The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  Subsequent clauses outlawed the taking and concealing of wreck, and the offering of wreck for sale, on pain of seven years’ transportation to the American colonies. A further act of 1826 reiterated the ruling against ‘false lights’, but also widened it to include the display of ‘misleading signals’.

  The legislation made little difference however. In 1861, the Malicious Damage Act found itself travelling over much the same ground as before:

  Whosoever shall unlawfully mask, alter, or remove any light or signal, or unlawfully exhibit any false light or signal, with intent to bring any ship, vessel or boat into danger, or shall unlawfully and maliciously do anything tending to the immediate loss or destruction of any ship, vessel or boat . . . shall be guilty of felony, and being convicted thereof shall be liable . . . to be kept in penal servitude . . . or to be imprisoned for any term exceeding two years, with or without hard labour, and . . . if a male under the age of sixteen, with or without whipping.

  By 1894, the shipping, salvage and anti-wrecking laws had been sufficiently codified to allow for a single Merchant Shipping Act to deal with all three. The 1894 Act abolished the vice-admiral system, and replaced it instead with individual ‘Receivers of Wreck’ and local customs officials, responsible for both suppressing looting and for reuniting lost cargos with their owners. The Receivers were permitted to use force—up to and including enlisting the help of the army—to quell rioting, and were legally exempted from responsibility for any deaths which might occur during their attempts to keep order.

  The scaffolding of the 1894 Act remains standing to this day, though the eighty or so individual Receivers have now been amalgamated into one post held by an individual working as part of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. In theory, the Receiver is also responsible for prosecuting cases where wreck has been taken but not reported, and for ensuring the protection of the most sacred wreck sites, including the Stirling Castle (sunk during the Great Storm of 1703) and the Association (the British naval flagship that sank off the Scilly Isles four years later).

  In the twenty-first century, most of the Receiver’s time is not spent blunderbussing gin-crazed Cornishmen in craggy coves, but in an office in Southampton issuing directives. Preventive work is now done by leaflet and website rather than with the help of dragoons. And the majority of that work is not directed at local coastal communities, but at the diving fraternity, some of whom have taken over where the old wreckers left off. With the twentieth century’s improvements in underwater technology, it has become possible for divers to go further and deeper than ever before, and thus to reach the remains of wrecks which would once have lain undisturbed. Since many areas of the sea bed along the British coastline are more ship than sand, and since many of those ships are alluring both as exploration sites and as sources of booty, serious diving has fast become a significant sport. Stealing from submerged wrecks has two significant advantages over stealing from wrecks aground: you are far less likely to be observed, and you are guaranteed never to leave fingerprints. In theory, anything found on a wreck in British waters should be reported immediately to the Receiver, but, as one professional diver put it: ‘Maybe 5 per cent of all the wreck that’s found ever gets officially declared. And that’s an over-estimate.’

  Sophia Exelby is now the UK’s only Receiver of Wreck. She is a brisk, competent woman in her early thirties who came to the job with a background in marine archaeology and a civil servant’s sense of protocol. She spends much of her time trying to encourage the diving community and general public into reporting wrecks they discover. But since there is currently no legal time limit on reporting wreck, she has to rely more on incentives than on sanctions. If, for instance, you take twenty boxes of training shoes or three seventeenth-century fish knives from a wreck either on land or underwater, the law states that you must report your findings to the Receiver. If you do not you could be fined £2,500 for each offence, as well as having to pay the person entitled to the wreck (or the Crown if it is an unclaimed wreck) twice the value of the recovered artefacts, plus loss of any salvage rights. If no rightful owner is found or comes forward within a year and a day, those items will, most likely, remain yours. However if you do not declare your findings the Receiver cannot prosecute—or would find it very difficult to prosecute—since there is no deadline. And if, five years on and ten boxes of trainers down, the Receiver or her staff were to appear at your front door asking exactly what those things were on your feet, you could declare that you were definitely just about to fill the form in, but that it had just slipped your mind. In other words, the law as it currently exists has neither teeth nor clothes.

  Exelby looks uncomfortable at this suggestion: ‘Well, yes, but prosecution is only one aspect of law enforcement. There is monitoring, and there are cautions, there are rulings, and there is education, and all those together make a package. And although prosecution is the highest level or the strongest measure, there are many other measures which are at our disposal which we can use, which also have a deterrent effect.’

  Had there been any recent prosecutions for theft of wreck? ‘Not at the moment, no.’ And had there been in the past? ‘I don’t actually know that. I don’t think so. I don’t believe so. To my knowledge there hasn’t been one taken forward.’ So as far as the Maritime and Coastguard Agency is aware, there has not been a single prosecution for wrecking in the twelve years since the post of Receiver was created? ‘There are other offences under the Act. There are three or four offences for various aspects of misappropriating wreck, such as hiding it or keeping it hidden or taking things and selling them overseas to foreign ports. I can’t remember them all off the top of my head. But none of those offences is dependent on a time.’

