The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  After a while, we get back into the car and turn away from the beach. Driving back that night, the haze is so thick that each car’s headlights form a perfect cone of light as they come towards us. Most of the journey back to Bhavnagar passes in silence. I stare out of the windows at the passing scrap plots. Every few yards someone has strung together a set of green and red navigation lights around a shrine to Ganesh or Shiva or Kali. Figures move in the darkness, fixing meals or sitting in the discarded armchairs watching the truckloads of LPG canisters thunder past. Men stoop by the shrines, rearranging the sprays of flowers or adjusting a starboard light, while above them a thousand abandoned cutlery sets tinkle in the breeze. It is hard not to wonder who exactly will one day drive down this road and discover in themselves a sudden unsatisfied need for an incomplete set of forty-seven mismatched muster instructions for a 1976 Estonian-registered bulk carrier or four rolls of damaged orange lino. The only item which is not much in evidence here is steel. Steel—from the hulls and innards of the ships themselves—is the point of this place, but steel, in general, has no need to sit and rot in the sun. Most of it is taken direct to re-rolling mills and turned into the concrete reinforcing rods used in construction. Between 60 and 80 per cent of it will stay in Gujarat, since most reprocessed steel is too low in quality to be sold for export. So, in effect, the ships of Alang will be transformed into the infrastructure of India itself.

  Perhaps Ajay is right. Looking at the little shrines with their landlocked navigation lights now being used for more heavenly reasons, Alang makes better sense. Those broken ships on the beach may or may not have souls. But if India is the recycling capital of the world, then Alang is where it finds its darkest incarnation.

  ***

  It may seem an odd way to end, in a wrecking yard without any wreckers. But in its own stark form, Alang represents part of what has happened to ships and to the people who live off them. Back in the days of wooden sailing vessels, any ship which hit the coast would not be expected to remain intact for long. Whether or not it was seized and stripped by wreckers, the hull itself would be unlikely to survive a winter on the rocks. But as ships got larger and steel began to replace timber, ships began to last. And last, and last. Steel doesn’t rot, it just lies there on the ocean floor providing prefabricated housing for the algae. No-one, not even the most dedicated wrecker or salvor, was ever going to be able to find a use for 30,000 tons of rusting hull. Shipowners had a choice; they could either sell their obsolete vessel to a scrapyard like Alang, or they could hope that the sea did the same job for less money. And so, alongside the development of huge international ship-breaking yards, there was also the development of another, less ostentatious form of demolition; the deliberate wreck.

  When the Shipwreck Committee was appointed in 1836 to ‘inquire into the increased Number of Shipwrecks, with a view to ascertain whether such improvements might not be made in the Construction, Equipment and Navigation of Merchant Vessels, as would greatly diminish the annual Loss of Life and Property at Sea’, the committee members discovered that captains were often as likely to be responsible for the destruction of their ships as sandbanks or hovellaires. Their report exposed an industry riven with mendacity and turpitude. As they concluded, there was a clear chain of corruption reaching all the way from the Houses of Parliament to the dockside tavern. Shipowners took shortcuts because legislation allowed them to do so, and crews had become so accustomed to working in overcrowded and dangerous conditions that most did not expect to survive more than ten years at sea.

  In the preamble to its report, the committee established ten principal causes of shipwreck. Firstly, ships were often poorly designed and defectively constructed—a tendency which was, if anything, actively encouraged by the system of ship classification which designated all new ships as inherently stronger than all old ships, however lame and shabby they might be. In the committee’s view, the system induced ‘shipowners to build their ships in the cheapest manner, and with the least degree of strength that was sufficient to sustain their vessels through the shortest period named’. Since it was evidently useless spending good money on a bad ship, and since the strength of foreign competition had already peeled profit margins to the bone, owners would rarely bother to maintain their ships in a seaworthy state.

