On 29/1/07 12:14, in article ,
"Martin" wrote:

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

Didn't Admiral Cloudesley Shovel have his rings stolen from his fingers?

That sounds right. What a magnificent name!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.../ftwreck23.xml
"Misery and starvation in the area made for barbarity, and when Admiral Sir
Cloudesley Shovel was wrecked on the Scillies in 1707, a local woman killed
him
for the sake of his rings, then stripped the body of its rich clothes. Another
local West Country record describes a drowned woman whose ears were bitten off
for the sake of her earrings."

Violent times, to put it mildly!
--
Sacha
http://www.hillhousenursery.co.uk
South Devon
http://www.discoverdartmoor.co.uk/
(remove weeds from address)