HAULING IN THE BOATS.
Even though we did not understand, we were keenly interested in all we saw, and still more so in the stories of wrecks which this young man had witnessed even during the few years, or months—I forget which—of his stay at the Lizard. He, too, agreed, that the rocks there, called by the generic name of the Stags, were the most fatal of all on our coasts to ships outward and homeward bound. Probably because in the latter case, captain and crews get a trifle careless; and in the former—as I have heard in sad explanation of many emigrant ships being lost almost immediately after quitting port—they get drunk. Many of the sailors are said to come on board "half-seas over," and could the skilfullest of pilots save a ship with a drunken crew?
Be that as it may, the fact remains, that throughout winter almost every week's chronicle at the Lizard is the same story—wild storms, or dense fogs, guns of distress heard, a hasty manning of the life-boat, dragged with difficulty down the steep cliff-road, a brief struggle with the awful sea, and then, even if a few lives are saved, with the ship herself all is over.
"Only last Christmas I saw a vessel go to pieces in ten minutes on the rocks below there," said the man, after particularising several wrecks, which seemed to have imprinted themselves on his memory with all their incidents. "Yes, we have a bad time in winter, and the coastguard men lead a risky life. They are the picked men of the service, and tolerably well paid, but no money could ever pay them for what they go through—or the fishermen, who generally are volunteers, and get little or nothing."
"It must be a hard life in these parts, especially in winter," we observed.
"Well, perhaps it is, but it's our business, you see."
Yes, but not all people do their business, as the mismanagements and mistakes of this world plainly show.