable disappearing act when ships slip beneath waves, leaving a swirling surface where an observable object once was: the ship’s ‘sensuality is an elegy to its disappearance’.178 Its wrecked body sinks into an abyss, a chasm of eerie waters and alien creatures. A shipwreck’s real and metaphysical withdrawal ‘disturbs us with an excess over what we 175 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 13. 176 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 11, original emphasis. 177 Tillich, ‘The Eternal Now’, pp. 30-38; Bryant, ‘Material Temporality’. 178 Morton, Realist Magic, p. 188; on architectural ghosts, see Jeanette Bicknell’s contribution to Korsmeyer, Bicknell, Judkins, and Scarborough, ‘Symposium’, pp. 435-441.

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can know or say about it, or what anything can know or say about it’.179 This excessive unknowability, or no-thingness, can be understood as meontic: that is, supplemental to a necessarily incomplete disclosure of this alien, unknowable object’s way of being. A meontological analysis of shipwrecks would consider what else besides, beyond being can be thought—essentially, the becoming through un-being or un-doing as a ship becomes a wreck and a wreck becomes particulated and percolated matter, scattered. Shipwrecks left undisturbed underwater are said to have been ‘left to rot into nothingness’ as though nothingness has some moral quality akin to wickedness, such that humans are morally obligated to intervene, to rescue the wreck from the evil nothingness of water.180 By contrast, a meontological response to the banalified rhetorical question of whether or not nothing is sacred would be a ‘yes’ that rumbles inaudibly but persistently throughout the estimated three million shipwrecks in Earth’s oceans.181 These sites of wreckage are caught up in the ‘rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces’ as they lie shuddering and spasming on the shifting seafloor in a foreign landscape almost exclusively devoid of the discernibly human, while at the same time being a product of the human.182 In the mid-fifteenth century, the River Hamble on the south coast of England reduced Henry V’s Holigost from a ‘great ship’ of the royal fleet to a scatter of timbers buried in the mud of the river bottom.183 Subjected to patterns of encroaching and receding riverwater from rainfall and the briny double tides of the Solent, most of the Holigost has long dissipated downstream, leaving only faint traces of its inhumed form on aerial photographs. Fisher invokes the weird and eerie to negotiate such encounters: ‘The eerie concerns the most fundamental metaphysical questions one could pose, questions to do with existence and non-existence: Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?’184 These anthropogenic objects move into and within a place absent of anthropos, and their becoming present there signals their immediate unbecoming, at least as it pertains to conception and intention. As Timothy Morton explains, referring to the Buddhist philosophy of Nāgārjuna, ‘Emptiness is not the absence of something, but the nonconceptuality of 179 Morton, Realist Magic, p. 47. 180 Bryant, ‘Archaeological Duty of Care’, p. 145. On the moral quality of material objects on the basis of philosophy and physics, see Dalton, ‘Object-Oriented Ethics’, pp. 59-78. 181 Estimate provided in UNESCO, ‘Wrecks’. 182 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 11. 183 Historic England, ‘Grace Dieu and the Possible Site of the Holigost’, and references. 184 Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 12.

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reality: the real is beyond concept, because it is real’.185 He continues later to explain that nothingness is disturbing because it is there, a part of what is given but which cannot be directly accessed, existing in a ‘weird crack’ in the world.186 As broken ships refute original intentions, the reality of the abyss presents an opportunity for the wreckage to shake off its creator and continue accelerating ever further toward the autonomy of nothingness. Regarding things discarded or displaced, Mary Douglas reminds us that ‘in the end, all identity is gone’.187 As the irreverent shipwreck unbecomes within the abyss, it also becomes the abyss, morphing into the gaping nothingness that first cradled it and then consumed it during the ‘long process of pulverizing, dissolving, and rotting’.188 Just as all living things were born from empty, Precambrian waters as eggs from the wombs of their mothers, upon death, all things return to some void, whether breath’s cessation, a grave, or a primeval oceanic womb. But for now, in the Quaternary, Earth’s amniotic fluids still teem with life, and as shipwrecks break further apart, their rust, their wood, their sailors’ bones, their pots and pans and sextants all succumb to the solvent of abysmal waters, the source of creation, destruction, and recreation. As Mircea Eliade wrote, In water, everything is ‘dissolved’, every ‘form’ is broken up, everything that has happened ceases to exist; nothing that was before remains after immersion in water, not an outline, not a ‘sign’, not an event. Immersion is the equivalent, at the human level, of death at the cosmic level, of the cataclysm (the Flood) which periodically dissolves the world into the primeval ocean. … Water purifies and regenerates because it nullifies the past.189

Paradoxically, water both nullifies and embodies the past. As the realm of the unrecognizably ancient, the source of the oldest life in the Archean eon—and therefore of the dead—oceans are equated with the past, the deepest past. But as Faulkner wrote, ‘the past is never dead; it’s not even past’. No one ever really puts the past behind them, and just as the bygone is never really gone, the oceanic abyss has never been empty. Neither is a lake (from Latin lacus) a lacuna (diminutive of lacus). Rather the opposite 185 Morton, Realist Magic, p. 74. 186 Morton, ‘Weird Embodiment’, p. 31. 187 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 197. 188 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 197. 189 Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, p. 194; cf. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 199.

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of vacuous nothings, oceans and lakes epitomize horror vacui, a loathing of empty space such that all gaps, all ‘weird cracks’, are filled. The oceanic void brims with the wet lives it regenerates through those that it takes. It dissolves and redistributes, like the past, like death: ‘there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere’.190 The wrecked ship’s continued destruction, its absorption into the primordial creative matrix, exemplifies Sabina Spielrein’s thesis that coming into being is the result of destruction, that ‘no change can take place without destruction of the former condition’.191 The abyss that absorbs ships from its surface was never a nothing, a nihil, but always the source for coming into being, at the same time that it was and remains the profound source for chaotic and destructive change. While Abrahamic religious doctrines may adhere to the ex nihilo account of creation, the text most sacred to Judeo-Christianity opens with the ‘breath of God’ (ruach elohim) eerily vibrating over ‘deep’ (tehom) ‘waters’ (mayim), bringing light to darkness, form to formlessness.192 The formlessness of the deep that exists before creation begins on that f irst day is paradoxically the symbol of sacred origins alongside growth, demise, and decay.193 Out of water, life emerges; into water, death awaits.

Deontology (Mary Rose) Out of the millions existing somewhere in that abyss, remote, miniscule percentages of shipwrecks are located. Those that are found frequently become the objects of rescue missions that seek to extract wreckage from the waters, where they have been for hundreds or even thousands of years. Once these disgraced bodies are discovered, nautical archaeologists feel compelled toward radical intervention in the (after)lives of shipwrecks.194 Survey and excavation alone often prove inadequate to the dutiful fulfillment 190 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 244; cf. Witmore, ‘Realities of the Past’, p. 25. 191 Spielrein, ‘Destruction as the Cause’, p. 174. 192 Keller, Face of the Deep; cf. Zaitsev, ‘The Meaning of Early Medieval Geometry’, p. 538. 193 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 198. 194 See Pétursdóttir, ‘Climate Change?’, p. 192; and ‘Anticipated Future?’, pp. 97-100, on the application of the term ‘afterlives’ to nonhuman, or extra-human, objects. She is right to suggest that the term may be inappropriate or even misleading because it assumes that an object’s ‘life’ is confined to the period of time during its existence when it serves an anthropogenic function. Throughout this book, I tend to correspond ship with ‘life’ and shipwreck with ‘afterlife’ to emphasize the object’s disappearance from the human horizon, and in turn, its def iance of anthropogenic telos. Furthermore, the physical location of most shipwrecks underwater links

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of the archaeologist’s professional obligations. Preparing and answering research questions is one of the qualities that sets the archaeologist apart from the treasure seeker: the archaeologist’s quest is scientific, while the treasure hunter merely pursues profit. While this distinction is mostly clear, the differentiation between motives that are purely scientific and those that are religious or magical is less apparent. Just as Old Testament scholar Robertson Smith concluded that science is not opposed but ‘deftly harnessed to the Christian’s task’, the scientific quest often feels more like a spiritual one, or even a moralizing venture.195 Causal relationships between Christianity and colonialism, and colonialism and science, are complex but are much clearer in the example of the history of archaeology. Emerging from colonial antiquarianism during the Enlightenment, the discipline was established with the discrete mission of preserving the material culture of the colonized Other because that Other was doomed to extinction through eventual assimilation.196 This ‘ethic of saving’ is still paramount to the mission of archaeologists globally—even those whose research focus is nonhuman objects rather than nonwestern subjects.197 For example, since its establishment in the mid-twentieth century, UNESCO’s World Heritage program has emphasized salvage and rescue using Christological terms such as ‘Save Moenjodaro’ in their missions to rescue ruins from decay.198 The same can be said of cases where the ruination of cultural monuments is intentional. Alfred Gell provides the example of the slashed Rokeby Venus, whose iconoclast endowed the painting ‘with a life it never possessed before by “killing” it and turning it into a beautiful corpse’.199 The artwork was almost immediately restored to its original condition, which ‘was also a means of re-erecting the barrier which prevents such images troubling us unduly, politically, sexually, or in any other way’.200 Shipwrecks are examples of ruined art or architectural objects that might trouble us spiritually too. As ruins underwater, wrecks are not just in danger of extinction or annihilation; they are already conceived of as dead ships, particularly humiliated them anthropologically with the realm of the dead, and in Chapter 4, the idea of afterlife works in tandem with that of the undead. 195 Cited in Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 22. 196 See Chapters 2 through 5 in Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought; and more concisely, Zimmerman, ‘On Archaeological Ethics and Letting Go’, pp. 98-99. 197 Fowles, ‘Perfect Subject’, pp. 9-27. 198 Meskell, A Future in Ruins, pp. 59-63; another example is in the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia: p. 57. See also Han’s critique of the ‘salvage-extraction dynamic’ in ‘Blue Frontier’, pp. 465, 477-479. 199 Gell, Art and Agency, p. 64. 200 Gell, Art and Agency, p. 64

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architectural monuments whose glory might only be reinstated through acts of salvation performed by the savior-scholar. Perhaps in part compensating for the notoriously and inherently destructive nature of this science, which slays even as it saves, nautical archaeologists’ miraculous resurrections are materialized in numerous forms.201 Resurrection can come in the form of literally raising the ship from the dead, as in the case of Henry VIII’s flagship, Mary Rose, whose wreckage was raised from the English Channel before being conserved, reassembled, and displayed in its own museum in Portsmouth,202 or the Vasa, whose seventeenth-century hull was lifted from the Baltic and displayed in its bespoke museum in Stockholm.203 Likewise, Robert de la Salle’s barquelongue Belle was excavated from the Gulf of Mexico, where it wrecked in 1686, and the reassembled hull is now exhibited in a museum in the Texas state capital.204 The timbers of the ancient wreck known as the Ma’agan Michael were raised one by one from the Mediterranean depths off the coast of Israel, like Lazarus from a watery tomb, but the resurrection didn’t stop there.205 The ship was also cloned: that is, reconstructed and sailed anew as the Ma’agan Michael II.206 Even eerier, ships like the nau Santa María that was part of Christopher Columbus’s fleet are resurrected without a body having ever been found.207 These replicas based on iconography alone seem to recall a resurrection closer to that of Christ; that is, the absence of physical remains only serves to enhance the divine nature of the body being divined. A relatively new trend in nautical archaeology is the virtual resurrection, which often borrows the measurements of bits and pieces of known wrecks of a similar date, size, and function, and in the style of 201 Cf., Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 7-11; Lucas, ‘Destruction and the Rhetoric of Excavation’, pp. 35-46. 202 Rule, The Mary Rose; cf. Fenwick and Gale, Historic Shipwrecks, pp. 38-39. 203 Cederlund, Vasa I. 204 Bruseth and Turner, From a Watery Grave; Bullock Texas State History Museum, La Belle. For more on this shipwreck, see Chapter 3. 205 The remains are on public display in the Hecht Museum in Haifa, Israel; Monroe, ‘The Ma’agan Michael Ship’, pp. 443-448. 206 For some criticisms of the epistemological role of replicas, see McGrail, ‘Replicas, Reconstructions and Floating Hypotheses’, pp. 353-355; and for a response, see Goodburn, ‘Some Further Thoughts on Reconstructions, Replicas and Simulations’, pp. 199-203. One of the criticisms in both papers is the lack of publication in peer-reviewed journals on ship replica methodology; this concern is also true for the Ma’agan Michael II, which sailed in 2017, and for which there have been no publications to my knowledge outside of newspaper articles. 207 See Chapter 1 and website for the ship replica, last accessed 3 June 2020: https://www. fundacionnaovictoria.org/replica-nao-santa-maria/.

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Dr. Frankenstein, assembles these partial ships into a new and arguably fictional (or monstrous) whole.208 This recent trend toward virtual resurrection has been, in part, a response to Rule 1 of the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage, which advises that in situ preservation ought to be considered as the first option. The rule’s basis is not the idea that underwater cultural heritage should be left where it is in acknowledgment of a new, autonomous or even misanthropic ecology for things like shipwrecks; rather, its basis is the idea that the bodily resurrection of the Mary Rose and the Vasa represents the ideal scenario, but a scenario that is impossible for all known shipwrecks because of the limitations of current excavation technology and capacity for public display.209 The rule supports in situ preservation so that future generations with better technological and financial abilities for recovery will be able to achieve this ultimate end, which is bodily resurrection. The widespread emphasis on ‘raising the hull’ and other ship parts has been critiqued as a masculinist approach to the study of wrecks, reflective of the sex and gender of the majority of the discipline’s practitioners.210 While acknowledging the validity of the feminist critique, I suggest that the multitude of resurrective practices within nautical archaeology is not only an expression of masculinity but especially indicative of Western masculinity and its Judeo-Christian entanglements. In many cultures ancient and contemporary, ships and boats are likened to human bodies.211 They are often named, ensouled, and granted autonomy. Humans look at wooden ships and boats as though gazing through a watery looking glass upon a slightly anamorphic reflection of Self: hull planking like skin (swollen with water and water-tight), frames like the bones of our skeleton (the form held rigid while protecting the viscera within), keel as spine (permitting us motion, symmetry, and balance). English-language nautical vernacular like yardarm, breasthook, and forefoot is further testimony to the ship-body metaphor. In addition to the allusive jargon, 208 E.g., Yamafune, ‘16th-Century Portuguese Nau’. For a more complete analysis of virtual tourism of shipwreck sites, see Chapter 5. 209 See, e.g., Maarleveld, ‘Open Letter’, p. 109. For the full text of the 2001 Convention, see UNESCO, Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage, Annex, rule 1. 210 Ransley, ‘Boats are for Boys’, p. 626. See also relevant discussion in Tuddenham, ‘Cyborgs and Shipwrecks’, pp. 107-108. 211 The argument introduced in the following paragraphs is explored more fully in Killian and Rich, ‘Maritime Christening’, in press. See also Rich, Cedar Forests, Cedar Ships, pp. 123-175; Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture, pp. 113-118; Adams, Maritime Archaeology of Ships, pp. 27-28. For more high-tech anthropomorphic machines, see Leach, Machine Sensation, on relative autonomy despite anthropogenesis, from Voyager 2 to sexbots.

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popular literature from the seventeenth-century English writer Richard Younge, who ‘hurls human body parts, Christian souls, and nautical terms into a single crowded space’, compounds corporeal likenesses: My Body is the Hull; the Keele my Back; my Neck the Stem; the Sides are my Ribbes; the Beames my Bones; my flesh the plankes; Gristles and ligaments are the Pintells and knee-timbers; Arteries, veines and sinews the serverall seams of the Ship; my blood is the ballast; my heart the principall hold; my stomack the Cooke-roome; my Liver the Cesterne; my Bowels the sinke; my Lungs the Bellows; my teeth the Chopping-knives; except you divide them, and then they are the 32 points of the Sea-card both agreeing in number.212

Although perhaps too seductive a sentiment for Younge’s pamphlet The State of a Christian, Lively Set forth by an Allegorie of a Shippe under Sayle (1636), ship-body correlates continue into the nether-regions of both. Signifying the spar’s phallic shape, the word ‘mast’ shares its etymology with ‘meat’, and the word ‘cunt’ has nautical affiliations too, referring to a type of knot that splices two lines together in a ship’s rigging. Perhaps because of the widespread doctrine of imago dei, if ships were based on the human form, then by extension, they were also based on that of God. And if a ship made in God’s image sailed the seven seas, it may have been more likely to appeal to divine generosity and be showered with blessings instead of meteors or cannon fire. However, the metaphorical ship-body does not seem to have been merely utilitarian in nature. Ships and bodies enjoy a ‘symbiotic referentiality’ that extends beyond form and function and into the ways that both were lived and performed.213 Ship parts and ship wholes were potent and explicit entities that elicited transformations between material substances of wood and flesh, in equal parts mortal and divine. Within the ongoing Crusading zeitgeist of the Early Modern period,214 the ship-body metaphor assumed profound religious importance. Art and literature of the period suggest that the ship was not understood by its sailors 212 Cited in full alongside a reprint of the original pamphlet in Mentz, ‘Toward a Cultural Poetics of Early Modern Shipwreck’, pp. 108-115; cf. Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity, pp. 3-4; Mentz, ‘God’s Storms’, pp. 77-78. 213 Blackmore, Manifest Perdition, p. 90. 214 On the crusading milieu, see Chapter 1; cf. Hamdani, ‘Islamic Background to the Voyages of Discovery’, pp. 273-306; West, ‘Christopher Columbus’, pp. 519-541; Sweet, ‘Christopher Columbus and the Millennial Vision’, pp. 369-382; Watts, ‘Prophecy and Discovery’, pp. 73-102.

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as just any human body but that of God as Christ. For example, a 1596 portrait of a young man features an inset with a ship sailing under the red cross of the English flag. Gesturing toward the ship, a hand reaches from the clouds. Above the ship and divine hand the words Le Sembable (‘the same’) are painted, indicating unambiguously a symbolic equivalence between them.215 Sailing within the protective hull of the body of Christ translated to all faring of the sea as pilgrimage, all voyages evangelical. Practicing exorcism, sailors plied demonic waters and broached satanic shores beneath a towering wooden cross in the form of the mast and yardarm ascending heavenward.216 Stemming from Early Christian iconographic and poetic traditions, the great cruciform mast and yardarm are also in reference to the Edenic Tree of Life, which was an indirect source of death for Christ, positioning him as the sacrifice needed to restore the possibility of everlasting life after the lapsus humani generis as well as, symbolically at least, a direct source of his death, as the Edenic tree was commonly conceptualized as having furnished the wood for the crucifixion.217 English poet and cleric John Donne (1572-1631) further identified Christ with the ship’s anchor: The Cross—my seal at baptism—spread below Does, by that form, into an Anchor grow. Crosses grow Anchors; bear, as thou shouldest do Thy Cross, and that Cross grows an Anchor too. But He that makes our Crosses Anchors thus, Is Christ, who there is crucified for us.218

215 Portrait of a Gentleman, circa 1596, BCH3152, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Caird Collection: https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/14625.html; last accessed 21 February 2021. My gratitude to Claire Jowitt for bringing this painting to my attention. 216 Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors; Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity, pp. 25-50; Blackmore, Manifest Perdition, p. 17; Corbin, Lure of the Sea, pp. 7-9. Corbin reports that Iberian seafarers would exorcise the oceans by immersing holy relics in the water and that the ship was understood at times as homologous to the Church, helmed by the Holy Spirit. 217 Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art, pp. 138-140, Fig. 53; see accounts collected in Spielrein, ‘Destruction as the Cause’, p. 175; and also Chapter 3 in Rich, Cedar Forests, Cedar Ships. 218 Excerpted from ‘A Sheaf of Snakes Used Heretofore to Be My Seal, the Crest of Our Poor Family’, in Donne, Poems of John Donne, p. 215. My gratitude is extended to Jeremy Killian for bringing this passage to my attention. The identification of Christ with the ship’s often cruciform anchor is also a tradition that can be traced back to Early Christian art and literature; see Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art, p. 140. For more on anchors associated with the Christian cross, see Van Doorninck, ‘Anchor and Hull Construction’, p. 27; ‘The Anchors’, p. 142; Haldane, ‘Anchors of Antiquity’, p. 23; Wachsmann, Sea of Galilee Boat, p. 342.

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At sea, the body of Christ, in the life-giving form of the ship, was all-encompassing, an inclusive triangular system linking the bodies and destinies of ship, sailor, and savior.219 When the moribund ship broke, as it was bound to do, the binding of ship to sacred body also ruptured. In Abrahamic holy scriptures, humans are composed of earth, not water, so a breach of brine over or into the ship’s hull in a storm or other sinking event was likened to the encroachment of feminine and demonic forces. Waterways were ‘perilous’ dwelling places of demons,220 and not surprisingly, those wet, dangerous places were likened to the waters of the womb: something from which to be delivered.221 Expressing a profound fear of the deep, which theologian Catherine Keller has called tehomophobia,222 there are numerous scriptural references to the sea in association with sin and demonic forces: Jeremiah 5:22 states that sand was placed as a barrier to keep the life-vanquishing waves at bay; Psalm 107 reveals the storm-tossed punishment of greedy sea merchants until they plead for their lives; Micah 7:19 tells of the sins cast into the depths of the sea; evildoers are drowned in Noah’s flood, the Pharaoh’s minions were drowned in the Red Sea, demon-possessed swine are drowned by Christ, and a seven-headed beast emerges from the sea in the book of Revelation before order is restored and the oceans are removed from existence altogether (ἡ θάλασσα οὐκ ἔστιν ἔτι – ‘the sea is no more’). In Early Modern Portuguese texts, storms tossing a ship at sea are analogous to the trials of the soul: ‘tribulation’ (atormentado) is related to both ‘storm’ (tormenta) and ‘suffering’ (tormento).223 219 Cf. Blackmore, Manifest Perdition, p. 10. 220 Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, p. 411; Stoyanov, The Other God, pp. 131-139; Flatman, Ships and Shipping in Medieval Manuscripts, p. 50. See also Chapter 6 in Rich, Cedar Forests, Cedar Ships. 221 Cf. Blackmore, Manifest Perdition, pp. 14-15. The theological association of seawater with demonic forces and evil wombs is still readily apparent in contemporary Evangelical Christian thought. For example, in a 2020 sermon, the spiritual advisor and head of the so-called ‘faith office’ of former US president Donald Trump, Pastor Paula White-Cain commanded that all ‘Satanic pregnancies’ conceived in evil wombs should be miscarried, and this denouncement came just moments after declaring spiritual warfare against the witchcraft and hexes of ‘the marine kingdom’, and ‘the woman that rides upon the waters’, the latter being a reference to the book of Revelation and the Whore of Babylon. Evil marine spirits ruling from an underwater kingdom is apparently a relatively common trope among the Christian right: e.g., Leclaire, The Spiritual Warrior’s Guide to Defeating Water Spirits; Olukoya, Disgracing Water Spirits; Holliday, Marine Spirits and Mystifying Sea Beings; Ruling World Water Spirits; Sexual Marine Spirits; for an easily accessible summary, see Mystery of the Iniquity, ‘Demonic Marine Kingdom’. Thanks to André Gagné for calling my attention to this continuation and for providing sources. 222 From Hebrew tehom (‫תהם‬, ‘the deep’ (f.)), Genesis 1:2; Keller, Face of the Deep, p. 26. 223 Blackmore, Manifest Perdition, p. 13.

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The Italian priest Opicino de Canistris (1296-c. 1350) used anthropomorphic cartography to illustrate the sea’s corrupting powers by placing Adam as Europe leaning toward Eve as Africa.224 Mapped within the figurative body of Christ, the fall from grace occurs at the Strait of Gibraltar, and Satan’s head is located in the Levant. The Mediterranean Sea is labeled as causa precati, or ‘cause of sin’. The demonization of the sea appears elsewhere in Christian iconography, where ‘the sea is the place where evil appears, sometimes with the Gnostic touch that it stands for all-devouring Matter that takes everything back into itself’.225 Because Matter is also Mother, from Latin mater, the sea’s evil nature is also undeniably feminine and peculiarly maternal, like a wicked but fertile stepmother.226 The conception of the sea as a source of moral corruption can also be found in Graeco-Roman thought, beginning especially with Hesiod’s assertion that the sea is evil and that seafaring had resulted in the degradation of humanity from a purer, pre-thalassocratic time.227 Plato agreed with his intellectual predecessor that ‘The sea, although agreeable, is a dangerous companion, and a highway of strange morals and manners, as well as commerce’.228 Early Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo, who was well-versed in Classical and Judeo-Christian philosophies alike, describes the ‘terrible’ sea as a place full of ‘creeping things innumerable’ and riddled with ‘tempests of temptations’.229 Christ as vessel is the only hope for safe passage: ‘So it’s essential we should stay in the boat, that is, that we should be carried on wood, to be enabled to cross this sea. Now this wood, on which our feebleness is carried, is the Lord’s cross, with which we are stamped and reclaimed from submersion in this world’.230 But when the ship can take no more torment, no more mortal terror, it succumbs to the abysmal, amniotic depths—the rapture in reverse. The moment the mast snaps, the ship may be considered lost, and ‘the breaking of the mast parallels the breaking of Christ’s body on the cross’.231 That, of course, is what was prophesied, or 224 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Pal. Lat. 1993 f. 2v, reproduced as the frontispiece in Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea. 225 Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, p. 8. 226 See references collected in Bachelard, Water and Dreams, pp. 115-132. 227 Dunsch, ‘Describe nunc Tempestatum’, p. 43. 228 Plato, Laws IV.705a; cf. Mentz, ‘Toward a Blue Cultural Studies’, p. 998. This passage is what is referenced in the title of Horden and Purcell’s Corrupting Sea. 229 Augustine of Hippo, ‘Expositions on the Book of Psalms’ (Psalm 104, Discourse IV.4-5) and ‘Tractates on the Gospel According to St. John’ (Tractate II, Chapter 1.4). 230 Augustine of Hippo, Essential Sermons, p. 120; cf. Marder, Philosopher’s Plant, pp. 73-74. 231 Blackmore, Manifest Perdition, pp. 15-17.

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what it was destined to do all along. However, the rupture of the ship-body is only part of the narrative, which must be concluded by resurrection. In Jacques Derrida’s final seminar, he places inhumation and cremation at odds with one another and notes that the West has long favored inhumation because the grave or tomb marks a specific space where the cadaver has a reserved place in the world, where it cannot be abandoned or exiled or forgotten—where eternity might be possible. The anonymity and ephemerality of cremated ashes deny these features, as does the placelessness of the drifting, decomposing body deposited at sea. Derrida asks ‘whether Christianity, with its imaginary or phantasmagory of death and resurrection, would have been thinkable if Christ had been cremated rather than entombed. Would certain conceptions of resurrection or rapture have ever gotten off the ground, so to speak, would a celebration of the Eucharist have ever really gone down, in a culture where cremation [or sea burial] was the norm?’232 Drowning is dying a living death, arguably one of the most feared exits in the Abrahamic traditions—if not the most feared—and still is in contemporary Western society.233 While wrecking, ships and their passengers are swallowed alive, an unholy return to the belly of the beastly Other, the watery womb. Deontologically, nautical archaeologists are compelled to complete the messianic cycle by resurrecting the drowned ship from monstrous marine depths. Using the godlike powers of science, the nautical archaeologist sees himself as ‘dissecting death’.234 Timbers are mapped and lifted to the surface one by one to restore the ship from the wreck, so that the ship might be displayed and so that mortals might bask in the glory of humanitas and be humbled in the perseverance of imperium. That archaeologists would be obligated morally to serve as both savior and scholar is hardly a new phenomenon and is certainly not limited to those working in the maritime realm. Western science, European colonialism, and Christian theology are inextricably intertwined, and archaeology as a whole exemplifies this ideological entanglement. In addition to the ‘ethic of saving’ based on the idea of the colonized Other’s imminent extinction, archaeological motives and methodologies were further developed in response to the challenges to creationist narratives posed by 19th-century theories of evolution and 232 Naas, End of the World and Other Teachable Moments, p. 79, citing Derrida’s ‘The Beast and the Sovereign 2 164/238’. 233 Naas, End of the World, p. 64; Baker, ‘Fears and Fantasies of Swimming’, pp. 311-324. See also Chapter 3. Drowning ranks second after being shot in the face by an intruder according to a list of least-preferable deaths compiled in Neuman, ‘The Most Popular Ways to Die’. On the Early Modern fear of drowning, see Corbin, Lure of the Sea, pp. 6-8. 234 Han, ‘Blue Frontier’, p. 467. And as Han rightly notes, ‘it is always a he’ (p. 478).

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deep time, which were popularized by European scientists like Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell.235 To restore the historicity of biblical accounts, scholar-theologians such as William Foxwell Albright and George Rawlinson traveled to the Middle East in search of ruins and artifacts that would uphold the veracity of a faith defined by ancient texts. In contemporary archaeology, discoveries throughout Palestine are still subject to incorporation within the messianic narrative. Perhaps the most profound example is that of a modest Roman-era wooden boat recovered from the bottom of Lake Kinnaret, the biblical Sea of Galilee, which is commonly presumed to have been one of the boats featured in Christ’s various miracles performed on the waters of this sea, as described in the Gospels. The boat, which is on display at the Yigal Allon Galilee Boat Museum in Kibbutz Ginosar, is often referred to simply as ‘the Jesus boat’. In this particular case of nautical resurrection, the splayed boat-body provides a direct and tangible link to the divine for Christians. Its fragmented hull is now surfaced and in service as a holy relic for Catholics and Protestants alike. The boat’s resurrection from a watery grave, its eternal preservation through embalmment, and its presentation as a relic manifest the Christological triumph of whole over part. The synecdochal doctrine of pars pro toto (‘part for whole’) is essential to understanding how relics work, as essential as wholeness is to salvation. While the part recalls the whole and is always connected to it, the part cannot entirely substitute for the whole. According to this doctrine, if divine bodies, including ships as embodiments of Christ, mediate between heaven and earth, partition and putrefaction must be overcome—either by reassembling the parts into a whole or by asserting that each part is the whole—before the promise of salvation can be actualized.236 In Medieval and Early Modern Christian religious practice, fragmentation is associated with evil, reassembly with improvement, and wholeness with goodness.237 To exemplify: upon exhumation, the head of a decapitated bishop had miraculously reattached itself to the body, which had resisted decay such that it bore no marks of the mortal wound, while a child’s body lain to rest at 235 Trigger, History of Archaeological Thought, pp. 156-158; Daniel, A Short History of Archaeology, pp. 49-53. This phenomenon should be understood as a single component within the larger historical truth of Western secularity as a function—if not direct descendent—of the Christian religion; see Taylor, After God. The importance of the Biblical Flood to Early Modern scholars, who helped to construct common conceptions of the sea as the remnant of God’s wrath, is emphasized in Corbin, Lure of the Sea, pp. 1-6. 236 Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 12-13. More on putrefaction, purification, and relics in Chapter 4. 237 Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 184-185.

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the same time in a grave nearby had thoroughly decomposed.238 Corresponding with the belief, lingering and latent, that holy bodies resist partition and decay, shipwrecks whose remains are best preserved are also those prioritized for scholarly protection, salvation, and canonization. Recall the circular reasoning on ruins from the previous chapter: these fragments are valued because they are preserved; they should be preserved because they are valued. Like the disintegrated carrack at Yarmouth Roads, featured in the hauntographs of this chapter, fragmented ships who succumb to decay are often relinquished to the eternal depths, where they rest in relative unworthiness.239

Mereology (Argo and Ark) Fragmentation is a special problem of modernity as much as it is a necessity in any sincere study of shipwrecks.240 In addition to the eventual, entropically fluctuating disintegration of the wreck in material terms, there is also the metaphysical rupture between ship and wreckage and therefore between divine body and dead body. It is this rupture that issues the desire to rescue the wreck from entombment—or demonic dissolution—on the seabed, deontologically necessitating the savior-scholar’s miraculous intervention. The rupture of ship/wreck is the first problem of naufragic mereology. The second is an ontotheological extension of the first: that is, the original fragmentation of water after its violent absorption into a singular, omnipotent God.241 238 Lafferty, ‘Ad Sanctitatem Mortuorum’, pp. 277-278. 239 Refer to the captions of the hauntographs of this chapter, and for more information on the Yarmouth Roads wreck, see Watson and Gale, ‘Yarmouth Roads Wreck Investigations’, pp. 183-192; Plets, Dix, and Best, ‘Mapping of the Buried Yarmouth Roads Wreck’, pp. 360-373; Dunkley, Yarmouth Roads Shipwreck; Fenwick and Gale, Historic Shipwrecks, pp. 46-47; Rich, Momber, and Nayling, ‘Maritime Archaeological Timber Sampling’, pp. 142-150; Rich, ‘Hauntography of an Ordinary Shipwreck’. 240 It seems possible, after reading Nochlin’s The Body in Pieces, that the contemporary fascination with shipwrecks may be a product of the fetishization of the fragment that Nochlin identifies through her survey of Early Modern European art. 241 An aside on wet omnipotence: during the writing of this book, I had a dream that my then-beau now-husband, who is Christian, professed lovingly that Christ has a vested, personal concern for his orgasms. While we respectfully disagree on many theological issues, this statement struck me in the dream, as it would have in reality, as absurd. His claim seemed to be based on the same philosophical grounds as compersion, the self-invented emotion that polyamorous lovers supposedly feel when rejoicing for the pleasure brought to one’s sexual partner by a different lover. In waking life, we both find compersion to have no philosophical or psychological credence,

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The first problem of rupture, the ontological relationship between ship and wreck, is rarely explicitly considered in archaeological scholarship. In the literature, shipwrecks are variously described as museums, time capsules, and microcosms, and these metaphors often reference ships and shipwrecks interchangeably. They are frequently understood as ‘closed systems’ or ‘snapshots’ from which shipboard life, ports of call, and shipyard construction programs can be extrapolated, and by further extension, entire bygone sociopolitical systems might be reconstructed. The shipwreck is the dystopian vestige of the utopian ship, or as Chryssanthi Papadopoulou puts it, the ship is the phantom limb of the shipwreck.242 Conjuring MerleauPonty’s phenomenon of the phantom limb, she characterizes the ship prior to wreckage as a ‘phantom place’ that haunts the wreck—or at least those who study it—with distant memories of a better self, complete when located in the past and on the surface. Considering the rupture between ship and wreck in bodily terms of amputation certainly corresponds to the pervasive ship-body metaphor discussed at length above; however, it also assumes that the rupture necessarily results in a loss. It is often true that lives and limbs onboard are lost during shipwreck, and it is always true that the ship’s potential to fulfill its anthropogenic function as transporter is lost. Even so, it seems less convincing that the broken ship’s existence is fundamentally lacking, or that even part of it—material or immaterial—has performed a phantasmal disappearing act, to anything other than human eyes. In order to more fully conceptualize the ship/wreck rupture, we should first consider the ‘strange mereology’ of the ship itself, which may be illustrated with Plutarch’s paradox of the ship of Theseus, a popular thought experiment among ancient Greek philosophers. The paradox is this: over time and throughout many sea voyages, each and every timber of the ship of

yet he seemed to claim that Christ is compersive. In the dream, I found our difference to be irreconcilable, and I left him. In the morning, this upsetting dream lingered on my mind, but that afternoon, I was reading Keller’s Face of the Deep and came across this passage that forced me to concede that if one believes in an omnipotent creator god, which he does, then that god is in fact invested in his orgasms. Coming, so to speak, to terms with ‘indecent theology’, Keller writes that essentially, life that becomes, comes, and that she ‘gladly receives this improper revelation: ‘And God becomes chaos: the smell of our bodies when making love, our fluids and excretions, the hardening of muscles and the erectness of nipples’. … [A] God who is ubiquitous cannot be absent from any molecule, membrane or mucus of the creation’ (p. 23, citing Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, p. 92). I remain unclear as to whether this equation would implicate Christ as a polyamorous deity, but I suspect that it does. 242 Papadopoulou, ‘The Phenomenon of the Phantom Place’, pp. 367-382.

