"Though few other countries had Britain's unique combination of advantages for a — island status, a vicious coastline, plenty of expensive traffic — almost every country with a coastline produced their own variants. There were Flemish wreckers, Spanish wreckers, Scandinavian wreckers. The French were such expert wreckers that they had been responsible for . In the , wrecks were so frequent that the eighteenth-century colonial government was estimated to derive two-fifths of its income from salvage."