Cbr18 Bingo – Map: the book includes maps of the area. It talks about mapping colonialism narratives. And it’s about people who definitely used maps on the ships.
Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific by Coll Thrush is about an area in the Pacific Northwest where thousands of boats have wrecked because of weather and geography conditions. But the book isn’t about climate, it’s about people.
With colonialism comes ships. And with ships, come shipwrecks. Thrush writes about indigenous people being blamed for the deaths of people who probably died in shipwrecks, about claiming flotsam and jetsam (finders keepers!), and about how shipwrecks and ‘savage’ captivity narratives go together like peanut butter and jelly. Or breaking and entering.
He covers water disasters from ships romantically lost at sea to unromantic oil spills. Talk about shipwrecks need to include what the ship was doing in the first place – skinning animals for their fur or deforestation or commerce.
He also talks about ghosts.
The book was obviously written by an academic. Almost ⅕ of the book is citations and notes. It pushed my tired after-work brain to think instead of just consume. It took a while for me to get used to his writing.
To meet the word minimum, I’ll add that I was drawn to this book for absolutely no reason. I don’t care about boats. I like creepy things and history, but there is no shortage of creepy dry history. I don’t even know if I liked it, but I’m happy I read it.
