In general shipwrecks are disastrous events, but if they occur on our long and picturesque coastline, or in our wide estuaries, or are left to rot on the banks of our verdant rivers, then in the public’s eye they acquire an air of romance.

These wrecks were reported in the papers of the times and are a mere fraction of all those lost at sea. This was highlighted in the 1860 Journal of the National Lifeboat Institution which stated that as the road system was primitive and the railways in their infancy, the majority of world-wide and British commerce was Carried by sea. But the general public failed to realise that shipwrecks were a daily occurrence, affecting both the families, homes and counting-houses countrywide. The journal also highlighted the facts that as most shipwrecks occurred out of sight at sea, they frequently failed to raise any public emotion or to arrest any attention.

Today, rightly, great play is made of disasters a fraction of this magnitude, So it is incredible that formerly death and disaster on such a scale passed almost unnoticed. However, the old adage says it all ‘Where he goes, and how he fares, no one knows, and no-one cares’.