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Theseus was replaced. Is then this ship still the ship of Theseus?243 Some 2500 years later, Roland Barthes complicated the paradox further by assigning the ship a name, the Argo, which was in fact a different mythological ship sailed by Theseus but which raises the additional question of how a name can persist if a composition does not.244 The paradox and its Barthesian extension address questions of identity, origin, sameness, cultural constructs, and even multidimensional time-space paradigms. While making no qualms about embracing paradoxical relations between things and their parts, one of the tenets of the branch of speculative realism called ‘object-oriented ontology’ offers an answer useful in the current mereological investigation. The object-oriented philosopher or archaeologist would say that it is indeed the same ship. Because all objects (ships) are made up of other objects (timbers) but no object (ship) can be reduced to its parts (timbers), all objects (ships) are independent of their parts (timbers). Philosopher Levi Bryant explains, ‘The larger object composed out of these parts is another object that has its own autonomy and life. If this is the case, then it is because parts of an object can come and go, while the object remains’.245 The rotting and replacing of timbers experienced by the ship of Theseus (or any other ship) is no different from the replacement of dead and dying cells and microorganisms in our bodies: like ships, we are holobiontic, hosting great populations of microbes and other insiders, communities composing an individual.246 Somehow, the communities can come and go, yet the individual remains, even though the whole is ontologically less than its constituent parts. Referring to this strange phenomenon with the term subscendence, Morton explains that ‘being is a symbiotic community consisting of itself and its spectral halo’.247 The characteristic autonomy of objects is classified as ‘strange’ because ‘the smaller objects composing larger objects are simultaneously necessary conditions for that larger object while being independent of that object. Likewise, the larger object composed of 243 For a concise analysis of this paradox in philosophical history, focusing on issues of identity and continuity, see Korsmeyer, Things, pp. 170-174. A preliminary discussion of this paradox as presented here can be seen in Rich, ‘Hauntography of an Ordinary Shipwreck’. Along similar lines, see Rich, Cedar Forests, Cedar Ships, pp. 181-182. 244 See especially the discussion of Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1977) and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) in Mesku, ‘Restoring the Ship of Theseus’. 245 Bryant, ‘Three: Strange Mereologies’. A similar logic, also from the philosophical movement of speculative realism, regarding the nesting of different assemblages (assemblages within assemblages) is explained in Delanda, Assemblage Theory. 246 On ships as holobionts, see Chapter 4; ideas expressed here originated in Rich, Cedar Forests, Cedar Ships, pp. 3-4, 181-182. 247 Morton, Humankind, p. 105.

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these smaller objects is itself independent of these smaller objects’.248 Once an object comes into existence, no fragmenting of its parts can delete it because it is independent of them. Therefore, the ship of Theseus is the same ship regardless of its disintegrated or renovated hull and regardless of its location at the sea’s surface or on its floor. From mythical Thesean to contemporary multinational watercraft, Ian Bogost provides another examination of strange mereology using the example of a cargo ship: The container ship is a unit as much as the cargo holds, the shipping containers, the hydraulic rams, the ballast water, the twist locks, the lashing rods, the crew, their sweaters, and the yarn out of which those garments are knit. The ship erects a boundary in which everything it contains withdraws within it, while those individual units that compose it do so similarly, simultaneously, and at the same fundamental level of existence.249

His choice of a container ship to illustrate the object-oriented concept of strange mereology is particularly apt.250 A container ship is a self-containing collection: ‘The confines of a ship are analogous to the covers of a book or codex as demarcation of a locus as sense making’.251 Those onboard make sense from nonsense through various organizing principles, such as hierarchical regimes, spatial allocation, and scientific navigation.252 Distilling sense from nonsense involves negotiating that which is contained with that which is boundless: the water. In a reversal from the real back to the mythical, Susan Stewart explains mereology by juxtaposing collections and souvenirs. In On Longing, she writes that ‘the archetypal collection is Noah’s Ark, a world which is representative yet which erases its context of origin.… While the earth and its redundancies are destroyed, the collection maintains its integrity and 248 Bryant, Democracy of Objects, pp. 213-214. 249 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, pp. 22-23. 250 Graham Harman uses the example of not just a ship but the orchestration of an entire group of them. The Dutch East India Company (abbreviated VOC, for the Verenigde Oost-indische Compagnie) was material without being a piece of matter; rather it was a ‘form that more or less endured for 193 years despite constantly shifting its components’. He notes that the VOC never existed in a single location and that its existence outlived all the people and ships that composed it; see Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology, pp. 27-28. 251 Blackmore, Manifest Perdition, p. 103; cf. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 4. 252 See Stewart, Nonsense.

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boundary’.253 She claims that what makes this primogenial container ship a collection rather than a souvenir is that as the vast ship sails and prevails over rising floodwaters, its context of origin is erased, and there is left only the possibility for seriality in the form of the continuation of life beyond cataclysm. However, the ship’s context of origin is not erased as much as it is spatially and temporally removed, which makes it a souvenir. The ship is a forward-gazing collection of various objects, yes, but it is also a souvenir, perhaps the passengers’ most important memorabilia as the ship does its best to mimic home, with walls, floors, and chambers that move across the surface of water, a place where none of us belongs.254 As both collection and souvenir, metaphor and metonym, the ship is intrinsically linked and psychically connected with home—land. At sea, everyone—Noah included—is a visitor, passing through a liminal, transitory state, en route. They are souvenirs themselves, composing a traveling collection, all the while longing for the restoration of terra firma.255 This is the very definition of nostos—the return home from a long sea voyage. The only way Noah knew the journey had ended was when his Ark ran aground the mountains of Ararat. His collection of living souvenirs was then released back into the dry wild. Embracing paradox even as they are received by water, wrecked ships retain their dual classif ication as both collection and souvenir. Their return to land passes not horizontally across the surface of the water but vertically through the water column. Their descent is registered in atmospheres of pressure rather than latitudinal or longitudinal change; their nostos is profound and the landing uncanny. At the same time as the wreck and its memorabilia harken back to dry land, they also still compose the original collection, even as components thereof drift away, disintegrate, and dissolve. Because the parts of an object can come and go while the object itself remains, the broken and submerged ship, whether Ark or Argo, is still the same ship as the ship afloat with wind in its sails and ballast in its belly. These assessments of nautical and naufragic mereologies correspond to those reached in Heidegger’s tool analysis regarding the existential relationship between the tool and the broken tool. For Heidegger, ‘there are only two principles at work in the cosmos: Zu- and Vorhandenheit, tool and broken tool.

253 Stewart, On Longing, pp. 152-153. 254 Rich, ‘Hauntography of an Ordinary Shipwreck’. 255 Stewart, On Longing, p. 150; Corbin, Lure of the Sea, p. 12.

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These never exist in isolation but compose two dimensions in every object’.256 In this sense, ship and shipwreck are always intrinsically coexistent, irrupturable. Objects revealing their Zuhandenheit, or ‘readiness-at-hand’, are ‘useful things’ (Zeugen) that are in the midst of routine action, serving a function and carrying on in accordance with their design and their place in the world—their Being. These tools are at once accessed and forgotten because of their accessibility; they are taken for granted because they play so well with others that they withdraw or recede from consciousness into the ‘shadowy subterranean realm that supports our conscious activity while seldom erupting into view’.257 The ship as it functions for others (sailors, their families at home, cargo, its recipients, rats, galley, lifesavers, and logbook) is zuhanden. Conversely and simultaneously, the ship’s alter-ego is vorhanden, or ‘present-at-hand’, especially when its timbers creak, a wave crashes over the gunwale, or a storm is on the horizon, and all on board are suddenly aware of their tool’s precarity and the possibility that it could break and send them all to a watery grave. This precarious state ushers the ship fully into the consciousness of its contents and users. The emergency conditions issued through Vorhandenheit are temporary, as they lead either back to Zuhandenheit following a repair or return to systems as normal, or to Unzuhandenheit, or ‘unreadiness-at-hand’, when the object breaks or is broken, rendering its usefulness useless. Unzuhandenheit is the dimension of the ship and its users and contents as they slip together beneath the surface of the water and settle on the seabed, forgotten inside a shadowy subterranean realm (of sorts) yet again. But Unzuhandenheit is merely a subset of the other two states of being and does not exist independently from them. This is because the breakdown of the ship is merely an opportunity for reconfiguration of the same object. Rather than the wreck existing as merely the ruined corpse of a dead ship, according to Heidegger, the ship and the wreck can be thought of as the same object existing in different states at once. The apparent rupture between the body perceived as divine and the one perceived as dead is impossible because fragmentation has no ontological bearing on the whole. To explain further the phantasmagorical aspect of fragmented bodies, existing in fluid states of Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit, Heidegger offers three modes—conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy—in which an object’s deficient state of unreadiness-at-hand (Unzuhandenheit) can either 256 Harman, Tool-Being and the Metaphysics of Objects, p. 46; Heidegger, Being and Time, § 15, pp. 69-71. 257 Harman, The Quadruple Object, p. 37.

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prolong or undo the onset of phenomenological amnesia by thrusting the broken ship back into either the usefulness of Zuhandenheit or the liminal state of Vorhandenheit.258 The broken ship becomes conspicuous when its unusability is discovered, just lying there. From that point, its condition may become exploited—colonized by sea creatures, mapped by archaeologists, looted by recreational divers, eroded by currents—thereby returning it to Zuhandenheit, even though its current readiness has changed radically from its initial intended utility. Secondly, and most paradoxically, it could become obtrusive through the nature of its absence: for example, when a ship’s disappearance from surface detection mechanisms renders its absence an obtrusive presence and survivors begin mourning despite the absence of closure that physical wreckage might offer, which places it back in the realm of Vorhandenheit. Shipwrecks, however, are perhaps most subject to the mode of obstinacy, which Heidegger defines as: something unhandy in the way of not belonging there, of not being complete. Unhandy things are disturbing and make evident the obstinacy of what is initially to be taken care of before anything else. With this obstinacy, the presence of what is at hand makes itself known in a new way as the being of what is still present and calls for completion.259

Reentering the liminal realm of Vorhandenheit, nautical archaeologists dutifully respond to the ‘calls for completion’, to resurrect the ship from the wreck and restore its initial Zuhandenheit. But this, too, is impossible because in order to do so, they must combat the obstinance of the wreck along with its salty Umwelt, which retains the wreckage in whole or part. Shipwreck obstinance is as unhandy as it is uncanny. The stubbornly contagious nature of water as it infiltrates formerly dry materials and dissolves formerly solid ones is surely to blame for the shipwreck’s unhandiness and its uncanniness. The sea’s unruliness brings us to the next fragmentation, that of water, which is less a matter of ontology than ontotheology. Within the Abrahamic tradition that still dictates so much of Western thought—conscious and subconscious—the seas are also a mere fragment of a former whole, when the water was all there was. In the first words of Genesis, the deep and formless expanse of water existed alongside if not prior to the god,

258 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 16, pp. 72-74. 259 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 16, p. 73, original emphasis.

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elohim.260 But there is nothing so sacred that it cannot be violated, not even nothing itself.261 After extracting light from the darkness of these waters, elohim made the expanse of sky to separate ‘water from water’ (mayim lamayim). The waters above the sky were refreshing and life-sustaining, and the waters below were the seas, life-taking—purifying and putrefying, respectively. First divided and then conquered, elohim proceeded to harness the seas, binding the boundless, to confine these waters so that dry land would penetrate from their depths. And elohim saw that this was good. The laconic narrative in Genesis of fragmentation and confinement retains elements of uxoricide, yet few of its readers would side with the tehom (the ‘deep’) over the elohim. This tale of divide et impera over primordial watery depths has been told, translated, and retold for at least 4000 years since the ancient Babylonian Empire was established. Tehom finds her etymological and ideological predecessor in Tiamat, the Babylonian goddess of primordial chaos and seas, equivalent to the even more ancient Sumerian goddess Nammu (also transliterated Mummu, or ‘mother’), whose murder trickles down the centuries into the Hebrew tohu vabohu (‘formless and void’), the tehom of the book of Genesis.262 The Babylonian creation story, Enuma Elish (from the epic’s first two words in Akkadian, meaning ‘When on high…’), features the divine conqueror, Marduk, whose rise to power is the more detailed antecedent to that of the Judeo-Christian elohim. The young lord Marduk falsely accuses Tiamat, his own grandmother, of ‘seeking evil’, and then ‘confirming her wickedness’, he binds and fragments her body, placing an expanse of sky between her halves: And he turned back to Tiamat whom he had bound. The lord trampled on the legs of Tiamat, With his unsparing mace he crushed her skull. When the arteries of her blood he had severed, 260 This ‘tehomic’ (from the Hebrew for ‘deep’) discussion flows from Keller, Face of the Deep, whose strong central thesis runs contrary to the musings of St. Augustine on the same moment of creation and the possibility of pre-existent waters: Augustine, City of God, Vol. 1, pp. 342-343 (Book XI.34). References to Genesis in the following paragraphs are taken from the JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2003), hereafter abbreviated as JPS. 261 Adapted from the Latin phrase nihil esse tam sactam quod non violari, excerpted from Cicero, In Verram, 1.1.4. 262 See evidence compiled in Keller, Face of the Deep, pp. 28-31 and 106-114; cf. Ruether, ‘Ecofeminism’, pp. 35-50. It should be noted that Greek cosmogony also involves separation, but the waters were not exactly to be equated with the primordial Chaos (χάος; Hesiod, Theogony, p. 56 fn. 6, II, pp. 116-117), most often understood as a dry or indeterminate mix of all elements; only the pre-Socratic philosopher Pherecydes of Syros associated χάος with water based on its etymological association with χέεσθαι: see Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 40-44, 57.

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The North Wind bore it to places undisclosed. On seeing this, his fathers were joyful and jubilant, They brought gifts of homage to him. Then the lord paused to view her dead body, That he might divide the monster and do artful works. He split her like a shellfish into two parts: Half of her he set up as the ceiling of the sky, He pulled down the bar and posted guards. He ordered them not to allow her waters to escape.263

It seems clear that these ancient, deep-seated associations of the sea with the primordial, the feminine, and the chaotic have called for a dry, masculine presence to intervene, to bind the chaos and control it through fragmentation and confinement. Formlessness, as Bataille notes, has no rights in any sense and gets squashed like spiders and spit.264 That bodies of water have long been equated with the bodies of women should come as no surprise; as Picasso is supposed to have said, women are crying machines. Our bodies produce a disproportionate amount of liquids, often unexpectedly and unpredictably: tears, ejaculate, breastmilk, amniotic fluids, menstrual blood, more frequently expelled urine. Those tears and that blood bind us to bodies of water as much as they do with dead bodies and mourning over them; yet the milk and womb water betray the closeness of death to birth, implicating womanhood and all its wetness in acts of destruction and creation alike.265 Women carry death, sorrow, and birth on our bodies the way seas carry ships, cradling them only to destroy and then recreate them. Strict controls over such cyclical wetness have been violently imposed by the divinely dry. And that feminine oceans should be considered evil and corrupting should also come as no surprise given that Early Modern Christians believed that women had no soul.266 The derivative question, to be explored more fully in the following chapter, is whether the arid, masculine spirit presiding over first fragmentations and the sea’s vilif ication continues to reign, even sub-liminally, over contemporary naufragic mereology and the scholarly missions of nautical resurrection, or creatio ex profundis. 263 Pritchard, Ancient Near East, pp. 31-32, Tablet IV, Lines 128-140. See also discussions of Enuma Elish in Taylor, After God, pp. 135-140, 173, 361. 264 Bataille, Visions of Excess, p. 31. 265 Bloch, ‘Death, Women, and Power’, p. 226. On women and death, see the confluence of Bataille, Kristeva, and Douglas in Zimmerman, Early Modern Corpse, pp. 3-6. 266 Sugg, Smoke of the Soul, pp. 164-166.

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The one in the other, they fall back. And at the end, no sails, no skiff, no bridge remain in that breaking up and thawing of ice. And anyone who always relied on solid ground and stout moorings and lifejackets and who hung on to good and evil, to truth, illusion, pretense … and also to the meaning of the earth, is now drowning in a pleasure (jouissance) that he has not willed. He who balanced on the highest peaks, on a rope, on thin air, and still managed to keep his footing, is now sinking. For there is no peril greater than the sea. Everything is constantly moving and remains eternally in flux. Hence with a thawing wind, bad fortune arrives. As well as salvation. 267

267 Irigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 36-37.

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Hauntograph 3: Yarmouth Roads 1. The Yarmouth Roads Protected Wreck Site has been atrophying at six meters beneath the surface of the Solent, between the south coast of England’s mainland and the north shore of the Isle of Wight, since the mid-late 1500s or early 1600s. While the upper layers of the vessel still protruded from the water’s surface, material dispersal was initially achieved through salvage missions carried out by local pillagers. Between then and the mid-1980s, when the dispersal of the ship as collection and souvenir was re-initiated by professional archaeologists, entropy has been accelerated by double tides, two lows and two highs, with currents running as fast as four knots in either direction. Yet the lower layers of the hull are entombed in thick clay, a mausoleum that has preserved hundreds of the skeletal oak timbers from which the ship was formed, along with numerous items that it contained and collected: pewter tableware from the Netherlands, Italian pottery, fine bone combs, and a bronze pestle. There is a semi-circular process of dislocation experienced by parts of the shipwreck as artifacts are removed from the site, and samples of hull timbers and fittings are cut away and subjected to scientific analyses that attempt an identification of the ship from the wreck, like forensic investigations at an unmarked grave. However, occurring at the same time as this systematic removal, there is also exchange; items such as datum points, scaffolding, and tape measures are left as offerings on the seabed, like notes and flowers at a shrine. Digital photographic collage (Sara Rich, 2016). Image credits: Maritime Archaeology Trust and the Isle of Wight Heritage Service.

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Hauntograph 4: Yarmouth Roads 2. A 50-meter exclusion zone has been established around the perimeter of the shipwreck at Yarmouth Roads to keep contemporary vessels from anchoring on the remains and to prevent unauthorized interference, including scientific disturbances. The shipwreck was designated as a Protected Wreck in 1984, under the UK’s Protection of Wrecks Act 1973, on the grounds that it exhibits extraordinary historical and archaeological importance. The claim of extraordinary importance rests on the theory that the site represents the unique remains of a Tudor-era Spanish merchant carrack engaged in international trade between the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and the North Sea. Even though deemed worthy of legal protection and annual monitoring by Historic England’s designated Licensee (the Maritime Archaeology Trust, since 2004), this wreck has not been prioritized for resurrection. The relative solitude experienced by this site lies in sharp contrast to the treatment of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’s flagship that wrecked at approximately the same time just 37 kilometers (20 nautical miles) to the east and whose timbers were excavated one by one and reunited in the Mary Rose Museum in the Historic Dockyards of Portsmouth. For the Yarmouth Roads wreck, with the majority of its body having been reconstituted, flushed, or disintegrated by a turbulent underwater environment, there is no triumph of whole over part. Even so, a gestalt relationship might be imagined between the once-entire sailing vessel, the wreckage’s gradual dispersal through time and space, and the archaeological samples removed from the buried remains, dually protected by clay and legislation. Digital photographic collage (Sara Rich, 2016). Image credits: Maritime Archaeology Trust and the Isle of Wight Heritage Service.

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Meskell, Lynn. A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Mesku, Melissa. ‘Restoring the Ship of Theseus: Is a Paradox Still the Same after Its Parts Have Been Replaced?’. Lapham’s Quarterly. 21 October 2019, https:// www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/restoring-ship-theseus. Last accessed 23 November 2020. Monroe, Christopher. ‘The Ma’agan Michael Ship: The Recovery of a 2500-Year-Old Merchant Ship’. Journal of the American Oriental Society 125 (2005): 443-448. Morton, Timothy. Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2013. –––. ‘Weird Embodiment’. In Sentient Performativities of Embodiment: Thinking alongside the Human, edited by Lynette Hunter, Elisabeth Krimmer, and Peter Lichtenfels, 19-34. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016. –––. Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. London and New York: Verso, 2017. Muckelroy, Keith. Maritime Archaeology. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Mystery of the Iniquity. ‘Demonic Marine Kingdom’. 21 March 2015, https:// endtimeswatcher.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/demonic-marine-kingdom/. Last accessed 21 February 2021. Naas, Michael. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Negarestani, Reza. ‘The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo’. In Collapse IV, edited by R. Mackay, 129-161. Falmouth: Urbanomic, May 2008. Neuman, Frederic. ‘The Most Popular Ways to Die’. Psychology Today. 3 January 2014, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/f ighting-fear/201401/the-mostpopular-ways-die. Last accessed 21 February 2021. Nochlin, Linda. The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1994. Olsen, Bjørnar, Michael Shanks, Timothy Webmoor, and Christopher Witmore. Archaeology: The Discipline of Things. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Olukoya, Dr. D.K. Disgracing Water Spirits. Lagos: Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministry, 2012. Papadopoulou, Chryssanthi. ‘The Phenomenon of the Phantom Place: Archaeology and Ships’. Journal of Material Culture 21 (2016): 367-382. Pétursdóttir, Þóra. ‘Climate Change? Archaeology and the Anthropocene’. Archaeological Dialogues 24.2 (2017): 175-205. –––. ‘Anticipated Future? Knowing the Heritage of Drift Matter’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 26.2 (2020): 87-103.

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3.

Among the Tentative Haunters Abstract Nautical archaeologists act as architects of ruins as they rebuild ships from wrecks. Architectural salvation from demonic depths appeals to two aspects of the Early Modern legacy: God as Divine Architect and the restoration of Edenic utopia from dystopia. This chapter considers the uncanny encounters between scholar and shipwreck that must precede archaeological resurrection. Ships are reengineered with information negotiated from the wreckage underwater, yet submersion dulls or nullifies each of the five senses classically used in scientific enquiry. The concept of dystopian phenomenology explains how archaeological knowledge of shipwrecks is acquired underwater. Recollections of ‘visitations’ to a wrecked sixteenth-century galleon in Ribadeo, Spain inform a phantasmal sensory approach to help unveil the elusive ontology of shipwrecks. Keywords: uncanny; sensorium; abjection; matrixial borderspace; maritime archaeology; Ribadeo galleon

Delirium of language, the boldest navigators. With their hulls and sails, don’t they want to take possession of her depths? … How needy and suppliant they are in this moment. How afraid they are the sea will swallow them up. How unprepared they find themselves to face this unchaining of natural forces. And what good is all their seamanship if the sea refuses to submit to it? What good is their language if there is nothing and no one to appeal to? 268

As functionally liminal works of architecture, traditional sailing ships hold a special place within the human imaginary. Envisioning a ship disappearing into the horizon is to envision standing on the threshold between life and death. All ships, like all other bodies, eventually fail, and only a small 268 Irigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 48-49.

Rich, S.A., Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins & the Uncanny. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463727709_ch03

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fraction of those broken vessels becomes subject to scientif ic enquiry. Like intrepid, colonizing seafarers on a ‘heart-of-darkness journey into the watery, mineral uterus of Mother Earth’,269 nautical archaeologists act soteriologically as architects of ruins in their attempts to rebuild ships from shipwrecks. This act of architectural salvation, this mimicry of creatio ex profundis, is presented here as the fusion of two Christological concepts: firstly, that of God as Divine Architect, a popular Medieval trope revitalized within Protestantism by John Calvin in 1536; and secondly, the utopian reconstruction of the Holy City after the utter annihilation of the sea, as described in the book of Revelation.270 The precedent for this ideological synthesis is apparent in the book of Job, which confirms ‫ יהוה‬as the earth’s architect and the sea’s imprisoner, when the creator interrogates the creation: Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? … Do you know who fixed its dimensions or who measured it with a line? Onto what were its bases sunk? Who set its cornerstone…? Who closed the sea behind doors when it gushed forth out of the womb, … When I made breakers My limit for it, and set up its bar and doors, And said, ‘You may come so far and no farther; Here your surging waves will stop’?271

Probably composed in the following century, the book of Proverbs reaffirms these divine roles when the act of creation is described as the moment ‘when he [‫ ]יהוה‬set a compass upon the face of the depth [tehom] … when he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth … [I began] rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth’.272 These verses in Job and Proverbs expand 269 Helmreich, Alien Ocean, p. 71. My thanks to Jon Carter for bringing Helmreich’s work to my attention. 270 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, pp. 60 (Ch. 5, v. 4), 145 (Ch. 14, v. 1), 160 (Ch. 14, v. 21); Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, Part 1, q. 27, a. 1, r.o. 3; Revelations 21:1. For more on geometry and architecture as divine arts, see Zaitsev, ‘Early Medieval Geometry’, pp. 522-553. For the pre-Christian divine male architect or Demiurge, see Plato’s creation myth, Timaeus, in Dialogues of Plato, II, 29, and relevant discussions in Ruether, ‘Ecofeminism’, pp. 41-46. For the ship as city (holy or otherwise), see also Chapter 4. 271 Job 38:4-11 (JPS). 272 Proverbs 8:27, 29, 31 (KJV; with the Hebrew consulted in JPS); it should be noted that while many translations deviate from naming the instrument used by the Divine Architect, the KJV and Geneva Bible both specify ‘compass’, which is significant given that these two were the most prevalent and influential versions available during the Early Modern era, the former

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upon the Genesis account of creation as having emerged from divinely dominated seas, discussed in the previous chapter, which also introduced the deontological compulsion to deliver the wrecked ship-body from the contaminating forces of oceanic depths. The present chapter proceeds by first considering the vocational aspect of god as architect, who designed the dry parts of the world for humans while restraining the wet parts and designating them as corrupt. Even so, underseas encounters must occur a priori in order for archaeologists to perform the act of nautical resurrection and, in effect, to fulfill the symbolic subjugation of the sea and ensure the restoration of utopia from dystopia.273 In most cases, ancient ships are reconstructed based on information negotiated from the wreckage underwater. This negotiation requires a transcendence on the part of the human investigator if not a transgression of the frontiers that define the very zones of our existence. In Delanda’s terms, divers surpass extensive boundaries, such as those delimiting our own ecosystem, and descend through intensive boundaries into high-pressure aquatic environments.274 These requirements exemplify the paradox of the ‘inherent displaceability and displacement’ of our physical and metaphysical limitations, as noted by Georg Simmel: ‘we are bounded in every direction, and we are bounded in no direction’.275 Although an ostensibly simple configuration, a human conducting research underwater presents an unusually complicated epistemological challenge. To accrue the information needed to perform the miraculous intervention, nautical archaeologists cannot rely on the primacy of vision. Indeed, submersion dulls or nullifies each of the five senses classically used in scientific enquiry and structural (re) engineering alike. Underwater, sight is untrustworthy, smell and taste are non-existent, touch is numbed, and hearing is dominated by the sound of one’s own breath. Other ‘non-senses’ betray us too, as water undermines the sense of time as both passing and linear, and even common sense declines with increasing depth. Rather than attributing the successes of nautical having been published in 1611 and the latter in 1599, and both aff irming the vocation of god as architect fulf illing his duty of dominating the sea in favor of habitable land. Cf., Zaitsev, ‘Medieval Geometry’, p. 536. See Keller, Face of the Deep, and Chapter 2 for further discussions of the Hebrew tehom in relation to elohim. 273 Thanks are extended to those in attendance at the meetings of the European Theoretical Archaeology Group in Southampton in 2016 and the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group in Toronto in 2017 where the foundations of this chapter were presented and discussed. 274 Delanda, Assemblage Theory, p. 110. See also Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, pp. 28-29. 275 Simmel, The View of Life, p. 2. Simmel maintains that the transcendence of boundaries is actually the essence of life itself.

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archaeology to the wonders of science or divine intervention alone, this chapter considers underwater epistemology as not just alien but dystopian phenomenology.276 Borrowing its title from the Adrienne Rich poem, ‘Diving into the Wreck’, it also challenges the way we imagine shipwrecks as haunted locales, plagued by eerie vestiges of that which had been living at the surface. Instead, it attempts to address how exactly shipwreck and archaeologist confront each other within the watery medium and how roles of haunter and haunted switch through the bizarre, if not unholy, processes of nautical inquiry taking place down there.

Conversion (Terror and Erebus) Sensory perception is an epistemic necessity. Philosophers have long claimed that our senses mediate the worlds within and without, the internal and the external. More specif ically, phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty have proposed that such bodily mediation acts as a bridge between the Cartesian duality of mind and body, along with subject and object. 277 In the Western tradition, Early Modern thinkers have primarily followed the authority of Aristotle, who identif ied f ive senses and placed them in a hierarchy specific to human experience.278 At the top of the Classical and Neoplatonic hierarchy of sense perception is sight. As the vehicle with which we absorb the appearances of the world including and beyond ourselves, and because the eye is ‘seen’ as the sense organ in closest proximity to the mind, vision remains at the pinnacle of the sensorium even in much later phenomenological thought.279 The next highest-ranked sense is hearing, which, especially in the Christian tradition, is associated with divine communications and the transmission of moral qualities through hymns, prayers, blessings, oaths, and excommunications. 280 Third in the hierarchy, smell is simultaneously associated with the spirit, as in purifying incense or the ‘odour of sanctity’ 276 On alien phenomenology, see Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, and Chapter 3 of Bryant, Onto-Cartography. 277 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; see also the collection of essays in Locke and McCann, eds., Merleau-Ponty. 278 Vinge, ‘Five Senses’, pp. 107-118; Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Senses, pp. 24-34, 65-68. For cross-cultural accounts of sense experience and senses alternative to those acknowledged in the West, see research in Howes, ed., The Varieties of Sensory Experience. 279 Vinge, ‘Five Senses’, pp. 114-115. 280 Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Senses, p. 27.

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that emanates from the souls of saints at their time of death, and at the same time, with the sinful defilements of the body, as in bodily fluids and excrement, poor hygiene, or decay.281 As such, the sense of smell itself acts as a pivotal, mediating method of perception located between the two higher senses of vision and hearing that internalize the intangible, and the two lower senses of touch and taste that deal exclusively in the tangible matters of the flesh: skin and tongue. While skin can at least perceive some intactile effects, such as cold chills that produce goose bumps, the lowly sense of taste is found at the base of the sensory hierarchy because it requires a physical mediating substance, such as food or fluid, to produce perception.282 The distinct sensorium available to the individual subject is, in the strictest sense of the word, requisite for all her or his aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience is requisite for the production of a posteriori knowledge about the world, including ourselves as located within it.283 The problem of epistemology in underwater nautical enquiry, then, is particularly paradoxical. Despite a bodily composition of 70% water, human bodies immersed in bodies of water do not behave in the same way as they do on dry land. In effect, the sensorium submerged is a sensorium stunted. Vision, the sense we most commonly rely upon to perform investigations of all kinds, is diminished by water, which, meter by meter, absorbs the light that is not reflected from the surface. Colors with longer wavelengths, like red, disappear in the first few meters. This is why divers bleed green below five meters. Orange becomes green at eight meters, and yellow turns green at fifteen meters below the surface. Green and violet have shorter wavelengths and can better penetrate the depths, but beyond 30 meters, everything is blue until water overpowers light altogether and becomes black, the color we use to describe the absence of light. Water’s dark arts do not end there. While capable of adjusting to the loss of most color, our terrestrial and mammalian eyes also need air to focus properly, so underwater, divers wear masks to eliminate the blinding effects of excess fluid on our corneas. However, the masks we must wear also distort size and distance, so that objects appear 25% closer and 281 Lafferty, ‘Ad Sanctitatem Mortuorum’, pp. 278-279. 282 Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Senses, pp. 27-28. Aristotle places touch at the base of the hierarchy due to its medium and its sensible objects being elusive and inconsistent; see Heller-Roazen, Inner Touch, pp. 27-30. 283 See Iseminger, ‘Aesthetic Experience’, pp. 99-116. On relations between cognition and perception, on the one hand, and common sense and consciousness, on the other, see Heller-Roazen, Inner Touch, pp. 34-55.

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33% larger than they are in reality. And beyond their physical effects on human physiology, different bodies of water have different personalities. For example, in areas of high turbidity such as the English Channel, divers often experience zero visibility due to sediments suspended in midwater that make it impossible to see objects—except for those sediments—that are even inches away from the diver’s eyes. In other words, the loss of color at depth and distortion of size and distance may be rendered irrelevant if there is no visibility to begin with. Because the speed of sound is dependent upon the density of the medium, hearing—the next in line in the Western hierarchy of the senses—is possible underwater because the liquid state carries sound vibrations at a pace four to five times that of air. However, the density of water also requires a greater initial force of energy to produce sound waves, and both the production and propagation of sound underwater are limited by factors including pressure from depth, particulates in the water, and ambient noise, such as boat traffic at the surface. Additionally, due to the physical properties of water, the origin of audible noise is impossible to determine by the human ear submerged. In most cases, the rhythmic sound of one’s own breathing is the dominant noise underwater, when exhaling results in a curtain of bubbles bursting out of the regulator and buoyantly drifting toward the surface where gases, like the humans who depend on them, rightly belong. Of the final three senses of the sensorium—smell, touch, and taste—only touch is of any use at all while submerged. Smell and taste are obliterated by the need to breathe underwater, which is facilitated by specialized equipment that covers the nose and mouth. If wearing a half mask, the diver’s eyes and nose are covered to permit better vision and to prevent water from entering the nostrils, while the regulator—the device that converts compressed air in the tank into ambient pressure—is held tightly in the diver’s mouth for inhalation and exhalation. If wearing a full-face mask, the mask covers the diver’s entire face while feeding breathing gases into her respiratory system, keeping water from her nose and mouth and providing a pocket of air for improved vision while submerged. As for touch, this sense is hindered by the layers of neoprene and rubber that protect our earthbound bodies from the water, whose density and thermal properties constantly extract body heat from the diver’s skin and lungs. With or without neoprene gloves on our hands, the water renders our flesh soft and often numb from colder ambient temperatures. The feet and hands are the first to experience heat loss prior to the body’s activation of shivering and vasoconstriction in anticipation of hypothermia. To sustain the body’s core

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temperature, divers such as those working on the Arctic sites of the HMS Terror and Erebus—both wrecked on the 1845 Franklin expedition seeking the Northwest Passage—must wear a full-face mask and dry suit to limit water’s direct contact with skin to only the hands and the head. Even so, being submerged in water that cold feels as though the top of one’s cranium is being peeled from the rest of the skull. But the water has other effects on our bodies, impeding even those senses that fall outside the Classical five of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Especially in deep water or in water with low visibility, divers can even lose the ability to tell the difference between up and down, surface and seafloor. This is a particularly dangerous situation when combined with the little-understood effects of nitrogen on our nervous systems when breathing compressed air at depth. Those working underwater frequently experience a lack of common sense, called nitrogen narcosis.284 The greater the working depth, the less common sense can be relied upon. In extreme cases of nitrogen narcosis, divers may lose their sense of place, their sense of duty, or even their sense of self before drifting off into the blue and eventually suffocating when their air supply is terminated.285 Some divers experience this euphoric ineptitude even at shallow depths, due less to the physiological effects of nitrogen and more simply to the uncanny nature of the world underwater. Yannis Hamilakis likens movement through water with intoxication and altered states of consciousness in that ‘normal’ sensorial modalities break down in this medium: And swimming and even more so diving, is also very different from any other bodily movements, not only because of the pressure of the water on your body but also because of the distinctive temperature, the very

284 See, e.g., Rocco et al., ‘Inert Gas Narcosis’, pp. 247-255. When I work on the fourth-century BCE site of the Mazotos shipwreck in Cyprus, which is at a depth of 45 meters, I have to bring a slate underwater with a numbered list detailing the tasks I need to perform, or I will only recall them with great difficulty and often confuse the necessary sequence. There have been numerous times that, while ascending, my mind has cleared enough to realize, only too late, the errors I made at the bottom. And with an allotted bottom time of only 20 minutes, the margin for error is very thin. 285 However, diminishing common sense and short-term memory impediment are not isolated to divers while underwater; scuba diving may increase risk of experiencing these and other negative cognitive effects even when back on dry land: e.g., Hemelryck et al., ‘Long Term Effects’’, pp. 928-934; Taylor et al., ‘Objective Neuropsychological Test Performance’, pp. 310-317.

