The Inhabitants of Morwenstow in 1834—Cruel Coppinger—Whips the Parson
of Kilkhampton—Gives Tom Tape a Ride—Tristam Pentire—Parminter and
his Dog Satan—The Gauger’s Pocket—Wrecking—The Wrecker and the
Ravens—The Loss of the _Margaret Quail_—The Wreck of the _Ben
Coolan_—“A Croon on Hennacliff”—Letters concerning Wrecks—The
Donkeys and the Copper Ore—The Ship _Morwenna_—Flotsam and
Jetsam—Wrecks on 14th Nov., 1875—Bodies in Poundstock Church—The
Loss of the _Caledonia_—The Wreck of the _Phœnix_ and of the
_Alonzo_.
WHEN the Rev. R. S. Hawker came to Morwenstow in 1834, he found that he
had much to contend with, not only in the external condition of church
and vicarage, but also in that which is of greater importance.
A writer in the _John Bull_ says: “He found a manse in ruins, and partly
used as a barn; a parish peopled with wreckers, smugglers and Dissenting
Bryanites; and a venerable church, deserted and ill-cared for, amidst a
heap of weeds and nettles. Desolate as was the situation of the grey old
sanctuary and tower, standing out upon the rugged incline that shelves
down a descent of 300 feet to the beach, it was not more barren of
external comfort than was the internal state of those who had been
confided to his pastoral care.
“The farmers of the parish were simple-hearted and respectable; but the
denizens of the hamlet, after receiving the wages of the harvest time,
eked out a precarious existence in the winter, and watched eagerly and
expectantly for the shipwrecks that were certain to happen, and upon the
plunder of which they surely calculated for the scant provision of their
families. The wrecked goods supplied them with the necessaries of life,
and the rended planks of the dismembered vessel contributed to the
warmth of the hovel hearthstone.
“When Mr. Hawker came to Morwenstow, ‘the cruel and covetous natives of
the strand, the wreckers of the seas and rocks for flotsam and jetsam,’
held as an axiom and an injunction to be strictly obeyed:—
Save a stranger from the sea,
And he’ll turn your enemy!
“The Morwenstow wreckers allowed a fainting brother to perish in the sea
before their eyes without extending a hand of safety—nay, more, for the
egotistical canons of a shipwreck, superstitiously obeyed, permitted and
absolved the crime of murder by ’shoving the drowning man into the sea,’
to be swallowed by the waves. Cain! Cain! where is thy brother? And the
wrecker of Morwenstow answered and pleaded in excuse, as in the case of
undiluted brandy after meals, ‘It is Cornish custom’. The illicit spirit
of Cornish custom was supplied by the smuggler, and the gold of the
wreck paid him for the cursed abomination of drink.”
One of Mr. Hawker’s parishioners, Peter Barrow,[*] had been, for full
forty years, a wrecker, but of a much more harmless description: he had
been a watcher of the coast for such objects as the waves might turn up
to reward his patience. Another was Tristam Pentire,[*] a hero of
contraband adventure, and agent for sale of smuggled cargoes in bygone
times. With a merry twinkle of the eye, and in a sharp and ringing tone,
he loved to tell such tales of wild adventure, and of “derring-do,” as
would make the foot of the exciseman falter, and his cheek turn pale.
During the latter years of last century there lived in Wellcombe, one of
Mr. Hawker’s parishes, a man whose name is still remembered with
terror—Cruel Coppinger. There are people still alive who remember his
wife.
Local recollections of the man have moulded themselves into the rhyme:—
Will you hear of Cruel Coppinger?
He came from a foreign land:
He was brought to us by the salt water,
He was carried away by the wind!
His arrival on the north coast of Cornwall was signalised by a terrific
hurricane. The storm came up Channel from the south-west. A strange
vessel of foreign rig went on the reefs of Harty Race, and was broken to
pieces by the waves. The only man who came ashore was the skipper. A
crowd was gathered on the sand, on horseback and on foot, women as well
as men, drawn together by the tidings of a probable wreck. Into their
midst rushed the dripping stranger, and bounded suddenly upon the
crupper of a young damsel who had ridden to the beach to see the sight.
He grasped her bridle, and, shouting in some foreign tongue, urged the
double-laden animal into full speed, and the horse naturally took his
homeward way. The damsel was Miss Dinah Hamlyn. The stranger descended
at her father’s door, and lifted her off her saddle. He then announced
himself as a Dane, named Coppinger. He took his place at the family
board, and there remained till he had secured the affections and hand of
Dinah. The father died, and Coppinger at once succeeded to the
management and control of the house, which thenceforth became a den and
refuge of every lawless character along the coast. All kinds of wild
uproar and reckless revelry appalled the neighbourhood day and night. It
was discovered that an organised band of smugglers, wreckers and
poachers made this house their rendezvous, and that “Cruel Coppinger”
was their captain. In those days, and in that far-away region, the
peaceable inhabitants were unprotected. There was not a single resident
gentleman of property and weight in the entire district. No revenue
officer durst exercise vigilance west of the Tamar; and, to put an end
to all such surveillance at once, the head of a gauger was chopped off
by one of Coppinger’s gang, on the gunwale of a boat.
Strange vessels began to appear at regular intervals on the coast, and
signals were flashed from the headlands to lead them into the safest
creek or cove. Amongst these vessels, one, a full-rigged schooner, soon
became ominously conspicuous. She was for long the chief terror of the
Cornish Channel. Her name was _The Black Prince_. Once, with Coppinger
on board, she led a revenue-cutter into an intricate channel near the
Bull Rock, where, from knowledge of the bearings, _The Black Prince_
escaped scathless, while the king’s vessel perished with all on board.
