The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  In the past, those visitors who did make it safely into the county—either by land or by sea—had often been sent there by the Church. Most protested vehemently against the wreckers. In a lengthy report by the Reverend G. C. Smith in his mid-nineteenth century letters to a friend (later published as The Wreckers, or A Tour of Benevolence from St Michael’s Mount to the Lizard Point), he wrote that:

  Natural depravity and the custom of centuries have inspired the inhabitants of the coast with a rapacity for plundering those wrecks . . . the name of ‘Wrecker’, therefore, applies to vast numbers, who inhabit the various parishes along the coast; and unfortunately such has been the frequency of wrecks every winter, that the people look as naturally for them at that season, as the sharks for the devotees who perish in the waters of the Ganges. Men, women, and children usually join in this work; and if the vessel contains a cargo of wine or spirits, it is not uncommon for five or six persons to drink so much as to perish on the beach, or in the adjacent lanes . . . When the news of a wreck flies round the coast, thousands of people are instantly collected near the fatal spot; pick-axes, hatchets, crowbars, and ropes, are their usual implements for breaking up and carrying off whatever they can. The moment the vessel touches the shore she is considered fair plunder, and men, women, and children are working on her to break her up, night and day. The precipices they descend, the rocks they climb, and the billows they buffet, to seize the floating fragments, are the most frightful and alarming I ever beheld; the hardships they endure (especially the women) in the winter, to save all they can, are almost incredible. Should a vessel laden with wine or spirits approach the shore, she brings certain death and ruin, to many with her. The rage and fighting, to stave in the casks and bear away the spoil, in kettles and all manner of vessels, is brutal and shocking. To drunkenness and fighting, succeed fatigue, sleep, cold, wet, suffocation, death and—what? An eternity! Last winter we had some dreadful scenes of this description. A few in this neighbourhood, it seems, having a little more light than others, scrupled to visit a wreck that came on shore last winter, on a Lord’s day, lest it should be breaking the Sabbath; but they gathered all their implements into a public house, and waited until the clock struck twelve—at midnight, therefore, they rushed forth, all checks of conscience being removed. Imagine, to yourself, my dear Sir, 500 little children in a parish, brought up every winter in this way, and encouraged both by precept and example to pursue this horrid system.

  But even Smith drew back from accusing the wreckers of murder:

  The Wreckers seldom or ever reap profit by these nefarious labours, for they are found at the end of the year nearly the same as the beginning. It appears, for the credit of the country, that these are confined to a few western parishes, and that even there no deeds of personal inhumanity towards the unhappy sufferers have been performed in modern times, even by the plunderers themselves . . . Inheriting from their ancestors an opinion that they have a right to such spoils as the sea may place within their reach, many among the enlightened inhabitants secure whatever they can seize, without any remorse; and conclude without any hesitation, that nothing but injustice, supported by police, and sanctioned by law, can wrench it from their hands.

  On closer inspection, however, anomalies begin to appear. G. C. Smith’s account can be found almost word-for-word in a variety of different sources. Which is fine, except that in one or two of the accounts, small details become large ones, plain anecdotes grow ornaments, and the wreckers turn innocent or guilty according either to the date of writing or to the intended readership. Sabine Baring-Gould, parson, squire, folk historian and composer, was the first writer to consolidate an image of his flock as a bunch of godless murderers swinging false lights on cliff tops. And the Reverend Hawker of Morwenstow, whose account of wrecking near Bude makes Dickens’s description of the death of Little Nell look evenhanded, has been soundly discredited by several recent writers. Hawker was born in 1803 and became vicar of Morwenstow on the west coast of Cornwall in 1834, during which time he became famous for his eccentricities and his overactive imagination. Even his son-in-law and first biographer, Charles Byles, conceded that Hawker, ‘never let facts, or the absence of them, stand in the way of his imagination’.

