“Then shrieked the timid, and stood still the brave.”
“Then shrieked the timid, and stood still the brave.”
“Then shrieked the timid, and stood still the brave.”
“At last there came on a dreadful wave, mast-top high, and away went the mast by the board, and we with it, into the sea. I gave myself up. I was the only man on the ship that could not swim; so, where I fell into the water, there I lay. I felt the waves beat me and send me on. At last there was a rock under my hand. I clung on. Just then I saw Alick Kant, one of our crew, swimming past. I saw him lay his hand on a rock, and I sang out, ‘Hold on, Alick!’ But a wave rolled and swept him away, and I never saw his face more. I was beaten onward and onward among the rocks and the tide, and at last I felt the ground with my feet. I scrambled on. I saw the cliff, steep and dark, above my head. I climbed up until I reached a kind of platform with grass; and there I fell down flat upon my face, and either I fainted away, or I fell asleep. There I lay a long time, and when I awoke it was just the break of day. There was a little yellow flower under my head; and, when I saw that, I knew I was on dry land.” This was a plant of the bird’s-foot clover, called in old times, Our Lady’s Finger. He went on: “I could see no house or sign of people, and the country looked to me like some wild and desert island. At last I felt very thirsty, and I tried to get down towards a valley where I thought I should find water. But before I could reach it I fell and grew faint again; and there, thank God, sir, you found me.”
Such was Le Daine’s sad and simple story; and no one could listen unmoved to the poor solitary survivor of his shipmates and crew. The coroner arrived, held his ’quest, and the usual verdict of “Wrecked and cast ashore” empowered me to inter the dead sailors, found and future, from the same vessel, with the service in the Prayer-Book for the Burial of the Dead. This decency of sepulture is the result of a somewhat recent statute, passed in the reign of George III. Before that time it was the common usage of the coast to dig, just above high-water mark, a pit on the shore, and therein to cast, without inquest or religious rite, the carcasses of shipwrecked men. My first funeral of those lost mariners was a touching and striking scene. The three bodies first found were buried at the same time. Behind the coffins, as they were solemnly borne along the aisle, walked the solitary mourner, Le Daine, weeping bitterly and aloud. Other eyes were moist; for who could hear unsoftened the greeting of the Church to these strangers from the sea, and the “touch that makes the whole earth kin,” in the hope we breathed, that we too might one day “rest as these our brethren did”? It was well-nigh too much for those who served that day. Nor was the interest subdued when, on the Sunday after the wreck, at the appointed place in the service, just before the General Thanksgiving, Le Daine rose up from his place, approached the altar, and uttered in an audible but broken voice, his thanksgiving for his singular and safe deliverance from the perils of the sea.
The text of the sermon that day demands its history. Some time before, a vessel,The Hero, of Liverpool, was seen in distress, in the offing of a neighbouring harbour, during a storm. The crew, mistaking a signal from the beach, betook themselves to their boat. It foundered; and the whole ship’s company, twelve in number, were drowned in sight of the shore. But the stout ship held together, and drifted on to the land, so unshattered by the sea, that the coast-guard, who went immediately on board, found the fire burning in the cabin. When the vessel came to be examined, they found in one of the berths a Bible, and between its leaves a sheet of paper, whereon some recent hand had transcribed verses, the twenty-first, twenty-second and twenty-third of the thirty-third chapter of Isaiah. The same hand had also marked the passage with a line of ink along the margin. The name of the owner of the book was also found inscribed on the fly-leaf. He was a youth of eighteen years of age, the son of a widow; and a statement under his name recorded that the Bible was “a reward for his good conduct in a Sunday school.” This text, so identified and enforced by a hand that soon after grew cold, appeared strangely and strikingly adapted to the funeral of shipwrecked men; and it was therefore chosen as the theme for our solemn day. The very hearts of the people seemed hushed to hear it; and every eye was turned towards Le Daine, who bowed his head upon his hands and wept. These