In those times, if any landsman became obnoxious to Coppinger’s men, he
was seized, and carried on board _The Black Prince_ and obliged to save
his life by enrolling himself in the crew. In 1835 an old man, of the
age of ninety-seven, related to Mr. Hawker that he had been so abducted,
and after two years’ service had been ransomed by his friends with a
large sum. “And all,” said the old man very simply, “because I happened
to see one man kill another, and they thought I would mention it.”
Amid such practices, ill-gotten gold began to flow and ebb in the hands
of Coppinger. At one time he had enough money to purchase a freehold
farm bordering on the sea. When the day of transfer came he and one of
his followers appeared before the lawyer, and paid the money in dollars,
ducats, doubloons and pistols. The man of law demurred, but Coppinger
with an oath bade him take this or none. The document bearing
Coppinger’s name is still extant. His signature is traced in stern, bold
characters, and under his autograph is the word “Thuro” (thorough) also
in his own handwriting.
Long impunity increased Coppinger’s daring. There were certain
bridle-roads along the fields over which he exercised exclusive control.
He issued orders that no man was to pass over them by night, and
accordingly from that hour none ever did. They were called “Coppinger’s
Tracks.” They all converged at a headland which had the name of Steeple
Brink. Here the cliff sheered off, and stood 300 feet of perpendicular
height, a precipice of smooth rock towards the beach, with an
overhanging face 100 feet down from the brow. Under this was a cave,
only reached by a cable ladder lowered from above, and made fast below
on a projecting crag. It received the name of “Coppinger’s Cave.” Here
sheep were tethered to the rock, and fed on stolen hay and corn till
slaughtered; kegs of brandy and hollands were piled around; chests of
tea; and iron-bound sea-chests contained the chattels and revenues of
the Coppinger royalty of the sea.
The terror linked with Coppinger’s name throughout the coast was so
extreme that the people themselves, wild and lawless as they were,
submitted to his sway as though he had been lord of the soil and they
his vassals. Such a household as Coppinger’s was, of course, far from
happy or calm. Although when his father-in-law died he had insensibly
acquired possession of the stock and farm, there remained in the hands
of the widow a considerable amount of money as her dower. This he
obtained from the helpless woman by instalments, and by this cruel
means. He fastened his wife to the pillar of her oak bedstead, and
called her mother into the room. He then assured her he would flog Dinah
with a cat-o’-nine-tails till her mother had transferred to him the
amount of her reserved property that he demanded. This act of brutal
cruelty he repeated till he had utterly exhausted the widow’s store.
The Kilkhampton parson hated rook-pie. Coppinger knew it.
He invited him to dine with him one day. A large rook-pie was served at
one end of the table, and roast rooks at the other; and the parson, who
was very hungry, was forced to eat of them. When he departed he invited
Coppinger to dine with him on the following Thursday. The smuggler
arrived, and was regaled on pie, whether rabbit or hare he could not
decide. When he came home he found a cat’s skin and head stuffed into
his coat-pocket, and thereby discovered what he had been eating.
Coppinger was furious. He had a favourite mare, so indomitable that none
but he could venture on her back, and so fleet and strong that he owed
his escape from more than one menacing peril to her speed and endurance.
Shortly after the dinner of cat-pie, the rector of Kilkhampton was
walking homeward along a lane when he heard behind him the clattering of
horse-hoofs; and Cruel Coppinger bore down on him, seated on his mare,
whirling his double-thonged whip round his head. He lashed the back of
the unfortunate parson, pursued him, struck and struck again till he had
striped him like a zebra, and then galloped off with the parting scoff:
“There, parson, I have paid my tithe in full; never mind the receipt.”
On the selfsame animal Coppinger is related to have performed another
freak. He had passed a festive evening at a farmhouse, and was about to
take his departure, when he spied in the corner of the hearth a little
old tailor who went from house to house in exercise of his calling. His
name was uncle Tom Tape.
“Ha! Uncle Tom,” cried Coppinger, “we both travel the same road, and I
don’t mind giving you a hoist behind me on the mare.”
The old man cowered in the settle. He would not encumber the gentleman;
was unaccustomed to ride such a spirited horse. But Coppinger was not to
be put off. The trembling old man was mounted on the crupper of the
capering mare. Off she bounded; and Uncle Tom, with his arms cast with
the grip of terror round his bulky companion, held on like grim death.
Unbuckling his belt, Coppinger passed it round Uncle Tom’s thin body,
and buckled it on his own front. When he had firmly secured his victim,
he loosened his reins, and urged the mare into a furious gallop. Onwards
they rushed, till they fled past the tailor’s own door, where his
startled wife, who was on the watch, afterwards declared “she caught
sight of her husband clinging to a rainbow”.
At last the mare relaxed her pace; and then Coppinger, looking over his
shoulder said: “I have been under long promise to the Devil that I would
bring him a tailor to make and mend for him; and I mean to keep my word
to-night.”
The agony of terror produced by this announcement caused such struggles
that the belt gave way, and the tailor fell among the gorse at the
roadside. There he was found next morning in a semi-delirious state,
muttering: “No, no; I never will. Let him mend his breeches with his own
drag-chain. I will never thread a needle for Coppinger or his friend.”
One boy was the only fruit of poor Dinah’s marriage with the Stranger.
