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

by Bella Bathurst

4 Stars

Pages: 386

Published: 06 March 2006

Publisher: HARPERPERENNIAL

Publisher’s Blurb

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.

Review

From Jamaica Inn to Poldark to Whiskey Galore I, like others, have seen the 'fictional' take on wreckers in the British Isles but never really knew what was fact and what was fiction.

Secretly I was hoping that this book would be crammed with tales of luring unwary ships onto the rocks and stories of Cornishmen fleeing from the redcoats over the cliffs and to a degree it was, but, it was so much more.

Whilst the wrecking tales where what brought me to this book it delivered so much more with descriptions of the key wrecking areas and the people who inhabited them. It also branched out to cover lesser know areas classified as wrecking like Whales and other cretaceous relations.

I found that the history of the locations and organisations involved in the prevention of wrecking including the RNLI which significantly had its roots in wrecking before the poachers turned gamekeeper were fascinating.

Some may argue that parts of the book wandered too far from its core directive but it is this departure from the wrecking stories that make this a joy to read.

I'm off to track down Bella's previous book about the Stevenson Lighthouses

The Author

Bella Bathurst is a fiction and non-fiction writer, and photographer, born in London and living in Scotland. Her journalism has appeared in a variety of major publications, including the Washington Post and the Sunday Times.

Her first published book was The Lighthouse Stevensons (1999), an account of the construction of the Scottish lighthouses by the ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson, and named one of the List Magazine's '100 Best Scottish Books of all time'.

https://bellabathurst.com/

https://www.theguardian.com/profile/bellabathurst

https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/bella-bathurst

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