The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks, from the 18th Century to the Present Day
352
The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks, from the 18th Century to the Present Day
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Overview
Even today, Britain’s coastline remains a dangerous place. It is an island soaked by four separate seas, with shifting sand banks to the east, veiled reefs to the west, powerful currents above, and the world’s busiest shipping channel below. The country’s offshore waters are strewn with shipwrecks—and for villagers scratching out an existence along Britain’s shores, those wrecks have been more than simply an act of God; in many cases, they have been the difference between living well and just getting by.
Though Daphne du Maurier and Poldark have made Cornwall famous as Britain’s most notorious region for wrecking, many other coastal communities regarded the “sea’s bounty” as a way of providing themselves with everything from grapefruits to grand pianos. Some plunderers were held to be so skilled that they could strip a ship from stem to stern before the Coast Guard had even left port. Some were rumored to lure ships onto the rocks with false lights, and some simply waited for winter gales to do their work.
This book uncovers tales of ships and shipwreck victims—from shoreline orgies so Dionysian that few participants survived the morning to humble homes fitted with silver candelabra, from coastlines rigged like stage sets to villages where everyone owns identical tennis shoes. Spanning three hundred years of history, The Wreckers examines the myths, realities, and superstitions of shipwrecks and uncovers the darker side of life on Britain’s shores.
“Bathurst, who won a Somerset Maugham Award for The Lighthouse Stevensons, offers a spellbinding tale of seafaring men, their ships and the ocean that cares for neither.” —Publishers Weekly
“A fascinating, haunting account of pillagers, plunderers, and pirates.” —John Burnett, author of Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780544301610 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
False Lights
The human body is better at life than it is at death. We are blunt objects made for subtle intents; we can turn our bodies to almost any task and find that we already have the necessary equipment inbuilt. We can survive injury, starvation, pain, breakage, disease, time and despair. We are designed to last and built to survive. We have almost everything we need to repair and defend ourselves, and what we lack, we find elsewhere. Every one of us inhabits our own biological masterpiece. But, like every grand design, we have our flaws. Many of them are surprising; while we remain resistant and adaptive to injury or disease, we are peculiarly vulnerable to changes in temperature. Raise or lower our core body heat by just a few degrees, and we start to lose function. Make the difference more extreme, and our organs cannot work. Maintain the heat or the cold for too long, and we die.
Originally designed for the tropics, we remain elementally temperamental. Whether living in the Arctic or at the Equator, all of us have to maintain our core heat to within roughly half a degree of 37° Celsius. Half a degree is a change so slight that in the air around us it would feel imperceptible. Our external world is subject to huge surges and lapses in temperature; Britain, with its irresolute weathers, still varies between -20° in winter and +35° in summer. But in order to keep ourselves alive and functional, we need to keep our core body temperature stable at all times, whether in winter, summer, ice or fire. It is an extraordinary feat, and it takes an extraordinary amount of energy.
Most of the time, clothes (or the lack of them) help to do the job for us. Over the centuries, we have evolved the capacity to moderate the effect of the environment on our bodies with the addition or subtraction of a layer of fur or wool or denim or Goretex. Apply the right layers of clothing and the internal temperature of someone in -40° Greenland will stay at the same level as someone in t-shirt and shorts in +40° subSaharan Africa. The trouble arises when we get wet. Water is our greatest vulnerability; we cannot live without it, but we cannot live within it. Like the earth itself, we are seven-tenths water. It is the great equaliser; the source of our subsistence. Everything we are or were or aim to be begins and ends at sea level. It dictates our capacity to survive and thrive as a nation, our view of ourselves, our defence, our past, our future. It gives us life, and it kills us. Most of the world's oceans are filled with water lower than the temperature which we can safely tolerate for any length of time (20°C). Water conducts heat twenty-four times more efficiently than air; a body in water will cool four times more rapidly than on land.
Those who fall into the sea — whether through accident or design — find themselves in a foreign element. Water aims to equalise as rapidly as possible; it wants you to become part of it, fast. It has no difficulty at all absorbing something as vulnerable as a human body. First it steals heat, then it steals energy, then — if it is rough, which the seas around the British Isles tend to be — it replaces the air in the lungs with water. And finally, it takes you down.
Unfortunately a man overboard is notoriously difficult to spot. Once in the water, there is very little to be seen — just a head and a bit of splashing. The speed of the current will carry the victim soundlessly away while a ship takes time to turn and return. A small sailing yacht will probably only have a crew of two or three, and using one to keep a permanent lookout while using another to reef and steer is not easy. Add to that the hazards of poor visibility or bad weather, plus the strong possibility that the victim is not wearing safety gear, and an unscheduled swim does not seem such a shrewd idea.