He was deaf and dumb, and mischievous and ungovernable from his youth.
His cruelty to animals, birds and to other children was intense. Any
living thing that he could torture yielded him delight. With savage
gestures and jabbering moans he haunted the rocks along the shore, and
seemed like some uncouth creature cast up by the sea. When he was only
six years old, he was found one day on the brink of a cliff, bounding
with joy, and pointing downwards to the beach with convulsions of
delight. There, mangled by the fall, and dead, they found the body of a
neighbour’s child of his own age; and it was believed that little
Coppinger had wilfully cast him over. It was a saying in the district
that, as a judgment on his father’s cruelty, his child had been born
without a human soul.
But the end arrived. Money became scarce, and more than one armed king’s
cutter was seen day and night hovering off the land. So he “who came
with the water went with the wind.” His disappearance, like his arrival,
was commemorated by a storm.
A wrecker who had gone to watch the shore saw, as the sun went down, a
full-rigged vessel standing off and on. Coppinger came to the beach, put
off in a boat to the vessel and jumped on board. She spread canvas,
stood off shore, and, with Coppinger in her, was seen no more. That
night was one of storm. Whether the vessel rode it out or was lost none
knew.[23]
Tristam Pentire[*] has already been mentioned. He was the last of the
smugglers, and became Mr. Hawker’s servant-of-all-work. The vicar had
many good stories to relate of his man.
“There have been divers parsons in this parish since I have been here,”
said Tristam, “some strict, and some not; and there was one that had
very mean notions about running goods, and said it was wrong to do so.
But even he never took no part with the gauger—never. And besides,” said
old Trim, “wasn’t the exciseman always ready to put _us_ to death if he
could?”
One day he asked Mr. Hawker: “Can you tell me the reason, sir, that no
grass will ever grow on the grave of a man that’s hanged unjustly?”
“No, indeed, Tristam: I never heard of the fact before.”
“That grave on the right hand of the path as you go down to the porch
has not one blade of grass on it, and never will. That’s Will Pooly’s
grave, that was hanged unjustly.”
“Indeed! How came that about?”
“Why, you see, they got poor Will down to Bodmin, all among strangers;
and there was bribery and false swearing; and so they agreed together,
and hanged poor Will. But his friends begged the body, and brought the
corpse home here to his own parish; and they turfed the grave, and they
sowed the grass twenty times over; but ’twas all of no use, nothing
would grow—he was hanged unjustly.”
“Well, but, Tristam, what was he accused of? What had Will Pooly done?”
“Done, your honour? Done? Oh! nothing at all, except killed an
exciseman.”
Among the “king’s men” whose achievements haunted the old man’s memory
with a sense of mingled terror and dislike, a certain Parminter and his
dog occupied a principal place.
“Sir,” said old Tristam one day to the vicar, “that villain Parminter
and his dog murdered with their shetting-irons no less than seven of our
people at divers times, and they peacefully at work at their calling all
the while.”
Parminter was a bold officer, whom no threats could deter, and no money
bribe. He always went armed to the teeth, and was followed by a large
fierce dog, which he called Satan. This animal he had trained to carry
in his mouth a carbine or a loaded club, which, at a signal from his
master, Satan brought to the rescue.
“Ay, they was audacious rascals—that Parminter and his dog; but he went
rather too far one day, as I reckon,” said old Tristam, as he leaned on
his spade talking to the vicar.
“Did he, Trim? in what way?”
“Why, your honour, the case was this. Our people had a landing down at
Melhuach, in Johnnie Mathey’s hole; and Parminter and his dog found it
out. So they got into the cave at ebb tide, and laid in wait; and when
the first boat-load came ashore, just as the keel took the ground, down
storms Parminter, shouting for Satan to follow. But the dog knew better,
and held back, they said, for the first time in all his life: so in
leaps Parminter smack into the boat, alone, with his cutlass drawn,
but”—with a kind of inward ecstasy—“he didn’t do much harm to the boat’s
crew.”
“Why not?”
“Because, your honour, they chopped off his head on the gunwale.”
Near Tonacombe Cross is a stone called the Witan-stone. To that Tristam
one day guided his master, the vicar.
“And now, your honour,” he said, “let me show you the wonderfullest
thing in all the place, and that is the Gauger’s Pocket.” He then showed
him, at the back of the Witan-rock, a dry secret hole, about an
arm’s-length deep, closed by a moss-grown stone. “There, your honour,”
said he, with a joyous twinkle in his eye, “there have I dropped a
little bag of gold, many and many a time, when our people wanted to have
the shore quiet, and to keep the exciseman out of the way of trouble;
and then he would go, if he were a reasonable officer; and the byword
used to be, when ’twas all right, one of us would meet him, and say:
’sir, your pocket is unbuttoned’; and he would smile, and answer: ‘Ay,
ay! but never mind, my man, my money’s safe enough.’ And thereby we knew
that he was a just man, and satisfied, and that the boats would take the
roller in peace; and that was the very way it came to pass that this
crack in the stone was called evermore the Gauger’s Pocket.”
In former times, when a ship was being driven on the rocks on Sunday,
whilst divine service was going on, news was sent to the parson, who
announced the fact from the pulpit, or reading-desk, whereupon ensued a
rapid clearance of the church. The story is told of a parson at
Poughill, near Morwenstow, who, on hearing the news, proceeded down the
nave in his surplice as far as the font; and the people, supposing there
was to be a christening, did not stir. But when he was near the door he
shouted: “My Christian brethren, there’s a ship wrecked in the cove: let
us all start fair!” and, flinging off his surplice, led the way to the
scene of spoliation.
