as well as that of England. The clergy were permitted to exercise
jurisdiction in regard to divorce and succession because they were
supposed to be ‘just persons,’ as also because they knew the art of
writing better than most other ancient judges. Modern probate law
does not differ materially in the two ends of the island, except in
nomenclature. The chief distinction is that in Scotland a will does not
require any ‘probate’ or proving; it proves itself, if it be signed
before witnesses; and if it be holograph—that is, in the handwriting
of the testator—its authenticity or validity is assumed, so long as
not impugned. The Scottish analogue of English probate is obtaining
confirmation of the executor. If the executor be named in the will, he
takes it to a lawyer: the lawyer makes up an inventory of the estate
of the deceased. This inventory is stamped at a revenue office by a
stamp corresponding in cost to the amount of the estate. The stamped
inventory, after being sworn to before a justice of the peace, is
presented to the sheriff-clerk of the county in which the deceased
had his ordinary domicile. The sheriff-clerk, in the interests of the
revenue, satisfies himself that the stamp is correct as to pecuniary
amount, and then grants confirmation under the seal of the court. That
confirmation is equivalent to a judicial warrant to collect every
debt and realise every asset specified in the inventory. If there
be no will, or no executor named in the will, the sheriff appoints
an executor, or executors, according to a recognised order, those
equally near in blood, or having an equal interest in the estate, being
appointed jointly; a proceeding which corresponds to the granting of
letters of administration by the English Probate Court.
Scotland, of course, as well as England, enjoys the benefit of the
statutory provisions applicable to estates under three hundred
pounds. The persons entitled to succeed, or one of them, can do all
that is necessary to transfer the estate from the dead to the living
without the intervention of a lawyer or the burden of his bill of
costs. He can go to the sheriff-clerk of the county of the domicile,
give the requisite information; and the sheriff-clerk will do all
that is necessary towards the giving of confirmation, for a fee that
is regulated by the amount of the estate, but which is a merely
nominal fee compared with what would fall to be charged by a regular
professional man.
The courts of Scotland, as a rule, decline to interfere with the
administration of the estates of deceased foreigners, among whom
Englishmen are included. It is a necessary condition to a Scotch
court confirming an executor or appointing one that the domicile of
the deceased shall have been in Scotland. Some of the English courts
are guided by much more expansive ideas of their duty, and will take
charge of the estate of any man, if it be large enough to promise
remuneration to Chancery and Probate practitioners. Within the last
few years, the English Court of Chancery extended its long arm to
administer the estates of Sir W. Stirling-Maxwell, formerly M.P.
for Perthshire; and for years the officials of Chancery directed
the management of his large Scotch heritable properties of Keir and
Pollok, of course with such copious intelligence as Chancery persons
have in regard to every property out of which money can be extracted,
but perhaps not at a rate of remuneration quite so moderate as would
have sufficed, had the greed of English lawyers and the benevolence
of English judges permitted the estates of this eminent patriotic
Scotchman to be administered according to the law of his own country. A
similar stroke of usurpation was more recently attempted in regard to
the estate of Orr Ewing. Less than the hundredth part of that estate,
which exceeded in value a quarter of a million, had been left to a
young man resident in London. This young man was under twenty-one,
and therefore an English ‘infant,’ unable to take care of himself.
Some officious person, calling himself a ‘next friend’ of this infant,
attempted to have all this large estate transferred from Scotland to
the Court of Chancery; and the Court of Chancery very kindly did what
it could to gratify the zeal of this ‘next friend’ for the interest
of the infant—and perhaps of some lawyers—of not very tender years.
But this usurpation was resisted by the Scotch beneficiaries and by
the Scotch courts. The House of Lords decided distinctly that the
English Courts acted according to their precedents when they made
this usurpation of jurisdiction over Scotch estates; and they decided
also, but a good deal less distinctly, that the Scotch courts did not
exceed their jurisdiction in resisting this usurpation. The courts of
law in London and Edinburgh are thus in conflict; and the claims of
each have so far obtained the sanction of the supreme tribunal of the
country, that hereafter, unless the legislature interfere, no large
Scotch succession can be considered safe from the purely benevolent but
somewhat expensive supervision of the English Court of Chancery.
AN OCEAN MYSTERY.
A TRUE STORY.
Though it is nearly twenty years ago since the events related below
occurred, yet the impression left upon my mind has never faded or lost
the vividness of its outlines; and though there is nothing really
inexplicable about it, yet the dash of mystery connected with it has
always marked it in my memory as an incident of an unusual order.