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peculiar sense of orientation and bodily balance underwater, the sight filtered through the medium of water, and so on.286

It is this uncanniness that helps us begin to think of existing within water as existing in ‘space-without-time’.287 And indeed, when underwater, the sense of passing time is obfuscated so entirely that 20 minutes seem like two, or, if decompressing in midwater, two minutes seem like 200.288 Since their articulation by Classical philosophers, the senses of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste have not only been ordered into a hierarchy, they have also collectively been placed in a position of lower epistemological value relative to the mind. Due to their positioning beneath the mind’s capacity for reason, the senses have also been assigned a gender. In explaining that the mind is for seeking truth while the senses are for establishing opinion, the influential Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – 50 CE), personified the mind as Adam and the senses as Eve.289 The senses, alluring though they may be, are fallible, feminine tricksters who need to be governed by the rational, masculine mind. Mind is placed not only over matter (mater, mother and material) but also over its mediation by sensation. In this way, the senses are similar to oceans, whose irrationality and tantalizing unpredictability must be mitigated through the combined patriarchal forces of science and ‫יהוה‬. In addition to correlating the perceptual hierarchy with the gender hierarchy, Philo’s influence can also be seen in his explication of the concept of logos as the aspect of divine reason—or of god’s master plan—that is knowable to humankind. Suitably, given Philo’s identification of logos with Adam, early Christians, especially the author of the book of John, made the 286 Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Senses, p. 114. 287 Johnson, ‘Liquid Space of Matrixial Flesh’, pp. 90-108. 288 On time and sensation, or ‘sensation and the form of time’, see Heller-Roazen, Inner Touch, pp. 51-55. In-water decompression is the method of off-gassing through the skin and exhaling the excess nitrogen accumulated in the body while breathing compressed air at depth. By eliminating excess nitrogen, divers greatly reduce the risk of succumbing to the condition commonly known as ‘the bends’, or more generally, decompression sickness. During decompression at shallower depths, divers may breathe gases enriched with higher amounts of oxygen (enriched-air nitrox) to expedite the reduction of nitrogen levels and decrease the amount of time spent in midwater. This places the diver at risk of oxygen toxicity, symptoms of which can range from coughing and convulsions to lung failure and death: see, e.g., Massey and Moon, ‘Neurology and Diving’, pp. 959-969; Newton, ‘Neurologic Complications of Scuba Diving’, pp. 2211-2218. 289 Vinge, ‘Five Senses’, pp. 113-114, citing Philo of Alexandria, Philo, p. 452. Philo himself drew from the pre-Socratic philosophy of Parmenides (among others), who delineated logos (as reason) from perception (as the source of opinion) and positioned the intelligible, rational world as superior to its sensible counterpart; see Clark, ‘Parmenides and Sense-Perception’, pp. 14-32.

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connection between logos and Jesus of Nazareth, who is understood to have come to earth to reverse the lapsus humani generis initiated by Adam and his more corruptible consort, Eve.290 The opening passage of the book of John is the scripture frequently interpreted by Christian theologians to support the doctrine of the trinity, a mystical fusion of all three divine concepts—god almighty, son or incarnation, and spirit or creative reason—into a single whole, simultaneously separate and same. With this fusion in the second century CE, Jesus of Nazareth becomes the equivalent of both the Divine Architect of the Hebrew scriptures and Philo’s logos: the master plan, or blueprint. With hierarchies soundly in place between men and women, land and water, reason and sense, we can begin to understand the full effects of water’s dark arts cast upon the body. When divers are suspended in midwater, haunted in a realm of feminine trickery, our bodily senses are closed off, this feminine power muted. Yet, as explained above, neither can the mind’s sense of reason be trusted, so powerful is this realm’s effects on not just the body but the psyche held within it. In essence, water levels the epistemological playing field between body and mind. This uncanny breakdown of the senses and non-senses alike is a dystopaesthesia, where procuring knowledge is also a lesson in how fleeting existence is and how feeble we are when located where we do not really belong in the first place. Not merely an atopia, a place inhospitable for human habitation, the underwater world presents humans with a dystopia, where rules are overturned, inverted, and inhospitality takes a dangerous turn. While it is true that ‘all margins are dangerous’ when humans succumb to oceanic depths, objectivity itself may be recognized for the ephemeral phantom that it is.291

Inversion (Impregnable) If dystopaesthesia is a way of characterizing how submersion affects the extended human sensorium—from bodily senses to perceptions of time and space, and from common sense and reason to our drowned sense of 290 Hillar, ‘Philo of Alexandria’, Part 11. Interestingly, Feuerbach expressed that belief was masculine and reason feminine: ‘Your attention please! I will reach a conclusion in your best interests: Eve was reason, Adam was faith’ (from the aphorism ‘Prelude’, with reference to ‘An Important Remark on Language’; Feuerbach, Death and Immortality, p. 246). 291 Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 150. Regarding the ephemerality of objectivity, see Prigogine and Stengers, Order out of Chaos, pp. 224-225; and Chapter 8, ‘Celestial Aesthetics’, in Berleant, Sensibility and Sense.

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self—then dystopian phenomenology is the quasi-sensorial, makeshift epistemological coping mechanism used in response to the unreliability of the sensorium submerged. To meet shipwrecks where they are, to perform the a priori scientific tasks that precede resurrection, archaeologists underwater must come to terms with the matrixial space and substance of water.292 In psychoanalysis, the matrix is the inversion of the phallus, the negative space of the womb, and writ large, the void of the matrix may be identified referentially with the earth’s cavities where bodies of water collect. Bodies of water, like bodies of women, subsume exteriorities into self-contained spaces. But in feminist psychoanalysis, this material inversion, this negative space is anything but empty or passive; rather, as Bracha Ettinger explains, the matrix is ‘a dynamic … borderspace of encounter’ and ‘a locus of a multi-directional process of change and exchanges on the [slippery] borderlines of perceptibility’.293 The water column, like the birth canal, is a complex passageway characterized by comings and goings and transformations, or, put another way, by creation, dissolution, and redistribution. As a place of chaos that confuses relational—especially non-oppositional—difference and permits the ‘co-emergence of self and Other’, the matrixial void is an illusory borderspace, ‘a psychic zone of misericord, for sharing the germination and the languishing of the matrixial gaze’. This gaze is an oceanic and intrauterine one that is not merely scopic but includes extra-visual, extrasensory ways of relating to and knowing alterity.294 Mimicking embryonic and fetal perception, the matrixial gaze is necessary to function within the watery matrix, where terrestrial ontologies of gravity, perception, inhalation, and reason are muddied, like the primordial, prebiotic brine within which life formed: The matrixial awareness accompanies us from the dawn of life and is traced in the psyche by primitive modes of experience-organization which are tuned to perceive and elaborate readjustments and re-attuning 292 This conclusion has been apparent to me from the start. During my first training dive at the pool at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas (USA), I was taking my first breaths underwater and getting accustomed to matrixial movements. Then everything went black. I could hear myself breathing, so just kept swimming underwater. A few minutes later, the lights came back on, and I came up to the surface. The janitor had mistakenly turned off the lights, and after the scuba instructor had climbed out of the pool to set them back on, she asked if I was okay. I responded that the whole experience had been like a return to the womb. 293 Ettinger, Matrixial Gaze, p. 31 (the matrix being composed of ‘slippery borderlines’ is used in the following sentence); see also Ettinger, Matrixial Borderspace. 294 Ettinger, Matrixial Gaze, p. 38; Venn, ‘Lessons from Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’, pp. 149-158.

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to connectivity in a general state emerging from a network of entities whose resolution is finer than symbols.295

It seems only natural that post-natal human perception within such a spatio-temporal meltdown would experience this dystopaesthesia. And yet there is something eerily familiar in this world inverted. In Freud’s 1919 essay explicating the uncanny, he distinguishes the ‘uncanny’ (Unheimlich) from other feelings within ‘the realm of the frightening’, such as fear and dread.296 But while fear and dread are responses to the unknown and unfamiliar, the uncanny stems specifically from the unease that emerges from ‘what was once well known and had long been familiar’.297 From its etymology, meaning the opposite of the confinements of home or the familiarity of the domicile (heimlich, ‘homey’ or ‘homely’), the uncanny ‘applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open’.298 Something that is heimlich is better off concealed, but as the threshold of revelation is crossed, it becomes unheimlich, revealed but without authority or consent. The uncanny is marked by a false semblance of death; unintended recurrences; silence, solitude, and darkness; and intellectual uncertainty.299 Freud’s account considers the uncanny as a product of castration anxiety: that is, the repressed fear of powerlessness, loss of control, and death.300 He remarks that while the pinnacle of uncanniness is the thought of being buried alive, this fear is merely a ‘lascivious’ variant on the fantasy of living in the womb.301 The womb features prominently in his theory of the uncanny, as it epitomizes the ambivalence of the Heimlich and Unheimlich, where the prefix ‘un’ indicates repression: the womb is everyone’s first home and so must be heimlich; yet everyone leaves the womb never to return, making encounters with it also fundamentally unheimlich.302 Ettinger counters Freud’s phallocentric account of uncanny experiences and encounters by expounding a theory of ‘matrixial phantasy’, where the uncanny is sparked by a resurgence of repressed memories not of separation or rifts but of being conjoined and simultaneously partial.303 295 Ettinger, Matrixial Gaze, p. 37. 296 Freud, Uncanny, p. 123. 297 Freud, Uncanny, p. 124-125. 298 Freud, Uncanny, p. 132. 299 Freud, Uncanny, p. 153. 300 Freud, Uncanny, pp. 139-140; Ettinger, Matrixial Borderspace, pp. 48-49. 301 Freud, Uncanny, p. 150. 302 Freud, Uncanny, p. 151. 303 Ettinger, Matrixial Borderspace, pp. 46-49.

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Hers is therefore a prenatal account of the uncanny, where connection is umbilical and incompletion is fetal. Thus the doppelgänger effect is not due to castration anxiety but rather the prenatal anxiety of having lived within another body that is both the same as and differentiated from one’s own. Likewise, disconcerting feelings of déjà vu surface when partial times and partial memories overlap with present experience. The diver descending through womb-like oceans to the seafloor enters at once a physically matrixial space and a psychically matrixial phantasy. It is the epitome of anamnesis, or the recurrence of an immemorial but everpresent primal scene. When the diver encounters a shipwreck there, in the midst of this originary tableau vivant, the experience is doubly uncanny: first, in accordance with Ettinger’s account of intrauterine experience and partiality as essence, but also in the Freudian sense of the traumatic split, as the circumstances of fragmentation and displacement redefine the encounter. In psychoanalytic terms, the encounter between shipwreck and diver exists at the threshold of pre- and postnatal experience. The encroachment of fantasy upon reality, so characteristic of the uncanny, is inverted, which only adds to the challenge of knowing through dystopian phenomenology. The inverted logic of the uncanny takes an even more sinister turn when the wreckage of ships called such names as the HMS Impregnable are under investigation. Wrecked in 1799 off the Isle of Wight, seawater turned from feminine to phallic while penetrating the fallow womb of the hull hundreds of years before divers descended on the site to learn what they could from the remaining belly of the wreck, impregnated at last only to birth more ocean.304 This leads to another kind of inversion that takes place within the matrixial borderspace—between shipwreck and diver. Shipwrecks are often fantasized as haunted locales, where spirits of drowned sailors dwell. Yet we the living also haunt the wreckage. We somehow intermittently appear, drifting, in a world for which we are no longer suited, grabbing at what is there in an attempt to complete our perpetually unf inished business. A close reading of Adrienne Rich’s poem, ‘Diving into the Wreck’, demonstrates the extent and uncanniness of inversion in such underwater encounters.305 The poem’s remarkable relevance here lies in its ability to be read metaphorically as a critique of patriarchy and, more literally, as a diver 304 In his discussion of Africans who experienced—and did not always survive—deportation aboard slave ships, Glissant also finds a womblike cavity in the hull of a ship, ‘a womb abyss’ cradled by the greater oceanic abyss: Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p. 6. 305 Rich, ‘Diving into the Wreck’, pp. 22-24.

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exploring a shipwreck—and both readings resonate. The diver, a woman, dons the awkward and anonymizing, if not androgynizing or masculinizing, equipment—fins, mask, and ‘body-armor of black rubber’—and slowly descends down a ladder on the side of a schooner and into the ocean: First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful.

Confronted by the dystopaesthesia of submersion, she is reliant upon her equipment to convert her body into one more suitable for this amniotic environment. However, her sensory adaptation is only the first part of coping with being completely out of her element: ‘I have to learn alone / to turn my body without force / in the deep element’. In the depths, she experiences the further dissolution of perception: And now it is so easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here.

At last, she remembers that she came to explore the damage done and inspect what still prevails, what truths can still be salvaged from mythic destruction: The thing I came for: The wreck and not the story of the wreck The thing itself and not the myth The drowned face always staring Toward the sun The evidence of damage Worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty The ribs of the disaster Curving their assertion Among the tentative haunters.

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The ghostly haunters, proceeding with great caution, are none other than the divers themselves: ‘We circle silently / about the wreck / we dive into the hold’. In a perspectival shift, it is the shipwreck who finds itself lying in silence ‘among the tentative haunters’. Shifting again back into the human perspective, in the broken belly of the wreck, the narrating haunter finds the corpse of a drowned sailor: I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress.

Despite having uncannily come face to face with the putrefied Other, it is not he who haunts the wreck but she: she who reenters the forbidden matrix, and within that amniotic realm, she makes her way into yet another abdominal cavity, the hull of the sunken ship, complete with rotting sailor and ruined cargo and ‘fouled compass’.306 Her own body is barely recognizable, circling unintelligibly, coming and going intermittently, unwelcome yet perennially returning. Her scientific questions are never fully answered, her business of inquisition always left unfinished. This type of inversion, wherein the roles of haunted and haunter are switched, recalls Julia Kristeva’s ‘abjection of self’.307 The diver is drawn toward ‘an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned’ by ‘a vortex of summons and repulsions’ that ‘places the one haunted by it literally beside [her]self’.308 The self becomes a ‘deject’, straying from identity and purpose toward the increasing danger of being an exile willingly entered into dystopia.309 And at this point, the encounter between diver and shipwreck transcends the uncanny and embraces the abject: ‘A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome’. Swimming alongside shipwreck, the meaning of weightlessness is entangled with the ‘weight of meaninglessness’.310 The abjection of meaninglessness amidst dystopia produces panic, which can only be controlled through sublimation; thus, the ‘abject is edged with the sublime’, a ‘sublime alienation’ that threatens 306 Cf. Rosen, Speculative Annihilationism, pp. 82-87. 307 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 1 308 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 5-6. 309 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 8. 310 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 2.

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to forfeit existence when swallowed by the very thing that fascinates, the thing that haunts the haunter.311 If I panic underwater, I find myself ‘on the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me’.312 To prevent becoming engulfed by oblivion, the haunter must find a way to regain some semblance of control lest she succumb to the same fate as the wreck she haunts. Circling the dead while skirting death, the act of ‘haunting is quite properly eerie: the presence of the past often can be felt only indirectly, and so we extend our senses beyond our comfort zones’.313 In his biopsychological treatise De Anima, Aristotle posits that sensory relationships are composed of three participants: organ, object, and medium.314 The medium, in our case, is water. This medium cannot be overcome, no matter how extravagant our mitigating equipment or our eliminating algorithms;315 instead, the medium must be consulted. Through kinaesthesia, or sensing through movement, the haunting diver becomes the organ, navigating the shipwreck through awareness of the placement of one’s body in relation to it, as the sensible object.316 Similarly, the diver might come to sense distance and time by acknowledging how much physical exertion it takes to move from one part of the wreck site to another, in a manner similar to proprioception, or movements of the body in relation to each other.317 While no single sense remains fully intact underwater, coenaesthesia, or the amalgamation of bits of information gathered through all the available senses, may be enough to stave off abjection-induced oblivion or panic. Finally, something that might be called amaesthesia allows for information to be acquired collectively by groups of divers working together, perceiving differences and corroborating varied aesthetic experiences until a consensus may be formed. And yet, a deeper dive into alternatives to sensory perception reveals that the haunter’s sensorium, necessarily revised for the dual sakes of survival and science, may include some even stranger senses than these. 311 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 9, 11. On the sublime, see Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry; Shaw, The Sublime; Doran, Theory of the Sublime; Clewis, ed., The Sublime Reader. 312 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 2. See also relevant discussions on the uncanny and anxiety in Trigg, Memory of Place; and Topophobia. 313 Gan, Tsing, Swanson, and Bubant ‘Haunted Landscapes’, p. G2. 314 Aristotle, De Anima, II.7. 315 On algorithms, see Akkaynik and Treibitz, ‘Sea-Thru’ pp. 1682-1691; see also the project website at https://seabetter.com/; last accessed 16 May 2020. 316 Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Senses, p. 22. See also relevant arguments surrounding movement and sensation in Massumi, Parables for the Virtual. 317 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, pp. 178-183.

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Delirium (Belle) The dystopaesthesia consequent from haunting ghostly objects underwater offers an incentive for reconsidering how knowledge is produced even under ideal conditions. In his reconfiguration of the five Classical senses, Michel Serres inverts the Western hierarchy of perception by placing touch first, offering ‘veils’ (voiles) as the first and primary sense-maker, and in doing so formulates a model for knowledge itself. The veil can be understood as an entanglement—or a confluence—of Aristotle’s medium, organ, and object. This knotted confluence consists of a multiplicity of layers that must be peeled back in processes of un-veiling / re-vealing.318 However, in contrast to the traditional model of ‘truth as unveiling’, the complex of veils necessitates an entangled, gradual activation of truth, not just a single heuristic exposure thereof.319 Serres explains that, instead of the veiled thing waiting passively to be discovered, there is no thing beneath the veil, just more tangled threads where ‘connections are not always unravelled’.320 The veil seems to provide a model of all epistemology as dystopian phenomenology, where ultimate centers are never reached321 and proofs tend toward the fluid and knotted and away from the rigid and seamless. It might even be argued that coming to terms with liquidity may be necessary to come to terms with life itself.322 Instead, negotiations with water are often more akin to machinations, even resulting in efforts to visually or even physically remove it altogether. Whether an algorithm to delete the visual presence of water in underwater photographs or even the use of a caisson to barricade the water from the shipwreck that it contains, this fundamental substance is often viewed by scientists more as a barrier in the way than a layer to engage with.323 One prime example is when the state of Texas built a million-dollar cofferdam around the remains of Robert de la Salle’s barque longue, Belle, to wall off the dark waters of Matagorda Bay before they could be pumped out and the entire vessel relocated to a museum on land.324 By contrast, Serres would seem to agree with the conclusion drawn above, that the medium of water is 318 Serres, The Five Senses, p. 80. 319 Serres, The Five Senses, p. 81; Connor, ‘Michel Serres’, pp. 318-334. See also Nietzsche’s essay ‘On Truth and Falsity’, pp. 58-72. 320 Serres, The Five Senses, p. 81. 321 Gell, Art and Agency, p. 147. 322 See Armstrong, Liquid Life. 323 For the algorithm, see fn. 315 above; for the caisson, see Yongzhie, ‘The Test Excavation of the Nanhai No. 1 Shipwreck’, pp. 84-87; Kimura, ‘East Asian Seafaring and Shipbuilding’, p. 218. 324 See Chapter 4, ‘Excavation Inside a Cofferdam’ in Bruseth and Turner, From a Watery Grave.

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to be consulted rather than overcome, when he claims that ‘Unveiling does not consist of removing an obstacle … but in following patiently and with respectful diplomacy the delicate disposition of the veils, zones, neighboring spaces, the depth of the pile’.325 The piles of dark, watery veils stacked upon shipwrecks are measured in atmospheres of pressure, where every ten meters of depth is equal to the weight of the earth’s atmosphere at sea level. A shipwreck lying 50 meters beneath the ocean’s surface is resting under six atmospheres of pressure. A diver’s lungs at that same depth are compressed to one-sixth of their volume at sea level. The diver’s regulator reduces the compressed air in the tank from 200 atmospheres to the ambient pressure of six atmospheres, but this also means that the diver consumes six times more air at this depth than at the surface. The air gauge reflects that the diver is breathing 90 liters of air per minute at 50 meters below the surface, which limits her time there to only a few minutes. As the diver ascends through these veils of pressure back to the surface, the regulator adjusts to the decreasing depth so that when she reaches the surface, her breathing gas, if any remains, is delivered at one atmosphere of pressure. Other watery veils disclose temperature along with depth, where thermoclines are discernibly felt during the descent and in reverse during ascension. The diver moves between the ‘ocean skin’—the top layer of the sea where warm air is distributed by waves—and the transition layer that separates it from the colder, deeper layers unaffected by the surface weather. The sudden change in ambient temperature is like moving through an invisible door from warm interior to frigid exterior, but this movement is vertical and there is no visible change to the space at all. There is only the drop in temperature to inform the diver that she is still going down, away from sunlight and further into the coldening depths. Upon returning from the seafloor, each thermocline is an embrace that warms and envelops—tighter and tighter—the body and reminds the diver that she is almost where she ought to have been all along. The veils formed by deep water are not the only ones with which the diver must contend. According to anthropologist Alfred Gell, the shipwreck itself, as a discernible, sensible object, gives off parts of itself in the form of ‘rinds or skins or vapours, which diffuse out into the ambience and are incorporated by the onlooker in the process of perception’.326 Calling on Lucretian atomism and ethnographic observation, the animative power 325 Serres, The Five Senses, p. 82. 326 Gell, Art and Agency, p. 223.

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of any object is irrelevant to having located a sacred center or core truth; rather, the thing’s power ‘is only in the reduplication of skins, outwards towards the macrocosm and inwards towards the microcosm’.327 With no core and no surface, no inside or outside, there is only ceaseless passage in and out. In this way, all objects are distributed in space and time, with even cognition occurring eerily beyond the body’s own fleshy layers. With their canvas sails and superimposed skins of wood sheathed in copper, their inundation and burial beneath misty sediments of sand and shell, the dissolution of soft parts and corrosion of harder ones, sensing with veils is well-suited to the phenomenology of ships and their wreckage.328 Serres opens his entry on veils, with the subheading of birth, with the recollected memory of a near shipwreck, when he found himself trapped, face to face with his own haunting: I dwell inside, I dwell outside. … I am delivered or debarred, … I go under or I exist. There is an almost identifiable point which the spatial experience of passing from inside to out, is proclaimed by the whole body. The I as a whole leaps towards this localized point and moves decisively from one half of the body to the other when the point slides, in contact with the separating wall, from its internal to its external surface. Since my near shipwreck I have become accustomed to calling this point the soul. The soul resides at the point where the I is decided. We are all endowed with a soul, from that first moment of passage when we risked and saved our existence.329

Serres’s reflected experience again recalls the Kristevan ‘abjection of self’, where the annihilating edge of non-existence and hallucination is all of a sudden a tangibly perilous—and perilously tangible—presence, where the layers of the sensing subject become inverted and indiscernible from those of the sensible object:

327 Gell, Art and Agency, p. 148. 328 Indeed, we might include sailors alongside Serres’s weavers and spinners as ‘the f irst geometers, because their art or craft explores or exploits by means of knots, proximities and continuities, without intervention from measurement, because their tactile manipulations anticipate topology’ (Serres, The Five Senses, p. 82); see also the section ‘Negentropy’ in Chapter 4 of this volume; and on distributed objects, see Chapter 9 in Gell, Art and Agency. 329 Serres, The Five Senses, pp. 20-21. Interestingly, one of Gell’s examples of peeling back layers also references shipwreck, from a line in the Norwegian play, Peer Gynt: ‘There goes the battered outer layer—that’s the shipwrecked man on the dinghy’s keel’: Art and Agency, p. 139.

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[A] pilot says I for his whole vessel, from the depths of the keel to the tip of the mast, and from the quarter to the boom, and that the soul of his body descends into the soul of the boat, towards the central turbines, to the heart of the quickworks. To free yourself from that vessel, you have to search for your soul in the hold, where the f ire is at its most dangerous—one perilous day.330

His emphasis on these liminal edges, being entangled in transitional spaces and fabrics, not to mention the story’s thinly veiled references to birth and rebirth, also brings to mind Ettinger’s matrixial stratum, a layer wherein subject and object are separate and yet conjoined by a shared medium, and inversions of the self are amniotic if not asomatous.331 And indeed, in Ettinger’s theory of the matrixial, veils also shift to disclose partial meanings, where truth-seeking observers experience a kind of epistemological déjà vu. Just as the diver can only experience fragments of the wreck repeated time and again, and those fragments are gradually formed into a mosaic of meaning, ‘in the matrix, … the emergence of meaning is not related to absence or even to the rhythmic movement of presence and absence, but to shareability and to changes in distance in proximity’.332 For Ettinger, the veil is one of separation and of contact, both permeable and opaque.333 Her veil, or matrixial screen, does not hide an object at all but mediates between the object and the gaze of sensation and desire thrust upon it by the subject. For both Ettinger and Serres, the veil is a passageway, a space marked by conductivity and hybridity.334 Not surprisingly, though, this ambivalent space also has a temporal component. Flirting with oblivion, the veil is ‘double-edged’ in that the memories produced through shared encounters with it defy future transformations and past repressions; instead, as a ‘shared memory [between object and subject] … it conveys traces of events that cannot be born nor borne alone’.335 These partial memories that transcend individual experience are characteristic of déjà vu, where consciousness is lured into a fragmentary loop of timelessness. With all their blue and green mysteries, water’s veils are intoxicating, delirium-inducing, and yet alluring as they promise the gradual and partial 330 Serres, The Five Senses, p. 21. 331 Ettinger, Matrixial Gaze, p. 37. 332 Ettinger, Matrixial Gaze, p. 38, original emphasis. 333 She is drawing from writings on the ‘screen’ by Lacan and Merleau-Ponty: Ettinger, Matrixial Borderspace, pp. 99-100, 148-149, 154-155. 334 Ettinger, Matrixial Borderspace, p. 154; Serres, The Five Senses, p. 80. 335 Ettinger, Matrixial Borderspace, p. 155.

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unveiling of something that has been removed from all human sense experience for layers upon layers of time. Just as the temporal aspect of Ettinger’s veil is ‘double-edged’, so is Kristevan time: ‘The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth’.336 Revelation by déjà vu—or the unveiling of overlapping, shared, and repeated partial memories—is an essential mechanism within the sensorium of dystopian phenomenology. Coincidentally, déjà vu is also a symptom of temporal lobe epilepsy, and as such, it is one of the psychological manifestations of the uncanny.337 Within veils, self and soul, subject and object, medium and organ, oblivion and memory all crease, crumble, and fold in upon each other. Immersed in the unraveling of these layers, the truth-seeking scientist embedded in thermoclines and compressed by atmospheres soon embodies presque vu, the sensation of being on the brink of epiphany after stitching together overlapping perceptions of shipwreck, only to run out of time at the bottom and return to the surface, tantalized by the revelation that is never entirely revealed. Particularly true of our encounters with the oceanic, human experience arrives from depths and natures we cannot fathom— that what we feel in the moment comes to us from far away or inside, from zones beyond the legibly human, from worlds existing at scales far above or beneath the everyday, from places ever out of reach and range of full apprehension.338

Desiderium (The Ribadeo) Necessary to consulting the medium of water in underwater epistemologies is going down there. The diving scientist must meet the shipwreck where it is before it can be saved from the perils of watery grave and decay, and this necessitates a voyage. In his adaptation of the Classical sense of sight, Serres plays on the layered meanings of the French verb visiter, meaning to visit or inspect. Most simply, the word refers to vision, or observation, but instead of just relaying the idea of the English verb ‘to see’, its meaning is more active: ‘to go and see’.339 In this way, Serres’s non-sense of visite describes a way of 336 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 9. 337 Freud, Uncanny, p. 150. 338 Helmreich, Sounding the Limits of Life, p. 163. 339 Serres, The Five Senses, p. 306; Connor, ‘Michel Serres’, pp. 318-334.

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knowing through travel, through going a distance and meeting face to face whatever you may find there. To visit something somewhere is a mutual act, where one party agrees to meet the other at a specific location, and through repeated visits, knowing is strengthened. In hauntings, where the visitors are uninvited, these encounters between living and dead are sometimes called ‘visitations’, and this term may equally apply to the unwelcome visits of the nautical archaeologist to the shipwreck site. While revelation will always prove evasive in the dystopian underwater realm, repeated visitations of this kind produce information gradually, which builds up inroads or at least meandering paths toward knowledge. Throughout his passages on the non-sense of ‘visit’, Serres weaves an ironic critique of post-Enlightenment thought, from the voyages of discovery to the scientific method, and from the global spread of monotheism to the Industrial Revolution: Thus the makers of maps could say that they had discovered America, convince others and take credit for it, when countless fishermen, following the paths traced across the watered silk, had already reached it without proclaiming it loudly as historical fact. The triumph of the written word resulted in a catastrophe of perception. The age of science created new iconoclasts, this time of the senses, and totally destroyed a prodigious body of knowledge in the realm of the perceived. All we have preserved are ruins, remains, fossils.340

While himself employing the book’s authority to decry the removal of the body from empiricism (as am I, apparently), he would seem to side with the practice in nautical archaeology of ‘diver ground-truthing’, where perception through bodily voyage to the seafloor bears greater weight than the visual abstractions of undersea textures and densities produced through remote ‘sensing’ technologies, such as side-scan sonar, single- and multi-beam echo sounding, sub-bottom profiling, hyperspectral imaging, marine magnetometry, and survey with remotely operated vehicles.341 Confirming the presence of anomaly underwater through the persistent practice of diver ground-truthing is an example of how ‘our reasoning and 340 Serres, The Five Senses, p. 254; cf. p. 268. 341 This observation may mitigate somewhat Virilio’s concerns about the replacement of sensory experience by digital proximity (cf. Virilio, Open Sky, p. 45), but see also Chapter 5. For the ‘profound’ role of acoustics in underwater sciences, see Helmreich, Sounding the Limits of Life, which will be consulted in greater detail in Chapter 4.

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sciences have become sufficiently refined for us to understand at last the extent to which the senses are capable of subtle kinds of knowledge’, even despite dystopaesthesia.342 Amidst the pixilated, machine-produced maps of remote sensing methodologies, the consistent deployment of divers seems an admission that it is only through visitation that a holistic and topological ‘view’ of the shipwreck might be produced. Instead of perception through instruments, so common in marine geophysics, or forging ahead with any tried-and-true method that produces clear, reliable results, Serres implores the learned reader to stop. He warns that to continue down this linear, singular path is to doom oneself to boredom, rigidity, idiocy, canonization, and imitability. Instead, we are advised to ‘keep the recognizable method or methods in reserve, in case of illness, misery, fatigue’ and instead to ‘go rambling again’, to wander freely in pursuit of the wondrous idea that first promised life.343 However, even such bold caveats must be taken in stride during this voyage, as Serres himself acknowledges that there is a place, even outside the reserves, for instrumentalized and mechanized learning. He assures the reader that ‘the act of visiting is equally valid for the empirical, the machine and the abstraction’.344 He even poses a series of hypotheticals that further call into question the separation of empirical and abstract—or sensible and intellectual—ways of knowing: Could we not say that what we call understanding and sensibility, and even reason, those secret compartments in the subject of knowing, the existence and location of which has never been demonstrated … are simply layers or strata of memory, memories of past cultures lost by history? We can see the Atlantic by means of a sextant or with the practiced gaze of an old sea salt, nothing obliges us to call ourselves empirical or abstract in either case. … It has long been said that vision is the model for knowledge and all our languages still express this idea, but supposing vision carried with it its memory and its forgetting?345

The role of memory in the non-senses of veils and visits alike is critical. If layers of immemorable encounters still permeate knowing, and if repeated visitations—bodily and mechanical—can reinforce that knowing, then 342 Serres, The Five Senses, p. 254. 343 Serres, The Five Senses, pp. 272-275. 344 Serres, The Five Senses, p. 307. 345 Serres, The Five Senses, p. 269.

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we are led into an epistemological system that might contend with the dystopaesthesia of the sensorium submerged. To be clear, though, recurring rendezvous at the seafloor, where scientist and shipwreck reconcile their differences, are hardly repeatable experiments. The repetition of underwater visitations is more akin to anamnesis, which, like history, keeps present that which is forgotten.346 Unlike history, though, which works to reestablish the truths of the past, anamnesis embraces the insights of absurdity: for example, when crawling along the seafloor against a current of three knots, gripping with gloved fingers the clay and watching small plants ripped from it fly past one’s mask as if in the vortex of outer space, all the while in search of the remains of the wooden hull of a carrack long lost to the erosion of exactly such currents. The absurdity of this experience at the bottom of the English Channel, and then yet again on the floor of the Eo Estuary in the Bay of Biscay mapping the remains of the Ribadeo galleon, is matched only by the bizarre sense of familiarity. The familiarity of the vortex, the very real threat of being swept out into the void, the absurdity of lengths gone to earn knowledge of the wreck, are all characteristic of this particular type of visitation. But the familiarity in particular is deceptive: ‘In anamnesis, the spasmatic return of the “same” is never the same, for it carries the marks of the peril of a disappearance in the new appearing. Spasm thus gives birth to … apparition, as a threshold amid recurrences’.347 Such anamnesic visitations are necessarily uncanny, if not abject, as the ‘peril of disappearance’ is real and imagined and experienced by both diver and wreck. As Freud explains, ‘it is only the factor of unintended repetition that transforms what would otherwise seem quite harmless into something uncanny and forces us to entertain the idea of the fateful and the inescapable’.348 Despite their insistence upon returning and the perpetual longing therefor, scientists visiting the seafloor are frequently faced with the threat of inescapability. In part, it may be this very sense—that each visitation to the underwater realm may be the last—that compels the nautical archaeologist to rescue the wreck, to usher the artifact from the seductive dystopia of aqua incognita to the predictable utopia of terra cognita. As much as there is a recurrent longing for the forbidden place, so there is for the promised placed. Desire is entangled in persistence, and there is a ‘persistent ubiquity of utopian desire in human history’, which ‘springs 346 Lyotard, ‘Anamnesis of the Visible’, pp. 107-119. 347 Ettinger, Matrixial Borderspace, p. 159. 348 Freud, Uncanny, p. 144.

