A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks, from the 18th Century to the Present Day
June 13, 2005
Bathurst, who won a Somerset Maugham Award for The Lighthouse Stevensons
, offers a spellbinding tale of seafaring men, their ships and the ocean that cares for neither. With the British Isles as her focus, Bathurst covers the four points of the compass, delving into the particulars of each fabulously treacherous area with relish. To the east are the Goodwin Sands, shifting sandbars that rise out of the English Channel at low tide. To the west lies the Corrievreckan, the largest whirlpool in European waters, which nearly swallowed George Orwell in 1947. The Pentland Firth, with its strong, unpredictable currents, terrifies sailors in the north. And to the south, at Cornwall, ships collide with saw-toothed rocks, undersea ridges and each other with alarming regularity. For generations, folks on land have made their living salvaging what they can from the resulting mess. Bathurst probes the gray areas between rescuer, salvager and wrecker; taking advantage of murky regulation and lax enforcement, some coastal dwellers are all three. An air of sweet melancholy hangs over Bathurst's poignant account of ships, men and the circumstances that tear them apart. Illus. not seen by PW
; maps. Agent, Kathleen Anderson.
July 1, 2005
Bathurst explains that "wreckers" were people who watched for a ship in distress and stole everything on board of any value, sometimes also drowning the crew and burning the boats. The Cornish were such accomplished wreckers that they regarded it not as a crime but as a profession. Bathurst traveled to eight wrecking "hot spots" in Britain in researching the history of wrecking over the last 300 years, its heyday occurring in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when sea traffic was at its heaviest and captains relied on keen-eyed lookouts before the age of sophisticated technology. The sheer variety and range of natural hazards around the coastline make it seem astounding that anyone made safe landfall in Britain at all. During her three years of research, the author interviewed 200 people and read court proceedings, newspaper reports, travelers' journals, and customs correspondence, and the result is an exceptional chronicle of knavery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)