The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  Looking round at the beachcombings, John Troutbeck’s assessment of the Scillonians comes to mind. They are, he wrote, ‘by their situation, the sons and daughters of God’s providence and accordingly are otherwise clothed and supplied out of wracks sent in by the sea, the spoil of their rich neighbours’. Given the poverty on the islands, Augustus Smith must have realised that, had it not been for wrecks, he might never have had a population there to reform.

  The secret of the islands’ disastrous allure is threefold. Like Stroma and the islands of the Pentland Firth, the Scillies are low lying, the highest point of St Mary’s being only 54 metres above sea level. The islands spread out in a confusion of reefs and tiny isles in each direction for almost ten miles, and stuck directly in the centre of three major shipping lanes. But all of these factors and more are true of other parts of the British Isles. Several of the Hebridean islands are also low lying and surrounded by heavy sea traffic, but they have not spent quite so much time since the advent of lighthouses collecting flotsam. It is a fourth factor which makes the difference to the Scillies. It is the Western Rocks.

  ***

  On a bright summer’s evening, I walk over the hill from Hugh Town to a house called ‘Nowhere’. The tarmac on the lanes is still warm, and the hedgerows boom with busy insects. Beyond the trees, the halyards of the visiting yachts plink unrhythmically against their masts. The land may be calm, but the water is not; there is a heavy swell, and a sense just at the edge of consciousness that something ominous is moving this way. ‘Nowhere’ has a small iron canon as a door knocker, and a walk of fifty yards from the house to the sea. Mark Groves has a broad, tanned face, and the unfeasibly blue eyes of the habitual sailor. While I explain what I’ve come looking for, he presents me with a pair of gumboots and an assessing stare.

  Groves is a local dive expert who has spent half a lifetime peering under the secrets of the Scillonian waters, and who knows the islands and their subterranean history better than almost anyone else on the islands. So show me this place, I say: I want to understand which way the water lies. Groves smiles. He could sail round the islands for two weeks or more, he says, and still never see half the Scillies’ wreck sites. But he’ll try; it’s a good evening with perfect visibility, and the boat is ready. We row out to the Zodiac, take a last glance at Old Town and depart.

  As the Zodiac accelerates away, I realise something. Time and many years of research has taught me that there are very few men on this earth who, when presented with a whey-faced woman with a notebook, won’t take it as a God-given chance to find out how shipshape she is. Put a woman to sea, and suddenly every sedate Sunday sailor turns into a boy racer and their boat into a watery TVR. Groves glances at the rising swell, whacks the outboard up to full throttle, and howls out of the cove: from 0 to 30 knots in 2.7 soakings. Pluming exhaust fumes over the rocks, we belt southwards, round the point at an angle of 45 degrees, and—with a splashy handbrake turn—stop dead in the cove at Porthcressa.

  Wiping the water off my face, I look about me. The low evening light has backlit the boulders around the edges of the bay, emphasising their size and darkness. The stones are strange around here liquid-looking curves of gneiss, big lumpish squares with their edges softened off, boulders with deep wrinkled fissures running all the way through their length. Some look as if they have been poured like pumice into the sea, and most have something almost stagy about their shape, as if they were really made of light fibreglass, and all of this—the rocks, the light, the town beyond—is just a temporary film set. The sea slurps around the coastline, plucking weed from the rocks and making the seabirds scatter. Groves glances backwards at me. I’m okay, but my notebook isn’t.

  ‘There,’ says Groves, pointing to the right-hand side of the bay: ‘That’s where the Cita went down. Right over the site of another wreck.’ What did he make of it? ‘People go on about it,’ he says, shifting defensively in his seat, ‘but it was just a bit of fun. It was a great day out for everyone, everyone enjoyed themselves, everyone got something, and there was no harm done.’ It was not those who took things from the containers that bothered him, but the police who tried to enforce what they considered to be the law. ‘No-one was doing anything illegal,’ he says. ‘It’s illegal to stop someone from collecting wreck as long as they report it. It was the police, not the people, who were breaking the law that day.’ And what of those who never had any intention of declaring their findings to the Receiver? Groves snorts. How is one woman sitting in an office in Southampton supposed to police the whole of the British Isles? How is she supposed to know what really happens when a ship goes ashore?’ Both of us peer silently into the translucent waters for a minute or two. Groves revs the motor and we howl south-westwards, trailing panic in our wake.

