1856 — The Harvard Magazine, Volume II, Number V, June 1856, page 222:
Do you think, though, that even an illustrated edition of it would fill him with genuine enthusiasm, — the luscious shipwrecky, Newfoundland-dog, barren-island sort of feeling, — if he bent his callous imagination to the task at twenty-one?
1896 — Elizabeth Westyn Timlow, Cricket at the Seashore, Estes and Lauriat (1896), Chapter VI:
"I was only joking. We've escaped from a burning vessel, you know, and every one else is either burned or drowned. We've provisions for a month, if we don't eat too much, and we're in the South Sea Islands. South Sea Islands sound nice and shipwrecky, don't you think so?"
1920 — McClure's Magazine, Volume 52, page 32:
Certainly the quaint garnet necklace could hardly have found a more romantic and shipwrecky sort of setting.
But down below he is not so good by any means—no spring from the loins, and feeblish, not to say shipwrecky, about the knees.
1903 — Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, Volume 56, page 453:
Plupy barely escaped being plucked, as his papers showed him to be weak in arithmetic, shipwrecky in grammar, erratic in spelling, and indictable in geography.
A few unfortunates there are, both men and horses, who are born with "shipwrecky" nervous systems, and these furnish the worst illustrations of causeless worry, of persistent forebodings, or, with a slightly deeper degree of defect, of shiftlessness, perversity, and even crime.
1954 — Manly Wade Wellman, Dead & Gone: Classic Crimes of North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press (1980), →ISBN, page 31:
She put a hot poultice on the shipwrecky stomach, and sent Whitfield to fetch Dr. Benjamin Robinson.
1985 — Anaïs Nin, The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1985), →ISBN, page 136:
No, the real shipwrecky feeling comes when I get home, to my account book, to the thirty pages of my novel, to Mother's consulation on the next dress, […]
2007 — Riaan Manser, Around Africa on My Bicycle, Jonathan Ball Publishers (2007), →ISBN, page 301:
So there I was, standing by the roadside in pitch darkness with my belongings and shipwrecky knees.
