Download The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas, False Lights and Plundered Ships AudioBook Free

In the best-selling author of The Lightouse Stevensons, a gripping background of the theatre and danger of wrecking since the 18th-century - and the often grisly ingenuity of United kingdom wreckers, scavengers of the sea. An excellent wreck has always represented sport, pleasure, treasure and, in many cases, the difference between living well and simply getting by. The Cornish were said to be so ferocious that notices of shipwrecks were given out during morning hours service by the minister whilst the congregation put in their time concocting sophisticated theological justifications for drowning the survivors. Treeless islanders relied on the harvest of storms to provide themselves with rafters, motorboat hulls, fence posts and floors. In other places false equipment and lighting were setup with grisly ingenuity across the shoreline to lure boats to destruction. With romance, insight and dry wit, Bella Bathurst traces the annals of wrecking, looting and salvaging in the United kingdom Isles since the 18th hundred years and leading up to the present day. 'For a completely laden general cargo to perform to ground in an accessible position is more or less like having Selfridges crash-land in your yard,' she writes. 'A Selfridges with the costs removed.' Far from being truly a black-and-white criminal offense, wrecking is often seen as opaque by its experts - the divisions between fraud and restoration are small. No successful legal prosecution has have you been helped bring; the RNLI was founded by wreckers - even today lifeboat crews keep up with the right to claim salvage; and since the sinking of the Cita in 1997, the inhabitants of the Scilly Isles have a startling propensity to sports Ben Sherman t shirts. In settings ranging from the eerily perambulatory Goodwin Sands to the wreck-strewn waters from the shoreline of Durham, these murky tales of resourcefulness and quick-witted opportunism open a beguiling vista of life at the tough edges of the land and legality.

Category: Classics