The Wreckers

by Bella Bathurst

  If Devon does cream and Yorkshire does grit, then Cornwall does shipwrecks. It has always done shipwrecks: that’s what it’s made for. No other county in Britain can put on a wreck quite like Cornwall can. It is shipping’s Ultima Thule, England’s legendary resting place, the coast where all the best vessels go to die. Though statistically it is not the county in the UK with the highest number of wrecks per mile of coastline, it is undoubtedly the county with the worst reputation. No other part of Britain comes close to Cornwall’s infamy; no other part of Britain would want to try. And if wrecking could ever claim to be a profession, then it was Cornwall which made it so. Though the wreckers of Cornwall were never alone—their work being seconded by a silent band of sympathisers all the way from the Pentland Firth to the Western Rocks—it is unquestionably Cornwall which stands out. Ask anyone, anywhere in the country, what the word ‘wrecker’ means to them, and the word ‘Cornwall’ tends to follow shortly after. In this particular universe, the Cornish are kings, dons, godfathers; unquestioned superiors to everyone else in Britain. Those who know about wrecking know that there were whole sections and sub-sections of the local population who were full-time self-employed free-range ship-lifters. They know that the Cornish lured ships onto the rocks, they know they had a whole industry devoted to thieving, and they know they put out false lights. People might have read or seen Whisky Galore or have heard of the Goodwin Sands, but what they really know is that the Cornish were at it, harder, fiercer, and longer than anyone else.

  To understand why, and how, so many ships have collided with Cornwall, all you need to do is to find a large-scale map or chart of the southern English coast. Though Cornwall is not the largest of Britain’s mainland counties, it is the one with the longest area of shoreline. Wherever you are in Cornwall, you are never far from the sea. From the land that proximity is its attraction. The county’s mixture of charming beaches and enfolded coves lure the tourists in their tail-backed droves. But from the sea, those coves and cliffs are custom-made repellants, designed to keep the natives in and the foreigners out. Cornwall has it all: a combination of beauty and violence generations of sailors could, and did, die for. Look at a wreck map of the county, and the tiny black crosses cluster like rust around every last inch.

  It has been calculated that the past 700 years have brought over 3,500 wrecks to Cornwall and the Scilly Isles; about 13 ships per square mile of coastline. But, like the Scilly Isles twenty-eight miles below it, Cornwall cannot easily be avoided. Shipping heading for America, towards west-coast ports or into the Channel all have to give it the wide berth due to such an infamous landfall. Navigators travelling from any direction can still expect to find every possible configuration of oceanographic unpleasantness, from submerged reefs to unmarked shallows. Despite this, both its coasts have always overlooked a huge variety of domestic and international traffic. The south coast saw East Indiamen heading down the Bay of Biscay, passenger liners on their way to New York, and freight carriers sailing for Dover. The west coast watched over the full fetch of the Atlantic, from small local colliers and trawlers to the traders laden with cargos for Liverpool and Glasgow.

  The two seas which border the county—the English Channel and the Atlantic—have entirely different personalities, and thus two competing aims in life. The Channel funnels water through the gap running south-west to north-east between England and France, while the Atlantic rolls all the way from here to America. When the two waters meet they create conflict: shallows, overfalls, unexpected tidal races. Waves and weather conditions coming from the west have had plenty of space—3,000 miles or more—in which to develop force and momentum, and while the weather on shore can be still to the point of breathlessness, the incoming swells have had a whole ocean to grow in. In Cornwall it is entirely possible to go from a flat calm to uncontrollable pitching within the space of minutes, and it is said that spray from an Atlantic storm can sometimes reach ten miles inland. The weather from the Atlantic comes in like a lion; fast, noisy, dramatic. As Mike Collier, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency’s fishing vessel surveyor at Newlyn puts it, the Atlantic gets ‘rough, and very rough, and bloody-hell-type rough’. Pounded on their seaward sides, sailors knew that there was not much solace to be sought from the land, since there are few large harbours of refuge along the west coast, and the prevailing wind often converted those which did exist into lee shores. So it is hardly surprising that along this stretch of coastline alone, 2,000 vessels are known to have been lost.

