'Masterly' retelling of European empire-building, 'Wreckers', seized by Viking

Viking will publish Oxford academic Simon Park’s “gripping retelling of the birth of imperialism” which explores shipwrecks, mishaps and the resistance of indigenous peoples, releasing “long-muffled voices” in history. 

Connor Brown, editorial director, acquired world rights to Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of ‘Discovery’ from Ben Clark at the Soho Agency. It will be published in hardback in spring 2025. 

“The old narrative of imperialism is that brave, swashbuckling adventurers went out and forged empires, bringing home great riches,” Viking said. “Despite stark revisions to this one-sided view of history, the early voyages themselves remain underexplored. This is the focus of Wreckers, where we see a series of failures on the part of the Europeans and a more active, resisting role for indigenous populations.” 

The book debunks the traditional narrative of historical figures such as Christopher Columbus, revealing how the explorer suffered several shipwrecks and was dying “while trying to persuade the world that America was, in fact, China”. Viking added: “Vasco da Gama, who first connected Europe to Asia via a direct sea route, did not know where he was going, and it was a Gujarati pilot who navigated him across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. There is also the fantastic tale of Frenchwoman Marguerite de Roberval, one of the few women to sail on a colonising expedition only to be marooned by her own brother.”   

Park’s book “taps into a thirst for stories of the sea and throws myths we have long been told about European empire-building overboard,” the publisher said, dubbing it a “gripping retelling of the birth of imperialism”.

Park is associate professor of Medieval and Renaissance Portuguese at the University of Oxford and tutorial fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is an expert in the literature and material culture of the early modern world, particularly from Portugal and its global empire. This is his first book for a general reader.  

Brown said: “This is a different story of the so-called ‘Age of Discovery’. We see how things could have gone very differently on the many voyages of this period – and how they often did. We are delighted to be working with Simon on this masterly and important book.”  

Park commented: “This book comes from thinking about what history would look like if we counted the defeats and the mistakes, rather than tallying up the apparent ‘breakthroughs’ that make up conventional tales about the past. It salvages some lesser-known stories and lets long-muffled voices speak in order to reveal just how shaky the first decades of European empires were, highlighting the many ways that disaster was integral to what people in the 16th century called ‘discovery’.”