Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World

By Josiah Blackmore, Julio Baena, Carmen Hsu and 4 more

Seafaring activity for trade and travel was dominant throughout the Spanish Empire, and in the worldview and imagination of its inhabitants, the specter of shipwreck loomed large. Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World probes this preoccupation by examining portrayals of nautical disasters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature and culture. The essays collected here showcase shipwreck’s symbolic deployment to question colonial expansion and transoceanic trade; to critique the Christian enterprise overseas; to signal the collapse of dominant social order; and to relay moral messages and represent socio-political debates. The contributors find examples in poetry, theater, narrative fiction, and other print artifacts, and approach the topic variously through the lens of historical, literary, and cultural studies. Ultimately demonstrating how shipwrecks both shaped and destabilized perceptions of the Spanish Empire worldwide, this analytically rich volume is the first in Hispanic studies to investigate the darker side of mercantile and imperial expansion through maritime disaster.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Jan 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781684483723

Book preview

Introduction

Carrie L. Ruiz and Elena Rodríguez-Guridi

Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World focuses on the portrayal of nautical disasters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature and culture and addresses the ways in which the shipwreck motif is inscribed in a larger imaginary that stems from a specific social milieu related to maritime expansion, mercantile interests, and warfare. Indeed, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represent the epoch that revolved most heavily around the seafaring enterprise in the history of the Hispanic world. At this peak of maritime activity, the shipwreck motif permeated the entire sociocultural environment. Within this context, the chapters in this book explore the reformulation of the literary tradition of the shipwreck topos within the specific milieu of the Spanish Empire to offer a more global picture of the early modern colonial enterprise. These studies reveal how the symbolic implications of the shipwreck thematic motif operate at multiple levels to question imperial expansion and transoceanic trade, comment on the Christian enterprise overseas, and symbolize the collapse of the dominant social order. The implementation of this motif frequently serves to problematize imperial discourse, but it also functions as a didactic tool to transmit moral messages as well as to reflect the sociopolitical debates of the time. In sum, we contend that shipwreck is a central element in the epistemology of the era. As such, it offers a rich and complex perspective on the fertile oceanic culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that merits an in-depth analytical approach. Moreover, this volume comes in a timely manner as we commemorate the five-hundred-year anniversary of the first circumnavigation of the globe by Juan Sebastián Elcano and Ferdinand Magellan. This is an opportune moment to explore the role of shipwreck and all of its interstices in Spanish early modern cultural productions.

Despite the centrality of maritime trade and expansion in the Hispanic world during this period and the significance of the ocean in Western art and literature, relatively little has been published on this theme in relation to the Spanish Empire and its transoceanic enterprise. To the best of our knowledge, until now no book-length publication has analyzed the significance of shipwreck in the field of Hispanic studies; existing works explore nautical catastrophes in early modern texts from England, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal. Although sections of the Netherlands, and all of Portugal, were indeed part of the Spanish Empire until the middle of the seventeenth century, the available publications focus on Dutch and Portuguese cultural products and do not analyze texts written in Spanish. Consequently, the literature leaves a gap in Iberian early modern studies, since the maritime disaster theme is examined only through the lusophone lens.

The importance of the shipwreck motif in Spanish textual production has been undervalued, but we contend that its impact marks an entire era that can be designated as the Naufragocene, the Age of Shipwrecks.¹ As such, its pervasiveness in multiple spheres of life and culture demands a macroanalytical approach that places the shipwreck theme at the center of discourse rather than as a disconnected literary, cultural, and historical instance. To do full justice to its pivotal role, we deem a comprehensive approach as most suitable to understanding shipwreck’s numerous ideological parameters. This book therefore explores the significance of shipwreck in a variety of cultural products such as theatrical plays, poetry, narrative, and chronicles. The many textual documents examined encompass multiple geographical regions of the Spanish Empire comprising the American and Asian maritime routes. In order to provide an in-depth study of early modern Spanish epistemology around the shipwreck phenomenon and its multifaceted nature, this volume’s contributors adopt a variety of analytical perspectives from history, literature, and cultural studies.