According to recent scientific advice, in order to have the best chance of surviving sudden immersion you should make sure you are in a calm and temperate sea — preferably the Mediterranean in mid-summer. You should also be male, and fit, but probably have a reasonable amount of fat as well. If female, then you may have a worse chance of surviving the initial shock of shipwreck but a better long-term prospect of survival, since women's bodies store a higher percentage of fat than those of men. If you have the misfortune to fall into a cooler sea, then you should have spent time acclimatising yourself to the impact by taking regular cold baths. If you insist on drowning yourself in the waters around the British Isles, then try to do so on the west. The North Sea, lacking the benefit of the warming Gulf Stream, is generally at least two degrees colder than the Atlantic. If possible, you should be wearing a well-designed lifejacket, correctly sized and tied, and fitted with a splashguard. You should also be wearing clothing which provides a good 'boundary layer' around the skin (a wet suit, for instance). You should enter the water slowly and with caution, and remain as still as possible for the first couple of minutes while your body acclimatises. You should remain aware of the effects of cold on the nervous and circulatory system, and perform any tasks requiring manual dexterity as soon as possible after entering the water, since the cold will rapidly begin to numb your hands. As the amount of oxygen finding its way to the muscles decreases, even the strongest swimmers will eventually find themselves treading water. If you find a lifeboat or life-raft, but have the misfortune not to be rescued within a few hours, it may or may not be a consolation to know that you will survive for about a week with no fresh water, and between forty and sixty days with water but no food. Cannibalism is not recommended — like other meats, human flesh is comprised mainly of protein, and digesting protein depletes more of the body's water stores than carbohydrates do. On no account should you drink sea water. As any gardener who has ever sprinkled salt on a slug could tell you, salt shrivels things. When salt water touches the lungs, it tightens the alveoli, fatally reducing oxygen capacity. If you wish to survive drowning, try to do so in fresh water.
Though the notion that anyone who falls overboard is going to do so calmly and slowly in a freshwater sea while wearing the right clothes and having taken years of preparatory cold baths may seem ridiculous, there is at least a chance that a modern boat will be equipped with safety equipment and that the local coastguard could be alerted. A shipwreck victim in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries had no such hope. Safety equipment as such did not exist. There was no coastguard, no SAR helicopter, no lifeboat. In a gale, the crew's best chance of survival was to bind themselves to the mast and wait it out. They knew there could be no emergency flare, no Mayday alert, no warning call from sea to land, no Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons, no fluorescent lifejackets equipped with whistles and splashguards.
The only advantage that an eighteenth-century victim might have had over a twenty-first-century one was the availability of buoyant material. Modern yachts are built of fibreglass and modern ships of steel. Unless there is sufficient air left in the hull, both types go straight to the bottom of the sea if they capsize. Eighteenth-century vessels built of wood at least offered the mariner the consolation of watching his erstwhile safe haven float past him as he drowned. Presuming, of course, that he had actually managed to come up for air, since he probably could not even swim. Until well into the 1960s swimming classes were not compulsory in British schools. In many parts of the country people still remember being hurled off the local pier by their parents or elder siblings in the hope that they would float. If they floated, then they could survive, and that was all the tuition they needed. Besides, it wasn't as if even that rudimentary lesson helped. There are still areas of Britain where until very recently, fishermen would even ignore the impulse to remain buoyant. If they fell overboard, they folded their arms, filled their boots, and met their fate. Once the sea has claimed someone, so the thinking went, no man — on land or on deck — could challenge that claim.
It is therefore unsurprising that most maritime safety organisations concentrate more on keeping people out of the water than on dealing with them when they fall in. Fortunately for most people in Britain there are now few moments when we need the sea. In the past, anyone who wanted to earn a livelihood, travel, emigrate, exchange knowledge, conquer the colonies, take their goods to market, work, teach, fight, learn, or survive, had to take a boat. They could not fly or take a train under the Channel. They were stuck, moated by the surrounding oceans. They had no choice but to trust to fate and an adequate captain. Either way you look at it, we are sodden from both above and below, surrounded by ocean and fogged by grey weather. No part of England is more than seventy-five miles away from the sea, and — no matter how far we appear to grow away from it — the sea still shapes our identity, our history and much of our wealth. Dampness is our defining characteristic, and every foreigner that ever read about England knows it as a place of unceasing rain. This is a liquid land, and even those who never go near the sea will ever completely avoid its clammy grip. In recent years, water has begun to creep deeper into our homes and our supposedly storm-proof lives. Whether or not global warming or over-development of the flood plains is the culprit, the waters go on rising, month after month.
Our relationship with water marks much of our history. We may not be far from our continental neighbours, but we persist in behaving as if we are worlds apart. Even now, the British regard the rest of Europe as a club we would rather not join. Depending on our mood, we can either welcome its invasions (tourists, workers, decent food), or turn our backs to it; more usually, we manage a combination of the two. The distance between Dover and Calais is seventeen miles, but it marks a fathomless distance of difference to us. Our encircling waters have protected us, fed us, enriched us and occasionally trapped us. Anyone with plans to invade France, or Italy, or Spain, had merely to muster an army and march across the mountains, but anyone deluded enough to think of invading Britain pitted themselves against an exquisite set of natural defences: dirty seas, high cliffs, vile weather and a combative population. Thus the only possible attractions for attacking us were either to rob us, or to tame us, or both.
