The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks, from the 18th-Century to the Present Day [Hardcover]

Bella Bathurst (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 14, 2005

Bella Bathurst's first book, the acclaimed The Lighthouse Stevensons,told the story of Scottish lighthouse construction by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson. Now she returns to the sea to search out the darker side of those lights, detailing the secret history of shipwrecks and the predatory scavengers who live off the spoils. Even today, Britain's coastline remains a dangerous place. An island soaked by four separate seas, with shifting sand banks to the east, veiled reefs to the west, powerful currents above, and the world's busiest shipping channel below, the country's offshore waters are strewn with shipwrecks. For villagers scratching out an existence along Britain's shores, those wrecks have been more than simply an act of God; in many cases, they have been the difference between living well and just getting by. Though Daphne Du Maurier made Cornwall Britain's most notorious region for wrecking, many other coastal communities regarded the "sea's bounty" as an impromptu way of providing themselves with everything from grapefruits to grand pianos. Some plunderers were held to be so skilled that they could strip a ship from stem to stern before the Coast Guard had even left port, some were rumored to lure ships onto the rocks with false lights, and some simply waited for winter gales to do their work. From all around Britain, Bathurst has uncovered the hidden history of ships and shipwreck victims, from shoreline orgies so Dionysian that few participants survived the morning to humble homes fitted with silver candelabra, from coastlines rigged like stage sets to villages where everyone owns identical tennis shoes. Spanning three hundred years of history, The Wreckers examines the myths, the realities, and the superstitions of shipwrecks and uncovers the darker side of life on Britain's shores.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bathurst, who won a Somerset Maugham Award for The Lighthouse Stevensons, offers a spellbinding tale of seafaring men, their ships and the ocean that cares for neither. With the British Isles as her focus, Bathurst covers the four points of the compass, delving into the particulars of each fabulously treacherous area with relish. To the east are the Goodwin Sands, shifting sandbars that rise out of the English Channel at low tide. To the west lies the Corrievreckan, the largest whirlpool in European waters, which nearly swallowed George Orwell in 1947. The Pentland Firth, with its strong, unpredictable currents, terrifies sailors in the north. And to the south, at Cornwall, ships collide with saw-toothed rocks, undersea ridges and each other with alarming regularity. For generations, folks on land have made their living salvaging what they can from the resulting mess. Bathurst probes the gray areas between rescuer, salvager and wrecker; taking advantage of murky regulation and lax enforcement, some coastal dwellers are all three. An air of sweet melancholy hangs over Bathurst's poignant account of ships, men and the circumstances that tear them apart. Illus. not seen by PW; maps.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

It’s hard to write a nonfiction book with limited sources and no way to properly authenticate what you write. But award-winning Bathurst (The Lighthouse Stevensons) seems up to the task, impressing critics with the thoroughness of her research (she interviewed 200 people and read travelers’ journals and newspaper reports) and the spirited way she integrates surprising facts, entertaining anecdotes, and fictional accounts. They also credited her with striking the right tone between whimsy and sensitivity with respect to the tragedies she relates. She doesn’t avoid the moral questions that wrecking asks, either. Although some reviewers felt the book lacks a little meat and could benefit from a stronger structure, they all agreed it makes for a captivating read.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1ST edition (July 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618416773
• ISBN-13: 978-0618416776
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,116,478 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lively Tales of Rocky Seas and Rocky Morals, July 11, 2005

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks, from the 18th-Century to the Present Day (Hardcover)

You are walking along the beach, and you find a box that has obviously washed up from the sea. You look inside, and find something valuable. What do you do? For almost anyone, this is as clear a case of finders keepers as can be. But what if you saw the ship on the rocks from which the box came? What if you rowed out deliberately to take such boxes from the foundering ship? What if in rescuing boxes you refused to rescue passengers? What if you had lured the ship upon the rocks deliberately by making a false lighthouse? The wreckers can tell you the answers to these questions, if you can get any of them to make frank replies. Wreckers are those who are eager to claim soon-to-be-lost cargo as their own, and the history of British wreckers (frank replies and all) is told in _The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks, from the 18th Century to the Present Day_ (Houghton Mifflin) by Bella Bathurst. The author's previous book, on the lighthouse-building family of Robert Louis Stevenson, was a sort of preparation for the current one, the light as opposed to the dark. It is full of death, riches, and good and bad luck, and therefore cannot help being fascinating.