“I do not see why it is,” said a Cornish clerk one day, “why there be
prayers in the Buke o’ Common Prayer for rain and for fine weather, and
thanksgivings for them and for peace, and there’s no prayer for wrecks,
nor thanksgiving for a really gude one when it is come.”
Mr. Hawker relates a good story in his _Footprints_, which was told him
by an old man in his parish named Tony Cleverdon.
“There was once a noted old wrecker, named Kinsman: he lived in my
father’s time; and when no wreck was onward he would get his wages by
raising stone in a quarry by the seashore. Well, he was to work one day
over yonder, half-way down the Tower-cliff, when all at once he saw two
old ravens flying round and round very near his head. They dropped down
into the quarry two pieces of wreck-candle just at the old man’s feet.”
(Very often wreckers pick up Neapolitan wax candles from vessels in the
Mediterranean trade that have been lost in the Channel.) “So when
Kinsman saw the candles, he thought in his mind, ‘There is surely wreck
coming in upon the beach’; so he packed his tools together, and left
them just where he stood, and went his way wrecking. He could find no
jetsam, however, though he searched far and wide. Next day he went back
to quarry to his work. And he used to say it was as true as a
proverb—there the tools were all buried deep out of sight, for the crag
had given way; and if he had tarried an hour longer he must have been
crushed to death. So you see, sir, what knowledge those ravens must have
had; how well they knew the old man, and how dearly fond he was of
wreck; how crafty they were to hit upon the only plan that would ever
have slocked him away.”
Wrecks are terribly frequent on this coast. Not a winter passes without
several. There are men living who can remember eighty.
If wrecking is no longer practised, the wrecking spirit can hardly be
said to be extinct, as the following facts will testify:—
In 1845 a ship came ashore in Melhuach Bay, between Boscastle and Bude.
The surge burst against the cliffs, and it was impossible to launch a
lifeboat; but a rocket was fired over the vessel, and so successfully
that the hawser was secured to the ship. Every life would, in all
probability, have been saved, had not some wretches cut through the
rope, more greedy for prey than careful to save life. Of all the crew
the only person saved was the captain. He confirmed the opinion of the
coast-guard, that, but for the cutting through of the hawser, every one
on board would have been rescued.
In 1864 a large ship was seen in distress off the coast. The Rev. A.
Thynne, rector of Kilkhampton, at once drove to Morwenstow. The vessel
was riding at anchor a mile off shore, west of Hartland Race. He found
Mr. Hawker in the greatest excitement, pacing his room, and shouting for
some things he wanted to put in his greatcoat-pockets, and irritably
impatient because his carriage was not round. With him was the Rev. W.
Valentine, rector of Whixley in Yorkshire, then resident at Chapel, in
the parish of Morwenstow.
“What are you going to do?” asked the rector of Kilkhampton: “I intend
to drive at once to Bude for the lifeboat.”
“No good!” thundered the vicar, “no good comes out of the West. You must
go East. I shall go to Clovelly, and then, if that fails, to Appledore.
I shall not stop till I have got a lifeboat to take those poor fellows
off the wreck.”
“Then,” said the rector of Kilkhampton, “I shall go to Bude, and see to
the lifeboat there being brought out.”
“Do as you like; but mark my words, no good comes of turning to the
West. Why,” said he, “in the primitive Church they turned to the West to
renounce the Devil.”
His carriage came to the door, and he drove off with Mr. Valentine, as
fast as his horses could spin him along the hilly, wretched roads.
Before he reached Clovelly, a boat had put off with the mate from the
ship, which was the _Margaret Quail_, laden with salt. The captain would
not leave the vessel; for, till deserted by him, no salvage could be
claimed. The mate was picked up on the way, and the three reached
Clovelly.
Down the street proceeded the following procession—the street of
Clovelly being a flight of steps:—
_First_, the vicar of Morwenstow in a claret-coloured coat, with long
tails flying in the gale, blue knitted jersey, and pilot-boots, his long
silver locks fluttering about his head. He was appealing to the
fishermen and sailors of Clovelly to put out in their lifeboat, to
rescue the crew of the _Margaret Quail_. The men stood sulky, lounging
about with folded arms, or hands in their pockets, and sou’-westers
slouched over their brows. The women were screaming at the tops of their
voices, that they would not have their husbands and sons and sweethearts
enticed away to risk their lives to save wrecked men. Above the clamour
of their shrill tongues, and the sough of the wind, rose the roar of the
vicar’s voice: he was convulsed with indignation, and poured forth the
most sacred appeals to their compassion for drowning sailors.
_Second_ in the procession moved the Rev. W. Valentine, with purse full
of gold in his hand, offering any amount of money to the Clovelly men,
if they would only go forth in the lifeboat to the wreck.
_Third_ came the mate of the _Margaret Quail_, restrained by no
consideration of cloth, swearing and damning right and left, in a
towering rage at the cowardice of the Clovelly men.
_Fourth_ came John, the servant of Mr. Hawker, with bottles of whisky
under his arm, another inducement to the men to relent, and be merciful
to their imperilled brethren.
The first appeal was to their love of heaven, and to their humanity; the
second was to their pockets, their love of gold; the third to their
terrors, their fear of Satan, to whom they were consigned; and the
fourth to their stomachs, their love of grog.
