The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Map of Great Britain

  False Lights

  Goodwin Sands

  Pentland Firth

  Scilly Isles

  Photos

  West Coast

  Royal Fish

  Cornwall

  East Coast

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2005 by Bella Bathurst

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  First published in Great Britain by Harper Collins Publishers, 2005

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Bathurst, Bella.

  The wreckers : a story of killing seas and plundered shipwrecks, from the eighteenth century to the present day / Bella Bathurst,

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-618-41677-3

  1. Shipwrecks—Great Britain—History. 2. Pillage—Great Britain—History. 3. Great Britain—History, Local. I. Title.

  DA90.B334 2005

  909'.096336—dc22 2005045951

  eISBN 978-0-544-30161-0

  v1.0813

  To John, with love

  Acknowledgements

  Much of this book is based on interviews from around Britain. Most of the interviewees were not wreckers themselves, but people who had a strong connection to the sea and to their local area. One person led to another in a chain of links and associations leading all the way from Shetland to the Scilly Isles. Almost without exception, everyone I spoke to gave up their time and their expertise with a generosity far beyond anything I had a right to expect. Without their help, this book would not exist. I remain unrepayably grateful both to them and to all the other unnamed experts who helped along the way.

  Several people provided invaluable background information. Sophia Exelby, custodian of what may well be the UK’s finest job tide, filled in much of my knowledge on the role of the Receiver of Wreck. Howard Richings, the RNLI’s shoreworks manager, gave me both an interview and a list of further contacts, as did John Caldwell in Scotland. Despite my private vow never to step on board a ship with him again, James Taylor, Chief Executive of the Northern Lighthouse Board, is always the best of companions and interviewees. In London, Ben Griffiths provided invaluable legal research, while the staff of the Signet Library, the Scottish Public Records Office, Kirkwall Library, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, Trinity House and the Morrab Library in Penzance all helped with the unending hunt for material.

  In Orkney and Caithness, Willie Mowatt MBE, James Simpson, Jackie Manson, Dr Tony Trickett, Brian Williams, Jeff Temple, John Thornton and George Gunn all offered time and insight. David Stogdon provided a wonderful new perspective on the Stroma men, interrupting his Christmas holidays to do so. Kirkwall Museum’s exhibitions officer Tom Muir filled in vital background history and checked through the manuscript. Further down the west coast, John Macleod, Hector Macleod, Dr Jeremy Hidson, Ken Holland, Roderick and Angus McLean, Lindsay Johnson, Nick Ryan and Sigurd and Rose Scott offered information on everything from smuggling to whirlpools, while Alisdair Sinclair was kind enough to check through the chapter for errors of fact. On the east of Scotland, Chris Marr, Dougie Ferguson and Ron Leask all offered me excellent material, though in the end I was only able to use a small portion of it. On the East Coast, Sid Barnett, Syd Weatherill, Ben Dean and John Porteous provided invaluable expertise on the local salvage industry, while in Norfolk, Richard and Julie Davies made me welcome and put up with endless pestering. In London, Richard Sabin and Bob Jeffries both read through sections of the manuscript and gave me a glimpse of a capital I never knew existed. On the south coast, Andy Roberts, Tess Vandervliet and Bob Peacock expanded my understanding of the Channel and the Goodwin Sands. In Cornwall, Rebecca Pender, Joe Mills, Mike Pearce, Mike Collier, Billy Stevenson and Maurice Hutchens all offered their expertise during a particularly busy time of year. And on the Scilly Isles, Matt and Pat Lethbridge, Peter Kyne, Mark Groves, Frank Gibson and Richard Lam provided me with a clearer view of those exceptional islands than I could have dared hope for.

  James and Sarah Dawnay not only provided the loveliest writer’s retreat in Scotland but introduced me to Sarah’s father, David Stogdon. In Edinburgh, Gus and Elspeth Ferguson offered contacts and companionship with their usual selflessness. My uncle and aunt David and Tessa McCosh had me to stay in Norfolk and pointed me in useful directions, while Rory Day showed me Argyll’s own maelstrom. Alex Renton—writer, skipper and friend—not only put up with my lousy crewing, but put aside his own writing in order to perform expert editorial surgery on the manuscript. Richard Ross travelled all the way from California to Stroma, made me smile and kept me going. Euan Ferguson, Ashley Heath, Alexa de Ferranti, Kamal Ahmed and Angus Wolfe Murray all offered friendship far beyond the call of duty, while my long-suffering family endured three long years of fishy anecdotes and complaint. Down in London, Alan Jones provided beautiful maps while both Michael Fishwick and Helen Ellis made the business of publication more fun than work. In New York, Elaine Pfefferblit, Libby Edelson and Webster Younce’s help and insights on publication were invaluable. Most of all, I owe Victoria Hobbs—friend and special agent—a debt I know I can’t repay. It is one thing to field seven years’ worth of neurotic emails, but to put up with repeated and systematic food poisoning goes far beyond any reasonable job description. This book owes its existence to her unstinting encouragement and patience, as well as to her suggestion that from now on, we eat out.