We were driving on our way northwards from the gloomy and savage
neighbourhood of Cape Horn, homeward-bound in Her Majesty’s frigate
the dear old _Bruisewater_, now, alas, long since consigned to the
shipbreaker. The fact of our being homeward-bound should have made
all hearts light and all faces bright among our five hundred souls;
but for all that, there was a general air of gloom in the ship,
which was not to be accounted for save by one theory only—that of
superstition. For things had not gone well with us since we had hoisted
our homeward-bound pendant. True, we had sailed out of Valparaiso Bay
with the said pendant streaming away, and with all our ‘chummy ships’
playing _Should Auld Acquaintance be forgot?_ as we passed by them;
and we had received and returned cheer upon cheer as we made our way
to the open sea; while from the midshipmen’s berth had rolled up in a
rich volume of sound, every night for more than a week before, the
old strain, so well known and so lovingly cherished in Her Majesty’s
service:
And when we arrive at Plymouth Docks,
The pretty little girls come round in flocks,
And one to the other they do say:
‘Oh, here comes Jack with his three years’ pay;
For I see he’s homeward-bou-ou-ound,
For I see he’s homeward-bound.’
But still, as I say, things had not gone well with us. We had speedily
left the warmth of tropical weather, and had gradually found it colder
and colder each morning as we made our way down south towards the
dreaded Cape of Storms. That was natural, and we were prepared for
it; but no sooner had we got to the latitude of the Cape itself, than
the wind had shifted, and we had it day after day, night after night,
a hard gale right in our teeth. Bitter cold it was too, with tearing
storms of snow and hail—heavy thundering seas sweeping us fore and
aft, bursting in upon our weather-bow, and covering us with spray,
that froze ere it fell upon our decks. Up aloft, everything frozen
hard—running rigging as stiff and unmanageable as a steel hawser;
blocks jammed with ice and snow; canvas as unyielding as a board; men
up aloft for an hour or more trying to take a reef in the fore-topsail,
and then so stiffened with cold themselves, as to be unable to come
down without assistance: while below, the close, musty, damp, dark ship
was the picture of discomfort, her decks, main and lower, always wet,
often with an inch or two of ice-cold water washing about on them;
soaking clothes hung up all over the place, in the wild hope that they
might eventually get dry; ports and scuttles tight shut, to keep out
the seas that thundered ceaselessly at them as the ship plunged and
wallowed in the angry element; no fires allowed anywhere except at the
cook’s galley, which was always fully occupied; and no warmth to be
obtained anywhere except in your hammock, and even this, in most cases,
what with faulty stowage and leaky decks, was wet through.
Day after day, night after night, this state of things kept on, until
there gradually crept in among the men—started, no doubt, by the older
hands, always and deeply imbued with the spirit of superstition—a
sort of dim suspicion that the ship was under a ban—bewitched, in
fact; that, as they said, there was a Jonah aboard; and until he
went overboard, we should never weather the dreaded Cape, but were
doomed to thrash continually to windward, never gaining an inch on our
way. Strange as it may seem, there were many, very many, among our
blue-jackets who held this belief firmly, and expressed it openly.
We, of course, in the midshipmen’s berth, careless and light-hearted
from our extreme youth, laughed at the solemn tones of the old
quartermasters, who employed their hours of midnight watch on deck
in narrating to us similar instances of vessels which had been thus
doomed to struggle with the storm until some unknown criminal had
either confessed his crime, or had voluntarily paid the penalty of it.
But, as the bad weather continued, and the ship seemed quite unable to
advance upon her homeward track, some of us, too, began to allow our
minds to be influenced to a certain degree by the mysterious language
and ominous hints of these men, so much our elders in years, and our
superiors in practical experience.
Matters had got to this pitch, and no change appeared about to take
place in the aspect of the weather or the direction of the wind, when
one wild and wretched forenoon at seven bells (eleven-thirty) the men
were piped to muster on the main-deck for that one drop of comfort
which they could look forward to in the day—the serving out of each
man’s ‘tot’ of grog. Faces which at other times wore a look of gloom,
were brightening under the influence of the spirit; the ever-present
growl was stilled for a while; the joke began to pass around as
the blood warmed and flowed more rapidly through the veins, when a
whisper—a sort of muttered suggestion, made at first with a kind of
apologetic reluctance, but with growing confidence and insistence as it
gained ground—passed through the throng of men that one of their number
was missing. Such a whisper makes its way through a ship’s company,
however large, like a current of electricity, and so it was in this
case; but at first the men kept it to themselves. It could not long,
however, be concealed; and presently it spread to the midshipmen’s
berth; next, the wardroom heard it; and soon the captain himself was
made aware of the suspicion. Well I remember, how, as we sat in the
cold, damp, comfortless, dirty berth, discussing the matter with boyish
eagerness, the sudden shrill pipe of the boatswain’s mate burst upon
our ears, followed by the hoarse cry of: ‘Hands muster by open list!’