But all appeals were in vain. Then Mr. Hawker returned to his carriage
and drove away, farther east, to Appledore, where he secured the
lifeboat. It was mounted on a waggon. Ten horses were harnessed to it;
and, as fast as possible, it was conveyed to the scene of distress.
But, in the meanwhile, the captain of the _Margaret Quail_, despairing
of help, and thinking that his vessel would break up under him, came off
in his boat, with the rest of the crew, trusting rather to a rotten
boat, patched with canvas which they had tarred over, than to the tender
mercies of the covetous Clovellites, in whose veins ran the too recent
blood of wreckers. The only living being left on board was a poor dog.
No sooner was the captain seen to leave the ship, than the Clovelly men
lost their repugnance to go to sea. They manned boats at once, gained
the _Margaret Quail_, and claimed £3000 for salvage.
There was an action in court, as the owners refused to pay such a sum;
and it was lost by the Clovelly men, who, however, got an award of
£1200. The case turned somewhat on the presence of the dog on the wreck;
and it was argued that the vessel was not deserted, because a dog had
been left on board, to keep guard for its masters. The owner of the
cargo failed; and the amount actually paid to the salvors was £600 to
two steam-tugs (£300 each), and £300 to the Clovelly skiff and sixteen
men. The ship and cargo, minus masts, rigging, cables and anchors, were
valued at £5000.
Mr. Hawker went round the country indignantly denouncing the boatmen of
Clovelly, and with justice. It roused all the righteous wrath in his
breast. And, as may well be believed, no love was borne him by the
inhabitants of that little fishing village. They would probably have
made a wreck of him, had he ventured among them.
Another incident, at Bude, called forth a second burst of indignation,
but this time not so justly.
A fine vessel, the _Ben Coolan_, laden with Government stores for India,
ran ashore on the sand, outside Bude Haven. The lifeboat was got out;
but the sea was terrible, and there was no practised crew to man her.
Crowds were on the pier, hooting the boatmen, and calling them cowards,
because they would not put to sea, and save those on the vessel; but an
old Oxford eight man, who was present, assures me that the crew were not
up to facing such a sea: they were gardeners, land-labourers, canal-men,
not one among them who, when he rowed, did not look over his shoulder to
see where he was going. The crew shirked putting out in the tremendous
sea that was bowling in; and the vessel broke up under the eyes of those
who stood on the pier and cliffs. The first rocket that was fired fell
short. The second went beyond the bows. The third went over the ship.
The mate was seen to run forward to catch the rope, when a wave burst
against the side, and spun him up in the foam, and he was seen no more.
The ship turned broadside to the waves, which tore her to pieces with
great rapidity. Only a few of the crew were saved. The captain was
drowned.
Mr. Hawker wrote shortly afterwards:—
A CROON ON HENNACLIFF.
Thus said the rushing raven
Unto his hungry mate:
“Ho, gossip! for Bude Haven!
There be corpses six or eight.
Cawk, cawk! the crew and skipper
Are wallowing in the sea,
So there’s a savoury supper
For my old dame and me!”
“Cawk! gaffer! thou art dreaming:
The shore hath wreckers bold,
Would rend the yelling seamen
From the clutching billows’ hold!
Cawk, cawk! they’d bound for booty
Into the dragon’s den,
And shout, ‘For death or duty!’
If the prey were drowning men.”
Loud laughed the listening surges
At the guess our grandam gave:
You might call them Boanerges
From the thunder of their wave!
And mockery followed after
The sea-bird’s jeering brood,
That filled the skies with laughter
From Lundy Light to Bude.
“Cawk, cawk!” then said the raven:
“I am fourscore years and ten,
Yet never in Bude Haven
Did I croak for rescued men!
They will save the captain’s girdle,
And shirt,[24] if shirt there be,
But leave their blood to curdle
For my old dame and me.”
So said the rushing raven
Unto his hungry mate:
“Ho, gossip! for Bude Haven!
There be corpses six or eight.
Cawk, cawk! the crew and skipper
Are wallowing in the sea:
Oh, what a dainty supper
For my old dame and me!”
A gentleman who was a witness of this wreck tells me: “We saw the
carpenter swimming ashore. He was a magnificent man, largely built, with
sinews and muscles of great strength. He swam boldly and desperately,
but badly, as he kept his breast above the water, so that he must have
been much beaten and bruised by the waves. We saw how his strength
gradually gave way, and then he seemed to rally, and make another
despairing effort. We succeeded in getting hold of him at last, and
brought him ashore. Unfortunately there was no doctor by, or any one who
was experienced in dealing with cases of drowning. We did as best we
knew, following the old usage of throwing him across a barrel. _Now_ I
know that it was the worst treatment possible. Had a medical man been at
hand, it is my conviction that the poor fellow would have been saved.
His blood was not curdled when we got him ashore, and I saw it settle
into his breast afterwards. It is an unpleasant thought, that a life was
sacrificed for want of knowledge.”
Those of the crew who were saved proved to be a sad set of fellows. They
got so drunk, that they could not attend the burial of their comrades.