  Doesn’t she find such legislative toothlessness frustrating? ‘It would be unfortunate to take forward a prosecution which wasn’t strong enough in terms of evidence, so that the courts turned it away and said, “this is a load of rubbish”. We can’t go trying to enforce the law when it might just be a local gripe, or local rivalries,’ she replies. Can she search? ‘We can search premises, but we need good enough evidence to do it. You can’t just go and knock people’s doors down, you need to be fairly certain of your case before you do so.’

  Though frustrated by the lack of time limits within the current legislation, Exelby believes it is possible to encourage more people to come forward. ‘Our opinion is that people should understand that there’s no reason not to report, because in I think 90 per cent of cases the finder gets title to the artefact that they have recovered or they get a salvage award based on the value of that find. So it’s really in people’s interest to report—it’s an incentive to honesty, if you like: carrot-driven rather than stick-driven.’ But, as she concedes, it is a policy which leans heavily on a belief in the finer side of human nature. Besides, when tougher powers are needed, Exelby remains trapped by the burdens of proof. ‘Offences under the Protection of Wrecks Act would be things such as diving within a protected area. But to prove that an offence had been committed, it would have to be something which you could actually see, and that’s also difficult. You can say that the wreck has been tampered with on the sea bed, but you can’t necessarily say who has done it. There are so many parameters which are a bit woolly on that one as well.’

  It is tempting to conclude that the law today is no stronger than it was 200 years ago when a wreck was defended by no more than the efforts of an exhausted crew and a single outraged customs officer with a stick.

  ***

  Even if all those centuries of laws and sanctions had been more effective, they could never have fully compensated for older, more feral forms of rule. Westminster could pass anti-wrecking statutes on a weekly basis, but none of them would make any difference to a hungry people on a distant island. And so, over the centuries, the law went one way and the wreckers went another. In different parts of the country fragments of legislation broke away from their original sources, floated into local lore and remained th
ere, rusting but still roughly functional. In many cases, those parts of the law which were most likely to benefit the wreckers were also the most likely to have lingered in the collective memory. The ‘man or beast’ rule was never meant to benefit anyone but shipowners and wreck victims, but it remained the wreckers’ licence to kill long after the original legislation had been repealed. Similarly, the 1808 ruling that those who presented a shipwreck victim’s corpse to the authorities for burial would be paid a bounty of 5 shillings remained a part of unofficial coastal law long after the law had been abandoned and 5 shillings had become 25 pence. As Robert Louis Stevenson pointed out in his Records of a Family of Engineers, what made sense in Westminster was nonsense by the time it reached Shetland.

  The danger is to those from without, who have not grown up from childhood in the islands, but appear suddenly in that narrow horizon, life-sized apparitions. For these no bond of humanity exists, no feeling of kinship is awakened by their peril; they will assist at a shipwreck . . . as spectators, and when the fatal scene is over, and the beach strewn with dead bodies, they will fence their fields with mahogany, and, after a decent grace, sup claret to their porridge. It is not wickedness: it is scarce evil, it is only in its highest power, the sense of isolation and the wise disinterestedness of feeble and poor races. Think how many Viking ships had sailed by these islands in the past, how many Vikings had landed, and raised turmoil, and broken up the barrows of the dead, and carried off the wines of the living; and blame them, if you are able, for that belief (which may be called one of the parables of the devil’s gospel) that a man rescued from the sea will prove the bane of his deliverer.

  There were other kinds of law as well: the unwritten rules of the sea set down by time and habit. In certain parts of the country there remains a belief that anyone who finds something on a beach, drags it above the high-water line and marks it with a stone has asserted his claim to that object forever. During the 1839 Commission of Inquiry into the establishment of a national constabulary, the Commissioner of the Liverpool Police explained the habits of the wreckers along the nearby coastline. ‘Such was the feeling of the wreckers,’ he said, ‘that if a man saw a bale of goods or a barrel floating in the water, he would run almost any risk of his life to touch that article as a sort of warranty for calling it his own. It is considered such fair game, that if he could touch it, he called out to those about him, “That is mine.” That is marked as his, and the others would consider that he had a claim to it, and would render him assistance.’

  There is not a single line in all the laws of England or Scotland which supports the notion of ‘finders keepers’, but the unofficial rule still persists in people’s minds. A refinement of the same idea was to be found in the old belief that ‘from immemorial usage’ the proceeds from any wreck should be divided three ways: a third to the landlord, a third to the finder, and the remainder to the vice admiral. A case brought by Lord Dundas as the Vice Admiral of Shetland against two shipowners was heard before the Edinburgh Court of Session in May 1800. As the prosecution explained:

  The liberal share which is thus allotted to the salvors and to the heritors, has taken its rise from the peculiar circumstances of the country . . . From the remoteness of their situation, and the impossibility which thence arises of the officers of the law taking wrecked and stranded goods under their protection, they are peculiarly exposed to the hazard of depredation; and it is necessary to reward in a liberal manner the fishermen and others . . . in order to encourage them to make those exertions which are necessary in such situations for the safety and protection of wrecked and stranded goods.