  Out to sea, the swell is deeper. As it slops over the halfsubmerged rocks, the water catches the last of the sun in an unbroken cascade of light. Belting past St Mary’s and towards the island of St Agnes, several things about the Scillies become clearer. Firstly, this place must have more lighthouses than any other part of Britain, each of them hunkered behind their thick sea walls and shining white in the perfect visibility. And where there is no lighthouse, it seems there is always something to mark position—a church, the ruin of a tower, the blackened entrance to a cairn, a radio mast.

  But although it is possible to see 360 degrees in every direction just now, ships do miss their bearings, mislocate the islands, or believe themselves to be out in the safety of the Atlantic when only inches from disaster. Just past Peninnis Head, Groves points out the site of the wreck of the Minnehaha. An 845-ton wooden vessel carrying a cargo of guano from Falmouth to Dublin, she struck the rocks on January 1874 during a gale, having mistaken a light on the island for the lighthouse on the Wolf. With her sails still set, she, like the Cita over a century later, ran full speed onto the rocks and ploughed such a hole into her bow that she was almost entirely underwater within two minutes. The captain and those of the crew who survived took to the rigging. For reasons still best known to himself, the captain then stripped off his clothes, shouted ‘With God’s help I will save you!’ and plunged into the sea. It was not until the following day that the futility of such a leap was made clear. The darkness and gale-force winds had obscured the fact that the ship was inches from the shore, and the majority of those crew who had remained on board were able to climb along the rigging and over the jib-boom onto the rocks. The captain, sadly, was drowned.

  Although the Stilly Islands are low lying, they are not flat or featureless like the islands of the Pentland Firth. Though there are plenty of elements here which serve as a reminder of the more northern islands, the one conspicuous difference is the vegetation. In addition to the un-English flowers and shrubs, the Scillies have trees, woods and coppices. Though the islands may at times be just as windy and exposed as the Hebrides, the balmy climate and sheltering coves give trees the chance to flourish in a way that no blasted northern moorland could ever afford. So, given that they had timber, fertile soil, and plants which self-seeded in their enthusiasm to grow, why did the Scillonians acquire such a reputation for wrecking?

  Daniel Defoe—who went no further than Cornwall’s edge during his tour around Britain—had evidently been deterred by the islands’ notoriety. According to him, ‘those excrescences’ had the worst record for shipwreck in Britain. ‘How many good ships are almost continually dashed in pieces there,’ he wrote, ‘and how many brave lives lost, in spite of the mariners’ best skills, or the lighthouses, and other sea-marks best notice.’ The Scillies, he claimed, were inhabited by, ‘a fierce and ravenous people; for they are so greedy, and eager for the prey, that they are charged with strange, bloody, and cruel dealings, even sometimes with one another, but especially with poor distressed seamen when they come on shore by force of a tempest, and seek help for their lives, and where they find the rocks themselves nor more merciless than the people who range about them for their prey.’ Did they wreck because they needed to,
or just because they wanted to?

  The light has taken on a brassy, artificial quality now, and the wind has risen slightly. The swell is building, its perpetual restiveness at odds with the sight of so much silence on shore. Once in a while, a car putters slowly up one of the lanes, its windows flashing back the evening light. Cows graze in the fields, tourists on bicycles stop at the summits or by the beach. Over there, it’s just a slow summer’s evening. But out here, there’s unceasing motion: the boat hurtling in and out of the lengthening troughs, the water breaking in on itself, the wind plucking at the collar of my jacket.