These essays are informed by a number of seminal works on the theme of nautical disaster. The most influential of these has been Josiah Blackmore’s cultural and historiographical examination of the Portuguese shipwreck narratives compiled by Bernardo Gomes de Brito in História Trágico-Marítima (1735–1736). Blackmore’s monograph Manifest Perdition engages issues of colonialism, historiography, and literary theory to depict how Portuguese shipwreck narratives serve to undermine expansionist endeavors.² Moreover, his work stimulated a reemergence of interest in the topic of nautical wreckage across early modern European studies, resulting in such books as Carl Thompson’s Shipwreck in Art and Literature and James Morrison’s Shipwrecked, which take a panoramic approach to the topic in different cultural expressions ranging from the Odyssey to contemporary popular culture.³ In Shipwreck Modernity, Steve Mentz examines the shipwreck metaphor in literature and culture from the perspective of environmental studies and within the backdrop of English maritime expansion. These admirable and comprehensive works include a wide array of periods, geographical areas, and artistic expressions, but they do not consider the rich shipwreck examples manifested in the Spanish realm.

The aforementioned publications echo the influential study of shipwreck by Hans Blumenberg in his canonical work Shipwreck with Spectator, which delineates the development of a logos pertaining to the sea, nautical disaster, and the role of the spectator vis-à-vis violent encounters with the ocean from ancient times through the nineteenth century.⁴ Blumenberg points out that the inception of theoretical notions around nautical disaster originated in classical writings, particularly in their use of rhetorical devices. Similarly, some of the chapters in this volume analyze the application of rhetorical topoi of nautical wreckage and its reformulation to critique sociohistorical aspects of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish milieu. Regarding the treatment of these nautical topoi, Boris Dunsch, in " ‘Describe nunc tempestatem’: Sea Storm and Shipwreck Type Scenes in Ancient Literature," traces the development of shipwreck and sea storm imagery through ancient Greek and Latin culture, especially its significance in relation to rhetorical conventions.⁵ Among these, the subgenre of speech of the psogos nautilias and the device of poetica tempestas are elements whose influence continued to be felt in the seventeenth century but was fed from their articulation in ancient and medieval times. Yet in spite of stemming from older formulations, these rhetorical devices engaged different ideological purposes. Whereas in earlier time periods nautical wreckage had a direct correlation with the wrath of God as divine punishment, in the Spanish Golden Age it acquired different connotations—namely, offering sociopolitical commentary.

As the chapters in this volume elucidate, the multiple expressions that arise in conjunction with the shipwreck motif are informed by a variety of ideological criteria that differ from those of previous eras. Chapter 1, by Carrie L. Ruiz, situates the maritime enterprise within a sociohistorical and literary framework. Beyond this context, Ruiz explores shipwreck as a metaphor for the voyage of life and the turbulent waters of fortune in relation to the actions and emotions of the literary characters in María de Zayas’s Tarde llega el desengaño. Moreover, nautical catastrophe in this work is connected to such notions as reason, madness, gender, and identity, ultimately signaling the decline of the nobility and the empire.

Chapters 2 and 3, by Julio Baena and Elena Rodríguez-Guridi, respectively, further analyze the role of the nautical disaster as examined in the literary production of Iberia. In particular, Baena and Rodríguez-Guridi highlight how the generic peculiarities and literary features of seventeenth-century texts, such as Miguel de Cervantes’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha and Luis de Góngora’s Soledades, serve to mine imperial notions of conquest. As both authors indicate, the shipwreck event sets into motion an irreversible process of territorialization by seeking to encompass spatial totality, but this process negates any narrative or historical progression.

Chapters 4 and 5, by Natalio Ohanna and Fernando Rodríguez Mansilla, delve into the polemics and diverse discourses in relation to the colonial enterprise in the New World, considering important moral debates of the early modern period through a transatlantic lens as a means to comment on and reconcile the multiple conflicting stances around such topics as moral truth, colonial domination, pauperism, and labor. Through the study of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios, Ohanna and Rodríguez Mansilla demonstrate how the inscription of the shipwreck narrative within the realm of the Americas triggers an inversion of power dynamics between conquerors and the conquered that impacts sociopolitical debates in Castile.

