wreckers

The Sailor's Word-Book

A name which includes both meritorious salvors of ships in distress, and the felonious brutes who merely hasten to wrecks for plunder. One of our British colonies deemed it so entirely a legal procedure to make a wreck of or cripple a vessel on the reef, that a naval officer was threatened with legal proceedings by a lawyer whom he prevented from carrying out his practice afloat.