The Wreckers

A story of killing seas, false lights and plundered shipwrecks  (HarperCollins, 2005)

Extract from the 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 redhot 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 waited 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 - RLS 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. RLS'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 were to become engineers to the NLB, and RLS himself completed his apprenticeship before trading in granite for ink. The Pentland Firth, where the Regent waited, is 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' RLS described unique to Swona, or had they also existed elsewhere? I'd heard of pirates, privateers and press-men, and I knew 18th and 19th 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 lights. 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 keeper 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 an established 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'd 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, 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 fog-horns, false harbours, false rescuers, false dawns; even stories of entire coastlines rigged as 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 accomplished wreckers that they had been responsible for drafting the first international law against it back in the 13th century. In the Carribean, wrecks were so frequent that the 18th century colonial government was estimated to derive two-fifths of its income from salvage. America called their wreckers mooncussers 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 passsing 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 after I finished The Lighthouse Stevensons, would I be walking straight into a twilight of historical whispers and unverifiable anecdotes? Would I spend my time researching things which, like RLS's Records, were evidently founded in fact but embellished in the telling? Were there sources which could be trusted and sound material ground on which I could steady a whole book? If I started this, would I just end up stranded amidst neverending lists of shipping casualties? 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 OED, a wrecker is 'one who tries from shore to bring about shipwreck with view to profiting by wreckage, or who steals such wreckage; person employed in demolition, or in recovering wrecked ship or its contents.' Salvage, on the other hand, is '1 verb: rescue (a ship or its cargo) from loss at sea. 2 noun: 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 UK 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 where there was never any need to deliberately wreck ships. Geography, weather conditions and a hostile sea washed up all the ships they'd ever need. Though it's almost impossible to verify, probably rather less than one or two percent 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 RLS 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 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 18th and 19th centuries when sea traffic was at its heaviest. For much of the 19th century and all of the 18th, 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 in most cases wasn't up 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 longitude, it was scarcely any surprise that so many ships came to grief. Nor did things necessarily improve once in sight of land. Until the early 19th 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 keen-eyed 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 my research for this book to the past 300 years, and to Britain alone. There were wrecks and wreckers before the 18th century, and there are wrecks and wreckers in other parts of the world. But Britain's own unique set of circumstances provided me with an obvious physical borderline. The sheer variety and range of natural hazards around the coastline - rip-tides on the Pentland Firth, whirlpools on the West, 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. And so, instead of presenting the book chronologically, I have arranged things by area. Different conditions called for different techniques, and the Pentland Firth pirates were as far from the Kent hovellers in style as they were in miles. I also discovered that, while the 20th century might have offered many improvements to lifesaving and sea safety, 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 GPS era, there were always wrecks, and always people who profited by them. As I also discovered, some of those people were still alive, and some of those people would talk. The Stevensons and the lifeboats represent the lighter side of humanity; now here is the dark.

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