But as the locals arrived at the scene, so too did the authorities. By fortunate coincidence, the local customs officer and coastguard had both recently retired, so the only people left on duty—and thus the only people left to represent the lonely might of Scillonian law enforcement—were two full-time police and two special constables. By tradition, the Scillies are quiet islands with an elderly population and relatively little criminal activity beyond traffic offences and domestic disputes. The police did initially try to prevent looting of the containers, but having found themselves significantly outnumbered, settled instead for a strategy which could be described as pro-active information management. They began by handing out salvage forms, and moved on to giving directions—‘Children’s clothing? Porthcressa, sir. Golf bags? Watermill Cove.’ As one island resident noted, directing traffic, ‘was the most sensible thing to do. At first they tried to stop it, they tried to say, well, you shouldn’t do this. But then there’s two policemen, what the hell can they do when this stuff is coming in all along the shore? There’s blokes running past them, and while one of them’s talking to one man, the others are passing them with a load full of stuff. There was nothing else they could do.’ As a cutting from Lloyd’s List in the local museum put it, ‘to the evident joy of the inhabitants of the Isles of Stilly . . . the cargo from the wrecked container feeder Cita is being salvaged in a refreshingly traditional fashion. The Receiver of Wreck will be having an exciting Easter weekend.’
In fact, the islanders were doing nothing illegal by taking items from the containers. Technically speaking, what they were doing was not wrecking, but salving, and between the two words lies a world of difference. As the law sees it, wrecking is conducted with malice aforethought, but salving is a more selfless pursuit. Any policeman who tried to obstruct the islanders would himself have been breaking the law. What is illegal is not the act of finding and rescuing cargo, but the failure to declare those findings to the UK’s Receiver of Wreck. In theory, every islander should have filled in a form detailing everything they took, sent it off to the Receiver in Southampton and waited to find out if she could trace the cargo’s original owners. If those owners were found and did demand their goods back, the salvor would then be compelled to hand it over in exchange for an award. If the owner remained untraced, or proved to be uninterested in the goods’ return, then—and only then—it would become the property of the salvor. In practice, many wreck forms were either filled in facetiously (the Scillies suddenly acquired a large new population of Donald Ducks and Mickey Mouses) or not filled in at all. As the subsequent Marine Accident Investigation Branch’s report delicately expressed it: ‘After the accident, many finders and temporary possessors of containers or their contents were unaware of their statutory obligations.’
Mike Collier, who in 1997 was the Maritime and Coastguard Agency’s spokesman on the wreck, recalls that, ‘I had a very good conversation with John Humphries on Radio 4 about this. He said to me, “They’re stealing it.” I said, “They’re not, they’re looking after it.” “Oh, come on,” he said, “they’re stealing. There’s pictures of them on the television trying clothes on.” I said, “Well, what they do with it is entirely up to them. They’re looking after it—they’re taking it away, they’re telling the Receiver where it is and if the owner of that cargo wants to come and get it, fine, he can come and get it. But they’re entitled to charge for their time and danger in recovering these things. And they could charge the owner storage time as well, if they wanted. If you do it properly, it’s not looting, you see, it’s recovering and holding wreck until the rightful owner comes along”.’
Giving people directions to the wreck wasn’t exactly official policy though, was it? ‘You might just as well, because you’ve got all these people strolling around on the rocks, and it’s a lot easier to keep it as a controlled mob than have people wandering around willy-nilly and fighting over stuff. There was some amazing scenes—there was people picking up pairs of shorts, trying them on, and going, “No, don’t think these look right,” and putting them back; kids walking around with a pair of trainers on and another pair of trainers around their neck; tractors with flat-profile racing tyres on them . . . ’ He trails off, laughing.
The islanders’ case was also helped by the fact that the Receiver found it almost impossible to trace and notify the owners of such a large and varied cargo. Many owners were outside the UK, and most were uninterested in reclaiming a few size 12 salt-damaged nighties. As the Scillonians saw it, all they were doing was clearing up. If no-one else was prepared to mount a salvage operation, then they would evidently have to do so themselves.