  The Channel is more complex. Because of the comparative proximity of land on either side, there is far less space for storms to build up. The Channel, like the North Sea, produces short, steep waves, with deeper troughs and higher peaks than the Atlantic. Weather patterns rise and fall abruptly, with less predictability than on the west. Ships in trouble find themselves racing for the shoreline only to discover what generations of sailors have learned to their cost: the south coast is often deceptive and never safe. While it may be overlooked by a softer coastline than the west, there are more natural hazards and more tricks to fool the eye. From the Lizard Peninsula to Dodman Point, the incoming navigator has to dodge and weave like Homer once did. If in need of a safe harbour, ships coming down from the west would have to turn the corner at Land’s End and make it safely into Newlyn or Penzance, running the hazards of the Longships Reef, Mount’s Bay or Looe Bar—which appears as a long stretch of sandy beach, but is in fact an underwater cliff. Cornwall’s south coast runs for about 100 miles, and over the centuries it has managed to accumulate as many—if not more—wrecks than the fiercer, bleaker west.

  But if the county’s coastline is repulsive, then its reputation is worse. Part of that notoriety is down to the efforts of one person. Though wrecking was predominantly a male trade, it was a woman who did most to perpetuate it. In 1935, Daphne Du Maurier (born in London but formed in Cornwall) wrote Jamaica Inn. The heroine, Mary Yellan, is orphaned young, and goes to live with her uncle Joss and aunt Patience on Bodmin Moor. Their house, and their mode of living, tend towards the gothic; Joss is ‘nearly seven feet high’ and built to terrify. He does no work, but quite a lot of wuthering. Aunt Patience is feeble and hapless, while Jamaica Inn itself is cold and full of ghosts. For an inn, it is also strangely guest-less, though it does seem to get used as a staging post for midnight couriers delivering large, heavy packages.

  One night, a dense fog descends. Uncle Joss—who has by now become almost completely nocturnal—offers Mary a sightseeing trip. When the two of them reach the coast, they find other men have arrived already and are spread out across the cliff tops waiting for something. What Mary thinks at first is a star shining close to the tip of the headland then begins to sway slightly with the motion of the wind. ‘The star,’ she realises, ‘was a false light placed there by her uncle and his companions.’ The men and Mary watch and wait, until, ‘out of the mist and darkness came another pin-prick of light in answer to the first.’ The second light moves closer and Mary is able to see the outline of a ship, creeping through the fog towards the shore. Mary realises that the ship is being drawn towards the false light, believing it to be either a signal of safe harbourage or the navigation light of another ship finding its way more confidently through the dark. The ship plunges towards the coast until, inevitably, it hits the rocks and begins to dissolve. The men, who had remained almost silent while they waited for the ship, ‘ran like madmen hither and thither upon the beach, yelling and screaming, demented and inhuman. They waded waist-deep into the breakers, careless of danger, all caution spent; snatching at the bobbing, sodden wreckage borne in on the surging tide . . . When the first body was washed ashore, mercifully spent and gone, they clustered around it, diving among the remains with questing, groping hands, picking it clean as a bone; and, when they had stripped it bare, tearing even at the smashed fingers in search of rings.’

  As Mary explains to the local vicar—who takes an unhealthy interest in Jamaica Inn’s guests—‘They are in it, every one of
them, from the coast to the Tamar bank . . . they’ve murdered women and children with their own hands, they’ve held them under the water; they’ve killed them with rocks and stones. Those are death wagons that travel with road by night and the goods they carry are not smuggled casks alone, with brandy for some and tobacco for another, but the full cargoes of wrecked ships bought at the price of blood, the trust and the possession of murdered men.’ In Jamaica Inn, Du Maurier name-checked every single myth about wreckers since the dawn of sailing: the false light, the victims held down to drown, the ripping-off of jewellery, the Faustian bargains struck with the sea. Jamaica Inn told the public what wrecking was supposed to be, and who its practitioners were. The rumours which had always swirled around the Cornish were given fictional form and settled for ever in the public imagination.

