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

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