Any coastal community sees storms deliver shipwrecks to its shores, and if times are hard no community lets those deliveries go to waste. 

Okay, even when times aren’t hard. As far as I can figure out, humans are wired to accept a free lunch. Or a free shipping container of slightly salted whatever. 

Before we go on, though, I need to build a wall between two words: Wreckers are people who scavenge what they can from wrecked ships or from the cargo that floats ashore. Wrecking is an activity that probably never happened. The Cornish are said (although not by the Cornish themselves, in my experience) to have used lights to lure ships ashore where they’d wreck. There’s not only no evidence that anyone actually did that, it’s questionable that it would even work. But it still means I can’t use the word wrecking here, since I’m talking about what did actually happen.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the right to wreck–wreck here meaning to scavenge a wrecked ship. And lets watch me jump through linguistic hoops to avoid the word wrecking.

 

The right of wreck

If Wikipedia’s right on this (it has a good overall record even if it’s subject to the occasional fit of madness), the right of wreck, or jus naufragii if we’re going to pretend we know Latin, is a medieval European custom rather than an actual law. 

It was based on the idea that if a ship wrecked it was because god got mad at the crew for–well, something, clearly, so he drove their ship ashore. That made the ship, its contents, and in the early days its crew the property of the finders. Because god had set it all up that way.

Gradually that business about enslaving the crew dropped away, but claiming whatever was left of the ship and its contents? That continued powerfully enough for the Church to condemn it from the 12th century into the 16th.

If you want to know what’s actually happening in a time and place, look at what gets condemned or outlawed multiple times. It’s not foolproof–centuries of hysteria over witchcraft really doesn’t prove the existence of witches–but it’s still a good place to start.

Starting in Norman times, the English crown owned the land–the whole damn land–and that’s relevant because ships tend to wreck where the sea meets the land. The king could and did hand chunks of land to his followers, but it was still his and if one of them pissed him off too badly he could take it back. We could find a parallel there to god getting mad and wrecking a ship because, never mind human ownership, it’s his to wreck, but it won’t stand up to rough handling so let’s not push it too far.

So the king owned the country, even the parts other people owned. Try not to think about it too hard. Just nod your head and agree that of course he got to eat his cake and discover that it was still there, on the plate. He was the king, after all.

What matters for us is that he also owned whatever washed ashore, and he could and did assign it to others, just like he owned land and assigned it to others. 

 

The right to complicate the situation

Edward I (1239 –1307; you’re welcome) introduced a law stating that”where a man, a dog, or a cat escape quick [in other words, alive] out the ship,” the ship wouldn’t be considered a wreck, and neither would its contents. Its owners had a year to claim their property–minus fees, rewards, and droits.

What’s a droit? It seems to involve money, law, and ownership. Beyond that, it’s a rabbit hole. 

The new law kicked off all sorts of arguments and lawsuits about what actually happened in this, that, or the other shipwreck. Did everybody die? Was the cat alive and curled up at someone’s fireside? Was this black cat at fireside the black cat who used to be the ship’s black cat? In other words, was the ship a “true wreck” or was it not?

The abstract of an academic paper that I can’t get full access to (sorry) says, “Different views coexisted about the legality and propriety of shoreline activities, whether salvagers worked with or against established authority, whether wrecking constituted a service, a custom, or a crime, and whether common lawyers or the civil lawyers of the Admiralty had jurisdiction.”

In other words, the law complicated things. And you might want to notice that the paper’s using the word wrecking there in exactly the way I’m not, but I’m pretty sure they lost points for it and I haven’t. 

 

But let’s stop following the story chronologically . . .

. . . because I’m having trouble unscrambling this egg. The point I want to get to is that somewhere along the line the crown gave seaside landowners the right to salvage whatever god (in his fury) had smashed onto their bit of the king’s shoreline, and this turned out not to be simple either, because the king (in his wisdom) had given the right to the owners of both manors and of hundreds.

Hundreds? The hundred was a political unit smaller than a county, and a manor was a large estate of no specified size but smaller than a hundred (at least usually; I can’t guarantee that it always was) and larger than the egg I can’t unscramble. So a hundred could contain multiple estates. 

In other words, the king just granted the same right to overlapping landowners. This is not a recipe for harmonious living. Cue an assortment of lawsuits, and if you’re interested in them follow the link just above, because we’re headed off in another direction:

If a tenant found a wreck, they were expected to let the lord know, in return for which they’d get half the goods and the lord would get the other half. That amount would’ve ranged from the piddling to the spectacular, but ordinary people lived close to the edge and no find was too piddling to pass up.

What happened if the tenant didn’t notify the lord? In a case in Cornwall, two tenants carried off 54 gallons of wine, were caught, and were fined, although the source I’m relying on doesn’t say how much. More than the wine was worth, I’m sure. 

What we can’t know is how often tenants weren’t caught, because not getting caught leaves no record.

 

Then the laws got tougher

In 1714, anyone who boarded a wreck without permission or got in the way of the crew salvaging their cargo faced fines and imprisonment. After 1753, they faced the death penalty.

