Bella Bathurst: The Wreckers

The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas, False Lights and Plundered Ships

In the way that a wrecked ship can bring unexpected spoils, so too does Bella Bathurst's story of the wreckers and salvagers who inhabit, possibly, the small communities of Britain's coastline.

Because who knew that they wanted to read about the secret history of ships and shipwrecks? Not me, and yet this book, which delves through the thick fog surrounding the long contentious practice of plundered ships, is a treasure — like those carried on the wrecks she writes about.

Bathhurst likens the possibility of a ship running aground as being more or less like having Selfridges crash-land in your back garden. And all of the goodies are lacking a price tag.

The wreckers of the title are those Bathurst first encountered while reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Records of a Family of Engineers. One passage stayed in her mind. It involved the narrowly averted wreck of a ship called The Regent, and Stevenson depicts the islanders of Swona watching and "all callously awaited the harvest of the sea ..."

Bathurst writes that she hadn't heard of wreckers or been aware that there were parts of Britain where "men, and women and children, stood with their arms folded waiting for ships to die."

She found it was the Cornish who were supposed to be "such accomplished wreckers that they regarded it not as a crime but as a profession. In fact, if anyone knew anything at all about the subject, they knew that the Cornish had been wreckers since birth.

The only people who did not know this were the Cornish themselves, who swore blind that they had been the victims of a terrible slander and would never have touched a ship in distress."

This sums up the difficulties of chasing such stories. The author wonders: "If I chose to take the wreckers on would I be walking into a twilight of historical whispers and unverifiable anecdotes?"

Who could resist such temptation? Not Bathurst, fortunately.

And so she finds herself, more or less inevitably after posing such a question, one morning on a deserted seafront at Ramsgate about to head out to the middle of the English Channel to investigate a place, or rather a sometimes place: the Goodwin Sands.

The Goodwins are a series of sand banks and are notorious not only because "they stick out like a pothole on the M25 but because that pothole has a history of wandering". They are known as the ship swallower. Now you see them, now you don't.

This is a fitting start in search of wrecker stories which, like the Goodwins, emerge from the sea, then, within a matter of hours, recede beneath the ocean.

The sands are a natural, if discomforting phenomenon. Wrecking is as unnatural a pursuit as you could imagine: whole villages waiting for ships to sink so as to plunder them; perhaps, in the past, even enticing them to safe harbour with the false lights of the sub-title.

Looking for the wreckers takes Bathurst from the sands to the Scilly Isles to Pentland Firth and the East Coast, and many other places besides including a pub in Cornwall where she puts her difficult question as awkwardly as you might expect — and feels the chill set in like more rolling fog.

Does she find her wreckers? There would be no surprise really, she surmises, that they did and do exist. "They have been bred," she writes, "of Britain's island psyche."

It is the coast which makes the wrecks happen and then: "Infamously, we are a nation of shopkeepers and bargain-hunters; secretive, materialistic and enterprising. We prefer a broad moral fudge to narrow fantaticism, we dislike outside interference and we have never been averse to taking a little bit extra on the side. Perfect qualities, one could say, for a trainee wrecker."

Harper Collins
$34.99 

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer.