Sea Control - Sea Control 511 - Cornish Wrecking with Dr. Cathryn Pearce

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Links1. Cornish Wrecking 1700-1860 – Reality and Popular Myth, by Cathryn Pearce, The Boydell Press, 2010.  

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today we are joined by Dr. Catherine Pierce, and she'll be discussing her book on the myths and reality of Cornish wrecking. This episode was edited and produced by William McQuiston. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Catherine Pierce, and we're going to be discussing her book, Cornish Wrecking, 1700-1860, reality and popular myth. So Catherine, welcome. Could you start by telling the listeners a little bit more about your background, please? Thanks so much for inviting me for the podcast. It's kind of fun to be able to talk about wrecking since it's been a little while since the book was published. As far as my background is concerned, I'm still trying to figure out how an Alaskan ended up in Portsmouth teaching naval history. But I was raised in Alaska and i started teaching there i became interested in maritime history i think

you know i can't even remember how long ago it was that i started to become really interested in maritime history but i think it's it's a lot being a young child and being out with with the family boat you know out in the fjords of alaska and being awed by the environment but then also eventually by the history of the peoples who lived there and who sailed there. So yeah, that's kind of how I think I came to maritime history. It was a lot of that environmental background. And my father was very interested in history as well. So he always kept that interest alive. We went to a lot of historical sites when he was actually retired to Air Force. And so we did live in a few places down in the States when I was really young. And

we did visit a lot of historical locations at that point. And that also helped to get me interested in it. So when I was a student, I was torn between studying history and studying biology. I kept going back and forth, but eventually history won. But the biology is now coming to the fore a little bit more because I'm looking at more environmental history, at least environmental history of the coasts and of the seas. But shipwreck, I'm not exactly sure how that happened. There is traces of interest in shipwreck kind of all the way through my history. So yeah, I eventually, I mean, I did finish a degree in maritime history with the University of Victoria. And my focus there was on the Hudson's Bay Company and their shipping department.

particularly off the coast of Oregon and Washington, British Columbia, and later Alaska. And shipwreck entered that as well. And I noticed looking back at my MA thesis that I was actually introducing it with a shipwreck in the Columbia River and the issues of claims of the goods between the local Indigenous people and the Hudson's Bay Company. So, yeah, the threads were very much there. But it took me a long time to actually finally be able to get on to a PhD. And I actually taught for quite a few years with the University of Alaska in Anchorage, went through the whole process of getting tenure, and then finally being able to get sabbatical. And it's with sabbatical that I was able to then go to the UK to start my PhD there. well thank you again for joining us as a reminder to the listeners all opinions that you hear today are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated so I think there's a relatively small portion of our audience that is from the UK so could you

start by explaining what a Cornish wrecker is and I don't know how well that term is known within the UK as the island is kind of turned away from its maritime past a little bit but and then talk about how you found your way to this topic as you started your PhD research. Yes. Cornish wrecking is actually very well known in the UK. It's part of the popular culture here. It is a stereotype of an individual. Usually the stereotype involves some sort of person who is out on the cliff with a lantern, a false light, luring ships ashore and then plundering shipwrecks. It is so ubiquitous in British culture that the BBC consistently runs programs that either talk about it in their comedy shows or in the radio programs. So it comes up a lot within British

culture. The way that I came to the topic actually started with an interesting cornwall. And that came from a chance call that we had from a woman from California who was looking for Pierce ancestors and thought that perhaps we might be possibly related. And this was back in the late 70s that this happened. So kind of early on around the time that Roots was coming out and people were getting interested in genealogy. And I wasn't even aware of Cornwall as a location, much less as a culture at that point. But I was curious. We didn't have any information for her. I didn't know anything about my peer ancestors, but it did kind of trigger that interest in Cornwall so that when I had an opportunity to visit the UK, when I had just started community

college actually and I went with a friend we went to Cornwall and I absolutely fell in love with it there even though I had no idea whether or not you know I had ancestors from there I had no idea but Cornwall is a place that captures the imagination of a lot of people it's still almost the number one place that people like to go for holidays here in the UK because of beaches and surfing and and and also very very deep history and that's very visible and so when I when we were at Cornwall I picked up this little booklet called Tales of Cornish Wrecking that was on sale at the local cafe at the Lizard Lighthouse and I also picked up a couple of other books about shipwrecks and about Cornish culture and those became kind of the seeds to this idea I ended up writing when I got

