Salvaging Wreckers: Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate, and Morality at Sea

This essay examines Sir Walter Scott’s use of wreckers and wrecking culture in his novel The Pirate (1821). Scott prompts his audience to reconsider the standards by which wreckers’ behavior has been traditionally judged. Urging his readers to look beyond stereotypical renderings of criminality and morality associated with the sea, Scott offers an honest—if ambiguous—commemoration of wreckers and British wrecking culture at its height, even as this culture faded away over the course of the nineteenth century.