Jamin Wells's book Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach reads differently in 2021 than it might have at its release in 2020. While its relevance to coastal, environmental, and disaster history has not changed, its relatability to present concerns is prescient. As I am writing this review, Egyptian courts have just ruled on the damages owed by the company of one of the largest container ships, the Ever Given, for the salvage operations and injury caused when it was blown sideways in the Suez Canal in March 2021. The wedged ship led to a week-long saga resulting in a $10 billion loss of global trade and was the focus of the globe as millions wondered how it would be freed from its “stuck” position.

The Ever Given's saga illustrates why Wells's book on nineteenth-century shipwreck history is particularly relevant today. In five chapters, Wells illustrates how coastal shipwrecks in southern New England and mid-Atlantic communities during the nineteenth century were critical to accelerating changes in state regulation, private-sector management, and federal infrastructural development of coastal regions, having wide-sweeping impact on our current policies on everything from trade to recreation on American shores. Wells also connects the history of the fascination with shipwrecks and salvage operations to the present, making it easy to see how the Ever Given event is just a continuation of global fascination with shipwreck disasters and salvage operations.

Chapter 1 of Wells's text delves into the creation of the American coastal frontier; a place left largely barren due to the variability of climate, conditions, and profitability of the region. Wells argues that at the turn of the nineteenth century, the coastal frontier turned from a “wild” and “unregulated” space, a site of debilitating crisis for ships and people stranded on its shoreline, into one with the first hints of regulation brought by private initiatives to assist those in need on the coastline as trade increased. As volunteer efforts to save shipwrecked lives and property formalized into a public priority with the creation of the federal lighthouse program, the barren shoreline took on new importance to the country as the new government tried to regulate, define, and protect its coastal property and the economy built around it.

Wells uses chapter 2 to delve into the history of shipwreck laws and their evolution from British colony through American statehood. In this chapter, Wells argues that the tightening of wreck laws and decrease of illegal wrecking activities made American coasts safe enough for tourism and economic prosperity at the exact moment when American coasts became a focal point of Americans looking for a final “frontier” of untapped natural territory. In chapter 3, Wells unpacks the early coastal craze of the pre-Civil War era when the development of federal lifesaving laws, associations, and equipment, in addition to steam travel, paved the way for the development of coastal communities in areas like Newport, Rhode Island, Tucker's Island, New Jersey, Cape Island (now Cape May), New Jersey, and eventually Atlantic City, New Jersey. As coastal communities formed and traffic to and from these areas picked up, the wrecking business (or professional salvage industry) cleaned the beaches while paving the way for tourists to admire wreckage from shipwrecks without being burdened by their destruction.

In chapter 4, Wells argues that while salvagers or “pirates” of past shipwrecks held one image in popular imagination, the professional wreckers of the later nineteenth century drew minimal similarities between their skills and techniques and the recovery of shipwrecked boats. The shipwrecks of the late nineteenth century transformed from absolute disasters to minor obstacles as industry men worked their magic in the cleanup. In the last chapter Wells shows that with the coastal shipwreck's power diminished with salvage efforts, regulations, and lifesaving efforts, shipwrecks at sea, such as the Titanic, quickly became the latest to fascinate Americans, leaving the coastal shoreline a tamed space for tourists and the sea a mystical place for catastrophes of the future.

While today's shipwreck is rarer than those of the past due to advancements in engineering and technology, as the Ever Given shows us, a shipwreck can still hold the fascination of millions globally, giving us a brief taste of the craze for news of shipwreck disasters in the nineteenth century. For those looking for the connection between the past and the present of shipwrecks and their evolution in cultural, environmental, and disaster history, they should look no further than Wells's book.