Beach robbers
As beach robbers persons who illegally located is called flotsam acquire, especially after targeted beaches allow foreign ships. Due to the beach law inherited from antiquity , beach robbery was permitted under certain conditions until the Middle Ages and actually occurred on almost all coasts of the world until the 19th century, but now only on the coasts of failed states that cannot enforce international law .
Social background
The " appropriation " (= acquisition of ownership of an abandoned property ) and, if necessary, the sale of flotsam was an essential contribution to securing livelihoods in coastal regions that have often been very poor for centuries, such as those on the North Sea and Baltic Sea . Most of the beach robbers, regularly fishermen and small farmers , were driven by their poverty. The flotsam offered them a necessary supplement to their meager income.
to form
On the one hand there is the "passive" beach robbery, also known as "beach walk". The rinsing seam is run off and the debris appropriated - on the one hand natural products such as wood, and on the other hand objects of human production such as clothes, valuables, equipment and devices or entire ships. It is similar to simple theft .
The less widespread form of beach robbery, which is operated with significantly higher criminal energy, is the "active" one: With false beacons , ships are deliberately lured onto shallows , reefs or onto the beach and then plundered. Even in civilized parts of the world, this did not come to an end until the 19th century with the extensive construction of lighthouses on the coasts, the publication of up-to-date nautical charts and other navigation aids . For various reasons, shipwrecked people who survive this type of beach robbery can still be killed. Because beach law, for example, generally stipulated that a stranded ship would only become the property of the finder after the crew had perished, the wreckers sometimes managed to fulfill this condition themselves. Survivors can also pose a threat to the robber by reporting them - which further increases the recklessness of the wreckers. The shipwrecked people who were made serfs, as was common on many Lower Saxony coasts until the thirteenth century, had a little more luck.
Legal classification
Originally, the coastal residents had been through in many regions of the world habit the right to use the beach as they see fit. In the countries shaped by antiquity, they could also refer to beach law and the norms of secular and ecclesiastical authorities derived from it . However, the prerequisite for appropriating the find was always the lack of ownership, for example through the death of the original owner.
There was and is almost no awareness of wrongdoing for the passive beach robbery, ie the “beach walk” : From the point of view of the beach-goer, he only takes what nature gives him by washing it on the beach. He could feel confirmed in this view because the authorities often such activities against remuneration or in kind tolerated. Such a clear conscience could not be invoked for active beach robbery , it was always considered an injustice. With him, beach robbery differs from piracy , only in that in the former, the perpetrator acts from the coast.
From the 12th century onwards, the beach law in Europe was repeatedly declared invalid by the authorities or at least adapted to Christian ideas by increasingly strengthening the law of the shipowner or shipwrecked person, which was restricted accordingly by the finder. For the coastal residents, this not only meant a significant reduction in their income, they also often felt it as arrogance and patronizing by the authorities on the mainland, who were already reluctant to endure. Detlev von Liliencron has the Sylt fisherman Pidder Lüng demand from the Danish bailiff:
- “Frii es de Strönthgang” - the beach walk is (be) free.
"Just the repetitions of the prohibition and the endeavor to be protected against it by special individual permits prove the relapses into the old evil." - These prohibitions initially only had a limited effect.
In most cases, the right to find property applies to flotsam . On some coasts, what is found has to be reported or handed over to a beach bailiff appointed by the state , customs or another authority.
media
- In 1906 Ethel Smyth wrote an opera under the title The Wreckers (Eng. "Strandrecht").
- Daphne du Maurier : Jamaica Inn (1936), as Hodder Adults Audiobooks, ISBN 1-840-32783-9 (English version).
- Alfred Hitchcock : Jamaica Inn (Eng. " Reef Pirates ", 1939) based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier, a "costume film" that is unfamiliar to him about a gang that lures ships to the rocks with false fire signs and then around them robbing under the beach law.
- Beach pirates (Original title: The Beachcombers), a Canadian television series, 1972-1989
- Enid Blyton : Five Go Down to the Sea (Eng. "Five friends pursue the beach robbers") (Eng. 1953, Ger. 1961), in the series Fünf Freunde , Bertelsmann, ISBN 3-570-21228-9 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ https://books.google.de/books?id=OrTOQR4QyKIC&pg=PA459&lpg=PA459&dq=Beachcombing+1851&source=bl&ots=_1rLfYg1os&sig=ACfU3U3EghcPbiixBLWCsQ26aLMezsiTIA&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjbu5T43avpAhUCsKQKHXohCzIQ6AEwCnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=Beachcombing%201851&f=false
- ↑ Peter Kremer: The peculiar history of the East Frisian Islands. Man and sea, coast and marshes - an eternal love story. In: Mamoun Fansa. State Museum for Nature and Humans, Oldenburg, 2006, accessed on May 20, 2017 (issue 44).
- ^ Siegfried Schmidt: Beach robbers on Rügen . 2004.
- ↑ a b Friedrich von Raumer (1825): History of the Hohenstaufen and their time. Fifth volume, pages 383-385, FA Brockhaus Verlag, Leipzig
- ^ Nils Hansen (2001): Beach law and beach robbery - remarks on a customary law on the Schleswig-Holstein coasts. In: Kieler Blätter zur Vkde 33/2001, pp. 51–78
- ↑ Carl Russwurm (1860): About beach law in the Baltic provinces. Lecture in the Society for History and Archeology of the Russian Baltic Sea Provinces. ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Kurt Rebmann / Franz Jürgen Säcker / Roland Rixecker (eds.): Munich Commentary on the Civil Code - Vol. 6, 4th edition 2006, § 958.