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from the same impulse as the myth or the eschatological desire for a better afterlife’.349 Such longing for a better afterlife is so pervasive in Western culture that it has been extended to the things humans make, not just humans themselves. Beloved artifacts are relocated into the utopia of climate-controlled exhibit cases in museums in European and American cities, where they are meant to live on forever, gloriously. Entire shipwrecks are resurrected from the depths and infused with polyethylene-glycol to stop their wooden timbers from further decay, effectively turning the organic into the inorganic, the mortal into the immortal. All the while, as Serres laments, ‘Pity the frail earth, torn, or covered in violent remains and unspeakable garbage’, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of species who have fallen prey to the ongoing mass extinction because of this overpowering desire for a better afterlife for ourselves and our things.350 But in Judeo-Christianity, utopian desire is originary and God-given. The original state of creation was utopian by nature, and this utopia consisted of ‘the domination of the architect God of the universe’.351 As explained in previous pages, the ‘state of creation’ also corresponds to the domination of land over primordial seas and the violent rifting of the waters into those below and those above. The birth of land was the annunciation of god, the logos, like a mathematician or metaphysician, voice, law and relationship dictated accordingly in a space drawn, ruled, calculated, measured, known and embellished by that world … It speaks the ruagh, spirit, wind, breath, voice moving over the waters before the first day of Genesis, the preliminary to creation.352

In imago dei, humans were designed in the architect-god’s likeness, and they were given a garden, a landscaped paradise on earth, in which to live. After the lapsus humani generis (‘fall of mankind’), the architect-god provided the ultimate sacrifice so that utopia would be restored. But humans had not heard the last of those corrupting waters. The European voyages of discovery and colonization conducted across those very oceans were also done in an effort to restore utopia from dystopia. This was literally so, as the voyages were motivated by Crusading efforts to reach the East Asian population before the Islamic empires could beat them to religious 349 Pohl, ‘Utopianism after More’, p. 51. 350 Serres, The Five Senses, p. 249. 351 Serres, The Five Senses, p. 244. 352 Serres, The Five Senses, pp. 246-247.

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conversion. To justify continued expeditions into forbidden lands and across demonic seas, Christopher Columbus sought the Garden of Eden off the coast of the Americas and thought he found it at the headwaters of the Orinoco.353 Appropriately then, Thomas More’s fictional Utopia, the eponymous city in his 1516 novel, was set on an Atlantic island off the coast of the New World, the island itself being a customary representation of the terrestrial paradise, surrounded by waters of the flood, in Medieval mappaemundi.354 By 1611, the word ‘utopia’—More’s own neologism—had entered into the English dictionary, as the concept quickly became an essential feature of Early Modern literature and philosophy, poignantly exemplified by Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis published in 1626.355 While ‘utopia is inseparable from the imaginary voyage’, the New World became the site of actual utopian projects, such as when the Puritans established settlements like Salem in New England as earthly projections of ‘New Jerusalem’.356 All these Early Modern utopian efforts, literary and literal, find their roots in Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to establish Christianity as the dominant—if not sole—religious force on Earth, thereby restoring Edenic conditions on a global scale. When scientists voyage underwater to remove sunken artifacts and place them in museums, they are participating in and reinforcing the Columbine tradition. With wings named after colonized overseas landmasses, the museum acts as a microcosmic utopia as it creates an ordered representation of the world in miniature.357 Viewing Earth as a globe, an abstraction mapped and conquered, enabled the capitalist configuration of commodification and appropriation.358 Following from privately owned cabinets of curiosity found in the homes of wealthy Europeans, having profited from the ‘age of discovery’, the encyclopedic museum came to realize—if not epitomize—the long-pursued union of Church and Empire, a ‘secure outpost of the heavenly 353 E.g., West, ‘Christopher Columbus’, pp. 519-541; Flynn, ‘Christopher Columbus and the Problem of History’, pp. 11-16. It seems possible that Columbus’s motivations to learn geography and geometry were so that he could act as the hand of the Divine Architect himself, thereby setting the wheels in motion for the arrival of the New World Order: Watts, ‘Prophecy and Discovery’, pp. 73-102. 354 Watts, ‘Prophecy and Discovery’, p. 77, Fig. 2. 355 See discussion on Francis Bacon in Chapter 1 of this volume; Pohl, ‘Utopianism after More’, p. 57. 356 Pohl, ‘Utopianism after More’, pp. 53, 60; Taylor, After God, pp. 86-91; Sweet, ‘Christopher Columbus’, pp. 369-382; Watts, ‘Prophecy and Discovery’, pp. 73-102; Delaney, ‘Columbus’s Ultimate Goal’, p. 287. 357 Shelton, ‘Cabinets of Transgression’, pp. 177-203. 358 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, pp. 212, 215-216.

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city in the world here below’.359 When the artifact in question is an entire shipwreck, the scientist assumes the role of the architect-god as the ship is rebuilt from the wreckage, restoring as much splendor as possible to its afterlife. The symbolic significance of this creatio ex profundis is even more portentous when considering that the wreck’s deliverance from the corrupting, dystopian waters is followed by its placement in the utopian atmosphere of the museum. To overcome the sea is a divine process, as announced in the book of Revelation, where it is forced to give up its dead before being eliminated altogether, and the sea’s cessation is the harbinger of New Jerusalem, the Holy City’s restoration on earth.360 With the museum as the utopian confluence of Church and Empire, rescued and rebuilt shipwrecks demonstrate the restoration of order from disorder and the exposition of divine might and right. But when scientists shake off their Enlightenment instincts and resist the godlike temptation to overpower—even if only symbolically—the oceans, they might instead consult the medium: that is, the waters themselves along with that which they contain. It then becomes possible to shift the scientific perspective to that of the shipwreck, who finds itself lying in silence ‘among the tentative haunters’, and to fathom the wreck’s circumstances as neither dystopian nor utopian but rather heterotopian. It is this underwater heterotopia that we will visit (visiterons) in the following chapter, where we will ‘venture off the beaten path to meet unexpected, non-natal kin’361 and wander through watery ‘landscapes, where assemblages of the dead gather together with the living’.362 And the sea can shed shimmering scales indefinitely. Her depths peel off into innumerable thin, shining layers. And each one is the equal of the other as it catches a reflection and lets it go. As it preserves and blurs. As it captures the glinting play of light. As it sustains mirages. Multiple and still far too numerous for the pleasures of the eye, which is lost in that host of sparkling surfaces. And with no end in sight.363

359 O’Donnell, ‘Augustine, City of God’. The author notes that his introduction to Augustine’s work was written in 1983 but never published in print. See also Augustine’s political idealism contextualized within that of his Graeco-Roman contemporaries and predecessors: Fortin, Political Idealism and Christianity. 360 Revelations 20:13; 21:1-2. Augustine of Hippo offers a more symbolic than literal interpretation of these scriptures; see Augustine, City of God, Vol. 2, pp. 290-291 (Book XX.15). 361 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 130. 362 Gan, Tsing, Swanson, and Bubant, ‘Haunted Landscapes’, p. G5. 363 Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 46.

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Hauntograph 5: Ribadeo 1. (rotate figure 90 degrees counterclockwise; view from left to right, top to bottom) The remains of the Ribadeo Galleon are located at a depth of approximately ten meters in the Eo Estuary, which runs into the Bay of Biscay and which separates the northern Spanish provinces of Galicia and Asturias. The galleon has been heavily eroded by the strong tidal currents that run between the Eo and the North Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless, it has been the subject of a great deal of inquiry, including investigations conducted by scientific divers who have mapped the site using traditional underwater drawing methods and more technologically advanced methods, such as multi-beam sonar. 364 Ship timbers date to the late sixteenth century and are possibly to be identified as part of the Santiago de Galicia, which wrecked in these waters in 1597. 365 The shipwreck site is a confluence of the knotted layers of salt and fresh water, sediments, temperature changes, cuttlefish couples, wooden hull remains, pottery sherds, barrel staves, stone and metal artifacts, and the periodic hauntings of human investigators and their instruments. Cyanotype prints, cuttlefish-ink imprints on cloth, and fishnet fabric, draped by brass rivets on acrylic rods on found window, in order from top left to right, then bottom left to right (Sara Rich, 2017). Image credits: Miguel San Claudio Santa Cruz and Raúl González Gallero.

364 San Claudio Santa Cruz et al., ‘El Pecio del Ribadeo’, pp. 208-221. 365 Eguiluz Miranda et al., ‘Ribadeo Shipwreck’, pp. 104-115.

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Hauntograph 6: Ribadeo 2. Watercolor painting on silky gossamer fabric of San Claudio Santa Cruz et al.’s 2012 multi-beam sonar imagery of the sixteenth-century Ribadeo shipwreck. 366 The more translucent painting drapes and folds over a color print of the sonar data, in the way that diver ‘ground-truthing’ overlays the epistemological pursuit of the shipwreck. Watercolor on fabric and ink on paper (Sara Rich, 2017). Image credits: Miguel San Claudio Santa Cruz.

366 The watercolor on paper study for this hauntograph is featured at the AS IF Center: https:// brighterimpacts.com/2017/12/24/1152/; posted on 24 December 2017, last accessed 30 November 2020. Reference to the AS IF Center’s sci-art residency and hauntographic processes can be found in SciArt Magazine: https://www.sciartmagazine.com/blog/residency-sara-rich-at-asif; posted on 19 April 2018, last accessed 6 March 2020. My gratitude to director Nancy Lowe for the opportunity to work at the Center.

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4. Vibrant Corpses Abstract To break away from the paradigm of corrupting seas, this chapter approaches shipwrecks ecologically and alchemically. The tragic wrecking of the late eighteenth-century frigate, Santa María Magdalena, off the coast of Viveiro, Spain, exemplifies that wrecks are not ‘dead ships’ but are carrying on in many of the same ways that they did at the surface. An artificial reef teeming with life after death, it embodies the alchemical maxim of putrefaction before purif ication. A comparison with more recent maritime tragedies, whose pollutants render them dangerously ‘undead’, calls for an urgent revision of how we conceptualize and evaluate ruins underwater, evaluations of which are currently limited by the false nature/culture dichotomy. Keywords: symbiogenesis; UNESCO; contemporary archaeology; new materialism; Santa María Magdalena shipwreck

And in order to speak the meaning of the earth, is it necessary to exhaust all her stores? Is the reign of the superman at hand when the whole of the earth becomes sublime discourse, when all that remains of her is her praise in the memory of ghosts? 367

The current Neoliberal Empire follows dutifully in the steps of its predecessors: ‘beginning with the Iberians, and clear through the long twentieth century, one of the first things great empires and states do is establish new ways of mapping, categorizing, and surveying the world’.368 And thus its methods of cloning colonial footprints are also innovative. Shipwreck detection mechanisms have, until now, always been waterborne: divers, 367 Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 18. 368 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p. 192.

Rich, S.A., Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins & the Uncanny. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463727709_ch04

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fishers, deepwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), the green wavelength of bathymetric LiDAR, and the ‘tow-fish’ that encase sonar transducers and magnetometers pulled by a vessel through calm, shallow waters. But now, even shipwrecks secreted away in turbid nearshore waters can be detected and mapped from the air, by satellite. Reporting from on high, NASA Landsat imagery spots plumes of particulate matter and scour pits that indicate wreck sites, adding validity to the rough estimate of some three million shipwrecks located within global waterways.369 Even data constrained to miniscule slivers of time and space reveal how populous shipwrecks are and have been. Recent research by the Spanish Ministry of Culture has logged 681 Spanish ships that wrecked along the Eastern Seaboard of the Americas from 1492, starting with Christopher Columbus’s Santa María off Hispaniola, to 1898, with the demise of numerous Spanish ships off the coast of Cuba during the Spanish-American War.370 Yet while these profound numbers are suggestive of the overabundance of wrecked ships and boats on Earth, they are merely abstractions. Quantitative data alone cannot communicate what all these shipwrecks are doing; they only indicate their vastness, their population dispersal on the distorted space of a geographic information system (GIS). However, setting aside temporarily the epistemic limitations, the vocabulary of shipwreck geography is qualitatively useful because, in thinking about populations of shipwrecks—beyond the increasingly crowded GIS maps produced through the omniscience of satellite imagery and the combing of historical records—we are thinking ecologically, which allows these sites to become conceivable as less ‘dead ship’ than ‘undead ship’. At the seafloor, wrecks carry on in many of the same capacities that they did at the surface; as undead ships, they continue to populate, disperse, harbor, and destroy. The previous two chapters have provided a critique of the resurrection approach to studying shipwrecks: that it is grounded in the hegemony and humanocentrism of Christian empire and Enlightenment ideology. This chapter suggests that another limitation to this way of researching wrecks is that it neglects a fundamentally shared role between the ship during its ‘working life’ and its wreckage retired to the seafloor: that whether located on the surface of the sea or at its bottom, the ship/wreck functions as a 369 Baeye et al., ‘Detection of Shipwrecks’, pp. 1-6. The 2013 estimate of three million shipwrecks globally is given in UNESCO, ‘Wrecks’. 370 Olaya, ‘El Mayor Mapa’; see also Rich, Nayling, Momber, and Crespo Solana, Shipwrecks and Provenance, Fig. 2.

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particular type of assemblage, a multi-species ‘city’.371 This chapter also aims to demonstrate in no uncertain terms that oceans are not the corrupting, demonic force that Early Modern writers, inspired by their Biblical and Classical forebears, have described. Seawater is neither maleficent nor polluted ‘by nature’; rather, the pollution of waters is achieved by none other than those whose conceit recreated themselves in the image of the Divine, ‘by culture’, and by the very cultural ideology that imagines and perpetuates a false ontological rift between the two realms.

Entropy (Nuestra Señora de los Remedios) While critiquing the savior-scholar model of nautical archaeology, the second chapter of this book also detailed the extent to which ships are likened to human bodies: planking that seals and protects the vulnerable interior like a thick layer of skin, frames that support and shape as do the bones of a skeleton, and the keel as a spine running the length of the symmetrical form. In Early Modern European literature, the ship-as-body metaphor was as ubiquitous as it was religious in meaning. The ship at sea may have functioned as the body of Christ, sacrificing itself to save its passengers from polluting waters, but such sacrifice entails susceptibility to corruption. The wooden ship moving through tempests was never silent but creaked and groaned in torment. Deep in the putrid belly of the bilges, and between the cracks of the ship’s wooden skin, seawater and human filth fermented and putrefied, blackening into slime and releasing a gut-wrenching miasma.372 The ship’s vulnerability was foundational to its sacrifice, its suffering necessary to its redemptive power; it figures not the baptism of Christ in the Jordan River but his perilous temptation in the Judaean Desert, or even the bloating of his corpse in its tomb. Perhaps this briny Eucharist where the god’s flesh and blood is made rotten and perverse is why sixteenth-century transatlantic passenger Eugenio de Salazar abandoned the ship-body metaphor. In a letter written on 19 July 1573 to his friend Miranda de Ron, Hispaniola’s newly appointed judge uses not a bodily metaphor but an urban one to describe his voyage from Tenerife to Santo Domingo. 371 Special thanks to those in attendance at my lecture for the HTC Honors College and Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Coastal Carolina University in February 2018 and for the Department of Art at Appalachian State University in April 2018, whose comments and questions initiated deeper investigations into the claims made in these pages. 372 Corbin, Lure of the Sea, pp. 16-17.

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Despite the auspicious christening of the nau upon which he sailed, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, De Salazar’s metaphorical ship-as-city is composed of bodies more profane than sacred. His letter begins by recounting a conversation he had with his wife, Doña Catalina, in their quarters, wherein he lamented to her, ‘I suspect we are in the house of the devil’. He emerges from their room to explore the ship, and the extended metaphor begins: ‘I call it town and city, though not that of God which the glorious Augustine described. For I saw no holy temple, no house of justice. Nor is mass said for residents, nor do they live by law of reason’.373 As he continues to relate his shipboard explorations, he provides the letter’s recipient with a general description of the vessel’s urban hellscape, emphasizing its cursed flora and fauna: There are trees, not exuding salubrious gums and aromatic liquors, but filthy pitch and fetid tallow. Also there are flowing rivers, not of sweetrunning crystal waters, but of most curdy nastiness; not filled with grains of gold as the Cibao [in Hispaniola] or the Tajo [in Iberia], but with vulgar, misshapen pearls from the toilets, and of lice so large that some get seasick and vomit pieces of cabin boys’ flesh. The ground is such that when it rains, it is stiff, and when the sun is strong the mire softens and sticks your feet to the floor. The fields have plenty for fowling for cockroaches, and great hunting for rats. Many are cornered and fight the hunters like wild boars.374

He proceeds to describe the city’s human inhabitants and how that alone differentiates this place from Augustine’s City of God: 373 English translations, opposite the Spanish original, are modified slightly from Frye, Letter of Eugenio de Salazar, pp. 28-29. From the Spanish original: ‘Sospecho que estamos en casa del diablo’. […] ‘Aunque lo llamo pueblo y ciudad, mas no la de Dios que describió el glorioso Augustino. Porque no vi en ella templo sagrado, ni casa de justiciar, ni á los moradores se dice misa, no los habitants viven sujetos á la ley de razon’. Some passages from this section were previously published online in Rich, ‘Hay Árboles en esta Ciudad’. 374 From the Spanish original, as in Frye, Letter of Eugenio de Salazar, pp. 30-31: ‘Hay árboles en esta ciudad, no de los que sudan saludables gomas y licores aromáticos, sino de los que corren contino puerca pez y hediondo sebo. Tambien ha rios caudales, no de dulces, corrientes aguas cristalinas, sino de espesísima suciedad; no llenos de granos de oro como el Cibao y el Tajo, sino de granos de aljófar más que comun, de granados piojos, y tan grandes que algunos se almadian y vomitan pedazos de carne de grumetes. […] Poneros-heis piés en el suelo de esta ciudad, entrará un golpe de mar á visitarlos, y besároslos-ha de manera que os deje los zpatos ó botas blancas más que nieve de su saliva espumosa, y quemadas con la fortaleza de su sal. Quereis-os pasear por hacer algun ejercicio, es necessario que dos grumetes os llevan de brazo, como novia de aldea’.

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This city is sad and dark—black outside, inside blackest—floor blackish, walls black, inhabitants black, and officers black. … But in the end, it is a necessary evil, like a woman. There is in this city a universality of people and population, with offices and dignities by their degrees and hierarchies, although not of angels. […] In short, the citizens of this city have no more amity, faith, or charity when at sea than sea snails.375

Then he proclaims, with biting sarcasm, how cosmopolitan this city is, with multiple languages spoken by learned men of the world, and where a new language has even come into existence: I was amazed looking at this city and the activities of its people, and marveled to hear the language of the sea, which I understood no more than the babbling of the roaring crowd. … In learning these confusing voices, accents, and words without understanding meanings, I think I have done more than ten mocking birds or twenty parrots. […] Yet do not marvel that I know anything in this language. I have had much exercise in it, so much that in all I speak it goes with me. […] When some sailor tips the jug too much, ‘Oh how you bail!’ When another breaks wind (which happens many times), ‘Ahoy the poop!’ Thus I still cannot leave off with this language.376

Continuing his wry discussion of the city’s culture and customs, he informs the reader of how social barriers are dismantled in this sailing city, allowing for hierarchies to become temporarily disbanded at mealtimes: 375 From the Spanish original as in Frye, Letter of Eugenio de Salazar, pp. 32-35: ‘Es esta ciudad triste y oscura; por defuera negra, por dentro negrisima: suelos negrales, paredes negrunas, habitadores negrazos, y oficiales negretes. […] mas en fin, es un mal necesario como un mujer. Hay en este pueblo universidad de gente y poblacion donde tienen sus oficios y dignidades por sus grados y hierarquías, aunque no de ángeles. […] Y en fin los vecinos de esta ciudad no tienen más amistad, fe, ni caridad que los bijagos cuando se encuentran en la mar’. 376 From the Spanish original, as in Frye, Letter of Eugenio de Salazar, pp. 38-41: ‘Estaba embelesado mirando esta ciudad y los ejercicios de la gente de ella, y maravillado de oir la lengua marina ó malina; la cual yo no entendia más que el bambaló de los bramenes. […] En aprender las voces, acentos y vocablos de este confuso lenguaje sin entender las significaciones, pienso que he hecho más que diez tordos ni veinte papagayos. […] Y no es de maravillar que yo sepa algo en esta lengua, porque me he procurado ejercitar mucho en ella, tanto que en todo lo que hablo se me va allá la mia. […] Cuando algun marinero trastorna mucho el jarro le digo: ¡oh! cómo achicais. Cuando otro tira un cuesco (que pasa muchas veces), digo: ah de popa. Así que ya no es en mi mano dejar de hablar esta lengua’.

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In this city, you must cook and eat at the same time as your neighbors, [and all that is eaten is corrupt and fetid, so] all belch desires and dream of [morsels] unreachable. […] Men, women, boys and old men, dirty and clean, all become a noisy crowd and mess of broken hardtack, some stuck together. Next to some, one belches, another vomits, another breaks wind, another unloads his bowels, and you eat lunch. Nor can you complain of anyone’s bad manners because the ordinances of this city permit everything.377

Perhaps utopian for some seafarers, certainly dystopian for the writer, the city that De Salazar describes is none other than a Foucauldian heterotopia: a frothy brothel, a garden of disgust, a colonizing rat-trap where oceanic anarchy dictates that time and space taunt those onboard with the paradox of seaborne freedom and shipbound imprisonment. Foucault’s lecture, from which the posthumously published essay Des Espaces Autres is based, explains a heterotopia as a type of ‘counter-site’ where a real, phenomenal place is represented, contested, and inverted. After providing numerous examples of heterotopias, each fulfilling various of the six principles he defines, Foucault concludes with a single, all-encompassing example: If we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development … but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence.378 377 From the Spanish original, as in Frye, Letter of Eugenio de Salazar, pp. 44-47: ‘En esta ciudad es menester que guiseis y comais á la misma hora de vuestros vecinos; [todo lo más que se come es corrompido y hediondo] y así todos estan regoldando deseos y descaliños de cosas inalcanzables del puesto donde ellos se hallan. […] Hombres, mujeres, mozos y viejos, suicios y limpios, todos van hechos una mololoa y mazamorra, pegados unos con otros; y así junto á unos uno regüelda, otro vomita, otro suelta los vientos, otro descarga las tripas, vos almorzais; y no so puede decir á ninguno que usa de mala crianza, porque las ordenanzas de esta ciudad lo permiten todo’. 378 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, pp. 22-27. For a maritime archaeological application of the ship as heterotopia, see Van De Noort, North Sea Archaeologies, pp. 178-200. While Foucault was correct in that the heterotopian ship was the vehicle of economic development for the colonizers, its arrival also facilitated the economic exploitation of the colonized. And yet, even as a symbol of

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Foucault had almost certainly never encountered De Salazar’s lengthy letter to Miranda de Ron, written in Spanish 500 years before his lecture in French and only published a few years after the philosopher’s death. However, the two certainly conceived of ships in similar terms if not synonymously. People onboard ships were often in a state of crisis: they were (and often still are) prisoners, refugees, criminals, conscripted into the military, infirm, adolescent, abducted, in exile, enslaved, in perpetual motion. There is a juxtaposition of space in that the ship mimics land with its towering tree-masts, its castles fore and aft, and its underworld of bilges. And yet no one would mistake a ship for land as it creaks and groans while the water tosses it back and forth across its surface. While motion is perpetual, there is a cessation—or a dissolution—of time as it is normally perceived. During lengthy voyages onboard ships, hours, days, and weeks bleed into each other as they become useless in monitoring the more relevant changes of wind, currents, storm patterns, and temperature. Ships are also both open and closed, isolated and penetrable: launching rituals, compulsory entry, and the barring of exit except for landfall or death. And finally, shipboard life is rigorously controlled by the captain and on down the ranks, and yet, as de Salazar witnessed, such hierarchies often prove futile, as everyone onboard is susceptible to the same overpowering forces that make all life equally vulnerable. Variously confining and defining as this heterotopia seems, and indeed was for so many, Foucault’s concluding sentence re-emphasizes the ship’s unusual place in the imagination: ‘In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates’. Written decades later, this line’s sentiment is expanded and embodied in China Miéville’s award-winning fantasy novel The Scar, set on a city called Armada. Perpetually drifting through the Swollen Ocean, Armada is constructed entirely of the hulls of ships hijacked by pirates and towed to the landless polis. There, the seized ship skeletons are lashed onto the outskirts of town, increasing the circumference of the city limits, and creating room for more weirdos and misfits abducted from the high seas. Once at Armada, hierarchies dissolve as abductees’ preexisting ranks are ignored, and they are given new identities. In the prologue to his novel, exploitation, the ship’s capacity as a ‘reserve of the imagination’ was reinforced, as it may also have symbolized the hope of the colonized for escape. Consider the example of the Sea Islands off the coasts of Georgia and the Carolinas, which harbored Africans and African-descendent peoples fleeing enslavement. This was such a common and perseverant practice and resulted in such relative isolation from the mainland that the communities became a distinct cultural and linguistic group, known as the Gullah Geechee.

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Miéville recognizes that the fictional heterotopia he is about to imagine for us has a real-world analogue in the form of an underwater counter-site: There is heroism and brute warfare on the ocean floor, unnoticed by land-dwellers. There are gods and catastrophes. Intruding vessels pass between the sea and the air. Their shadows fleck the bottom where it is high enough for light to reach. The trading ships and cogs, the whaling boats pass over the rot of other craft. Sailors’ bodies fertilize the water. Scavenger fish feed on eyes and lips. There are jags in the coral architecture where masts and anchors have been reclaimed. Lost ships are mourned or forgotten, and the living floor of the sea takes them and hides them with barnacles, gives them as caves to morays and ratfish and cray outcastes; and other more savage things. In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.379

Effectively, when the ship ceases to skim the water’s surface and instead succumbs to its depths, little of its characterization as heterotopia changes. If anything, as a counter-site to a counter-site, the wreck is the ultimate heterotopia, not the ship. Foucault’s first defining principle of heterotopia is that of crisis and deviation: wrecks clearly exemplify crisis, and as man-made objects whose social function has been revoked by brokenness, they could easily be identified as deviant. The second principle is similar to deviance in that it requires a change to the social function of an existing heterotopia over time; Foucault uses the example of a cemetery whose location has shifted from the city center to the outskirts of town as a result of changing conceptions of death and contamination. Formerly the manifestation of Empire and Divine Right, the wrecked ship is dislocated from the social center and becomes ‘the other city’ in ‘its dark resting place’, as with Foucault’s cemetery. At the same time, there is a hierarchical shift too, as social strata, along with species rank, dissolve along with the bodies that once defined them. The third principle has to do with juxtaposition and incompatibility, fulfilled by the submersion of thousands of forest trees and other terrestrial kinds to the bottom of the sea so that the wreck is a microcosm of land, displaced 379 Miéville, The Scar, p. 2.

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beneath the water. The fourth principle is heterochrony, or a break with traditional time, such as what occurs with the loss of biological life, or perhaps more so, the ship’s ‘quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance’. Cemeteries, museums, and libraries are heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time, and as both cemetery and museum, shipwrecks also accumulate on the seafloor as do corpses in graveyards, books in libraries, and stolen ethnographic objects in museums.380 They even accumulate in the same places on the seafloor, at ‘ship traps’ or ‘ship graveyards’, such as Molasses Reef (French Cay, Turks and Caicos), Thunder Bay Island (Lake Huron, USA), South Hams (English Channel, UK), Dry Tortugas (Florida, USA), and Ningaloo Reef and the Houtman Abrolhos (Western Australia). The fifth principle is one of access: the heterotopia is both open and closed, isolated and penetrable. As explained at length in the previous chapter, submerged wreck sites are vulnerable and exposed to water’s entropic forces, and yet they are sealed off from the terrestrial world; as such, they are isolated from the human sphere, and yet many wrecks are accessible to those willing to convert and subject their bodies to the demands of the submarine realm. Finally, the sixth principle is the creation of a space of either illusion or perfection. The shipwreck generates both spaces simultaneously. For human eyes, it is the picture of chaos, but this chaos is an illusion born of our terrestrial bias. Where we see jumbled disorderliness in need of measuring, labeling, and cataloging, others reside amongst the mess in accordance with the orderliness of a predictably pelagic existence. Entropy for one is negentropy for another. With the amalgamation and dissolution of all those wrecked bodies comes a new menagerie of colonists who take refuge in the ship-body and those of its passengers: humans, rats, roaches, dogs, cats, and livestock. Macro- and microorganisms, plankton and nekton feed on that plethora of telluric flesh until not even bones remain. Even the bodies of inanimate passengers, such as clay jars and wooden barrels, are repurposed as houses for eels and octopi; opportunistic groupers secret themselves away in the empty spaces between cargo units; mollusks tunnel into the sand and hull; anemones and algae affix themselves to wooden planks and metal fittings 380 The shipwreck as underwater museum analogy has been in common parlance since George Bass, founder of the discipline, emphasized following his team’s excavations of the Bronze Age wreck at Cape Gelidonya (Turkey) in the 1960s that ‘Artifacts which lie beneath the action of waves have been protected against certainly the most destructive of all agents—man, himself’, before going on to list the many ways that water and seafloor sediments work to preserve shipwreck materials: Bass, Archaeology Under Water, p. 23. See also the colonial museum as divine city, and shipwreck as inversion of that desire, in Chapter 3 of this book.

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alike; and billions more plants and animals flock to the wreck site, which teems with life and death simultaneously.

Negentropy (Magdalena) De Salazar’s description of the fetid flora and fauna onboard the Nuestra Señora de los Remedios hints at the second aspect of the ship-as-city metaphor. As noted at the beginning of the second chapter, the word ‘metaphor’ as it pertains to ships has a kind of double meaning in that ships often act as linguistic metaphors, and at the same time, they also literalize the meaning of the word as they transport an array of objects from one site to another over water, thereby literally ‘carrying across’.381 But from a biological perspective, the ship is also a kind of phoresy or an organism that carries other organisms, the way that a shark brings along its resident remoras or a bur is carried in the fur of a horse.382 Yet, like its literary functions, the ship’s biological role may transcend even that of transporter, and in considering this aspect of a ship’s telos, we are again brought into a reckoning with the relationship between the ship and the wreck. Just as a house of worship can be understood as a microcosm of heaven, a city can be understood as a microcosm of a society, and a museum as a microcosm of utopian society, ships and their wrecked remains have also been understood as microcosms, directly indicative of the social conditions prevailing at the time of the vessel’s sailing and sinking.383 However, in ways that correlate to the ship’s classification of heterotopia, it can also be understood as microcosmic in the biological sense of nested layers of interacting complex organisms. As Darwin explained, ‘each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm—a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven’.384 Like biological organisms or distinct ecosystems, ships are complex assemblages composed of untold species, some of whom are 381 In addition to the second chapter of this book, see also Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator. 382 Margulis, ‘Words as Battle Cries’, pp. 673-677. 383 For city as microcosm of society, see Gulick, ‘City as Microcosm of Society’, pp. 5-15. For museums as microcosmic utopias, see Chapter 3 of this book and Shelton, ‘Cabinets of Transgression’, pp. 177-20. For the longstanding trope in maritime archaeology of ships and shipwrecks as microcosms of ancient societies, see Muckelroy, Maritime Archaeology, and the discussion in Papadopoulou, ‘Phenomenon of the Phantom Place’, pp. 371-372. 384 Darwin, Variation of Animals and Plants, Vol. 2, p. 453; cited in Margulis, ‘Words as Battle Cries’, p. 677.

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displaced from their various ecological niches, all of whom combine to form a unique ecological unit that houses, feeds, breathes, reproduces, lives, and dies, continuously.385 Preoccupied as we are with our own dramas, we are prone to overlook the fact that ships transport much more than humans and their things. Historically, ships have carried rats, horses, livestock, cockroaches, fleas, forest trees, mold, bacteria, smallpox, Bubonic plague, all the innumerable microorganisms carried and nurtured by all these lives, and all the while, gulls encircle the masts, barnacles are latching onto the outermost layers of the ship, and teredo worms are chewing their way through any exposed wood. While the ship itself, despite all its bodily features, may be classified only with difficulty as an organism as such—considering that wood once separated from its roots and leaves loses its classification as ‘alive’ and that inorganic shipbuilding materials like metal and fiberglass have never really been awarded that status—we might re-think of the vessel, using Jane Bennett’s vital materialism, as an example of ‘the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle’.386 Forming the architectural framework, the ship, along with all its inorganic and inanimate components, is perhaps the most vital feature of the ecosystem adrift. It is a mobile cave system, a valley, a mountain, a forest, or a city, with few if any discrete boundaries between it and the surrounding water and air or the interdependent objects carried along with it. The ship may not be living, but it surely is pulsing with liveliness. As anthropologist Stefan Helmreich muses, Life is strange, pushed to its conceptual limits, spilling across scales and substrates, becoming other, even alien to itself. Life thwarts full definition, even comprehensive theorization, not because it is mysterious but because it is impossible to separate fully forms of explanation from the apparition of living things themselves, forms of life from life forms.387

Moving the scale from the holistic down to the molecular, there is no difference between the carbon atoms in a felled tree that became a ship’s mast and those found in that ship’s captain; likewise, there is no difference between the iron atoms in a sailor’s blood and those of a steel-hulled vessel. Categories of animate and inanimate might be better suited to the realm of linguistics 385 Cf. Delanda, Assemblage Theory, pp. 137-164. 386 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, pp. 6, 58-61. 387 Helmreich, Alien Ocean, pp. 8-9; cf. Helmreich, Sounding the Limits of Life.

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than to biology, where such signifiers as pronouns or determinatives indicate the degree of sentience or aliveness the culture collectively attributes to the object in question. That is, objects understood culturally to possess a soul or life force are designated as animate, while those deprived of autonomy are deemed inanimate.388 As mentioned early in the second chapter, many cultures have recognized the individual autonomy of boats and ships, and although traces of this autonomy remain in naming ceremonies and attributions of movement and behavior to animation by divine forces, Early Modern European culture and its contemporary descendants animate only those living beings classifiable according to Linnaean taxonomy. According to this classification system, derived from Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735), one must be living and clearly capable of intentional movement in order to be animate, and one must either be living and moving but as a ‘lower’ life form—dead—or never have been alive in order to be inanimate.389 Biologically, especially considering the volition of plants and fungi, the distinction between the two terms and the ideas they convey quickly breaks down, and considering viruses, a similar point can be made even with the categories of living and not living—or dead, inert.390 Philosophically too, such distinctions have been called into question numerously. Recently, Timothy Morton has argued for a logic of ambivalence, where life is ‘a hesitancy between two different kinds of death’.391 One kind of death is simply nonexistence, while the other is the kind of extermination that results from ‘the relentless pursuit of relentless life’ or, put differently, the axiom that ‘more existing is always better than any quality of existing’.392 Explicitly implicating capitalism and theism in his critique, Morton posits that life is haunting and uncanny and that we should be thinking of life again as ‘a subset of a vaster quivering, movement itself as a subject of a deeper shimmying’.393 Without mechanical input from within or without, this shimmering and shimmying has been regarded as a ‘spectral, undead, unholy, heretical taboo or as an esoteric secret’.394 But like all heresies, the 388 Cf. Gell, Art and Agency, pp. 121-122. A highly effective example of such attributions and how problematic they might be can be seen in ancient Sumerian culture, where the earliest written language indicates that Sumerians considered animals to be inanimate but statues representing gods or people to be animate. 389 Schlesinger, Explaining Life. 390 Helmreich, Limits of Life, pp. xi-xvi. 391 Morton, Humankind, p. 43. 392 Morton, Humankind, pp. 46-48. 393 Morton, Humankind, p. 38. 394 Morton, Humankind, p. 49.

