All Cornishmen at one time
were supposed to be 'wreckers', or to take advantage
of the many shipwrecks which occurred of Cornwall's
coast. There used to be the proverb "'Tis a
bad wind that blows no good to Cornwall."
Apparently, the dwellers of St. Germoe and St. Breage
had a particular reputation along these lines from
the following:
God keep us from rocks and
shelving sands
and save us from Breage and Germoe men's hands.
There is also a
probably apocryphal anecdote about a Cornish
clergyman who was delivering the Sunday sermon when
someone opened the church doors and shouted, "A
wreck! A wreck!". The clergyman leaped from his
pulpit and barred the door,begging the congregation
to give him time to remove his gown so that he might
get a fair start.
The authors of
Cornish Shipwrecks quote a variation of the above:
From Wicked Rocks and Shelving
Sands,
From Breague and Germoe men's hands,
Dear Lord deliver Us.
A letter written in
1710 described the tinners of Germoe as "mad
people, without the fear of God or the world." A
hundred years later they would still "cut a
large trading vessel to pieces on one tide...strip
half-dead men of their clothing."
************ men on
the beach began to eye the cargo which was being
off loaded onto the beach. A large crowd began to mill
about threateningly and the Lloyd's of London agent
from Penzance and his men began to get hemmed in
slowly. The situation began to look ugly until a a
local man who was also a colonel in the yeomanry
called out his men and put a cordon across the beach
to keep the crowd at bay.
Meanwhile, the gale
sent another vessel, the Russian Flora,
bound for the Baltic with wine, onto the shore at
Praa Sands. She struck at high water, so she washed
onto the beach and accessible at ebb tide. The
tinners, now joined by many others who had been
thwarted at Marazion, swarmed all over the Flora.
They stole everything, even the clothing from the
backs of the crew. The yeoman colonel had his hands
full at Marazion and by the time he reached Pra Sands
it was too late. The Flora was
in pieces with nothing left, but even so they had
difficulty in getting the now drunken mob away from
the wreck and rescuing the near naked and exhausted
Russian crew. On 4 January 1817 the London brig
Resolution, bound home with wine and oranges, was
driven on the beach at Porthleven, to the east of the
"Fishmonger's Arms" inn. The local tinners,
fishermen, and most of the population from Porthleven
to Prussia Cove pounced on the cargo of wine and
within an hour a regular orgy was in full swing
around the stranded brig. A custom man galloped off
to Falmouth with the news and returned with a band of
fifteen men
***************
were banned from
working underground in the mines and then only after
unspeakable abuse had been published.
For these people to
see luxuries beyond their imagining washed ashore
lying there for the taking, is it surprising that
they would take them? It was a small from salvaging
to wrecking, then to smuggling.
Few, at that time,
could see the acts of the wreckers as a symptom of a
deep social and economic problem plaguing the poor
and desperate of this region. Today, we might think
that these folk could see little alternative to their
bleak, colorless lives than taking the occasional
bounty washed ashore. Anger and frustration, normally
bottled up, exploded under the loosening effects of
alcohol if the cargo was wine, spirits, or ale.
Customs officers were seen by the locals as uncaring
for their plight and concerned only with filling the
crown's coffers with additional revenue, of which the
crown already had in ample amounts.