In chapter 6 Carmen Hsu examines Antonio Enríquez Gómez’s play Fernán Méndez Pinto, in which China functions as a mirror of contemporaneous political dynamics of the Iberian Peninsula rather than as commentary on the Asian enterprise. The book closes with two chapters that do focus on the colonial enterprise in Asia, in particular on the failure of such endeavor as seen through historiographical chronicles and missionary accounts. Both Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez (in chapter 7) and Noemí Martín Santo (in chapter 8) reveal the precariousness of the Spanish Empire in the geographical realm of the Philippines and Japan. As seen through the religious and political texts they study, it becomes apparent that the shipwreck event forecasts the end of the empire. The following paragraphs summarize each chapter in turn.

In chapter 1, Turbulent Waters: Shipwreck in María de Zayas’s ‘Tarde llega el desengaño,’ Ruiz analyzes the symbolic value of the shipwreck motif in Zayas’s seventeenth-century novella. Establishing a rich sociohistorical and literary context of the notion of nautical disaster, she examines the significance of the implementation of this trope throughout all fictional frames of the short story. The chapter demonstrates how the nautical theme becomes a rhetorical means to express the correlation between literal and metaphoric collapses of power that occur among all of the story’s masculine characters. Consequently, the shipwreck motif serves Zayas’s ideological purpose, which is twofold: first, to point to the flaws of the nobility, and second, to question patriarchal order. By tying shipwreck to the masculine realm of human folly and uncontrolled emotions—such as lust, rage, and madness—Ruiz proposes that the narrative points to the inversion of the natural order, which is linked to the decline of the nobility. Furthermore, the chapter exposes how the shipwreck element inverts the economy of power, since the patriarchal order collapses and causes harm. Ultimately, the shipwreck metaphor functions within overarching notions of gender and empire.

Baena, in chapter 2, Two Small and Two Large Imperial Shipwrecks by Miguel de Cervantes and Luis de Góngora, uses Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s fundamental opposition between history and nomadology as a starting point to analyze the shipwreck scenes in Cervantes’s Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, the second part of El Quijote, and Góngora’s Soledades and Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea. Baena argues that shipwreck symbolizes the totalitarian domination, or the dream of totality, to which the Spanish Empire aspires, but that it contains the seeds of its own destruction. He postulates that the colonial enterprise culminates the process of striation of the sea (smooth space par excellence) in a totality that terminates the empire by turning it into a smoothed space. Thus, shipwreck is the event that submerges the striated space of domination by conquest, cartography, commerce, or (hi)story into the smooth and nomadic space of the sea—that is, into an ahistorical, atemporal, mapless movement.

In chapter 3, "The Reader as Castaway: Problematics of Reading Soledades by Luis de Góngora," Rodríguez-Guridi studies the function of the reader of Góngora’s Soledades as a shipwreck victim and the act of reading as analogous to the survivor’s struggle to conquer a new land. Beginning with Blackmore’s critical remarks about the shipwreck text as a counterhistoriographic narrative of imperialism, Rodríguez-Guridi proposes that the hardship and disorientation the castaway experiences across the geographical hostility and unfamiliarity of the territory are reenacted in the reader’s trajectory through the complicated language of the silva. The redundant and pointless itinerary of the reader in the conquest of the textual landscape delays the progression of the narrative and the development of a coherent discourse of territorial domination. Readers, constantly cast upon the discursive shores, must reconfigure their intellectual associations indefinitely, allowing other voices into the narrative. Fundamentally, Rodríguez-Guridi advocates that the reading process of Soledades exposes alternative historical interpretations to the empire’s propaganda of colonial expansion.