are the words: “But there the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams; wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ships pass thereby. For the Lord is our Judge, the Lord is our Lawgiver, the Lord is our King; He will save us. Thy tacklings are loosed; they could not well strengthen their mast, they could not spread the sail: then is the prey of a great spoil divided; the lame take the prey.” Shall I be forgiven for the vaunt, if I declare that there was not literally a single face that day unmoistened and unmoved? Few, indeed, could have borne without deep emotion to see and hear Le Daine. He remained at Morwenstow six weeks; and during the whole of this time we sought diligently, and at last we found the whole crew, nine in number. They were discovered, some under rocks, jammed in by the force of the water, so that it took sometimes several ebb-tides, and the strength of many hands to extricate the corpses. The captain I came upon myself, lying placidly upon his back, with his arms folded in the very gesture which Le Daine had described as he stood amid the crew on the main-top. The hand of the spoiler was about to assail him, when I suddenly appeared, so that I rescued him untouched. Each hand grasped a small pouch or bag. One contained his pistols, the other held two little log-reckoners of brass; so that his last thoughts were full of duty to his owners and his ship, and his last efforts for rescue and defence. He had been manifestly lifted by a billow, and hurled against a rock, and so slain; for the victims of our cruel sea are seldom drowned, but beaten to death by violence and the wrath of the billows. We gathered together one poor fellow in five parts: his limbs had been wrenched off and his body rent. During our search for his remains, a man came up to me with something in his hand, inquiring: “Can you tell me, sir, what is this? Is it a part of a man?” It was the mangled seaman’s heart; and we restored it reverently to its place, where it had once beat high with life and courage, with thrilling hope and sickening fear. Two or three of the dead were not discovered for four or five weeks after the wreck; and these had become so loathsome from decay, that it was at peril of health and life to perform the last duties we owe to our brother-men. But hearts and hands were found for the work; and at last, the good ship’s company, captain, mate and crew, were laid at rest, side by side, beneath our churchyard trees. Groups of grateful letters from Arbroath are to this day among the most cherished memorials of my escritoire. Some, written by the friends of the dead, are marvellous proofs of the good feeling and educated ability of the Scotch people. One from a father breaks off in irrepressible pathos, with a burst of “Oh my son, my son!” We placed at the foot of the captain’s grave the figure-head of his vessel. It is a carved image, life-size of his native Caledonia, in the garb of her country, with sword and shield.[27]
At the end of about six weeks Le Daine left my house on his homeward way, a sadder and a richer man. Gifts had been proffered from many a hand, so that he was able to return to Jersey with happy and joyful mien, well clothed and with thirty pounds in his purse. His recollections of our scenery were not such as were in former times associated with the Cornish shore: for three years afterward he returned to the place of his disaster accompanied by his uncle, sister and affianced wife, and he had brought them, that, in his own joyous words, “they might see the spot of his great deliverance”; and there, one summer day, they stood, a group of happy faces, gazing with wonder and gratitude on our rugged cliffs, that were then clad in that gorgeous vesture of purple and gold which the heather and gorse wind and weave along the heights; and the soft blue wave lapping the sand in gentle cadence, as though the sea had never wreaked an impulse of ferocity, or rent a helpless prey. Nor was the thankfulness of the sailor a barren feeling. Whensoever afterward the vicar sought to purchase for his dairy a Jersey cow, the family and friends of Le Daine rejoiced to ransack the island until they had found the sleekest, loveliest, best, of that beautiful breed; and it is to the gratitude of that poor seaman and stranger from a distant abode, that the herd of the glebe has long been famous in the land; and hence, as Homer would have sung, hence came
Bleehtah, and Lilith, Neelah, Evan, Neelah, and Katy.
Bleehtah, and Lilith, Neelah, Evan, Neelah, and Katy.
Bleehtah, and Lilith, Neelah, Evan, Neelah, and Katy.
