Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2014 June 21

= June 21 =

Jamaica Inn
If a person deliberately causes a shipwreck with intent to plunder the ship, is that person considered a pirate, or is there another more specific term to denote such a person? 24.5.122.13 (talk) 02:56, 21 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Arrr, Beacon mentions the alleged (but never verified) possibility of "intentional shipwrecking" by (what else) shipwreckers. Clarityfiend (talk) 05:26, 21 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks! 24.5.122.13 (talk) 06:03, 21 June 2014 (UTC)


 * "Wreckers" (those engaged in "wrecking") are, as that article says, people who take goods that have washed up from wrecks, or who plunder wrecked ships. That's the same term used in historian Cathryn J. Pearce's book Cornish Wrecking, 1700-1860 : Reality and Popular Myth. She says that popular fiction stories about wreckers robbing and murdering the survivors of wrecks were far from the truth. One survey of the outcome of wrecks reported that in only 7% of wrecks were sailors personally robbed, and she calls incidence of violence against such sailors "exceptional".  Wreckers were, rather than some violent coastal mafia, ordinary folks (from a variety of social backgrounds, not all of them poor) harvesting an unexpected bounty at the coast (which was usually illegal, but a law that wasn't enforced very vigorously); sometimes all they wanted was some nice bits of wood.  It seems the popular stories about people inducing a wreck, as in Jamaica Inn, are a romantic nonsense. The "False lights" section of the Wikipedia article also suggests this didn't happen.  There doesn't seem to be a word for deliberate wreck inducers; outside fiction there doesn't seem to be the need for such a word. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 17:40, 21 June 2014 (UTC)


 * There is indeed such a word. See Barratry_(admiralty_law) 196.214.78.114 (talk) 09:17, 23 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Although according to our article, barratry is committed "by a master or crew of a vessel" rather than by the Jamaica Inn wreckers who lived ashore. Alansplodge (talk) 12:58, 23 June 2014 (UTC)


 * The claim that false lights were never used to cause shipwrecks is odd, given that George II found it necessary to enact a death penalty for that very offense: "Deliberate Wrecking: Putting Out False Lights" was punishable by death, per Wrecking Offenses, 26 George II (1753) per that same book about Cornish wreckers Was George II a credulous and silly worrier, led astray by folk tales of something implausible that never happened? Is that why the merchants demanded the new and more severe laws? Seems highly doubtful. Canada in 1841 had a similar law against this nonexistent and never-ever done naughtiness: . The US sometime before 1838 had a similar law against placing false lights to cause a shipwreck: Very puzzling why multiple countries passed a law against a nonexistent problem.  Here is an 1823 prosecution for shipwrecking by false light in the US], but he was acquitted. An 1874 article in Harper's said that some in the Bahamas were said to have used false lights to wreck ships.  reports a history of false lights being used in New Jersey to wreck ships. The captain of the Julia Dean, wrecked on Lake Michigan in 1855, said that he was lured onto the reef by a false light intentionally set out.   discusses the "mooncussers" of Cornwall and elsewhere, who prayed for shipwrecks and cursed moonlit nights when mariners could see clearly the coast, and could not be fooled by swaying lights simulating ships at anchor.  A false light might also deceive a mariner into thinking it marked a point whereafter he should turn toward shore to enter a safe passage. The claim that a false light would never cause a shipwreck because sailors avoid the shore makes little sense.  Edison (talk) 15:39, 24 June 2014 (UTC)


 * In any case, regardless of whether it's possible to cause a shipwreck by placing a false light, it's clearly possible to cause a shipwreck by deliberately extinguishing or obscuring a legitimate navigational beacon, as was done in the movie. 24.5.122.13 (talk) 23:42, 24 June 2014 (UTC)