ABSTRACT
This essay describes the fantasies of sunken ships that took shape once people developed the technologies to observe physical wreckage on the ocean floor. My essay begins by using passages from Shakespeare that show how wreckage was imagined before such access, as both a gravesite and also a repository of fabulous, untouched wealth. It then shows how this fantasy started to shift to a picturesque vision in the lineage of a romantic aesthetic of ruins in the picture Davy Jones’s Locker (1890) by William Lionel Wyllie, which this well-known marine painter made based on undersea observation. Finally, it considers the way in which Jacques-Yves Cousteau staged the wreckage as a gothic spectacle, both in his first underwater movie filmed with scuba, the black and white Sunken Ships [Epaves] (1943), as well as in the shipwreck sequence of The Silent World [Le Monde du silence] (1956), which Cousteau co-directed with Louis Malle. The undersea shipwreck revises previous gothic conventions, turning the spectator-diver into a posthuman ghost. Both as a contribution to knowledge and as a charismatic, haunting spectacle, undersea ruins moreover take on uncanny potential opening them to a new future.