  Overloading, fraud and inadequate supervision only worsened the situation. Shipowners, knowing that they could claim on the insurance and that the cost of the premiums could be passed on to the cargo owners, would scarcely bother ensuring that their ships were seaworthy. Many of the emigrant coffin ships of the nineteenth century were barely capable of making it out of their home port, let alone across the Atlantic. Shipowners bought semi-derelict hulks, extorted a small fortune out of each passenger, and sat back in the confident expectation that the deliberate drowning of 300 half-starved Irish peasants was unlikely to trouble the British authorities.

  Besides, if the ships themselves weren’t at fault, then the crew probably were. As the committee discovered, ‘the frequent incompetence of masters and officers appears to be admitted on all hands . . . some are appointed to command merchant vessels at periods of such extreme youth (one instance is given of a boy of 14, all of whose apprentices were older than himself), and others so wholly destitute of maritime experience (another instance being given of a porter from a shipowner’s warehouse who was made a captain of one of his ships) that vessels . . . have been wrecked on coasts from which they believed themselves to have been hundreds of miles distant at the time.’

  A bad situation was, in the committee’s view, worsened by the lack of adequate harbours of refuge on many areas of Britain’s coast, and by the fatal inaccuracy of most navigational charts. When ships did run aground they found that ‘there is on many points of the coast a want of that moral principle which should inculcate a just regard for the rights of such [shipwrecked] property. It is rather looked upon as a chance gift, which each has a right to scramble for as he can, notwithstanding the laws which have been passed from the earliest period, to prevent or punish such depredations . . . The plunder of shipwrecked property on the coast has been carried on to an enormous extent.’ More terrible still was the fate of the victims. The committee reported on two or three cases in which ‘the crews of several ships in each year having been reduced to the necessity of existing on the remains of their comrades’.

  But perhaps worst of all, in the committee’s view, was the menace of rum. ‘Drunkenness,’ they stated, ‘either in the masters, officers, or men, is a frequent cause of ships being wrecked . . . the practice of taking large quantities of ardent spirits as part of the stores of ships, whether in the Navy or in the Merchant Service, and the habitual use of such spirits, even when diluted with water, and in what is ordinarily considered the moderate quantity served to each man at sea, is itself a very frequent cause of the loss of ships and crews.’ As an example of the benefits of nautical temperance, the committee pointed westwards, ‘there being at present more than 1,000 sail of American vessels traversing all the seas of the world, in every climate, without the use of spirits by their officers or crews, and being, in consequence of this change, in so much greater a state of efficiency and safety than other vessels not adopting this regulation.’ By the early nineteenth century, the daily grog ration was as much of a tradition within both the Merchant and Royal Navies as sodomy and insubordination. Until 1824, the daily ration for one adult rating in the Royal Navy was a pint of rum diluted with a quart of water, and for officers, an undiluted pint.

  In August 1836 the committee reported its findings. Among their recommendations were the immediate establishment of a board (the Mercantile Marine Board) to regulate and police the merchant service, the enforcement of a universal maritime code, and the establishment of proper courts of enquiry to look into individual shipwreck cases. They also wanted the system of ship classification tidied up, design and construction regulated, proper consideration given to the various life-saving devices shown to the committee
, and a system of schooling for both officers and ratings ‘in which some attention should be paid to their habits of cleanliness, order and sobriety, and the preservation of their moral characters, all of which are at present unhappily neglected’. Prospective candidates for the service would now also be expected to pass examinations in ‘seamanship, navigation, and nautical astronomy’, and to wear a recognisable uniform. Ambitiously, they suggested that Britain begin negotiations with most of the other major maritime powers to ensure that shipwreck victims were properly treated, and ‘in order to supersede, if possible, the present barbarous practice of plundering the ships and men thrown by misfortune on dangerous shores’. They also recommended that the daily grog ration be discontinued immediately, and a ‘more nutritious and wholesome’ beverage such as coffee, cocoa, chocolate or tea be provided as a substitute.

  The committee’s findings did not meet with universal approval. Many shipowners felt that the report was no more than the ramblings of parliamentarians drunk on statutory meddling, and argued that to put even a tenth of the committee’s recommendations into effect would cost Britain her place in world commerce. As they saw it, there were and would always be risks involved in sea travel, and a dangerous coastline was just one of those God-given things.

