The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  ‘The first 10 feet, someone had cut little steps in the cliff, but from then on you were on your own. Perilous—awful, I wouldn’t go down there now. And then I poured the wine into a milk churn which was at the back of the car and took it home. It wasn’t very good really, but we drank it all the same. The wine was being washed in for two or three weeks, and there were times when customs came over there—they knew it had come in, and they knew we were taking stuff. I remember on one of my trips, coming from the barrels with a bucket if not two buckets of wine, and the customs man met me in that gap. And I thought, “Oh God”, and put my buckets down, not that I was in time to hide them. He said, “Anything over there?” I said no. And then he turned and walked away!’ Mills laughs. ‘In the context of what had been going on for a week or two, you could understand it. He’d been given an impossible task—these damn things washing in all up and down the coast for about twelve or fifteen miles.’

  Before I leave, he returns again to the subject of false lights. ‘I don’t think you’ll find much evidence of deliberate wrecking,’ he says. ‘I’m quite emphatic, and I’m quite convinced, and I’m not trying to protect my forebears—I’m quite convinced that there was no deliberate wrecking of ships.’

  The law supports Mills’s view, though the evidence does not. A search through the sessions of the local magistrate’s courts yields a view of the Cornish as opportunists, but not as murderers. Though there were plenty of convictions for ‘plunder and riot’, smuggling, theft, and disorderly conduct, there are no known convictions for displaying false lights at any point in Cornish history. In fact, the only evidence points in quite the opposite direction. One of the few verifiable instances of deliberate wrecking in Cornwall occurred in 1680 when the keeper of St Agnes lighthouse was found to have deliberately left the lamp unlit and then to have looted the resulting wrecks. Trinity House subsequently barred any Cornishman from work on the St Agnes light.

  In fact the only known case involving a mention of false lights was not in Cornwall at all, but further up the west coast in Wales. According to the Shrewsbury Chronicle of 1774, charges were brought by a Captain Chilcote against three ‘opulent inhabitants’ of Anglesey for ‘feloniously plundering, stealing and taking away’ several casks of rum and brandy, ‘and divers other goods and merchandise’. During a heavy gale in September 1773, Chilcote’s ship, the 80-ton Charming Jenny, en route from Dublin to Waterford, was said to have been lured by false lights onto the coast of Anglesey and wrecked. The three crew were killed when the vessel struck, though Chilcote and his wife reached the shore on a makeshift raft. ‘Nearly exhausted and helpless, they lay for some time, till the savages of the adjacent places, more ravenous than the devouring elements from which they had just escaped, rushed down upon the devoted victims . . . Happy to escape with his life, he hastened to the beach, in search of his beloved wife, when, horrid to tell, her half-naked and plundered corpse presented itself to his view—a dismal view!’. When an outraged inhabitant of Anglesey wrote to the paper refuting the claims, Chilcote wrote back claiming that,

  he has never accused any person of the murder of his wife, or of having put out false lights. There is a report in this country that his wife was alive when she was cast on shore, but he cannot say whether it is true or no. He says that she was stripped of her gown, shoes, buckles, cap and handkerchief, and that her pockets were cut off from her sides, wherein were seventy guineas, his watch and other effects. He was not stripped himself, but he says that some time after he was cast on shore, as he lay on the beach exhausted and speechless, but still retaining his senses, he saw a person coming towards him with a knife in his hand, who took his silver buckles out of his shoes; and cut one of his shoes with a knife. That as he lay in this deplorable condition, he saw the greater part of his cargo left on dry ground by the ebbing tide. He says that some time after, a great number of persons with boats, carts, drags and horses surrounded him, and plundered and carried away the whole so cast on shore, within the space of six hours.

  One of the accused was acquitted and the other two were sentenced to death by hanging. From that case still lingers the only evidence that anyone in any part of the UK was ever prosecuted for displaying false lights.

