Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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. ****

I quite enjoyed this well-written history of wrecking along the coasts of the Bristish Isles. The author did a wonderful job of interviewing some of the elderly folks around the country that were able to supply some of the kind of history (With a few embellishments I'm sure.) that would otherwise be lost forever once they are gone. I also received an unexpected education about the geology of Great Britain and bit of oceanography that was a pleasant addition to the text. I thought the book was entertaining and easy to read. In fact, I've since purchased another copy to give as a gift.

The main problem with this book is that it confuses the definition of what constitutes a 'wrecker,' with what constitutes a 'salvager.' The two are very different, even though they both deal with shipwrecks. The wrecker encourages or lures ships to crash onto the rocks and reefs, and thus benefitting from the resulting valuable cargo from the wreck at the cost of the lives of the sailors on the vessel so wrecked. A salvager simply benefits from the recovery of the cargo of a vessel that has wrecked itself, and ordinarily after rescuing the crewmen aboard forst. Two very different things! This book is about salvagers, not wreckers! To be fair, I believe Ms Bathurst originally intended to write about wreckers, but because her research methodology was so weak, she simply switched to writing about salvagers without changing the title of the book. The failure of her methodology for obtaining original source information is hardly surprising; if you simply walk into waterfront pubs as a stranger and start asking people if they were, or know anything about wreckers, they will understandably all deny any knowledge. You might well ask them if they were murderers, or criminally insane! Information of this sort is very closely held, very rarely divulged, or even spoken about, and certainly never to strangers! In any case, if you would like to read a book about salvagers from around the British Isles, this may be your cup of tea. If you are looking for information about wreckers, this ain't it!