  I have been looking down for a few moments, preoccupied with trying to keep both myself and my notebook dry. I’m aware that we’re passing the edge of St Agnes and heading south-westwards, and I know from maps what we are heading for. But it isn’t until I look up again that I realise why it is that these islands so profoundly alarmed Defoe. Seeing the Western Rocks for the first time seems like that moment in films when the plane flies over the edge of the mountain range or plunges the viewer over the side of a cliff. A chord, a sudden thunderous sound, the first gigantic notes as all-consuming as the view. Something immense and deep; a sound as huge as a cathedral. A mass, perhaps, or a requiem. Whatever the music was, it would have to be melodramatic, because the Western Rocks are melodramatic.

  Up ahead, there is nothing but the sea and an immense black semi-circle of rocks. The first rises up quite close to St Agnes and the last stretches off almost beyond the point of visibility. These are not the softened, liquid-looking stones of the bay near St Mary’s. These are savage-looking things, a giant hell-mouth ringed with black-tipped fangs. Many are large enough to stand well clear of the water, close enough to each other that any ship unwary enough to become entangled among them would be sliced to splinters within seconds. Alongside the larger reefs, there are little ones poking only a few feet out of the water like archetypal sharks’ fins, rocks with ridges so sharp you could slice meat with them, enormous squared-off lumps of granite, whole islands without a single horizontal surface. This is an Alcatraz, and these rocks are the everlasting version of bullets and razor wire. The brassy light gives them all a strange burned beauty, and within that beauty, a deep sense of menace.

  Seen on a map, the Western Rocks form an incomplete circle, a perfect, naturally occurring security fence stretching for three and a half miles to the south-west of the Scillies. Like Scapa Flow at the other end of the country, the rocks are outriders to the islands shaped to form a perfect bay, and have become a place of pilgrimage for wreck divers all over the country. Unlike Scapa Flow, they offer no safety at all. The largest of the rocks are those furthest to the west—coincidentally the point which would be closest and most hazardous to shipping coming up from the Bay of Biscay. Though their vertical spikes make them seem immensely tall from a small boat, none can be much over 20 metres above sea level. On a rainy or a foggy night, these rocks must be all but invisible. If a ship was caught within this circle, it would have found it almost impossible to manoeuvre out again. Smaller boats—gigs and fishing vessels—might have been nippy and shallow enough to negotiate their way past the various hazards. But a large sailing vessel with the wind in the wrong direction would never have had the leeway to get free. Once in, they were trapped. Small wonder that two-thirds of the Scillies’ wrecks are buried here among the Western Rocks.

  In the past, sailors could rely on nothing more than the light on St Agnes and the Bishop, and the sight—too close, and too late—of white water breaking on the rocks. Navigational aids did not help much. Before 1750, charts quite often depicted the whole Scilly Isles archipelago as being ten to fifteen miles farther north of its true position. And, just in case the rocks themselves are not enough to frighten off even the most steadyheaded sailor, the Scillies have a few more tricks for the unwary. Right in the centre of the western circle, in the one space which seems clear, is another rock, Luitreth, which lies just under the surface of the water, submerged by only a metre at low tide but imperceptible from above. The same goes for the reefs to the north-east of Great Crewabethan, which also never quite emerge from the water. Just outside the main circle are four further rocks—Crebinicks, the Retarrier Ledges, the Gilstone and the Bishop. Some measure of their unpleasantness can be gauged by the fact that, in medieval times, they were used as sites of execution for felons. Once convicted, criminals would be rowed out past the islands and abandoned. Having been given a jug of fresh water and two loaves of bread, they would be left to starve, drown or die of exposure; whichever came first. Each of these rocks has been responsible for horrific losses. The Bishop—which either took its name from its supposed similarity to a bishop’s mitre, or to an early shipwreck in which a man named Bishop was one of the only two survivors—is the westernmost of the four, and thus the one on which Trinity House constructed a lighthouse.

