“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]
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[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