Ship-Breakers Shore

The so-called Ship-Breakers Shore extends for roughly three thousand Riqs westwards from between the port of Rothaven in the Unified Governorates. Along this dismal and depopulated coastline could once be found the roving gangs of wreckers, indigenous Yehudi inhabitants of the region who survived the fall of Ashkenatza and Minarboria by luring merchant vessels, typically sailing at night or in conditions of poor visibility, onto treacherous shoals with false lights and fake signals, only to swarm any such ship as came to grief using flotillas of small boats launched from inlets and hidden coves. The crews of wrecked boats would be butchered, or sometimes kept for meat during lean seasons, and the salvageable cargo pillaged in a brisk and dispassionate manner by the experienced hands of the wrecker crews. Such practices continued into the era of Imperial rule with the Wreckers continuing their work usually untroubled by the overstretched in-shore flotilla operating out of Šlomxala. The depredations, carried on over generations, left the shore of what is today (1676 AN) Lower Lywall festooned with the rusting carapaces of gutted hulks, variously wedged or impaled onto the jagged granite extrusions of the seacoast. The wrecker crews met their end in year 1672, scattered and suppressed as a dragnet of General Inspectorate troops scoured the coastal communities of the region for carpenters, shipwrights, metal workers, and maritime engineers for conscription into the shipyards of Rothaven, uprooting long established clan families in the process.

Once the Command Executive fully realised the character of the people who had been snatched up by the corvée there could be no question of permitting them to return to their homes and former lives upon the completion of the Florimell building programme. Instead they were held over on various pretexts to provide a labour force for additional projects, whether the construction of the Rothaven Container Port or the expansion of the South Benacian Pipeline, so as to ensure that honest toil would exhaust the energies that might otherwise have turned once more towards singularly criminal enterprises. The more incorrigible amongst them were identified overtime and singled out for transfer to the Biological Remediation Service operating in the unfamiliar conditions of the horror infested interior.

Following the disasters and upheavals that had followed the abrupt downfall and exile of the House of Verion from its Benacian holdings, the Raspur Pact aligned successors of the Imperial Republic had impounded Iron Company merchant shipping in their ports. Whilst many of these vessels had been incorporated into the merchant navies of the allied powers, their numbers soon exceeded requirements, and the question of disposal came to the fore.