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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 July 2022
Abstract
Nautical archaeologists act as architects of ruins as they rebuild ships from wrecks. Architectural salvation from demonic depths appeals to two aspects of the Early Modern legacy: God as Divine Architect and the restoration of Edenic utopia from dystopia. This chapter considers the uncanny encounters between scholar and shipwreck that must precede archaeological resurrection. Ships are reengineered with information negotiated from the wreckage underwater, yet submersion dulls or nullifies each of the five senses classically used in scientific enquiry. The concept of dystopian phenomenology explains how archaeological knowledge of shipwrecks is acquired underwater. Recollections of ‘visitations’ to a wrecked sixteenth-century galleon in Ribadeo, Spain inform a phantasmal sensory approach to help unveil the elusive ontology of shipwrecks.
Keywords: uncanny; sensorium; abjection; matrixial borderspace; maritime archaeology; Ribadeo galleon
Delirium of language, the boldest navigators. With their hulls and sails, don't they want to take possession of her depths? … How needy and suppliant they are in this moment. How afraid they are the sea will swallow them up. How unprepared they find themselves to face this unchaining of natural forces. And what good is all their seamanship if the sea refuses to submit to it? What good is their language if there is nothing and no one to appeal to?
As functionally liminal works of architecture, traditional sailing ships hold a special place within the human imaginary. Envisioning a ship disappearing into the horizon is to envision standing on the threshold between life and death. All ships, like all other bodies, eventually fail, and only a small fraction of those broken vessels becomes subject to scientific enquiry. Like intrepid, colonizing seafarers on a ‘heart-of-darkness journey into the watery, mineral uterus of Mother Earth’, nautical archaeologists act soteriologically as architects of ruins in their attempts to rebuild ships from shipwrecks. This act of architectural salvation, this mimicry of creatio ex profundis, is presented here as the fusion of two Christological concepts: firstly, that of God as Divine Architect, a popular Medieval trope revitalized within Protestantism by John Calvin in 1536; and secondly, the utopian reconstruction of the Holy City after the utter annihilation of the sea, as described in the book of Revelation.
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