ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the remarkable proliferation of accounts and images of the disaster, seeking firstly to illustrate the sheer volume and pervasiveness of shipwreck imagery in the Romantic period and secondly to explore why these maritime tragedies, and this disaster in particular, so gripped the collective imagination. The wreck of the Halsewell, like many other shipwrecks in this era of British maritime expansionism, took on a well-nigh mythic quality. The mythic is used here both in a loose, colloquial sense, to suggest a widely known story which retained considerable currency and fascination for an extended period, and also in the more precise sense elaborated by Claude Levi-Strauss, to suggest a story which brings into focus and seeks to negotiate tensions and contradictions. As this will suggest, the agenda in most subsequent depictions of the wreck was not simply to memorialize the disaster and its victims but also to recuperate it within consolatory and explicatory frameworks.