Strange to say, Le Daine has been twice shipwrecked since his first peril, with similar loss of property, but escape of life; and he is now the master of a vessel in the trade of the Levant. In the following year a new and another wreck was announced in the gloom of night. A schooner under bare poles had been watched for many hours from the cliffs, with the steersman fastened at the wheel. All at once she tacked, and made for the shore, and just as she had reached a creek between two reefs of rock, she foundered and went down. At break of day only her vane was visible to mark her billowy grave. Not a vestige could be seen of her crew. But in the course of the day her boat was drifted ashore, and we found from the name on the stern that the vessel was thePhœnixof St. Ives. A letter from myself by immediate post brought up next day from that place a sailor who introduced himself as the brother of the young man who had sailed as mate in the wrecked ship. He was a rough, plain-spoken man, of simple religious cast, without guile or pretence; one of the good old seafaring sort; the men who “go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters”; these, as the Psalmist chants, “see the wonders of the Lord, and His glories in the deep.” At my side he paced the shore day after day, in weary quest of the dead. “If I could but get my poor brother’s bones,” he cried out yearningly, again and again, “if I could but lay him in the earth, how it would comfort dear mother at home!” We searched every cranny in the rocks, and we watched every surging wave, until hope was exchanged for despair. A reward, of meagre import, it is true, offered by the Seaman’s Burial Act, to which I have referred, and within my own domain doubled always by myself, brought us many a comrade in this sickening scrutiny; but for long it was in vain. At last, one day while we were scattered over a broken stretch of jumbled rocks that lay in huddled masses along the base of the cliffs, a loud and sudden shout called me where the seaman of St. Ives stood. He was gazing down into the broken sea—it was on a spot near low-water mark—and there, just visible from underneath a mighty fragment of rock, was seen the ankle of a man, and a foot still wearing a shoe! “It is my brother!” wailed the sailor bitterly; “it is our dear Jim; I can swear to that shoe!” We gathered around: the tide ebbed a very little after this discovery, and only just enough to leave dry the surface of the rock under which the body lay. Soon the sea began again to flow, and very quickly we were driven by the rising surges from the spot. The anguish of the mourner for his dead was thrilling to behold and terrible to hear. “Oh my brother! my brother!” was his sob again and again, “what a burial-place for our own dear boy!” I tried to soothe him, but in vain: the only theme to which he could be brought to listen was the chance—and I confess it seemed to my own secret mind a hopeless thought—that it might be possible at the next ebb tide, by skill and strength combined, to move, if ever so little, the monstrous rock, and so recover the corpse. It was low water at evening tide, and there was a bright November moon. We gathered in numbers; for among my parishioners there were kind and gentle-hearted men, such as had “pity, tenderness and tears”; and all were moved by the tale of the sailor hurled and buried beneath a rock by the strong and cruel sea. The scene of our first nightly assemblage was a weird and striking sight. Far, far above, loomed the tall and gloomy headlands of the coast; around us foamed and raged the boiling waves; the moon cast her massive lowering shadows on rock and sea;
And the long moonbeam on the cold, wet sandLay, like a jasper column, half-upreared.
And the long moonbeam on the cold, wet sandLay, like a jasper column, half-upreared.
And the long moonbeam on the cold, wet sandLay, like a jasper column, half-upreared.
And the long moonbeam on the cold, wet sand
Lay, like a jasper column, half-upreared.
Stout and stalwart forms surrounded me, wielding their iron bars, pickaxes and ropes. Their efforts were strenuous but unavailing. The tide soon returned in its strength, and drove us, baffled from the spot, before we had been able to grasp or shake the ponderous mass. It was calculated by competent judges that its weight was full fifteen tons: neither could there be a more graphic image of the resistless strength of the wrathful sea, than the aspect of this and similar blocks of rifted stone, that were raised and rolled perpetually by the power of the billows, and hurled, as in some pastime of the giants, along the shuddering shore! Deep and bitter was the grief of the sailor at our failure and retreat. His piteous wail over the dead recalled the agony of those who are recorded in Holy Writ—they who grieved for their lost ones, and would not be comforted, because they were not! That night an inspiration visited me in my wakeful bed. At a neighbouring harbour dwelt a relative of mine, who was an engineer, in charge of the machinery on a breakwater and canal. To him, at morning light, I sent an appeal for succour; and he immediately responded with aid and advice. Two strong windlasses, worked by iron chains, and three or four skilful men, were sent up by him next day with instructions for their work. Again at evening ebb we were all on the spot. One of our new assistants, a very Tubal Cain in aspect and stature, and of the same craft with that smith before the flood, plunged upon the rock as the water reluctantly revealed its upper side, and drilled a couple of holes in the surface with rapid energy, to receive, each of them, that which he called a Lewis-wedge and a ring. To these the chains of the windlasses were fastened on. They then looped a rope around the ankle of the corpse, and gave it, as the post of honour, to me to hold. It was on the evening of Sunday[28]that all this was done; and I have deemed it a venial breach of discipline to omit the nightly service of the church, in order to suit the tide. Forty strong parishioners, all absentees from evening prayer, manned the double windlass power; I intoned the pull; and by a strong and blended effort, the rocky mass was slowly, silently and gently upheaved; a slight haul at the rope, and up to our startled view and to the sudden lights, came forth the altered, ghastly, flattened semblance of a man! “My brother! my brother!” shrieked a well-known voice at my side, and tears of gratitude and suffering gushed in mingled torrent over his rugged cheek. A coffin had been made ready, under the hope of final success; and therein we reverently laid the disfigured carcass of one who, a little while before, had been the young and joyous inmate of a fond and happy home. We had to clamber up a steep and difficult pathway along the cliff with the body, which was carried by the bearers in a kind of funeral train. The vicar of course led the way.[29]When we were about half-way up, a singular and striking event occurred, which moved us all exceedingly. Unobserved, for all were intent in their solemn task, a vessel had neared the shore: she lay to, and, as it seemed, had watched us with night-glasses from the deck, or had discerned us from the torches and lanterns in our hands. For all at once there sounded along the air three deep and thrilling cheers! And we could see that the crew on board had manned their yards. It was manifest that their loyal and hearty voices and gestures were intended to greet our fulfilment of duty to a brother mariner’s remains. The burial-place of the dead sailors in this churchyard is a fair and fitting scene for their quiet rest. Full in view, and audible in sound, for ever rolls the sea. Is it not to them a soothing requiem that
Old Ocean, with its everlasting voice,As in perpetual jubilee, proclaimsThe praises of the Almighty?
