Hawker described the bulk of his parishioners as a "mixed multitude of smugglers, wreckers and dissenters of various hues."
The coastmen were expert smugglers and wreckers, the agriculturists were ignorant and drunken, the parish clergy were slothful, in many cases intemperate, and largely given to fox-hunting.
On his return journey he narrowly escaped the pagan wreckers of Sussex, and only reached his own country to find Ceadda (St Chad) installed in his see.
Though for a long time they were callous wreckers and pirates, and cruel, and though they show great want of feeling in the "devil murders" - ceremonial murders of one of themselves for grave offences against the community, which are now being gradually put down - still on the whole the Nicobarese are a quiet, inoffensive people, friendly to each other, and not quarrelsome, and by inclination friendly and not dangerous to foreigners.
Many wreckers and not a few Customs men were killed in pitched battles over the booty.