4 - Vibrant Corpses

Summary

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 purification. 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?

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’. And thus its methods of cloning colonial footprints are also innovative. Shipwreck detection mechanisms have, until now, always been waterborne: divers, 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.

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.