Old Ocean, with its everlasting voice,As in perpetual jubilee, proclaimsThe praises of the Almighty?
Old Ocean, with its everlasting voice,As in perpetual jubilee, proclaimsThe praises of the Almighty?
Old Ocean, with its everlasting voice,
As in perpetual jubilee, proclaims
The praises of the Almighty?
Trees stand, like warders, beside their graves; and the Norman shingled church, “the mother of us all,” dwells in silence by, to watch over her safe and slumbering dead. And it recalls the imagery of the Holy Book wherein we read of the gathered reliques of the ancient slain: “And Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night”.
A year had passed away when the return of the equinox admonished us again to listen for storms and wrecks. There are men in this district whose usage it is at every outbreak of a gale of wind to watch the cliffs from rise to set of sun. Of these my quaint old parishioner, Peter Barrow, was one. On a wild winter day I found myself seated on a rock with Peter standing by, at a point that overhung the sea. We were both gazing with anxious dismay at a ship which was beating to and fro in the Channel, and had now drifted much too near to the shore: she had come into sight some hours before, struggling with Harty Race, the local name of a narrow boisterous run of sea between Lundy and the land; and she was now within three or four miles of our rocks. “Ah, sir!” said Peter, “the coastmen say—
From Padstowe Point to Lundy Light,Is a watery grave by day or night.
From Padstowe Point to Lundy Light,Is a watery grave by day or night.
From Padstowe Point to Lundy Light,Is a watery grave by day or night.
From Padstowe Point to Lundy Light,
Is a watery grave by day or night.
And I think the poor fellows off there will find it so.” All at once, as we still watched the vessel labouring in the sea, a boat was launched over her side, and several men plunged into it one by one. With strained and anxious eyes we searched the billows for the course of the boat. Sometimes we caught a glimpse as it rode upon some surging wave; then it disappeared a while. At last we could see it no more. Meanwhile the vessel had held down Channel, tacked and steered as if still beneath the guidance of some of her crew, although it must have been in sheer desperation that they still hugged the shore. What was to be done? If she struck, the men still on board must perish without help, for nightfall drew on. If the boat reappeared, Peter could make a signal where to land. In hot haste then I made for the vicarage, ordered my horse, and returned towards the cliffs. The ship rode on, and I accompanied her way along the shore. She reached the offing of Bude Haven, and there grounded on the sand. No boatman could be induced to put off, and thick darkness soon after fell. I returned worn, heartsick, and weary on my homeward way; there strange tidings greeted me: the boat which we had watched so long had been rolled ashore by the billows, empty. Peter Barrow had hauled her above high-water mark, and had found a name, theAlonzoof Stockton-on-Tees, on her stern. That night I wrote as usual to the owner, with news of the wreck, and the next day we were able to guess at the misfortunes of the stranded ship: a boat had visited the vessel, and found her freighted with iron from Gloucester for a Queen’s yard round the Land’s End. Her papers in the cabin showed that her crew of nine men had been reported all sound and well three days before. The owners’ agent arrived; and he stated that her captain was a brave and trusty officer, and that he must have been compelled by his men to join them when they deserted the ship. They must all have been swamped and lost not long after the launch of the boat, and while we watched for them in vain amid the waves. Then ensued what has long been with me the saddest and most painful duty of the shore: we sought and waited for the dead. Now, there is a folk-lore of the beach, that no corpse will float or be found until the ninth day after death. The truth is, that about that time the body proceeds to decompose; and as a natural result it ascends to the surface of the current, is brought into the shallows of the tide, and is there found. The owners’ representative was my guest for ten days; and with the help of the ship’s papers and his own personal knowledge we were able to identify the dead. First of all, the body of the captain came in: he was a fine, stalwart, and resolute-looking man. His countenance, however, had a grim and angry aspect, just such an expression as would verify the truth of our suspicion that he had been driven by others to forsake his deck. Then arrived the mate and three other men of the crew. None were placid of feature or calm and pleasant in look, as those usually are who are accidentally drowned, or who die in their beds.