  In part, the outrage of vicars such as Hawker was undoubtedly genuine, not least since it usually fell to them to organise (and, in many instances, to pay for) some form of Christian burial for unclaimed shipwreck victims. Until the early nineteenth century, corpses were either left to rot where they lay or buried in shallow graves along the cliff tops or in rough ground close by. Old local habits proved hard to shift. In common with many coastal communities, the Cornish believed that those who saved a drowning man would be repaid with their own death. The distaste for touching the deceased remained so profound that an act was passed in 1808 offering a 5-shilling bounty to anyone reporting a corpse, while penalising them £5 for failing to do so. The act only made a partial impression. Hawker claimed that he supplemented this with a further five shillings of his own, though even with financial incentives it cannot have been a pleasant task to go in search of ‘gobbets’ on the beach—the lumps of flesh and bone which was often all that remained of a crew after the sea and the wreckers had done their worst—or to have answered the midnight knocks on the door to find someone bringing news of a hand, a foot, or a severed head ashore.

  Hawker may have often altered or inflated his own role in events, but what was unquestionably true was that between 1824 and 1874, eighty-one vessels were recorded as having been wrecked around the coast near Bude, and that as the local vicar, Hawker would have been forced to deal with them. During his time in Morwenstow, he claimed to have personally buried over forty victims. In 1868, after yet another wreck, Hawker wrote: ‘I do indeed pray that I may be spared as much as possible the misery and indeed danger of proximity to the dead when far advanced in decay . . . If it were not for the fact that burial of the dead is one of the seven acts of mercy that God will surely requite, my heart would fail me.’

  Though there is little doubt that the majority of Cornish vicars fulfilled their calling with honesty and fortitude, there is equal evidence that some went spectacularly native. The ancient smuggling rule that a couple of casks would be laid aside for the local man of God extended to wrecking as well. When the authorities began a search for the missing cargo of the Lady Lucy, wrecked off Porthleven in 1939, they discovered four hogsheads of brandy hidden in the cellar of the local parson. Any vicar who had been posted to a parish in which every single inhabitant had been brought up since birth with the firm conviction that plundering ships was not only a duty, but a God- and law-given right, would very likely find it more their life’s worth to object. In truth, some Cornish vicars probably were in league with the wreckers, some did all they could to oppose them, and some merely turned a blind eye. There is an old anecdote of a man bursting into church with news of a wreck on the rocks nearby. The parson hears the man out, turns back to his congregation and orders them to remain seated. But instead of continuing with the service, he flings off his surplice, and announces, ‘Now we can all start fair!’ before bolting for the door and the path to the beach. The story, inevitably, always concerns a Cornish church, and a Cornish parson. Another early account on similar lines claimed that:

  If a wreck happened to occur in Cornwall while Divine Service was being held, notice of it was given out from the pulpit by the parson. It is said of the wreckers, I know not with what truth, that the strongest among them would swim out through the breakers and drown the exhausted survivors by thrusting them under water as the poor wretches struggled, with failing strength, to reach the shore. There were even pious fanatics who went so far as to admonish the people that it was sinful to succour a vessel in distress upon the Sabbath; that it was, in fact, sinful to save life. On the other hand, refusal to do so was a proof of true religiousness since it showed that they realised it was God’s will that the ship should sink and the crew perish.

  As
the 1839 Commission on establishing a national constabulary heard, both the Cornish wreckers and their most zealous imitators in other parts of the country had been able to create a perfect circle of violence. Because they always appeared in such numbers, because they came armed and because they would stop at nothing—not even extreme personal risk—to attack a wounded ship, it was almost impossible to stop them. Besides, there was also confusion over the different official roles and duties. Lloyd’s agents were expected to save and account for both ships and cargo, but had no power to protect vessels from plunder. The coastguard was regarded with suspicion and considered to be acting without legal authority, and those guards who did appear on the seething beaches usually felt themselves to be undermanned and overwhelmed. Customs officers were expected to protect property but were rarely given the means to do so, while the police force had no true force at all. It was hardly surprising that the only method left open to the various different officials was to call in the army—a device of last resort which took time and did little to instil confidence among either victims or shipowners.