home to medieval history, and I actually wrote about medieval Cornwall and about wrecking at that point. So I was only about 21 at the time, so fairly young. And that interest kind of sat on the back burner until I was able to think about a PhD. I was really interested in maritime history, and particularly of Cornwall. And when I had the opportunity to study at the University of Greenwich and talking to my supervisor, I was looking at possibly the naval history of Falmouth at one point or the Cornish wrecking. And then that around the time that I was talking to her about this and trying to decide what to do, then there was actually a shipwreck in Cornwall. The Kodima went aground. It was a Maltese timber carrier. That was in February

2002. And all of a sudden, there's all this timber that came ashore. There was all these newspapers talking about Cornish wreckers that were on front pages and things. And I thought, this thing actually has legs. I think I can do this. We did have a concern about how much historical archival research would be possible, because there had only been one study done when I was looking at the historiography, what has been written about the topic before. There was only one solid academic piece on it and that was in a book published in the 1970s and in a very important book called Albion's Fatal Tree but that was it so it was it was one of those topics like I really want to do this but you know is there enough and what am I you know how am I going to do this

because I also knew if there was is that my the records were going to be in lots of different places. So it was a real challenge. Where does the reputation of a Cornish wrecker come from? That one is a challenging question because it ends up that the Cornish wrecker is both a legendary figure. They said that a figure of a man on a cliff waving that lantern, those false lights to drive a ship ashore to wreck. That's probably the most well-known meaning of a Cornish wrecker. But there are also real wreckers, kind of actual wreckers, and they were also considered by elite society to be these stereotypical scoundrels, you know, who stole from shipwreck victims or from the drowned on the beach. So there were all kinds of these negative stereotypes that were slowly built up, these negative descriptors, like some of them that I found were greedy cormorants waiting for their prey, or that they were cannibals, or they were devils, or lawless villains. So this actually raised some really interesting questions for me about the representation of the coastal rural poor as well.

But that's the image that has been carried forth within a lot of the literature now. Sometimes, though, those terms have been conflated, because there are a lot of different definitions of what a wrecker actually is. But, yeah, I mean, there were wreckers that were accused of attacking ships, taking them apart for goods and for wood. And there was actually one accuser who claimed that they could do that within a single tide because they were miners. They were tinners who already had the equipment to do it. But he was actually complaining because they weren't working in the mines. He didn't like them, you know, going off and doing other things. So those images of Cornish wreckers became fairly big. conflated and they entered public consciousness more so through a lot of writings and particularly

really strongly in the Victorian era but early earlier than that because there were writings of like the Wesleys who were developing Methodism at the time and had visited Cornwall as being a particularly barbaric location. Cornwall itself, particularly in the 18th centuries and earlier, was seen as being a fairly barbaric place. You know, it was not close to cities. It was rural. The people there had spoke a different language. You know, they had spoken Cornish up through the 18th century. So they were not English as such. And there was a lot of that rural versus urban divide that was going on within the elite minds. And so with mining, miners also were considered kind of lower strata of society, and a lot of wreckers were miners. So with that kind of

reputation, then we've got somebody like Wesley moving in, claiming that Methodism will, by proselytizing to the miners and by conversion, that they will become civilized. And so we do get these stories then that are told about religion civilizing the minors. And as part of that civilizing, that means that they would no longer be wrecking, they would no longer be smuggling, they would no longer be playing some of their barbaric sports. The reality is that yes, a lot of Cornish became Methodist, but they didn't stop the wrecking because they had other beliefs, you know, that they actually believed that wreck coming ashore was actually God's providence. You know, they actually saw it from a religious point of view anyway.

You mentioned the coastal rural poor, and obviously Cornwall is not the only place that coastal rural poor exist in the world. I'm assuming this activity wrecking, by which I'm referring to like the taking things from the wreck, not necessarily the man on the cliff with the lantern trying to lure someone ashore that scavenging whatever you want to call it the wrecking occurs in most every location where the ocean meets lands why is cornwall in particular singled out and then how is that you mentioned popular culture before how is that proliferated in popular culture yeah yeah this is a question that i've been dealing with for quite a while because, yes, wrecking is ubiquitous.