  In 1843, following the loss of 240 British ships and 500 lives within the space of three years, the committee reconvened. During the intervening years, laws had been passed restricting deck cargoes in ships plying between Britain and America, but casualty numbers remained too high and the committee found it necessary to spread the terms of their inquiry more widely. This time, the committee examined not just external wreck preventives—lighthouses, floating breakwaters, lifeboats, coastguards, rockets and mortars—but internal ones as well. Health provision was improved, attention was paid to the supply of on-board anti-scorbutics, and issues concerning employment, wages, training and the system of shipboard punishment were addressed. For the first time, they also recommended the fitting of ‘watertight divisions in steam-vessels’. But it would take a farther seventy-one years and the loss of 1,500 lives in the Titanic disaster of 1912 before the fitting of bulkheads became compulsory.

  Changes in maritime drinking habits were also slow to take effect, since—despite the committee’s best efforts—neither the Royal or Merchant Navy showed the slightest inclination to swap alcohol for hot cocoa. Over the course of the nineteenth century the grog rations were gradually reduced, or gin substituted for rum, but it was not until 1970 that alcohol was finally banned by the Royal Navy.

  Despite both shipwreck enquiries and the subsequent advances in legislation, the changes made almost no difference to the casualty statistics. Throughout the nineteenth century, the figures kept creeping upwards: in 1851, 692 registered vessels were wrecked on the British coastline with 900 lives lost; by 1880, 1,303 vessels were wrecked and 2,100 lives lost, and by 1909—by which time the average tonnage and passenger capacity of each vessel had increased, meaning an exponentially greater loss of life when ships did founder—733 vessels were wrecked and 4,738 lives lost. Although on-board conditions improved steadily throughout the twentieth century, two world wars also took an appalling toll on British shipping, and though the Royal Navy did its best to provide escorts for merchant vessels, they had neither the resources nor the equipment available to fully defend the convoys against the depredations of German wolf packs and dreadnoughts. Between June 1940 and June 1941 alone, three and a half million tons of British merchant shipping was sunk in the North Atlantic.

  Late twentieth century improvements to charts, navigational aids and buoyage have, however, reduced the numbers of shipwrecks. Ostensibly, the sea is now a safer place. Technology has been responsible for much of that change. The bridges of many modern ships now look more like games arcades than wheelhouses, and captains are now more likely to need a masters degree in IT than a feel for the sea. But increasing dependence on electronic equipment carries its own risks. Computers fail or crash, and when they do so captains have to fall back on more old-fashioned skills. If those skills atrophy through lack of use, then there is a genuine risk that the sea will once again start taking its old rake-off. Besides, improvements in technology are rarely matched by improvements in human physiology. Half the wrecks mentioned in this book were caused by someone falling asleep or misreading the charts, a form of fallibility that no amount of legislation will ever eliminate.

  There are other difficulties as well. Advances in technology have inevitably led to advances in misuse of that technology. Over the past ten years, the Global Positioning System has become almost ubiquitous in the maritime world. GPS works by adapting the old-fashioned navigational technique of triangulation to modern technological methods. Instead of a sailor taking two compass sights off the nearby coastline and thus managing to fix his position, the GPS system triangulates from the land to a number of satellites and back again, giving the mariner a reading of his position accurate to within a few feet. Theoretically, it is possible to ‘spoof’ the satellite signal—to send out a false signal with a higher power than the real one, so that the receiver (and therefore the sailor) will read only the stronger of the two signals. By forcing the on-board GPS receiver to listen to the false signal, any would-be wrecker could ensure that the sailor mistakes his position, thereby making him, and his valuable cargo, uncomfortably vulnerable to grounding or collision. The principle is almost exactly the same as that of putting out false lights: beguiling those on board a ship into believing that they are where they are not. Another alternative would be to jam the signal by broadcasting white noise over the same frequency, thus making it impossible for the receiver to read the satellite correctly. As James Taylor, chief executive of the Northern Lighthouse Board puts it: ‘The technology which allows ships which drive on satellite navigation autopilot for most of their lives is also the technology which allows someone else to drive it ashore, or onto a reef, and wreck it.’

