Consider the Shipwreck: Ten Books on Maritime Disasters and Ecological Collapse
I am a nature writer during ecocollapse. I have an incurable genetic kidney disease, polycystic kidney disease (PKD), inherited from my father, that has tracked down our family for more than one hundred and fifty years, and killed most of us before we reached fifty. After facing those twin tragedies, you’d think I’d be reading cat mysteries, romances, books about gardening. Instead, I find myself in indie bookstores looking for books about shipwrecks.
It started when I was twenty-two, the year I was diagnosed. Lost and overwhelmed with the news that I had inherited the disease that killed most of my family, I wandered up and down the east coast, visiting friends and my remaining relatives to bring them the news in person.
“Take this,” said my friend Bethany before I left, handing me a dogeared copy of Moby-Dick. “It is actually really funny.”
I devoured the book, lying in guest rooms, resting at gas stations when I got too tired. I read it sitting on my childhood beach on Long Island Sound, the place that would inspire my own book, the place that inspired my mother to become a geologist and work for the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Agency—who would, in turn, inspire me to become a nature writer.
Bethany was right. Moby-Dick was hilarious, and joyful, and queer, and a book so much about America and community and race and class and whales and the ocean that I fell helplessly in love with it and have never recovered.
Impulsively, I drove to New Bedford, Massachusetts, the historical hub of the American whaling industry and the site of the opening of Moby-Dick. I stood in the church where Ishmael worships before departure, read the preacher’s incredible sermon sitting in a pew, and cried in the room that held the grave markers for the lost sailors who have no graves but the sea. I realized how much my own lost family, my own shipwreck of a future, was universal.
There is a lot of research about how people who have experienced trauma often access media that helps them heal that trauma in a safe way. Horror movies, escape rooms, haunted houses—all of these can access some part of our limbic brain to practice the overwhelming fear in small, safe doses, so that we can heal.
I’ve come to call what I do “Practicing the Shipwreck,” or to paraphrase T.S. Garp in The World According to Garp, letting something be pre-disastered. After years of this practice of moving between the reality of disaster and the reality of repair, I have a muscle, an emotional muscle, that allows me to look at darkness, and then get back to work.
I have seen how much this helps in my life. I was told at twenty-two that I had five years before kidney failure, that I’d never have a child. I expected to die young and broke, all the books I wanted to write, all my hopes, locked up in my diagnosis. I got to work redefining what I wanted in the way of healing and support, community and the hope of survival.
And here, at fifty-three, an author and mother of a college student, my kidneys, while damaged and enormous, are still working well enough that I am not on dialysis. I have seen it at work in the Long Island Sound, where in 1987 the ecosystem was almost extirpated of all life in a mass hypoxic event, but where also, after decades of conservation, legislation, and community efforts, humpback whales were spotted in 2020.
Those of us who have survived the worst things we can imagine know well—even in the end of one’s world or the end of the world entire, there is no end. We go on. Ishmael lives to tell the tale. Our families carry forward the dead in genetics and memory and love. Our planet carries forward the lost in fossils and tracks and changes and evolution, in recalibration, and in the best-case scenarios, return.
We all need this muscle during collapses personal or ecological. We need to learn how to face the worst things that have ever happened—clear-eyed and open-hearted—and believe that we can go on. We all need to practice the shipwreck.
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Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale
This book found me, child of a hydrogeologist and a fisherman, a willing reader. I grew up in view of Monument Mountain, where Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne hiked to the top and perhaps fell in love and for sure came up with the shape of this book. It picked up where my childhood obsessions with Greenpeace, animals, the ocean, and whales specifically, left off.
Making fictional the actual events of the whaleship Essex, it is about what leads nature to enact understandable vengeance on human overreach. Full of commentary on environmental, racial, and class issues in America, it feels prescient and modern at the same moment. It is one giant shipwreck story, even if the actual shipwreck holds off until the very last moments.
And for more eloquence about why this is essential reading, pick up Nathaniel Philbrick’s book Why Read Moby-Dick? Because he says everything that I believe about why you must read this book right now.
Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea
This book taught me how to connect a shipwreck story to the people who are impacted by it. Sebastian Junger’s journalism allows for the weather history and meteorological tracking of the storm itself, it invites descriptions of the fear and intensity of the experience of the storm in action, but it also allows us to see the full web of maritime life that surrounds the storm and its consequences.
Like Moby-Dick, you understand the experiences of the sailors, and feel that you’ve followed their lives to their ends, as well as understanding their beginnings.
Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
I read this in a re-issued anniversary edition in 2015, after consuming a number of films and articles about the remarkable voyage of Earnest Shackleton. I loved the story so much—as many fans of arctic exploration do—that I named my bike Shackleton.
Endurance was the name of the ship that Shackleton took into the sea ice in his hopes to dogsled his way across the continent to the South Pole. Fortitudine vincimus, or “by endurance we conquer” was his family motto. As a person with chronic illness, the way this story invited me into claiming the dignity of endurance was a gift.