  Any book about the past is in some sense a ghost story. This one started with Robert Louis Stevenson and was written with his history and his family always in mind. One of the many pleasures of researching this has been in revisiting many of the places where the Stevensons worked. Every succeeding year gives me greater admiration for their works both in print and stone. And lastly, there are the ghosts closer to home; those of Johnny Noble and my father. Who, I very much hope, would have enjoyed this book.

  Introduction

  While researching another book five years ago, I came across the following passage in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Records of a Family of Engineers:

  On a September night, the Regent lay in the Pentland Firth in a fog and a violent and windless swell. It was still dark, when they were alarmed by the sound of breakers, and an anchor was immediately let go. The peep of dawn discovered them swinging in desperate proximity to the isle of Swona and the surf bursting close under their stern. There was in this place a hamlet of the inhabitants, fisher-folk and wreckers; their huts stood close about the head of the beach. All slept; the doors were closed, and there was no smoke, and the anxious watchers on board ship seemed to contemplate a village of the dead. It was thought possible to launch a boat and tow the Regent from her place of danger; and with this view a signal of distress was made and a gun fired with a red hot poker from the galley. Its detonation awoke the sleepers. Door after door was opened, and in the grey light of the morning fisher after fisher was seen to come forth, yawning and stretching himself, nightcap on head. Fisher after fisher, I wrote, and my pen tripped; for it should rather stand wrecker after wrecker. There was no emotion, no animation, it scarce seemed any interest; not a hand was raised; but all callously awaited the harvest of the sea, and their children stood by their side and wait
ed also. To the end of his life, my father remembered that amphitheatre of placid spectators on the beach, and with a special and natural animosity, the boys of his own age. But presently a light air sprang up, and filled the sails, and fainted, and filled them again, and little by little the Regent fetched way against the swell, and clawed off shore into the turbulent firth.

  The passage held me. True, it had an unmistakeable air of paraphrase about it—Robert Louis Stevenson having taken the same enterprising approach to his own family’s history as he did to Jacobite rebellion or South Seas piracy—but it was also evidently based on fact. The Regent was the Northern Lighthouse Board’s inspection vessel. Robert Louis Stevenson’s father, Thomas, would have been on the yacht with his own father Robert on a tour around all the Scottish lights. In time, seven Stevensons would become engineers to the Northern Lighthouse Board, and Robert Louis Stevenson himself completed an engineering apprenticeship before trading granite for ink. The Pentland Firth lies between the far north-eastern corner of mainland Scotland and the Orkney Islands and is considered to be one of Europe’s most hazardous sea areas. These things I knew, but who were these malevolent spectators standing so silent on the beach? Why had they waited there in the dawn for the Regent’s destruction? Were these ‘wreckers’ Stevenson described unique to Swona, or had they also existed elsewhere? I’d heard of pirates, privateers and press men, and I knew eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maritime life provided as many human hazards as natural ones. But I hadn’t heard of wreckers or been aware that there were parts of Britain where men—and women, and children—stood with their arms folded waiting for ships to die.

  Further reading revealed tantalising details. It seemed that all the Stevensons had at one time or another encountered strong local hostility to the construction of their lighthouses. Concealed within the pages of their Minute Books were hints of protest and resistance, whispers of sabotage, and—once in a while—a yell of outrage when a lightkeeper was caught rigging the wreck return books or ‘salvaging’ casualties too conscientiously. The Stevensons did their best to keep their keepers on a short leash, but even they were unable to account for the communities around them. In time, each of the family brought back definite evidence—in houses, on farms, below ground—of imports to the islands arriving unscheduled in the night.

  Meanwhile at the other end of the country, the Cornish were supposed to be such accomplished wreckers that they regarded it not as a crime but as a profession. In fact, if anyone knew anything at all about the subject, they knew that the Cornish had been wreckers since birth. The only people who did not know this were the Cornish themselves, who swore blind that they had been the victims of a terrible slander and would never have touched a ship in distress. Elsewhere things were just as bad. From all around Britain I started finding stories of people deliberately drowning shipwreck victims, stories of shoreline orgies so dionysian that few participants survived until morning and stories of wreckers burning the boats of Excise men. There were stories of grand pianos sitting unplayed in hovels, of crofts fitted with silver candelabra, and—more recently—of an entire island dressed in suspiciously identical shirts. There were stories of false lights and false foghorns, false harbours, false rescuers, false dawns; even stories of entire coastlines rigged meticulously as stage sets.

  Elsewhere in the world things were just as bad. Though few other countries had Britain’s unique combination of advantages for a wrecker—island status, a vicious coastline, plenty of expensive traffic—almost every country with a coastline produced their own variants. There were Flemish wreckers, Spanish wreckers, Scandinavian wreckers. The French were such expert wreckers that they had been responsible for drafting the first international law against it back in the thirteenth century. In the Caribbean, wrecks were so frequent that the eighteenth-century colonial government was estimated to derive two-fifths of its income from salvage. America called their wreckers ‘moon-cussers’ after their habit of swearing at the light of an incriminating moon. The Canadians suffered a sea almost as unpleasant as Britain’s, and a similar fund of tall tales. They had whole townships built from wrecked ships’ timbers. They had stories of ghostly ladies holding up the stumps of fingers bitten off by wreckers in search of rings. And they had Sable Island, a spit of land which was at one time supposed to have been entirely populated by passing fishermen and shipwreck victims.