  And yet the myth of the Cornish as the first and worst of the deliberate wreckers remains persistent. Accounts written by observers—some reliable, some mendacious—make mention of savage practice, and novelists from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first have built on the image of the Cornish as a people just that little bit closer to the fishes than the rest of the country. Daphne Du Maurier was not alone in committing the wreckers to fiction, though she has probably done most to shape Cornwall’s image in the public imagination. With Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek, she established an English version of Southern Gothic which is still recognisable in the way the county sees itself today. Though she told the secret, she was unhappy with its consequences. Returning in the late 1960s to Jamaica Inn, she found that, ‘Today everything is changed . . . Motor coaches, cars, a bar, dinner of river-trout, baths for the travel-stained instead of a cream-jug of hot water. As a motorist, I pass by with some embarrassment, feeling myself to blame . . . As the author I am flattered, but as a one-time wanderer dismayed.’

  Though Jamaica Inn was, and still is, the most famous of the Cornish wreckers tales, other novels told a similar story in equally vehement terms. J. F. Cobbs’s The Watchers on the Longships, published in 1948, considered the Cornish to be ‘a rude, and almost savage, set of people . . . little removed from barbarians’. Other writers went further, suggesting that the Cornish were not only responsible for false lights, but for completely false coastlines. According to the historian Kenneth Langmaid, as soon as local wreckers knew a lucrative ship was on its way towards Cornwall, they would begin constructing a makeshift stage set. The women in the village would be sent out to cut gorse and bracken, and the men would begin filling and trimming the oil lanterns. As night fell, the villagers would take their bundles of gorse and their lights to a hazardous stretch of headland nearby—preferably one which overlooked a convenient submerged reef just offshore. Armed with enough oil to last out the night, the women would station themselves at a point midway down the surrounding cliffs. Extra lights would also be placed at other points along the length of the cliff and near the water’s edge. The men would row out a little way from the headland, towing behind them a small flotilla of makeshift rafts. When the target ship was sighted by the lookout, the women would light both gorse and lanterns, and the men would position a lamp on each of the rafts, pushing them out so they floated around the reef. To the approaching ship, the lanterns and the rising smoke on the cliff would look like the lights from a few friendly fishing cottages in a quiet cove, and the bobbing lamps on the rafts like boats at safe anchor. If—as was likely—the captain was by now navigating by dead-reckoning, he would probably not be troubled by the fact that he was four or five miles away from his anticipated destination. Only when his ship struck solid rock and the masts toppled down around him would he realise how completely he had been deceived. Maybe it’s only a story. There again, maybe it’s not.

  There was also confirmation of the local passion for wrecking from more reliable sources. One senior naval officer described the Cornish as a bunch of ‘lawless barn-door savages’, and a wreck report in 1700 claimed that ‘The number of rioters was so great and their threatenings so high, and their proceedings so outrageous that the ordinary ministers of justice durst not attempt to suppress them.’ According to the General Evening Post, reporting news of a wrecked brigantine driven ashore near Looe in 1751, ‘They are so used to night work, so Habituated to Defiance of any Authority and Contempt of the Laws, and generally more or less so inflamed with Spiritous Liquors that they are ever ready to perpetrate any Villainy that their Violent Temper and Love of Lucre shall prompt them to.’

  In 1839 the commissioners appointed to look into the possibility of establishing a nationwide constabulary report
ed that, ‘The population on the coast of Cornwall has long been addicted to this species of plunder . . . Whilst on other parts of the English coast the persons assemble by hundreds for plunder on the occurrence of a wreck, on the Cornish coast they assemble on such occasions in thousands.’ Even in the twentieth century, foreign sailors still talked of the Cornish the way white men talked of ‘Hottentots’. ‘I have been wrecked in different parts of the globe, even in the Fiji islands,’ wrote the Dutch captain of the Voorspoed, a general cargo vessel wrecked in Perran Bay in 1901, ‘but never among such savages as those of Perranporth.’ An old story about a naive young curate posted to a Cornish parish sums up the general view. While out walking, he finds the corpse of a shipwreck victim on the beach. Rushing up the cliff towards the road, he accosts the first man he meets and asks him what he should do with the body. ‘Search ’is pockets,’ the man replies brusquely, and walks on.

