The incomes of most coast dwellers were fairly meagre, earned from fishing end farming. The chance of looting the cargo of a wrecked vessel, was-too good to miss. Not every ship yielded up gold and silver but there was always something useful to take home - wood, ropes. Household goods and provisions could always be used or passed on at a profit. Wine and spirits did not always leave the beach on a cold night and some wreckers even died of exposure after collapsing in a drunken stupor.

The fact that the law decreed that a ship ashore was not a shipwreck unless no man, dog or cat had survived was conveniently overlooked. If there were such survivors the owners of the vessel had a year and a day to lay claim to their goods. It is unlikely that any surviving crew members, thankful to have got ashore alive, would have argued with a mob of lawless cutlass waving locals intent on robbery. Their threats "to make the ship a wreck" would have surely quelled all protests! Law enforcement at the scene of a wreck was an impossible task for a handful of constables and revenue men facing looters with probably generations of experience behind them in piracy, smuggling and wrecking.

'Wrecking' has two meanings. It can describe the deliberate act of luring a ship ashore by the use of false lights or other means with the intention of looting the cargo. The actual act of stealing the cargo once a ship was ashore is also termed 'wrecking'. By the eighteenth century the "barbarous plundering" of wrecked vessels had become so widespread that in 1713 an Act of Parliament was passed "to better protect the fate of vessels in distress and their cargoes" and clergymen in coastal parishes were required to read this Act to their parishioners four times a year at the same time reminding their errant flocks of the penalties which could be .incurred when they were apprehended. The legislation appeared to have little effect and looting remained widespread until late in the-nineteenth century although after 1800 there was a more humane attitude to shipwreck survivors.