Wreckers

‘Simon Park tells the dark, twisted, sometimes terrifying story behind the pageant we think we know: how Europeans went out to meet the world, ‘discover’ it and make their empires. He tells a story of lovers and cannibals, shipwrecks and mutinies and ruinous failures from a wide-angle view and a continent’s worth of sources. His immaculate scholarship puts the risk and the blood back into what sometimes seems just a lifeless parade, the human story of discovery’ – Michael Pye, author of The Edge of the WorldAn excellent account of voyages in the Age of Discovery, focussing on the complex reality in which shipwreck and disaster were as frequent as successful landfall. Superbly written, entertaining and compelling, this book should be read by anyone interested in this pivotal period in history – David Gibbins‘Rollicking but reflective account…an adroit storyteller’ – Michael Prodger * New Statesman *

Simon 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 vast global empire. This is his first book for a general reader.