Unlucky to save a drowning man

Writing of the great storm of 1703, Chambers noted how late lifesaving came to the English coast. Well into the eighteenth century people living by the sea counted themselves the lawful heirs of the drowned, and a wreck was chiefly a chance to take what the sea brought ashore. A superstition backed this up, holding that it was unlucky to rescue a drowning man. Burke brought in a bill in 1776 to charge the value of plundered wrecks on the district where they happened.