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shimmering as unholy is a culturally constructed choice that can just as easily be made orthodox as not. The shimmer, or bir’yun among indigenous Australians of the Northern Territory, is the ancestral power that pulses through all earthlings.395 But in re-cognizing this feature of enlivened existence that defies the usual binary categories of relative vitality, haunted grey areas might emerge: ‘the more we think ecological beings—a human, a tree, an ecosystem, a cloud—the more we find ourselves obliged to think them not as alive or dead, but as spectral’.396 As another kind of ecological being, a ship should perhaps at least be considered spectral, if not altogether alive. Taken as a whole, then, a ship, along with its constituents, is not just phoresic—a body carrying with it other bodies—but also holobiontic. First developed by biologist Lynn Margulis, the term holobiont can be defined broadly as an ecological unit of different lifeforms, or bionts, living together in a long-lasting, intimate relationship.397 Donna Haraway takes her cue from Margulis and explains holobionts as symbiotic assemblages, at whatever scale of space or time, which are more like knots of diverse intra-active relatings in dynamic complex systems, than like the entities of a biology made up of preexisting bounded units (genes, cells, organisms, etc.) in interactions that can only be conceived as competitive and cooperative.398

The inadequacy of the binary terms to explain the complexity of holobiontic ecological assemblages has prompted Haraway to refer to the compositional partners of the assemblage as ‘holoents’, a word that bypasses the Linnaean biases of ‘beings’ or ‘organisms’ and even ‘units’. Haraway’s knotted relatings recall the discussion in the previous chapter of Serres’s topological knots, but her woven and tangled fabrics are made juicy with co-evolved tissues of a nucleic kind.399 Sailors’ enfolded knots become webbed assemblages 395 Bird, ‘Shimmer’, p. G51. 396 Morton, Humankind, p. 55. 397 Although originally, the term was conceived as a way to define the symbiotic relationship between a host and its resident microbiome (‘the symbiotic complex’), it has now been expanded to encompass other forms of symbiotic ecological units: Margulis, ‘Symbiogenesis and Symbionticism’, p. 4, Table 1; Margulis, ‘Words as Battle Cries’, pp. 673-677; Guerrero, Margulis, and Berlanga, ‘Symbiogenesis’, pp. 133-143; Simon, Marchesi, Mougel, and Selosse, ‘Host-Microbiota Interactions’. 398 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 60. 399 See section ‘Delirium’ in Chapter 3 of this book; Serres, The Five Senses, p. 82.

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of cotton, sea salt, barnacles, iron oxide, gull shit, and bacteria all trying to weather the storm. At sea, the evolutionary success of the ship-scale holobiont is dependent upon the success of the vessel in staying afloat. Once it capsizes, very few of the individual organisms—if they can be thought of as individuals at all—composing the ecological unit can survive to continue the relationship; those that do carry on beyond the wrecking are the ‘embodied bits of vitality’400 with few depth restrictions and no lungs requiring air. An example would be Teredo navalis, the xylophagic bivalve commonly referred to as shipworm or teredo worm that attacks wooden vessels while in transit, burrows deeper into the wood as the ship sails into different waters, and continues to devour the vessel following the sinking event.401 As wooden oceangoing ships were replaced by steel- and iron-hulled vessels in the mid-nineteenth century, seawater began being used as ballast, which meant that all the biota in the ballast water, from plankton and protists to sea stars and jellyfish, were transported globally. Swallowing ballast water in one location and purging it and its biota in another has resulted in steadily growing accumulations of invasive species that are eerily metonymical of neoliberal globalization as a whole.402 But it also means that when these vessels wreck, the lifeforms stowed away in the hull’s liquid ballast can be released underwater, and if inoculation leads to successful introduction, they begin to serve as some of the first species composing the next evolutionary phase of the ship as holobiont. Just like the ship as heterotopia, the holobiontic vessel retains its lively, bustling qualities even after it wrecks and falls to the seafloor. It may be helpful to borrow philosopher Levi Bryant’s ontological classification system and to think of ships and their wrecked counterparts as ‘animate corporeal machines’: a (decomposing) body composed of other bodies and composing yet another body (of water), which has self-organized and grows as it acquires new colonizers and accretes new materials even as old ones break away.403 Pre-Industrial shipwreck sites, which are the most frequent recipients of archaeological intervention, are notorious multi-species assemblages. They act almost as sanctuary cities, where vast arrays of livelihoods are invited and supported. The so-called inanimate components of the shipwreck 400 Helmreich, Alien Ocean, p. 6. 401 For more on T. navalis, see Palma and Santhakumaran, Shipwrecks and Global ‘Worming’. 402 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p. 205; National Research Council, Stemming the Tide, pp. 145-170. See also Helmreich, Alien Ocean, 145-170. 403 Bryant, Onto-Cartography, pp. 20-25, although he might disagree and rather classify the assemblage as an ‘inanimate corporeal machine’.

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are essential for generating the next phase in this ecological unit’s evolution: the always-inanimate materials such as metal, glass, stone, and ceramic provide the building blocks for colonizing lifeforms, while the newly inanimate materials such as plants and seeds, animal bodies, and organic textiles become the foodstuffs for the new residents. Extra-human architects refashion wooden timbers, which provide both architectural and culinary value.404 As introduced in the previous section, the wrecked ship and its dead become a submarine habitat, so fully integrated with those living in and on it that the colony is inseparable from the colonists. The bodies making up the original holobiont are incorporated into those of the new holobiont, with a few perhaps having survived the turbulent transitional stage. In considering what biology can offer to a more complete understanding of the relationship between ship and wreck, we can see that ‘Gaps in time as well as space mark the edge of the abyss that is the groundless ground of everything that is and is not. Life is lived along this unfigurable edge’.405 As is the case with animate and inanimate, and living and dead, creation and destruction can also be understood as episodes, or phases of a cycle, rather than as antonyms at the extremes of a spectrum.406 Likewise, while entropy always reigns supreme, and the ship and its original contents will die and disintegrate, there is a phase during which the order of multi-species symbiosis is restored, at least for the benthic. While few terrestrial types are privy to this fleeting moment of negentropy, it should come as no surprise given that life itself—nothing if not slippery, microbial, and rhizomatic— originated on the seafloor.407 In 1810, the Spanish frigate Santa María Magdalena (built in 1793) and the brigantine Palomo wrecked in a storm while anchored off the coast of Viveiro (Galicia, Spain) in the North Atlantic, and over 500 sailors were killed. Innumerable other lives also went down with the two ships. As one of the scientists excavating this site, we were warned that uncovering human remains was a distinct possibility since very few of the 500 bodies were ever recovered. The first time descending on a site is always anxiety-inducing. At a depth of about eight meters, it is shallow but dark and murky, with what little was visible cast in a yellow-green light intercepted 404 Cf. Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World; for a more concise exploration of nonhuman architecture, see Krumbein and Asikainen, ‘Ancient Architects’, pp. 63-70. 405 Taylor, After God, p. 347. 406 See also Chapter 2 of this book and Spielrein, ‘Destruction as the Cause’, pp. 155-186. 407 See relevant discussions of deepwater hyperthermophiles and shapeshifting genes in Helmreich, Alien Ocean, pp. 68-105. For more on negentropy, see Bryant, Onto-Cartography, pp. 93-108; Taylor, After God, pp. 321-322.

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with flecks of drifting biota. But even if visibility had been heightened or cast in aquamarine instead, just knowing the site’s particularly grisly human history lent the experience a more peculiar gravity. And yet, at the bottom, one would never guess that the shipwreck was a mass grave. There were leery eels peeking out of cannon shafts and various other nooks and crannies; there were octopi everywhere, even a particularly curious juvenile living between two of the pine planks that my team was sampling; there was a highly vocal dolphin who called the site home and acted as inspector general to all our activities; and there were countless species of fish, crustaceans, echinoderms, bivalves, plankters, algae, and grasses growing in and on the shipwreck. The site of such extraordinary tragedy was also the quintessence of dramatic biodiversity, composed through decomposition. It is for this reason that—prior to the advent of underwater acoustic technologies, satellite omniscience, and other forms of remote sensing— most ancient shipwrecks were located not by scientific or even recreational divers but by fishermen.408 In their capacity as holobionts, shipwrecks act as artificial reefs that harbor vast numbers of fish of commercial interest, and because many of these long-lasting ecological units have been submerged for hundreds of years, the species present are well-established and are therefore likely to feature commercially preferable ‘old-growth’ individuals of large size.409 Inspired by the holobiontic nature of historic shipwrecks, there have been recent global efforts to support commercial fishing, underwater tourism, and marine conservation by intentionally sinking abandoned watercraft in the hopes that they will mimic the biological effects of their more tragic nautical counterparts like the Santa María Magdalena.410 While in some cases, individual decommissioned ships are scuttled to form the basis of a new reef, other artificial reefs are made by stringing together several end-of-the-line vessels, much like an underwater version of Miéville’s Armada described above.411 However, these scuttled ships and boats are often composed not of wood like the fictional Armada or actual Magdalena but plastics, corrodible metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), lead, asbestos, and petroleum hydrocarbons. Even if most of these materials are 408 See, e.g., Price, ‘Notes from Mount Desert Island’, pp. 59-76, and especially the many examples of precedents listed and cited on p. 60. 409 For a deeply disturbing history of global exploitation of marine ‘resources’ in commercial fishing, see Roberts, Unnatural History of the Sea. 410 Ilieva et al., ‘A Global Database of Intentionally Deployed Wrecks’. 411 E.g., Diplock, Artificial Reefs; Lukens and Selberg, eds., Guidelines for Marine Artificial Reef Materials.

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stripped from the ships before sinking them, the scuttled vessels have to be monitored to ensure that residual industrial construction materials in contact with corrosive seawater are not creating a toxic marine environment that renders moot the entire enterprise.412 While this care can be extended to vessels and other structures submerged to attract biota, unintentional wrecks composed of these materials most often are not stripped of their hazardous components. Instead, Industrial-era shipwreck sites are toxic, anti-holobiontic assemblages, acting as microcosms of widespread ecological catastrophe, of Earth as a ‘ghost habitat’.413

Putrefaction (Sanchi) Early Modern seafaring empires, such as the one that Eugenio de Salazar served from his post in Hispaniola, paved the way for unprecedented industrialization, neoliberalism, and globalization. Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, reality began to be reordered so that the human experience was radically differentiated from nonhuman existence, and this cultured reality was exported globally. Culture was violently extracted from nature and its conceit justified by the new trinity of God, Empire, and Capital; and through emergent scientific methods, the holier ancient trinity of Space, Time, and Life were abstracted in order to facilitate global appropriation and exploitation by an emergent theocorporatocracy. 414 Without the Christian European empire’s transatlantic terror known as the Middle Passage, the Industrial Revolution would have been physically impossible.415 Spanning the Early Modern era and continuing into the present day, this theocorporatocracy was fully entrenched by the nineteenth century, a claim substantiated with a pronouncement by the influential French political economist, Henri de Saint-Simon, in the 1820s: 412 Helton, ‘Intentional Scuttling of Vessels’, pp. 901-904; MacLeod, Morrison, Richards, and West, ‘Corrosion Monitoring’, pp. 53-74. There are two relevant notes that should be made here: one, that many of the metals are stripped to sell for scrap rather than exclusively to prevent harmful corrosion; and two, there were also metals such as lead, copper, and iron in use on wood-hulled ships (wood near lead anchors or sheathing is the most likely to be well-preserved because the metal poisons underwater organisms too), but even so, the ratio of organic to inorganic materials on pre-Industrial watercraft was much higher, allowing for minimal toxicity in relation to the amount of edible and/or colonizable materials. 413 Roberts, Unnatural History, p. 272. 414 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p. 190. 415 Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock of the Anthropocene, p. 234.

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The object of industry is the exploitation of the globe, that is to say, the appropriation of its products for the needs of man; and by accomplishing this task, it modifies the globe and transforms it, gradually changing the conditions of its existence. Man hence participates, unwittingly as it were, in the successive manifestations of the divinity, and thus continues the work of creation. From this point of view, Industry becomes religion. 416

With this ideological shift toward the divine pursuit of property and profit, developments in nautical architecture from the fifteenth century onwards are both cause for and consequence of the new degree of objectification of nonhumans—and also many humans—as ‘resources’.417 With increased shipbuilding during the ‘Age of Sail’ and the construction of new ship types like the carrack, galleon, and fluyt came the widespread deforestation of Europe’s ancient woodlands, and when they ran low, those of its colonies were felled instead.418 As shipbuilding contributed to the gradual deforestation of woodlands worldwide, technological discoveries in Europe revised nautical architecture again. In the mid-nineteenth century, as wooden hulls were replaced with steel ones, and stone ballast with seawater, sails were replaced with steam engines. These engines were powered by coal, and ever since, fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas have been the primary source of energy for seaborne industries, whether mercantile or naval. Today, ships are not only fueled by oil, they fuel the global demand for oil. Ships facilitate the transport of approximately 50% of the total amount of oil and liquified natural gas (LNG) produced worldwide, and they are required for the continual search for offshore oil and gas fields.419 The intensification of the fossil fuel industry has resulted in tankers that have increased in size, carrying more product, and in numbers, flooding international sea lanes. On 6 January 2018, the Iranian oil tanker Sanchi collided with a Chinese cargo vessel, the CF Crystal, in the East China Sea. The tanker was carrying 111,300 metric tons (960,000 barrels) of ultralight natural gas condensate, which is used for producing jet fuel and diesel, and which poses an 416 Simon, Doctrine de Saint-Simon, Vol. 2, p. 219, cited in Bonneuil and Fressoz, Shock of the Anthropocene, p. xii. See also related discussions in Chapter 1. 417 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, pp. 212-213; Rich, Cedar Forests, Cedar Ships, pp. 201-203. 418 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, pp. 182-187; cf. Rackham, Woodlands, pp. 238-240; Wing, Roots of Empire; Rich, Nayling, Momber, and Crespo Solana, Shipwrecks and Provenance, pp. 2-3, 5, 9-11, and references therein. 419 Rogowska and Namieśnik, ‘Environmental Risk Assessment of WWII Shipwreck Pollution’, p. 463.

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immediately volatile threat to marine life due to its toxicity.420 The tanker itself was powered by 1,000 metric tons of bunker fuel, the tarry viscous substance that remains after lighter hydrocarbons are extracted from crude oil. Upon collision, Sanchi erupted in flames that killed all 32 crew members and burned for eight days before sinking to a depth of 115 meters. The crew of the CF Crystal were rescued and the ship towed to port in Zhoushan. China’s State Oceanic Administration reported that the four highly toxic oil slicks around the Sanchi wreck site covered a surface area of over 100 km2. In the days following the ship’s submersion, the Shanghai Maritime Search and Rescue Center and the Ministry of Transport reportedly sent support vessels armed with submarine robots, which were to search out the shipwreck’s leaks in order to seal and contain them.421 But in the longer-term aftermath of the wreck, there have been limited reliable reports published on the success of cleanup missions, even though models made at the time of the incident predicted widespread toxic contamination due to turbulent waters and the strong Kuroshio Current in that part of the Sea.422 With an unknown chemical composition of the condensate and an unknown ratio of fuel burned to leaked during the collision, it is difficult to know with certainty how the localized oceanographic forces would dilute and disperse the wreck’s bunker fuel and cargo of condensate. However, even low concentrations of condensate would poison larvae and plankton, while the inevitable acute chemical exposure would damage fish reproduction cycles, birds, and marine mammals. In the weeks following Sanchi’s sinking, reports of contamination prioritized the effects on fisheries, demonstrating that the bulk of even scientific concern has been focused on the risks of contamination to human food sources, while bypassing the effects on everyone else.423 A truly volatile substance, condensate differs from darker, cruder oil primarily due to its invisibility. Its ghostliness compounds cleanup efforts as it infiltrates waterways, mixing in undetected with seawater, infecting everything it touches before eventually evaporating. This image runs contrary to the kinds of oil spills most people are familiar with, such as the spill resulting from the 1989 wreck of the Exxon Valdez (Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska). Unforgettable images of fish, shellfish, and 420 Carswell, ‘Unique Oil Spill in East China Sea’, pp. 17-18. 421 Ren, ‘China Sends Underwater Robots’. 422 Yin, Zhang, Zhang, and Qiao, ‘Long-Term Prediction’, pp. 69-72; National Oceanography Centre, ‘Sanchi Oil Spill Contamination’. 423 Myers and Hernández, ‘A Nearly Invisible Oil Spill’; Loew, ‘Condensate from Tanker’; Lau, ‘Seafood Supply May Be Hit’.

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seabirds slowly dying beneath layers of thick, tar-black crude accompany the imaginings of contemporary shipwrecks. However, these images have been decades in the making. Early twentieth-century wrecks, especially those involved in the World Wars, still leak tons of petrol and naphtha and other hazardous fluids into global seaways. However, as noted regarding the wreck of Sanchi, ‘The lack of visible devastation has almost certainly dampened public reaction that might have galvanized a more vigorous response’.424 Visibility is essential for intervention, even—or perhaps, especially—in devastations that our own species has caused. The irony of visibility is also noted in recent Australian policy research: The world took notice and action when the oil tanker Prestige sank and leaked oil onto the coast of Spain and France [in 2002]. Significant resources and considerable money were allocated to locate the wreck, patch the leaks, and eventually offload the remaining oil. What is not well known, is that there is a significantly larger global marine pollution threat from over 7800 sunken WWII vessels worldwide, including over 860 oil tankers, corroding for over 60 years at the bottom of the world’s oceans. 425

Having been written in 2005, these thousands of wrecks are still looming on the seafloor, now 75 years later, their hydrocarbons still spreading like toxic tentacles through the water and all that it permeates. Tragically, leaking petroleum is not the only way that shipwrecks bear the burden of fossil fuels corrupting the seas. Most vessels, even steel-hulled ones, are also entangled in fossil-fuel based plastics. On 13 January 2012, the Italian cruise ship, Costa Concordia, wrecked off Isola del Giglio (off the Tyrrhenian coast of Italy) killing 32 passengers and crewmembers. Photographic and videographic imagery taken by Italian police and civilian rescue divers relay vacant, eerie scenes of doomed middle-class luxury, wrapped in plastic.426 Vinyl seat coverings protected foam cushions, polyester bed linens embraced foam mattresses in each of the 1500 cabins, plastic drink cups were stocked for the 4000 passengers onboard, and innumerable plastic-coated electrical wires spanned the 290-meter-long cruise ship. Fossil fuels and the plastics 424 Myers and Hernández, ‘Invisible Oil Spill’, para. 14. 425 Monf ils, ‘Global Risk of Marine Pollution from W WII Shipwrecks’, pp. 1049-1054; cf. Rogowska and Namieśnik, ‘Environmental Risk Assessment of WWII Shipwreck Pollution’, pp. 463-469; Monfils, Gilbert, and Nawadra, ‘Sunken WWII Shipwrecks of the Pacific and East Asia’, pp. 779-788. 426 My thanks to the readers who caught the thinly veiled Twin Peaks reference here.

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made from them define modern human life perhaps more than any other material. However, Costa Concordia’s plastic also continues to define the nonhuman life, those local benthic colonizers flocking to the heterotopian wreckage. Shortly after the ship sank, salvage operations began, and only two years later, she was righted and towed back to her home port of Genoa. But even in that short period of time, the corruption had been accomplished. Marine biologists investigating the site after the wreck’s removal found a consistent and significant increase in marine microplastic pollution in sampled fish and shellfish.427 They may conveniently be relegated to the past, but shipwrecks still happen, and they are still tragic heterotopias. But they are also toxic heterotopias, where attempted marine colonization comes at the expense of the very life it is supposed to support.428 It is clear that when modern and contemporary vessels wreck, they generate oceanic ghost habitats, or undead zones. The undead zone is somewhat different from the ‘dead zone’, which is an oceanographic term referring to hypoxic sections of sea-, lake-, and riverbeds where oxygen-dependent organisms are asphyxiated through anthropogenic eutrophication, or an overabundance of nitrogen- and phosphorus-based runoff from agriculture and industry.429 Exacerbated by global warming, such nutrient-rich pollution causes algal blooms, but just as these organisms are born en masse, so too do they die en masse, and when they do, the bacterial degradation of these billions of bodies consumes the available oxygen in seawater, creating the suffocating conditions of hypoxia.430 So long as phosphate and nitrate pollution is produced and remains waterborne, dead zones may seasonally fluctuate but will predominately retain their classification of lifelessness. By contrast, Industrial-era shipwreck sites can be thought of as ‘undead zones’ in that while they generate sections of lifelessness on the seafloor, in the water column, and at the surface, reanimation is imminent. Exposure to toxic fossil fuels leaked from wrecks kills some immediately, but it kills even more methodically, working slowly into reproductive cycles and snuffing out lives over the course of many generations. Likewise, microplastics invade all bodies, oceanic and biological, and microorganisms are put to the task of 427 Avio, Cardelli, Gorbi, Pellegrini, and Regoli, ‘Microplastics Pollution after the Removal of the Costa Concordia Wreck’, pp. 207-214. 428 See Rich, ‘On Moats and Reservoirs’; Rich, Hamdan, and Hampel, ‘Naufragic Architecture’, in press. 429 Diaz and Rosenberg, ‘Spreading Dead Zones’, pp. 926-929. 430 Altieri and Gedan, ‘Climate Change and Dead Zones’, pp. 1395-1406.

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degrading the polymers,431 breaking them down until they are as dispersed as Sanchi’s ghostly condensate. Plastics contaminate gradually until ‘the soft boundaries of plant and animal cells become the rigid, smooth boundaries of plastic, having been turned into oil’.432 These emulating and emanating putrefactants drift indefinitely, the undead cargo creating new fossils from the ones that produced them millions of years ago. There is a kind of Mezentiusial metaphysics at work in grasping the shipwreck as the living dead. As noted in Chapter 2, the ship upon sinking might look death in the face and see its mirror image in the water’s surface, the fragmented doppelgänger awaiting it on the other side of the looking glass. When bound together in that moment of truth, not only does the living ship on the surface of the water see itself as already dead, but so does the wreck gaze from beneath the sea upon the living in terror, recognizing itself as undead, animated only by the living.433 In the torture of Mezentius, known from the Etruscans through to the European Renaissance, two bodies—one living and one dead—were bound together face-to-face until the putrefaction of the dead transgressed into the living body and they were united as one, bound not just by the ropes tying them together but by the worms swimming through the blackening slimy flesh of both. In our case, the worms are teredo or the invasive ballast biota that bridge the holobiontic transition from living to living dead. Mary Douglas famously defined pollutive dirt as ‘matter out of place’.434 This simple definition, often misapplied, is deceptively complex because its necessary and sufficient conditions include both a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order, similar in this way to Foucault’s heterotopia. Shipwrecks are displaced from the ordered, topside relations of shipping lanes, rankings and pay grades, protocols, traditions, schedules, and predetermined ports of call. They are matter removed from the intentions of their designer, contravening the ship’s prescribed manifest. The putrefactants carried by and composing modern ships and their wreckage compound this scenario significantly. Here, meter after meter beneath the ocean surface, the matter of petroleum hydrocarbons is so far removed from its designated place within the wells of crude oil and natural gas beneath desert sands and peat bogs that response and responsibility are washed from the hands of 431 Auta, Emenike, and Fauziah, ‘Distribution and Importance of Microplastics in the Marine Environment’, pp. 165-176. See also the more theoretical discussion of plastic pollution in oceans in Liboiron, ‘Redefining Pollution and Action’, pp. 87-110. 432 Morton, Humankind, p. 47. 433 Negarestani, ‘The Corpse Bride’, p. 135; see also Chapter 2 in this book, ‘Ontology’. 434 Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp. 44-45.

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those at fault and into the fins and tentacles of the bystanders. To reverse these effects or to transcend the stage of putrefaction into purification, we will have to make the appropriate alchemical preparations, and these will almost certainly require us to cast aside the boundaries thrust upon us as species, souls, societies, and scientists.

Purification (Costa Concordia) At the site of a mass grave, a plane crash, or a crime scene where the victim cannot be identified by survivors, forensic archaeologists are called upon to investigate. They study the context; look for artifacts and other traces that help to reconstruct the circumstance of disaster; identify the sex, stature, age, and ancestry of the people once inhabiting the animated bodies; and determine the cause and time of their death. When it comes to dead humans above water, archaeological intervention is the norm, regardless of how long ago the deaths occurred. Below water, however, archaeological intervention oddly hinges on the antiquity of the disaster. The UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage defines submerged heritage as All traces of human existence having a cultural, historical or archaeological character which have been partially or totally under water, periodically or continuously, for at least 100 years such as vessels, aircraft, other vehicles or any part thereof, their cargo or other contents, together with their archaeological and natural context. 435

By definition, then, the temporal statute of limitations of 100 years of submersion would, at the time of writing, allow for the legislation of protective measures for WWI-era wrecks as objects of underwater cultural heritage, but not for those occurring more recently. So, for example, neither the wrecked and sunken Sanchi nor the wrecked and partially submerged Costa Concordia (prior to its removal from the wreck site) nor even the 7800 sunken WWII vessels located in waterways around the world falls within the domain of ‘cultural heritage’ on the basis that they have not been submerged for long enough to be considered of sufficient historical or archaeological value. In an era of unspeakable urgency, the bases for this policy stipulation are not 435 UNESCO, ‘UNESCO 2001 Convention’, article 1(a); cf. Rogowska and Namieśnik, ‘Environmental Impact of WWII Shipwreck Pollution’, p. 461.

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only arbitrary but dangerous. Even UNESCO is aware of this exclusionary policy’s implications, as it has recently sponsored a set of management protocols for the thousands of WWII-era vessels in the Pacific, even though the UNESCO Convention 2001 does not formally protect these 80-year-old sunken ships and aircraft from threats of looting or other damages directed at human remains and artifacts of human origin.436 But as much as they are threatened, they are also threatening, as these vessels harbor ‘explosive remnants of war’ and vast amounts of oil and other petroleum products that spill out from the ship’s confines by way of erosion, corrosion, and severe storms, which are increasing in size and frequency as a result of global warming. There is another qualitative distinction at work in UNESCO’s definition too, as seen in the clause differentiating archaeological and natural contexts, which makes clear that UNESCO’s definition of heritage rests on a sharp distinction between the categories of nature and culture: archaeological interventions are warranted when culture’s developments and demises are the object of study, while biologists are responsible for studying nature along with its decline. There are plenty of sound reasons for challenging if not rejecting the nature/culture binary,437 but even if we were to accept these categorical distinctions between the relevant disciplines, because the measurable natural decline—in biodiversity, for example—is anthropogenic and therefore cultural ‘in nature’, does it not necessarily fall within the remit of the humanities and social sciences? As Michel Serres wrote, ‘All dualism does is reveal a ghost facing a skeleton. All real bodies shimmer like water and silk’.438 The sea as ‘corrupting’ is a common Western trope, found dating back to Biblical and Classical texts if not before, and this trope was rejuvenated in the Early Modern ‘age of discovery’ in order to legitimize the various efforts underway to conquer—and exorcize—the world’s oceans in the name of Empire and God. Yet it is not seawater that has polluted mankind; it is mankind, imagining itself having been made in the image of God (imago dei), that has poisoned the seas. How this inversion has affected archaeology is a matter of adversity to toxicity 436 The Pacific Underwater Heritage Partnership, Safeguarding Underwater Cultural Heritage in the Pacific; Dromgoole, Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, 437 See Chapter 1. Most relevant here may be Helmreich’s concise problematizing of distinctions between ocean-as-nature and ocean-as-culture (Limits of Life, pp. 94-101), or Stacy Alaimo’s water-bound implorations in Exposed: Environmental Politics & Pleasures in Posthuman Times, or Veronica Strang’s historical overview of water-human relations in Water: Nature and Culture. However, see also Timothy Morton’s powerful and influential work in Ecology without Nature and Dark Ecology, along with Bryant’s summary and response in Onto-Cartography, pp. 255-256. 438 Serres, The Five Senses, p. 25.

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and the institutional resistance toward recognizing toxicity as a legitimate, and permanent, human artifact.439 Research questions for the thousands of twentieth- and twenty-first-century shipwrecks—whose fuel seeps, whose plastics brittle and slough off, whose metals corrode, and whose batteries release a litany of ecotoxic substances—are just as worthy of investigation as are research questions surrounding the fates, routes, and final moments of ancient and historical shipwrecks. Therefore, if contemporary scientists insist upon the deontological necessity of resurrecting ships from wrecks, our efforts might concentrate on the ones in most urgent need of salvation: those whose bodies corrupt the seas with their—or rather, our—putrefaction.440 Following one of the most fundamental alchemical precepts, putrefaction must precede purification. If transmuting a base metal into gold, the lesser metal must first undergo a process of extraction, characterized by incineration, pulverization, and dispersion, at which point the decomposed parts of the original material are sorted according to degrees of refinement. The metal is ‘putrefied by separation, and is dissolved, digested, and coagulated’ before the alchemist may guide its transmutation toward a purified state.441 Not surprisingly, Early Modern poet and cleric John Donne understood the tenet of ‘putrefaction begets purification’ in theological terms, with the metallic extraction of purity from baseness correspondent to the metaphysical extraction of the soul from the body at death.442 Perhaps there is a lesson embedded here in the depths of hermeticism and theological analogy, as in the depths of corrupted seas. As much as messianic ideologies still frame scholarly endeavors, we might consider the way that the wrecked Costa Concordia was lifted from the seafloor and towed to Genoa before the steel hull was broken down into its constituents, the most valuable of which were extracted for new applications. The afterlives of this vessel, from midwater microplastic pollution to metallurgical reclamation, exemplify the stages of putrefaction to purification. However, the alchemical process of purification, with breaking and wasting as its requisite, is further defined by its exclusivity. Only the most refined, whether metals or souls, experience transmutation, while the rest do just that—rest, lying in wait for other entropic forces to break them down according to their own design. In Bangladesh, where the Ganges meets .

439 Stewart, ‘Toxic Landscapes’, p. 31; Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo, ‘Toxic Politics’, pp. 331-349. 440 Cf. Rich, Hamdan, and Hampel, ‘Naufragic Architecture’, in press. 441 Atwood, A Suggestive Inquiry in the Hermetic Mystery, p. 115, n. 21; Keller, ‘Science of Salvation’, p. 487. For more information on alchemy, the following volumes have been consulted and are recommended: Newman, Promethean Ambitions; Holmyard, Alchemy; Garcia Font, Histoire de l’Alchimie en Espagne; and the heavily illustrated volume in Dutch, van Lennep, Alchemie. 442 Keller, ‘Science of Salvation’, pp. 486-493.

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the Bay of Bengal, one-third of the world’s decommissioned ships—oil tankers, cruise liners, ferries, and trawlers—are towed to this purgatorial beach, awaiting purification through metallurgical stripping and scrapping.443 This site near Chittagong, like the millions of underwater sites of wreckage distributed globally, is visible from outer space, and yet there is a great deal of information lost in the translation from shipwreck reality to satellite imagery. As cultural geographer Mike Crang has observed, the process of transmutation is intimated by gradual changes in the satellite imagery: oncewhole ships are suddenly and unrecognizably disfigured, while imprints of keels in the sand act as ‘ghostly markings of ships past’.444 Like the long-dead stars still visible to us in the night sky, deceived by the speed of light, the satellite photographs depict ships that are no longer there, whose reusable elements have already been transmogrified into new, radiant forms. Here, we are deceived by the speed of lustration rather than merely that of luster. Chittagong’s liminal site of ‘ship-breaking’ has invited notorious socially conscious photojournalists, such as Sabastião Salgado and Edward Burtynsky, to reveal the making of contemporary ships’ afterlives. Crang characterizes these images as ‘an elegiac melancholy for lives lost and things destroyed’.445 The still photographs of low-paid laborers and broken steel behemoths littered amongst industrial wastescapes open an intimate porthole into an ignorable practice that implicates capitalism and consumerism in mutually reinforcing social and environmental injustices: ‘the charge is of toxic exotique, of the vibrant and verdant become death’.446 The images focus on the hideous complexities of putrefaction while leaving us consumers—visual and material—to ponder whether the shiny metal objects on our shopping lists might be shipwrecks reincarnated, purified through incineration, dissolution, digestion, and coagulation. Crang concludes his meditation on ‘steel, ships, and time’ with the prognostication that global change, from economy to ecocide, may require ‘less a discipline of anthropology than entropology to study it’.447 Such invocation for disciplinary mutation likewise encourages the collusion—or collision—of biologies and archaeologies because the Anthropocene is nothing if not a slapping reminder of the inseparability of nature from culture, the sheer impossibility of alchemical or theological extraction of one from the other. 443 Crang, ‘Tristes Entropique’, pp. 59-74. Crang observes that 80% of all the steel used to manufacture new objects in Bangladesh comes from these ships (p. 62). 444 Crang, ‘Tristes Entropique’, p. 64, Fig. 4.2. 445 Crang, ‘Tristes Entropique’, p. 71. 446 Crang, ‘Tristes Entropique’, p. 71; cf. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life. 447 Crang, ‘Tristes Entropique’, p. 71.

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If nothing else, the contested name of this new geological epoch recalls that tyrannical, anti-heroic ‘man, made in the image of a vanished god’ who ascends in power above the rest of the earthlings, only to yet again plummet in detumescence, fooled into superiority by a myth that he wrote about himself.448 We earthlings are kin, and we are all in this thing together, but the responsibility for it rests on our kind of studious primate alone. For centuries in the West, we have used our opposable thumbs and capacity for symbolic thought to draw ladders, scala naturae, and Edenic trees of life that mapped out our relations to the rest of the earthlings, always placed at the bottom closer to primeval chaos, while we, in imago dei, drew ourselves into the pinnacle like sky gods.449 The unforgivably conceited notion that humans and our byproducts are somehow distinct from the rest of earthly existence ‘drips with blood and dirt, from its sixteenth-century origins to capitalism in its twilight’.450 As artist Pam Longobardi put it simply, ‘the ocean is in our blood, and the ocean’s blood is on our hands’.451 Painted in that sanguine shade, our Enlightened self-portrait is undoubtedly flawed, but like other heresies, this too is a mere matter of orthodoxy. And just as orthodoxy is dependent upon the consensus of councils and subject to new revelations, science prides itself upon provisional epistemologies, open to new heuristics and adaptive to new logics. I am reminded of Audre Lorde’s 1984 essay, where she writes that patriarchy cannot be destroyed by the same tools used to construct it: ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’.452 To deconstruct the hierarchies built with exclusivity, exploitation, and tolerance, we must instead use the tools of interdependency, community, and respect. Emancipation from the master’s house can only be achieved through the knowledge that our strengths are in our differences and that those differences compose our sameness. A similar logic, in response to the patriarchal crisis of ecocide, is expressed with religious philosopher Mark Taylor’s cartographic metaphor: that the old maps are useless in the spacetime of this new epoch.453 In other words, to navigate the perils of now, we need a new legend composed of vocabulary that is no longer reliant on such words as ‘natural’, ‘social’, 448 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 47. 449 Hejnol, ‘Ladders, Trees, Complexity’, pp. G87-G102. On the hesitant use of ‘we’, see Neimanis, Bodies of Water, pp. 12-15, 27-28. 450 Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p. 4. Also relevant here is Bryant’s discussion of culpability in Onto-Cartography, pp. 90-93. 451 Longobardi, ‘Plastic as Shadow’, p. 184. 452 Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools’, pp. 110-114. 453 Taylor, After God, p. 348.