MORWENSTOW, Sept. 18, 1869. _My dear Mr. Martyn_,—I will not say,
forgive me for my silence. You must do that; but how can I state my
miseries? First of all, for a fortnight I have been a cripple from
sciatica, only able to creep bent double from room to room.[25] On
Sunday night a hurricane smote my house at midnight, burst in the
whole of our bedroom-window at a blow, and drove us out of bed to
dress and go down. Two lights of the drawing-room window were also
blown in, one broken to smash. No man or boy in the house. Well, we
had a bed made up in the servants’ room till the morning. At dawn
tidings came that a large vessel was ashore in Vicarage Bay, just
under the hut. I was put into the gig, and carried out. Found the
crew in death-horrors. Rocket apparatus arrived, and fifteen men
were dragged ashore alive. The other seven (blacks) were drowned
among my rocks. Guess my state. The whole glebe alive with people.
Seven corpses came ashore for burial one by one. Graves already dug,
and shrouds prepared; but more yet. The cargo, coals, sixteen
hundred tons, vessel nineteen hundred tons, largest ever seen here.
Broken up to-night. My path down is now made for donkeys. What can
be saved is to be brought up and sold, as well as the broken ship.
Cannot you get help for one Sunday, and come over? It would be the
act of an angel to come to my rescue. You have your house, and you
could do much that I ought to do and cannot. Come, I entreat you.
God bless you, and help me; for I am indeed in much anguish, and my
poor Pauline worn out. Love to all.
Yours faithfully,
R. S. H.
MORWENSTOW, Oct. 9, 1869. _My dear Mr. Martyn_,—I have devoted to
you my first interval of freedom from pains and crushing worry. Let
no man hereafter ever accuse me of shrinking from duty. I was
assisted up to the churchyard by Cann to bury the last sailor, in
such an anguish from sciatic pains, that I had faintness on me all
the time; and on returning from the grave my leg gave way under me,
and I fell. However, I have done it so far single-handed, and I am
thankful....
Yours faithfully,
R. S. HAWKER.
Not long after a Spanish vessel came ashore a little lower down the
coast. There were on her a number of Lascars. When the coast-guard
officer went on board, the Lascars, supposing him to be a wrecker, drew
their knives on him. He had the presence of mind to show them his
buttons with the crown stamped on them, and so to satisfy them that he
was a government officer. The crew were much bruised and injured. They
were taken into Stowe and other farmhouses in the neighbourhood, and
kindly nursed till well. The captain was a gallant little Spanish don.
The rector of Kilkhampton, who diligently visited the sailors, urged on
the captain, when all were well, the advisability of the crew coming to
church to return thanks for their rescue. He hesitated, saying he was a
Roman Catholic: but the rector urged that all worshipped the same God,
and had the same Saviour; and, after having revolved the matter in his
own mind, he agreed.
Accordingly the whole crew with the captain came to Kilkhampton Church,
a beautiful restored building, filled with old carved seats, rich modern
stained glass, and where the service is choral, and rendered with great
beauty and reverence.
The Spaniards and Lascars behaved with the utmost devotion and
recollection. After service they adjourned to Penstowe, where they were
hospitably entertained with a dinner. The captain and the mate dined
with the family, the sailors in the hall. The captain took in the lady
of the house. On the other side of him at table, sat one of the farmers
who had received the shipwrecked mariners into his house. The Spaniard
helped the lady to wine, half-filling her glass; but was nudged by the
farmer, who bade him give her a brimmer. The little captain turned
round, and looked him in the face with an astonished stare, which said
plainly enough: “Do you, a Cornish clown, think to teach manners to a
Spanish don?” The burly Cornish farmer withered at the glance.
In 1853 a vessel laden with copper ore was wrecked in the bay below
Morwenstow Church. The ore was recovered, and carried up the cliff on
the backs of donkeys; but it was a tedious process, and occupied two or
three months. Mr. Hawker was touched with the sufferings of the poor
brutes, zigzagging up a precipice, heavily laden with ore; and, during
all the time, had water drawn for them, and a feed of corn apiece, to
recruit their exhausted strength as they reached the top of the cliff.
His compassion for the donkeys made a profound impression on the people,
and is one of their favourite stories about him when they want to tell
of the goodness of his kind heart.
During these two or three months, the agent for the firm which owned the
vessel lived in the vicarage and was entertained royally. When
everything had been recovered, and he was about to depart, he thanked
the vicar for his great kindness, and begged to know, on the part of the
firm, if there was anything he could do, or give him, which would be
acceptable as some recognition for his kindness.
“No,” answered the vicar; “nothing. If paid by you, God will not repay
me.”
The agent again, and in more forcible terms, assured him that the firm
would not be happy unless they could make him some acknowledgment for
his services and hospitality, out of the common way.
“Then I will ask one thing,” he said; “give the captain another ship.”
The agent hesitated, and then said that what he asked was an
impossibility. The firm had no other ships which were not then provided
with captains. They could not, in justice, displace one of them, to
instal in his room the captain of the wrecked ship.
“Never mind,” said Mr. Hawker; “this is the only thing I have asked of
you, and this is refused me.”
A few days after, the agent came to him to inform him that the firm
purposed laying the keel of a new vessel, and that the captain for whom
he pleaded should be appointed to her.
The ship was built, and was baptised _Morwenna_. She now sails to and
fro along this coast, and, whenever she passes Morwenstow, runs up a
flag, as a mark of deference to the spot whence she derives her name.