It is found on all coasts. I mean, part of it is because of Cornwall being other, the far southwest coastal and rural, but there are other places that are like that too. Ireland, in particular, has a similar reputation about wrecking. If you read any of the elite work in the 19th century, for instance, Ireland is also coupled with Cornwall. for a lot of the same reasons

and I think partially we've got people that are speaking a different language, they're speaking a language that's not considered the civilized language you know from the central metropole you speak English so anybody speaking Cornish or Irish or even Welsh

or Scots Gaelic you do get some of the opinions of some of the more elite writers that they are more barbaric And I've also been working a lot with these areas. The coastline is also a more barbaric kind of a coastline as well. And it's like this idea that the further west you go, the more barbaric people we get. And these are quotes. These are all definitely quotes because I certainly don't feel that way. the the Cornish people of course also had a lot of dealings and perhaps even more dealings across the channel perhaps to Brittany than they did to like London you know the only ones who had a lot

of dealings with London would have been the landowners the manorial lords but the but most of the common people would and fishermen would have more connection with France there but the The process of the myth-making, the oral panics that came, that denigrated and devalued the coastal peasants, I think, I mean, they were being poor, they're ripe for caricature by the more comfortable classes. So, yes, the Cornish were caught in this prevailing stereotypes, useful for Methodism. But what I really haven't been able to totally figure out is why the Welsh were not included within all this, because the Welsh even continued speaking Welsh until now. I mean, their language has survived more than the Cornish had survived. The Welsh were also converted to Methodism. You know, they had a lot of those same mechanisms that were going on. The Welsh were miners, so there's so much that's there. So I'm still trying to figure out exactly why it was the Cornish that a lot of the writers

really grabbed onto. And I'm thinking writers such as, you know, a lot of the literary magazines would carry stories about Cornish wreckers. Playwrights would start to write plays about Wreckers. And the Cornish Wrecker goes all the way through, and probably the most famous or infamous Cornish Wrecker would be Joss Merlin with Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn. So we have, going from literary magazines to eventually,

Wreckers are found in boys' adventure novels, and then going all the way into operas. there's ethel smice the wreckers was a big opera and damari's work and on so it it just gets carried into the popular culture but it's the cornish form that gets carried into popular culture more so than the records from some of these other areas how did the british government begin to codify what's allowed in the practice of wrecking yeah that's that's a a big question and when I spent a lot of time trying to get worked out and that particular question actually took me all the way back to looking at medieval wreck law and then coming forward just to see how

it started to develop because basically for common people no form of wrecking is allowed and in this I'm looking at wrecking as something not just taking stuff immediately from a ship that you can see that that's come ashore and taking goods but this also means goods that have come ashore even without the wreck being there you know things that we go out and we go beachcombing that is considered a form of wrecking that legally we are not supposed to or usually legally allowed to keep what we find if it looks like it's something of value and that has a long history to it. English law and then later British law codified specific meanings for what wreck actually is. Wreck is only for goods that have been cast ashore that have not been claimed by

its owner. So at the same time, we get definitions like flotsam, that are goods that are found floating in the sea, or jetsam, goods that might have been thrown overboard to lighten a vessel when in danger. And then Lagan, which are goods that are thrown overboard, perhaps tied to a buoy or something so it could be recovered. It's interesting that a lot of smuggled goods kind of come into that and they end up coming ashore there. And of course, this is not limited to Cornwall. The laws that are codified are actually for the country. But the first English laws are based on Mediterranean law, originally in Roman law. And then also there was the codification of the laws of Oloron, which were also used in France and some of the other

countries on the continent who have coastlines. So this particular issue of shipwreck cargo going ashore and what happens to it was something very much of interest to both the merchants who lost the goods, but also to whoever owned the land that the goods came ashore on. And that was not going to be common people. So they had their own ways of defining this. But a lot of the laws through the medieval period were working out rights of owners and trying to establish also the law of salvage as part of it so that finders would be paid salvage by the owners, usually through the sale of goods. Occasionally, people were allowed to keep some of the goods that they found. But yeah, eventually the law determined that wreck was something that remained unclaimed

for the period of a year and a day. And that's a very illegal definition for it. But yeah, years of legal discussion and cases to get to that point. The monarchs were very interested in this because they used right of wreck as a way to award their elites, their followers that supported them. They gave manors to, and as part of some of the coastal manors, the lords of the manor were given the right of wreck, meaning that they were able to keep wreck if it remained unclaimed. Although later on they had to pay customs duties, but we'll get to that later. the churches the church was also very interested in this at first and so a lot of a lot of the big churches monasteries also had rites of rec on their manorial land and one of them that i found

