SHIPWRECKS

Advertiser, Newark. 1846. SHIPWRECKS ON THE NEW JERSEY COAST. The Catholic Telegraph (1831-1846). Sep 24,

 

https://search.proquest.com/docview/89990159?accountid=14512 (accessed October 30, 2018).

 

This newspaper article from 1846 discusses many different New Jersey shipwrecks below Sandy hook light, the location of where many shipwrecks have occurred on record. The article further details the types of cargo that the ships were carrying, many of which were food items like lime and strawberries. Contextually, this newspaper article is relevant because it provides an accurate report of the current/tide conditions that have caused many of the ships to capsize. This source is important to our thesis because it makes mention of a “mysterious tide” that has struck in a specific location, which is worth investigating so that we have a better understanding of whether majority of our shipwrecks occur in the same location due to the same cause.

 

Dewey, Christopher Todd. 2013. “A Tale of Two Shipwrecks: U. S. Steamer Convoy and Confederate Schooner William H. Judah.” Thesis, Ann Arbor: MAI 52/02M(E), Masters Abstracts International. The University of West Florida.

 

Dewey, Christopher. A Tale of Two Shipwrecks: The US Steamer Convoy and the Confederate Schooner William H. Judah. LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, 2013.

 

https://search.proquest.com/docview/1436292561?accountid=14512.

 

This 2013 paper discusses the U. S. Steamer Convoy that burned and sank in Pensacola Pass in March 1866 and the search for the Confederate Schooner William H. Judah that suffered a similar fate in the same spot five years later. The result of this research is a comprehensive examination of the cultural and natural forces that created Convoy's contemporary wreck site, definitively addressing a local folklore tradition regarding the wrecks' collocation. The paper might be significant to our thesis due to its exploration of possible causes for a shipwreck site location and its environment.

 

Duru, Okan. "Theory of shipping productivity revisited: Industrial revolution, ship technology and shipping freight rates." In The 74th Conference of Japan Society of History of Economic Thought, Toyama. 2010.

 

http://jshet.net/docs/conference/74th/duru.pdf
 

This paper explores the transformation of shipping productivity from the 18th century into the 20th century. It is significant because it analyzes all of the factors that affect the productivity of maritime economics in terms of technological advancements, ship rates, and also external events that were relevant in the time period. For our thesis, this resource is important because it is necessary to examine all factors that could have potentially affected the ship capacity during the latter 19th century. By understanding the capacity in relation to external variables, we can better understand the purpose and result of each voyage.

 

Elinder, Mikael, and Oscar Erixson. "Gender, social norms, and survival in maritime disasters." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 33 (2012): 13220-13224.

 

http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/109/33/13220.full.pdf

 

This article examines how women and children fare in shipwrecks compared to men, given that the social norm of “women and children first” clearly made an impact on survival in the Titanic shipwreck. However, evidence from a database of 18 other maritime disasters between 1852 and 2012 demonstrates that the survival rate of women is, on average, only about half that of men. Additionally, crewmembers have a survival advantage compared to passengers. This resource is important because it demonstrates where there may be silences in primary source data that we find, as men may give most recounts, and the female bias will thus be lost. This resource impacts our project because it not only allows us to acknowledge these silences in our data, but also has led me to wonder more about the ratio of crewmembers to passengers and how that may impact the number of lives lost, providing us with more ways we can visualize and understand our dataset. 

 

A FRIEND, OF COMMERCE. "NAVIGATION.: Why Are So Many Ships Lost?" New York Daily Times (1851-1857), Jul 21, 1854.

 

https://search.proquest.com/docview/95824784?accountid=14512.

 

This article examines the reason why so many ships are wrecking and being lost off the coast of New Jersey.  The evidence includes detailed accounts of the various factors which affect ships at sea.  The article goes on to discuss deficiencies in current shipping habits, and instances where there can be improvements in efficiency.  The article finishes by discussing various remedies, their perceived effectiveness, and the path to implementation.  This source is important because it provides a comprehensive overview of the multitude of factors in the early 1850s causing so many frequent shipwrecks.  For our thesis, the aggregate information will be invaluable, as this source provides primary information related specifically to the time period we are studying.

