The western wave all a’flame: Gothic ships and sunset

I am deeply fascinated at the moment by nineteenth-century Gothic sea fiction, particularly its phantoms, wrecks, and derelicts. The long nineteenth-century, as we know, saw tremendous social, industrial, and scientific developments, including the replacement of wooden sailing ships by steel and steam. The ghosts of the Age of Sail still haunted our seas; wooden derelicts trapped in the currents accounted for many a phantom ship sighting, says Margaret Baker, yet by the 1930s, these were all destroyed. These ghosts remain in our literature, and in our film.