JACKI LYDEN, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden.
Little is more romantic than a shipwreck. Unless, of course, you're on that ship. There are upwards of 30,000 shipwrecks lining the coastline of Great Britain and, according to a new book, "The Wreckers," plundering ships was a way of life for inhabitants of Britain's coastlines.
The book begins with a passage from a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson in which a becalmed ship nervously drifts towards what the captain had hoped would be a safe harbor, a fishing village: "Door after door was opened and in the gray light of the morning, fisher after fisher was seen to come forth, yawning and stretching himself, nightcap on head. Fisher after fisher, I wrote, and my pen tripped, for it t`would rather stand wrecker after wrecker. There was no emotion, no animation. It scarce seemed any interest. Not a hand was raised, but all callously awaited the harvest of the sea."
Bella Bathurst is the author of "The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks." And she says those people waiting callously on shore sprang to life when it came time to bring in the sea's harvest.
Ms. BELLA BATHURST (Author): It's worth remembering that, although it was--what they were doing was going out to rob the ships, it took extraordinary skill to go out in the middle of a gale without lights, probably in darkness and in rain and hail and all the rest of it, to a stricken ship. Whether or not they were going to rob it, it was almost irrelevant. They had to know the local sea area unbelievably well to be able to kind of cope with that sort of thing. And the British lifeboat service was--originated in part from the wreckers who were going out to stricken ships. And because, originally, there was no incentive to save life, the wreckers would go out and nick what they could and leave the bodies.
LYDEN: That was a real surprise to me, reading this, that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, one of the most, I would think, worthy, respectable charities in the United Kingdom had this history of emanating from, you know, a very suspicious place.
Ms. BATHURST: I think so, yes. I mean, it sort of makes sense. It does make sense in that--as I say, in order to be a lifeboat man you need--or you certainly needed in the past an enormous kind of skill. And yet you ne--really needed courage as well and the ability to sort of pull together as a community. And those were both--they were qualities that were essential prerequisites for a wrecker as much as they were necessary for lifeboat men.
LYDEN: But you do have a couple of grim details in here about bodies washing up and ears being bitten off to retrieve earrings.
Ms. BATHURST: That was a very bizarre--there was a royal commission set up to work out what the two--establish a local constabulary in the country, and wanted the--this was given as kind of evidence in a court of law by somebody that he had seen--there had been a ship washed up near Hoylake, I think, near Liverpool. And one of the wreckers had bitten the ears off a corpse on the beach to get at her earrings. And the more you can look at the fact, the more you just think that is only--sort of grif--grotesque. It's kind of bizarre. Because you just: Well, why didn't he just take them out?
LYDEN: But you also have delicious descriptions of people hiding this stuff all over the place. Hiding grand pianos, hiding casks of whiskey; caverns and pits dug in fields. I mean, people became very adept at secreting this stuff away.
Ms. BATHURST: They were very adept and somewhere like Stromer, which is a flat, treeless island, and looks, when you see it from the mainland, absolutely naked, is a fascinating case in point. Because you kind of think, you know, if you hung your washing out, everybody from here to New York would be able to see the color of your shirts. But actually, that wasn't the case. They were brilliant at hiding things because they were often raided by the customs and the receivers of wreck and the police. And the only place where they never kept wreck was in their own homes. They had hiding place--under the font in the church. They had hiding places in the fields. They had a very elaborate system for hiding big pieces of wreck underwater. The only marker of these pieces of wreck was a little cork floating on top.
LYDEN: Bella Bathurst, in a lot of the places that you visited, people tried to sort of downplay how atrocious some of the attitudes may have been if you look at it by, you know, modern considerations. And that takes place in Cornwall, too. People say, `Oh, nothing ever happened here.' But we know from Daphne Du Maurier and "Jamaica Inn" that, really, those people in Cornwall were hideous, lethal wreckers.
Ms. BATHURST: The Cornish in one sense are maligned in that they get very cross when they're accused of being wreckers. They say that they weren't wreckers. Of course, they were wreckers. The only thing is that they were not alone. I mean, the rest of the country was at it just as much as they were, as craftily as the Cornish were and as frequently as the Cornish. So the Cornish get a rough deal in some senses, but it's difficult to have too much sympathy with them given that they now have a flourishing tourist industry based on wre--their wrecking past as well.
LYDEN: Like you say, they're willing to sell you the idea and deny it at the same time. But you have letters here from local clergy at the time trying to stop this, or constables who were too frightened to enforce it because people would literally leave a meeting and go out with pickaxes and wreck, or even, I guess, in Cornwall, you know, light false lights, right?
Ms. BATHURST: Very straightforward wrecking, as in a ship lands on the rocks and you just go down and plunder it, was something of a national pastime, not just in Cornwall but in other parts of the country. The more complicated allegations like the idea of putting out false lights to lure a ship onto the rocks. It's much, much more difficult to substantiate that. And I never managed that, and it's worth saying that. Cert--that was the most active sort of wrecking, but there is an element of--it's too good to be total myth, but I'm not sure that the wilder kind of flights of Daphne Du Maurier's imagination and everybody else's imagination--it actually came to pass in that way.
LYDEN: There's a wonderful job title that I guess still exists in the British government and I'm not sure it needs to be employed quite as much: the receiver of wreck. Does wrecking still go on today?
Ms. BATHURST: Absolutely. It goes on in a slightly more prosaic form in that a lot of it has gone underwater because of the improvements in dive technology. And people can plunder shipwrecks underwater. I mean, I don't want to malign the whole of the dive community, but I believe that a lot of plundering does go on still of wrecks. So that's what's happened to a lot of wrecking. But still, I mean, if there was a ship on the rocks at--on the Pentland firth tonight, I dare say there would still be kind of people out and interested.
LYDEN: Bella Bathurst is the author of "The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks From the 18th Century to the Present Day." Bella Bathurst, thanks very much.
Ms. BATHURST: Thank you very much.
LYDEN: You can read an excerpt from "The Wreckers" at our Web site, npr.org.
Copyright © 2005 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.