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and their divisive brethren. To keep up with the rhythms of the life- and death-wielding Anthropocene, we need new schemata that cross the sciences and humanities, if not also the sciences and faith traditions.454 Therefore, rather than cordoning off the undead zones of contemporary and modern shipwreck sites from archaeological inquiry, we must overcome the imposed distinctions between nature and culture by asking ourselves how we can ‘best use our research to stem the tide of ruination’.455 While we precisely image and accurately imagine historic shipwrecks as underwater confluences of animate and inanimate—or tranquil—coexistences of death and life, all too often, modern and contemporary shipwreck sites are ghost habitats rather than bustling heterotopias. Responsible inheritors of the ideological severing between nature and culture must recognize that the ‘ecological ghosts of oceans past already swim in emptied seas’.456 Heirs of the severing must reject this ideology in order to connect with our uncanny kin while we still can. While Earth’s oceans are often conceived of as infinite—even in the passage by Foucault above—they are not infinite, as those living inside them, hunted and polluted to extinction, are well aware. Instead of ‘the infinity of the sea’, it is only the ‘pain of water [that] is infinite’.457 Ultimately, I agree with anthropologist Nils Bubandt that we are presented with a choice here and now, a choice that might be summarized as one between the necropolitics of orthodoxy and something akin to spectrality: The question is what kind of politics to choose: the ghostly necropolitics of the current moment or a politics informed by other kinds of spirits. It seems to me that the spectrality of the Anthropocene is full of ghosts of many kinds. There are the old ghosts of carbon-based industry, the specters of corrupt politics, and the God-tricks of conventional science, to be sure. … Anthropocene landscapes of death and extinction are, however, also inhabited by emergent and unexpected constellations of life, nonlife, and 454 Cf. Rich, Hamdan, Hampel, ‘Naufragic Architecture’, in press; Bianchi et al., ‘Ideas and Perspectives’, pp. 3005-3013; Keller, Political Theology of the Earth, p. 10; Gan, Tsing, Swanson, and Bubant ‘Introduction: Haunted Landscapes’, p. G12; Taylor, After God, pp. 348-355; Descola, Ecology of Others, pp. 86-88; and the refreshing and insightful collection of research compiled in Keller and Rubenstein, eds., Entangled Worlds. On the shared adaptive capacities of science and religion, see Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, pp. 182-184. 455 Gan, Tsing, Swanson, and Bubant ‘Introduction: Haunted Landscapes’, p. G1. 456 Hull, Darroch, and Erwin, ‘Rarity in Mass Extinctions’, p. 349; also referenced in Morton, Humankind, pp. 75-76. The term ‘severing’ is also borrowed from this work, as defined in pp. 13-18 and used throughout. The word ‘severing’ in regards to the ideological separation of humans from nature is also used in Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, p. 11; see also Chapter 1 of this book, ‘Legacy’. 457 Bachelard, Water and Dreams, p. 6.

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afterlife. […] For both indigenous spirits and the spirits of the new geological idea of the Anthropocene ask us to notice the magic of the forces, human and non-human, that shape the atmosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere. … But they offer a dissenting voice [as well], and here is the basis for a common front between indigenous spirits and the emergent sciences of the Anthropocene, one that grows from a shared recognition of the magic of being-with.458

Ditching the neoliberal orthodox-in-earth-tones model of ‘sustainability’, to choose spectrality is both an opportunity and a responsibility for radical changes to the way empowered humans regard and respect, embrace and enfold fellow earthlings. With these invocative ‘intervocations’ in mind, becoming aware of shipwreck hauntologies as chimerically ongoing and perseveringly undead entails a kind of holistic comprehension that transcends the traditional archaeological refrain of ‘broken ship, dead ship’. And by extension, it also entails a method of intervention that deviates from the typical quasi-theological routine of resurrection by the esteemed savior-scholar. This other kind of awareness would necessitate the widespread, public recognition that there can be—and should be—a much deeper relationship between humans and our wreckage than merely that of salvor : salvage. However, as consumers of visual culture and so much more, we should equally be leery of relationships with wreckage that derive from the spectator : spectacle paradigm. Shipwreck hauntologies are mutable, not monolithic, and as will be explicated in the following and final chapter, to encourage singular, voyeuristic encounters with resurrected shipwrecks, actually or virtually removed from their watery environments, only serves to dislocate them from the reality that is theirs and ours. As an act of resistance to the increasing omniscience and extended omnipotence of remote sensing and hi-res digital tracking, the following chapter echoes and responds to Haraway’s call to my beloved cephalopod allies, many of whose refuges are the vanishing critter-holes of shipwrecks around the world, to ‘squirt inky night into the visualizing apparatuses of the technoid sky gods’.459 Nothing comes into appearing that has not dwelt originally in the natural element. That has not first taken root in an environment that nourished it undisturbed by any gaze. Shielded from the unveiling of any fixed form.460

458 Bubandt, ‘Haunted Geologies’, pp. G136-G137. 459 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 186, n. 87. 460 Irigaray, Marine Lover, pp. 56-57.

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Hauntographs 7-11: Magdalena 1-5. The collection of five reliquaries shown here was conceived in response to excavations of the wrecked frigate Santa María Magdalena in Northern Spain. The site is well known throughout the region as a cemetery for the 500 sailors who went down with the ship in service to God and Castile, in a storm off the coast of the Spanish port of Viveiro in 1810. Of course, it is also an eight-meter-deep cemetery for the countless extra-human others who were on board and whose bodies, whether originally animate or inanimate, have also contributed to the shipwreck assemblage. Despite the innumerable deaths by drowning, or perhaps because of it, this cemetery is also a sanctuary, a vibrant place teeming with dolphins, turtles, eels, octopi, and countless other plankton and nekton. Unlike most other reliquaries, this series commemorates neither life nor death exactly. The relics are exuviae, or parts shed from an original body in order to allow growth of a new whole, thus outliving the first body.461 These reliquaries celebrate the alchemical transmutation, or phantasmagoric transience, of shifting from one mode of existence into another. Magdalena 1 (p. 178, top): wrought-iron cross with bones and shells threaded by gold wire (Sara Rich, 2019); Magdalena 2 (p. 178, bottom): glass and metal octagonal fixture containing bones and shard of beach glass sewn with gold thread onto blue velvet platform (Sara Rich, 2018); Magdalena 3 (p. 179, top): lace and metal frame containing bone, wooden domino, and silver St. Christopher pendant (Sara Rich, 2018); Magdalena 4 (p.  179, bottom): brass receptacle, bones, and rosary suspended between glass top and mirror platform by acrylic rods (Sara Rich, 2018); Magdalena 5 (this page): brass lantern, rosary, and shell, with bones and glazed pottery sherd embedded in sand (Sara Rich, 2018).

461 Gell, Art and Agency, pp. 108, 142.

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–––. ‘“Hay Árboles en esta Ciudad”: Maritime Metaphor and Irony in the Letter of Eugenio de Salazar (1573)’. N.d., https://forseadiscovery.wordpress.com/desalazar/. Last accessed 25 August 2019. –––. ‘On Moats and Reservoirs’. PLATFORM. 19 April 2021, https://www.platformspace.net/home/on-moats-and-reservoirs. Last accessed 24 May 2021. Rich, Sara A., Leila Hamdan, and Justyna Hampel. ‘Naufragic Architecture in the Anthropocene’. In Contemporary Philosophy for Maritime Archaeology: Flat Ontologies, Oceanic Thought, and the Anthropocene, edited by Sara A. Rich and Peter B. Campbell, in press. Leiden: Sidestone Press. Rich, Sara A., Nigel Nayling, Garry Momber, and Ana Crespo Solana. Shipwrecks and Provenance: In Situ Timber Sampling Protocols, with a Focus on Wrecks of the Iberian Shipbuilding Tradition. Oxford: Access Archaeology, 2018. Roberts, Callum. The Unnatural History of the Sea. Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2007. Rogowska, Justyna, and Jacek Namieśnik. ‘Environmental Risk Assessment of WWII Shipwreck Pollution’. In Wastewater Reuse and Management, edited by Sanjay K. Sharma and Rashmi Sanghi, 461-478. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. Schlesinger, Allen B. Explaining Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995. Serres, Michel. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. Translated by Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Shelton, Anthony Alan. ‘Cabinets of Transgression: Renaissance Collections and the Incorporation of the New World’. In The Cultures of Collecting, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, 177-203. London: Reaktion, 1994. Simon. Doctrine de Saint-Simon, Vol. 2. Paris: Aux Bureaux de l’Organisateur, 1830. Simon, Jean-Christophe, Julian R. Marchesi, Mistophe Mougel, and Marc-André Selosse. ‘Host-Microbiota Interactions: From Holobiont Theory to Analysis’. Microbiome 7.5. 11 January 2019, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40168-019-0619-4. Last accessed 21 February 2021. Spielrein, Sabina. ‘Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being.’ Journal of Analytical Psychology 39 (1994): 155-186. Stewart, Haedon. ‘Toxic Landscapes: Excavating a Polluted World’. Archaeological Review from Cambridge (Special issue: On the Edge of the Anthropocene?) 32.2 (2017): 25-37. Strang, Veronica. Water: Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion Books, 2015. Taylor, Mark C. After God. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015. UNESCO. ‘Wrecks’. N.d., http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/ underwater-cultural-heritage/underwater-cultural-heritage/wrecks/. Last accessed 30 August 2019.

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UNESCO. ‘The UNESCO 2001 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage and Its Context’. N.d., http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/ themes/underwater-cultural-heritage/underwater-cultural-heritage/definitionof-underwater-cultural-heritage/. Last accessed 26 October 2019. Van De Noort, Robert. North Sea Archaeologies: A Maritime Biography, 10,000 BC – AD 1500. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Van Lennep, Jacques. Alchemie: Bijdrage tot de Geschiedenis van de Alchemistische Kunst. Brussels: Gemeentekrediet, 1984. Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press, 1967 [1925]. Wing, John T. Roots of Empire: Forests and State Power in Early Modern Spain, c. 1500-1750. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Yin, Liping, Min Zhang, Yuanling Zhang, and Fangli Qiao. ‘The Long-Term Prediction of the Oil-Contaminated Water from the Sanchi Collision in the East China Sea’. Acta Oceanologica Sinica 37.3 (2018): 69-72.

5.

Macabre Simulacra Abstract The maritime legacy is the human legacy; it is colonization, war, globalization, climate change, and it is coping with all these things. Yet the void between humans and their watery world remains. Attempting to fill this void, the savior-scholar model has shifted from physical to virtual resurrection. 3D digital shipwreck reconstructions have become the default mechanism for scientists to engage the public with maritime heritage, marketing VR tours with claims to ‘bring history alive’. This chapter first examines the spectator : spectacle paradigm as a byproduct of the savior-scholar model. Recounting the Bayonnaise, wrecked in 1803 off the coast of Finisterre, Spain, it then offers the lasting experience of wonder as substitute for the fleeting commodity of virtual shipwreck exploration. Keywords: Bachelard; Baudrillard; simulacrum; virtual reality; photogrammetry; Bayonnaise shipwreck

When you gave precedence to interpretation over the movement of life, didn’t you thereby choose this fate? … Was there a potential interlocutor for such a thought? Or only a spectator? Or a spectatrix? […] To locate herself outside two histories: yours, hers, and the relations between them. In order to admire and reproduce the realization, successfully executed in its final designs, of your becoming. As she cast off all the veils in which she was hidden and imprisoned, she had yet to sustain that destiny which forever set you apart from her, maintaining the (male) one and the other at a definitive distance.462

Often located deep underwater, shipwrecks are esoteric. Their spectators, if they have any of the human kind, are the exclusive few possessing both the training and will to meet them in their own environment, which is 462 Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 71.

Rich, S.A., Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins & the Uncanny. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463727709_ch05

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fundamentally inhospitable to human presence. Even so, the internet is increasingly flooded with 3D digital reconstructions of shipwreck sites so that nearly anyone and everyone might participate in a ‘dry dive’.463 Photogrammetric models and VR experiences are labeled as democratizing, as they increase public awareness of and access to these sites/sights; they are even said to ‘bring history alive’.464 As explained in the previous chapters, though, most shipwreck sites are also graveyards, so when digital-exploration advocates claim to resurrect this history, what exactly is being promised and why? And while many virtual explorers seem satisfied with the prospect of immediate visual gratification, what might be lost by turning underwater graveyards into rapidly consumable commodities? Building on previous chapters’ arguments of a scientific practice against utopian manifest destiny and in favor of finitude, this final chapter presents virtual shipwreck exploration as, on the one hand, a byproduct of the Western obsession with immortality and, on the other, an expression of capitalist desire via unfettered voyeurism.465 Responsible scientific practice involves sharing results with the public, who often indirectly subsidizes research through tax-funded government agencies. Arguably, scientists also have a moral obligation to propagate knowledge and instill a love of learning while helping to induce and maintain senses of awe, wonder, and enchantment with our planet. 466 Yet within archaeology, and nautical archaeology in particular, there seems to be little discussion on what it is that public engagement is supposed to achieve, outside the commonly chanted call to ‘raise awareness’ or ‘promote the appreciation’ of underwater cultural heritage. 467 UNESCO’s claim that 463 E.g., BOEM, ‘Virtual Archaeology Museum’, and the current list of Sketchfab models, last accessed on 26 June 2020, at https://sketchfab.com/search?q=shipwreck&sort_ by=-pertinence&type=models. 464 A Google search using the term ‘VR “brings history alive”’ produced 14,800 results on 24 June 2020, nearly doubling the 7,840 results produced on 7 July 2019. 465 Thanks to those in attendance at the annual meeting of the North American Theoretical Archaeology Group in Syracuse in May 2019 and at the Rocky Mountain Division of the American Society for Aesthetics in Santa Fe in July 2019 for thoughtful comments and questions that probed further considerations into this chapter’s critique. Special thanks are extended to my students at Coastal Carolina University in Honors 201/202/203 (Colonialism) in the spring, summer, and fall 2019 semesters, who read drafts of this chapter and provided invaluable responses, either verbally, visually, or both. 466 Cf., Witmore, ‘Archaeology and the New Materialisms’, pp. 203-223; Greyson, Vital Reenchantments. 467 Maarleveld, Guérin, and Egger, eds., Manual for Activities directed at Underwater Cultural Heritage, pp. 49-56. See support for public cyber-archaeology projects in Forte, ‘Cyber-Archaeology’, pp. 7-18; Forte and Kurillo, ‘Cyber-Archaeology and Metaverse Collaborative Systems’, pp. 7-19.

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‘education leads to awareness, and awareness leads to protection’468 seems to bypass some of the greatest potentials of education, ironically in favor of positioning the scientist again as savior, a kind of Salvator Patrimoni. In his essay ‘The Aims of Education’, Alfred North Whitehead emphasizes that education is not to be confused with simply being informed or aware, but it is rather the ability to utilize knowledge actively into duty and reverence. The essay opens with the line, ‘Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling’.469 If maritime archaeologists were to abandon UNESCO’s awareness paradigm in favor of a mindset of education as empowerment, we might find ourselves in a better position to facilitate publicly charged changes to the status quo, fostering that receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling that Whitehead advocated. We might work to prime audiences for an emotional connection with the real tragedy of shipwreck or instill a dual sense of respect and responsibility for the extra-human (or no-longer-human) Other, or simply help re-establish a sense of intellectual curiosity in the public sphere. But to achieve any of this, intimacy must first be restored to the objects under study, if not also between scientist and citizen. In a departure from our screen dependencies, this chapter argues that a return to the artful and analog may produce more meaningful, intimate encounters between the esoteric and public domains.

Exploration (Melckmeyt) Humans have a fundamental need to explore. We are a species always on the move. Our intelligence generates overwhelming curiosity that stimulates close assessments of our surroundings and leads us into unfamiliar territories. This need has been encoded into our DNA over the course of millions of years; indeed, much of our entire evolution was shaped by a class of explorers whose status as knowledge producers aided in establishing social structure and cohesion, along with maintaining the security of the group, its mobility, and its survival into the future. 470 For humans, knowledge has always been power, and such a deeply ingrained need for exploration has now seen our species populate all land surfaces of our planet, and imminently, beyond it. 468 Maarleveld, Guérin, and Egger, eds., Manual for Activities directed at Underwater Cultural Heritage, p. 309. 469 Whitehead, ‘Aims of Education’, p. 1. 470 Gamble, Timewalkers, pp. 110-111.

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The desire to explore the oceans at and below their surface has been with us for at least 60,000 years beginning when humans set out across Pacific waters, eventually colonizing Australia. But inter-oceanic travel only became commonplace in the Early Modern period, when New World colonizers set forth from ports in the Mediterranean and North Seas, crossed the Atlantic, penetrated the Arctic, and eventually succeeded in reaching the Pacific and Indian Oceans. War was at the heart of these voyages, and similarly, the first concerted underwater explorations descended from the subaqueous missions of the frogmen of World War II, veterans of which helped develop Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA) for recreational, commercial, and scientific diving.471 Underwater archaeological tourism offers contemporary subaqueous explorers the opportunity to descend, physically and psychologically, into ‘the other world of the sea, of history and the past’.472 In sharp contrast, contemporary virtual explorations do not require mobility at all, and voyaging underwater to view immense spaces and submerged structures can be achieved while remaining perfectly dry.473 Digital reconstructions miniaturize the object of exploration and transmit it via the mysteries of the internet so that entire structures and vast disembodied spacetimes can be entered into via a portal, the ‘square horizon’ of a glass screen as small as the palm of a human hand. In his critical evaluation of the digital reduction of earthly space and time, philosopher Paul Virilio wonders if Today, when we are all so worried about the ecological balance of a human environment seriously threatened by industrial waste, would it not be appropriate to add to the concerns of green ecology those of a grey ecology that would focus on the postindustrial degradation of the depth of field of the terrestrial landscape?474

He identifies this degradation of depth of field as a kind of pollution—a ‘dromospheric pollution’—but also as a new kind of empire: a territorial expansion, where the hegemonic influence of technological culture

471 See also section below, Exploitation. These points are explained further in, e.g., Cousteau, Silent World; Walden and Gleeson, Frogmen. 472 Melotti, Plastic Venuses, pp. 175-176. 473 Melotti, Plastic Venuses, pp. 52-56. 474 Virilio, Open Sky, p. 41 (original emphases); cf. pp. 58-68. The screen as a ‘square horizon’ is borrowed from pp. 26, 41.

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effectively takes over the planet and which, paradoxically, results in the ‘telluric contraction’ of that same world.475 Anthropogenic miniaturization has been a concern among philosophers even before the pervasion of digital screens. In his highly influential 1934 essay, Walter Benjamin laments the loss of art’s aura with the onset of mechanical image reproduction technologies, such as photography and cinema.476 An object’s aura is a phenomenon of distance, which is undermined by the false sense of intimacy made possible through mass production and easy ownership of replicas and prints. The aura, derived from the authority and autonomy of the original, is diminished through replication and miniaturization. Decades later, Susan Stewart observed that the process of miniaturization ‘assumes an anthropocentric universe for its absolute sense of scale’ because ‘[t]here are no miniatures in nature; the miniature is a cultural product, the product of an eye performing certain operations, manipulating, and attending in certain ways to, the physical world’.477 Though we may disagree on the basis for a distinction between natural and cultural products, Stewart articulates an important claim that the deliberate reduction of an object’s scale is necessarily manipulative to the point of exercising patriarchal, godlike powers of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence over the miniaturized. In noting that gigantism is associated with masculinity, while miniaturization corresponds with the feminine, the patriarchal aspect of control over the miniaturized becomes more threatening.478 Sharing similar concerns in his adjacent discussions of miniatures and immensity, Gaston Bachelard further discusses miniaturization as manipulation in relation to phenomena of distance and proximity: ‘In distant miniatures, disparate things become reconciled. They then offer themselves for our “possession”, while denying the distance that created them. We possess from afar, and how peacefully!’479 Explorers of digital shipwreck models peacefully enter pixilated sites; they spin and zoom entire wrecks and a section of the seafloor upon which they rest; and they possess this sight immediately with little consideration of the lengths gone to make the model, effectively ‘denying the distance’ along with the presence 475 Virilio, Open Sky, pp. 32-33. See also applications of Virilio’s ‘dromology’ to shipwrecks in Chapter 2. 476 Benjamin, ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, pp. 217-251; see also: Gell, Art and Agency, pp. 99-101; Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, pp. 24-25; Korsmeyer, Things, pp. 12-20. 477 Stewart, On Longing, pp. 55-56. 478 Stewart, On Longing, pp. 111-117. 479 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 190.

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at the actual site of life and death coexisting throughout this space. Virtual explorers become ‘phenomenologists of images’ who should ‘take note of the extreme simplicity of these reflections which so successfully separate the daydreamer from the restless world, and give him an impression of domination at little cost’; therefore, the virtual explorer becomes a ‘philosopher of domination’ possessing, through the simplistic imagery of immensity in miniature, ‘proof of his own greatness’.480 This criticism may seem extreme: how could a popular and by all accounts benign if not beneficial activity be characterized as one reflecting a dangerous and hubristic desire for domination over the object being explored? Much of my critique is an expansion of Bachelard’s concerns regarding simplistic images that seek to represent complex phenomena and the sort of ‘relaxed participation in images of immensity’ that characterizes virtual exploration.481 While these critiques may be applied to all forms of virtual exploration, they are especially applicable to the distanced exploration of underwater shipwreck sites because, while allowing for immediate gratification through ‘immediate proximity’,482 such relaxed participation is not capable of leading the shipwreck spectator toward ‘the presence of immediate immensity, [the] immediate immensity of its depth’.483 Writing in the 1950s, Bachelard could not possibly have had in mind the unique desire for immediacy that motivates the human consumption of virtual space.484 Even so, I echo his call ‘to liquidate, as it were, the spectacle complex, which could harden certain values of poetic contemplation’.485 Expanding upon Baudelaire’s metaphysical use of the word ‘vast’, Bachelard weaves a route toward the entanglement of grandeur, on the one hand, and intimacy, on the other: ‘grandeur does not come from the spectacle witnessed, but from the unfathomable depths of vast thoughts. … The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold’.486 Recalling related concepts of the sublime, in any genuine pursuit of grandeur, or immediate immensity, intimacy must first be restored. And although virtual ‘immersion’ may brand itself as an intimate encounter, it is not even the equivalent of the efforts of painters such as Turner (1775-1851) and Géricault (1791-1824) who invited viewers into the spectacular sublimity of shipwreck in order to provoke some philosophical 480 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 190. 481 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 208. 482 Virilio, Open Sky, pp. 35, 49-57. 483 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 204, original emphasis. 484 Cf., Woodward, ‘Consumption as Cultural Interpretation’, pp. 671-697. 485 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 208. 486 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 209.

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or political discourse.487 By contrast, the provocation of VR shipwreck tours is one of personal consumption, as seen with the example of the ‘experience’ of the Dutch fluyt Melckmeyt, wrecked off the coast of Iceland in 1659. The ‘virtual dive’ offers users an alternate, individually experienced reality: ‘By donning a Virtual Reality headset, members of the public can now experience what a diver sees without getting their feet wet. Visitors can also see how the shipwreck might have looked just after it sank 360 years ago’.488 Beyond even the substantial concerns over the confusion of time and space or fact and fiction, perhaps the most dangerous of pretenses to virtual intimacy is the idea that ‘exploration’ can be achieved alone and without movement. In effect, this kind of ‘exploration’ tends to achieve the opposite of the sublime: namely, solipsism, and with it a certain denial of the confines of one’s body—and, indeed, one’s life.

Exploitation (Thistlegorm) As students in my courses on colonialism have learned, exploration and exploitation are two sides of the same coin: they are, like Charon’s obol, instigators of irreversible change, a one-way transition from a pre-existing state to an indelible alteration thereof, resulting in augmentations that often render the past unrecognizable from the conditions of the present. From sea to shining sea, the development of SCUBA revealed a new era in exploration that opened up the water column to sport divers, commercial operations, and scientists. In its inception, the aqualung, co-invented by World War II veteran Jacques-Yves Cousteau, was a harbinger for a new wave of colonization: not over-seas but beneath them. Remembered in popular imagination as an adventurer and marine conservation enthusiast, Cousteau produced films such as Épaves (‘Sunken Ships’, 1946) and Le Monde du Silence (‘The Silent World’, 1956), which were the first to popularize the underwater realm, thereby rendering the invisible visible through the means of Enlightened reason and its resultant technology. 489 At the same time as wrecked ships are pragmatically sought on the seafloor in order to salvage their raw materials, discoveries of wreck sites are laden with suspense as 487 Riding, ‘Shipwreck in French and British Visual Art, 1700-1842’, pp. 113-130. 488 From the description of the YouTube video for the virtual dive of the Melckmeyt, posted 15 October 2019, https://youtu.be/hovKu1bi7kA; last accessed 21 February 2021. See also Katz, ‘Take a Virtual Tour of a 17th-Century Shipwreck’. On the commodification of experience itself, see Silberman, ‘Public Archaeological Interpretation’, pp. 184-186. 489 Cohen, ‘Shipwreck as Undersea Gothic’, p. 158.

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the discoverers are awakened to a latent, ancient presence of menace and haunting. Cousteau’s use of Gothic narrative conventions is apparent in the scenes of diving in the Red Sea on the SS Thistlegorm, wrecked by German bombers in 1941, where viewers are transported ‘from a present ruled by reason to a tortured, haunted past’. 490 Divers are presented as courageous explorers who expose themselves to all manners of horror for the sake of the accumulation of knowledge, because the only way to control the horror is to know it. Yet Cousteau’s underwater advocacy and his exaltation of technologies of access far surpassed that of mere exploration. He also advocated a new race of subaquatic humans, Homo aquaticus, who would live fully submersed and harvest all the resources of the underwater realm: More an avatar of conquest than of conservation, however, Homo aquaticus was conceived of at a time when Western industrial nations increasingly turned to the ocean, the ‘inner space’ covering more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface, to solve the problems posed by the terrestrial limits to growth. They viewed the ocean as a potentially endless treasure trove of food and fuel and even as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. 491

Presaging Elon Musk’s ambitions for outer space, Cousteau’s utopian conquest of Earth’s ‘inner space’ was an ongoing expression of extreme anthropocentrism and the capitalist desire for ownership over an entire realm where humans are biologically unfit for habitation.492 That post-war wave of desire for oceanic domination has, of course, resulted in decades of economic exploitation and resulting ecocide, whose onset paradoxically coincides with the public access to oceans that Cousteau’s inventions and filmography made possible. As far as the underwater world is concerned, public awareness has certainly not resulted in the widespread protection that UNESCO guidance would suggest. Instead, the sudden visual accessibility and exploitation of our planet’s waters may help validate Bachelard’s concerns about miniaturizing imagery and its consumption as an expression of dominion. Yet Cousteau’s invitation to harvest the sea was hardly an open one. His vision of an underwater utopia populated by evolutionarily advanced 490 Cohen, ‘Shipwreck as Undersea Gothic’, p. 160. 491 Crylen, ‘Living in a World without Sun’, p. 2. See also Chapter 4 of this book on the underwater dead zones created by post-industrial shipwreck sites. 492 See related discussions of the underwater world as ‘dystopian’ in Chapter 3 of this book.

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aquanauts was exclusionary, limited to economically and socially elite white men whose proto-posthuman cyborgian anatomy would permit a type of white flight, an ‘escape from otherness’ that might inhabit ‘the fluid space of the sea more dexterously than could other bodies and thus convert it from a space of difference to one of continuity with the industrialized West’.493 Not surprisingly, this vision has been partially at least realized in the ocean sciences whose practitioners are almost exclusively affluent white men.494 Nautical archaeology is no different, having been ‘pioneered’ in the 1960s as a subfield of archaeology by a host of white American and European men and a handful of white, upper-class European women.495 While impossible to divorce the vision of the visionary from the scientific legacy he left, we must also acknowledge that the bodily composition of this branch of the academy has undoubtedly shaped the way in which the science is practiced. As has been established in the preceding chapters, the general attitude toward the study of shipwrecks has been marked by the contradictory colonial desire to rescue from otherness and to commodify that same otherness, which corresponds to the unsettling nature of Cousteau’s dichotomous conservationist and colonialist agendas. That being said, part of the commodification mission of nautical archaeology has been imposed upon the field by external funding bodies; however, its response to this imposition is all the more indicative of its neoliberal underbelly. Nautical archaeology requires capital, considerably more so than terrestrial excavations. There are support vessels to be rented, salaries for boat crews to be paid, desalination and conservation to be arranged, food and housing for archaeological crew members to be secured near the coast for the duration of the field season, air cylinders and oxygen tanks to be filled, diving and underwater imaging equipment to be rented or purchased, and terrestrial and marine vehicles making daily trips from the base camp to the underwater site to be fed petrol. Because archaeology underwater is so resource-intensive, publicly funded projects often promise a significant outreach, education, and dissemination component in the project proposal in order to ensure funding committees that a proportionate amount of the research will be redistributed back into the public sphere. Because of the physical inaccessibility of underwater sites, outreach and education aims 493 Crylen, ‘Living in a World without Sun’, p. 22. See also Hawthorne, ‘Cyborgs’, pp. 213-249. 494 Crylen, ‘Living in a World without Sun’, p. 3, fn. 8; Hawthorne, ‘Cyborgs’, p. 235. 495 Ransley, ‘Boats Are for Boys’, pp. 621-629. Some of these ‘pioneers’ include George Bass, Peter Throckmorton, Frederic Dumas, Robert Ballard, Honor Frost, Joan du Plat Taylor, and Margaret Rule.

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are often achieved by establishing an online presence—blogs, social media, streamed and uploaded video footage, and increasingly 3D reconstructions with VR options on platforms like Sketchfab—so that boxes are ticked and funding bodies are appeased, resting assured that the taxpayer support of scientific research will come full circle in a more immediate fashion. But in a kind of systemic exploitation that capitalizes on the perceived public demand for immediately consumable heritage byproducts, the promise of immediate public gratification is often just as perfunctory as the box that it ticks.496 Rarely do archaeologists, especially those working underwater, actually engage the public in any meaningful way.497 Instead, the cursory online presences merely simulate genuine scientific interest in public engagement. At the time of writing, little to no research has been conducted on the quality of engagement with the public that any online presence achieves, let alone the whirling, dragging, and zooming of 3D shipwreck models.498 It might be assumed, however, that ‘reconstructions and simulations of the past, because of their artistic value, are more likely to be admired than to serve as an engaging and reliable source of information’.499 A scan through the currently available shipwreck models on Sketchfab supports this assertion that most offers for virtual exploration are, at best, gimmicky attempts at ‘edutainment’. The default use of the virtual to claim rights to public funding starts to feel a little like disaster capitalism, where scientists, instead of corporations, profit from the same disasters that they objectify.500 496 See the discussion of archaeological tourism and consumerism, and especially the increase in VR experiences in response to market pressures for expediency at the expense of intellectualism in Melotti, Plastic Venuses, pp. 57-58. 497 While I’m certain that many others exist, one highly notable exception to this tendency is the Maritime Archaeology Trust based in Southampton, UK, which makes earnest efforts to engage the public in both novel and meaningful ways. Spending a two-year post-doctoral appointment with this charitable research organization was in large part what inspired this chapter; for example, see Rich, Watts, and Momber, ‘Mesolithic Woodworking’, pp. 3-12. Also refer to the MAT website (www.maritimearchaeologytrust.org) for more information on current and previous fieldwork, research projects, and community actions. 498 The issue is noted also by advocates of digital technologies in heritage education: e.g., Copplestone and Dunne, ‘Digital Media’; McKinney et al., ‘Developing Digital Archaeology’, pp. 179-195. Indeed, little research has been conducted on the long-term effects of VR on the public at all: cf. Nash, ‘Virtual Reality Witness’, pp. 119-131. On the scientif ic uses of digital reconstructions, however, see, e.g., Howland, ‘3D Recording in the Field’, pp. 19-34; Haydar et al., ‘Virtual and Augmented Reality’, pp. 311-327. 499 Stobiecka, ‘Digital Escapism’, p. 206; cf., Melotti, Plastic Venuses, pp. 53-56. 500 For more on the economic interests embedded in the ‘gold rush’ of the digital humanities, see Fiormonte, ‘Critique of the Digital Humanities’, pp. 59-76. Other critiques can be found in

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At the same time, granting public access to sights of catastrophe on the seafloor by way of a mouse click or the tap of a fingertip only serves to perpetuate the condition of armchair archaeology and runs the risk of cheapening not only what teams of archaeologists do but also the peculiar gravitas of shipwreck sites. Not surprisingly, one can now take a ‘virtual dive’ on the wreck of the SS Thistlegorm discovered by Cousteau, but in this new era of ‘exploration’, even Cousteau’s Gothic angle that recalled the past destruction and horrific loss of life is narrowed down to one of the mere consumption of attractions.501 Rendering the past as ‘resource’, the heritage fetish commodifies these tragic relics so that there is a kind of exploitation at work in the viewer experience as well. Again, this recalls what Bachelard states regarding space and images: that the spectator who possesses the miniature is a ‘philosopher of domination’. To possess so easily must surely be a conquest. As a consumer of this archaeological byproduct, the virtual conquistador is entitled to ‘dive into an artistic spectacle of pleasure’ that passes for ‘the depths of the past’.502 But in reality, as Jean Baudrillard has stated, the cybernetic consumer’s aim is total control.503

Eschatology (Batavia) The era of simulation is marked by an ambivalent treatment of death. On one hand, the digital model precludes the event of death by ‘deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes’.504 Of all the truths that are liquidated with the coming Liu, ‘State of the Digital Humanities’, pp. 8-41. In response to these and other critiques, see Berry and Fagerjord, Digital Humanities, pp. 136-150. 501 Silberman, ‘Public Archaeological Interpretation’, pp. 184-186. See the project website, last accessed on 24 November 2020, at https://thethistlegormproject.com/360-underwater-video/. 502 Stobiecka, ‘Digital Escapism’, p. 205. The past-as-underwater idiom, ‘plunging into history’, is also used at Herculaneum’s Virtual Archaeology Museum (MAV); see Melotti, Plastic Venuses, p. 53. 503 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 121. 504 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 2. It should be noted here that, in contrast to Baudrillard and others’ (including my own) use of ‘real’ and ‘actual’ synonymously and interchangeably, Delanda, following Deleuze and Guattari, makes an important distinction between the two words in relation to the ‘virtual’, in that the virtual is real but not actual: Delanda, Assemblage Theory, pp. 108-109; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 100. While I acknowledge that Delanda’s is a more complete way of understanding the relationships between the three terms, my tendency towards interchangeability stems in no small part from

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into existence of the digital simulation, the denial of the fact of finitude may be the most disturbing and dangerous. And yet, like the döppelganger in German myth, the existence of the electro-ergonomic clone also signifies immanent death.505 It is the shadow or phantasmagoric mirror image that haunts the real and the original, a constant yet spectral reminder that death has only been averted until now. The shipwreck virtually modeled is supposed to rest assured that its own entropic annihilation will continue while its digital double will live on uncannily unimpeded. Equally embedded in simulation’s conflicting mechanisms that simultaneously prevent and predict death is its ambivalence toward violence and pain. The ambivalence of imagery has been widely discussed, and while photography and videography come with their own sets of concerns, virtual imagery comes with an even more profound caveat because it consistently aims to blur the distinctions between the real and the imaginary, making it potentially more powerful and more dangerous as a medium.506 In her introduction to war in contemporary visual culture, Dora Apel writes of haunting images that remind us that ‘the true horror of war can never be adequately represented; it is the silencing of voices and the largely unseen nature of violence and suffering that is more often represented’.507 Likewise, archaeologist Yannis Hamilakis laments the role of violently sanitized conflict imagery in the production of cultural anesthesia, which denies the screams, the pain, the blood, the mutilated body parts along with the smells of urine, excrement, and rot that accompany warfare, whether on land or on water. He echoes Baudrillard’s concerns that in such imagery, ‘War thus becomes akin to a sensorially sanitized computer game’.508 In their pretenses of objectivity, virtual reconstructions of shipwreck cemeteries silence all voices, all suffering, except those of the spectator.509 They place the spectator—in the form of the all-seeing eye or avatar—in a central position of omnipotence over the simulated and spectacular tragedy of the having read Baudrillard long before reading Delanda and Deleuze; nevertheless, I hope that my word choice has not created a stumbling block for the reader. 505 Virilio, Open Sky, pp. 39-40; Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 95; Freud, The Uncanny, p. 142. 506 See, e.g.: Sontag, ‘Imagination of Disaster’, pp. 42-48, contra Silcox, Defense of Simulated Experience. 507 Apel, War Culture, p. 14. 508 Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Senses, p. 3; while much of Baudrillard’s Gulf War echoes these concerns, in pp. 69-70, he regards the solution to the pervasion of the virtual as total dissemination so that its prevalence may render it banal, neutralizing its perverse effects. 509 Hawthorne, ‘Cyborgs’, p. 233; regarding the theatricality of suffering and the irony of the spectator’s participation, see Chouliaraki, Ironic Spectator, pp. 27-32.

