wreckers

wreckers. Stories about wreckers are legion, and Dame Ethel Smythe even composed an opera about them.Haste to the shore, the storm is nigh,
The breakers roar, the sea-birds cry;
Wreckers awake, for luck has come!
What sound was that?
Some gallant ship has come to port,
Striking the rocks …
Some ship upon the rocks has struck
With noise of thunder.
Quick, ere she founder,
Haul in the plunder!
Since time immemorial they have been alleged to have lured ships ashore with false lights, or by deliberately extinguishing genuine ones, and then plundering them and killing anyone from them still alive. This activity has allegedly been going on since pre-Christian times, and as late as 1905 a German pilot book of the Mediterranean warned of false lights being displayed on the North African coastline.

A favourite method of luring a vessel ashore was said to have been deployed by the inhabitants of Block Island, RI. Known as ‘jibber the kibber’, it entailed tying a lantern round the neck of a hobbled horse, which made the motion of the lantern very similar to the light of a ship at sea. Many other ingenious ways of luring a ship ashore have also been recounted, and laws were even passed in several countries threatening execution to any wrecker apprehended.

During the days of sail ships driven ashore were an essential part of the local economy for many British communities, if not the only one. When Sir John Killigrew built a stone lighthouse on Cornwall's Lizard Point in 1619, the local inhabitants forced him to extinguish it. In Devon and Cornwall children in their evening prayers requested that ‘a ship might be sent ashore before morning’ (Sea Breezes, vii. 71), and Danish children made similar requests. In the middle of the 18th century the Revd Troutbeck of St Mary's in the Scilly Isles prayed: ‘Oh Lord, bless the sea and the strand! Protect the poor sailors from evil and lead them to a safe harbour. But if it is Thy divine will that their ship shall be lost, then, we pray Thee, let it happen on our coast.’

That stranded ships were plundered, and the crews sometimes killed, is well documented—the fate of Sir Clowdisley Shovel is just one example—but those investigating the legends have found no evidence that any were ever actively caused by wreckers. (See, inter alia, J. de Courcy Ireland , Mariner's Mirror, 70 (1984), 44
, H. Henningsen , Mariner's Mirror, 71 (1985), 215–18
, and G. Place , Mariner's Mirror, 76 (1990), 167.
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