 

Goerlandt, Floris, and Pentti Kujala. "On the reliability and validity of ship–ship collision risk analysis in light of different perspectives on risk." Safety science 62 (2014): 348-365.

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925753513002191

 

This article analyzes variables that may affect the risk of ship-ship collisions through a quantitative perspective. The piece is important because it defines and categorizes what factors are considered risky to lead to the event of a ship collision. This resource narrows down the scope of the factor that is most significant to understanding ship collisions in relation to the other factors. It illuminates the need for understanding the maritime route of the voyage because it presents the fact that the voyage area is important to why many collisions happen. It also reveals that the quantitative factors aren’t always most reliable, because they’re complementary to many of the qualitative factors that may result in ship collisions.

 

"JOHN SCOTT RUSSELL ON IRON-CLAD SHIPS." Scientific American 7, no. 9 (1862):134-35.

 

http://www.jstor.org/stable/24964133.

 

This article, by John Scott Russell in 1862, is a testimony to the invention of the ironclad ship. It important because it presents another new piece of technology that developed during our time period. The ironclad ship was created especially for the purposes of defense in wartime, and so wrecks (or lack thereof) during the American Civil War could have been influenced by this new technology.

 

Keller, Reuben P., John M. Drake, Mark B. Drew, and David M. Lodge. "Linking environmental conditions and ship movements to estimate invasive species transport across the global shipping network." Diversity and Distributions 17, no. 1 (2011): 93-102.

 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1472-4642.2010.00696.x

 

This paper breaks connects environmental conditions and ship movements to explain how species are transported along the global shipping network. It is significant because it shows how interconnected the world is in terms of maritime transportation of not only physical factors, but others as well. In the paper, there is a portion that illustrates how ports around the world are connected, and that helps give us a better understanding of how concentrated primary ports are along the east coast, and where ships may be headed afterwards.

 

"THE LIFE-SAVING SERVICE." New York Observer and Chronicle (1833-1912) 55, no. 3 (Jan 18, 1877): 22.

 

https://search.proquest.com/docview/136229388?accountid=14512.

 

This is an article from the January 1877 edition of the New York Observer and Chronicle that features an excerpt about the Life-Saving Service. This resource is important because it explains how the start of the Life-Saving Service (Coast Guard) in 1877 greatly reduced the fatality and loss of property in shipwrecks. The article specifically helps our thesis work because it can serve as a possible explanation to why the number of shipwrecks peaked and suddenly began to decrease around this time. It will also be interesting to see if our data reflects the same assertions made by the Life-Saving Service about the decrease in shipwreck fatalities and property lost.

 

Moaleji, Reza, and Alistair R. Greig. "On the Development of Ship Anti-roll Tanks." Ocean Engineering 34, no. 1 (2007): 103-21.

 

https://www.engr.mun.ca/~bachmayer/engr6055/assignments/reading-assignments/roll_control.pdf.

 

This article analyzes the invention and development of ship anti-roll tanks in the 1880s. This is important because this technology was specifically produced in order to keep ships upright, and prevent them from the capsizing. Our data shows that the 1880s decade occured right before a steep drop-off in the number of wrecks, and so this technology could provide partial causation for this phenomena.

 

North, Douglass. "Ocean Freight Rates and Economic Development 1750-1913." The Journal of Economic History 18, no. 4 (1958): 537-55.

 

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2114547

 

This article discusses the impact of declining freight rates on economic development, and argues that the decline in freight rates led to lower cost of goods, thus fueling economic development. The author uses freight rate indexes and comparisons in the price of wheat and timber by location and year to describe these differences and their impact on the economy in various locations. This resource is important because it provides a good description of the economic climate between 1850 and 1900 and gives insight as to the outside pressures that may have impacted ships during that time. This resource supports our thesis because it provides more evidence that the shipping climate changed between 1850 and 1900, including the increase in coal trade (based on visualizing our data, most ships that wrecked during this period were carrying coal), decline in freight cost just before our period of interest (potentially leading to more ships being built), increased utilization of ships, improved knowledge of winds and currents, and technological changes in sail and steam.