  Occasionally, not even the presence of soldiers was enough to suppress the looting. In 1817, when the brig Resolution, carrying a cargo of wine and oranges, was wrecked at Porthleven, a full-scale orgy was in progress within an hour. The local customs officer, realising that he was overwhelmed, galloped off in search of reinforcements and returned with a party from the Inniskilling Dragoons. The wreckers simply drove the soldiers from the beach and continued drinking well into the next day. It was not until twenty-four hours later, and the arrival of further military reinforcements, that the rioting was brought under control.

  Even when the coastguard or the army did reach the coast quickly and saved some items from the predators, they could not always guarantee that their salvings would remain safe. Another particular Cornish speciality was the storming of customs houses and the removal of items put there for storage and disbursement. From the wreckers’ point of view, they were doing no more than reclaiming what was rightfully theirs, but the threat of continuing violence even after cargoes had been locked up provided yet another deterrent to prevention.

  But despite all this evidence—the victims, the lords, the shipowners, the sea-captains, the vicars, the officials—the locals remain adamant that there is no such thing as a real Cornish wrecker. In bookshops and libraries, in museums and harbours, in bars, shops, hotels and tourist traps, the answer is always the same: the Cornish never deliberately wrecked ships, and they never used false lights. In most places, the fact that I’m asking these questions at all is taken as further proof—if proof were needed—of bad faith. ‘There was no wrecking here,’ says the manageress of a bookshop in Falmouth. ‘That was all just stories made up.’ So how come so many of those stories were ‘made up’ by the Cornish themselves? ‘They weren’t,’ she says. ‘They were made up by Outsiders.’ Outsiders like Du Maurier, Hamilton-Jenkin and Borlase? I browse for a while among the shelves and then buy two books off her, one called Cornish Wreckers, the other Cornish Shipwrecks.

  Falmouth high street is bright and busy, with shops selling knick-knacks to the passing trade: Cornish rock, Cornish pasties, Cornish boats, Cornish pictures, Cornish key fobs and tea towels. Over the years, Cornwall has become very adept at flogging its past. Just down the road, the new Cornwall Maritime Museum is nearing completion. Land’s End has a real wreck and The Relentless Sea. Charlestown has an entire museum devoted to shipwreck and rescue, offering pirates, smugglers and an appropriately salty version of the county’s criminal past. And Jamaica Inn is still open and still recycling its old myths. Almost every shop in the county is filled with images of bearded, peg-legged sea dogs clutching swords or pasties on everything from beer mats to key rings. Over the years, it would seem that the Cornish has figured out how to have things both ways, selling images of themselves as swashbuckling plunderers to the tourists, whilst simultaneously denying that anything actually took place.

  And so, having exhausted more conventional methods of research—libraries, salvage websites, statistics, legal reports, local histories—all that remains is to try a less conventional method. In mid-April, the port of Newlyn is already sluggish with tourists loitering down the narrow side streets. Cars move slowly along the coastal road between Mousehole and Penzance; families stop to gaze up at the fishermen’s cottages, looking for something—anything—to buy. At some time in the past, Newlyn and Penzance were two separate towns, but the years have coupled them together. Like Edinburgh and Leith, the larger and the smaller now co-exist, one working, the other idle. Penzance is more grown-up and developed, rich with tourists and visiting yachts. Newlyn also gets the tourists, but has managed—just—to cling on to its day-job. Remove the tourists, and it would be a quiet place: small, solid, sure of itself, built to stare straight towards the worst of the Atlantic weather. It looks like the sort of place that hasn’t changed much since the wreckers were rampant—if, of course, there ever were any wreckers.

