befallen me since my collation to this wild and remote vicarage, on the
shore of the billowy Atlantic sea, might not be without interest to
the reader of a more refined and civilised region. When I was collated
to the incumbency in 18--,[42] I found myself the first resident
vicar for more than a century. My parish was a domain of about seven
thousand acres, bounded on the landward border by the course of a
curving river,[43] which had its source with a sister stream[44] in a
moorland spring within my territory, and, flowing southward, divided
two counties in its descent to the sea. My seaward boundary was a
stretch of bold and rocky shore, an interchange of lofty headland and
deep and sudden gorge, the cliffs varying from three hundred to four
hundred and fifty feet of perpendicular or gradual height, and the
valleys gushing with torrents, which bounded rejoicingly towards the
sea, and leaped at last, amid a cloud of spray, into the waters. So
stern and pitiless is this iron-bound coast, that within the memory of
one man upwards of eighty wrecks have been counted within a reach of
fifteen miles, with only here and there the rescue of a living man. My
people were a mixed multitude of smugglers, wreckers, and dissenters
of various hue. A few simple-hearted farmers had clung to the grey old
sanctuary of the church and the tower that looked along the sea; but
the bulk of the people, in the absence of a resident vicar, had become
the followers of the great preacher[45] of the last century who came
down into Cornwall and persuaded the people to alter their sins. I was
assured, soon after my arrival, by one of his disciples, who led the
foray among my flock, that my “parish was so rich in resources for his
benefit, that he called it, sir, the garden of our circuit.” The church
stood on the glebe, and close by the sea. It was an old Saxon station,
with additions of Norman structure, and the total building, although of
gradual erection, had been completed and consecrated before the middle
of the fifteenth century. The vicarage, built by myself, stood, as it
were, beneath the sheltering shadow of the walls and tower. My land
extended thence to the shore. Here, like the Kenite,[46] I had “built
my nest upon the rock,” and here my days were to glide away, afar from
the noise and bustle of the world, in that which is perhaps the most
thankless office in every generation, the effort to do good against
their will to our fellow-men. Mine was a perilous warfare. If I had
not, like the apostle, to “fight with wild beasts at Ephesus,” I had to
soothe the wrecker, to persuade the smuggler, and to “handle serpents,”
in my intercourse with adversaries of many a kind. Thank God! the
promises which the clergy inherit from their Founder cannot fail to
be fulfilled. It was never prophesied that they should be popular, or
wealthy, or successful among men; but only that they “should endure to
the end,” that “their generation should never pass away.” Well has this
word been kept!
Among my parishioners there were certain individuals who might be
termed representative men,--quaint and original characters, who
embodied in their own lives the traditions and the usages of the
parish. One of these had been for full forty years a wrecker--that is
to say, a watcher of the sea and rocks for flotsam and jetsam, and
other unconsidered trifles which the waves might turn up to reward the
zeal and vigilance of a patient man. His name was Peter Burrow, a man
of harmless and desultory life, and by no means identified with the
cruel and covetous natives of the strand, with whom it was a matter of
pastime to lure a vessel ashore by a treacherous light, or to withhold
succour from the seaman struggling with the sea. He was the companion
of many of my walks, and the witness with myself of more than one
thrilling and perilous scene. Another of my parish notorieties, the
hero of contraband adventure, and agent for sale of smuggled cargoes
in bygone times, was Tristram Pentire,[47] a name known to the readers
of these pages. With a merry twinkle of the eye, and in a sharp and
ringing tone, it was old Tristram’s usage to recount for my instruction
such tales of wild adventure and of “derring-do” as would make the
foot of an exciseman falter and his cheek turn pale. But both these
cronies of mine were men devoid of guile, and in their most reckless
of escapades innocent of mischievous harm. It was not long after my
arrival in my new abode that I was plunged all at once into the midst
of a fearful scene of the terrors of the sea. About 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 dressing-gown 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 once only 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, sails, 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 towards 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-shaped
dressing-gown, he sobbed, with a piteous cry, “O 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. I had sent in for brandy, and was pouring it down his
throat, when my parishioner, Peter Burrow, arrived. He assisted, at my
request, in the charitable office of restoring the exhausted stranger;
but when he was refreshed and could stand upon his feet, I remarked
that Peter did not seem so elated as in common decency I expected he
would be. The reason soon transpired. Taking me aside, he whispered in
my ear, “Now, sir, I beg your pardon, but if you’ll take my advice, now
that man is come to himself, if I were you I would let him go his way
wherever he will. If you take him into your house, he’ll surely do you
some harm.” Seeing my surprise, he went on to explain, “You don’t know,
sir,” he said, “the saying on our coast--
“‘Save a stranger from the sea,
And he’ll turn your enemy.’
There was one Coppinger[48] cast ashore from a brig that struck up at
Hartland, on the Point. Farmer Hamlyn dragged him out of the water
and took him home, and was very kind to him. Lord, sir! he never would
leave the house again! He lived upon the folks a whole year, and at
last, lo and behold! he married the farmer’s daughter Elizabeth, and
spent all her fortin rollicking and racketing, till at last he would
tie her to the bedpost and flog her till her father would come down
with more money. The old man used to say he wished he’d let Coppinger
lie where he was in the waves, and never laid a finger on him to save
his life. Ay, and divers more I’ve heerd of that never brought no good
to they that saved them.”
“And did you ever yourself, Peter,” said I, “being, as you have told
me, a wrecker so many years--did you ever see a poor fellow clambering
up the rock where you stood, and just able to reach your foot or hand,
did you ever shove him back into the sea to be drowned?”
“No, sir, I declare I never did. And I do believe, sir, if I ever had
done such a thing, and given so much as one push to a man in such a
case, I think verily that afterwards I should have been troubled and
uncomfortable in my mind.”
“Well, notwithstanding your doctrine, Peter,” said I, “we will take
charge of this poor fellow; so do you lead him into the vicarage and
order a bed for him, and wait till I come in.”
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 the 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 poor disfigured faces toward 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, and
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 there from their
two years’ voyage, their intended course to Gloucester, 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, that I wrote among the fragments
of their wrecked vessel, and 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 Scots, 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 sung out, ‘Land!’ I had hardly done so when she struck with
a blow, and stuck fast. Then the captain sung 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 in
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 sung 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 just 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 or without a strong feeling of interest and compassion for 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 these 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 ship pass thereby.
For the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our
king; He will save us. The 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 as my guest
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 maintop. 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[49] of
brass; so that his last thoughts were full of duty to his owners and
his ship, and his latest 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[50] 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 Scottish people.
One from a father breaks off in irrepressible pathos, with a burst of
“O my son! my son!” We placed at the foot of the captain’s grave the
figurehead[51] of his vessel. It is a carved image, life-size, of his
native Caledonia, in the garb of her country, with sword and shield.
* * * * *
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 grateful
mien, well clothed, and with £30 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
very 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 sleekiest, 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 a 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!” yelled the sailor, bitterly; “it is our own
dear Jem--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. “O my brother! my brother!” was his
sob again and again; “what a burial-place for our own dear merry 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.”[52]