ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two texts written in response to historical shipwrecks: Edmond Pet's wreck off England's North Sea coast in 1613 and Anthony Thacher's wreck off Cape Ann, Massachusetts, in 1635. These two texts provide vivid images of the fractures in conventional thinking that shipwreck narratives produce. Both texts were published in print, although Thacher's letter circulated for a generation in manuscript before being included in Increase Mather's Illustrious Providences, published in Boston in 1684. These are not among the most famous wrecks of seventeenth-century English history; unlike the wreck of the Sea-Venture on Bermuda in 1609, for example, they neither led to the rescue of the Jamestown colony nor plausibly inspired Shakespeare's, The Tempest. These are lesser known texts because they reveal the interpenetration of the two dominant interpretive modes invoked in early modern shipwreck stories: Providential recuperation and empirical explanation.
