title: Cornish Wrecking, 1700-1860: Reality and Popular Myth
author:  Cathryn J. Pearce 
description: A painstaking, well-considered and persuasively argued account of wrecking that shatters the well-established image of the wreckers, and that engages with some of the central issues of crime and the law in Hanoverian and early Victorian England. (...) Pearce's book constitutes a significant addition to knowledge and understanding in a variety of areas that are of considerable interest to contemporary students of history. JOURNAL FOR MARITIME RESEARCH Cathryn Pearce has done a masterly job in challenging the traditional stereotype of the Cornish wrecker. ... Cornish Wrecking is full of interesting and well-chosen anecdotes, matching the violent with the humane. (...) This book can be warmly recommended. THE LOCAL HISTORIAN This pioneering work is helpful for legal and administrative historians, suggestive for social and literary historians, and necessary for maritime historians. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MARITIME HISTORY Maritime historian Cathryn Pearce has produced by far the best - in fact the only - authoritative study of wrecking in Cornwall. www.smuggling.co.uk Provides one of the most detailed explanations of the Law and Rights of Wreck that I have read in any non-legal work, and written in clear and concise language. (...) This book really is an excellent piece of research on a subject which is more often told on the basis of myth. SOUTH WEST SOUNDINGS Must surely be the definitive study of the subject. (...) Well-researched, well-written and well-presented, Cornish Wrecking is a model study of a controversial practice in Cornish - and British - history which continues to this day. CORNISH BANNER A highly readable and intriguing examination of an often misunderstood subject. PIRATES AND PRIVATEERS
zlib_text: **Comstock Lode**
  
   **by**
  
   **Louis L'Amour**
  
  * * *
  
  * * *
  
  To Joseph and Shirley Wershba
  
  ******PART ONE**
  
   ******I**
  
  It began with a dream, a dream that ended in horror.
  
  It began in a thatched cottage with wind around it and rain beating on the
  shutters, with a flagstone floor and the smell of fish frying, and his mother
  putting blue plates on the table and his father sitting by the fire. It began
  in Cornwall, in England, in 1849.
  
  It began with listening to the storm blowing in from the sea and the fire
  hissing from occasional drops that fell down the chimney.
  
  It began with Val Trevallion's father saying, "Mary, we are going to America."
  
  His mother stopped, holding a blue plate in her two hands, staring at his
  father.
  
  "We are going to California, to the goldfields. There will be no more mines
  for our son, and this day I have decided."
  
  Tom Trevallion leaned over and knocked his pipe empty of ash on the edge of
  the hearth. "Tomorrow we will go to Gunwalloe."
  
  "But aren't ther