Author’s Note

Some notes on “wrecking”

As I’m fascinated by historical crime and detection, I have a collection of legal volumes dating from the late 1700s onwards. These detail all the weird and wonderful naughtiness our ancestors got up to, and what their punishment was if they were caught.

So, I can inform readers that “wrecker” was not the term used for those cold-blooded murderers who put out “false lights” to lure ships onto the rocks in bad weather. Goods which were considered “wrecked”—and therefore available to salvage—were objects which washed ashore, bearing no mark of ownership. However, survivors of a shipwreck could still stake their claim to the goods, and this is why Nat Pryce and his henchmen were not troubled by the deliberate murder of survivors.

It was not unknown for scavengers to come down to the beach after a wreck and make off with whatever they could find, even robbing survivors. If caught however, the penalty for the perpetrators was death.

Some notes on “itinerant medicine vendors”

The term “quack doctor” is a derogatory one, which is why I have avoided it in this book. But the entrepreneurial spirit of the hero, Lawrence, shows him to be just such a one, concerned with promoting his own wares in a theatrical way and making his living by alleviating sickness. His activities, however, would have fallen outside the field of professional medicine, and been frowned upon by the establishment.

This is not to say that all remedies produced by quack doctors were ineffective. They also performed useful operations at a bargain price, pulling teeth and acting as barber-surgeons, in addition to dealing with issues of sexual health which some genuine practitioners shied away from.