  The supposed ferocity of the Cornish was attributable to three things: remoteness, custom, and poverty. Originally, the rights to all wreck belonged to the Crown, which then distributed those rights to local landowners (‘lords of the manor’) in return for men and loyalty in times of war, or for money in times of peace. The lords thus had claim to anything and everything washed up on their particular section of foreshore. Over time, they found that claim so rewarding that ownership of wreck rights became as disputed as the wrecks themselves. To strengthen their claim, the lords usually enlisted the aid of the most easily bribed local magistrates and as many local troops as they could muster.

  In most parts of the country, wreckers usually claimed they were driven to plunder through destitution, and thus that wrecking should be regarded as a form of fishy Marxism, redistributing wealth and property from rich shipowners to poor labourers. The lords of the manor had no such justification. They were only interested in the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the slightly richer, and were said to requisition anything on their foreshores with an enthusiasm which starving men could not well have matched. To them, a good wreck constituted something between an international interior design consultancy and Ali Baba’s cave; half the great houses in Cornwall were said to be furnished with Spanish oak, Flemish tapestries or Portuguese candlesticks. Lengthy disputes arose between shipowners who would demand the return of £10,000 worth of gold ingots or a chest fall of jewels washed up on a Cornish beach, and lords, who would reply that the items had been mysteriously lost in transit. The lords also had the power and the resources to make the most of shipwrecks. Instead of one lone wrecker stacking up as much timber as his mule could carry, the lords of the manor scooped up anything and everything that appeared on their sands.

  Unsurprisingly, the lords and their tenants loathed each other. The tenants complained that the lords enforced their rights too greedily, and the lords complained that the tenants were no more than axe-wielding murderers. From comparatively early times, the major land-bound industry in Cornwall had been the tin mines. As elsewhere, mining jobs were not lucrative; by the mid-eighteenth century, the average tinner could expect to earn between 16 and 21 shillings per month. In time, therefore, the tinners acquired a savage reputation. Relatively undamaged shipping driven ashore in the area would be stripped so rapidly that the tinners were often down to the ship’s timbers by the time the authorities arrived, and it was alleged that the wreckers often consumed so much stolen alcohol that many would simply expire where they lay.

  In March 1753, George Borlase, factor to the Onslows of Gulval near Penzance, wrote that:

  The people who make it their business to attend these wrecks are generally Tynners and as soon as they observe a ship on the Coast they first arm themselves with sharp axes and hatchets and leave their tyn works to follow those ships . . . they’ll cut a large trading vessel to pieces in one tide and cut down everybody that offers to oppose them . . . I have seen many a poor man, half dead, cast ashore and crawling out of the reach of the waves fallen upon and in a manner stripp’d naked by those Villians, and if afterwards he has saved his chest or any more cloath’s they have been taken from him . . . I think whoever shd. forcibly take any goods out of the possession of such shipwreck’d sailor by force shd. suffer as highwaymen [highwaymen were traditionally hanged on a roadside gibbet].

  It may well be that Borlase’s outrage was genuine and that he was entirely above involvement in such practices himself, though what seems to have irritated him most was not the tinners’ violence or amorality, but the fact that they instantly stopped work as soon as they spotted a vessel in distress. Often, the lords’ scandalised tones owed more to their outrage at the tinners’ success in stripping a wreck than it did to any genuine sense of injustice.

