Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall

by Robert Stephen Hawker

“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!