Maritime Disasters and Collective Identities: Surviving Shipwreck in Early Modern Portugal

• DOI: 10.1353/hpn.2020.0114
• Publication Date: 2020-12-20T14:01:13Z
• Authors: Estela Vieira
• Keywords: Expansionism; Plural

This article focuses on one of the twelve Portuguese shipwreck narratives collected by historian Bernardo Gomes de Brito in História trágico-marítima (1735–36), Naufrágio que passou Jorge Albuquerque Coelho, capitão, e governador Pernambuco (1601). Several features make this account unique. Unlike majority shipwrecks which occur off southeastern African coast, maritime disaster takes place Atlantic. Furthermore, narrative's title refers to its captain and not name carrack, ironically never completely shipwrecks, but just barely survives arduous journey. Building Josiah Blackmore's reading these sixteenth- seventeenth-century accounts as symptomatic "a counter-historiographic impulse official textual culture imperialism," I explore how story survival rupture, while striving represent subjectivity, fact, disrupts country's expansionist rhetoric pointing instead emergence collective identities. The essay explores ways narrative interrogates individualization or subjectivization processes reflected rhetorically text. formal stylistic practices at play show disasters unsettle early modern conceptualizations subjective ontological experiences reflect a plural framework thought.