They also had a strong environmental point to make. Amongst the useful items, there were also many which were either so damaged they could not be re-used, or which posed an active threat either to the ecology of the islands. In addition to the fuel oil—tackled mainly by the Coastguard’s Marine Pollution Control Unit—five of the containers held pallets of polyester film ultimately intended to be used for cassette and video tapes. When the Cita sank, so too did the polyester. Once wetted, the film became useless, and was left abandoned on the sea bed. Over time, the sea began to break up the rolls of film and send them shredded ashore. For a while, the island was decorated with an impromptu confetti of translucent plastic. To the islanders’ considerable irritation, the clear-up operation took months.
The Scillonians were also helped by two other factors. Faced with the Cita’s vast and unexpected riches, a group of islanders got together to collect children’s clothes for charity. Six builders’ skips’ worth of clothing were eventually sent to charities on the mainland and in Romania and Africa. Finally, the locals could—and did—claim that they were doing no more than resurrecting a traditional island art. ‘We all went wrecking!’, one man was later reported to have jubilantly declared. ‘First time since 1938. We could have got an EU grant for revitalising an ancient industry!’
***
The daily helicopter shuttle from Penzance to St Mary’s passes over some of the prettiest death traps in the world. As well as guiding the novice passenger through some of England’s most desirable tourist destinations, it also completes an unintended survey of almost every one of the south coast’s worst sea hazards. Flying south-westwards over Land’s End, the helicopter passes the final tip of Britain and its three unmythical guardians: the Longships, the Wolf and the Seven Stones. Standing at the axis of three major shipping routes, each watches over some of Britain’s busiest waters.
The Longships are a ragged cluster of rocks rising up out of the sea like the doodles of some bored celestial mapmaker who forgot to polish off the Cornish coastline properly. The largest of those rocks is topped off with a lighthouse, shining photogenically in the early September sun. The Wolf, eight miles further south-east, guards the entrance to the Channel. Its light is often the first sight of Britain that returning sailors see, though it was not until 1870 that the reef was lit. The Wolf was supposed to have taken its name either from a corruption of an Anglo-Saxon word, or from the legend that the rock on which it stood contained a cavern which, when the sea rushed through it, gave out a deep lupine howl. There is a story—too good to be true, and too credible to be fictional—that local wreckers, aware that the sound of the howl alerted ships to the rock’s existence, sailed out from Cornwall and stopped up the Wolf’s mouth.
The Seven Stones (named by someone with a good sense of alliteration, if not of arithmetic—there are actually eight stones) rise seven miles from the Scillies. It was on one of those rocks that the oil tanker Torrey Canyon, laden with just under 120,000 tons of crude oil, ran aground in 1967. The ship had been doing 17 knots when she grounded, and the impact damaged her hull so badly that she began leaking almost immediately. At the time, it was the biggest maritime disaster in history. But even this unholy trinity of risks—Longships, Wolf and Seven Stones—are not the last of the hazards in this area. What Cornwall and the Scilly Isles gain in beauty, they pay for with
danger.
Beyond the Seven Stones, and twenty-eight miles south-west of the mainland, are the Scillies themselves. There are five main inhabited islands, but over 140 smaller ones scattered across the oily sea, most of which are no more than small reefs populated by sea birds. Like the Hebrides, they form a rough and patternless archipelago, surrounded on many sides by a pale rind of sand. Seen from above, the sea that surrounds them is clear, the holiday-brochure turquoise of the tropics. Closer to ground level, three-dimensional details appear—the steep rise of a cliff face, trees and woods, tidy striped fields; the usual postcard views. It is not until well beyond the airport doors that the difference between Scilly and the mainland becomes properly apparent. Initially, the most notable thing is the absence of municipal outbuildings and an almost startling sense of fecundity. Hugh Town is a small-scale place, its centre pinched to slimness by the bays on either side, and still blooming fit to burst. Along the side streets, the sun shines down on front gardens full of plants so stiffly disciplined they look as if they have been grown with rods up their backs.
