True, but disguising the land to look like a boat has a long history in wrecking.
“Wrecking” being the term of art for (mis)leading a sbip to run aground or into rocks so the locals can plunder the cargo and salvageable components. Crew? What crew?
Calling @Princhester
Alas, they all drowned. Except the ones whose heads were bashed in, perhaps on the rocks. Or somehow slit their throats against some sharp piece of wreckage.
Heh, remote coastal villages inhabited by wreckers/ smugglers/ pirates were the original “Hills Have Eyes” / “Deliverance” trope.
Urban legend. Yes, sometimes people plundered shipwrecks. But deliberately luring ships to be wrecked didn’t happen.
" A traditional legendary trope is that of wreckers deliberately decoying ships on to coasts using tricks, especially false lights, so that they run ashore for easy plundering.[1] While this has been depicted in many stories and legends, there is no clear evidence that this has ever happened."
While false lights probably wouldn’t work, I’ve also heard (in fiction) the idea of sabotaging light houses so a ship wouldn’t realize they were near the hazard the lighthouse was intended to warn against.
In the Wiki article linked above, a wrecker admitted as much:
A Bahamian wrecker, when asked if he and his crewmates made beacons on shore or showed their lights to warn ships away from the land at night, is reported to have said, “No, no [laughing]; we always put them out for a better chance by night”.
Can’t think of any law that forbids disguising a boat as land per se. As @TroutMan says it’s going to be illegal if it’s not displaying appropriate navigation lights.
And while I haven’t bothered looking it up I believe at least some jurisdictions have general laws against creating hazards to navigation.
So as long as your boat-disguised-as-land has the required lights and is not in a location that will somehow create a hazard, I think it would be OK.
I assumed Randall was referencing the old lighthouse and naval vessel urban legend.
For sure
Look, if they didn’t want their throats slit, they wouldn’t have been caught up in a press gang in the first place.
Somebody would need to apprehend these guys, if that was the case.
The ship was based at Surabaya in the Netherlands East Indies when Japan invaded in 1941.[5][6] Following the Allied defeats at the Battles of the Java Sea and Sunda Strait in late February 1942, all Allied ships were ordered to withdraw to Australia.[4] Abraham Crijnssen was meant to sail with three other warships, but found herself proceeding alone.[7]
To escape detection by Japanese aircraft (which the minesweeper did not have the armament to defend effectively against), the ship was heavily camouflaged with jungle foliage, giving the impression of a small island.[6][7] Personnel cut down trees and branches from nearby islands, and arranged the cuttings to form a jungle canopy covering as much of the ship as possible.[7] Any hull still exposed was painted to resemble rocks and cliffs.[7] To further the illusion, the ship would remain close to shore, anchored and immobile during daylight, and only sail at night.[4][6][7] She headed for Fremantle, Western Australia, where she arrived on 20 March 1942; Abraham Crijnssen was the last vessel to successfully escape Java, and the only ship of her class in the region to survive.[4][5]
I suspect that wartime rules are different. Quite a lot of things are allowed, sometimes required, in war that will land you in prison for doing in civilian life.
Excellent. Thanks for digging this up. 
You’re welcome. There are other photos floating around on the internet. I’m guessing it was quite the story in the day. It reminds me of the cell phone towers disguised as palm trees or pines around here. The pine trees are more convincing.
It’s a fascinating topic. The article linked below has a good summary of it.
The law requiring navigation lights is from Regulations to Prevent Collisions of Vessels at Sea adopted in 1889 at The International Convention for Safety of Life at Sea. The penalty wasn’t getting arrested or something; it meant that if your ship didn’t comply, you were on the hook for a collision.
In wartime, the rule wasn’t so much revoked as it was prioritized against the alternative.
From a purely legal aspect, a war vessel operating in international waters may be held liable for a collision resulting from the warship’s failure to display proper lights or lights which are so placed as to mislead another ship in such a manner as to have caused a collision. This places a burden on a vessel of war, as it is necessary to cruise under “darkened ship” conditions for obvious military reasons. It was advisable to install navigational lights on all our vessels, so controlled that the deck officer could turn all of them on or off at once. The decision as to the use of the lights, either momentarily or continuously, was a matter of discretion. The choice, in many instances, was between avoiding imminent collision or revealing the presence of the ship to an enemy submarine or aircraft which might be operating in the vicinity.
And if you really want to get into the weeds, read the article for how navigation lights on carriers were handled. I had no idea it was so complex.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1946/june/navigational-lights-under-wartime-conditions
Not just wartime. Warships routinely turn off their navigation lights, even in peacetime, if they don’t want to be spotted. Of course it’s incumbent on them to give way to everyone else to avoid a collision, and to also use their sensors to avoid all other marine traffic. And if there is a collision, it’s their fault and the U.S. government will find itself paying damages. (And the commanding officer will almost certainly have their career come to an abrupt end.)
IIRC and too lazy to Google …
There was a USN destroyer collision in/near Yokohama a few years ago that played out along those lines. Operating blacked out in a busy shipping area, trying avoid all the unwitting merchant ships and somehow oops’d themselves into a collision.
So “This is an aircraft carrier, and I order you to yield” is extra-special wrong, then.
I don’t remember that one involving having their running lights off, but I’m also too lazy to Google.
It does happen though. I did my first Midshipman cruise on the USS Arkansas. A few months before, as a result of steaming darkened at flank speed perpendicular to the shipping lanes across the Strait of Messina, they collided with the Megara Ilea. The Captain actually didn’t lose his job; he’d only taken command a few weeks earlier and his actions were judged critical to avoiding a much worse broadside collision. The XO, Navigator, and previous CO were not so lucky. Oddly, nothing happened to the Admiral who ordered them to speed through such busy waters with their cloaking device activated.