The flotsam and jetsam of a wreck are the property of the Crown. The
coast-guard are on the _qui-vive_ after a storm, and there is no chance
now for village wreckers. They may carry off small articles, which they
can put in their pockets; but so many have been had up of late years
before the magistrates, and fined, that the officers of government have
it nearly all to themselves. When, however, a keg of brandy is washed
ashore, the villagers go down to the beach with bottles, break in the
head of the cask, and fill their bottles. Should a coast-guard officer
appear, the keg is kicked over, and they make off with their liquor. The
bottles are sometimes kept in a cave, or hidden in the sand, and removed
at night. The coast-guardsmen may suspect that the head of the cask was
stove in purposely, but cannot prove it. When the shore is strewn with
articles, an auction is held on the spot. The farmers are the principal
buyers, and they get the goods very cheap. They have their donkeys at
hand, to remove up the cliffs what they have purchased. The expense of
transport prevents others at a distance from entering into competition
with them.
After all has been sold, portions of the beach are let by auction for a
week or fortnight; and those who take the beach are entitled to claim,
as their own, whatever is thrown up by the sea during their tenure. A
wreck does not come ashore at once, but by instalments; nor always at
one place, but all along the coast.
Should there not be sufficient articles found by the coast-guard to make
it worth their while to call in an auctioneer, they hold an auction of
their own; but, not being licensed, they cannot run the price of the
articles _up_, they therefore run them _down_. For instance, a piece of
wood comes ashore, worth, may be, half a crown. The coast-guard offers
it for ten shillings; and, if no one will give that for it, it is
offered for nine, then eight, and so on, after the manner of a
cheap-jack.
I had got as far as this in my memoir on Saturday night, 13th Nov.,
1875. On the following morning I went to Morwenstow, to take duty in the
church. The wind was blowing a hurricane from the south-west. I had to
hold on to the grave-stones, to drag myself through the churchyard in
the teeth of the storm, to the church porch.
There were few present that morning. No woman could have faced the wind.
The roar of the ocean, the howling of the blast, the clatter of the
glass in the windows, united, formed such a volume of sound that I had
to shout my loudest to be heard when reading the service.
When morning prayer was over, I went into the porch. A few men were
there, holding their hats on their heads, and preparing for a battle
with the wind.
“Not many at church this morning,” I said. “No, your honour,” was the
answer; “the wind would blow the women away; and the men are most of ’em
on the cliffs, looking out if there be wrecks.”
Two vessels were caught sight of between the scuds of rain, now on the
top of a billow, then lost in the trough of the waves.
They had been driven within the fatal line between Hartland Head and
Padstowe Point.
“Is there no chance for them?”
“None at all.”
That evening we sang in church the hymn for those at sea, in “Ancient
and Modern.” Whilst it was being sung, one vessel foundered; but the
crew, six Frenchmen, came ashore in a boat. An hour or two earlier the
other went down, with all hands on board.
On Monday and Tuesday bits of the wreck came up in the coves, with
_Wilhelmina_ on them, but no bodies.
After a storm the corpses are fearfully mangled on the sharp rocks, and
are cut to pieces by the slate as by knives, and bits of flesh come
ashore. These are locally called “gobbets”; and Mr. Hawker, after a
wreck, used to send a man with a basket along the beaches of the coves
in his parish, collecting these “gobbets,” which he interred in his
churchyard, on top of the cliffs.
In 1845, after a wreck, nine corpses were taken into Poundstock Church.
The incumbent was wont to have daily service. The nine corpses lay along
in the aisle that morning. It was the twenty-second day of the month,
and he read the Psalm cvii.:—
They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in
great waters; these men see the works of the Lord, and His wonders
in the deep. For at His word the stormy wind ariseth, which lifteth
up the waves thereof. They are carried up to the heaven, and down
again to the deep; their soul melteth away because of the trouble.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at
their wits’ end. So when they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, He
delivereth them out of their distress. For He maketh the storm to
cease, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad,
because they are at rest; and so He bringeth them unto the haven
where they would be.
This psalm coming in its proper order seemed strangely appropriate, read
with those dead mariners for a congregation.
The narrative of the wreck of the _Caledonia_ in 1843 must not be told
by any other than Mr. Hawker himself. The following is extracted from
his “Remembrances of a Cornish Vicar,”[26] slightly shortened.
At daybreak of an autumn day I was aroused by a knock at my bedroom
door: it was followed by the agitated voice of a boy, a member of my
household: “Oh, sir, there are dead men on Vicarage Rocks!”
In a moment I was up, and in my cassock and slippers rushed out.
There stood my lad, weeping bitterly, and holding out to me in his
trembling hands a tortoise alive. I found afterwards that he had
grasped it on the beach, and brought it in his hand as a strange and
marvellous arrival from the waves, but in utter ignorance of what it
might be. I ran across my glebe, a quarter of a mile, to the cliffs,
and down a frightful descent of three hundred feet to the beach. It
was indeed a scene to be looked on only once in a human life. On a
ridge of rock, just left bare by the falling tide, stood a man, my
own servant: he had come out to see my flock of ewes, and had found
the awful wreck. There he stood, with two dead sailors at his feet,
whom he had just drawn out of the water, stiff and stark. The bay
was tossing and seething with a tangled mass of rigging and broken
fragments of a ship; the billows rolled up yellow with corn, for the
cargo of the vessel had been foreign wheat; and ever and anon there
came up out of the water, as though stretched out with life, a human
hand and arm. It was the corpse of another sailor drifting out to
sea. “Is there no one alive?” was my first question to my man. “I
think there is, sir,” he said, “for just now I thought I heard a
cry.” I made haste in the direction he pointed out; and on turning a
rock, just where a brook of fresh water fell to the sea, there lay
the body of a man in a seaman’s garb. He had reached the water faint
with thirst, but was too much exhausted to swallow or drink. He
opened his eyes at our voices; and, as he saw me leaning over him in
my cassock, he sobbed with a piteous cry: “Oh, mon père, mon père!”
