‘Shipwreckful’ Afterlives

This chapter examines the dynamics of shipwreck as played out in Renaissance travel writing. Through a reading of the work of Jean de Léry and the lesser-known Jean-Arnaud Bruneau de Rivedoux, it shows how in eyewitness or recently passed-on first-hand accounts of shipwreck, very real events were marked and shaped by the conventions established earlier in the century by allegorical, fictional and polemic shipwreck texts. But the extreme conditions of (actual) shipwreck place great strain on these otherwise persistent tropes, and both Léry’s and Bruneau’s Histoires generate new incarnations of once-familiar figures. Léry, for example, offers both a conventional narration of the storm at sea modelled on Psalm 107 and Erasmus’s ‘Naufragium’, and, later, several rearranged versions that point to the limitations of proverbial, classical, and biblical commonplace in such extraordinary circumstances. These texts, both written by Reformists intent on foregrounding their empirical approach, present the most forceful vindications of sea travel of all the texts studied here. While they describe vividly and often distressingly the suffering endured by seafarers and the victims of shipwreck, they also emphasise the value of such experience, and its power to affect even those who are spectators to it from dry land.