Endurance was stuck in early-forming sea ice and endured a slow-motion wreck over two years. All the while, Shackleton’s men lived inside, playing violin at night, singing for each other, and curating slide shows. The dignity and leadership that enabled Shackleton to keep all his men alive through the years-long disaster is detailed wonderfully in this book.
When I wonder how to go on through my own difficulties, this story, the violin, the portage of boats across the ice fields, the climb to rescue, comes back to me.
Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
There are many shipwrecks in this book, the ones that are caused by Captain Nemo and his Nautilus, the one that brings Ned Land and Doctor Aronnax to live with Nemo and his crew, and the possible end of the Nautilus itself, though whether that shipwreck occurs is left obscure. Mysterious shipwrecks occupy most of the beginning of this book, with dramatic descriptions of destruction and the loss of men and boats.
But the book comes to life when the survivors find themselves, through Nemo, discovering the beauties of the undersea world and the political motivations and scientific discoveries of their captor. The shipwreck reveals the complexities of worlds unseen.
Dan Kurtzman, Fatal Voyage: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis
The shipwreck in this book occurs early, a devastating result of Japanese attack on the USS Indianapolis during a battle in the Pacific theater in World War II. But the shipwreck is only the beginning of the harrowing days that follow, where sailors, having survived the sinking of their ship, floated in the wide ocean through five days of dehydration, drowning, starvation, and famously, shark attack.
A memorable scene in Jaws has Quint tell the story of what remains the largest loss of human life to shark attack in history. In the end, only 317 of the 1,196 sailors of the USS Indianapolis were rescued. This book connects those terrible statistics to individual accounts of the disaster.
Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
Isaac’s Storm is a nonfiction recounting of the Galveston hurricane of 1900, which killed twelve thousand people, the worst weather disaster in American history. I bought the bestseller on impulse in a Midway Airport bookshop on my way from Chicago to Boston to care for my father as he was dying from the kidney disease we share. I read it through on the plane, then read it again for weeks at his bedside.
It is a town-wreck, a hurricane book, but it also features ships caught in the storm at sea, ships wrecking into a city, and the heartbreaking wreck of the raft made to escape a flooding home. It conveys the science of weather, the history weather prediction, and the American politics that made the disaster worse.
It presents a fully realized world within the creative nonfiction, with recreated conversations, the heat of the Gulf Coast, the smell of fresh sawn wood, the sound of the Bavarian beer hall, the heartbreaking feeling of losing the grip of the hand of your beloved underwater.
Diana Preston, Lusitania: An Epic Disaster
I brought this book on my honeymoon with my first husband. It is an engrossing read about the sinking of the Lusitania and how that disaster struck the spark for the American entry into World War I.
Preston created an epic book, one that makes the geopolitics of the moment of the Lusitania’s sinking strikingly vivid, and helped me connect not only with the sinking, the lives lost, the people changed, but also with the events that made it seem inevitable, and the hubris and war fever surrounding it.
The marriage I was celebrating didn’t last, but the book has continued to echo in my mind for twenty years.
Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
Moby-Dick is my favorite book, and the greatest disaster novel in history, so it is no surprise that this book, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick (2000), an examination of the history of the Essex, the whaleship whose story inspired Herman Melville to write his masterpiece, is a favorite as well. I picked it up on a table of ocean books at Women and Children First Bookstore in Chicago and devoured it in one day, skipping sleep to finish it.
In the Heart of the Sea has perfectly structured storytelling and wonderful details, such as the discovery of an antique dildo in a fireplace in the former cottage of a whaler’s wife on Nantucket, an item that the people of the time referred to as a he’s-at-home.
Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
I read Rebecca Solnit’s incredible history half for comfort, and half to rewire my brain so that I understood disaster differently. The book traces five famous disasters, the 1910 San Francisco earthquake, the Halifax Explosion of 1917—technically the only shipwreck in the book, but what a shipwreck—the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, September 11, 2001, and 2005’s Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
Solnit makes the case that this story we tell, where disasters bring out the worst in people, the extreme violence, the rejection of collectivity, is a lie. The history of disasters, she argues, is one of communities built in rubble, in fear, in isolation, as people sought to protect each other, even strangers, when the worst happened. It is essential reading.
David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder
I told myself that I shouldn’t buy David Grann’s latest book. I told myself that reading about a shipwreck was not a great move while my kid was on a ship off the Grand Banks, deep in the Atlantic Ocean. But the lure was too strong, and I tore through the story of bad captaining, bad luck, bad weather, cannibalism, survival, and leadership.
I remembered that humans are still human, good and bad, in the worst of times. I felt things. I worked that muscle. I lived in the space where the worst things happen. I lived in the space where the worst things are survived. I practiced the shipwreck.
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The Mourner’s Bestiary by Eiren Caffall is available via Row House Publishing.