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site, where voyeuristic impulses to gaze into alien worlds of a past time and forbidden space are unimpeded by the spaces and times actually inhabited.510 And yet even though ‘everything escapes representation’, the site portrayed is not even a replica; it is a mere simulacrum, an impossible double of something that never really existed.511 The virtual shipwreck is a montage of images sewn together with software, the anthropogenic remains a fabricated dead zone devoid of the perpetual extra-human dramas that compose the shipwreck’s heterotopian, holobiontic reality.512 Baudrillard argues that such persistence of the extinction of the real is a function of postmodernity: The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution—today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede.513

In our self-defeating drive to authentically represent the past, the screen ‘can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein’.514 To explore virtually is to inhabit a metaphor,515 yet simulations of the past and simulacra of shipwrecks are often touted as ‘the only means to reconstruct matter that is now gone’, and as such, imaging technology offers ‘its potential for preserving and (re)animating the world’s heritage’.516 510 Cf., Melotti, Plastic Venuses, p. 55. This phenomenon should be understood in opposition to the limitations that the selective framing of photography—and, although perhaps to a lesser degree, videography— imposes with its linearity and often narration that transfers the authority over the imagery to an Other, who acts as guide to the self. Even so, viewers should be aware of the ethical implications of the aestheticization, in whichever medium, of tragedy and suffering; see Apel, War Culture; Chouliaraki, Ironic Spectator; and Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life, pp. 148-152. 511 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 107; for further discussion, see Silcox, Defense of Simulated Experience. On replicas in archaeology, see Korsmeyer, Things, pp. 84-91. 512 See Chapter 4 of this book. 513 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, pp. 43-44. 514 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 48. 515 Hawthorne, ‘Cyborgs’, p. 228. 516 Stobiecka, ‘Digital Escapism’, p. 206. See also McCarthy et al., ‘Rise of 3D in Maritime Archaeology’, pp. 1-10.

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Beyond the oxymoronic claims to either materialize the immaterial or immaterialize the material, it also remains worth questioning why reconstructing or reanimating the bygone, especially the violently bygone, is such a priority to begin with. The emphasis on ‘achieving’ immortality over ‘succumbing’ to destruction and decay places digital archaeology and cyber-archaeology in the position of ‘the archaeology of saving’.517 Eternal preservation and conservation at the expense of materiality certainly has a redemptive quality highly reminiscent of the savior-scholar complex now familiar to the reader. In the virtual realm, though, the spirit can finally triumph over the flesh, the otherworldly immaterial over the earth- and death-bound material.518 This aspect of the virtual as transcendent of the material has implications for the human body as much as it does for cultural heritage. Many advocates of VR claim that the ability for users to transcend the limitations of their own body is one of the medium’s greatest advantages and one that, in the case of underwater shipwreck exploration, permits access to those who would not otherwise be able to witness these sites due to the circumstances of their physicality.519 As detailed in Chapter 3, diving exacts sacrifices from the human body, and some bodies are less able to offer such compensation.520 People whose mobility is restricted or whose respiratory, cardiac, or nervous systems do not permit them to dive safely could conceivably gain an experience of something that they would not otherwise be able to have. In this way, the virtual offers another kind of utopia, where physical restraints can be left behind and participants can exist freely in an otherwise off-limits underwater realm. This scenario sounds hauntingly similar to Cousteau’s fantasy of Homo aquaticus described above, although without the socially constructed restrictions of his exclusionist vision and without the need to wait for evolutionary processes to catch up to that vision. In many respects, though, this disembodied utopia swims in the face, so to speak, of so much feminist literature that encourages us to embrace the messiness of bodies—including their unique and inherent limitations—and find power

517 Stobiecka, ‘Digital Escapism’, p. 207. The archaeology of saving, however, is nothing new, and such language has been in use at least since UNESCO’s World Heritage program that emerged after World War II; see Chapter 2 of this book and the numerous examples in Meskell, Future in Ruins. 518 Cf., Markley, ‘Metaphysics of Cyberspace’, p. 75. 519 E.g., English, ‘Why Virtual Reality?’ pp. 281-303. 520 Bookspan, Diving Physiology in Plain English.

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within them.521 Again, arguments in favor of a simulated, disembodied utopia seem symptomatic of the greater ambivalence toward aging and death that characterizes so much of modernity and its aftermath.522 To reiterate, most shipwreck sites are also graveyards, and the psychological association of physical descent with death and the past may explain the ‘success of wreck-diving to modern shipwrecks, often from wartime, … where the voyeuristic fascination with death is particularly evident’.523 Yet existing virtual exploration models either diminish this fact, as in the example of the Thistlegorm above, or incorporate ‘morbid voyeurism’ into the ‘cool factor’ of the experience.524 Consider Beacon Virtua, the virtual simulation of Beacon Island off the coast of Western Australia, which saw the aftermath of the wrecked Dutch East Indies flagship, Batavia, in 1629.525 After a mutiny and rerouting of the vessel off course, the Batavia wrecked on Morning Reef, just off Beacon Island. A total of 40 men drowned during the wreck, while 282 passengers reached Beacon or other islands of the Houtman Abrolhos. In the weeks following, one of the mutineers conceived a plan for an island utopia that would justify his massacre of nearly half the shipwreck survivors, including women and children. On the website for the Western Australian Museum, Beacon Virtua is introduced before explaining the technicalities of producing the simulation and providing instructions on how to access it: In Beacon Virtua you can explore the legacy of the VOC ship Batavia by visiting a simulation of Beacon Island. Beacon Virtua will take you on a tour of the island including its jetties, fishing shacks and several grave sites of Batavia voyagers who were buried on the island after the ship was wrecked and following the uprising. The graves have been reconstructed through a technique called photogrammetric 3D reconstruction, a process

521 E.g., Hawthorne, ‘Cyborgs’, pp. 213-239. Along similar lines, Virilio expresses concerns about contemporary sedentarism conflating ‘abled’ and ‘disabled’ bodies, so that the former aspires to abandon motricity in favor of electronically enabled inertia: Virilio, Open Sky, pp. 20-21. 522 See the detailed discussion defending the use of simulated experience in working toward political utopia in Silcox, Defense of Simulated Experience. 523 Melotti, Plastic Venuses, p. 176; see also Chapter 3 of this book. Note Julia Kristeva’s remark that the Latin word cadere, to fall, is the root of the English ‘cadaver’: Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3. 524 For ‘morbid voyeurism’ see Melotti, Plastic Venuses, p. 55. On the ‘cool factor’, see Stobieka, ‘Digital Escapism’, pp. 195, 200; and Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor, and Witmore, Archaeology, pp. 88-89. This pattern is similar to what Chouliaraki notes regarding humanitarian campaigns that either ‘avoid or aestheticize the presence of vulnerable others’ (Chouliaraki, ‘Improper Distance’, p. 372). 525 Woods et al., ‘Beacon Virtua’, pp. 197-210.

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which uses multiple photographs of an object to build an accurate and detailed 3D model of it.526

The graves of massacred individuals seem to be used here as clickbait. Appealing to the macabre to generate public interest in history is nothing unusual, but using these grave sites as mere spectacles to explore raises some questions about what exactly it is that virtual tours are resurrecting, reconstructing, reanimating, and why. While the shipwreck itself is not featured in the virtual tour, since the ship’s material remains were raised and reconstructed in the Western Australian Museum in Perth, the underwater wreck site and incidental cemetery is planned for inclusion in the virtual tour at the next upgrade.527 The virtual resurrection of such gruesome pasts approaches the conditions specified by philosopher of aesthetics Noël Carroll for art-horror. Citing fusion and fission as two such conditions, the virtual reconstruction achieves both as its software stitches together imagery of real sites into a new, sanitized fiction while at the same time splitting the site/sight into real and virtual parts, as in the doppelgänger described above.528 Based on a true story, this art-horror entices with its promise of the macabre yet leaves viewers less than satisfied because it necessarily elides the true, actual horror of the place. In Shipwreck with Spectator, philosopher Hans Blumenberg maintains that the (metaphorical) spectator of shipwreck basks not in the suffering of others but in the safety of being on dry land.529 Because this safety through distance between shipwreck and spectator is so much more magnified when the reality is virtual, even the most well-intended virtual interactions with tragedy can have unintended consequences. VR experiences are often regarded as an opportunity to increase empathy and awareness among participants, but the reality frequently falls short of the expectations and 526 For context and links, refer to the Western Australian Museum’s website: http://museum. wa.gov.au/maritime-archaeology-db/beacon-island-visualisation; last accessed 24 June 2020. Likewise, Titanic VR offers a tour of the famous deepwater shipwreck that killed over 1500 people, sensationalizing and, at USD 20 per download, directly prof iting from the tragedy: http://titanicvr.io; last accessed 24 June 2020. 527 Woods et al., ‘Beacon Virtua’, pp. 197-210. 528 Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, pp. 45-47. 529 Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator, pp. 26-27. Blumenberg refers to a passage by Lucretius where the Roman poet remarks on the pleasure experienced observing a sinking ship from the safety of the shore. Blumenberg interprets this remark not as an example of Roman Schadenfreude but as a metaphor to illuminate the experience of a philosopher who has just secured a new theory, wherein the philosopher is the spectator and the shipwreck is the hostile chaos of reality against which the spectator has managed to find some solid ground or truth.

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can even become counterproductive. Lilie Chouliaraki warns of ‘the ironic spectator’ whose sense of morality upon virtually experiencing tragedy often descends into narcissism.530 By collapsing the distance between the spectator and the Other, the experience of the self as the privileged Western subject/spectator provides the foundation for moral response rather than the situation of the objectified Other.531 Chouliaraki refers to this phenomenon as ‘improper distance’,532 and ‘VR further tends toward improper distance where it presents distant spaces and others in an aesthetic mode, inviting a contemplation of the scene as a tableau vivant or spectacle rather than a painful reality’.533 Such critique of the denial of distance once again echoes Bachelard’s concerns that intimate immensity is forsaken by immediacy, which leads in turn to a sense of domination among those experiencing the ‘spectacle complex’.534 In her critique of the portrayal of human tragedy through pity and irony, Chouliaraki positions ‘improper distance’ in contrast to Roger Silverstone’s explication of ‘proper distance’.535 He claims, not without controversy, that Web experiences too often ‘mistake connection for closeness, and closeness for commitment, and … confuse reciprocity for responsibility’.536 In order to nurture proper distance in relation to the Other, which is necessary to maintain a moral life in a ‘nomadic universe’ where the sense of place is dissembled and everyone is at once a neighbor and a stranger, we must be aware of the paradox of connection and separateness that conditions contemporary existence and the necessity of grounding one’s morality in the asymmetry of social relations. Proper distance implies that when we experience second-hand the tragedy of Others, we do not expect reciprocity in the form of empowerment or enlightenment in the form of identification with the Other. Rather than empathy, Silverstone calls simply for respect and responsibility.537 His rejection of empathy in favor of respect anticipates Paul Bloom’s recent push for rational compassion, arguing that empathy, as it is aligned with pity, can do more harm than good, assuming it can 530 Chouliaraki, Ironic Spectator. 531 Nash, ‘Virtual Reality Witness’, p. 125; Chouliaraki, Ironic Spectator, p. 4. 532 Chouliaraki, ‘Improper Distance’, pp. 363-381. 533 Nash, ‘Virtual Reality Witness’, p. 125. 534 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 208. See also the ecocritical lamentations in McMurry, ‘Media Moralia’, pp. 487-501. 535 Chouliaraki, ‘Improper Distance’; Silverstone, ‘Proper Distance’, pp. 469-491. 536 Silverstone, ‘Proper Distance’, p. 476. Silverstone leans heavily on Levinas’s discussions of proximity and the face; see Levinas, Otherwise than Being and Totality and Infinity. 537 Silverstone, ‘Proper Distance’, p. 481.

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be achieved at all.538 When we are examining tragedies that occurred decades ago, hundreds or even thousands of years in the past, compassion may be not only the most desirable emotional response but also the only one possible. Unfortunately, claims to generating empathic responses among virtual shipwreck explorers may merely be a ruse, which is why understanding the role of improper distance in VR experiences is critical to understanding the actual motivations behind sensationalizing and prioritizing certain sites of catastrophe. Beyond the appeal to the macabre to increase public engagement statistics and therefore rights to further funding, there may lie something even more sinister. Maritime tragedies are absolutely not a phenomenon relegated to the distance of historical hindsight. Dozens of migrant boats have wrecked in the Mediterranean Sea just in the last decade, killing thousands of people. Yet archaeologists are not promising 3D models, VR tours, or AR experiences of these underwater sites.539 To do so would be insensitive, too political, too soon. But are the concerns of neutrality and temporality all that make it acceptable to reanimate one catastrophic site but not another? Surely if the purpose of virtual and digital experiences were actually to arouse global awareness, empathy, and protective action, then these wrecked boats would be prioritized for representation. However, the sunken sights of wreckage most susceptible to 3D and VR reanimation are not humble migrant boats or modest fishing vessels or even everyday cruise ships. Instead, they tend to be the giants of history: twentieth-century war vessels like the British Merchant Navy’s WWII ship SS Thistlegorm, the Royal Navy’s WWI cruiser HMS Falmouth, or Early Modern European ships of exploration, discovery, and colonization.540 In short, they tend to be the same ones prioritized for bodily resurrection, like the Vasa, Belle, and Mary Rose, discussed in Chapter 2. Indeed, the Batavia has been resurrected (her timbers raised and reassembled in a museum), cloned (her full-scale replica the most prominent tourist attraction of the port of Lelystad in the Netherlands), and soon virtually reanimated as well. Prioritizing this singular aspect of maritime history to share with the public serves to perpetuate the Great Man narrative, that the fallen heroes of the World Wars and the prowess of the men behind the European Age 538 Bloom, Against Empathy. 539 However, they are being studied from the perspective of maritime archaeology; Peter Campbell, personal communication, 2020. 540 See section ‘Exploitation’ above and the Thistlegorm project website at http://thethistlegormproject.com; last accessed 24 November 2020. On the Falmouth, see Firth, Bedford, and Andrews, ‘HMS Falmouth’, pp. 187-196.

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of Sail are most worthy of memorialization through reanimation. This focus on masculine achievement serves precisely the opposite function of democratizing history, which so many VR advocates claim as a benefit to digital, Web-based representations. The idea that history as his-story should be ‘brought to life’ because it is spectacular and therefore deserving of the status of spectacle is a sentiment that reflects Thomas Carlyle’s antiquated theory of Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world. […] They were the leaders of men, these great ones: the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwell in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole word’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these. … We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness.541

Additionally, the language def ining the theory of the Great Man who synchronizes a Universal History evokes a particular religiosity, one of singular divine right and a destiny to manifest. At the same time that Carlyle was composing his series of treatises on masculine divine destiny, similar sentiments were used to justify unspeakable catastrophe in the New World, Africa, and Australia as the Early Modern European virtues of heroism, nobility, and conquest were enacted on the frontiers of these ‘unsettled’ continents. The idea of sacrifice for the greater good is still pervasive in the West and still as subjective as it ever was. I strongly suspect that lingering notions of manifest destiny are lurking behind the contemporary archaeologies that drive this new kind of land rush toward the seafloor and the quests to reanimate the great ships and the great men who built and sailed them. It may be worth noting that the word ‘virtual’ is an adjectival form of the Latin noun virtus, which originally

541 Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, pp. 1-2.

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meant ‘manliness’ or ‘manhood’, itself stemming from the Latin vir, or man, which is still evident in the English word ‘virility’. With emphases on ‘protecting’, ‘saving’, and ‘preserving’ catastrophic shipwreck sites/sights, digital and virtual archaeologies profess the ability of salvation through the possession of imagery said to reanimate the object of historical interest, to ‘bring it back to life’. Alongside latent desires to manifest a divine destiny, this scholarly insistence upon making the material immaterial—or the mortal immortal—demonstrates a clear sense of entitlement to not just perpetuity but eternity. Rather than merely an expression of humanocentric hubris, this drive toward the virtual is also a direct function of Christianity’s profound influence on the field of archaeology, not to mention Western society as a whole. Presaging Baudrillard’s cautionary sentiments on simulacra and simulation, cited above, and drawing on Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity, Guy Debord wrote in Society of the Spectacle, This spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man.542

However bizarrely, the promise of paradisiac everlasting life that Christianity unleashed upon the world seems to have, at least following the Protestant Reformation in Western Europe, also produced a septophobic society that has reverberated even into the supposedly secular subset of academia.543 Somewhat different from a mere aversion to death, the fear of decay and rot may be just as powerful a motivating force for the production of VR and 3D representations of shipwrecks as the others explicated 542 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, p. 20. The epigraph of the first section in Debord’s book against capitalism (f irst published in Paris in 1967) is taken from the preface to Feuerbach’s 1841 book against Christianity, where the latter spells out his disdain for religion having made illusion sacred and truth profane; see Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, p. xix. 543 See Chapter 1. Mark C. Taylor details secularity as a function of religiosity in the West, providing strong evidence for the impossibility of separating the two. In this case, then, we can better understand the academy as deeply embedded in the Christian tradition, especially the branch of which emerged after Martin Luther in the Early Modern period; see Taylor, After God. See also relevant discussions in Rosemary Radford Ruether, ‘Ecofeminism’, pp. 43-50.

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above.544 Indeed, the imminent putrefaction of vessels so intrinsically linked to the Christian imperial agenda may be an especial affront to Western masculinity.

Elegy (Bayonnaise) The second chapter of this book elaborately observes that all ships were born to wreck. Virilio takes this lesson and implores us, in archaeological language no less, to apply it to the virtual age: ‘we need to try and unearth “the original accident” specific to this kind of technological innovation. Unless we are deliberately forgetting the invention of the shipwreck in the invention of ship …, we need to examine the hidden face of new technologies, before that face reveals itself in spite of us’.545 As I clamor to agree, I must also remain aware of how my own perspective as a feminist, pantheist, and anarchist has informed my views of virtual shipwreck exploration. The veins of capitalist exploitation, voyeuristic fetishes, manifest destiny, savior and spectator complexes, a Universal History defined by Great Men, and a sense of entitlement to eternal life that are so apparent in my own discipline of nautical archaeology all run deeply against my ontological grain. But rather than merely decry these tendencies, I would like to propose some alternative ways to present shipwrecks of all types to the public, ways that might better take into account the particular complexities and peculiarities of these sites of grave importance, their inevitable decay, and our own. Let me start with a brief story. The Bayonnaise is a late eighteenth-century French corvette that wrecked in 1803 off the North Atlantic coast of Finisterre in Galicia, Spain. I was one of the lead archaeologists of a crew tasked with removing samples of wood from the site to determine the provenance of the timbers that composed the ship. Part of the process entailed photogrammetry to record the destruction that we introduced to the wreckage. This particular wreck concealed no human casualties because it was intentionally run aground and set ablaze to prevent the imminently victorious British navy from capturing the ship intact. Even so, there was a dead body on site. A German tourist who had just completed the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route had gone swimming and disappeared near the site shortly before our arrival. The Spanish search-and-rescue team flew helicopters overhead while we were 544 See arguments presented in Chapters 2 and 4. 545 Virilio, Open Sky, p. 40, original emphasis.

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working underwater in two to four meters of visibility. Every strand of algae that was cleared from the wreckage could have exposed the entangled, rotting body of this young man. A few days later, the corpse was found drifting about 20 meters away from the shipwreck. This story demonstrates something that the photogrammetric model produced of the site could never reanimate: that is, that shipwrecks do not exist in the vacuum of history. Only one aspect of their catastrophic existence is located in the past. Like other drowning victims, they rise to the surface only to sink again, drifting and decaying, becoming and unbecoming simultaneously. Therefore, to relay only sensational ghostly images of shipwrecks is disingenuous, reducing them to a historical commodity to be possessed and consumed by the privilege of visualization. Virtual imagery—with its parallel illusions of multi-dimensional access, infinite reproducibility, and technologically enabled omnipotence—provides false representations that ignore, at times dangerously, the reality of wreck sites as distant but actual places of perpetually embodied drama. As Susan Hawthorne put it, ‘it isn’t the thing, or the place it claims to be. Virtual truth is a lie. In virtual flight your feet are firmly on the ground. […] VR is the commodification of the mind’s processes’.546 This commodification is one of the most important factors that distinguishes virtual experiences from other forms of make-believe.547 Even though participants willingly enter the capitalist fantasy of cyberspace, virtual consumption also comes with unintended, deleterious costs such as enhanced solipsism and narcissism.548 In his cautionary push for an ethics of cyberspace, Roger Silverstone suggests that we might pause and ‘consider the limits, both technological and human, of our attempts to know and to control the world’.549 This moment of pause and acceptance of finitude is necessary work if we are to restore intimacy, which is a precondition for acknowledging immensity. Representing and comprehending the vastness of shipwreck sights/sites requires an embrace of not eternal preservation or a mockery of the macabre but the alterity of oceans, placing human tragedy at a respectful, proper distance to all the other life-death comings and goings that characterize the precarity of existence on this planet. 546 Hawthorne, ‘Cyborgs’, pp. 223, 230. 547 See especially Part I in Silcox, Defense of Simulated Experience. 548 Markley, ‘Metaphysics of Cyberspace’, p. 74. 549 Silverstone, ‘Proper Distance’, p. 490. Many of his concerns echo those of Robert Markley in ‘Metaphysics of Cyberspace’, who was writing in the previous decade. It appears that time has done little to alleviate the concerns of these early critics like Silverstone and Hawthorne.

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Bypassing the usual recourse to the primacy of vision to which 3D and VR reconstructions are limited—despite claims to the contrary550—and the improper distance to which both purveyors and participants are confined, we might instead employ slower, more poetic, more contemplative artistic practices to satisfy the public demand for scientific knowledge of shipwrecks while offering a real reality experience more enduring than the fleeting ‘coolness’ of a gimmicky virtual space. As Bachelard invokes, ‘Slowly, immensity becomes a primal value, a primal, intimate value’.551 Simply ‘firing the imagination’ with displays of flashy imagery is not enough to actually engage the public with shipwrecks located underwater.552 This is especially the case if scientists are aiming for the public to not just be loosely engaged but to become rationally, intellectually, and emotionally invested in the more esoteric aspects of our world to which we as scientists have asymmetrical access.553 And if we want to help members of the public connect with ways of being that surpass our everyday access, then we must consider carefully which emotions we are trying to elicit in response to the distant Otherness of shipwrecks. Chouliaraki proposes ‘agonistic solidarity’ as a solution to the pity and irony that interactions with tragedy so often evoke in public spectators; yet, while both imagination and discomfort are requisite in her recommendation, she harnesses them in the work of empathy, which is arguably neither ideal nor possible.554 In a modest revision of her suggestion, we might instead pursue the stirring of rational compassion among members of the public, not just for the human casualties of shipwreck but also for the precarious condition, the continually changing material reality of each distant site as a unique place, wondrous, awesome, enchanting, and sometimes also horrifying. 550 Melotti, Plastic Venuses, pp. 53-54; Adams, ‘Experiencing Shipwrecks’, pp. 85-96. 551 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 212. 552 Contra Adams, ‘Experiencing Shipwrecks’, p. 94. Overreliance on such imagery alone may also be insufficient to communicate with the public in a way that distinguishes the scientist from the salvor; the image of shipwrecks but also the image of our profession is at stake: Gately and Benjamin, ‘Archaeology Hijacked’, pp. 15-35. 553 Melotti laments how cultural tourism’s embrace of multimedia designs, including VR, is a symptom of anti-intellectualism that threatens to displace the educational component of cultural tourism in favor of recreation and entertainment (Melotti, Plastic Venuses, p. 57). It seems to me that scientists have a social responsibility if not moral obligation to instill and sustain intellectualism in the public sphere. This may be reason enough to critique the presence of—if not over-reliance on—digital media in archaeological tourism. 554 Chouliaraki, ‘Improper Distance’, pp. 374-375. For rational compassion, see Bloom, Against Empathy. For a sophisticated if hesitant defense of empathy in archaeology, see van Helden and Witcher, ‘Walking in Someone Else’s Shoes’, pp. 109-127.

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Indeed, wonder, in all its ambivalence, may be the emotional state that we should seek to provoke in our efforts to engage the public with shipwrecks and other underwater ruins. Wonder stands in contrast to empathy, pity, and irony because, importantly, it ‘does not see its objects possessively: they remain “other” and unmastered’.555 Holding autonomy sacred, ‘to wonder is to respect things as things in themselves’;556 it is to break away for a moment from the Baconian humanism of knowledge as certainty, ‘which exercises a sovereign simplification’ and ‘allows the conquest of the other, which it simplifies as object’.557 By contrast, wonder is attuned to uncertainty and especially to the uncanny, as it ‘opens an originary rift in thought, an unsuturable gash that both constitutes and deconstitutes thinking as such. To open the question of wonder, then, is to open thought not only to the fantastic and amazing, but to the dreadful and the threatening’.558 A truly wondrous representation of a shipwreck would ‘have to give up all efforts to purify itself of the ugly and monstrous’ and instead respectfully embrace the ‘awesome and the terrifying alike’.559 Wonder, as related etymologically to ‘wound’, also means ‘miracle’, so that the word is just as entwined in the emotions associated with suffering and healing as it is with the Kantian sublime and the Kristevan abject.560 And how appropriate it is that a thaumaturge, or something that induces a miraculous healing event, takes its name from a very ancient sea god named Thaumas, whose name means ‘wonder’ in Greek. As a wonder, the sea offers its healing and suffering powers simultaneously, and shipwrecks illustrate superbly the capacity for the sea to entice with its immensity and to annihilate with that same alterity. Although throughout this book, I have repeatedly lamented certain Christian doctrines that have shaped and limited the contemporary scholar’s approach to wrecks—especially but not exclusively those of Early Modern European ships—wonder is intrinsically bound to its roots in pre-Modern 555 Hepburn, Wonder and Other Essays, p. 134. 556 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, p. 131. 557 Keller, Political Theology of the Earth, p. 14. 558 Rubenstein, Strange Wonder, pp. 10-11. 559 Rubenstein, Strange Wonder, p. 12. 560 While Rubenstein in Strange Wonder acknowledges this close correlation between abjection, wonder, and the sublime, Fisher draws a sharp distinction between wonder and fear and even refers to fear as wonder’s opposite. However, his analysis seems to run contrary to wonder’s scriptural correlates, as explained in the following paragraph; see Fisher, Wonder, pp. 1-9. In another interpretation, Hepburn sees wonder as exaltation as a recent departure from its original theistic meanings of the ‘terrifying and weird’: Hepburn, Wonder and Other Essays, p. 131. On wonder and the sea, see Corbin, Lure of the Sea, pp. 121-137.

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theophilosophy, and perhaps ironically, I believe that this is one of its greatest assets. The ancient Hebraic equivalent of wonder, yir’at (‫)יראת‬, is generally translated as fear, as in the fear of elohim or the deity known by the unpronounceable ‫יהוה‬.561 Awakening a reverential fear of the inscrutability of oceans, of the interconnected liquid bodies that allow for the possibility of life and death un/becomings on this planet is a necessary condition to end our ongoing attempts at domination over them.562 Water precedes and proceeds all life here, and it will certainly exceed it as well. We should regard again our oceans and all that they contain with the reverence and wonder that they warrant. After all, Psalms 111:10 and Proverbs 1:7 agree that yir’at is the beginning of wisdom. Therefore, as a necessary and preexisting condition to the construction of knowledge, wonder should also be considered as central to pedagogies both private and public. While shipwrecks present ideal places for even the land-bound to locate wonder, at the same time they exemplify some of the most troubling aspects of life in the Anthropocene and all the senses of dread, anxiety, and finitude that cognizance of such contingency conjures. Written nearly 40 years ago, anthropologist Ernest Becker concludes his study of the widespread denial of death with this thought: ‘whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false’.563 Because the bell tolls louder with each drop of the ocean’s pH level and each incremental rise of Earth’s average surface temperature, there is no time for falsehood, no time for the mirage of simulacra. If the price of beauty is pain, wonder’s close relative—enchantment—may be another affective state worth eliciting in the public as they engage with the distant suffering of real shipwrecks and the inevitability that creeps ever closer and requires ever more urgent action.564 Following on Jane Bennett’s work on vibrant and enchanted materialities, Lauren Greyson explains that enchantment ‘allows us to imagine engendering

561 Rubenstein, Strange Wonder, p. 10; Heschel, God in Search of Man, pp. 46, 74-77. 562 See Chapter 2. There is another certain irony at work here in that, arguably, the waters precede even elohim, as explained in Keller, Face of the Deep. 563 Becker, Denial of Death, pp. 283-284. In defining ‘ecosublime’ as a distinct concept, Rozelle forcefully asks, ‘When does an awareness of home provoke terror and awe? When it’s burning’: Rozelle, Ecosublime, p. 1. 564 Cf. Little and Shackel, Archaeology, Heritage and Civic Engagement, p. 31; Keller, Political Theology of the Earth. For parsing differences between wonder, enchantment, awe, and similar affective states, see Vasalou, Wonder.

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futures that are neither naively hopeful nor hopelessly apocalyptic’.565 As opposed to standing back and allowing the virtual to turn Earth into ‘humanity’s phantom limb’,566 we would benef it by supporting wonder and enchantment in our engagements with members of the public as we are all realizing the urgency of striking that balance, of taking a critical view—and being responsible for what we find there—of what longstanding notions of human entitlement to domination over all Others is really doing and undoing. Bennett was perhaps the f irst scholar in the twenty-f irst century to notice and issue a call for the heightened relevance of ‘an ethic of enchantment’: Its appreciation of nonhuman, as well as human, sites of vitality … proceeds from and toward the principle of treading lightly on the earth. This is not to rule out or demonize technological engagements with it but, rather, to temper them with the modesty that comes from acknowledging the independent vitality of nonhuman forms and from admitting corollary limits in the capacities of human agents to know exactly what they are doing when they manipulate the world in which they participate. … By becoming more responsive to other material forms with which one shares space, one can better enact the principle of minimizing harm and suffering.567

Like Bennett, it is not my aim here to demonize digital methods of public engagement with shipwreck sites but rather to question their eff icacy, the effects of such engagements on public participants, and what it is that we really are, could, and should be trying to accomplish with public pedagogies. To elicit intimacy alongside distance, humility over hubris, compassion instead of pity, and responsibility out of respect, we must first make sure that our own research practices incorporate those same affective states. While there is certainly room for digital technologies in public outreach and education, pedagogical research demonstrates that the practice of inspired aesthetic experiences in learning goes a long way toward achieving, 565 Greyson, Vital Reenchantments, p. 18. 566 Virilio, Open Sky, p. 66. He follows this unnerving proposition with another horrifying question: ‘Doesn’t the development of telecommunications prosthetics accentuate the “ghostly dimension” of a vision of the world from now on computer-enhanced?’ 567 Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life, p. 157. She goes on to conclude, ‘My own sense is that the ethical and political potential within suffering is more likely to be realized if one’s attention to suffering is infused by or remixed with the en-couraging experience of wonder’ (p. 160).

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nurturing, and maintaining a sense of wonder and enchantment with real spaces—no less those tragic, esoteric, and uncanny assemblages on the distant seafloor.568 This is our task as educators: to not fall prey to the lure of simulacra and instead to push back against ‘the absurd waste of the media age’, with its ‘glittering images that divert as they bore’.569 Environmental education, especially in the Anthropocene, should be messy. It should involve getting our hands dirty, being resourceful, and cooperating with real, extra-human things: ‘In this sense, science and philosophy are alike in their dealings with wonder. For them, wonder is a void, the opening for a tunnel that leads somewhere more viable. It is a means’.570 Maybe, just maybe, wonder could be the means to the end of if not the entirety of contemporary ecocide, at least the globalized ideology of agrilogistics that constitutes the nature/culture divide and that, in turn, has provided the philosophical and moral grounds for the perpetuation of the Anthropocene.571 Because wonder is a detachment or suspension of trust in one’s own logics, this emotional state may well be the one necessary to dismantle the persistent logics of agriculture, or agrilogistics. Moving this call to action reconsidered into the realm of the modestly empirical, I conducted a series of experiments implementing an analogue aesthetic program into classroom settings, with students who were almost entirely previously unfamiliar with shipwrecks at all, and the results have been promising. After virtually touring several digital models of shipwreck sites, the students have consistently reported being significantly more intellectually engaged with the site for which they produced a hauntograph: the Bayonnaise shipwreck. For example, one student, majoring in economics, commented: I respect the work that went into creating the virtual representations of the shipwrecks; however, I don’t think that this is the most effective way to study them. It is nice to have the option to explore shipwrecks from a computer, but I agree with the critiques of VR exploration that argue that it puts the viewer almost more out of touch than they previously were before viewing, as the heaviness of a shipwreck cannot be fully conveyed through digital means. At most, VR recreations of shipwrecks 568 Constantino, ‘Critical Relevance of Aesthetic Experience’, pp. 63-77; cf. Fisher, Wonder, especially the chapter ‘Wonder and the Steps of Thought’. 569 Rozelle, Ecosublime, p. 111. 570 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, p. 126. 571 On philosopher Timothy Morton’s agrilogistics and the nature/culture divide, see Chapter 1.

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are somewhat of a novelty in the age of the internet but cannot serve as a substitute for further learning or actual experience.572

Another student, a marine biology major, commented similarly: While I believe that virtual exploration of any archaeological site is an amazing attempt of giving audiences a chance to explore from home, I also believe it limits the viewer’s ability to fully understand the historical and emotional concepts behind these sites. I personally have explored a few shipwrecks in the Caribbean. It is an amazing yet haunting feeling. It’s haunting to see, in real life, a shipwreck where people could have been fighting to survive the multitudes of water entering the ship. At the same time, however, these shipwrecks are beautiful to explore underwater due to the various organisms that now call the wreck home. These feelings cannot be represented through a VR experience. You do not feel as if you are viewing these ships up close and personal with these experiences. This is an attempt to bring real-life explorations to the comfort of our homes; however, it will never replace the feeling of actually exploring sites and understanding (or creating) a background of emotions to remember.

An undergraduate philosophy student remarked that: When the interaction with subject matter is limited to a screen (and I have a particularly small laptop), it does not feel like an ‘experience’ in any sense of the word. What I am seeing is not the ship itself but someone’s 3D rendering. In my opinion, for someone to truly learn and take away something from an experience or lesson, the student/observer has to resonate personally with the subject material, and I was not able to do so through online virtual tours of the shipwrecks. I did make the emotional connection, thinking of the gruesome and truly unfortunate deaths of the passengers [while making my hauntograph]. The greatest ‘con’ of these virtual constructions is the dis-attachment from the reality which originally created these scenes (violent storms and whatever else may have plagued the crew/passengers).

572 Student responses have been lightly edited for grammar, punctuation, and clarity. My heartfelt appreciation is extended to those students who responded to this project so thoughtfully.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, an exercise science major lamented the lack of authentic movement in the virtual tours and explains how she tried to recreate that sense of motion in her hauntograph: Overall, I would say the main difference between my hauntograph depiction of the Bayonnaise shipwreck and the depictions of the shipwrecks viewed in the virtual tours is the added element of the ‘movement’ of the ship over time. One of the things I noticed immediately when viewing the virtual tours was how fixed and stationary the wrecked ships were. But one of the details of [the story of the Bayonnaise] that stuck out to me the most was that rather than being trapped below forever, fragments of the wreckage rise up to the surface of the water and then eventually sink back down, being anything but stationary. This is why, for my hauntograph, the wood timbers are shown layered on top of each other randomly, as if they had moved up and down over time. I also incorporated red algae plants into the wreckage, as part of the purpose of a hauntograph is to combine life and death. The red algae is the new life living among the wrecked ship.

