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Drawing on the shipwreck narratives explored in his book "Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of Discovery" (Penguin, 2025), Professor Park's talk revisited the so-called Age of Discovery from the vantage point of failures. Even as Europeans proclaimed their superiority when embarking on global ventures, their journeys were frequently shaped by greed, rivalry, and repeated catastrophe. Shipwrecks, in particular, expose the fragility of imperial ambition: far from self-sufficient conquerors, Europeans often survived only through reliance on local knowledge, indigenous expertise in language, geography, foodways, and medicine, and the goodwill—or strategic calculations—of the people they encountered.