 

Owen, John Roger. “‘Give Me a Light:’ The Development and Regulation of Ships’ Navigation Lights up to the Mid-1860s.” International Journal of Maritime History 25, no. 1 (June 1, 2013): 173–203.

 

https://doi.org/10.1177/084387141302500109.

 

This resource is a research article that provides a detailed background on the development of navigation lights in the nineteenth century, leading up to the 1860s. It is important because not only do navigation lights have a strong correlation to shipwrecks, but the correlation is discussed within the article itself. The laws put in place during this time period that required ships to have lights could have affected the number of wrecks observed. Many of the causes of this shipwrecks in our dataset were due to collisions, and so this is an important factor to include when analyzing causation.

 

Pascali, Luigi. "The wind of change: Maritime technology, trade, and economic development." American Economic Review 107, no. 9 (2017): 2821-54.

 

http://pseweb.eu/ydepot/semin/texte1314/PAS2014WIN.pdf

 

This article argues the impact of the invention of the steamship on trade, specifically on trade routes and distances to various countries since wind was no longer a requirement. The author use a database on bilateral trade from 129 countries between 1850 and 1900, and uses that information to calculate shipping distances and times between various ports to understand ratios of impact of steamships on various nations. This resource is important because it provides insight on changing trade and shipping during the period between 1850 and 1900, and gives a plausible reason for a drastic change that we see in our data set. For our thesis, this resource is important because changing trade routes could have been a reason for more shipwrecks, as sailing ships travelled their old routes and found them clogged with more ships going new directions.

 

"PHENOMENA AND CAUSES OF SHIPWRECKS." The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature (1844-1898), November 1858, 333.

 

https://search.proquest.com/docview/89718726?accountid=14512.

 

This entry is an 1858 article within the Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature that delves into the causes of shipwrecks within the period starting 1850 up until the article’s release. This resource is important due to the the topic of the piece being inline with what we are trying to research for our project. The resource specifically lists out the many possible causes of shipwrecks not just off the atlantic ocean but internationally which can broaden the criteria we look out for when we are scrubbing through out data. Many of the possible causes are due to weather patterns above oceans and inexperience in oceaning navigation which may illuminate some findings in our data.

 

"Saving Life on the Jersey Shore." New York Daily Times (1851-1857), Dec 29, 1856.

 

https://search.proquest.com/docview/95908373?accountid=14512.

 

This article examines the extensive damage and loss of life caused by shipwrecks along the “inhospitable coast of New Jersey” and argues that the government needs to build and set up permanent station houses along the coast to preserve the lives of those who are saved from shipwrecks.  The evidence utilized includes a resolution presented to the US Senate, details of the frequent shipwrecks, and the story of a recent shipwrecks where 300 people passed three days wet and chilled on the beach without shelter, fire, or food.  Many of them perished.  This source is important because it is a primary source which documents the dangerousness of the New Jersey coasts and the inadequacy of the means to save lives.  For our thesis, this source reveals the pressing need for more efficient ways to save lives off the coast of New Jersey in the mid 19th century. 

 

 

"Shipwrecks on the Jersey and Long Island Shores." Chicago Daily Tribune (1847-1858), Jan 17, 1856.

 

https://search.proquest.com/docview/168706941?accountid=14512.

 

This article from the January 1856 edition Chicago Daily Tribune chronicles the unfortunate shipwreck of the E. K. Collins. The resource is important because it helps us understand the variety of ways that weather impacted ship travel, safety, and odds of surviving for crew members. This particular shipwreck details how ice is a prominent cause of shipwreck. Ships often became wrecked not only by running into ice, but having crucial ship or lighthouse mechanisms frozen in the cold. These defects prevented the ships from turning and/or caused them to misinterpret their location. This article helps widen our understanding of “ice” as a cause for many of the shipwrecks during the time period from 1850 - 1900s.

