The timeline of many coastal communities is punctuated by the dates of shipwrecks nearby. Over time, the shipwrecks become everyone's history, just as the sea belongs to all. Nothing stirs the imagination like finding part of a shipwreck. A rusty metal fitting on a lonely stretch of beach can haunt us with many unknowns. Studying shipwrecks is important work for archeologists, historians, and all kinds of people who live near the coast.
Scholars use shipwrecks to understand the past.
People in coastal communities see shipwrecks as important historical events in their area. People whose job it is to protect marine sanctuaries see shipwrecks as important lessons in how currents, weather, technology and human error can combine in ways that can damage the environment. Shipwrecks remind us that the ocean is, after all, a wild and unpredictable place. Here forces that we cannot measure combine and can easily overpower anything that humans can build. Until this century, existing charts were incomplete and sometimes misleading.