These posts make more sense when read in order.
Please click here for the first article in this series.
The twilight is sad and cloudy,
The wind blows wild and free,
And like the wings of sea-birds
Flash the white caps of the sea.
But in the fisherman’s cottage
There shines a ruddier light,
And a little face at the window
Peers out into the night.
Close, close it is pressed to the window,
As if those childish eyes
Were looking into the darkness
To see some form arise.
And a woman’s waving shadow
Is passing to and fro,
Now rising to the ceiling,
Now bowing and bending low.
What tale do the roaring ocean,
And the night-wind, bleak and wild,
As they beat at the crazy casement,
Tell to that little child?
And why do the roaring ocean,
And the night-wind, wild and bleak,
As they beat at the heart of the mother
Drive the color from her cheek?
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Twilight” in The Seaside and the Fireside
In the early 19th century the wrecking industry in the Florida Keys became extremely lucrative. Although called wrecking, this was actually what we would now call salvaging. It was not like the notorious wreckers who set up deceptive lights to lure ships onto the rocks so they could plunder whatever they could salvage. There are tales of this in Florida lore, but I know of no evidence that it actually happened there or anywhere else. The Florida wreckers didn’t have to lure ships to their doom and destruction. The Keys were treacherous enough.
As shipping increased, about one a week would run aground or hit a reef. The wreckers’ job was to try to refloat the ship and get it to safety, or to salvage what they could. If they saved the ship, or got it where it could be towed in for repairs, they received a salvage award. After 1822 when Key West became an official port of entry, the salvage awards were set by Key West’s Admiralty Court. If a vessel was lost, then whatever cargo could be salvaged was sold, with the wreckers receiving a percentage of the take. There were so many shipwrecks along the Keys that wrecking made Key West the richest town in Florida. In 1830 the entire population of Key West was just 517, including 66 slaves and 88 free Blacks. Twenty years later the population was five times that number.
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| Shipwreck. Claude-Joseph Vernet, 1772. |
The criminal activity of wrecking was also known as mooncussing; the idea being that using lights to lure ships onto rocks was most effective on moonless nights, so the mooncussers cursed those nights when the moonlight foiled their scheme. They were considered to be land-pirates who moved their lights around on horseback to cause shipwrecks, which they in turn looted, murdering any survivors.
There were rumors of mooncussers at Cape Cod, near Provincetown, Massachusetts, where, again, a ship wrecked almost every week. And, again, these wreckers appear just to have been salvagers or beachcombers, like in Key West. The rumors may have been gossip spread by the Puritans who considered the salvagers to be outcasts and reprobates. They were actually mostly fishermen, who lived in a community just to the south of Hatches Harbor called Helltown, which was known for its drinking, gambling, carousing, and smuggling.
On the other hand, it’s also reported that the community always ensured all survivors were rescued before commencing salvage operations. Still, one can imagine how the ship owners and merchants felt when a ship wrecked and its cargo, along with everything else of value was hauled off by salvagers. In one case in 1894, overnight in less than twelve hours, two-thirds of a ship had been taken away.
Henry Beston wrote how all this was viewed on the Cape, saying, “Cape Codders have often been humorously reproached for their attitude toward wrecks. On this coast, as on every other in the old isolated days, a wreck was treasure trove, a free gift of the sea; even today, the usable parts of a wreck are liable to melt away in a curious manner. There is no real looting; in fact, public opinion on the Cape is decidedly against such a practice, for it offends the local sense of decency.[...] When men are lost on the beach, the whole Cape takes it very much to heart, talks about it, mulls over it; when men are saved, there is no place where they are treated with greater hospitality and kindness.[...] Their first thought has always been of the shipwrecked men.”
In other places criminal wreckers were known as wrackers or bankers. Some people claim Nags Head on North Carolina’s Outer Banks got its name because wreckers would hang lanterns from the necks of mules or horses and walk them along the beach causing mariners to think the lights were from boats in a harbor. There are also folktales of them in the Caribbean, England, and Denmark, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that they actually existed.
Of course there have always been criminals around and it’s possible someone might think that luring ships onto rocks was a great idea, but it would be hard to keep something like that secret and anyone involved would probably have been hung with great fanfare.
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