Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures, Maps and Tables
- Dedication
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: A Reputation for Wrecking
- 1 Cornwall and the Sea
- 2 ‘Dead Wrecks’ and the Foundation of Wreck Law
- 3 Wrecking and Criminality
- 4 The Cornish Wrecker
- 5 Wrecking and Popular Morality
- 6 Wrecking and Enforcement of the Law
- 7 Lords of the Manor and their Right of Wreck
- 8 Wrecking and Centralised Authority
- 9 The Wrecker, the Press, and the Pulpit
- Conclusion: Myths and Reputations Reconsidered
- Appendices
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Wrecking and Popular Morality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures, Maps and Tables
- Dedication
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: A Reputation for Wrecking
- 1 Cornwall and the Sea
- 2 ‘Dead Wrecks’ and the Foundation of Wreck Law
- 3 Wrecking and Criminality
- 4 The Cornish Wrecker
- 5 Wrecking and Popular Morality
- 6 Wrecking and Enforcement of the Law
- 7 Lords of the Manor and their Right of Wreck
- 8 Wrecking and Centralised Authority
- 9 The Wrecker, the Press, and the Pulpit
- Conclusion: Myths and Reputations Reconsidered
- Appendices
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
the grim hell-hounds prowling round the shore
While serving as second mate aboard the Britannia, William Falconer was shipwrecked off Cape Colona in the Levant. He returned home to write and publish his most famous poem, The Shipwreck, in 1762. While ostensibly reflecting his experiences, he used his pen in his third version to castigate and shame those who populated England's shore. Northumbria, he opined was:
Where the grim hell-hounds, prowling round the shore,
With foul intent the stranded bark explore:
Deaf to the voice of woe, her decks they board,
While tardy justice slumbers o'er her sword.
Although Falconer singled out Northumbria, and other writers have targeted regions such as the Dorset coast, the reputation of the ‘grim hell-hounds’ rests most squarely on Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. Indeed, Falconer is preceded in using such rhetoric by Daniel Defoe, who described the Scillonians in 1724 as
a fierce and ravenous people … they are so greedy, and eager for the prey, that they are charged with strange, bloody, and cruel dealings, even sometimes with one another, but especially with the poor distress'd seamen when they come ashore by the force of a tempest, and seek help for their lives, and where they find the rocks themselves not more merciless than the people who range about them for their prey.
Although many fictional wrecking narratives utilise the motif of the deliberate wrecker preying on shipping by using false lights, the work of Falconer and Defoe represents what has become an associated literary motif: that of crowds of wreckers swarming upon shipwrecks and their victims. Between the existence of literary narratives and the use of similar hyperbole and motifs by the press, an entrenched cultural construct of the wrecker has been developed whereby the wrecker is portrayed as immoral and the epitome of evil.
It is this stereotype which has grabbed the public imagination, and thus is more widespread than the archetype of the wrecker protecting his customary rights. This malevolent figure is not romanticised like that of the smuggler or the highwayman; rather he must always be overcome. But to what extent is Falconer's vision of ‘a bloodhound train, by rapine's lust impell'd’ an accurate depiction?
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- Chapter
- Information
- Cornish Wrecking, 1700–1860Reality and Popular Myth, pp. 104 - 122Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2010