With the typecasting of the Cornish as wreckers in popular consciousness, their actions in relation to shipwrecks have been interpreted in terms of that identity, no matter their record of lifesaving. Indeed, the stereotype has been magnified in the popular press even in the early twenty-first century: witness the BBC headlines that opened this book – ‘Timber galore for Cornish wreckers’ after the 2002 wreck of the Kodima. The Cornish are conflicted about their wrecking past, and have contradictory reactions regarding their labelling as wreckers. As other marginalised groups have done, they have attempted to ‘own’ the myths through a retelling of the stories in their own way, whether in the yarns told to willing listeners, or through more permanent means of literature, theatre, and film. And yet defensiveness is also apparent, played out in local denial whenever the topic of wrecking is introduced. Indeed wrecking is a sensitive subject. At the root of Cornish defensiveness is the accusation that they lured ships ashore using false lights, not that they were involved in the plunder of shipwrecks. A germane example illustrating their concerns comes from one recent popular history, where it is facetiously claimed:

It is true that the Cornish deny that they deliberately wrecked ships with false lights – there is no evidence for it, despite the above assertion – but they do not deny that they were wreckers. Thus, it is the conflation of the myth with reality that is at the heart of Cornish concerns, a conflation that does not take into account the sheer complexity of wrecking activities, the ubiquity of the practice in other coastal regions, or the historicity of the custom. Wrecking was not unique to Cornwall.