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Chris Hogg · 29-01-2007, 08:01 AM posted to uk.rec.gardening

On Sun, 28 Jan 2007 23:53:08 +0000, Sacha
wrote:

On 28/1/07 22:02, in article ,
"Chris Hogg" wrote:

On Sun, 28 Jan 2007 12:35:45 +0000, Sacha
wrote:

On 28/1/07 11:32, in article , "Janet Tweedy"
wrote:

In article , "Keith (Dorset)"
writes

Wrecking is a time-old tradition whereby coastal dwellers have always
supplemented their often meagre earnings by salvaging items of value from
the shoreline at the time of a wreck.

Here in Dorset, often the whole community would venture out, often in
appalling weather to grab whatever was there for the taking.

Pardon me for my ignorance but I always thought that wreckers were the
murderous little swine who lured ships onto rocks thereby destroying
them and murdering the sailors on board.
It's one thing to salvage stuff from a beach another to deliberately
kill sailors!
Not that I'm condoning the looters but surely they aren't 'wreckers'?

janet

No, they're not wreckers. Your definition is the correct one. Sometimes,
if passengers and crew reached the shore in safety, the wreckers would kill
them to stop them either telling the tale of what happened, or to steal the
jewellery they were wearing.

Er...you have documentary evidence to support this?

Do you have some to support your denial?

You snipped the support! Did you not read it? I even gave you the
references.

Just the other day I read of the
captain of a ship whose finger was hacked off so that the emerald it bore
could be stolen.

That I can believe, although it is also the stuff of penny-dreadfuls!
But hacking off a finger is not the same as murdering the survivors.

Are you telling us there were no wreckers in Devon and
Cornwall?

Plenty, but not those who lured ships onto rocks.

snip
Perhaps things were different in the Channel Isles.

What? With the Casquets, the Minquiers and the Ecrehous? No point in
bothering, was there?

The same argument applies to Cornwall, especially around the Isles of
Scilly, the north Cornish coast, the east coast of Mounts Bay and
around the Lizard, which were notoriously dangerous coasts for sailors
with few ports of safety in bad weather.

--
Chris

E-mail: christopher[dot]hogg[at]virgin[dot]net