  It is that gap between law and lore which is part of what makes the concept of wreckers and wrecking so beguiling. Anyone who burgles or robs or loots goods from a derelict house knows they are breaking the law. Anyone who came across a wrecked car and helps themselves to a couple of tyres and a fan belt knows they are stealing. Even those who, in the midst of a riot, step through a smashed shop window and make off with three incompatible hard-drives and an obsolete TV do so in the knowledge that they are taking advantage of the breakdown of civil society. Anyone who takes another man’s property on land knows they are castigated by all the lawmakers from Moses onwards. They might not agree with those laws, but they know they exist. They might believe, along with Proudhon, that property is theft, but they also know that the law considers theft to be theft. So what exactly makes ships and the sea so different? Why should it be that anything touched by salt water is also considered to have been washed clean of ownership? Why should it be that what comes from the sea has no history?

  There are plenty of good social, historical and economic explanations for wrecking, but nothing will ever really explain its metaphysical causes. The wreckers have always occupied a no-man’s-land somewhere between water and earth, and through all the 2,000 years’ worth of legislation, they have persisted in the belief that they have an absolute right to anything off an abandoned vessel. It never seemed to matter whether that wreck had taken two years of international travel through the seas to arrive on their beach, or whether it arrived yesterday stamped with an identifiable mark from an identifiable owner on an identifiable ship. The wreckers would probably argue that they just made the best of what came their way, but they were also taking advantage of a subtler transformation. The sea does not sort objects according to weight or value, but by whether they float or not. Once stripped of context and immersed, those objects have also cast off their former identities and become something else. Add poverty and remoteness to the equation, and it is not really surprising that the wreckers thought as they did. They wrecked for the same reasons that Mallory climbed Everest; because it was there. They wrecked because they were poor, because they lived on the coasts, and because a ship on the rocks was irresistible during a Shetlandic winter or a Hebridean famine. In the more remote parts of Britain they wrecked because they had to. Treeless islands such as Tiree or Barra saw wrecks and jettisoned deck cargo as a kind of divine hardware store, providing them (albeit erratically, and at high rates of interest) with fence posts, joists, rafters, floorboards, and boat hulls. Families who lived along the main coastal trading routes would find their only luxuries—silk for a dress, china for the kitchen, tools for the farm—laid out for them on the rocks and reefs of an inhospitable coast. Whatever washed up on a beach was considered ‘the sea’s bounty’, God’s gift to the borderliners—even if God at times appeared to be a present-giver who insisted on disinfecting all his gifts with salt water first.

  There were other, more subtle temptations to wrecking other than mere necessity. Anyone who breaks into someone’s house or flat with intent to steal from it will be confronted by a thousand tokens of possession and identity. But anyone who breaks into a container vessel is confronted by a mass of anonymous objects. Their endless replication makes them seem impersonal, and their homelessness makes them seem unwanted. The ship and its contents are en route from one country to another; from manufacturer to retailer, from retailer to customer, from customer to landfill site. Unless the wrecker steals up to the captain’s cabin and pilfers a watch or a wallet, he is probably not going to be confronted by any discomfiting signs of ownership or with the victim of his crime. If something evidently belongs not to an individual but to an organisation or a group, then—so the thinking goes—it does not really belong to anyone at all. Finding a container-load of cotton shirts, stamped with their brand and still sealed in plastic packets, is somehow not the same as finding a suitcase filled with someone’s old clothes. In the first instance, so the thinking goes, the company probably produces thousands of shirts a day, is insured, and will regard the loss of a few short-sleeves as—quite literally—a drop in the ocean. It’s business, not personal. But in the second instance, those clothes belong to someone. Someone who does mind, and who probably doesn’t have insurance, and who would very definitely take exception to seeing their best coat on the back of a beachcombing thief. In law, there is no difference
between the collective and the individual. But in the mind of the wrecker, there most definitely is.

  Besides, who exactly is a wrecker? Just for a minute sit back and consider yourself. Let’s just say that you live in a place where unbidden gifts arrive on your doorstep at night, and from time to time deliveries of firewood or timber appear unpostmarked near your home. Once in a while, you and the dog go out for a walk to find precisely the thing you need laid by the side of the path—a fence post of just the right size, a crate of untouched oranges. Whoever—or whatever—put them there has vanished, and you can be sure they’re not coming back. Sometimes this silent deliverer of gifts, who expects no remuneration and asks for no thanks, does wonderful things: provides exactly the right roofing material for your house, a bolt of undamaged canvas, even an unsolicited crate of vintage port. You know that such items are unclaimed, and that unless you take them, they will remain so. No-one will see you find it, no-one will know you have it, and no-one will ever challenge your right to it. By taking it, you will not be stealing it, you will be salvaging it. And you know salvage is as legal as breathing.

  And then you find out that more of the same is going to arrive. You realise that there will be whole containers full of such items—not luxuries, but things you really need: children’s clothing, household equipment, tins of fruit. You know that in this next delivery, there will be more than enough of everything for everyone, and that you will be able to take as many bottles of gin and as many spare car tyres as you want. You know that this time people will see you, but no-one will mind, because they’ll all be out there on the headlands with tractors, carts and jemmies, joyfully helping themselves in a great free-for-all. You know that they, like you, are savouring this, and that your whole hard-worn community is rejoicing in its bonanza.