  Sir John Killigrew of Arwenack was probably the best known of the lords, and his story exemplifies the combative relationship between landlord and tinner. Historically, the Killigrews had always had a strong family predilection for piracy; in 1583, it was said that a sword-wielding Lady Killigrew had boarded a Spanish ship moored in Falmouth harbour, drowned the crew and requisitioned the cargo. In 1619, Sir John applied to Trinity House for a patent to construct a light on the Lizard peninsula. Trinity House refused, so Killigrew petitioned the Lord High Admiral the Duke of Buckingham instead. He claimed that a light would put a stop to the local practice of showing false lights, and ‘I assure your Lordship that most of the houses near the Lizard are built with the ruins of ships.’

  Though his petition sounded pious enough, Killigrew was moved less by compassion for distressed mariners than by the prospect of levying dues on all shipping passing the light. Despite Trinity House’s protests—and the family precedent—the Duke granted the patent and Killigrew began construction. When half-completed, a group of local tinners attacked the workers and pulled down the half-built light. Killigrew was forced to hire a company of dragoons to keep further incursions at bay, and complained that he had found the whole business, ‘far more troublesome than I expected, for the inhabitants near think they suffer by this erection. They affirm I take away God’s grace from them. Their English meaning is that now they shall receive no more benefit by shipwreck, for this will prevent it. They have been so long used to reap profit by the calamity of the ruin of shipping that they claim it hereditary, and hourly complain on me. Custom breeds strange ills.’ The light became Killigrew’s nemesis, since maintaining it in adequate working order cost far more than the sum of any dues he managed to collect. Eventually, Killigrew ran out of money, and the light fell derelict.

  In almost all parts of Cornwall the wreckers were also favoured by geography. Now, those who want to get to Cornwall have to join the back of a very long queue. As any seat-sore Bank Holiday tripper knows, getting from London to the south-west still takes as long, if not longer, than it takes to get to Aberdeen—double that on a hot mid-summer weekend in the school holidays. The improvement and expansion of the A30 has speeded access a little, but Cornwall’s recent popularity has more or less cancelled out any temporary advantage from better roads. Every last cove and corner of the county is stuffed to the point of discomfort from mid-April onwards. In the past, however, the problem with Cornwall was not its popularity, but the opposite. A mid-nineteenth century journey to Penzance from London by mail coach would have taken at least three days, which was seventy-two hours too long to effectively protect any wreck which came ashore. No-one came to Cornwall, so no-one saw. Though the county had its usual quota of magistrates, coastguards and preventive men, Cornwall’s distance from London—the very thing which now renders it so popular—proved to be the wreckers’ most effective weapon.

  Besides, even when the law could have got there in time, there was no guarantee they would have found their targets. Cornwall seems to have been custom built for secrecy. The county is filled with tiny lanes enclosed by high hedgerows so thick with age and overgrowth they seem as much part of the natural landscape as the cliff tops, steep village streets down which nothing wider than a bicycle can pass with comfort, unexpected cove
s appearing and disappearing behind another few miles of switchback road, twisting river mouths and thickly wooded hillsides, glimpses of water vanishing behind ambiguous headlands, similar-sounding place names, and always that dreamlike sense of having passed this way a little time before. It is that confusion, the sense of having stumbled across a halfdiscovered land, which forms so much of Cornwall’s attraction. You could stay in the same place every summer for twenty years and still get lost every time. The fishing village at the bottom of a near-vertical hillside with its bath-sized cove, its perfect pub and its peeling red phone box might be there one weekend but have vanished by the next; the patch of beach on which you built a fire and cooked an impromptu meal might seem vivid in memory but no longer exists in fact. Walk along the same stretch of headland and somehow the path leads you off to a different place on each revisitation. Sail up one of the inlets and stare round you as the sun goes down; whatever you see will be gone by the time you return. Landmarks get nearer or further, headlands appear or repeat; expected signs refuse to materialise. Cornwall is England’s mirage, parts of it always vanishing before your eyes. From land and sea, it is a cartographer’s nightmare and a wrecker’s dream—a place that could not possibly have been better designed for concealment.