really interesting like a battle abbey i mean battle is a town in in england but that's that's near the site of of 1066 you know that where william the conqueror came ashore and so there was a lot of very rich land there that was handed over to some of the Normans there. And I even found that Battle Abbey had actually forged some of the records to claim wreck. Because for a while it was seen as being something lucrative when there were a lot of shipwrecks. So there's a lot of court cases about claiming of wreck all the way up until the 19th. And even the 20th century now occasionally it happens when lords the manor and the admiralty start to kind of wrangle over who gets to claim these goods but one of the important lines that was carried through in

popular culture came from the statute of westminster in 1275 that was during the reign of edward i this line was where a man a dog or a cat escaped quick out of a ship that such ship nor barge nor anything within them shall be a judged wreck and so what this did is it can put in this idea i mean it was actually evidentiary you know this is evidence of the owner of the goods if there is these animals on board but it was taken to mean that if there were no survivors if it was a dead wreck then the wreck would be fair game and that's how some of the the common people started to interpret that that if it was a dead wreck then they had they could have claim to it because you know there's no owner and of course the next step to that on the part of you

know those who want to come up with moral panics or whatever is like oh if all the survivors are murdered then it's going to be a dead wreck and so stories claiming that wreckers then murdered shipwreck victims became part of that popular culture, but no stories have been substantiated. I mean, the only stories I found even close to talking about that was actually from the 12th century. So a really long time ago, and who knows, but they make for great stories. But these kind of stories about murdering wreckers are told and have been fictionalized, and you can find it in fiction today and even some non-fiction unfortunately on the evidentiary side if you if you don't mind taking one additional question is the man with the false signal up on the clip

is there any evidence that that actually took place because it's someone who spent a great deal of time at sea it seems uh the odds of luring someone in to the exact spot that you want them to go and then being able to wreck that vessel in the way that you want to that seems like there's a number of circumstances that have to align for that to work out to your benefit if you are the individual up on the cliff holding the lamp and it seems like your time would be better spent doing other things so i'm curious if that there's any evidence to support that claim or if that was a popular story that then just gets passed down and expanded over the years yeah yeah that that is probably like the number one question about the whole aspect of wrecking

because it isn't so fascinating and yes it does take a lot lot of of things aligning as you say initially the idea behind the false lights on the cliff was it was supposed to actually act like a lantern hanging from like a stern light and so so a mariner seeing that would think that there was more sea room than there was and then they would come ashore but yeah from a record point of view particularly in usually it's supposed to happen during you know a lot of storms or whatever i go out on on the cliff all the time because i live near one it's like there's no way you know even though back then there was a lot of ships going by they didn't need to you know they they really didn't need need to do this i mean i can see how it could possibly work

because i have come across cases where like one ship was actually saved because lanterns were placed at the edge of a key um i think this was new key when new key was first built in the north cornwall in the bristol channel and and they actually use lanterns to direct a ship in so i can see that can happening i can see mistakes being made because of lights and being mistaken where for lighthouses that has happened but to deliberately be out there with a lantern kind of waiting yeah it's not really a great use of time yeah i mean lanterns were signaled signals for smugglers and things but but yeah to actually deliberately wreck a ship it's crazy i think and then also the the whole thing about the light and the false lights actually comes

from stories you know that are buried fairly back in classical times about false lights about deceiving and and then how it ends up the story ends up being this legend of this man because usually he also has either a cow or a donkey and sometimes but it's not a lantern it's a candle tied to a donkey's tail or a lantern hanging around the neck of a cow yeah there's just all these kind of fantastical aspects of these legends that get carried forward and i don't think that works either but i mean i do do believe in me people when they see shipwrecks we automatically do try to come up with with ways to explain why they happened and i can see how some people might think, well, maybe it was a lantern or something who did it. The false lights does appear in

statutory law, but originally it appeared in laws about lighthouses to make it illegal to be shining a light from a building facing seaward. And then we did get, with some of the codification of rec law in the 18th century we actually do get a there is a line in the statute from trying to remember the date of it yeah 1753 that was the the statute of what we call 26 george the second it was passed in the 26th year of george the second's reign this was the one that brought in false lights as being one of the crimes of wrecking and that it would be punished by the death penalty. Some writers have claimed that because that has been put into statute that it must have existed, the crime must have existed. But that's not actually how 18th century lawmaking