So, then, the captain thought it important enough to make serious and
official inquiry into. Then came the calling over of those five hundred
names, with most of which we had been familiar for three years or more
of our commission in the Pacific. But I am wrong—not quite all of those
five hundred. There came a time when the name of one, a petty officer,
was called; but no reply came to the call, and a dead silence reigned
over the ship—a silence, I mean, as regards human speech or sound:
the gale and the thundering seas never for a moment ceased _their_
tumult. Then followed the grave and searching investigation into the
mystery. Who had seen him last? Where was he then? In what state? How
long ago was it? and so on, and so on; until at last the whole ship’s
company knew that one of their number had gone overboard—presumably
in the morning watch; probably swept off by a peculiarly heavy sea,
well remembered in that watch. But unknown, unheard, unseen—his cry
for help, if such a cry he gave, utterly drowned and smothered in the
ceaseless roar of the sea, the shriek of the wind. And so the men were
dismissed, each to his special duty; and the paymaster was directed to
see that the fatal letters D.D. (Discharged dead) were placed against
the unhappy man’s name in the ship’s books.
And now occurred a circumstance which took the whole ship by storm, as
it were, and which, mere accident and coincidence as it was, made all
the old seadogs nod their heads and eye the younger men meaningly, as
who would say, ‘What did I tell you?’ while they, on their part, were
firmly impressed with the lesson in cause and effect thus so pointedly
placed before them. It was close upon noon when the fact of a man
being lost was clearly established; and ere the afternoon watch was
over, the sky had cleared, the storm had dropped, the wind had shifted
right round, and was now blowing dead fair! There was no room for more
argument—the oldsters had it all their own way; the scoffers were
silenced.
The ship now, in a few hours, rounded the Cape, which before had seemed
an impossible obstruction to her, and made her way unhindered to the
north; but the feelings engendered by the events immediately preceding
this change had taken too strong a hold upon the men to pass lightly
away, and in many a long first or middle watch the subject of the
disappearance of the lost shipmate and its immediate effect upon the
elements was discussed with bated breath, and many an ominous shake
of the head was given as the opinion was moodily expressed that ‘We’d
not done with him yet.’ And when, a few days afterwards, on a Sunday
morning during divine service, the quartermaster of the watch came
creeping and tiptoeing down the ladder to report something to the
commander, who at once followed him silently up the after-hatchway,
but a few minutes afterwards returned and whispered mysteriously to
the captain, who in his turn mounted on deck and did not come down
again, we all felt that perhaps something more might be in store for
us, and was even now perchance at hand. How impatiently we sat as
the sermon dragged out its seemingly interminable length, and then,
when at last the blessing had been given and the quick sharp voice
of the first-lieutenant had issued the order, ‘Boatswain’s mate,
pipe down!’ we literally tumbled up on deck, to learn what it was
that had disturbed the calm of that Sabbath forenoon. It needed but
a glance. ‘Icebergs!’ There they were, a long array of cold, filmy,
shadowy giants, looming huge in the mist with which each surrounded
himself—ghostly, ghastly, clammy spectres from the very land of Death
itself. Not that we thought of them then as such; no, we were glad,
we youngsters; we liked them; we said they were ‘jolly,’ though any
object less gifted with an aspect of joviality one can hardly imagine.
Each, as we neared it, wrapped us in its clammy shroud of death-cold
fog, and chilled us to the very marrow, and, towering far above our
main-royal-mast head, seemed to threaten us with instant and appalling
destruction.