Ohanna, in chapter 4, "On Moral Truth and the Controversy over the Amerindians: The Relación (1542) by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca," examines the shipwreck narrative of Cabeza de Vaca in regard to historical discourses of moral truth and the colonization of America. Parting from the shipwreck narrative as an account that inverts the relationship between dominators and the dominated, the conquest is stripped from its epic quality and destabilizes common notions in which coercion was rationalized. Ohanna argues that Cabeza de Vaca solves the paradoxical dilemma of how to fuse spiritual conquest with material gain and expansion without falling prey to doctrinal contradictions. The experience as castaway allows Cabeza de Vaca to position his narrative as an experiential account in which the humanity of Native Americans comes to the forefront and preconceptions are revealed as inaccurate constructions. Ohanna postulates that the account cannot be extricated from its social milieu in which colonial power clashes with the moral reservations of the church. In this light the shipwreck narrative, rather than setting the stage to question the colonial enterprise, allows Cabeza de Vaca to position himself as an example of the peaceful evangelizer. Therefore, the conflict between the colonizing endeavor of the crown and the moral concerns of the church is reconciled through this figure.

In chapter 5, "The Discourse of Poverty in Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios," Rodríguez Mansilla also analyzes the complex nature of Cabeza de Vaca’s text by placing it at the crux of contemporaneous social and religious debates on pauperism. For Rodríguez Mansilla, the entire text should be interpreted as an allegorical voyage in which shipwreck acquires a positive connotation. As such, the shipwreck experience paves the way to find redemption of the body and soul and to acquire the king’s favor to embark on another conquest. In this sense, Rodríguez Mansilla contends that Naufragios is indeed a shipwreck narrative that arises from a larger debate on poverty, holiness, and manual labor. The nautical catastrophe permits a destabilization of social parameters and an inversion of social status as the conqueror turns into a pobre vergonzante. Rodríguez Mansilla points to the pervasiveness of this paradigm in other chronicles of the New World. Shipwreck becomes a springboard to allow the noble to demonstrate ingenious survival methods (i.e., manual labor) to avoid hunger. By establishing this model, Cabeza de Vaca merges two opposite sides of the peninsular debate on poverty in order to secure the favor of the crown: the legitimacy of the beggar as holy, and the value of work to climb out of poverty. Hence, the nautical metaphor is in fact a metaphor for notions of social identity.

Hsu, in chapter 6, "Shipwreck, Exile, and Political Critique in Fernán Méndez Pinto (1631) by Antonio Enríquez Gómez," further explores the image of the castaway as a means to reflect on political dynamics of the seventeenth-century Spanish court and society—in particular, on the figure of the valido and the position of the conversos. Hsu reveals how the theme of shipwreck and the subsequent vicissitudes of Gómez’s main character construe a political allegory to implicitly critique Philip IV’s reign and the practice of favoritism. Hsu asserts that although the play is set in the Chinese court in Beijing, it does not present itself as a commentary on the Iberian presence in Asia but instead as a reflection of seventeenth-century Spanish society. Laden with nautical metaphors of catastrophe that link existence to the changes of fortune, Gómez’s play projects the theme of disillusionment and cautions against attempting success abroad because, in spite of achievement and loyalty, misfortune is ever present. Simultaneously, Hsu postulates how the figure of the castaway and the plot of the play reflect the difficulties that the author himself confronted as a converso.

In chapter 7, The Manila Galleon Shipwrecks: Writing Crisis and Decline in the Spanish Global Empire, Rodríguez-Rodríguez examines the role of maritime catastrophe in two central texts in seventeenth-century Filipino historiography—namely, Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las islas Filipinas and Franciso Colín’s Labor evangélica—that present the archipelago as a failed colonial project foretelling the deterioration of the Spanish Empire. Rodríguez-Rodríguez stresses that shipwrecks were a much more common occurrence on the Manila Galleon Trade Route than in other parts of the liquid space of the empire due to great geographical and climatic obstacles. The ever-present threat of shipwreck fomented the sense of isolation and the adverse image of this colony. Rodríguez-Rodríguez further explains that the nautical wreckages had a larger impact on this colony than in other realms of the empire, since the entire economy of the islands depended on the successful journey of galleons between Acapulco and Manila. Therefore, the shipwreck accounts that prevailed in the political and religious writings of the Spaniards in the Philippines represent a fracture in the colonial discourse and underscore the fragility of the entire colonial enterprise in