“A good wreck,” especially if there were no survivors left to tell the tale, or to claim anything, would keep the seaboard of half a county in luxury of sorts for quite a considerable time, and as survivors were such detrimentals, they were, in those “good old times,” very quickly made not to survive. It was a rude, but practical application of that Socialistic doctrine of collectivism, of which we hear so much nowadays, “the greatest good to the greatest number.” The story of the _Chanteloupe_ is a dark and repellent instance of those practices. It narrates how a lady named Burke, familiar with the evil reputation of these people, and fearful of being murdered, put on all her jewellery when the ship struck, and was flung ashore glittering with precious stones. If she had thought to purchase life with that display, she made the most fatal of errors, for the sight only served to arouse the worst passions of those beach-combers, who slaughtered the unfortunate woman for the sake of her rings and other trinkets. When enquiries were set afoot, her body was discovered in the sands, bloodstained, with fingers cut off and ears mutilated; but it does not appear that the guilt was brought home to any one. The fisherfolk, doubtless, all hung together, lest they should hang separately. Two years earlier a local Quaker, one Henry Hingeston, had published a pamphlet denouncing the wrecking propensities of this coast: “I have been deeply affected,” said he, “to see and feel how sweet the report of a _shipwreck_ is to the inhabitants of this country, as well professors as prophane, and what running there is on such occasions, all other business thrown aside, and away to wreck. … I am verily persuaded that it hath been more sweet to hear that all the men are drowned, and so a ‘proper wreck,’ than that any are saved, and by that means hinder their more public appearance on that stage for getting money. O! the cruelty that hath been acted by many. My heart hath been often heavy to consider it, insomuch that I think multitudes of heathen are nothing near so bad. Remember the broadcloth slupe, stranded in Bigbury Bay, richly laden. O! for shame, for shame, I am really vext that ever my countrymen should be guilty of such devilish actions.” But the estimable Hingeston might just as effectively have preached to the gulls and the cormorants on the iniquity of catching fish, as to have denounced wrecking. ’Twas in the blood, and that is all there is to it. These old tales of long-vanished days seem very remote and indistinct, but they came very near and vivid when a few years ago some children digging in the sand of the Ham, turned up a skull, pronounced to be that of a negro. It was considered, together with heaps of bones afterwards discovered, to be a relic of the tragedy of the _Chanteloupe_.