September is peak tourist season, and the roads are occupied by squads of patrolling geriatrics squinting at the un-British sun or making occasional dignified lunges for the park benches. Like the Channel Islands, the Scillies are a haven for old folk; warm, pleasant, almost entirely free of the irritations of modern life, and modelling a version of Englishness which died with Winston Churchill. This is a wish-fulfilment version of Britain, an island with all the bad bits removed. The Scillies’ greatest success has been in turning erstwhile disadvantages into assets. By restricting the quantity of accommodation available and by setting prices high enough to make your eyes water, they have cultivated exactly the right sort of tourism—retired, respectable and respectful, interested in horticulture and history, traditional, affluent. The husband likes boats and the wife likes flowers or golf; both of them like being warm. Every year they come, and every year they book again a year in advance.
Over on the island of Tresco, all of the Scillies’ selling points are vividly shown. There are plants in the Abbey Gardens which could not possibly exist anywhere else in the British Isles. Walking along the neat gravel paths, the passer-by is surrounded by the horticultural equivalent of post-surgery Californians: huge oozing succulents, looming mutants with razor-tipped leaves, brash spires of bright vegetation, ferns casting lacey black shadows, bruising grey-green shrubs with saw-toothed leaves. The colours are different too: bright, sharp pinks and oranges, primary reds, exuberant greens. In this small acreage alone there must be enough foliage to stock a continent’s worth of garden centres. The Abbey Gardens thrive on a whole different scale to the few balding palm trees scattered around the promenades of Falmouth or Brighton. It seems at times like a dream of England, a digitally-enhanced reality in which all things familiar have been air-brushed by the sun into a better version of their normality.
But the Abbey Gardens also contain something else. Walk round a far-off corner of this strange English rainforest and there, suddenly, is ‘Valhalla’, a breeding ground for monsters of a different sort. Walk three steps in, and you are confronted by a huge golden eagle, with its wings half spread and a gilded snake in its beak. Beside it is a man in a frock coat and black buckled shoes brandishing a cobwebbed sword. And beside him is a vast flat salmon, a sad-eyed lady in an unseasonable frock, a friar wielding a cross above his head, a fish with a faceful of teeth, a Turk in a fez, and a soldier with a rifle, braced to run. The monk, the fish and the bird make an ill-assorted army, but all of them seem warlike enough. All strain forward, longing for the command to action, gazing towards invisible armies advancing over the horizon.
The thirty-odd ships’ figureheads at the Valhalla exhibition were collected by Augustus Smith, a man who made even more of an imprint on the Scillies than the Cita. Up until the early 1830s the islands had been run by the Godolphin family on a lease from the Crown. When the lease expired, the islands languished for a while. In 1834 they were bought by Smith, a rich thirty-year-old bachelor from Hertfordshire with a yen for reformation. Throughout Britain, the 1820s and 1830s was the age of the Great Improvers—moneyed men who had absorbed many of the new theories of land management and wanted a patch of land to put them into practice. They felt that, with hope, money and benign autocracy, it would be possible to transform their new fiefdoms from a state of faithless sterility into vast roofless factories filled with sober, God-fearing peasantry.
In Smith’s view, the Scillies made an ideal case for ‘Improvement’. The islands themselves were fertile and had the potential to support one or two small-scale industries. But at the time Smith took the lease, the land was badly overcrowded. The prevailing system of apportionment divided land equally between all the children on the tenant’s death. The system meant that the available land became smaller and smaller, and more and more impoverished. Titling himself the Lord Protector of the Scillies, Smith evicted those families he considered to be ‘unproductive’, introduced universal primogeniture to guarantee the size of each farm, and brought in compulsory education (including navigational classes for all children). He also constructed a quay and the 7 acre Abbey Gardens, as well as encouraging shipbuilding and developing the islands’ reputation as a source of unusual horticulture. To foster a good and godly population, he built several churches and made strenuous efforts to eliminate the island’s reputation for smuggling.