worked. Because laws were so specific about things, a lot of times they threw in things that might have happened. And I've been thinking that this was probably put in because it could have happened, that because of the legends, you know, they were trying to cover all their bases. You know, this line does come in later. It wasn't in the original bill. It comes in after the bill has been discussed several times in committee, and then it gets entered into that fairly late on, and then enters law that way, but it was never used in a court of law. I had a colleague who was a senior lecturer in law, and he really kindly went through a lot of the, I mean, he had access to the databases of all these various cases and came up with nothing

that had anybody actually being tried for using false lights. There was in several books, And even in the Albion's Fatal Tree book, they do mention some Welsh wreckers who used false lights to wreck a ship. And these these these wreckers were eventually tried and they were executed, but not for using false lights. That was something that the journalist put into the stories afterwards, because, again, there was no no evidence of that. You know, the captain who survived said, no, there's nothing like that. And, I mean, all of the stories that are in nonfiction books I've gone through and I've looked at those, and they just don't hold up to water. You know, I just have not been able to find a single case where false lights were used to deliberately wreck shipwrecks. I found it interesting that you mentioned a captain. As a former captain, it's not a huge logical leap for me to say that that is something a captain would find after wrecking his or her vessel. To say, oh, I saw these lights, I was confused, must have been false lights. It could have just been a light on land, not someone purposely doing something to you.

exactly and i haven't found any captains actually saying oh yeah it was somebody with their false lights that have done it i think i guess the only time i found something similar that there was a mate of an american ship back in the 1690s and that ship wrecked and he did claim that it was a false light shown from the lighthouse and research found there was of course a an investigation for that and and sending out out um letters and and articles you know in the paper asking anybody to please say what what conditions did they see around this time as they were coming by this area and it it turned out i mean the lighthouse actually was having it was one of very first lighthouses they were really having problems with the type of coal and being able to

be lit and you know so there were some issues but but yeah the the lighthouse keeper was was found not guilty and the problem is that that it was kind of written up in one of the books and the rest of the story wasn't told so it made it look like he was guilty and this idea that Cornishmen were not allowed to man lighthouses after that came up and again that was a whole kind of mythic thing, legend, that came up, which is not true. But it's fascinating, nonetheless. Well, I'm sorry that that's all we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Catherine Pierce. Catherine, where can we find you online, and what are you working on next? You can find me at the University of Portsmouth website there. I'm originally with the Port

Towns and Urban Cultures, but I am now with the Center of Port Cities and Maritime Cultures. I am on Twitter, but not very much, under at Catherine Pierce. I can be found more on Blue Sky, at Catherine Pierce. The work that I am doing right now, I'm actually expanding my research. Wrecking is part of it, but I have a real interest in shipwrecking coastal communities. and in particular, the role of coastal communities in shipwreck. So not just wrecking, but the life-saving is there, the taking care of victims, that sort of thing. And the most recent piece that I was working on was a wreck of a naval sloop, HMS Brazen, which actually wrecked not far from where I lived in January of 1800. And over 100 men died from that.

And I'm actually kind of focused on the story to tell a little bit of a different narrative because the original narrative was focused on Navy and nation, you know, the crew and their place within the French Revolutionary Wars, protecting the coast. But I've actually flipped it because I wanted to look at it more locally and what the role of the people of New Haven and Brighton were. And that actually leads to the history of the Navy's Sea Fensibles, a small militia that was formed of fishermen, smugglers, and whoever to protect the coast. They had local knowledge. So they were the ones that were actually kind of dealing with possible invasion. They were dealing with the French privateers during the French Revolutionary and then later the Napoleonic Wars when the sea principles were extended. So I have been focusing on that particular story and also looking at wrecking as a form of subsistence. So kind of turning my view from the legal aspects, but actually getting into how wrecking was practiced by the people there and what part of wrecking held within their lives, within their shore work and all that. So a lot of work to do still. Well, it all sounds fascinating. Let's stay in touch because I would definitely be interested in talking with you about both of those projects as you develop them further.

Thank you again for joining us. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to get out of here. I'm going to get out of here. I'm going to get out of here.