The Stirling Castle Shipwreck not only represents the consequences of pushing one’s luck at sea, but also important themes spanning many historical scholarships and denominations: historical storytelling and pseudohistory. But what do they mean, and why are they relevant to the Stirling Castle?
Historical storytelling is the process of taking a kind of creative liberty with retelling historical events.1 Periods of time or details lost to fickle human memory are filled in and often exaggerated to offer a seemingly complete narrative, or just to craft a more engaging story.
Pseudohistory is the practice of intentionally warping a historical narrative for a particular agenda. Most of the time the reasoning is political.2 In the case of the Stirling Castle wreck, the agenda was to alienate and dehumanize the native aboriginal people of Australia.
The sinking of the Stirling Castle had less historical impact as a shipwreck and more as a harrowing and horrifying account of what happened to the surviving crew. There was a particular focus on Mrs. Fraser, the wife of Captain Fraser, being that she was the only woman aboard the ship and pregnant at the time.
There was a sort of morbid excitement attached to how quickly the stories spread. The image to the right is the title page of a piece published in 1837 about the shipwreck. However, the emphasis on words such as “inhumane”, “savages”, and “barbarous”, are used in ways to capture the attention of an audience rather than recount a reliable narrative. Such is the nature of historical storytelling.
The presence of historical storytelling is one to always keep in mind when researching a historical event. It has been one of the major obstacles in the research of the Stirling Castle shipwreck given the political push against the humanization of native Australian aboriginals at the time of the incident.