If you want to blame someone for that, I’m told you can blame the philosopher John Locke, who argued for the sacredness of property. The idea caught on among (no surprise here) people who had property, and suddenly it seemed perfectly sensible to say that the purpose of government was to protect and preserve property. Punishments for crimes against property became harsher, usually following some local event that the great and the good could whip themselves into a state of outrage over. Soon a person could face the death penalty for anything from picking pockets to poaching to stealing livestock. 

And here’s a spot where I have to stand on my head to avoid using the word wrecking: scavenging from a wreck went on the list. 

If you’re not in a mood to blame John Locke for that, you can blame the East India Company, which had plenty of property to consider sacred and had lost some expensive cargoes off Cornwall and the Scilly Isles. Along with a few other companies who had a lot to gain, it lobbied to change what was still essentially a medieval law on wrecks. 

 

The aftermath of one wreck

In 1767 a French ship, L’Adaldise, wrecked off Cornwall, not far from where I live. To be clear, I wasn’t there. I’m not that damn old. I not only hadn’t been born yet, neither had my grandparents. I only come into the story because I know the area. 

A hundred people rushed to the shore, according to the account. At the time, the nearest village would’ve been very small indeed and (if AI can be believed, and it sometimes can) the whole parish (4,000 acres) had a population of 700. I’m guessing it would’ve taken a while to collect 100 people. But Cornwall was a poor county, and a wreck washing ashore could well have meant the difference between eating and not eating.

However many gathered, a lot of people rushed to the shore. Some were salvaging for the lord of the manor and some for themselves, or so the article I’m relying on says. Some had axes and chopped into the hold to get at the cargo, but they also carried off masts, anchors, cables, ropes, and anything else that could be put to use. 

Then everyone went home, including an elderly farmer, William Pearse, who for reasons that aren’t clear to me was the only person arrested (at home) and charged with wrecking. Under the new law, he faced the death penalty. He was held in Launceston jail, which the British in their inexplicable wisdom spell gaol. Eight years later, a reformer described the jail this way:

“The Prison is a room or passage twenty three feet and a half by seven and a half, with only one window two feet by one and a half;—and three Dungeons or Cages on the side opposite the window; these are about six and half feet deep…They are all very offensive. No chimney: no drains: no water: damp earth floors: no Infirmary . . . The yard is not secure; and Prisoners seldom permitted to go out to it. Indeed the whole prison is out of repair. . . . I once found the Prisoners chained two or three together. Their provision is put down to them through a hole in the floor of the room above. . . . And those who serve them there, often catch the fatal fever . . . a few years before, many Prisoners had died from it.”

Pearse was tried in Bodmin, and if he had any witnesses to defend him they would’ve had to make a rough trip across the moor, but no records of the trial exist so we can’t know. I can’t help wondering, though, how anyone could’ve appeared as a witness in his defense without having to admit that they’d been a participant. 

What we do know is that Pearse was convicted and sentenced to death, and so were six others that week, all for theft of one sort or another–except, possibly, for the one person convicted of house-breaking. 

 

Appeal

Death sentences were often handed out and then commuted them to transportation by the judge. (At the time, transportation was to the American colonies.) Four death sentences from that week were commuted, but not Pearse’s, and the elite of Launceston rallied behind him, campaigning for a royal pardon. 

Why did the local gentry rally behind a poor man? Possibly because they had a lot to gain from wreckers and a lot to lose if the crackdown held. Pearse was being used as a test case.

Campaigning for a pardon involved lawyers, and lawyers involved money, something Pearse didn’t have. It’s not clear who footed the bill, but the local gentry sound like a fair guess. 

Whoever was paying, Pearse now had a high-powered legal team, and local politicians were appealing for a pardon, arguing variously that he hadn’t taken much (“an inconsiderable quantity of rope” and a bag of cotton), that he wasn’t guilty, that the witnesses against him had lied, and that local people were deeply concerned about the case. Pearse’s age could also have been expected to argue for a pardon, and in any case the statute called for the death penalty only if violence was involved. 

Meanwhile, Pearse sat in that small, foul jail in Launceston.

Following standard procedure, the matter was referred back to the judge who’d condemned him (the logic was that he knew the case best), and the judge wrote, “‘As there were many common people in Court, I took the opportunity of inveighing very warmly against so savage a Crime, and of declaring publickly that no Importunities whatsoever should induce me to reprieve the Criminal.”

Pearse did not get his pardon.

It’s not irrelevant that the judge was also a legal representative for the East India Company. Remember them? The good folks who lobbied for the harsher law?

Pearse was the first person hanged as a wrecker under the new statute.

 

Current law

That doesn’t really take us to the present day, but let’s hit fast forward. Under the Merchant Shipping Act of 1995, you have to report a wreck or any materials from a wreck to none other than the Receiver of Wreck. That could get you a salvage award, which will vary depending on the value of the wreck and what you had to do to rescue it. What you can’t do anymore is call in the entire village and cart everything away like ants carrying an entire picnic home to the nest.