  And yet most Cornishmen will tell you two things: firstly, that what the Cornish mean by a wrecker is subtly but un-mistakeably different to what the rest of the country means by a wrecker, and secondly that, despite the overwhelming clouds of smoke, there is no true fire in the belief that any Cornishman ever deliberately caused a wreck. When a Cornishman confesses to wrecking, he assumes that the listener understands that the word does not suggest anything more than mild-mannered beachcombing, or—at worst—the liberation of a few unwanted bits of flotsam. According to the Cornish definition, wrecking is a gentle, vegetarian sport, not the carnivorous industry found elsewhere. As the historian A. K. Hamilton-Jenkin put it in his 1932 book on Cornwall and the Cornish: ‘For the latter-day Cornishman, wrecking has come to mean little more than a pastime, representing at the most an occasional opportunity of gaining a few perquisites of a more or less illegitimate kind.’ A wrecker in Cornwall is always passive, never active; he is the salvor—or the gatherer—of existing wreckage. He does not cause, or seek to cause, a wreck, and he disassociates himself from those who do. Like the inhabitants of almost every coastal area in Britain, Cornishmen might benefit from the small oddments left by a wreck, but they never, ever forced its happening. A true Cornishman is a tender-hearted creature, first to save life and last to profit.

  As for the rumours, the Cornish have no idea why they have been so slandered. Though they may have been accused of wrecking by everyone from Scilly to the Shetland Isles, and though they will concede that once in a while they did undertake a spot of conscientious seaside clearance work, most Cornish will tell you that, if it existed at all, wrecking was unquestionably only ever undertaken by Kentish men, or Hebrideans, or boatloads of marauding Scillonians. But definitely not the Cornish. The Cornish never lured ships, they never drowned shipwreck victims, and—most emphatically of all—they never showed false lights. In fact, they probably would not even know what a false light was, and in the extremely unlikely event that they did know, they would presume it a rumour put about by foul-minded outsiders, probably from London. True, there were always a lot of shipwrecks around the coast, and—in the days when Cornwall was almost inaccessible to all but the most fundamentalist customs men—there was undoubtedly a lot of smuggling. When ships did come ashore, the population would often selflessly risk their lives to rescue both crew and cargo. But deliberate wrecking? False lights? No. Never. Anyway, as the Cornish point out, why bother trying to cause a shipwreck when every winter brought ships ashore in their thousands? Why, if they were such savages, did their lifeboat crews go on saving shipwreck victims year after year at such appalling cost to themselves and their families? Why is it only the Cornish who get the notoriety, when—if the old stories are to be believed—half the counties in Britain were out there on the shoreline with carts and lights and axes at the first puff of a storm? Besides, why has no-one ever properly considered the insubstantiality of the false-light story? The legends say that Cornishmen would tie a lantern round a horse’s neck or to a cow’s horns, and would lead the beasts along the cliff tops so that the motion of the light imitated the swinging of a ship’s lantern. But how many people have ever tried tying a hot oil lamp around any part of an animal’s anatomy? The reaction—outrage, panic, a strong smell of singed hair—would scarcely suit the stealth of a well-prepared wrecker.

  Joe Mills is a local historian living in St Day near Redruth. His voice on the phone sounds middle-aged, but in person he is much older, his face framed by a bright halo of wispy white hair. Though a little deaf, and prone to occasional lapses of short-term memory, one suspects that even now, he doesn’t miss much. He served with the Navy on destroyers both during and after the war, though he insists I turn off the Dictaphone before he will talk about it—‘I don’t like boasting’. He is also a Cornishman to the bone, and proud of it.

  He remembers both his mother and his grandmother telling him: ‘We’re not English, you know, we’re Cornish,’ and has spent much of his life studying the differences between the two states. ‘We have distinct racial characteristics. The Cornish language was spoken freely well into the eighteenth century, and in the first decades of the nineteenth century it was still prevalent. That characteristic is there. Cornwall has been neglected by the rest of the UK for a very very long time. It has a long history of being comparatively poor. We don’t have the big, rich families—not many of them—that you get in the shires. You don’t get the sort of farming families that you get in Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Dorset.’