The complicated legal status of wrecks, wreckers, and wreckage is here covered in detail, but it is fair to say it is not made plain. No English law has supported "finders keepers" in any form, but wreckers pretty much depend upon it. After all, as Bathurst invites us to consider, if a foundering ship has been properly evacuated of all its crew, and it is about to break up with all its goods going to the bottom, what can possibly be wrong with nimble wreckers climbing aboard and plucking whatever they can? It's a different issue from wreckers luring ships to their doom. Go to Cornwall now, the setting for _Jamaica Inn_, and they will sell you souvenirs from the age when wreckers deliberately wrecked ships, and they will deny that such things ever occurred. There is much less malevolence described on most of these pages, although they are full of those who live by the sea and try to profit thereby. If you don't like the dark of _Jamaica Inn_, which may or may not be based on real history, try the rollicking _Whiskey Galore_, which is really based on the sinking of the _Politician_, with a quarter million barrels of malt whisky, wrecked off parched isles of Scotland in 1941. The _Cita_ ran aground on the Isles of Scilly in 1997 and gave the islanders tons of toys, car engines, and brand name Nike trainers. These are fine stories that anyone will enjoy, because wrecks are inherently fascinating. One man who photographs says anyone will go look at them, "Not necessarily to go and pick it over, but just to go and see it. It seems to create an awful lot of interest in people."

Just so this book. Bathurst has visited the locales described, and most importantly, has actually sailed these dangerous waters, with expert local guides. Off Scotland, for instance, is the Gulf of Corrievreckan, with monstrous rocks and a subaquatic pit known as "the Gateway to Hell". Bathurst is mystified by her scary visit: "A couple of hours ago, I though I understood the laws of physics." Valleys of water, liquid obstructions, and boiling cold water teach her differently. A captain unaware might be sailing along, only to realize that a great pit of water is opening in front of him and there is nothing his vessel can do. The Goodwin Sands, near the narrowest part of the English Channel, are islands that can disappear or reappear irregularly, depending upon how the sands shift, and since they are in a busy waterway, they have dragged innumerable ships down. The wreckers (locally called "levellers") assist such vessels if they can, but pick up whatever merchandise they can, too. Even the members of the legendary and fully respected Royal National Lifeboat Institution, one man says, would get to a wreck first and rescue the survivors, and then "... if they got some perks of it, well..." This is an engaging tale of the gusto of sea life, of unsure waters, and of uncertain morality.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating Look Into A Little-Known Area, January 8, 2006

By 

Andy French "Crotchety Music Fan" (Mission Hill) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks, from the 18th-Century to the Present Day (Hardcover)

We all know about shipwrecks, but I had never heard of people who make a living off of these tragedies - even whole communities that basically lie in wait for these wrecks to happen - until I stumbled on this book.

Bella Bathurst's look into Wreckers is really interesting, though a tad overwritten. Nonetheless, it's totally worth reading. She's particularly good at capturing the personalities of the people involved, as well as giving a great historical overview of this bizarre and fascinating pocket of human life.

If you like books about seafaring, this is a great little detour.

4.0 out of 5 stars Made my 25 best reads of 2009., March 16, 2010

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks, from the 18th-Century to the Present Day (Hardcover)

Bella Bathurst, The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks from the 18th Century to the Present Day (Houghton Mifflin, 2005)

While I was coming up with my Best Reads of 2009 list, I found that I'd somehow forgotten to write a review of Bella Bathurst's The Wreckers, the book which clocked in at #16 on that list. It's almost two months later, and I still haven't written that review. I finished the book back in October 2009, and I'm writing this on February 15, 2010. (Note: there is no guarantee I will finish this review on February 15; I always have a few stubs lying around waiting for me to finish them.) So I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I've got the structure firmly in my head; The Wreckers will be with me for much longer than this, rest you assured. Bella Bathurst has written my favorite kind of nonfiction book here, one that manages both the readability of a conversational tone and ample evidence of research. One in which the author is personally invested, but in which the author is not enough of an egoist to turn the entire book into a memoir that's related only tangentially to the purported subject. It is a book that is in balance. Given that, Bathurst could have probably written about any topic from the weather patterns of the South Atlantic to the population density of Norwegian emigrants in Tibet and I'd have liked the book. But her subject, as well, is intrinsically fascinating: wreckers and the many other sub-groups that go along with them, from those with complete legitimacy (the salvors) to those who might as well be flying the black flag (may as well call them pirates, for in the final analysis, that's what they are).

Bathurst wanders coastal Britain interviewing salvors, wreckers, and associated folks, looking at shipwrecks, and tracing the histories of some of Britain's most dangerous stretches of coastline, examining the way wreckers have been portrayed in popular culture and law before examining as much of the history as she can find. As we see different pieces of the coastline (and jet off for an epilogue in India), a picture emerges that is quite different than the one we're all used to. Granted, when much of your history is coming from those involved, it's worth taking it all with a couple of grains of salt. But whatever opinions you've formed by the end of the book, it's an absorbing journey through a lifestyle that's been slowly dying out over the past decades, and one that's well worth your time. ****