 

 

Siegel, Alan A. "SHIPWRECKS." In Disaster!: Stories of Destruction and Death in Nineteenth-Century New Jersey, 93-140. NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY; LONDON: Rutgers University Press, 2014.

 

http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt19qgh5g.7.

 

This book describes the different and most destructive both natural and human caused disasters to have struck the New Jersey coast from 1821 and 1906. This article plays an important role in our project because it details six of the most deadliest shipwrecks within the time period we’ve chosen to focus on. The author aims to provide color and depth to the dataset by detailing origin stories about the captains, as well as the different narratives of the disasters and impact. The six of the most deadliest shipwrecks he covers are John Minturn, South of Mantoloking - February 15, 1846, Powhattan, Beach Haven - April 15, 1854, New Era, Deal Beach - November 13, 1854, New York, North of Barnegat Inlet - December 20, 1856, Vizcaya and Cornelius Hargraves, Off Barnegat Bay - October 30, 1890, Delaware, Barnegat Bay - July 8, 1898. The relevance of this source to our thesis is that it provides perspective upon the most deadly of the shipwrecks and explores not only the cause of the shipwrecks (many of which were weather) but also the internal and external factors.

 

Wells, Jamin John. 2013. “The Shipwreck Shore: Marine Disasters and the Creation of the American Littoral.” Dissertation, Ann Arbor: DAI-A 75/01(E), Dissertation Abstracts International. University of Delaware.

 

Wells, Jamin John. The shipwreck shore: Marine disasters and the creation of the American littoral. University of Delaware, 2013.

 

https://search.proquest.com/docview/1443861051?accountid=14512.

 

This paper from 2013 discovers the cultural impact of the tens of thousands of ships that were shipwrecked in the nineteenth century. The efforts in the 1870s to mitigate and prevent multiple ships from wrecking changed the American public’s view of the ocean from a dangerous and desolate place to one of desire, safety, and adventure. It continues to explore how tourists and the public began to view shipwrecks as a novel place for tourism and exploration, which in its own right turned American opinions on the matter and had a substantial impact on American identity at sea. This article will be important to us as it can allow us to discover the fears of the average American sailor during the peak times of shipwrecks before the Shipwreck Shore became popular.

 

"WORK OF THE LIFE-SAVERS." New York Times (1857-1922), Apr 30, 1882.

 

https://search.proquest.com/docview/93987377?accountid=14512.

 

This article examines the 1881 official government report of the operations of the Life-saving Service, the service that saves sailors and passengers from shipwrecks on the Atlantic coast, which included 250 vessel disasters and 1,878 stranded persons, 1,854 of which were rescued.  Included in its examination is specific accounts of shipwrecks and the lengths life-savers went to rescue stranded crews.  This source is important because it provides in depth details about the conditions facing both stranded people and life-savers during the period we are studying.  For our thesis, this source will be directly relevant to the state of affairs as it related to shipwrecks and the technological and legislative innovations required to improve safety.

 

Wolters, Timothy. "Re-inventing the Ship: Science, Technology, and the Maritime World, 1800–1918 ed. by Don Leggett and Richard Dunn." Technology and Culture 55, no. 2 (2014): 496-497.

 

https://muse.jhu.edu/

 

This work compiles the different technology utilized in various types of vessels and investigates the changing frequency, nature, and causes of shipwrecks due to technological advancement. It helps contextualize the different and changing causes of shipwrecks throughout the 1800s and the early 1900s as a result of the redesigning and the reinventing of ship design. This source adds to our overarching thesis by showing that shipwrecks were caused and also mitigated by different improvements in technology in the ships and illuminates the relationship between shipwrights, inventors, and architects. Furthermore, this will confirm our data on whether shipwrecks of certain types became less frequent over time if a certain technical advancement such as the redesign of the ship’s mantle were able to improve accuracy and navigation.