Wrecking is the practice of taking valuables from a shipwreck which has foundered or run aground close to shore. Often an unregulated activity of opportunity in coastal communities, wrecking has been subjected to increasing regulation and evolved into what is now known as marine salvage. Wrecking is no longer economically significant. However, as recently as the 19th century in some parts of the world, it was the mainstay of otherwise economically marginal coastal communities. A traditional legendary trope is that of wreckers deliberately decoying ships on to coasts using tricks, especially false lights, so that they run ashore for easy plundering. While this has been depicted in many stories and legends, there is no clear evidence that this has ever happened.
Luring ships to wreck with false lights
There are legends that some ships were deliberately lured into danger by a display of false lights. John Viele, retired U.S. Navy officer and author of a history of wrecking in the Florida Keys, states that such tricks simply would not work. He points out that mariners interpret a light as indicating land, and so avoid them if they cannot identify them. Moreover, oil lanterns cannot be seen very far over water at night, unless they are large, fitted with mirrors or lenses, and mounted at a great height (i.e., in a lighthouse). In hundreds of admiralty court cases heard in Key West, Florida, no captain of a wrecked ship ever charged that he had been led astray by a false light. A Bahamian wrecker, when asked if he and his crewmates made beacons on shore or showed their lights to warn ships away from the land at night, is reported to have said, "No, no [laughing]; we always put them out for a better chance by night". Legend maintains that the town of Nags Head, North Carolina takes its name from wreckers or "bankers" deploying false lights. The toponymic legend states that in the 18th century, wreckers would hang lanterns from the necks of mules (colloquially called "nags" at the time) and walk the animals very slowly up and down the beach. The alleged intent was to fool mariners into believing that the slow-moving lights were ships drifting at rest or at anchor, prompting the ships to change course and subsequently run aground. In 1860, a writer for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine corroborated the story of the "bankers" who gave Nags Head its name.
Wrecking in the Americas
Spanish America As soon as the Spanish began sending home the treasures they found in the New World, some of the treasure was lost in shipwrecks. By the 1540s Indians along the coast of Florida, where many of the Spanish treasure ships wrecked, were diving on the wrecks and recovering significant amounts of gold and silver. By that time the Spanish had been using first Indians (the Lucayans from the Bahamas were particularly prized for the task) and then Africans to dive for pearls around the islands near present-day Venezuela. The Spanish began using these divers to recover treasure from shipwrecks. The Spanish kept salvage ships with crews of African divers on-call in major ports around the Caribbean, ready to sail as soon as word of a wreck was received. In the course of the 16th through the 18th centuries the Spanish recovered more than 100,000,000 pesos worth of treasure by such means. Spanish salvage efforts had varying success. Although the Spanish carried out salvage operations on the wrecks of the 1715 Treasure Fleet for four years, they recovered less than half of the treasure recorded as sent on the fleet. On the other hand, the Spanish recovered more treasure from the 1733 treasure fleet than had been officially registered on it.
Bermuda and Jamaica In the 16th and 17th centuries, Spanish ships returning to Spain from the Caribbean rode the Gulf Stream to Cape Canaveral and then aimed for Bermuda. Raising Bermuda was essential to Spanish ships for verifying their position before setting course for the Azores. As a result, some Spanish ships wrecked on Bermuda. After the English settled on Bermuda in the early 17th century, they quickly took up "wracking" on Bermuda, and then extended their search for wrecks to all of the Caribbean. Later in the 17th century the center for English "wracking" in the Caribbean shifted to Port Royal in Jamaica. William Phips went there to recruit the divers he used to salvage treasure from a Spanish wreck on the north shore of Hispaniola, where he recovered the largest amount of treasure from a single wreck before the 20th century.
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