Gradually he revived; and when he had fully come to himself with the
help of cordials and food, we gathered from him the mournful tale of
his vessel and her wreck. He was a Jersey man by birth, and had been
shipped at Malta, on the homeward voyage of the vessel from the port
of Odessa with corn.
Mr. Hawker wrote this account for a periodical, without giving the name
of the place, or signing the article. This explains a few trifling
deviations from fact. He goes on to relate how he took Le Daine into his
house. This was not strictly true. Le Daine was found by another
gentleman, and taken by him into his father’s house in Morwenstow
parish, where he was carefully and kindly nursed till his recovery. Mr.
Hawker continues his narrative thus:—
I returned to the scene of death and danger, where my man awaited
me. He had found, in addition to the two corpses, another dead body,
jammed under a rock. By this time a crowd of people had arrived from
the land, and at my request they began to search anxiously for the
dead. It was indeed a terrible scene. The vessel, a brig of five
hundred tons, had struck, as we afterwards found, at three o’clock
that morning; and, by the time the wreck was discovered, she had
been shattered into broken pieces by the fury of the sea. The rocks
and water bristled with fragments of mast and spar and rent timbers;
the cordage lay about in tangled masses. The rollers tumbled in
volumes of corn, the wheaten cargo; and amidst it all the bodies of
the helpless dead—that a few brief hours before had walked the deck,
the stalwart masters of their ship—turned their disfigured faces
towards the sky, pleading for sepulture. We made a temporary bier of
the broken planks, and laid thereon the corpses, decently arranged.
As the vicar, I led the way, and my people followed with ready zeal
as bearers; and in sad procession we carried our dead up the steep
cliff, by a difficult path, to await, in a room at my vicarage which
I allotted them, the inquest. The ship and her cargo were, as to any
tangible value, utterly lost.
The people of the shore, after having done their best to search for
survivors and to discover the lost bodies, gathered up fragments of
the wreck for fuel and shouldered them away; not perhaps a lawful
spoil, but a venal transgression when compared with the remembered
cruelties of Cornish wreckers. Then ensued my interview with the
rescued man. His name was Le Daine. I found him refreshed, collected
and grateful. He told me his tale of the sea. The captain and all
the crew but himself were from Arbroath in Scotland. To that harbour
also the vessel belonged. She had been away on a two-years’ voyage,
employed in the Mediterranean trade. She had loaded last at Odessa.
She touched at Malta; and there Le Daine, who had been sick in the
hospital, but recovered, had joined her. There also the captain had
engaged a Portuguese cook; and to this man, as one link in a chain
of causes, the loss of the vessel might be ascribed. He had been
wounded in a street quarrel the night before the vessel sailed from
Malta and lay disabled and useless in his cabin throughout the
homeward voyage. At Falmouth, whither they were bound for orders,
the cook died. The captain and all the crew, except the cabin-boy,
went ashore to attend the funeral. During their absence the boy,
handling in his curiosity the barometer, had broken the tube and the
whole of the quicksilver had run out. Had this instrument, the pulse
of the storm, been preserved, the crew would have received warning
of the sudden and unexpected hurricane and might have stood out to
sea; whereas they were caught in the chops of the Channel, and thus,
by this small incident, the vessel and the mariners found their fate
on the rocks of a remote headland in my lonely parish. I caused Le
Daine to relate in detail the closing events.
“We received orders,” he said, “at Falmouth to make for Gloucester
to discharge. The captain and mate and another of the crew were to
be married on their return to their native town. They wrote,
therefore, to Arbroath from Falmouth, to announce their safe arrival
from their two-years’ voyage, and their hope in about a week to
arrive at Arbroath for welcome there.”
But in a day or two after this joyful letter there arrived in
Arbroath a leaf torn out of my pocket-book and addressed “To the
Owners of the Vessel the _Caledonia_ of Arbroath,” with the brief
and thrilling tidings, written by myself in pencil, among the
fragments of their wrecked vessel, that the whole crew, except one
man, were lost “upon my rocks.” My note spread a general dismay in
Arbroath, for the crew, from the clannish relationship among the
Scotch, were connected with a large number of the inhabitants. But
to return to the touching details of Le Daine.
“We rounded the Land’s End,” he said, “that night all well, and came
up Channel with a fair wind. The captain turned in. It was my watch.
All at once, about nine at night, it began to blow in one moment as
if the storm burst out by signal; the wind went mad; our canvas
burst in bits. We reeved fresh sails: they went also. At last we
were under bare poles. The captain had turned out when the storm
began. He sent me forward to look out for Lundy Light. I saw your
cliff.” [This was a bluff and broken headland just by the southern
boundary of my own glebe.] “I sang out, ‘Land!’ I had hardly done so
when she struck with a blow and stuck fast. Then the captain sang
out, ‘All hands to the maintop!’ and we all went up. The captain
folded his arms and stood by silent.”
Here I asked him, anxious to know how they expressed themselves at
such a time, “But what was said afterwards, Le Daine?”
“Not one word, sir; only once, when the long boat went over, I said
to the skipper: ’sir, the boat is gone.’ But he made no answer.”
How accurate was Byron’s painting!—
“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.
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 the _Phœnix_ of 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 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, 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.
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, the _Alonzo_ of 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 ship _Alonzo_ of
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 the _Alonzo_ is 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 the
_Alonzo_ of 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!
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