So we sped on, iceberg after iceberg rising above the horizon as we
held our course; and, if sources of anxiety and alarm by day, how much
more so by night! Often we entered a vast bank of impenetrable fog,
conscious that somewhere, in its inmost recesses, lay concealed, as if
waiting for its prey, a gigantic berg, but never knowing from moment
to moment when or where exactly to expect it. This was a splendid
chance for the croakers. Many a great solemn head was shaken, and many
a jaw wagged with gloomy forebodings over that unusual and unexpected
appearance of ice in the Southern Sea. By-and-by, the wind began to
freshen, and signs of another gale appeared, though this time from
a quarter fairly favourable to us; and with her canvas snugged down
and a bright lookout forward, the old ship began to shake her sides
as she hurried away from those inhospitable seas with their spectral
occupants towards the inviting warmth of the tropics and the steady
blast of the trade-winds.
Anxious for a breath of fresh air before turning in to my half-sodden
hammock, I went on deck to take a turn with a chum, and enjoy, as we
often did together, a few anticipations of the delights of home once
more. It was a wild—a very wild night. There was a small moon; but
the clouds were hurrying over her face in ragged streamers, and in
such constant succession, that her light was seldom visible; and when
she did show it for a fleeting moment, it fell upon a black, tossing,
angry sea, whose waves broke into clouds of icy foam as they fell
baffled off the bow of the great ship, or tried to leap savagely over
her quarter. It was a hard steady gale, the wind shrieking and humming
through the rigging, and the old ship herself pounding ponderously but
irresistibly at the great mountains of water before her, and creaking,
groaning, and complaining as she did so, masts, yards, hull, all in one
strident concert together, as if remonstrating at the labour which she
was forced to undergo. In spite of the moon, the night was as black
as Erebus, and from the quarter-deck on which we paced, the bow of
the ship was barely visible. We were just turning our faces aft, my
chum and I, in our quarter-deck walk, when a voice rang out sudden,
clear, and loud forward—the voice of the starboard lookout man: ‘A
bright light on the starboard bow!’ Instantly we, and indeed every
soul on deck, turned and peered hard in that direction. Not a vestige
of a light was to be seen! Then the voice of the officer of the watch
was heard from the bridge, ordering the midshipman of the watch to go
forward and find out if the man was dreaming, or if any one else had
seen the light which he reported. No one else had seen it; but the man
stuck to his text. He had seen for a second of time a bright light on
the starboard bow—a _very_ bright light, quite different from anything
which was usually seen at sea.
‘No, sir! I beg your pardon, sir! I wasn’t asleep—not I, sir! broad
awake as I am now, sir! and able to swear to it.’
By this time all hands were on the alert, and many officers, old and
young, had tumbled up from below at the hail.
‘But, my good man, if it was really a light which you saw, some one
else must have noticed it too.’
‘Don’t know nothin’ about that, sir; but I can swear to it. What I seen
were’——
‘A bright light on the starboard beam!’ sang out the starboard waist
lookout at this moment, and ‘I saw it!’ and ‘I saw it!’ echoed several
voices; but before the officer of the watch could turn round towards
the direction indicated, it was gone, and the starboard beam presented
one uniform sheet of impenetrable blackness.
‘Waist there! What was it like?’
‘Somethin’ of a flash-light, I should say, sir,’ replied the lookout.
‘Very bright and very short—gone in a moment-like.’
By this time the captain and commander were both on the bridge, and the
whole ship was alive with curiosity.
‘What can it be?’ I asked of the old boatswain against whom I brushed
in the darkness as I walked aft.
‘’Tis a boat,’ said he; ‘that’s what it must be. The cap’n he allows
it’s a boat, and he’s pretty sure to be right. Some poor souls whose
vessel has foundered among the ice—whalers, most likely—took to the
boats, they have. I saw that there light myself—seemed very close to
the water, it did. They seen our lights, and burnt a flash-light. If
they got another, they’ll show that, too, presently.’
And now the voice of the commander rang out: ‘Mr Sights!’
‘Ay, ay, sir,’ replied the gunner.
‘Clear away your two foremost guns on the maindeck, and fire blank
charges at short intervals; and get some blue lights, and show them in
the fore-rigging at once!’
‘Ay, ay, sir.’ And away went the gunner to see his orders carried out
instantly.
But ere his head had disappeared down the hatchway—‘A bright light on
the starboard quarter!’ roared out the marine sentry at the lifebuoy
right aft; and once more everybody turned sharp round to find nothing
to gaze at but the universal darkness.
‘Hands, about ship!’ was now the order; and in quick succession came
from the bridge the well-known commands in the sharp, imperative
voice of the lieutenant of the watch: ‘Ease down the helm!’—‘Helm’s
a lee!’—‘Raise tacks and sheets!’ &c. And as the splendid old ship
answered her helm like a boat, and began to fill on the other tack,
‘Maintopsail haul!’—for our courses were furled—‘Head braces!’ ‘Of all,
haul!’ and we were on the other tack.