  But was this all there was? Just stories? No more, no less; all smoke, no fire? If I chose to take the wreckers on would I be walking straight into a twilight of historical whispers and unverifiable anecdotes? Would I spend my time researching things which, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Records, were evidently founded in fact but embellished in the telling? And was wrecking something which—if it existed at all—had only existed for a short period, and had now faded out? If it did still exist, would anyone ever talk openly about a criminal activity for which they could still theoretically be prosecuted? Lastly, and most important of all, what exactly was a wrecker?

  Like the word itself, wrecking is almost always as opaque as its practitioners. According to the Oxford English Dictionary a wrecker is ‘one who tries from shore to bring about shipwreck with a view to profiting by wreckage’, or one ‘who steals such wreckage; a person employed in demolition, or in recovering wrecked ship or its contents’. Salvage, on the other hand, is ‘1 vb: to rescue (a ship or its cargo) from loss at sea. 2 n: the cargo saved from a wrecked or sunken ship.’ The divisions between rescue, theft, and recovery are often too narrow to be clearly visible, and in different parts of the British Isles it is still difficult to pick out the difference between wrecking, salvage, hovelling, looting, and ‘pro-active beachcombing’. Wreckers could be both active and passive: they could actively create shipwrecks, or they could passively make use of wrecks which came their way.

  Though most people’s awareness of the crime is probably derived from Jamaica Inn, Daphne Du Maurier’s tale of a group of murderous Cornishmen who lure ships to destruction by putting out false lights along the coastline, there are many parts of Britain (including Cornwall) where there was never any need to deliberately wreck ships. Geography, weather conditions and a hostile sea washed up all the ships they would ever need. Though it is almost impossible to verify, probably rather less than one or two per cent of all British shipping casualties were ever actively wrecked by those onshore. The rest happened for the usual reasons—mechanical failure, human error, navigational miscalculation, storm, gale, lee shore—and were simply exploited by those who found them.

  There were also a few instances which fell between active and passive wrecking. As Robert Louis Stevenson pointed out, there were parts of the country where coastliners sinned by omission, having done so little to prevent wrecks that they were, in effect, encouraging them. In some places, beacons and seamarks vanished and were not replaced. In others, local pilots would threaten to run incoming ships aground unless captains promised them a decent cut of the cargo. And, once in a while, impromptu navigational aids would be sabotaged. In one corner of Scotland a lovelorn bull was apparently put to graze in a field overlooking a particularly hazardous stretch of water. The bull spent his nights broadcasting his desire for a mate, though for a long time the only responses he got were from the horns and sirens of passing ships. When the locals realised that the bull was doing a better job warning skippers of nearby land than a foghorn could ever do, they moved him away and found him a cow.

  Whether active, passive or sin of omission, wrecking has existed in some form or another ever since ships first went to sea. In Britain and most of Europe, wrecking’s heyday occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when sea traffic was at its heaviest. For much of the nineteenth century and all of the eighteenth, captains setting out from or returning to the coast of Britain faced a formidable set of obstacles. They groped their way across the oceans using the best equipment they had at the time, which did not amount to much. Charts and pilot books were often inaccurate and incomplete;
cloud cover made sextant readings impossible; compasses could distort, and barometers only provided sailors with advance warning of their impending fate. In a world in which prizes were still being offered for anyone who could find a way of accurately measuring longitude, it was scarcely surprising that so many ships came to grief.

  Nor did things necessarily improve once in sight of land. Until the early nineteenth century, there were almost no navigational aids to help sailors on their way; no lighthouses, no beacons, no VHF or radar. Captains relied as much on a keeneyed lookout as they did on any more sophisticated technology. Small wonder that there were wrecks, and plenty of them.

  For this reason, I have chosen to confine this book to the past 300 years, and to Britain alone. There were wrecks and wreckers before the eighteenth century, and there are wrecks and wreckers in other parts of the world. But Britain’s own unique set of circumstances provides an obvious physical borderline. The sheer variety and range of natural hazards around the coastline—riptides on the Pentland Firth, whirlpools on the west coast, sandbanks in Norfolk and Kent, reefs in the Scillies, collisions in the Channel—sometimes makes it seem astounding that anyone made safe landfall in Britain at all. Different conditions called for different techniques—the Pentland Firth pirates were, for instance, as far from the hovellers of Kent in style as they were in miles. And so instead of presenting the book chronologically, I have laid it out by area.

  While the twentieth century might have offered many improvements to lifesaving and sea safety, I found that it also provided work for the wreckers. Two world wars, the introduction of new technology and a vast increase in the size and tonnage of shipping often meant more wrecks, not less. Electronics fail, old skills atrophy, and undermanning makes ships vulnerable. And so, from the end of the days of sail to the beginning of the era of GPS (Global Positioning System), there have always been wrecks, and always people who profit by them. As I also discovered, some of those people were still alive, and some of those people would talk.