Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of Discovery, Simon Park, Viking, £25

Winslow Homer (1836-1910), the great American Realist painter, is best remembered for his depictions of seascapes and maritime calamities, especially The Life Line (1884) portraying heaving waves and the rescue of two figures from a stricken ship. It is the fierce spectacle of nature doing its worst that appealed to the poets, just as it is the same for us who stand spellbound before dramatic artworks. Perhaps the magnetism of disaster taps into something crueller, too: the fact that catastrophe is just so much more enticing, irresistible even, to witness than success. It is a notion present in Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of Discovery by Simon Park, Associate Professor in Medieval and Renaissance Portuguese at Oxford.

In Wreckers, Park attempts to sink a few long-accepted derring-do narratives of empire-building during the Age of Discovery, from the 15th to 17th centuries. To do this, he sets his sights on particular individuals who – bedeviled by greed and dreams to determine the world agenda – set out on the high waves. Many suffered serious ordeals. They were stranded, kidnapped or ended up as wrecked as their ships, washed up ‘on the coasts of the Americas, Asia or Africa not as triumphant conquistadores but as castaways clinging to the splintered timbers of wrecks’. If they succeeded, then it was usually thanks to local knowledge and goodwill.

By concentrating on the less-told personal stories of humiliations and unfortunate outcomes – rather than popular grandiose histories – Park hopes that a more realistic picture of these ‘maritime moths lured by the trading beacons of other continents’ will emerge and that then the empire might too ‘lose some of its might’. It is an exciting premise.

The opener sets the tone by explaining how Colombus ‘failed on his own terms, going to the grave claiming America was China’, and then we are off with one of the ten grandes portugueses, the nobleman Vasco da Gama who led the first European ship to reach India by sailing round the southern tip of Africa. He’d been selected by King Manuel to lead the 1497 expedition. Less understood is that Da Gama was woefully ill-prepared, with his experience amounting to skippering a small expedition five years prior in well-known waters; as Park points out, this was hardly adequate practice for a voyage to India. A litany of crises unfolds as they make their journey, by St Helena’s Bay (in modern South Africa), for example, they are attacked with spears yet incredibly had no weapons to fight back with.

On the voyage, the mariners would erect crosses and pillars made of stone, called padrões, to mark how far they’d come. These were symbolic markers, and latitudes were measured, but more tellingly these pillars were the ‘sixteenth-century version of a flag on the moon’. When they sailed away from Mossel Bay (also in modern South Africa), locals tore the padrão down. Mozambique, a Portuguese colony until the 1970s, was a disaster. When trying to take on water, Da Gama suspected a trap was being set and overreacted by pummelling locals with canons for hours, the Portuguese then stole from nearby boats and took prisoners. In Mombasa, the seafarers faced daily subterfuge and took more captives who they believed could help them with local knowledge. Da Gama wanted to be guided, he wanted help. As Park drily notes: ‘He would prefer to be shown the way rather than discover it for himself.’

On their return, King Manuel declared the mission a success. Less spoken of was the fact it was a Gujarati pilot that helped the vessel with navigating the final 4,000 kilometres of Indian Ocean, a crossing that meant a new era in world history and yet one that received just a single sentence in the surviving ship’s log.

It was historians, kings and poets who retrospectively made Da Gama into a hero but Park reframes these histories by acknowledging that, while he did achieve something unprecedented (with lots of help), he was essentially an opportunist, and one who was keen on hostage-taking.

Other mariners were even more woeful. We meet Martin Frobisher, the English colonist who had great ambitions to be the ‘Columbus of Albion’ and set off looking for the North-West Passage (the seaway linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans), a key trading route. On his first voyage, Frobisher reached Resolution Island, believing it to be the entrance to the passage. Instead, he discovered a bay on the south of Baffin Island, now known as Frobisher Bay. On this trip, Inuit kidnapped five of his men, who were never seen again. He made three attempts in all but, just like Vasco da Gama, he returned with less than he’d hoped. Much time was spent in collecting what he thought was gold ore but turned out to be valueless rock, or fool’s gold, or iron pyrites, shiny brassy cubic crystals.

We then meet an entirely different voyager, Marguerite de Roberval, from La Rochelle, who having witnessed the French fishing fleets returning with hulls filled with cod packed in salt caught in the North Atlantic, imagined a New France across the ocean. Women are not often featured as part of the Age of Discovery story yet hers is a particularly fascinating one.

In 1582, she embarked with her relative and guardian (following the death of her parents), Jean-François de La Rocque, Sieur de Roberval, who had been chosen as captain by King François I to colonise Canada. That wasn’t all; she also boarded with a secret lover. Her belief was that in ‘New France’ the couple may be useful as the colony would need children for it to survive. It was a time of fierce competition between Portugal, Spain and France for laying claim to faraway lands, and, eager to get on with it, Roberval recruited a motley crew of convicts and set sail in the spring of 1542. Almost immediately, winds buffeted them back to shore, and they anchored there, waiting for the storm to pass, just off the Breton coast.

Once at sea, Park paints a brilliantly amusing and colourful portrait of life on a ship which was merely 25 metres long. For Marguerite and her lover, the confines of the ship did not allow ‘their passion much space’ and he describes them descending down to the cargo holds for privacy amid the snorting livestock, barrels and sacks. While their love affair advanced, provisions grew grim and were blighted by weevils. Meanwhile, rumours circulated like rats about the lovers, and this was hard on Roberval: ‘Chastity was a prize and a virtue in those days and reputation was everything. A liaison between a woman of his family and a passenger sullied both.’ What happens next is pure Hollywood.

Towards the shore of Labrador, a seemingly uninhabited island was sighted. The captain told Marguerite to enjoy the space and air before they set off again for their final destination. She and her lover went in a rowing boat along with her relative and some crew. A while later, the men pushed the rowing boat back into the water and abandoned her. A ‘brutal surprise’ and the only consolation being that the couple no longer had to hide their affections. Months later on the island, she gives birth, and survived, but the baby died and then her lover did, too. Wolverines sniffed around their graves at night, which she defended. She turned to the only thing she had left, God, and hoped for a miracle. As she survived on her wits, drinking rain gathered in pools and fishing, Roberval’s colony succumbed to scurvy. Eventually, she was miraculously rescued and returned to France. Some say she endured the island for a year, others say two. Her story in this book is incredible and in Park’s hands it comes grippingly alive, as he concludes, ‘she usurped the narrative space of the swashbucklers… but, in the end, did not become another casualty of their actions’.

Park’s decision to write this book was fired, he explains, by how alive, and stormy, these histories are today. The afterlives of these events are currently being ‘vigorously renegotiated’ across the globe. The term hurricane comes to us via Spanish, Park writes in his introduction, from the word hurakán – ‘god of the storms’ in the language of the Taíno people of the Caribbean. ‘The word’s etymology is a little trace of something that comes from outside Europe, and beyond its control, to rock the boat.’ It is satisfying that Park’s excellent new book, too, acts as a disrupter for these long-accepted histories.