  It therefore comes as something of a shock to realise that this port, with its couple of acres of sheltered water and its modest practicality, is now England’s largest fishing port. In other words, England’s fishing fleet has shrivelled so completely that this place, with its nineteen or so trawlers, is now as good as things get. This morning, there are seven or eight fishing trawlers lined up against the quay, some warming quietly in the spring sun, some inflamed by a cold fountain of blue sparks. Two or three men are moving around their decks, taking a welding torch to the winches and the rusted fish hatches. The boats are not large—maybe 80-foot long—and each of them has evidently sailed through many years of Atlantic gales. On most, the paintwork is rusty, the fenders have split, the decks are rutted and the wheelhouse glass is opaque with age. There is no glamour here, no dazzling white multi-million pound supertrawlers, no proof of much more than the most basic levels of equipment and comfort. Instead, there’s just a bunch of old boats doing the same job as they’ve done for the past thirty years. The only evidence of success—or even of modest prosperity—are up on the masts, almost out of view. The radar equipment and satellite aerials on most of the boats are new, and look it: big, expensive equipment designed not only to alert the rest of the maritime world to the vessels’ existence, but to hunt down every last fish they can from here to Newfoundland.

  In a small office overlooking the quay, Mike Collier sits surrounded by the evidence of wreck. He is the Maritime and Coastguard Agency’s local fishing vessel surveyor, a post which requires him to enforce the regulations on ship safety and to deal with casualties if and when they happen. On the wall are a number of photographs, one of the Cita, one of a large ugly vessel heeled over in shallow water with most of her hull exposed, and two of private yachts high and dry on the rocks. Collier himself is friendly and amiable, fielding calls throughout our conversation and obviously at home in his chosen occupation. Looking out at the trawlers moored outside, I wonder how many vessels he is responsible for. ‘Gosh,’ he says, thinking carefully. ‘The boats vary in size—we’ve got some of 35 metres right down to five metres. And there must be about sixty boats which come into the bigger category—the over 15 metre category. Below 15 metres, we’ve probably got something like a hundred, I suppose, in total. It’s quite a big fleet. The only problem is, it’s quite an ageing fleet. They’ll invest in equipment and they’ll keep the boats up to scratch, but there hasn’t been much investment in new tonnage down here—it’s stayed fairly static. We’ve got one new boat in the port and a couple that are nearly new, but that’s all. It isn’t because they can’t afford to, it’s because people don’t want to change their boats—they’re quite happy, they’re familiar with the boat that they’ve got. If you’ve got a boat which is paid for, it doesn’t owe you anything, and all it’s costing you is the maintenance, then I can see the point of not investing. Because to buy a new boat is going to cost you probably—I don’t know, let’s be conservative and say £500,000 to buy a good new fishing
boat. You might get something a bit cheaper than that, but that’s the usual price.’

  Since all fishermen are expected to be expert sailors, any problems which arise are less due to human error than to mechanical failure. ‘Anything that’s mechanical or floats on the sea is liable to be beset at any time by problems. You can have your car serviced regularly and still the finger of fate will come out of the cloud one day, and say, “You, you bastard, snap” . . . the water pump breaks, but you just coast to the side of the road and get on to the AA or Britannia, and they’ll come and get you, but if you’re 150 miles south-west of here and it’s blowing howling hooligan and the water pump packs up, you’ve got a problem.’ Which, presumably, is exacerbated by all the risks in fishing off a dangerous coast. Collier considers. ‘It is, but fishing is done by people who know that it’s dangerous and therefore react totally differently than if . . . Fishing is a controlled danger, it’s an accepted danger, it’s not just a perceived danger for people standing on the shore.’

  Many of the shipping casualties caused by human error are due to watchmen falling asleep. Sailing of any kind can be both physically and mentally exhausting, and it is unsurprising that those left on lookout during the night often succumb. As Collier points out, the pressures are even greater for fishermen. ‘It happens—it’s one of these things that can happen in the best regulated vessels. Human beings get tired at night; the automatic reaction in the hours of darkness is sleep, and they’re working very hard.’ He points to the picture of the yacht. ‘That one was sleep-induced . . . Poor bloke—that was his worldly possessions, all gone. And all through tiredness—if he’d stayed out in the Atlantic, he’d have been alright.’ Then, of course, there is the Cita, another infamous loss caused simply by some Polish sailor’s need for a nap. Collier was involved in the salvage operation, and remembers the Cita with affection.