From our side, we regarded the water as both a challenge and a hazard. Since we were surrounded by it, we had to learn to cross it. Over the centuries we became knowledgeable about our particular patch of ocean, and the understanding made us bold. We sailed further, bought, sold, colonised, stole and appropriated, and then brought our spoils back in triumph across the water. We were rich — disproportionately so, and we came to regard the ocean as both our God-given element and our lake of liquid gold.
All that imperial loot came at a price, however. According to the Shipwreck Index of the British Isles, published by Lloyd's Register, and currently the most comprehensive estimate of UK losses, there are between 30,000 and 33,000 known wrecks around the British coastline. Though the figures include both domestic and foreign shipping, the final total is undoubtedly an underestimate. Though the Index has recorded all known ships from the point at which reliable records began to exist, there will be many thousands more vessels which, because they were small, or unregistered, or working illegally, vanished without ever making it safely into the books. Lloyds Register, which began producing annual figures for British and worldwide shipping casualties in the 1880s, only dealt with vessels above 1,000 tons, a statistical benchmark which exempted many smaller fishing vessels and almost all small inshore craft.
Still, even the figures which do exist make for interesting reading. The areas of England with the greatest numbers of wrecks per mile of coastline, are, perhaps predictably, Norfolk, west Cornwall and the Goodwin Sands (off Kent) with 25.6, 26 and 32 wrecks per mile respectively. Less predictably, the county with by far the worst shipwreck record in the whole of the British Isles is Durham, a small county with only twenty-six miles of coastline. The reasons for its appalling total of 43.8 wrecks per mile lie both in the geography of that coastline, and in its erstwhile economic identity as the home of shipbuilding, coal, and iron. The rivers Tees, Wear and Tyne are all local to Durham and collectively launched more ships than either the Clyde or the Mersey, or indeed any other river in Europe. Beyond the mouths of those rivers, small colliers steamed up and down the east coast with coal for all quarters of the British Isles. In part, the huge numbers of local shipping casualties were due to the volume of seaborne traffic in the area. But they were also due to the curse of the North Sea and the east coast: steep seas and lack of adequate safe harbours. In addition, as the 1836 Shipwreck Committee heard, the shipbuilding standards in the area were often outrageously low, and attempts to improve standards or safety derisory.
Other parts of Britain were similarly troublesome. Though the Shipwreck Index does not provide county-by-county statistics for Scotland, there is strong evidence that certain coastal areas equalled or even exceeded the worst of England's totals. In particular, the Pentland Firth and the north-east coast were areas that even skilled navigators avoided if possible. Scotland is effectively governed by three seas: the Atlantic on the west, the North Sea on the east and a combination of the two in the north with a character all of its own. On the west coast, the majority of ships would be coming to or from the Clyde, heading from Glasgow down to western English ports or over to America and Canada. As with County Durham, much of the shipping around the east was local and small scale: fishing vessels, freighters going to and from the Continent, and — later — boats servicing the offshore oil industry around Aberdeen. Shipping round the north included a bit of everything: whaling vessels, East Indiamen dodging blockades further south, American ships heading towards Norway or Sweden, submarines and warships entering or leaving Scapa Flow, fishing trawlers, tankers on their way to Flotta or Sullom Voe.
But all the figures for Britain combine to emphasise one thing. Though a steady 20 per cent of all shipwrecks were and still are caused by what could be classified as human error — inaccurate charts, insufficient fuel, incompetent crews, drunken captains, absent lookouts, corrupt pilots — the majority of them are caused by what insurance companies still classify as 'Acts of God'. Passengers could sail on the best-equipped ships with the most experienced captains using the most up-to-date charts; they could choose the safest and best-lit routes; they could personally refuse to put to sea until every last block and tackle had been checked and rechecked; they could vet the captain and dismiss the crew, but if the wind turned or the sea rose, they could still find themselves backing inexorably onto a lee shore or yanked by the currents onto a sandbank or staring upwards into a lump of blue-black sea with their name written on it. And nothing at all, not technology, not skill, not experience and definitely not prayer would ever have saved them from their fate.
There were and are parts of the British Isles where the sea is inclined to give sailors the benefit of the doubt. But there are also many places where there are no second chances and where the sturdiest ships in the world still sail with trepidation. The distribution of wrecks around our coastline — bone piled upon bone for two millennia or more — tells a tale more eloquent than mere statistics. Some of those ships lie on the sea bed because of mendacious shipowners or sleeping captains; some of them are there because of malfunctioning engines or missed stays. But most of them are there because the sea put them there, and because that sea never did care whether they lived or died.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Wreckers"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Bella Bathurst.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Contents,
Front Cover,
Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
Map of Great Britain,
False Lights,
Goodwin Sands,
Pentland Firth,
Scilly Isles,
Photos,
West Coast,
Royal Fish,
Cornwall,
East Coast,
Epilogue,
Bibliography,
Index,
About the Author,
