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[53] dwelt a relative[54] 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 aidance 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 that all
this was done, and I had deemed it a venial breach of discipline to
omit the nightly service of the Church in order to suit the tide. A
Puseyite bishop might have condemned my breach of Rubric and Ritual,
but I exercise episcopal authority in my own parish, and accordingly I
absolved myself. 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 poor 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. When we were about halfway up a
singular and striking event occurred, which moved us all exceedingly.
Unobserved--for all were intent on 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 and gratulate 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 Saxon and
shingled church, “the mother of us all,” dwells in silence by, to watch
and wail over her safe and slumbering dead. It recalls the imagery of
the Holy Book wherein we read of the gathered relics 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.” In such
a shelter we laid our brother at rest, rescued from the unhallowed
sepulture of the rock; and there the faithful voice of the mourner
breathed a last farewell. “Good-bye,” he said, “good-bye! Safe and
quiet in the ground!”
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 and ward
the cliffs from rise to set of sun. Of these my quaint old parishioner,
Peter Burrow, was one. On a wild and dreary 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 surges and the shore. She had come into sight some hours before
struggling with Harty Race, the local name of a narrow and 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 Padstow 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 on 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, and no trace was visible
for long. At last we could see it no more. Meanwhile the vessel 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 a neighbouring haven, and there
grounded on the sand. No boatman could be induced to put off, and thick
darkness soon after fell. I returned worn, heart-sick, 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
Burrow 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 owner’s 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 owner’s
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, and his features wore somewhat of a fierce and
reproachful look--just such an expression as would verify the truth
of our suspicion that he had been driven by the violence of others to
forsake his deck. The face of the dead man was as graphic a record of
his living character as a physiognomist could portray. 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 many of them had _that_ awful
expression of countenance which reminded me of a picture once described
to me as the result of an experiment by certain artists in France. It
was during the Revolution, and amid the anarchy of those times, that
they bought a criminal who had been condemned to die, fastened him
to a cross, and painted him for a crucifixion; but his face wore the
aspect, not of the patient suffering which they intended to portray,
but a strong expression of _reluctant agony_. Such has been the look
that I myself have witnessed in many a poor disfigured corpse. The
death-struggle of the conscious victim in the strong and cruel grasp of
the remorseless sea was depicted in harsh and vivid lines on the brow
of the dead.
But one day my strange old man, Peter Burrow, 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, in
artist phrase, 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
pictured signs, to secure identity for their bodies if their lives
are lost at sea, and then, for the solace of their friends, should
they be cast on the shore and taken up for burial in the earth. What
a volume of heroism and resignation to a mournful probability in this
calm foresight and deliberate choice, to wear always on their living
flesh, as it were, the signature of a sepulchral name! The symbolic
figures and the letters which were supposed to designate our dead were
all faithfully transcribed and duly entered in the vicar’s book. 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! 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 the 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! Linked with such themes as these which I have related in this
Remembrance are the subjoined verses, which were written on a rock by
the shore.
THE STORM
War! ’mid the ocean and the land!
The battle-field Morwenna’s strand,
Where rock and ridge the bulwark keep,
The giant warders of the deep!
They come! and shall they not prevail,
The seething surge, the gathering gale?
They fling their wild flag to the breeze,
The banner of a thousand seas!
They come, they mount, they charge in vain,
Thus far, incalculable main!
No more! thine hosts have not o’erthrown
The lichen on the barrier stone!
Have the rocks faith, that thus they stand
Unmoved, a grim and stately band,
And look, like warriors tried and brave,
Stern, silent, reckless, o’er the wave?
Have the proud billows thought and life
To feel the glory of the strife,
And trust one day, in battle bold,
To win the foeman’s haughty hold?
Mark, where they writhe with pride and shame,
Fierce valour, and the zeal of fame;
Hear how their din of madness raves,
The baffled army of the waves!
Thy way, O God! is in the sea;
Thy paths where awful waters be:
Thy Spirit thrills the conscious stone;
O Lord! Thy footsteps are not known.
FOOTNOTES:
[41] From _All the Year Round_, vol. xiii. pp. 153-156. 1865.
[42] 1834.
[43] The Tamar.
[44] The Torridge.
[45] John Wesley.
[46] And like Daniel Gumb. See p. 107.
[47] _Vide_ p. 32, _et seq._
[48] See the essay, “Cruel Coppinger,” and Appendix F.
[49] These are still preserved. They are little sand-glasses, shielded
with brass, cylindrical in shape. The sand in one takes twenty-eight
seconds to run, that in the other fourteen.
[50] Hawker is not forgotten in Arbroath. A lecture was delivered there
on February 18, 1903, by the Rev. A. E. Crowder, on “Cornwall: its
Scenery, People, Antiquities, and Folklore.” The lecturer referred to
Hawker and the wreck of the _Caledonia_.
[51] For Hawker’s poem on this occasion, see p. 22.
[52] “Gebir,” Book I., lines 216, 217. The usual version has “_hard_
wet sand.” Hawker and Landor (it may be remarked by the way) were in
many respects kindred spirits.
[53] Bude.
[54] Probably Mr. George Casebourne, Civil Engineer, who married a
sister of Mr. Hawker’s, and was for some years superintendent of the
Bude Canal.
