The current Neoliberal Empire follows dutifully in the steps of its predecessors: ‘beginning with the Iberians, and clear through the long twentieth century, one of the first things great empires and states do is establish new ways of mapping, categorizing, and surveying the world’. And thus its methods of cloning colonial footprints are also innovative. Shipwreck detection mechanisms have, until now, always been waterborne: divers, fishers, deepwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), the green wavelength of bathymetric LiDAR, and the ‘tow-fish’ that encase sonar transducers and magnetometers pulled by a vessel through calm, shallow waters. But now, even shipwrecks secreted away in turbid nearshore waters can be detected and mapped from the air, by satellite. Reporting from on high, NASA Landsat imagery spots plumes of particulate matter and scour pits that indicate wreck sites, adding validity to the rough estimate of some three million shipwrecks located within global waterways.

Even data constrained to miniscule slivers of time and space reveal how populous shipwrecks are and have been. Recent research by the Spanish Ministry of Culture has logged 681 Spanish ships that wrecked along the Eastern Seaboard of the Americas from 1492, starting with Christopher Columbus's Santa María off Hispaniola, to 1898, with the demise of numerous Spanish ships off the coast of Cuba during the Spanish-American War.