Part the Tooth
The Crown had a distinct upper hand in the matter of holding the goods and spoil of a wreck, complaining bitterly to local magistrates of ‘certayn persons have helped themselves to my priveleages’. There was also the shoring, where goods floated ashore off wrecks. Perhaps the inflation of the situation in Cornwall arose from local coastlines, where there was less room for ships to be manoeuvred, a ship heading for some shelter, finds it shrouds clinging to the cliff face, blown by the intense gusts, rigging gets caught, and she is lost. Unlike many other coasts of Britain, her inshore waters are littered with half hidden rocks. Add to that there was the miner, who (unlike his fishing cousin) had to work to pay his tied rent and to buy food, and at times relied on other sources of income.
Remember that the majority of Cornish folk lived by the nurture of the sea, they knew the hardships of the sailor, and his voyage. A move was there to preserve life and the ship. All along the vicious coast are stories of rescue of life from wrecked ships. The chances of survival, from a ship which has been scarred by jagged rocks and gripped by the wild seas, hurled agains cliffs or even tossed up on a beach, with the fury of sea and wind all around, was remote. There were tales of 2000 miners going to a wreck; but imagine a coast of high cliffs, of roaring winds and a tempestuous raging sea. In that is a ship being torn to pieces, spars, ropes, heavy boards, heaving bowsprit, just how many desperate men could be on that narrow margin of survival. The barrel that is being sought is lifted and can kill a man with one blow. No, the wrecking that was conducted in that large scale would have been undertaken on the morning after the wreck when all but a handfull from the ship had died, others would have been taken in by villagers. There is one horrible tale told of a wrecker having spotted on the following morning a ‘priceless ring’, it being on the finger of a survivor clinging to a rock, he just cut off the finger. We have to ask, was the wrecker aware that the person was alive or dead? Was the observer of this incident a friend or foe? Just how true is it? Was the observer himself trying to get the ring? Only too often the parson was involved looking not only for lost souls, but for a cask of bordeaux, as were local publicans, hoping to get a few casks of brandy. The picture painted is one of pillage and carnage. They repeat tales of miners gathering their knives and axes, not having followed the miners, and imagining killing in a glorious frenzy to get their ill gotten harvest of the sea. The knives and axes were for cutting ropes and to get the sails, to open doors that were blocked, to open hatches, to open crates of goods, full crates were unwieldy, much easier to get the contents separately. Some ships had animals for cargo and others had animals for food. Others had beasts of burden. To deny any killing or injury between an anxious wrecker and a possessive sailor would be foolhardy. But ask yourself this; when a sailor appears eventually at his employer’s desk, being asked ‘where is my geneva?’ ‘Well Milord their were hundreds of them vicious Cornishmen, and it was either them or me, and look at this gash in my arm, they killed me mates’.