  Other forms of modern wrecking, including scuttling, Mary Celestes, and ships which mysteriously disappear overnight, are all encouraged by the complexities of the modern shipping industry. The Prestige, an oil tanker which broke up near the coast of Spain in 2002, is a case in point. Originally named the Gladys, she was a single-hulled ship and over twenty years old. She was also built in Japan, flying a Bahamian flag, owned by the subsidiary of a Greek company based in Liberia which had bought her cargo of oil on the stock market in the Baltic states, had been chartered by an offshoot of a combined Russian-Swiss company based in Switzerland, was captained by a Romanian but crewed by Filipinos and was insured in London but licenced to operate by the United States. Disentangling who exactly is responsible for her is complicated enough; making those people pay for the damage she caused is near impossible. As the Galicians have found with the Prestige, and the Scillonians found with the Cita, every ship is now a floating disunity of nations. For anyone interested in wrecking ships—or in global terrorism—the twenty-first century has proved the perfect moment. The technology to save lives may have improved, but the technology to ‘lose’ both vessels and cargoes has improved at just the same rate.

  ***

  For as long as there have been ships, there have been wrecks, and for as long as there have been wrecks, there have been wreckers. There always have been and there always will be. Not just because both the sea and technology still make it possible, but because wrecking always did satisfy some very fundamental side of human nature.

  After a while, the front rooms of wreckers, salvors, divers, fishermen, lifeboat volunteers and coastguards all acquire a uniformity of appearance. Alongside the disproportionate numbers of cats occupying the best chairs, most have a surplus of maritime knick-knacks: paintings, books, odd bits of brasswork, glass buoys, tea cups, plates stamped with some dead ship’s insignia. Some of this loot—whether legally or illegally gained—is unquestionably both beautiful and desirable. The elegant brass lantern by the fireplace, the old ship’s bell and the captain’s silver n
apkin ring all have a shining role to play in their new land-bound lives.

  But what is also striking is how many of these objects appear completely valueless: piles of obsolete low-denomination coins, blunt table knives, broken crockery, brass portholes so covered in algae that the glass is now opaque. To someone who knows none of its history, it just looks like junk-shop clutter. It is junk-shop clutter. But to the person who found it—dragged it from the sea bed, plucked it from a wheelhouse, grabbed it in the last few instants before the ship went down—it has a value unconnected to money. The sea once stole it, and now they’ve stolen it back. In the Scilly Isles, there’s a shop that sells bits and pieces from various wrecks including the naval flagship, Association. Displayed on one of the tables is a broken spoonhandle, a bent and rusty fork, a chipped tea cup, a comb—things that even the most desultory car-boot flogger would be ashamed of. The spoon handle was priced at £25, and the rusty fork at £32. To the shop owner—and, presumably, to many of his customers—all these useless things had been elevated by their connection with the Association into a different place. They had come from a wreck and been washed by history, and those facts alone justified their price.

  Most wreckers will emphasise the usefulness of a good shipwreck: the raw materials, the timber, the fuel oil. But in practice, it is not always the useful things that they most prize, it is the souvenir and the pointless ornament. They do not show visitors the mahogany cross beam over the lintel or the three extra tractor tyres, they show them the clock and the captain’s jacket. For the truth is that wrecking was never just about need, it was also about want. As Richard Davies in Norfolk puts it: ‘The wreck itself is good. Any wreck.’ In other words, wrecking is theft, and stealing things is fun.

  The sheer pleasure in theft might have been one reason why the wreckers wrecked, but there were also more subtle forces at work. If it is partly Britain’s physical circumstances which brought the wrecks, then it is also our island psyche that made the best of them. Infamously, we are a nation of shopkeepers and bargain-hunters; secretive, materialistic and enterprising. We prefer a broad moral fudge to narrow fanaticism, we dislike outside interference, and we have never been averse to taking a little bit extra on the side. Perfect qualities, one could say, for the trainee wrecker. Add poverty, necessity, and superstition to the equation, and it is hardly surprising that wrecking throve as it did.