But one day my strange old man, Peter Barrow, came to me in triumphant haste with the loud greeting, “Sir! we have got a noble corpse down on your beach. We have just laid him down above high-water mark, and he is as comely a body as a man shall see!” I made haste to the spot; and there lay, with the light of a calm and wintry day falling on his manly form, a fine and stately example of a man: he was six feet two inches in height, of firm and accurate proportion throughout; and he must have been, indeed, in life a shape of noble symmetry and grace. On his broad smooth chest was tattooed a rood, that is to say, our blessed Saviour on His cross, with on the one hand His mother, and on the other St. John the Evangelist: underneath were the initial letters of a name, P. B. His arms also were marked with tracery in the same blue lines. On his right arm was engraved P. B. again, and E. M., the letters linked with a wreath; and on his left arm was an anchor, as I imagined the symbol of hope, and the small blue forget-me-not flower. The greater number of my dead sailors—and I have myself said the burial-service over forty-two such men rescued from the sea—were so decorated with some distinctive emblem and name; and it is their object and intent, when they assume these signs, to secure identity for their bodies if their lives are lost at sea. We carried the strangely decorated man to his comrades of the deck; and gradually in the course of one month we discovered and carefully buried the total crew of nine strong men. These gathered strangers, the united assemblage from many a distant and diverse abode, now calmly slept among our rural and homely graves, the stout seamen of the shipAlonzoof Stockton-on-Tees. The boat which had foundered with them we brought also to the churchyard; and there, just by their place of rest, we placed her beside them, keel upward to the sky, in token that her work, too, was over, and her voyage done. There her timbers slowly moulder still; and by-and-by her dust will mingle in the scenery of death with the ashes of those living hearts and hands that manned her, in their last unavailing launch, and fruitless struggle for the mastery of life.[30]But the history of theAlonzois not yet closed. Three years afterwards a letter arrived from the Danish consul at a neighbouring seaport town, addressed to myself as the vicar of the parish; and the hope of the writer was that he might be able to ascertain through myself, for two anxious and grieving parents in Denmark, tidings of their lost son. His name, he said, was Philip Bengstein; and it was in the correspondence that this strange and touching history transpired. The father, who immediately afterward wrote to my address, told me in tearful words that his son, bearing that name, had gone away from his native home because his parents had resisted a marriage which he was desirous to contract. They found that he had gone to sea before the mast, a position much below his station in life; and they had traced him from ship to ship, until at last they found him on the papers of theAlonzoof Stockton-on-Tees. Then their inquiry as to the fate of that vessel had led them to the knowledge, through the owners, that the vicar of a parish on the seaboard of North Cornwall could in all likelihood convey to them some tidings of their long lost son. I related in reply the history of the death, discovery and burial of the unfortunate young man. I was enabled to verify and to understand the initial letters of his own name, and of her who was not to become his bride, although she still clung to his memory in loving loneliness in that foreign land. Ample evidence, therefore, verified his corpse; and I was proudly enabled to certify to his parents the reverent burial of their child. A letter is treasured among my papers filled to overflowing with the strong and earnest gratitude of a stranger and a Dane for the kindness we had rendered to one who loved “not wisely” perchance, “but too well,” to that son who had been lost, and was found too late; one, too, whose “course of true love” had brought him from distant Denmark to a green hillock among the dead, beneath a lonely tower among the trees, by the Cornish sea. What a picture was that which we saw painted upon the bosom and limbs of a dead man, of fond and faithful love, of severed and broken hearts, of disappointed hope, of a vacant chair and a hushed voice in a far-away Danish home!