Chapter V (2)

“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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