If this informal series of experiments conducted among university students might be suggestive of an overall trend among non-specialists, then engaging the public with shipwrecks through more creative means such as short-term ‘sci-art’ workshops or longer-term field schools geared toward wonder might more successfully restore intimacy not only between scientists and the taxpayers who often fund our research but perhaps even more importantly between the spectator, the spectacle, and its specters. Recalling the humility of wonder, we might conclude with some notes following from Michael Taussig’s ethnographic work on mimesis and alterity.573 I am struck by the concept of yielding in shamanic practice, as it opens the possibility of crafting a representation, or participating in some process of representing, that yields to things and forces not just different from but greater than oneself. To yield to an other is to step back onto the threshold of self, and of self in time, into the uncanniness of (maternal) living together, or blurring self into a more chaotic other, rather than stepping in a progressive, orderly march toward (pixelated) domination. Letting go, sinking back into the wetness of the ultimate procreative mimesis machine—because the womb of the Great Mother is self and other—contrasts with the aims of Enlightenment science’s conquistador legacy of overpowering, overwhelming 573 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, pp. 46-47, 122-123.

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what appears to stand in the way of desire or truth. But appearances are also powerful. And if Taussig is right, that to make an image is to resurrect a soul, then the yielding, magic-wielding image-maker runs the risk of self-annihilation.574 Though they may both resurrect, the yielding ‘imagician’ differs from the savior-scholar in both intention and interpretation of the creative act. Where the savior-scholar follows the monotheistic precedent of creation by way of annihilating the preexisting other,575 of ripping apart into fragments that accumulate in museums and bibliographies, the imagician risks life itself and yields to the real possibility of slipping too far beyond the threshold to retrieve the truth that is sought. There is such potential for necromancing students of shipwreck to transcend the savior-scholar paradigm by physically and metaphysically yielding to the watery depths and allowing for more vivid, rather than virtual, reanimations. As Isabelle Stengers concludes, ‘we have something to learn from those practices we have eliminated as superstitious… I do not claim we should mimic those practices, but maybe we should accept to “seeing” them, and wonder’.576 Endless rapture awaits those who trust the sea. For as she rises and falls, so one’s rapture swells and sinks. Whether the sea is rising or falling, nothing changes in the enchantment of living—moving about endlessly. And does it matter if the sea is pouring over the beaches or sinking back into its bed? Doesn’t the one will the other, and the other the one? And isn’t it the passage from one to the other that makes for eternal good fortune? 577

574 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, p. 111. 575 See Chapter 2, section ‘Mereology’. 576 Stengers, ‘Wondering about Materialism’, p. 380. 577 Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 13.

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Hauntographs 12-16: Bayonnaise 1-5. (rotate figure 90 degrees counterclockwise; view in order numerically) This selection of student-produced hauntographs demonstrates only some of the possibilities for engaging non-specialists more holistically—or hauntologically—with shipwrecks. The Coastal Carolina University student participants first virtually toured several digital models of shipwreck sites. Then they read the story of the Bayonnaise shipwreck as told in this chapter. They were given a concise definition of ‘hauntograph’ as explained in the opening pages of this book and instructed to make their own hauntograph of the Bayonnaise. Each of the resulting artworks, in its own way, uses symbolism to identify the wreck as that of the Bayonnaise; indicates the relationship between the ship and the wreck, or between past and present; and suggests a closer-than-usual relationship between death and life as bodies underwater—living, dead, and somewhere in-between—drift in and out of the tableaux. Bayonnaise 1: collage and colored pencil drawing (Joy Carlson, 2019); Bayonnaise 2: glass bottle with shells, wood, and oil (Mercedez’ Carpenter, 2019); Bayonnaise 3: colored pencil drawing (Sarah Bartholomew, 2019); Bayonnaise 4: colored pencil drawing (Sarah Collins, 2019); Bayonnaise 5: colored pencil and marker drawing (Olivia Barbeau, 2019).

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Hauntograph 17. Bayonnaise 6. Lying on the sand beneath eight meters of seawater off the coast of Finisterre, Spain, a wrecked French corvette, the Bayonnaise, is a tangled mess of charred wooden timbers and iron concretions covered in long strands of algae and seagrass. The wreck is revealed with difficulty, when the weeds are cleared out or when the trillions of particles suspended in midwater are washed away with the changing of currents and tides. When the visibility suddenly opens and the shipwreck begins to be recognizable, wonder can be felt inside that opening, that wound, before the sea conducts its miraculous healing and the point of access closes to intruders yet again. Mobile with shells, coral, bones, and fleur-de-lis print fabric sewn onto velvet-lined metal tray (Sara Rich, 2019).

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Recording and Interpretation in Maritime Archaeology, Coastal Research Library 31, edited by Jonathan Benjamin, Trevor Winton, and Wendy van Duivenvoorde, 197-210. Cham: SpringerOpen, 2018. Woodward, Ian. ‘Consumption as Cultural Interpretation: Taste, Performativity, and Navigating the Forest of Objects’. In The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ronald N. Jacobs, and Philip Smith, 671-697. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.



Postface. On Underwater Séances and Punk Eulogies Abstract The postface to the book’s f ive chapters provides a summary of the overarching argument, which is that nautical archaeology bears with its contemporary practice its Early Modern origins in Christian theology. The resurrection—or savior-scholar—model of nautical archaeology is revisited and critiqued for its tendencies toward paternalism and interventionism, features that appear to replicate key theological tenets emphasizing an existential and ontological hierarchy, with humans occupying the pinnacle. In contrast, the postface conjures Spinoza and Feuerbach in a séance to offer an archaeology of shipwrecks whose comparatively anarchic method relies on insurrection rather than resurrection. Keywords: anarchism; flat ontology; Great Chain of Being; maritime archaeology; panpsychism

In this book, I have argued that archaeologists tend to view shipwrecks as dead ships, as once active, vibrant things made inert through irreparable bodily harm. Because Western science is a function of Christian theology, even the agnostic archaeologist understands dead ships as awaiting resurrection from the seafloor, which places the scientist in the position of the savior. In the Early Modern period, ships embodied Christ while enacting imperial and colonizing missions, and for these vessels to succumb to degradation at the hands of demonic waters is an affront to the scientist, whose credo—even subconsciously—remains in keeping with the Christian theological emphases on salvation and the restoration of Edenic utopia. I see this approach as problematic in its paternalism and its insistence on intervention, both of which seem to be an effort to mimic the god that has risen to power in the West and, by extension, around the globe. Most deleterious is that the motives underlying these paternalistic interventions

Rich, S.A., Shipwreck Hauntography: Underwater Ruins & the Uncanny. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463727709_post

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derive from the Abrahamic tradition that there is an ontological hierarchy with humans—made in imago dei—at the peak, lording over all other entities beneath them, down the scala naturae into devilish, microbial waters with their lowly fish and kelp and corals. From our collective view in the ecocidal Anthropocene, the violent severance and elevation of human culture from everything else on Earth has the consequence of extinction for everyone populating that supposed chain of being. As an alternative to the Abrahamic approach to the scientific study of wreckage, this book would like to offer a more anarchic variation—hauntography or something like it—that embraces others as kin and that regards with a sense of wonder the finitude of materiality. A handful of times in these pages I’ve whispered in passing the idea of gathering, and these final thoughts will gather those allusions like a bouquet of flowers offered to the dead and dying. The first time was in the preface, where the etymology of the word ‘thing’ (Old English þing) was given as a gathering or a meeting, an assembly or assemblage. Later in the preface, I referred to my dive team, and then again in Chapter 4, in the section Negentropy (Magdalena), I mentioned my dive team in relation to a particular dolphin who supervised our archaeological activities on this section’s eponymous shipwreck. In the midst of the queries into public engagement with shipwreck sites in Chapter 5, the sections Exploration (Melckmeyt) and Exploitation (Thistlegorm) claimed that the virtual ‘experience’ of a shipwreck is at odds with the actual experience of doing archaeology or engaging in any other process of scientific exploration. Exploration of this kind is not solipsistic but requires teamwork, a gathering of individuals with common goals but diverse expertise. Unlike Lutheranism, archaeology is not about the individual revelation; rather, as mentioned in the Chapter 3 sections Inversion (Impregnable) and Delirium (Belle), if anything of the past is revealed from the abysses, it is through consensus. And a consensus, as explained in Chapter 4’s section Purification (Costa Concordia), can only be reached through an assembly, a séance of scientific disciplines, faith traditions, human and extra-human kin. And so, like a conference where individuals assemble in order to confer, gathering is a kind of sharing: objects, labor, ideas, experiences, affections, etc. And this leads me to the point I wish to make here, which is one made in passing at the conclusion of Chapter 1: that in 1830, philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach reasoned that death is the ultimate form of sharing, even the ultimate expression of love. At death, one’s hold over her consciousness—or her personhood, knowledge, or life story—is released and handed over

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to others; consciousness becomes communal.578 Feuerbach attributes personhood to all things with consciousness; in other words, all things with a history have a life story and are therefore alive. Life ceases only when changes—or metamorphoses—cease, and at this point, the constitution of personhood that was under constant construction during life becomes eternally divisible and distributed into others.579 In other words, a thing is a gathering, and a thing that shares is a thing that dies; further, that disintegration of boundaries between sharing entities is the very constitution of love.580 His ideas on death and sharing resonate with those espoused by the heretic Baruch Spinoza in the late seventeenth century: namely, that upon death, the mind, entangled with the body, disperses.581 There is no immortal soul, no heaven or hell, but simply dispersal. A fingerbone can become a holy relic. Flesh can become food for worms. And an immaterial idea can become a ghostly artifact; even if it is never written, never spoken, never enacted in any way, ideas too haunt posthumously, flirting with reception by the still-living. Every single þing in existence is perpetually unfinished business, always availing itself for the impossibility of completion. According to the pantheist, panpsychist Spinoza, disintegration is simply reintegration. So like the fingerbone, the flesh, and the idea the deceased once had, a wrecked ship disintegrating into the abyss is reconstituted as worm food, octopus hideout, metallic concretion, or microbial breeding ground even as it is reintegrated into that abyss. A century and a half later, Feuerbach, who would go on to profess atheism despite notable pantheistic (or at least panpsychist) tendencies, would appear to agree with much of Spinoza’s thesis, albeit enhanced by his own characteristically morbid and ornery flare. He claims that a flower in bloom, moments before the petals fade and fall to the ground, exemplifies that beauty and transience are one and the same. Situated at the liminal moment when beginning meets end, the recognition of beauty is a becoming aware of the temporality of life, and just as the beautiful flower precedes the wind that rips it apart, so do all beautiful things and moments foreshadow the division that occurs at death.582 Autumn leaves fall, streams in the desert dry, fog in the moonlight dissipates, fresh snow muddies and melts, and youth wearies, wears down and out. Recalling the word ‘fleeting’ and its 578 Feuerbach, Death and Immortality, pp. xxx, 116. 579 Feuerbach, Death and Immortality, pp. 83, 89, 95-96. 580 Feuerbach, Death and Immortality, pp. 121-123. 581 Spinoza, Works of Spinoza, Vol. II, pp. 117-118, 259-260, 266-267, or Props. XLV, XXIII, XXXVIII of The Ethics. 582 Feuerbach, Death and Immortality, pp. 88-89, 93-94.

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ancestral relationship with the Old English fleotan explained in Chapter 2, one might make the case that a sailing ship at sea is beautiful only insomuch as it is the picture of awful and awesome transience: that in recognizing its beauty, one also recognizes that it will succumb to greater forces, that it will wreck—or to modify Virilio’s point made in the final chapter above, the sailing of the ship is the sinking of the ship.583 Feuerbach carries this idea into the beauty of the human form, following the popular but pseudoscientific idea of unilineal evolution (itself a variation of the scala naturae), that the human form has reached perfection because it is the last shape, ‘having progressed through the long series of stages of the great variety of animal shapes’.584 Thus, as the limit of evolution, beyond which there is nothing but the division of consciousness, ultimate beauty is the human body. Even so, death cares not for the perfection of forms, and this can be seen in the uncanniness of broken bodies, or perfection crippled. Living bodies that lack limbs and eyes force witnesses into a recollection of death’s disintegrative nature. The lack, the absence where there should be a presence, is a living memento mori, an eerie reminder of the fate of our bodies, which is eventually to break apart.585 Given the pervasive ship-body metaphor explained in Chapter 2 of this book, it seems reasonable to extract from Feuerbach’s argument that a broken ship is uncanny for the same reasons as a broken body: already existing on the threshold between realms (the liminal body on the threshold of perfection and disintegration, the liminal ship at the threshold of air-as-perfection and water-as-disintegration) when broken, they cross yet another boundary from liminality into the uncanny, confronting us with the shadowy nearness of nonexistence. And when those broken bodies of flesh and wood are found underwater, uncanniness is compounded by the dystopian environment of a deadly womb where all is inverted, as explained in Chapter 3. And so the savior-scholar is compelled to perform the miracle, to conquer death and 583 Virilio, Open Sky, p. 40. 584 Feuerbach, Death and Immortality, p. 88. 585 Feuerbach’s influence on Freud is nowhere clearer than in this passage on missing body parts in Death and Immortality, pp. 93-93. Interestingly, however, Feuerbach also seems to anticipate claims made in Graham Harman’s metaphysics in regards to real and sensual objects. Feuerbach says that the individual with the missing eye or arm should not despair because the defect is only in the ‘essence’, while there remains a complete counterpart in the ‘substance’ (p. 95). Feuerbach’s essence would seem to align with Harman’s sensual object, the transient one that is perceivable and maneuverable by other objects, while ‘substance’ is akin to Harman’s real object, the enduring counterpart of the sensual object that is withdrawn from perception, interaction, and accidents. See Harman, Speculative Realism, pp. 123-129; Quadruple Object, pp. 20-50.

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restore utopia by raising the ship from the sea and reassembling it piece by piece in a museum, as a replica to sail again, or as a digitized object existing in the infinite perfection of virtual space. But rather than a scientific paradigm based on resurrection, we might consider insurrection instead. Both words derive from the Latin surgere, to ‘rise up’, ‘mount’, or ‘ascend’. Resurrection carries the meaning of resurgent—to rise again or to appear again but with the additional insinuation of rising from the dead. Insurrection also means rising up—not from but against. An insurgent rises up against authority, or, significantly, an insurgent gathers force. Numerous times throughout this book, especially in the first two chapters, I have commented on the autonomy that comes with brokenness. A broken thing is one that breaks free from the intentions of its creator. A broken thing is an insurgent, and as it gathers forces, it is not a dead thing exactly but rather a séance, a conference of haints sharing some knowledge, some personhood with the living. Not surprisingly, my idea finds some foothold in Feuerbach, who says that death, which is indistinguishable from division, offers an opportunity for freedom to ‘take root’ because the death of a living thing ignites the ‘inner breaking’ and reconstitution into other species, other forms of existence.586 The broken thing, the wrecked ship, refutes the telos imposed from beyond, and in gathering forces, it opens up to new becomings. Broken systems offer opportunities for revolutions, which are simply transformative redistributions of power—disintegrating and reintegrating forces.587 So perhaps instead of seeking immortality and imposing it upon the things we make, we ought to acknowledge their autonomy when they break and break free from our design. We might let our insurgent wreckage disintegrate and reintegrate rather than imposing upon it the immortality that our own species desires and to which, as explained in the first chapter of this book, it 586 Feuerbach, Death and Immortality, pp. 96, 112-113. 587 Given the overabundance of the word ‘insurrection’ to describe the events of 6 January 2021 in Washington D.C., just days after these words were penned, it may be worth noting here Marwan Bishara’s argument that Trump supporters’ storming of the Capitol building was not an insurrection but rather a deadly spectacle. He correctly claims that to call it in an insurrection is to ignore the context and nature of the Trump presidency, which was characterized by media spectacles and a reality-TV style obsession with ratings. That it proved deadly is further evidence that ‘Trump is living proof of the spectacle in its worst forms, with unmatched capacity for deception, repetition, delusion, and exclusion’ (Bishara, ‘Spectre of Trump’s Spectacles’, pa. 27; for more on spectres and spectacles, see Chapter 5 of this book). The insurrection that I invoke here is one that organizes to gather forces against nationalist, patriarchal injustices, not in defense of them.

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has come to believe it is entitled. But as explained further in Chapter 4, this entitlement is enabled only through the exploitation and pollution of lives painted as further down that slippery scala naturae. Seemingly inexhaustible supplies of fossil fuels and forests, endless oceans of nondegradable plastics, and colonization missions to the infinity of outer space can all be traced back to the bloody rifting of human from world, of culture from ‘nature’, and the exaltation of one with the condemnation of the other. The rifting was a force set into accelerated motion when the Santa María wrecked on the shores of Ayiti and Christopher Columbus called it divine providence. But this wreck was the first of many more deadly ones to come. As the Martinican philosopher Aimé Césaire wrote in his Shakespearean parody, A Tempest, Stephano: Trinculo, you know I used to be prejudiced against shipwrecks, but I was wrong. They’re not bad at all. Trinculo: That’s true. It seems to make things taste better afterwards… Stephano: Not to mention the fact that it’s got rid of a lot of old farts that were always keeping the world down! May they rest in peace.588

I like to imagine that all the ships wrecked on globalizing missions since 1492 have been acts of defiance against their imperialist overlords. They are all insurgents, now gathering new forces of marine sediments and biota, gesturing a rotten mizzenmast toward the farcical nature/culture binary. In the hopes that the final words of the preceding paragraph summoned one last hauntograph, this time an especially insolent one found only in the mind of the reader, we will borrow the concluding line of Spinoza’s Political Treatise, ‘But of this enough!’589 So in the spirit of gathering, sharing, kinship, and teamwork, my final remarks will acknowledge some of the communal efforts that have resulted in this book. While individual crews, classrooms, and conferences are footnoted throughout the main text, my general thanks are extended here to the many divers, archaeologists, and diving archaeologists with whom I’ve worked on these and other wrecks; the taxpayers, students, and patrons who have supported our expeditions; and the skippers who put on the kettle after a cold dunk. My gratitude is extended to the teachers who have taught me to breathe and to think, especially under water; to the thinkers cited here whose words encouraged the connections and conclusions drawn; to the 588 Césaire, ‘A Tempest’, Act III, Scene 2, Lines 68-72, p. 359. For more on A Tempest, see also Chapter 1. 589 Spinoza, Works of Spinoza, Vol. I, p. 387.

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anonymous reviewer (and those who offered) and the Maritime Humanities editors for their invaluable insights (oversights, however, are mine alone); and most of all, to my multispecies family and friends who listen, love, and remind me to do the same. Finally, I extend my gratitude to Earth’s bodies of water, where I’ve experienced surprising hospitality so far, and to the shipwrecks and their residents who have tolerated my hauntings and even the organized pilfering of some of their parts (pottery sherds, wood and soil samples, amphorae, barrel staves, sheathing, cannons, anchor stocks, olive pits, grape seeds and stems, pine and wine resin, …). I promise that in order to learn better the afterlife stories of the bygone yet enduring, I will work toward becoming a better, more yielding, necromancer. And to everyone still reading this: ‘The danger of death teaches us how to swim; so bravely throw yourself into the ocean!’590

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Index abject 128-29, 132, 134, 137, 212 see also emotions abyss 45, 81, 83-84, 126 n. 304, 163, 228, 229 alchemy 171, 173-74, 180 alterity 124, 210, 212, 217 anarchy 23, 28, 30, 154, 209, 228 Anthropocene 15, 28-29, 32, 40, 42, 50 n. 110, 174, 176-77, 213, 215, 228 anthropocentrism 19, 26, 193, 196 architecture 39, 44, 46-48, 62, 115-116, 156, 166 divine architect 21, 116, 123, 139 n. 353 Arctic Ocean 121, 192 Argo 94-96, 98 Aristotle 118, 119 n. 282, 129, 130 Armada, China Mièville’s The Scar 155, 164 art 13-18, 27, 46-48, 53, 62, 80, 85, 88-89, 94 n. 240, 102, 142, 175, 211 paintings 85, 89, 194 see also hauntography Atlantic Ocean 11-12, 33-34, 38, 48, 50, 54, 136, 139, 163, 192, 209 Augustine of Hippo 91, 101 n. 260, 140, 152 Australia 15, 157, 161, 168, 192, 203-204, 207 Ayiti 26, 36, 49, 232 Bachelard, Gaston 23, 63, 193-94, 196, 199, 205, 211 see also psychoanalysis Bacon, Francis 45-51, 57-58, 139, 212 Baltic Sea 86 see also Vasa Batavia 203, 206 Baudrillard, Jean 23, 199-201 simulacra 22-23, 201, 208, 213, 215 Bayonnaise 23, 209, 215, 217, 219-20 Belle 86, 130, 206, 228 Benjamin, Walter 23, 193 Bennett, Jane 159, 213-14 vital materialism 159 blue humanities 12 Bogost, Ian 14, 17-18, 97 see object-oriented ontology Bryant, Levi 32 n. 41, 79 n. 166, 96, 162 see object-oriented ontology capitalism 29, 33-34, 39, 44, 47, 50-51, 62, 160, 174-75, 198, 209 n. 542 cargo 54-55, 99, 128, 157, 167 ships 97, 166-67 caravels 26, 30, 50 Caribbean Sea 36, 43, 139, 216 see also Hispaniola carracks 26, 50, 94, 105, 137, 166 cartography 91, 175

cemeteries 36, 83, 92-94, 151, 156-57, 180, 190, 200, 203-204 grave robbing 76 Césaire, Aimé see Tempest, A China Sea 56 n. 123, 166-67 Chouliaraki, Lilie 205, 211 Christianity 21-22, 43, 46-47, 49, 53, 61-63, 77, 85, 92-93, 102, 118, 122-23, 139, 208-212, 227 Anglicanism 58 Bible, the 21, 85, 117 n. 272 see also Genesis; Ecclesiastes; Job; John; Proverbs; Pslams; Revelation Catholicism 58, 93 Lutheranism 20, 29 n. 33, 228 Jesus Christ 60, 86, 89-91, 93, 123, 151, 227 Judeo-Christianity 19, 36-37, 42, 48, 58-60, 84, 87, 91, 101, 138 Protestantism 18, 51, 59-60, 93, 116, 208 climate change see global warming colonialism 16, 19, 25-26, 29, 43, 46, 49, 85, 92, 195 postcolonialism 19, 43, 50, 56 Columbus, Christopher 26, 33-34, 36, 38, 48-52, 56, 139, 150, 232 conquistadors 22, 26, 49, 199, 218 Costa Concordia 168-69, 171, 173, 228 Cousteau, Jacques-Yves 195-97, 199, 202 cruise ships 168, 174, 206 crusades 26, 50, 88, 138 Cyprus 20, 56, 65, 121 n. 284 Darwin, Charles 93, 158 death 12-13, 20-22, 28, 31, 45, 49-50, 54, 58-64, 76-79, 83-84, 89-92, 102, 125, 156, 160, 170-176, 199-203, 208, 213, 228-233 Derrida, Jacques 14, 37, 80, 92 hauntology 14, 80, 177, 219 Descola, Philippe 28 diving 21, 41, 118, 121, 134, 192, 196, 197, 202-203, 232 Donne, John 89, 173 doppelgänger 79, 126, 170, 200, 204 dystopaesthesia 123, 125, 127, 130, 136-137 dystopia 21-22, 95, 117-118, 123, 128, 135, 137-138, 140, 154, 230 dystopian phenomenology 21-22, 124, 126, 130, 134 Ecclesiastes, book of 59 ecocide 19, 174-175, 196, 215, 228 education 191, 197, 214-215 edutainment 198 eighteenth century 56, 76 n. 154, 209 Eliade, Mircea 83

264  emotions 94 n. 241, 191, 206, 211-212, 215-216 awe 190, 214 n. 563, 190 compassion 205-206, 211, 214 empathy 204-206, 211-212 fear 33, 61 n. 41, 62, 90, 92, 125, 208, 212 n.560, 213 horror 12, 79, 196, 200, 204 pity 138, 205, 211-212, 214 sublime 13, 23, 39, 128, 194-195, 212 wonder 14, 23, 190, 212-215, 217-218, 228 empires 13, 27, 34-37, 46, 49, 54, 56, 57, 78, 101, 139-140, 149-150, 156, 165, 172, 192 imperialism 19, 46, 53, 55, 209, 227, 232 eternity see immortality England 27, 41, 47, 82, 89, 209 English Channel 86, 120, 137, 157 Enlightenment 26, 36, 57, 62, 85, 140, 150, 205, 218 post-Enlightenment 35, 135 entropy 12, 22, 39, 79-80, 157, 163 Enuma Elish 101 eschatology 31, 48, 58, 81 Ettinger, Bracha 124-126, 133-134 see also psychoanalysis; matrix extinction 18, 23, 85, 92, 138, 176, 201, 228 Exxon Valdez 167 feminism 21, 87, 124, 202, 209 Feuerbach, Ludwig 20, 60-62, 123 n. 290, 208, 229-231 Fisher, Mark 81-82, 212 n. 560 fluyt 166, 195 fossil fuels 22, 33, 44, 166, 168-169, 232 petroleum 164, 168, 170, 172 Foucault, Michel see heterotopia France 35, 51, 168, 209 Franklin Expedition 121 Freud, Sigmund 76, 125-126, 137, 230 n. 585 see also psychoanalysis; uncanny frigates 26, 55, 163, 180 galleons 22, 26, 50, 54, 137, 166 Gell, Alfred 85, 131 Genesis, book of 19, 33, 44-45, 48, 100-101, 117, 138 Adam and Eve 19, 33, 63, 91, 122-123 creatio ex nihilo 45-46, 49, 84 Garden of Eden 18, 20, 31, 36, 48-49, 53, 58, 77, 89, 139, 175, 227 see also paradise; utopia imago dei 19, 88, 138, 172, 175, 228 lapsus humani 48, 89, 123, 138 Noah’s Ark 19, 33, 90, 97-98 genocide 19, 50 ghosts 14, 17, 81, 128, 130, 167, 172, 201 ghost habitats 165, 169, 176 Gilgamesh 18, 59 Glissant, Édouard 50 global warming 31, 33 n. 44, 42, 169, 172 graves see cemeteries

Shipwreck Hauntogr aphy

Gresham Ship 41 Gulf of Mexico 86 Hamilakis, Yannis 121, 200 Haraway, Donna 161, 177 Harman, Graham 14, 98 n. 250, 230 n. 585 see also object-oriented ontology haunting 13, 26, 81, 129, 132, 135, 160, 196, 216, 231, 233 hauntography 14, 17-23, 81, 94, 215, 217 Hawthorne, Susan 210 Heidegger, Martin 21, 98-100 heritage 14-15, 20, 22, 27-28, 30, 37-44, 52, 55-58, 62, 76, 198-199, 201-202 see also underwater cultural heritage; UNESCO heterotopia 140, 154-158, 162, 169-170, 176, 201 hierarchy 17, 28, 97, 118-120, 122-123, 130, 153, 155-156, 175, 228 Hispaniola 26, 33, 51, 150-152, 165 HMS Falmouth 206 HMS Impregnable 126, 228 Holigost 82 Holland 104, 195, 203, 206 Dutch East India Company 98 n. 250, 203 holobiont 22, 96, 161-165, 170 see also Margulis horror vacui 84 humanism 26, 45-46, 51, 57-58, 60, 63, 76, 212 Iberia 48-49, 149, 152 see also Portugal; Spain immortality 19-20, 31, 39, 42, 53, 58-63, 76-77, 138, 190, 202, 208, 229, 231 Indian Ocean 192 see also Holland; Dutch East India Company Indigenous peoples 36, 38, 50, 52, 54, 161, 177 industrialism 33 n. 44, 37, 51, 197 inversion 124, 126, 128, 133, 172, 228 Irigaray, Luce 19, 25, 64, 75, 103, 115, 140, 149, 177, 189, Islam 46, 56-57, 78, 139 Job, book of 116 John, book of 122-123 Judaism 59, 122 Keller, Catherine 21, 90 Kinnaret boat 93 Kristeva, Julia see abject liminality 13-14, 20, 28, 77, 80-81, 96, 100, 102, 115, 133, 174, 229-230 Lorde, Audre 175 Ma’agan Michael 86 manifest destiny 43, 52-53, 207, 209 Margulis, Lynn 161 see also holobiont Marigalante 33 Mary Rose 86-87, 206

Index

matrix 30, 84, 124-128, 133 see also womb Mediterranean Sea 48, 86, 91, 192, 206 Melckmeyt 195, 196 n. 488 Mentz, Steve see blue humanities mereology 21, 94-98, 102 microcosm 22, 45, 95, 132, 139, 157-158, 165 Middle Ages 16, 45, 50, 93, 116, 139 miracles 18, 23, 42, 86, 93-94, 117, 212, 230 modernity 30-31, 36, 38, 52, 60, 62, 78, 94, 203 postmodernity 61 n. 41, 201 monotheism 31, 135, 218 Moore, Jason W. 20, 33-34, 62 Morton, Timothy 20, 32-34, 44-45, 62, 82, 96, 160 agrilogistics 20, 32, 44-45, 59, 215 see also object-oriented ontology museums 14, 22, 28, 41, 51-52, 58, 86, 93, 95, 130, 138-40, 157-58, 203-04, 206, 218, 231 nature/culture, dichotomy of 13, 20, 28-30, 33, 36-44, 46-48, 58, 62-63, 151, 165, 172-176, 215, 232 nau 86, 152 negentropy 22, 157, 163 neoliberalism 26, 47, 58, 149, 162, 165, 177, 197 New Jerusalem 21, 49, 139-140 New World 36, 139, 192, 207 nineteenth century 12, 162, 165-166 Nissia 20, 56, 65-66 Nuestra Señora de los Remedios 152, 158 object-oriented ontology 96 see also Bogost; Bryant; Harman; Morton ontology 77-78, 80, 100 Pacific Ocean 45, 49, 54, 172, 192 patriarchy 19, 30, 46, 122, 127, 175, 193 paradise 31, 36, 48-49, 138-139, 208 see also Garden of Eden; utopia phantom limbs 95, 214 phantoms see ghosts Philo of Alexandria 122-123 Plato 91, 116 n. 270, 118 pollution 36, 151, 168-169, 173, 192, 232 Portugal 27, 47, 54-55, 90 see also Iberia Proverbs, book of 48, 116, 213 Psalms, book of 213 psychoanalysis 13, 21, 124, 126 see also Bachelard; Ettinger; Freud; Spielrein relics 62, 93, 229 reliquaries 16, 22, 180 Renaissance, European 18, 25-26, 57, 170 resurrection 42, 60, 63, 77, 92 model of shipwreck archaeology 18, 21, 23, 76-77, 86-87, 93, 102, 117, 124, 150, 177, 204, 206, 227, 231 see also savior-scholar model

265 Revelation, book of 90, 116, 140 Ribadeo 22, 137, 141-142 Rich, Adrienne 118, 126 ruins 20, 22, 28, 34-40, 42-43, 55, 62-63, 85, 93-94, 116, 135, 212 Salazar, Eugenio de 151-152, 154-155, 158, 165 Salle, Robert de la 86, 130 salvage 17 n. 12, 55, 75-76, 85, 169, 177, 195 Sanchi 166-168, 170-171 San José 54-55 Santa María 26, 51-52, 86, 232 Santa María Magdalena 163-164, 180 savior-scholar model 21, 23, 63, 86, 151, 177, 202, 218, 230 see also resurrection scala naturae 33, 175, 228, 230, 232 sci-art 16, 217 science 16, 19, 22, 31-36, 41, 46-48, 51, 58, 60-62, 85-86, 92, 118, 122, 129, 135-36, 172, 175-177, 197, 215, 218, 227 SCUBA see diving seafaring 22, 47, 51, 91, 116, 154, 165 transatlantic 151, 165 transoceanic 26, 49, 50 senses 22, 117-123, 129-130, 135-136, 190, 213 sensorium 118-121, 123-124, 129, 134, 137, 200 see also emotions Serres, Michel 22, 130, 132-136, 138, 161, 172 seventeenth century 49, 86, 88, 229 Shakespeare, William see Tempest, The shipbuilding 14, 47, 159, 166 ship of Theseus 95-97 see also mereology Silverstone, Roger 205, 210 sixteenth century 41, 46, 51-52, 151, 154, 175 slavery 33, 38, 43, 50, 127 n. 304, 155 Middle Passage 165 Spain 26-27, 51-52, 54-55, 150, 163, 168, 209-210 see also Iberia Spielrein, Sabina 84 see also psychoanalysis Spinoza, Baruch 229, 232 steamships 166 Stengers, Isabelle 218 Stewart, Susan 23, 97, 193 symbiogenesis see Lynn Margulis tankers 166-168, 174 Taussig, Michael 217-218 Taylor, Mark C. 175, 208 n. 543 technology 22, 31, 47-48, 53, 58, 87, 135, 164, 166, 192-196, 201, 208-210, 214 bathymetry 150 geographic information systems (GIS) 150 sonar 135, 150 telos 20, 26, 28, 42-44, 48, 76, 158, 231 Tempest, A 43, 232 Tempest, The 43

266  Thistlegorm 196, 199, 203, 206 Titanic 204 n. 526 tombs see cemeteries tourism 164, 192, 206, 209, 211 n. 553 twentieth century 43, 57-58, 85, 149, 168, 173, 206 twenty-first century 173 uncanny 13-15, 21, 79, 98-100, 121, 123-128, 134, 137, 160, 176, 212, 215, 230 see also Freud underwater cultural heritage 14, 20, 28, 87, 171 see also heritage; UNESCO UNESCO 57-58, 85, 87, 171-172, 190-191, 196 see also heritage; underwater cultural heritage United States of America 130, 157

Shipwreck Hauntogr aphy

utopia 19, 20-21, 31, 36, 43, 48-49, 53, 57-58, 61-62, 72, 95, 116-117, 137-140, 158, 190, 196, 202-203, 227, 231 see also Garden of Eden; paradise Vasa 86-87, 206 Virilio, Paul 23, 78, 192, 209, 230 dromocracy 78-79 virtual reality 22, 190, 195, 198, 202, 204-208, 210-211, 215-216 Walcott, Derek 19-20 womb 21-22, 83, 90, 92, 102, 116, 124-126, 218, 230 see also matrix World Wars 57, 168, 192, 195, 206 Yarmouth Roads 21, 94, 104-105

Drawing on a broad theoretical range from speculative realism to feminist psychoanalysis and anti-colonialism, this book represents a radical departure from traditional scholarship on maritime archaeology. Shipwreck Hauntography asserts that nautical archaeology bears the legacy of Early Modern theological imperialism, most evident through the savior-scholar model that resurrects—physically or virtually—ships from wrecks. Instead of construing shipwrecks as dead, awaiting resurrection from the seafloor, this book presents them as vibrant if not recalcitrant objects, having shaken off anthropogenesis through varying stages of ruination. Sara Rich illustrates this anarchic condition with ‘hauntographs’ of five Age of ‘Discovery’ shipwrecks, each of which elucidates the wonder of failure and finitude, alongside an intimate brush with the eerie, horrific, and uncanny. Sara Rich is a maritime archaeologist, art historian, artist, and author of speculative fiction. She is currently Assistant Professor of Honors and Interdisciplinary Studies at Coastal Carolina University. “What would contemporary theory look like if it moved underwater? In her wonderfully written Shipwreck Hauntography, Sara Rich rewrites the history of modernity in terms of its sunken vessels. Shipwrecks are not dead masses in need of salvation, but are especially uncanny forms of living matter.” ‒ Graham Harman, Southern California Institute of Architecture

ISBN: 978-94-6372-770-9

AUP. nl 9 789463 727709