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Spring Equinox in the Maghrib: Wrecks, People, and Things in the Sea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2016

Julia Clancy-Smith
Julia Clancy-Smith*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz.; e-mail: juliac@email.arizona.edu
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Extract

In 1762, a ghost ship appeared off the Tunisian coast between Tabarka and Bizerte during the spring equinox, notorious for treacherous weather. According to a local chronicler: “Perceived in the distance was a ship with masts but no flag flying that approached the shore, then drew away. It was the month of April [1762] and unusually cold . . . the next morning, we saw the vessel veer toward land while a violent tempest raged.” Wrecked on the rocky shoreline, it funneled unimaginable wealth to pastoralists, villagers, and scavengers from far and wide. The ship proved to be without passengers or crew whose fate remains unknown until this day.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , November 2016 , pp. 750 - 753
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 ibn Yusuf, Muhammad al-Saghir, Mechra El Melki: Chronique Tunisienne du règne des fils d'Ali Turki (1705–1771), trans. Lasram, Mohammed and Serres, Victor, 2nd ed. (Tunis: Editions Bouslma, 1978 [1900]), 439 Google Scholar. The original manuscript in Arabic, titled Tarikh al-Mashraʿ al-Milki fi Saltanat Awlad ʿAli Turki, is unpublished and undated.

2 See Horden, Peregrine and Purcell, Nicholas, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000)Google Scholar; Findlen, Paula, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar; and esp. Alan Mikhail, “Anatolian Timber and Egyptian Grain: Things that Made the Ottoman Empire,” in Early Modern Things, 274–93.

3 Clancy-Smith, Julia, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2011)Google Scholar. A fuller discussion is Clancy-Smith, Julia, “Gone Missing: The Mediterranean of the Barbary Coasts,” in Re-imagining the Mediterranean, ed. Tucker, Judith (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

4 Studies on medieval and early modern Iberia, North Africa, and the Western Mediterranean have profoundly altered the narrative. Clancy-Smith, Julia, “The Middle East and North,” in The New World History: A Teacher's Companion, 2nd ed., ed. Dunn, Ross E. (Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

5 Fernand Braudel emphasized the perils of winter storms for both the Mediterranean and Black Seas. On English seafaring, see Lee, Robert, “The Seafarers’ Urban World: A Critical Review,” International Journal of Maritime History 25 (2013): 23–64 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Ward, Cheryl, “The Sadana Island Shipwreck: An Eighteenth-Century AD Merchantman off the Red Sea Coast of Egypt,” World Archaeology 32 (2001): 368–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Historians in “water studies” might consult scholarship in outlying fields. For example, Weitmeyer, Christian and Döhler, Hardi, “Traces of Roman Offshore Navigation in Skerki Bank (Strait of Sicily),” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 38 (2009): 254–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Manzella, Giuseppe M. R., “The Seasonal Variability of the Water Masses and Transport through the Strait of Sicily,” in Seasonal and Interannual Variability of the Western Mediterranean Sea, ed. La Viollette, Paul E. (Washington, D.C.: American Geophysical Union Publications, 1994), 33–45 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Muhammad al-Saghir, Tarikh, 438–41.

9 Ibid., 441–42.

10 Ibid., 441. See Saberi, Helen, Tea: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2010)Google Scholar. After the Crimean War, British tea merchants sought new markets in the western Mediterranean, introducing tea to Morocco in the 19th century. On sea foraging, see Dolin, Eric Jay, Brilliant Beacons: A History of the American Lighthouse (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016)Google Scholar.

11 Clancy-Smith, Julia, “A View from the Water's Edge: Greater Tunisia, France, and the Mediterranean before Colonialism, c. 1700–1840s,” in France and the Mediterranean in the Early Modern World, ed. Weiss, Gillian and Armstrong, Megan, special issue, French History 29 (2015): 24–30 Google Scholar.

12 Khalilieh, Hassan S., Islamic Maritime Law: An Introduction (Leiden: Brill, 1998)Google Scholar.