BLACK JOHN[55]
[Illustration: “BLACK JOHN”
_From a picture formerly belonging to R. S. Hawker, now in the
possession of Mrs. Calmady_]
A picture hangs in my library--and it is one of my most treasured
relics of old Cornwall--the full-length and “counterfeit presentment,”
in oil, of a quaint and singular dwarf. It exhibits a squat figure,
uncouth and original, just such a one as Frederick Taylor would delight
to introduce in one of his out-of-door pieces of Elizabethan days,
as an appendage to the rural lady’s state when she rode afield with
her hawk on her wrist. His height is under four feet, hump-backed
and misshapen; his head, with tangled elfy hair falling wildly on
his shoulders, droops upon his chest. Negro features and a dark skin
surround a loose and flabby mouth, which teeth have long ceased to
harmonise and fill out. He is clad in a loose antique russet gaberdine,
the fashion of a past century: one hand leans on a gnarled staff, and
the other holds a wide-brimmed felt hat, with humble gesture and look,
as though his master stood by.
The traditionary name of this well-remembered character on the
Tamar-side is Black John. He lived from the commencement to the
middle of the eighteenth century in the household of an honoured
name, Arscott of Tetcott,[56] an ancestor of one of the distinguished
families of Cornwall; and as his master was wellnigh the last of the
jovial open-housed squires of the West of England, so was Black John
the last of the jesters or makers of mirth. When the feast was over,
and the “wrath of hunger”[57] had been assuaged, while the hare’s or
fox’s head, the festive drinking-cup of silver, went round with the
nectar of the Georgian era, “strong punch for strong heads,” the jester
was called in to contribute by merry antic and jocose saying to the
loud enjoyment of the guests. Such were the functions sustained by
my pictured and storied dwarf, and many an anecdote still survives
around us in hearth and hall of the feats and stories of the “Tetcott
merry-man.” Two of his usual after-dinner achievements were better
suited to the rude jollity and coarse mirth of our forefathers than to
the refinements of our own time; although they are said to exist here
and there, among the “underground men” and miners of Western Cornwall,
even to this day. These were “sparrow-mumbling” and swallowing
living mice, which were tethered to a string to ensure their safe
return to light and life. In the first of these accomplishments, a
sparrow, alive, was fastened to the teeth of the artist with a cord,
and he was expected to mumble off the feathers from the fluttering
and astonished bird, with his lips alone, until he was plucked quite
bare without the assistance or touch of finger or hand. A couple of
projecting tusks or fangs, such as are called by the Italians Bourbon
teeth, were of singular value as sparrow-holders to Black John; but
these were one day drawn by violence from his mouth by an exasperated
blacksmith, whose kitten had been slain, and who had been persuaded by
a wretch, who was himself the actual assassin, that it was the jester
who had guillotined the poor creature with his formidable jaws. The
passage of the mouse was accomplished very often, amid roars of rude
applause, down and up the gullet of the dwarf.
A tale is told of him, that one day, after he had for some time amused
the guests, and had drank his full share of the ale, he fell, or seemed
to fall, asleep. On a sudden he started up with a loud and terrified
cry. Questioned as to the cause of his alarm, he answered, “O sir,” to
his master, “I was in a sog [sleep], and I had such a dreadful dream! I
thought I was dead, and I went where the wicked people go!”
“Ha, John,” said Arscott of Tetcott, in his grim voice, wide awake for
a jest or a tale, “then tell us all about what you heard and saw.”
“Well, master, nothing particular.”
“Indeed, John!”
“No, sir; things was going on just as they do upon airth--here in
Tetcott Hall--the gentlefolks nearest the fire.”
His master’s house was surrounded with all kinds of tame animals and
birds so bold and confiding, from long safety and intercourse, that
the rooks would come down at a call and pick up food like pigeons at
the very feet of a man. Among the familiar creatures of the Hall were
two enormous toads: these were especial favourites with Mr. Arscott,
who was a very Chinese in his fondness for the bat and the toad, and
who used to feed them very often with his own hands. One morning the
family were aroused by sounds near the porch, of battle and fight. A
guest from a distant town, who had arrived the night before on a visit,
was discovered prone upon the grass, and over him stood as conqueror
Black John, belabouring him with his staff. His story was, when rescued
and set upon his feet, that on going out to breathe the morning air he
had encountered and slain a fierce and venomous reptile--a big bloated
creature that came towards him with open mouth. It turned out to be one
of the enormous toads, an old and especial pet of master and man,
who had heard a sound of feet, and came as usual to be fed, and was
ruthlessly put to death; not, however, unavenged, for a wild man of the
woods (so the townsman averred) had rushed upon him and knocked him
down. When Mr. Arscott had heard the story, he turned on his heel, and
never greeted his guest[58] with one farewell word. Black John sobbed
and muttered vengeance in his den for many a day for the death of “Old
Dawty”--the household name of the toad.
[Illustration: ARSCOTT OF TETCOTT
“The good old Squire! once more along the glen,
Oh, for the scenes of old! the former men!”
_R. S. Hawker_
_From the picture by F. Northcote, R.A._
]