“Or Vast Fiery Cross, on the Banner of Morn”: Reading the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company's Shipwrecks (2013)
Courtney, Stephen (Author)
Smith, Crosbie W. (Author)
Journal for Maritime Research: Britian, the Sea and Global History
Volume: 15, no. 2
Issue: 2
Pages: 183-203
During the nineteenth century shipwrecks served as flexible constructs through which survivors, authors, preachers, editors and proprietors could articulate shared cultural values. This article focuses on the loss of three major steamships, the Tweed, the Forth and the Amazon, all of which belonged to the prestigious Royal Mail Steam Packet Company operating mail, passenger and high-value freight services between Southampton and the Caribbean from 1841. The wreck of the Tweed on the Alacranes reef off the coast of Mexico with heavy loss of life inspired one influential survivor to shape a narrative of providential deliverance through civilising objects such as the mariner's compass and within the liturgical framework of the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer, a copy of which had actually been rescued from the wreckage. The loss of the Forth on the same reef two years later, however, produced a far more conventional account of masculine heroism in the face of seemingly impossible circumstances. But it was the sudden destruction of the Amazon by fire on her maiden voyage that inspired sermons not only of deliverance but of eschatological warnings of the end of time itself. These dramatic narratives transformed loss of life and property at sea into powerful cultural symbols of empire and religion that transcended the material disintegration. The once-proud steamers thus become the ideological sites of enduring contests between civilisation and chaos, light and darkness, and life and death. Concomitantly, a cultural history that reasserts human agency challenges historical patterns that impose predetermined direction on shipwrecks simply as instances of technological inadequacy, economic mismanagement or human error.
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