  Inherent to the Cornish sense of identity, he thinks, is the sea and its proximity. ‘Cornwall is a narrow promontory, and nowhere in Cornwall are you very far from the sea. At the far end, where we join with Devon, is the widest part, and there you can be forty miles from the sea, I suppose. But down at this end, you’re not often as much as ten miles from the sea on one side or another. It makes us very familiar with tides, very familiar with cliffs, very familiar with water. And native Cornish, like native animals of any sort, learn through generations what is dangerous.’

  It is not just that sea’s length he finds awe-inspiring, but its depth, and what comes up from those deeps. ‘We’ve got an unbridled Atlantic ocean, which meets nothing until it reaches here—the fury of it is unbelievable to people who haven’t experienced this sort of shore. It’s horrifying. You see the Bishop lighthouse or the Wolf sticking up out of the sea, but you never think of the rocks below it going down and down—it’s a mountain, and you’re only seeing the mountain top. During my time at sea, I never thought of anything being more than ten feet below what I could see. Like everyone who went to sea for the first time, someone said to me, do you know how far we are from the nearest land, and I would start saying, 350 miles, maybe 400 miles, and they’d say, no, 5 miles. Straight down. Five miles of water—you can’t imagine it, can you?’.

  For all their familiarity and opportunity, however, Mills categorically refutes the suggestion that the Cornish would ever have taken part in deliberate wrecking, or that the false light story has any validity. ‘I don’t think they were great wreckers. No, I don’t subscribe to any theory that there was deliberate wrecking. I would say never. There is no evidence that [the use of false lights] ever took place here.’ As Mills points out, the law always distinguishes between manslaughter and murder, even when the victim is a ship. The Cornish might steal cargo, they might rip a ship to pieces, they might even raid the customs house, but they would not, he says, ever have deliberately drawn a ship towards danger.

  There was, however, plenty of passive wrecking. ‘The only wrecking done—and they did use the term wrecking—was going out and getting what you could off ships. I remember in my boyhood going off to the coast here and there to see, and also going along the beaches to see what had been washed in. If you heard of a shipwreck—and news does travel fast—it was commonplace to go down to the beach to see what you could get. In my younger days if, for example, a ship went ashore near St Ives carrying packing cases full of paint or something like that, and it came washing in, we’d go down there because paint was worth saving and if you didn’t like the colour, you could sell it to somebody else. Also you had people who lived near the coast a
nd who would walk along the beach every day at low tide to pick up the jetsam that was there. Strictly speaking, you’re not supposed to keep it, but certainly as far as one’s own conscience was concerned, you felt perfectly clear, keeping whatever there was.’

  Mills only remembers one occasion when he became involved in what he considers to have been ‘serious wrecking’. Roundabout 1936, a French or Spanish ship (he is not sure which) shed its deck cargo of wine out at sea, and over the next few days, the barrels floated in along the north Cornish coastline. ‘If you were to go to Porthtowan beach and you’re looking out to sea, on your left-hand side there’s a big rock broken away from the cliff. There’s a gap between it as wide as this room is long, and you go through there to the next beach if the tide is out. The rock is called Tobban Rock, and the next beach is called Tobban beach. There’s no access to Tobban beach except when the tide is fully out, or you’re prepared to climb the cliff above it, which is about 200 foot high there, I suppose.

  ‘I had an Austin 16 Saloon at that time, and I remember taking a couple of buckets and driving it down to the coast. Not down to the beach, but up to the cliff tops, because the barrels which were washed up at Porthtowan had the customs people to guard them, and you couldn’t get them. Some of the casks of wine were damaged, some were completely smashed and the sea water had got in, but there were casks—and I’m talking about casks with that sort of diameter’—he stands up and raises his hand to shoulder height, maybe five foot off the ground—‘which were completely unspoilt. So you knocked the bung in, and then you rolled it. And then you would push the thing over so that the wine gushed out, and you held your bucket underneath. And trip after trip! I went up and down those cliffs—I’d love to show you, because you probably wouldn’t believe how dangerous and how damn silly it was—but I went up and down with these buckets of wine. I remember I had two buckets of wine I carried up, and when I got to a really perilous part I would put down one bucket, go up with the other, pour it into the churn, and come back for the remaining one.