Up until his arrival, the Scillonians had made a good, if erratic, income from bartering goods to passing ships. On the arrival of a vessel on its way northwards to one of the west coast ports from Europe, the local fishermen would sail out with meat and fresh vegetables which they would exchange for payment in kind: silks, tobacco, rum. Though Scillonian smuggling was never on the scale of the Cornish and Devonian trade, Smith remained vehemently opposed to it, and—given his strong moral influence over the islands—managed to put a stop to it wherever possible.
So what was a man who disapproved of a bit of free-enterprise nautical barter doing building up a collection of salvaged ships’ figureheads? Did Augustus Smith ban smuggling, but sanction wrecking? The collection at Valhalla does at least show just how many wrecks Smith had to choose from. As a general rule, he was a shrewd man who proved intelligent enough to adapt his passion for Improvement to local conditions. He realised that, aside from sunshine, the Scillies have two great lures for the tourist: plants and wrecks. In the past 150 years, it has been calculated that almost 400 vessels have met their deaths around the Scillies; in the age of sail, the casualties were considered too numerous to bother counting. Smith could either work against the sea, or he could work with it. He could either pretend that there were no wrecks, or he could—like his subjects—reap their benefits. A figurehead from a ship which had already been destroyed represented an eloquent souvenir, and if the sailors no longer had use for it, then he might as well transform it into a bit of horticultural statuary.
Smith began his collection of figureheads in about 1840, shortly after he had bought what remained of the abbey and began establishing a garden there. Most of the items were taken from small merchant vessels wrecked on the islands. Figureheads could support a multitude of meanings: as forms of identifying shorthand for other shipping, as quasi-religious sacrifices to the sea gods, and as mascots in which the crew could place their faith. Over the centuries, they went from being the slaughtered head of a real animal to a kind of wooden daemon or familiar, personifying the spirit of a ship. Elizabethan warships went to sea as much to show off all the wealth and strength of England as to engage the enemy, and were often so overdressed they resembled churches turned inside out. By the 1700s figureheads were only part of the passion for decorating every available surface of a ship from the gun ports to the gunwhales. As the passion for expensive decoration diminished during the eighteenth century, the navy began shaving away the more ornate embellishments around the hull of warships, but—though the figurehead often sat uneasily under the bowsprit or astri
de the stem post—they proved almost impossible to eliminate completely, since sailors felt that a ship without a familiar was a ship surely doomed.
Merchant vessels, meanwhile, fitted figures according to the size and splendour of their ships. East coast colliers and fishing boats usually had nothing more than an elegantly-painted name board, while East Indiamen and transatlantic ships could take their pick of animals, vegetables or minerals—the most popular image being, unsurprisingly, a nineteenth-century version of a page-three girl clad in not much more than a bit of skimpy symbolism. Wives, daughters and mistresses of shipowners were used as muses, and occasionally fictional characters like Tam o’ Shanter or Ivanhoe echoed the name or nationality of the ship. Though clipper ships, with their sharp-angled bows, were ideal for figureheads, most did not carry them. The figurehead vanished with the first puffs of the steam age, and by the early twentieth century, none but the oldest ships wore them.
Smith’s collection at Valhalla was therefore only a response to the facts. He might have been able to put a stop to smuggling, but he was never going to be able to prevent shipwreck. Though the Scillies are not the most prolific area for wrecks in the country—with 800 known wrecks over the past 800 years—the Scillonians are unquestionably the most ingenious at dealing with them. Nowhere else in Britain, not even Cornwall, has made such triumphant commercial success out of so much destruction. Even now, nearly 200 years after Smith first came here, the business of wreck is still going strong. It would be entirely possible to return from St Mary’s to some dry corner of Britain carrying half a household’s worth of flotsam. There are books, pens, trays, candlesticks, two or three shops doing a flourishing trade in trinkets; Irish linen tea towels depicting the most significant wrecks; mugs emblazoned with images of the naval flagship the Association, fridge magnets, posters. The local pub, the Bishop and Wolf, seems to have been the victim of some devastating flood during which every piece of nautical paraphernalia in Hugh Town Bay has been washed in through the doors. Every spare inch of vertical space has an old binnacle or a sea-marked piece of wood tacked to the beams.
The Wreckers Page 13