The ship was now brilliantly illuminated by half-a-dozen blue lights
burnt in her fore and main rigging; while, as we began to move ahead
once more, our bow guns blazed forth from the maindeck one after the
other—a roar which we fondly imagined would be more welcome than the
most delicious music to the ears of the poor storm-tossed castaways
in that frail boat which we now hoped to rescue from the wrath of the
raging sea. At intervals there appeared again the bright but transient
flash which had first attracted our notice; and through the roar of
the waves and the shriek of the wind, we at times imagined that we
could hear human voices shouting no doubt for help, and all eyes were
strained to the uttermost through the blackness to try and discern the
first glimpse of the boat itself. The last flash had told us that we
were steering directly for it, and on we sped, our blue lights hissing
and flaring in our rigging, our guns ceaselessly roaring out our
sympathy and our desire to save.
‘Keep a sharp lookout forward there!’—‘Lifeboat’s crew, fall in aft!’
and we prepared to lower the port quarter-boat, which was told off as
a ‘lifeboat’—that is, for any purposes of rescue, although the state
of the sea was anything but favourable for boat-duty; but when we
thought of that poor boat tossing about on the storm-vexed sea with its
freight of shivering and half-drowned men, ay, and maybe a woman or two
among them, and then remembered the frowning icebergs and the fearful
dangers which they represented, no man hesitated, and had volunteers
been called for to man the lifeboat, the whole ship’s company would
have come forward. Well can I remember the almost choking feeling of
thankfulness in my own heart when I thought of the wild joy of these
poor outcasts at the prospect of so speedy a rescue, and anticipated
the delight of welcoming them on the quarter-deck of so staunch and
safe a ship. But all in a moment my anticipations and my sentiments of
gratitude were scattered to the winds.
‘Keep her away, sir! keep her away!’ came a roar from the forecastle.
‘You’ll be right down upon her! A large full-rigged ship right ahead of
us!’
Up went our helm, and the ship’s head paid off; and as we strained
our eyes in the direction indicated, we could dimly make out, to our
intense surprise and unspeakable wonder, the huge, shadowy, ghostly
outline of an unusually large vessel. No signs of life appeared about
her. The light which had first attracted our notice was now no longer
to be seen. Her masts, yards, and sails were only just visible—not
as a black hard shadow against the sky, but pale, spectral, as if
mere vapour—barely to be discerned, yet leaving no room for doubt.
There she sailed, a veritable phantom ship. All hands gazed at her in
silence. The blue lights were allowed to burn out, and no fresh ones
were lighted. The great guns ceased to thunder on the maindeck. The
lifeboat’s crew muttered uneasily among themselves, as if dreading
the possibility of being ordered to board so uncanny a craft; while
the older hands once more shook their heads, and said ‘they knowed we
’adn’t seen the last of that poor feller as fell overboard.’
But there was nothing more for us to do. Who and what the mysterious
stranger hanging on our port quarter was we could not possibly
ascertain on such a night, in such a gale; and at length the order was
given to ‘Wear ship;’ and we once more turned our back on the vessel
which we had been so eagerly pursuing for more than an hour. As we did
so, we could see that he too altered his course; his spectral yards,
with their shadowy sails, swung round, and he disappeared without a
sign in the darkness of the night.
* * * * *
‘Don’t tell me,’ said the boatswain, ‘as that there were a real ship.
Didn’t that poor feller disappear suddently just before we sighted her?
Answer me that! Well, then—did we ever know what become of him, eh?—No!
Very well, then! That there phantom ship was to tell us as how he was
drownded, that’s what that were, and nobody shan’t persuade me no
other than that.—How do I explain them bright lights? Answer me this:
Were them lights ornery lights, such as ship shows at night?—No; of
course they weren’t. Corpse lights!—that’s my answer; and when I says
corpse-lights, I means it.’
It _may_ have been an honest merchantman, outward-bound, and too
intent upon making a speedy voyage to ‘speak’ us, but, nevertheless,
the boatswain’s opinion was pretty generally accepted as the correct
solution of what was considered to be an ocean mystery.
* * * * *
Printed and Published by W. & R. CHAMBERS, 47 Paternoster Row, LONDON,
and 339 High Street, EDINBURGH.
* * * * *
_All Rights Reserved._