Wrecking

Wrecking is the practice of taking valuables from a ship that has foundered or run aground close to shore, historically an unregulated activity of opportunity carried out by residents of coastal communities before increasing regulation transformed the underlying activity into what is now known as marine salvage. Though no longer economically significant, wrecking was as recently as the nineteenth century the economic mainstay of otherwise economically marginal coastal communities in some parts of the world. A persistent legendary trope holds that wreckers deliberately lured ships onto the coast using tricks such as false lights so that the vessels ran aground for easy plundering, a story told in many legends and works of fiction, though no clear historical evidence supports the claim that this deliberate luring actually took place.