We wrecked Another Ship Last Night
“We wrecked another ship last night.
We lured her onto the rocks and went down to the sandy cove to recover our ‘salvage’…. Three sailors still clung to life.
We finished them !
The vessel was laden with rum, sugar and spices…. A member of our community thought that there must be gold… if there was, it’s now at the bottom.
I am heading over the moors to Tavistock with three kegs of rum….. the weather is awful but the gains are great. My husband had to fight two other villagers to lay claim to these barrels…. He’s a big man and …. Well, he won !
The monks in the abbey will pay a pretty penny for this liquid so long as I get there before any of the other villagers.
William our ‘light man’ will get his reward from this but the rest of our coin will be hidden behind the barn, in the wall….. for safe keeping. I dare say, that by sun up, villages all over Devon will be celebrating this ‘wreck’.”
For centuries, coastal communities along the coast of North Devon and Cornwall, benefitted from the right to ‘salvage’.
If a ship was wrecked, local people could claim the goods washed up on the beaches as ‘salvage’… so long as no sailor from the ship survived.