  The Retarrier Ledges were the site of one of the worst peacetime disasters in maritime history, when the SS Schiller, a 3,400-ton passenger steamer, hit the Ledges in May 1875. The Schiller was heading from New York to Hamburg via Portsmouth with 254 passengers and 101 crew. Though built as a ‘high-speed’ transatlantic liner, the Schiller was moving comparatively slowly as she neared the Scillies, since a thick fog had recently descended. At 9.30 p.m., the captain ordered a change of course designed to take the Schiller further out into the Channel and thus well clear of the islands. As it was, the change was already too late. Unknown to him, the ship had already been carried by the complex currents far further north than he anticipated, and at 11.40 p.m., she struck the half-submerged Ledges. As the seas rose, the Schiller began to sink. Confusion, the destruction of two lifeboats, the fog and a bitter spring gale all conspired to form a tragedy. In the end, several hours after she grounded, it was neither the lighthouse keepers nor anyone from the Scillies who reached the Schiller’s survivors first, but a boat from Sennen Cove in Cornwall. Despite the rescuers’ attempts to reach the ship, 311 people lost their lives in the disaster.

  These rocks are also the scene of the best known of all the UK’s wrecking incidents. In 1707, four naval warships under the command of Admiral Sir Cloudisley Shovell were on their way back from fighting in the Mediterranean. At 8 p.m. on the evening of 22 October, all four struck the Gilstone Reef. Like the Schiller two centuries later, the flagship Association had mistaken her position, and was sailing far too close to the Scillies. She was blown by a gale onto the rocks, and the rest of the fleet followed her: 1,630 soldiers died that night. It was subsequently rumoured that Sir Cloudisley had been warned that he was steering a course for disaster by one of his own sailors, a native Scillonian. Sir Cloudisley, incensed that a subordinate should question his instructions, ordered the man hanged at the ship’s yardarm. The condemned man’s last request was that Psalm 109—probably the loveliest curse ever written—should be read out to the Admiral

  Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand . . . Let his days be few, and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow . . . Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children. Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following let their name be blotted out . . . Because that he remembered not to shew mercy, but persecuted the poor and needy man.

  Sure enough, no sooner had the man been hanged than the weather turned foul and the Association struck. Some time later, the Admiral was washed up—alive, but only just—on the beach at Porth Hellick on St Mary’s. He was found by a local woman who was said to have mutilated him, stripped him of a valuable emerald ring and then buried him on a patch of the foreshore where, to this day, no grass will grow. Later, on her own deathbed, the old wrecker was supposed to have confessed to the crime, ‘declaring’, according to Sir Cloudisley’s grandson Lord Romney, that ‘she could not die in peace until she had made this confession, as she was led to commit this horrid deed for the sake of plunder’. Whether or not the stories ar
e true, they have stuck, and now remain as part of the Scilly’s folklore.

  Groves steers the boat a little northwards and switches off the engine. In the sudden silence, there is nothing except the slurp of the swell against the hull and the sound of the sea birds endlessly resettling. We are encircled here, the closest spikes only a few metres away. The light has become heavier and because we are pointing almost directly westwards, the inward circle of the rocks are cast in deep shadow. When the sea breaks against their sides the sun catches the water and shines through it, making every droplet iridescent. For a second or so, it looks as if someone is hurling up handfuls of diamonds from the deep. This combination—high swell, angled sun, still air—doesn’t occur often, but when it does, it can sometimes make even the baldest patch of sea look both beautiful and sinister. Here, with the silent islands in the background and this vicious geology all around, even the sea birds seem threatening.

  Despite the summer temperatures, I am starting to feel very cold—and not just physically, either. Up until now, researching this book has been about the facts of shipwreck—the tides, the currents, the hours, days, dates, the endless statistics and names of ships I’ll never see, the vessels which might, at best, have one or two old newspaper photographs as their final commemoration. Pursuing the wreckers was a fascination, but until now a comparatively abstract one. Out here, surrounded by the black water and this strange light, the whole concept of shipwrecks and wrecking has suddenly moved from the abstract to the real. Below our feet, there are ghosts in the water—the unsettled suggestion of people who lost their lives slowly in fear and in pain. This place is eerie, and it does not seem as if one would have to be particularly suggestible to find the sheer physical facts terrifying. I asked to be brought out here. Now, seasick with destruction, I want to go.