Robert Stephen Hawker, the composer of the Cornish anthem The Song of the Western Men, who collected the existing legends and, with a few additions of his own, published them in Charles Dickens' magazine All the Year Round in 1866.
His story was prefaced with the verse: Will you hear of Cruel Coppinger He came from a foreign kind; He was brought to us by the salt water, He was carried away by the wind!
He mysteriously raised enough money to buy himself a house and lands, and set himself up as the leader of a feared band of smugglers, wreckers and pirates in Cornwall.
He controlled a number of bridle paths and footpaths which converged at a steep cliff, at the foot of which was a cave where he kept his booty and stolen livestock.
When his father-in-law died Coppinger was eager to secure the remainder of his money, and to force his widowed mother-in-law to hand it over, he would threaten to whip his wife with a cat-o-nine-tails.
His property in Brittany was destroyed during the French Revolution in 1793 and around this time he moved to Cornwall where he bought an estate named Trewhiddle, near St Austell.
Shipwrecked in 1792, he married a woman named Hamlyn, though she was much older than the young girl featured in the legend and was called Ann rather than Dinah.