Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 June 1893 — WRECKING STILL PRACTICED. [ARTICLE]

WRECKING STILL PRACTICED.

People in the Southwest of England Unable to See Any Crime in It. It is not long since a large ship went ashore at Lizard and finally ground herself to pieces on the rocks. The closest watch was kept by the agents and preventive men, but the next spring a perfect epidemic of musical Instruments broke out in every village in the district, proving audibly enough that the light-fingered wreckers had been at their tricks all the time. How it is done the rambler in the west country, who can use his eyes and ears, will soon discover; will agree, too, with the remark made the other day in a western village, that people who talked of wrecking as a thing of the past knew very little about it. “You see, sir,” said the weatherbeaten fisherman to a London News reporter, “a great deal drifts out of a wreck, and although there are salvage men always on the watch, there’s many a cask and bale that’s picked up by our boats. One man with a long pair of tongs and another with a water telescope can make a good thing of it between them. There was an Italian steamer, now, that went ashore at Mullion. She was full of fruit and wine, and all sorts of things enough for everybody. There were great cases of champagne lying about, and the word went round among our men that it was ‘real’ pain with no ‘sham’ to it, for when we did knock the tops of the bottles off all the wine went out at one spurt and we couldn’t get a drop. But at last we got the corkscrew and then we were happy. Well, I had a cask of sherry wine out of her,” he went on, “and I got it safe in by the back way, and you see I’ve a coastguardsman living on each side of me. But, law bless you, sir, they be just the same as we. Oh, yes, sir; everything is supposed to be given up, but everything isn’t, not by a good way. And when we risk our lives to save the cargo, who has a better right to a share of it than we?” He was near the Mosel, he said, when she ran full speed upon the rocks, and the sound of it was like a thousand tons of cliff falling into the sea, and such shrieks as never were heard. Might he have stopped her? Well, perhaps he might. But a mate of his who put out at the risk of his life and warned a big liner that, she was too close to shore—she backed off and was saved —never got so much as a word of thanks, let alone any reward, for saving her. “Another man.” he went on, “warned a steamer from his boat, and, as I am a living man, they tried to swamp him for fear the captain would be blamed for his bad sailing.”