Abstract
This book is an authoritative, archivally rich social and economic history of shipwrecks and salvage in early modern Britain, from the Tudor period to the eighteenth century. It is divided into 12 well-paced chapters, which cover definitions of and jurisdictions over shipwrecking and salvage, as well as the processes and practices of the activity both regionally and chronologically. David Cressy also provides a summative introduction that usefully frames the study against the work of previous historians in the field in order to mark out his contribution. For the most part, the study is organized by time and space, as well as by theme, and this provides the book with an underpinning rationale that allows for both coherence and range.
Perhaps Cressy's biggest claim is that the traditional view of poor coastal dwellers, or ‘barbarous country people’ (10), taking unmerciful, violent and illegal advantage of salvage opportunities that break down the social order needs reassessing. Here, Cressy follows in the wake of Cathryn Pearce's 2010 study, Cornish Wrecking 1700–1860, which focuses on just one county in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to demonstrate in Shipwrecks and the Bounty of the Sea that ‘salvage involved cooperation between authorities and coastal inhabitants’ (72) in both an earlier historical period and across the coastal regions of maritime Britain. 1 By taking careful account of the semantics of wrecking, Cressy convincingly shows how exaggerated, emotionally charged language was used to heighten complaints of salvagers’ behaviour by wreck victims, shipowners and merchants to rhetorically manipulate courts and commissions of inquiry to support their claims for restitution. The on-the-seashore reality was more nuanced. Cressy details time after time, from Cornwall to Yorkshire and the North, examples of the cooperation of shoremen and salvagers with government officials, lords of manors and droit holders to deal with wreck victims as well as broken ships and cargoes. This is not to say that lawless looting or violence was unknown, of course, but the social processes of wreck recovery were far more likely to engage communities cooperatively, sometimes competitively, to harvest as effectively as possible the sea's bounty.
A case in point is the Dutch ship the Golden Grape, a 500-ton cargo carrier, which wrecked in 1641 on Chesil Beach in Dorset en route from Spain to Le Havre with cargo valued at £10,000, carrying in descending amounts Spanish raisins, olive oil, sherry, wine, wool and lemons. A whole chapter, ‘The Bounty of the Golden Grape’, is devoted to this wreck because of the weight of the surviving testimony – from no less than 343 witnesses who gave evidence at the subsequent commission of inquiry and restitution − about what happened and who was involved. It is a splendid account, perhaps the high-water mark of the book, providing a detailed snapshot of Dorset coastal society, the processes of wrecking and salvage, and the ‘tactical vagueness’ (174) deployed by deponents when questioned later by the Admiralty commissioners about events and what happened to the cargo. Cressy recounts how only 535 of the 1,253 barrels of raisins, and 172 of the 400 jars of olive oil, were accounted for by the salvagers, and from this calculates the likely value of the reward to be paid to them for the return of goods to their lawful owners, as well as the profit likely to have been gained from the dispersal of the missing cargo by the salvagers. Both the wealth of detail about wreck economics, showing how much it might bind together and enrich communities, and the individual micro-histories and stories of the individuals involved make this a particularly powerful and important chapter.
Another chapter of particular interest – to this reader at least – is on ‘Deep Recovery’. The methods employed to retrieve wreckage from offshore underwater sites – from free diving to various underwater ‘engines’ – are briefly recounted in all their resourcefulness and ingenuity. This chapter both summarizes technological aspects of offshore recovery and gives a flavour of the secretive, highly speculative and commercialized world of the salvors of the day and the deals they struck with wreck owners and other stakeholders in the business of treasure-hunting. More detail on the offshore material, to balance the attention given to sea-to-shore salvage activities, would have been welcome. The book provides something of a whistlestop tour through key early modern undersea explorers – Jacob Johnson/Janson, Edward Bendall, Robert Willis, William Harrington, William Phips, Philip Ford and Thomas Neale, amongst others – and fuller information could have provided fascinating insight about their individual exploits and stories.
This is an enjoyable book to read, written in a lively, engaging manner – with the Golden Grape wreck, we deal with ‘Raisins Galore’ rather than Whisky Galore, for instance. It also includes a useful appendix, ‘Two Centuries of Shipwreck’, which provides a chronological list of English and Welsh shipwrecks, and also logs the type of source that provided the information (e.g. state papers), although ships’ tonnage is only intermittently recorded in the list. The inclusion of 10 well-chosen black-and-white illustrations adds to the book's attractiveness, although some – particularly the maps, for instance of ‘The Essex Sands’ from 1588 (138) − are so small in size that their valuable detail is difficult to see.
One of the reasons for my wanting to review this book was to benefit from its discussion of the Gloucester shipwreck of 1682, lost en route to Scotland whilst carrying James, Duke of York and heir presumptive. Of course, I appreciate that the announcement of the wreck's discovery in June 2022 and the publication of new research about it post-dates the writing of this book, which was published in September 2022. Nevertheless, its treatment is a little disappointing. The index reveals three references (27, 50–2, 177), although actually note 45 on page 226 mentions that the diver, Harrington, was employed to search for the Duke's lost silver plate (the book's notes have not been indexed). In his discussion of the wreck, Cressy repeats hostile Whig claims that James saved his pet dog rather than people (which are contradicted in many accounts) and, more seriously, appears to understand James Dick, Lord Provost of Edinburgh's comments about the large-scale survival of ‘Englishmen of Respect’ (52) to mean that ‘Providence made sure that officers and aristocrats of the naval vessel Gloucester survived its sinking in 1682, the boats not accommodating the common seamen’ (177). This statement is misleading – aristocrats, especially from Scotland, and ship's officers did drown in numbers. Robert Ker (Earl of Roxburgh), Donogh O’Brian (Lord Ibracken), John Hope (Laird of Hoptoun), Sir Joseph Douglas and many others did not find berths in the rescue boats. James Hyde, second lieutenant on the Gloucester, also drowned, for instance – he was the youngest brother of the Duke's first wife, Anne Hyde, as well as of Henry Hyde (Earl of Clarendon) and Laurence Hyde (First Lord of the Treasury). The Gloucester sank quickly – it was under water in less than an hour after hitting sandbanks – so few boats had time to launch, and many nobles and officers (including the captain, Sir John Berry), as well as the crew, ended up in the water. P. M. Cowburn's two-part article ‘Christopher Gunman and the Wreck of the Gloucester’ is not listed in Cressy's bibliography, and contains much useful archival research on the Gloucester shipwreck and aftermath. 2
Notwithstanding these criticisms, Shipwrecks and the Bounty of the Sea is a book of learning and erudition, and it succeeds ably in highlighting the scale of shipwrecks and salvage and their importance to the very fabric of early modern Britain. It is recommended to all those interested in understanding Britain's history as an island nation at a period when maritime trade and travel were rapidly expanding.